Poet-professor Sidney Wade recently wrote, “There’s enough beauty in this world to choke a god.” On that note, I’ll admit I’m slow in coming to many things as a result. I limit the number of my unheard albums queue to 50 or thereabouts in an effort to thwart hoarderdome, but there’s only so much aural goodness a person can consume in a day, and my head predictably goes wanting. Needless to say, it’s inevitable some albums get cast aside and buried, deeper and deeper, beneath the next day’s batch of potential personal heroes.

Sean Lennon’s Friendly Fire was one of those (unintentional) “cast asides.” This is not to say I find his nasally collection of elongated vowels a particularly salient marker of 2006. However, as a music writer, I consider it my job to stay abreast of the increasingly saturated sonic playground. When the son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono waits eight years to release his sophomore solo LP it’s most likely in my interest to not wait half a year to press play. After the third listen I’m forced to conclude the album doesn’t disappoint so much as fails to impress save for a few key tracks.

But perhaps I’m asking too much.

Listening to “Dead Meat” one evening caused me to do a mental double take not because I’m particularly lovelorn or vengeful, but because my inability to focus on one art form has resulted in my lagging behind the times in all of them. And it’s not just creative-types attempting a grandiose balancing act. There are professors who attempt equilibrium between their professions and their family lives, athletes who attempt it between their training and their social lives, and so on. It happens. In my case I’m afflicted with a desire to do the artistic-identity shuffle. Everyone takes on too much.

It’s four in the morning and I’m exhausted sitting here listening to Sean Lennon sing: “Gonna get what you deserve / In the end you’re going to learn / Gonna get what you deserve.” There are storyboards for a film yet to be cast and a book on the business of media on my desk. There’s a guitar stretched lazily upon my comforter and a pen frantically scribbling about an album I don’t much care for on the whole. I’m on the floor looking up at the littered, tangible aspects of my personality, when suddenly I’m lost in the orchestration of this song, the vocal doubling and sweeping strings reminiscent of Elliott Smith on a good day, Duncan Sheik on a bad one. I think of the balancing act Sean Lennon plays between famous son and human musician, and I think to myself that I can do it; I can tackle everything at once. Then the piano waltzes to a close, its right hand tucked into slumber by vibrato strings, and I know better. It’s time to slow down.

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