The calliope crashed to the ground

I just bought The Essential Bruce Springsteen from amazon.ca — $20 for a triple CD! There's a lot of great stuff on here, though I get the impression that I'm going to listen to disk one a lot more than the other two. The first song is 1973's "Blinded by the Light", which was covered by Manfred Mann's Earth Band in 1977. The Springsteen version is very upbeat, almost dance-able, but the lyrics are frequently indecipherable. The Manfred Mann version is much better known, and is a little more "interesting", in that there are more speed changes, guitar licks, and keyboard fills. The lyrics are obviously the same, but I can understand them a little better (in that I can hear the words - I have no idea what the song actually means). I've always loved the Manfred Mann version — this is one of the fairly rare times that I prefer the remake of a song to the original.

I've always been impressed with people who are creative, like songwriters and artists and such. I can't draw worth a damn, but I'd love to be able to. Gail says that writing software is creative, and I suppose it is (you could even consider it an "art" if you try), but it's not the same thing. I can play the guitar, but creating music rather than playing something that someone else wrote seems much harder. Just as difficult, I would think, is the ability to take a song that someone else wrote and re-work it, as Manfred Mann did on this song, or as Joe Cocker did on his version of the Beatles' "With A Little Help From My Friends". It's kind of hard to believe that this is the same guy that wrote recorded the bubblegum "Doo Wah Diddy Diddy" twelve years before (according to Wikipedia, Manfred Mann didn't write that song either).