It’s after 5 p.m. on a Thursday before a holiday weekend.   Just finished some fact checking on one of our feature stories. Kept getting transferred over to empty offices.  Voicemail.  People are gone for the weekend already, I guess.  More evidence: Heading to White Plains on the Hutch this morning reminded me of Will Smith cruising around Midtown in I Am Legend, except the only animals I saw were the usual half-dozen freshly slaughtered raccoons.  It’s really a morbid way to start the day, especially since they usually seem to make it as far as the divider before they meet their end.  Alas, enough of this holiday cheer…

I’m not heading anywhere for the weekend, though, so I needed this blog entry to be a bit of a pick-me-up, a rally cry for all those others out there who are still en-cubed at this hour (and then there’s Friday.  Let’s not go there yet).

So I started hunting for some reggae.  What I found was Red Sky Morning, a pop punk, Sublime-ish band with a drum- and power-chord-driven sound.  Says on MySpace that they’ve got a connection to Westchester.  Not sure what that connection is as of yet.

The song I really liked was “Nature of the Beast.”  It’s a ballad along the lines of a Bradley Nowell tune.  It profiles a couple of hard-luck characters.  “Johnny,” turns to subway stick-ups as a result of his drug-addicted dad.  Next character, Anita, becomes a prostitute to drum up much-needed cash.  She feels like she’s left with two options: “the bottle or the knife.”

The song’s not really not as much of a downer as the lyrics might imply, and there’s even a great little keyboard riff after the chorus that could be in a light-hearted reggae groove.  And what’s it matter if the lyrics are a downer, anyway?  Even one else is sitting on the beach somewhere, listening to the sound of the surf.  We just have the hum of fluorscent lights.

It’s the nature of the beast…