Jimi Hendrix's Kiss the Sky revisited

Way back on December 22, 2022, I wrote a nostalgic post about becoming a full-blown Jimi Hendrix convert via the 1984 compilation, Kiss the Sky. I lamented jettisoning my cassette of the album decades ago. Well, guess what? I found the comp on CD at my local record shop and, after some wavering and hemming and hawing, I bought it. The icing on the cake is that it's what is known in CD collector geekitude as a "target CD," as in the design of the CD surface resembles a target.



I can't tell you how exciting it was to pop that CD in my car's disc player and hear that Hendrix collection for the first time in at least 24 years (probably longer than that). It's not as if Kiss the Sky is that earth-shattering--with the exception of the live "I Don't Live Today," I have all of these songs on other albums--but listening to those songs in that order was like taking the Wayback Machine to 1987, when I was playing the hell out of the Kiss the Sky cassette. Maybe it was a subconscious attempt to re-enter my 19-year-old body, if only for a brief period of time. But it also might be the more prosaic reason that it's one hell of a fun compilation that is incredibly well sequenced, and for a disc that is likely 42 years old, it sounds wonderful. Whatever the case may be, it was 40+ minutes of joy in this difficult world.

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