On Josiah Leming - DUDE IS ALL THAT

The part of me that wishes I had an alternative track to my life where I am a desperately impoverished but earnestly and charmingly self-indulgent and really very talented especially for being so young and naive and unworldly singer-songwriter traveling the country with only a guitar and a bag of clothes and a notebook and a stubby pencil that needed sharpening and also being blessed without too much pride so that I could let a pretty girl who is pretty confused about everything herself buy me drinks before we two lost souls stumbled from a bar into the back seat of my dirty beat-up car in some alley in the middle of some small town somewhere in Kentucky or North Dakota or Arizona or wherever to do whatever it is that lost souls do when they're trying to find each other and they're not likely to see each other ever again except for a "thanks for adding me" link or two on myspace or facebook would have it be Josiah Leming's life that I would lead on that there alternative track.

Yes, it's that kid from Tennessee who sang with an english accent on American Idol. Dude is all that. Seriously. See below. Note the nice touch of the upside down painting of the ship in the background.



I hope America gets to find out what Josiah Leming thinks of his experiences in 2007 and 2008 when he gets older. It seems to me from this great distance of exclusively multimedia exposure to Josiah that he is unflinchingly honest in what he says and does. I would so much hope -- if I'm correct that he is unflinchingly honest, etc. -- that he continues to be that way and in ten years and then again in twenty years he's still writing songs to let us know what he's learned and how his life has changed who he is. This is a guy that needs to produce a retrospective at some point. At least that's my opinion.

In part because I also have the feeling that Josiah has this extraordinary and possibly unshakable belief that the world wants him to succeed and everything to be OK for him. I'm praying he's right. It seemed to me that he thought it was his destiny to be the next American Idol. He was very wrong about that, but I don't see that it slowed him down that much. Thank goodness.

The world of the cynic is such an ugly place.