The problem was that my Samsung Galaxy earbuds suddenly stopped producing audio with my Samsung laptop. They would connect and I could use the tapping motions to make videos stop and start, but the sound refused to come through the buds! It would only come through the main speakers. My buds still worked normally with my phone, so after a couple restarts and a re-pairing of the buds with the computer, I think we’re back on track. That was weird…I love tech when it’s working perfectly, but not so much when it ain’t.
(And yes, I could have just listened to this song on my phone and then posted here, or I could have posted from my phone directly, but I like my workflow and it annoys me when it’s screwed up!)
So anyway, the other night we were watching an episode of The Repair Shop, and one of the people who brought something in to be fixed was an old British folk singer named Ralph McTell. He brought in a large stuff kangaroo that had something to do with a kid’s show he did songs for, but what caught my ear during the “profile” section of the segment was that McTell had a big hit in the late 1960s called “Streets of London”. I gave the song a few listens, and it really hit me. Not only is it a beautiful song with a touching, lilting melody, but McTell’s voice is exactly the kind of deep baritone you would want for a song like this.
The lyrics at first seem to be thematically simple, though the imagery they use is definitely poetic. It’s easy to listen to “Streets of London” and hear a kind of “People have it worse off than you” message, but I think it goes a bit deeper than that. The song seems to me a kind of statement about a society that allows these levels of loneliness and despair to exist at all. Anyway, here is “Streets of London” by Ralph McTell.
