I’ve noted a couple of times as I have worked through the original 30-Day Song Challenge and The Sequel how powerfully I associate music with family and my childhood. If you’d grown up where I did, you’d perhaps understand why the movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? was more than just a really good comedy. The soundtrack was loaded with
Read moreThe guy can’t sing (phrasing, anyone?) He can’t write songs. And while I’ve heard guitarists defend him, I’ve personally never seen or heard him play anything that strikes me as being more than sort of marginally competent. I would ask you to explain to me what the big deal is, but I’m afraid you’d try. So here’s a song by
Read moreHere’s one I’ve been waiting on. Few things reveal more about a society than its music. Plato explained that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state change with them. Argue chicken and egg on this if you like, but Jimmy Swaggart bitched about it and Pop Will Eat Itself sampled his rant in the intro to
Read moreI’ve always felt strongly attuned to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous short story, “Ethan Brand.” The title character forsakes his life to search the world for the unpardonable sin. He finds it. It ends badly for him. The nature of the sin? He remembered with what tenderness, with what love and sympathy for mankind, and what pity for human guilt and woe,
Read moreWhen we think about rock & roll and its various derivative styles, we pretty much think of the US and UK. And why not – just about every thread of the popular music universe has arisen in one of the two countries. But when you invent something cool, everybody is going to want to play, which is why you can
Read moreWhen we’re kids we like the damnedest things, don’t we? There was a moment, I guess during the summer of 1972, when my two favorite songs were the Jackson 5’s “Rockin’ Robin”…
Read moreSo many places I haven’t been, so many places I want to go, so many songs about places. But I guess the place I haven’t been that I want to see the most is Scotland. My favorite Scottish artist is Fish. And as he sings here, when he was still with Marillion, he was born “with a heart of Lothian.”
Read moreA little whimsy, a lot of alienation. Dynamic tension, much? Wonderful stuff from The Blueflowers, whose “In Line with the Broken-Hearted” is one of the best CDs of the year so far.
Read moreAnd I’m back from several days of packing and moving, just in time to find this emotional and spiritual landmine waiting for me. [sigh] When you’re a kid in America, nothing is as tangibly magical as Christmas. The excitement, the presents, the lights, the sheer spectacle of the entire world gone shimmery. And nothing is more special than family, the
Read moreFirst, via Ann Ivins: Harold Camping’s Family Radio has completely redesigned its Web site with no mention of the Rapture. Hunh. I hopped over to have a look, because cynical me wondered if the redesign was sophisticated enough to suggest that they had been working on it since, you know, last week. But have a look. Nothing here that a
Read moreEvery movie has a soundtrack. And let’s be honest – most of them are as unmemorable as … well, as the movies themselves. At its best, though, the music captures the spiritual essence of the auteur‘s vision, interacting with the film in ways that are simply transcendent. One plus one equals infinity, and it’s impossible to ever conceive of song
Read moreSweet hell, what was I thinking when I came up with this entry I mean, it isn’t that I can’t think of songs, it’s just that there are several people I consider best friends: people who have been close to me at various points in my life, people I have relied on, shared good times, survived the bad. People whose
Read moreI imagine most of us have loved. And lost. I also imagine that most of us look back, on occasion, and wonder what the hell we were thinking. Some years ago I made what I still regard as the worst mistake of my life. When it went to hell it didn’t destroy the whole world, it didn’t leave me any
Read moreIn a way, this is kind of a trick question. If you’re doing it right, a song doesn’t last nearly long enough. So when I was creating 30-Day Song Challenge, the Sequel, maybe I should have designated day 13 for your favorite make-out album. In any case, this may be the single easiest day of either the original challenge or
Read moreIf you’ve been following the series, you may have noticed that instead of simply offering up a song that fits the criteria (“a song you love from the ’00s”), I’m trying to write about songs that are in some way definitive. Maybe it was something that typified a dominant movement, or perhaps it was a tune that marked an important
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lullaby pit 