City Lights: Pointing out music that’s worth discovering

The late rock critic Paul Williams once wrote that, when dealing with works of art, praise amounts to pointing at something, declaring it “great” and hoping that readers agree.

Of course they don’t always, which provides impassioned fodder for any number of shows and online forums. But even if our opinions vary, we’re usually assured that we can point to the same thing — that this movie or song or book is readily available to whoever wants to access it.

One of the critic’s dilemmas, then, is to ecstatically praise something that’s almost impossible for others to find. I may point and proclaim it a masterpiece, but if you’re clueless as to what I’m pointing at, do my words have any effect? The popular saying goes that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference, and even the recipients of the toughest critical drubbings succeed in a way that many others fail: The world is not indifferent to them.

How much cultural sway this column has, I don’t know, but I will use it now to trumpet Rich Clayton and Chris Burroughs’ album “Let the Dog Decide,” which was created in 2010 and has existed, in the four years since, mostly on the counter at a winery in Buellton.

I poked my head in that winery on a vacation in December and struck up a conversation with Burroughs, who works as a pourer and had a brief cameo in the movie “Sideways.” As I left, he reached over to a small stack in the corner and handed me a free copy of his CD. At first glance, it showed the usual signs of a homemade endeavor: no record-label logo, an email address on the back and the headlining artists credited with music, lyrics and production.

The thing is, it’s a fantastic album. Clayton, who sings lead and composed the music, and Burroughs, who sings backup and penned most of the lyrics, have a knack for gorgeous harmonies, evocative storytelling and tunes that fix themselves in your memory. There are several tracks here that might have been radio staples for decades, if only Jackson Browne or the Beach Boys or Crosby, Stills and Nash had set them on vinyl.

But, as Burroughs explained to me later on the phone, stardom isn’t what he and Clayton were after. When they sat down to write and record “Let the Dog Decide,” they wanted simply to have fun and recoup costs. For the most part, that meant hand-selling the CD — as of last week, I could find only two mentions of it online, one of them an iOffer page that had expired.

Now, the music itself is finally making its Internet debut. Four years after the album’s completion, Burroughs had a friend set up a Facebook page (titled “Let the Dog Decide”) and begin posting videos for each track; as of this week, two had been completed. If you hear the songs online once all 10 are up, it’s best to do so in the intended order.

Begin, then, with “Ghosts in Chihuahua,” a loose-limbed story song about a drifter who roams to the Mexican city and meets a bereaved stranger named Coyote. The latter’s mission is desultory, to say the least (“Looking for my children — I think they might be here / If I don’t find my children, guess I’ll just go buy myself a beer”), and he and the narrator soon embark on a night of high living that ends with a cruise into south-of-the-border oblivion.

Wandering, indeed, is the theme that runs through these 10 songs, which find their protagonists constantly on the move — pining and planning, miles from home, with one foot in civilization and the other in some uncertain state of grace. Track two, the harmony-laden “Thinking How You’d Be,” centers on an “old blue Chevrolet”; “In a Desperate Way” is bathed in romantic yearning; “Goin’ Somewhere (LTDD)” and “Long Way to Go” capture the joy and tedium of a lengthy trek. (“LTDD,” incidentally, stands for the album’s title phrase, which stems from the narrator’s decision to “let the dog decide” where the road leads.)

Side two — it’s marked as such on the back cover — opens with “My Old Friends (Hey, Tim),” a paean to absent comrades, then moves into country melancholia in “Another Turn,” a rockabilly rave-up in “The Bloody Trail” and stately folk in “Bright Blue.” The closer, “Where the Blue Sky Starts,” is most striking of all: a half-spoken ramble in which the names of real and imagined icons, from Jane Austen to Tom Sawyer, spill out of the narrator’s consciousness, evoking the reveries that might charm a driver’s mind as sleep sets in at the wheel.

All fine material, and brilliant at its best. But if almost no one hears it, to what extent does it really exist? That’s a difficult question for an admirer as much as for an artist.

One of the most moving and perplexing short stories I have ever read is Iain Ross’ “The Missing Link,” an extremely brief account (less than one page) of a woman, now past her 100th birthday, who met Oscar Wilde as a teenager and has spent her entire life describing their meeting to gaping strangers. Ross was my classmate at the University of East Anglia, and the story appeared in the university’s 2003 creative writing anthology — its only publication to date.

I have no idea how many people have read it. But if you call me on the phone right now, I can recite “The Missing Link” to you verbatim. Those few dozen words that Ross put together tap into some of the deepest possible questions about the preciousness of memory, the cult of celebrity, the eternal human quest for beauty. It’s all there, tucked on one page of a long-forgotten book.

By contrast, I can’t perform “Let the Dog Decide” over the phone. So if my descriptions sound interesting, please venture onto Facebook and listen to the songs. If you enjoy them, send them to your friends. If they enjoy them, ask them to send them to their friends as well. It may be no more than pointing, but that’s all any of us can do.

MICHAEL MILLER is the features editor for Times Community News in Orange County. He can be reached at michael.miller@latimes.com or (714) 966-4617.