Category: Music

Musical Selection: Storytelling Songs

9/15/2017

It surprises me when someone says, "Oh, I don't know the words. I just listen to the music."

Words being important to me, yes, but still, how sad to miss the lyrical turns, the clever wordplay, the telegraphic details.

Sheryl Crow says, "He says his name is William, but I'm sure it's Bill or Billy or Mack or Buddy, and he's plain ugly to me." She's showing us what it is to see through the ploys of a barfly trying to get the girl's attention.

So when Ms. Crow goes on to announce that all she wants to do is have some fun, we can see it's not so easy –– even while drinking beer at noon in a bar that faces a car wash.

Of course, maybe the words and story is what appeals to me. They are kind of my things, after all.

Like this song from Bree Sharp.

Granted, it's a ballad, which would lead anyone to expect a narrative, but she paints a noir, Bonnie-and-Clyde picture of the end of a spree.

But why oh why does Lipton Iced Tea snip a bit of Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweat's SOB in their television ad campaign?

Yes, the hand-clap is catchy, but there's a jarring cognitive dissonance when one pairs this particular song with a hearty recommendation for something to drink.

Someone at the ad agency must have had a sense of humor.

(Says she, making up a story.)

PS: And on the other hand, we have songs like Louie Louie.

The words are so indistinguishable that you can put whatever comes to mind into those slurred lines, and all you are left with as a listener is a passionate understanding for the need to leave.

I know it's supposed to be a sea-shanty, but honestly it could just as easily be a call to take up needlepoint or remove potatoes from the stove. Wooah, baby, me gotta go.

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The Would-Be Farm: It's All Re-Runs on Farm TV

9/7/2017

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Beach life. I worked as the first mate on a small passenger ferry* that shuttled tourists from Pass-a-Grille Beach across a short stretch of salt water to an uninhabited barrier island called Shell Key.

If there were customers, we'd also take them on a sunset cruise.

It was a great gig. My sister and I job-shared. We rendered tourists happy by the application of two-hour doses of undeveloped beach and surf. They got to see the real Florida. Sometimes they tipped.

(*The Shell Key Shuttle is still in biz, but under new management.)

The boss, Captain Alva, was perhaps the most mature and sensible adult male I'd known up till then. He offered positive, actionable advice when asked and took joy in the highlights of the day. Still does.

Inevitably, after a sunset cruise, the friendly fishing folk hanging around Merry Pier would ask how the sunset had been.

Because I love to get the laugh, I usually answered with something flip, deadpanned for shock value: "Aw, you know –– same old same old. It was a re-run. Saw it last week."

At the Would-Be Farm, we get a lot of that re-run stuff.

The fire-pit doing its thing, for instance. A bonfire doesn't seem to get old.

Even if we don't have any magic on hand, there's a lot of material for rapid oxidation. Brush transformed to dust. Heat and light. Sticks in the fire, sparks in the sky.

The night-time music is on repeat, too. Between the maniacal Whip-poor-wills and the spring peepers, it's something to have a bit of peace. Not to mention, though I am, the canids.

Coyotes serenade us most nights. We call it the chorus of the damned.

We try to pick out the individual voices in the quavering-howling-yapping-yipping wall of sound. In late summer, the pups join in with typically youthful enthusiasm.

The closest human sound might be atonal music by way of a middle-school band tuning up. An example? Sure, she typed, grinning evilly.

Check this Messiaen YouTube clip. At your own risk, by the by: Despite everything, I think I'm getting addicted to it.

We often end the sunlit day at the beaver pond.

We put a two-seater deer stand up a pine tree so we can get above some of the mosquitoes and see beyond the fringe of cattails that surrounds the pond.

The beavers –– true to stereotype –– clock in at dusk and work their fannies off maintaining the mud dams. They are reliable as clockwork, chugging through the water like mammalian tugboats.

With the right show, we can watch re-runs –– one most devoutly hopes –– for years.

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Musical Selections...Lhasa de Sela

7/14/2017

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I am only sorry that I didn't know about Lhasa de Sela when she was still alive. I don't believe her untimely death makes her music better, but it certainly makes listening to it all the sweeter.

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Music Selections: Word Tacos

6/9/2017

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Sometimes a person just needs a silly song in a different language.

!Hay Machete!

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Roger Moore? Et Tu?

5/23/2017

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He was not my favorite Bond, but he was a smooth Saint.

And he was a pop culture icon; Amy Winehouse didn't have to explain anything past "like Roger Moore," because we got it.

I'll skip the Nerf Herder song and also close my eyes against Roger Moore's own song stylings. Goodbye, Mr. Moore.

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Musical Interlude: Weirdest, Possibly Coolest.

5/19/2017

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Weird, cool, and oddly entertaining:

How and why? Who would do such a thing?

I can only answer for why I found and listened to this Craftsman music as I was in quest of power-tool Christmas music, which I remembered from a long-ago NPR story about the things people play at the holidays. The album (A Toolbox Christmas, natch) scores high in the category of odd, though not so well in the "listenability" department.

Well, kudos* to anyone who makes music.

*Word nerd alert: "kudos" is a singular noun that translates from the Greek as "praise." So in a grammatically correct universe, when someone is highly praised, she gets much kudos rather than many kudos.

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Tiny Desk Concerts

4/11/2017

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It's unfortunate that Winston Churchill, in the midst of fighting for the survival of freedom and decency during World War II, did NOT actually respond to a call to cut funding for the arts by asking, simply, "Then what are we fighting for?"

It would have been neat to have heritage for such a sharp rallying cry.

Thank you, NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts. Even though with only about 20% of your budget coming from the feds, I am happy that some of my taxes go to support this, not that.

And thank you, Lake Street Dives. Really enjoying this latest bit of what my mom would have called blue-eyed soul.

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This Space Intentionally Left Blank

4/7/2017

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A river of words is usually in flood. And while I write about nearly everything, my blogging impulse is toward humor. This spot abounds with absurdities and piffle.

This week has thwarted me.

Not on a personal level, but at the world-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket level. I'm not ready to josh around with words today.

I have high hopes. The sun'll, as Annie would belt out, come out –– tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there'll be sun... Mashed up, inevitably, with the melancholic fall "Come What May" from Moulin Rouge. Be as kind as you can be out there.

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Oh ShEnandoah, I Long to Hear You.

1/10/2017

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Thank goodness for teachers like Mr. Forman. My grade-school music teacher was nerdy and boney and tireless in his love for and encouragement of music. He mimeographed the lyrics of songs and once a week from 4th to 6th grade, we went to his classroom and sang while he played electric piano.*

I have no recollection of how we sounded. Not all of us were invited to join the school chorus. But I can still sing every word of Elton John's "Rocket Man, John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High," "Shenandoah," John Prine's "Paradise," and more.

These are tunes that pop up on the internal jukebox and startle me in their clarity.

*He also played in a jazz band on the weekends, but I only learned that later.

Sidebar Tangent: John Prine wrote "Paradise" for his dad in 1971 about coal-mining in his Kentucky hometown. The chorus goes something like "Oh Daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County/Down the Green River, where Paradise lay./Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking/Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away."

In 2015, the Peabody Energy Corporation filed a lawsuit, that, among other things, claimed that the lyrics were inflammatory and offensive. Forty some years later, and Mr. Peabody's coal train still riding those rails.

This ties into my New Year's genealogy binge.

My binge was marked by long stints in front of the trusty laptop punctuated by exclamations of, "Huh. Well of course it's his great-uncle Gorton," and "What were the chances that these two families would intermarry this many times? Jeesh. Guess they swiped right on KINder. Nyuk nyuk nyuk."

So here's a brief, obvious overview: when looking up into the family tree, everyone gets four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, 16 g-g-grands, 32 g-g-g-grands and on and on.

Family multiplication happens pretty quickly: about 100 years gets you sixteen great-great-grandparents. Sixteen family branches. Sixteen.

If you are lucky, there might be a photo of yourself in diapers perched on one of those great-great-pappy's grumpy lap.

But in a hurry, these many forebears become mysterious strangers. Even with a storytelling family, diarists, and hoarders of ephemera, finding out about these people can prove fiendishly difficult.

The time flashes past. Nobody asks enough questions. And a flood or a fire or a hungry mouse can wipe out the paper records of a whole county.

Baby Mumsie on her great-grandfather's lap.

But back to my binge: I was poking into the history of my Wheeler kin. They lived way up in the hills of Franklin County, Georgia, fifty or so miles southwest of Asheville, NC. My Grampa Navy would have pronounced that word as "he-ills."

Franklin County held quite a number of likely Richard Wheelers who might be my great-great-grandfather, but he's been a sticky wicket.

In that steep corner of the world, Wheelers bifurcated like tadpoles in a pond. And they each named their kids after the same uncles and dads: William, Richard, John, James.

Which is why I was idly staring at the 1880 US Census entry for a Wheeler family. In 1880, our Richard had been dead already for seven years, leaving the kids and wife to work the farm. This nearby family farm was headed up by John Franklin Wheeler, a possible brother to my Richard, with kids named Mary E., Catherin C., Richard W., Masurah, Martha, and Lu Ellar.

Lu Ellar, really? It's an all-to-easy assumption to think that hill folks are all Clampetts –– clichéd stewed squirrel and moonshine.

Taking a closer look at the census-taker’s handwriting, I saw that Lu Ellar is more likely “Sue Ellen.” Regional –– but not so over-the-top as "Lu-Ellar."

As I pondered names and names, my internal jukebox piped up with “Shenandoah.”

It’s a magnificent song, really, a sea-shanty with long sonorous notes that are fun to splash out on. It's about the exploration of the States when the "west" was the Missouri River.

I'll spare you my rendition, but Harry Belafont's version is pretty good.

Mr. Foreman used to insist that we pronounce the lyrics as befitted the song and its historical setting (just as a later professor taught me to read Spenser so that it rhymed). So when the chorus came up in my mind (and –– full disclosure –– throughout the living room) I sang it this way: “A-WAY! I’m bound away, across the wide Missor-ah.”

If Lu Ellar can be Sue Ellen, what about Massurah? Massurah, Missourah...Missouri.

Missouri? Click-click-click and it turns out that Massurah was the delightfully easier-to-track Missouri Caroline Wheeler. Her grandfather was my great-great-great grandfather. I don’t yet know why she was given this unusual name, but I do have a better handle on Richard, son of Mary Freeman and William Wheeler.

I probably should have mentioned it sooner, but thank you, Mr. Forman, for putting up with my shenanigans, teaching me to read music (I’ve mostly forgotten, but still), and sharing your unembarassed love of song.

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Musical Selections: On Heavy Rotation

12/6/2016

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For every genuinely cheerful Christmas song, there are thirteen gruesome dirges that –– for some of us –– tend to get stuck on the internal jukebox.

For instance, I love me some "Santa Baby," especially the Eartha Kitt version, but then there's The Pogue's "Fairytale of New York."

Both songs embrace the material feel-goods of the season, but with such different moods.

The other dozen miserables? Challenge accepted: The Chieftans and Elvis Costello's The St. Stephen's Day Murders, which sounds cheerful until you listen to the actual words. Shelby Lynne's Xmas nails the dark side of the material feel-goods of the season.

Then there's Hayes Carll's Grateful for Christmas (dare you not to get choked up over your egg nog on that one) and Robert Earl Keene's fantastic Merry Christmas from the Family, which is painfully funny with the sad.

I vote that the most suicidal Christmas song of all time is anyone's version of I'll Be Home for Christmas. (Because they won't. Of course they won't. Everyone's heart is going to break for Christmas. Jeesh.)

Second runner-up in the depression sweepstakes? Of course, John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Happy X-Mas (The War Is Over). Yeah, let's hope it's a good one.

Add in the tunes that are just so irritating: even the youthful Jackson 5's version of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus makes me claw at my ears. So does the spiteful Gramma Got Run Over By a Reindeer by Patsy and Elmo and Spike Jones' All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth. The best way to chase me out of Home Depot? Play these songs.

I cannot be the only person who finds Wham!'s Last Christmas more than a little soul-killing. And while I am not hating on the King, seriously, who can listen to Blue Christmas without chiming in a broader, more sarcastic verson? Likewise, Brenda Lee's wonderful gappy voice just grates on me on Rocking Around the Christmas Tree.

Okay, uncle. I can't listen to any more.

I close with a few seasonable choices that make me happy to deck the halls and bake cookies.