Take a tour of loneliness. Of your own, sure, always, but first of Jimmy Donley’s. If you start with his, you’ll end up with your own again. It will be there waiting. Only Donley will play a trick on you and magic isn’t a good enough word to describe it. He will take your aloneness, your lonesomeness, your echoey alonemost ache, and he’ll transform it. He’ll fix it up nice. He’ll make it livable. It will not hurt so much anymore. You’ll find that you’re on your feet somehow and you want to move and keep on moving and you’re wishing you could sing like he could, that you could belt that empty feeling right out of your lungs. The dog is howling at you now because you hadn’t got up off the sofa for three days and now you’re dancing jerkily about the room and you’re clutching your chest and you’re wailing in a weird, woeful sort of way. For two and a half minutes until the song ends and his voice crackles back to silence, your loneliness is not lonely anymore. It’s something else, something that if you’re willing to play along, we can agree to call beautiful. And it still belongs to you. That’s the trick: It’s yours and no one else’s, but it’s worth something now. And when the song is over, if you feel it switching back and growing cold and damp and menacing again, you can always return the stylus to the gap between the tracks, or hit repeat if technology allows. Let the dog bark all it wants.