Into the Light of the Dark Black Night

To call the Fab Faux the world's greatest Beatles cover band, while true, doesn't do justice to how insanely good they are. These five musicians---the best-known is probably the human beanstalk Will Lee, the innately comic and hugely talented bassist of Paul Shaffer's David Letterman band---are dedicated to duplicating live the entire Beatles catalog exactly as it sounded on record.

Even the Beatles could not do that after their first few albums. And that's why there are five musicians in the Fab Faux--they aren't about looking like the Beatles, they are about bringing the music of the greatest rock band of all time (sorry, Mick and Keith) to life on the hugest canvas--live performance--at the highest level of musicianship.

But this post is about more than the splendid performance of the Fab Faux, whose concert I attended Saturday night at the Shea Center at William Paterson University in Wayne. It's also about a song written for a seriously afflicted child (and recorded in part at the concert). It's about a volunteer group called Songs of Love that has now created exactly 15,000 such songs, each one different. And it's about the recipient of that 15,000th song and his family, who were at the concert.