All things even, my favorite is his pirate song

RETRO: McGuinn, Clark & Hillman - "Don't You Write Her Off"

I just can't stop listening to Roger McGuinn these days.

It started, I'm pretty sure, when the copy of The Enlightened Bracketologist perennially stationed next to Ben Freed's toilet reminded me just how majestic McGuinn's cover of "Up To Me" is. Bob Dylan's original, from his half-scrapped first attempt at Blood on the Tracks is no less a classic, of course.

This past week, my obsession with The Byrds' frontman led me to "Don't You Write Her Off," McGuinn's the top-40 single from his 1979 project with his former bandmates Gene Clark and Chris Hillman. The song is lushly arranged and economical, so much so that the chorus barely lets half a minute elapse before erupting from the verse: In short, it has nothing to do with The Byrds' jangly folk rock, or even the more polished brand that surfaced on McGuinn's 1970s solo albums. "Don't You Write Her Off" has far more in common with the forced, pseudo-Latin guitars of Crosby, Still and Nash, and the limp country rock of the Eagles, a pedigree which, by any logic, should translate to "soulless."

For whatever reason, "Don't You Write Her Off" is the very opposite: spirited, buoyant and maybe even vital, in such a way that anticipates what Paul Simon did seven years later on Graceland.

The tragedy? McGuinn only penned and sang two for McGuinn, Clark & Hillman; the other, "Bye Bye, Baby" actually does recall his work with The Byrds. The contribution's of McGuinn's bandmates, however, are barely a degree removed from--and hardly any better than--the Eagles' hits that dominated the radio waves of the day.