The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Today is Willie Nelson’s birthday. He is 88 years old.
Sheila O’Malley has more on him, but suffice here to say that he’s one of the great geniuses of American art in the last century. I truly believe this. His songs and his music will endure.
A few selections:
Also, do check out one of my favorite pieces of music writing ever, this article on Willie Nelson and his guitar, Trigger.
Songwriter Jim Steinman, one of the biggest contributors to the “bigger than life” aura of a lot of rock music of the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and beyond, has died. He was 73.
Steinman’s songs were the stuff of excess: in a genre where radio play discourages songs much longer than four or five minutes, Steinman filled artists’ albums with epic anthems eight, nine, even twelve minutes long. His songs were huge-sounding, too, seemingly written to take advantage of a singer’s full range (and God help a singer of limited range who tries to enter the juuuust-this-side-of-campy emotional world of a Steinman song). In Steinman’s lyrics, relationships are all about intensity and emotion and sensuality; Steinman’s songs are the stuff of wild love affairs that leave the participants in a breathless, sweaty heap, lit either by the final flickerings of the guttering candles or by the lonely lights of the car’s dashboard after a long night of…well, a long night.
Steinman’s songs may seem to be a marriage of the adolescent and the epic, but I find them wonderful just because it’s nice sometimes to remember what it all felt like in those awkward years when every emotion was a feeling large enough to tilt the world on its axis. That is what Jim Steinman captures in his best songs, that sheer, white-hot intensity of feeling that adult protestations aside, really is a lot more than just raging hormones. An inexperienced heart feels things wildly, in the kind of way of a Jim Steinman song.
While a lot of people might cite his work for Meat Loaf, my personal favorite Jim Steinman song is one he wrote for Celine Dion, “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now”. It’s a song where passion and anger and rage and death and tragedy all come together, and say what you will about it, you surely have to admit that this song belongs to Celine Dion’s enormous arena-filler of a voice.
Thanks for the music, Jim Steinman.
Robert Schumann’s Traumerai is one of classical music’s best-known melodies. The original work is for solo piano, and many piano students learn it (though, to my recollection, this one never came to me during my years of piano instruction). There’s a wonderful book by NPR’s Noah Adams, Piano Lessons: Music, Love, and True Adventures, in which Adams chronicles his year of piano lessons at the age of 52 when he wants to learn Traumerai so he can play it for his wife.
Even though the piece is best known and loved as a piano work, it has–like all the great classical works–been ported to other instruments and ensembles. This one, I find especially appealing: it’s for solo cello with piano accompaniment. I hope Schumann would approve.
Today is April 1, which means that it’s another National Poetry Month! This month, each of my Thursday music posts will involve poetry, either by direct setting or…something else. (What “something else” may be, I’m not really sure. It might just be settings.)
This is a gorgeous setting of a slightly revised version of one of my favorite poems by one of my very favorite poets, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The poem is “The Lady of Shalott”, and the musician is the great Loreena McKennitt.
![John Atkinson Grimshaw - "The Lady of Shalott" - Google Art Project.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Atkinson_Grimshaw_-_%22The_Lady_of_Shalott%22_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg#/media/File:John_Atkinson_Grimshaw_-_"The_Lady_of_Shalott"_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)
This poem has appealed to me ever since I read in high school, either my junior or senior year. Its lyricism and its capture of the sadness of one of the tales that takes place at the periphery of the Arthurian legend (which is ultimately a collection of very sad stories). Tennyson’s work continues to move me greatly; no matter how poetry changes or what has come after, I always find myself responding to his sense of rhyme and meter, as well as his content. Reading Tennyson is like coming home.
“The Lady of Shalott” begins thusly:
On either side the river lieLong fields of barley and of rye,That clothe the wold and meet the sky;And thro’ the field the road runs byTo many-tower’d Camelot;The yellow-leaved waterlilyThe green-sheathed daffodillyTremble in the water chillyRound about Shalott.
As it’s lengthy, I won’t quote it here in its entirety. But you can read it here.
And here is Loreena McKennitt’s setting.
It’s been False Spring here in The 716 of late, as I noted the other day. Today at work I spent about twenty minutes doing my twice-monthly rooftop inspection (a regular part of my job!), and during this, I put in my earbuds and listened to this piece of music. I chose it because its duration is such that it would last roughly the length of time it takes me to inspect the roof, and I searched this out in the first place because I’ve been intending to listen more to this particular composer.
Rachel Portman is known mainly for her film music, though she has written a lot of other stuff too (including an opera based on The Little Prince). Her film work tends to quieter, character-driven films, like Jane Austen adaptations (she won an Oscar for her score the 1996 version of Emma, becoming the first woman composer to do so) and the like. This selection is a collection of several cues from her score to the film The Cider House Rules, which I know nothing at all about other than Michael Caine plays a headmaster of a boarding school or something like that, and he bids his resident boys a decent night’s sleep every night with the words “Good night, you Princes of Maine, you Kings of New England.” The movie was well regarded when it came out, something like twenty years ago, but I certainly have heard nothing of it since.
Portman’s music is gently pastoral in its approach to the drama (at least as it’s represented in this suite), putting me in mind of the fine English pastoral music of the early 20th century–composers like Butterworth and early Vaughan Williams.
If it’s a lovely spring day where you are, may this enhance it…and if not, may this put you in mind of warmer days to come!
Ever have something that was a favorite of yours at some point, but which for no real reason–just the normal moving on to new things, Robert Frost’s “knowing how way leads on to way”–you just leave the favorite thing behind, and then some time later–years later, even–you suddenly remember it?
I’ve been listening to an album by Brona McVittie, an Irish folk singer and songwriter, that I discovered by…well, more on that another time. In listening to McVittie’s album, I found myself reminded of an artist I listened to a lot way back in the early 2000s, but whose track I lost since then. She’s an English folk singer and songwriter named Kate Rusby. I found several of her albums on YouTube and played part of one on my night’s commute…but for now, here’s a song from her debut album, from way back in 1997. This is called “Sir Eglamore”, and it’s a delight.
So why haven’t I heard it in so long? Well…yeah. Way leads on to way, doesn’t it? It’s not just about two roads in a yellow wood.
Here’s Kate Rusby with “Sir Eglamore.”
Sir Eglamore was a valiant knight,
fa la lanky down dilly,
He took up his sword and he went to fight,
fa la lanky down dilly.
As he rode o’er hill and dale,
All armored in a coat of mail,
Fa la la m ba di n da da n da, lanky down dilly..Out came a dragon from her den,
fa la lanky down dilly,
That killed God knows how many men,
fa la lanky down dilly.
When she saw Sir Eglamore,
You should have hear that dragon roar
Fa la la m ba di n da da n da, lanky down dilly.Well, then the trees began to shake,
fa la lanky down dilly,
Horse did tremble and man did quake,
fa la lanky down dilly.
The birds betook them all to peep,
it would have made a grown man weep,
Fa la la m ba di n da da n da, lanky down dilly.But all in vain it was to fear,
fa la lanky down dilly,
For now they fall to fight like bears,
fa la lanky down dilly.
To it they go and soundly fight,
the live-long day from more ’till night,
Fa la la m ba di n da da n da, lanky down dilly.This dragon had a plaguey hide,
fa la lanky down dilly,
That could the sharpest steel abide,
fa la lanky down dilly.
No sword could enter through her skin,
Which vexed the knight and made her grin,
Fa la la m ba di n da da n da, lanky down dilly.But as in choler she did burn,
fa la lanky down dilly,
He fetched the dragon a great good turn,
fa la lanky down dilly,
As a yawning she did fall,
he thrust his sword up, hilt and all,
Fa la la m ba di n da da n da, lanky down dilly.Like a coward she did fly,
fa la lanky down dilly.
To her den which was hard by,
fa la lanky down dilly,
There she lay all night and roared,
the knight was sorry for his sword,
Fa la la m ba di n da da n da
Fa la la m ba di n da da n da
Fa la la m ba di n da da n da
Fa la la m ba di n da da n da da.
One year, give or take, more or less.
There’s a famous song from the Broadway show Rent, called “Seasons of Love”. The song talks about the measure of time, specifically, a year:
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
Five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?In daylights, in sunsets
In midnights, in cups of coffee
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife
In five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, a year in the life?
That’s how many minutes there are in one year: 525, 600.
As I write this (a few days before I’m publishing it), the COVID-19 death toll in the United States, according to the CDC website, is 519,064. We’re just under a death a minute from this disease, over the last year.
“How do you measure, measure a year.” Indeed.
I’m not sure when I consider the COVID-19 virus to have really “begun”, in terms of being a major concern in my personal world. Maybe it was when the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic (March 11, 2020). Maybe it was when Tom Hanks announced that he and his wife, Rita Wilson, had tested positive (March 12, 2020). Maybe it was when the National Basketball Association had to start canceling games because players were testing positive (the same day). I remember watching this segment on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, which aired on March 1, 2020, a few weeks before everything went haywire. The segment is worth watching again, because it’s astonishing how wrong everybody was at the beginning…but even given that proviso, note Larry Kudlow confidently saying, “We’ve got this thing contained already.”
What strikes me most about that video–and this was not only before vaccine development was even at a hopeful stage, but when our best science still hadn’t homed in on COVID-19’s respiratory nature and was still not really endorsing mask use and was instead focusing on rigorous hand-washing and avoiding face-touching–is what Oliver says at the 18:25 mark:
“At this point, you may be wondering, how scared should you be? And the answer is probably, a bit. A bit. I don’t want to be alarmist here, but I don’t want to minimize what we might be facing here.”
It turned out that we should have been a bit more than a bit scared, but then, we didn’t know then what was to come or how Americans would react to it all. Those first weeks, though? Those were…incredible.
It’s all a bit hazy right now, but as COVID-19 began to take hold in the US, and as we all realized that Mr. Kudlow’s lying aside, we most certainly did not have this contained, and as we all saw in the news stories of massive lockdowns in China and Italy and other places with soaring case and death counts, Americans started to panic. For those of us who work in grocery stores, that panic turned into something pretty epic. The run on cleaning supplies was obvious, as were the runs on a number of food staples. People were suddenly wondering: Are we about to be locked in our homes for weeks on end? Are we going to be forbidden to go outside? Will we not be able to buy food or other supplies?
By the end of those first days, the shelves at The Store looked like…well, I struggle to come up with a metaphor, but we’ve all seen the pictures from grocery stores in the South when the hurricane that’s on its way has been upgraded to Category Four. Our delivery schedules were thrown into serious awry as individual stores were suddenly ordering two, three, four times as much supply as they usually did; this surge got passed on to corporate warehouses and then to suppliers. Some brands disappeared from our shelves and have yet to show back up, even now. Buyers scrambled to get stocked with brands we’d never heard of (and if I may say so, Sugardale pepperoni is really tasty!), and of course there were the buying limits that seemed to go on forever. One can of beans. One jar of peanut butter. One package of toilet paper.
And oh, toilet paper. Somehow that one item became the “poster child” for the pandemic’s early run of panic shopping, didn’t it? I came in to work on Saturday morning for a sixth day, just to assist our overwhelmed Grocery department, and the first thing I did at 6:45 am was to pull a pallet of toilet paper out onto the sales floor. The entire pallet was emptied by eager customers in minutes. So was the second one. So was the third one.
At that point, no one had any real idea of how to best combat the virus. The best advice was to wash your hands constantly and avoid touching your face. My hands were absolutely raw after all that washing, and that’s when hand lotion became an indispensable part of my life. We didn’t know yet that the virus was mainly transmitting via respiratory droplets, but that became clear pretty quickly (I remember a horrifying story about a choir someplace in Washington that had a rehearsal that led to nearly all the choir members becoming infected), and then…masks were upon us.
I never liked wearing masks as a kid, not even as part of a Halloween costume, so this took me some time to get used to. It took me a bit of experimenting to realize that the best masks for me were the ones where the straps or cords go around the head and not around the ears, and I bought several masks online from makers who knew what they were doing (i.e., not cheaply-made single-ply thin cotton ones). A year later, I’ve mostly become accustomed to wearing the mask, though I do consider myself fortunate in that my job affords me ample opportunity to take the mask off when I’m alone in my own work room. But even so, I have to admit to being shocked and dismayed at the reaction to masks by an awful lot of Americans.
I’ve seen people wearing masks with anti-mask slogans printed right on them, which strikes me as deeply weird. One said “This mask is USELESS!”, and naturally, it was, given that its wearer had it below her nose. Another said “Worn by FORCE, not FEAR!!!”, which is just goofy. I do not for the life of me understand that macho American attitude toward “fear”, as if self-preservation is a non-manly thing to want. I periodically see snark online: Why would you wear your mask when you’re DRIVING BY YOURSELF, sheeple! Well, speaking just for myself, I’m making several stops in one trip and I don’t want to bother with putting the mask on, taking it off, putting it on, taking it off, each time I stop someplace or come outside. And don’t get me started on the people who will, upon exiting a store or office, rip their mask off and take in a giant deep breath as if they’ve just broken the surface after a deep dive in the sea beyond the limits of their lung capacity.
I’ve reached a point where much of the time I’m wearing a mask, I don’t even think about it and barely notice that I have it on, to the point that I’ve actually caught myself trying to do things like blow a bit of hair off my phone or take a sip of coffee while masked. I cannot understand the sheer levels of anger something so simple as a face mask has inspired. I am once again confronted by the degree to which a great many of my own fellow citizens hold beliefs with which I cannot even begin to remotely empathize…but this is not that post.
As crises go, it’s been very strange for me that this one has been fairly well tailored to suit my particular lifestyle. As an introvert who is quite happy to live a mostly inner life, this pandemic has not been that hard to live with. I miss eating out with The Wife, and the festivals that we love visiting were all canceled last year: no Nickel City Con, no Sterling Renaissance Festival, no Erie County Fair, no Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival. But I still got to go on nature walks with the dogs, and while eating in restaurants hasn’t been a thing in a very long time, we’ve had a lot of wonderful takeout meals. But we don’t find ourselves missing out on desperately-needed human contact; we don’t find ourselves starved for hugs and we don’t find ourselves aching for a return to “normal”. I would, in fact, be lying if I did not admit that some small part of me finds a bit of satisfaction in seeing the world’s extroverts, so many of whom act like introverts like me are somehow problematic, being forced into my way of living for a little while.
Still, though: it’s been a year, and it’s been a hard year, a bad year, a terrible year. It’s been a year that was always going to be bad, but didn’t have to be as bad as it was (and I have a lot more to say about that, whether or not I actually do decide to say any of it). But there were moments along the way, moments of light, moments of goodness, moments that made me think that maybe, just maybe, this entire experience would be a learning experience for enough of us–a critical mass, if you will–that maybe we can still build a future to come in which we put aside the notion that we’re all in this alone, that we’re all marked for our individual fates and that our purpose here is just to serve as our own tiny cogs in the great machine that we call The Economy.
As the light grows at the end of this tunnel, I hope and pray that we take the lesson with us that nothing had to be this way, and that our world can be better. If a crisis does nothing else, it affords us an opportunity to look deeply at our society and ask serious questions about why we do certain things the way that we do. A “return to normal” would be so incredibly disappointing, wouldn’t it? I don’t know about you, but I was never in love with my “normal”. I dare us to do better.
And I think that those 525,600 people–one for every minute, and counting–dare us to do better too.
So I was curious: Did Judy Garland ever record the song “It’s Been a Long, Long Time”? I did a very quick search and didn’t find anything…but I did find this rendition, by an apparently very young Frank Sinatra. Apparently Sinatra never did a studio recording of this song, but he did do it on a radio show of his, and that recording turns up here.
I still don’t know if Garland did the song, so if anyone knows one way or the other, don’t keep me in suspense!