And…we’re done!
I’ve been cranking out the words for the last couple weeks in order to bring this one to its conclusion, and this morning, conclude it, I did!
So here’s a bit of cheerful triumphalism. (Sorry about the vuvuzela things.)
Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
Our song challenge continues, and this week it’s A Song You’d Like Played At Your Wedding. Well, my wedding was twenty-two years ago, so here’s a song that was played at my wedding. The Wife and I danced our first dance to this song. Here are the Righteous Brothers with “Unchained Melody”.
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Something for Thursday
Back at it with our Song Challenge! This time it’s A Song I Like From the 1970s, which is pretty broad, innit? There are a lot of directions I can go here because that’s the decade I was born, so a lot of this stuff is familiar to me on a pretty elemental level. I’ll try not to go overboard, but here are several 1970s-era songs that I like a great deal, starting with one that as a kid I didn’t realize that it’s about…what it’s about. I figured these folks were having an afternoon snack of a piece of candy or something. It wasn’t until I listened to the song anew as a twenty-something (I’m very sure I didn’t hear the song at all between the time I was 5 and the time I was 25) that I realized just what kind of delight these folks were discussing in terms of afternoon enjoyment.
Here’s a wonderful Jim Croce song that has to probably be explained to young listeners hearing it for the first time. Operator? “You can keep the dime”? What’s all that about?
Let’s see…well, we have to have the Bee Gees, and this is my all-time favorite Bee Gees song.
And then there’s John Denver! I think there was a time when I didn’t love John Denver. I think it was however much time elapsed between my birth and the first time I heard John Denver.
Ballads about 1970s events? We’ve got those, too:
And I’ll leave off with this bit of pep by ELO, “Mr. Blue Sky”.
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Returning to the Song Challenge, it’s a song from my pre-teen years! I wasn’t sure how to define this–after all, a song from 1972, when I was pushing one year old, was definitely “pre-teen”, strictly speaking. But I think they’re referring to the “tweener” category, when you’re 11 or 12. As my tweener period coincides very nicely with the arrival on the scene of MTV, here’s one of the very first songs I ever encountered in “music video” form. (Although we didn’t even have MTV at our house until several years later, because it took our town that long to run cable out that far on the road where we lived. For several years my sole exposure to MTV came during visits and sleepovers at a friend’s house.)
Anyway, here’s the sublimely goofy early 80s icon Adam Ant, with “Goody Two Shoes”.
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I was all set to move along in the ongoing Song Challenge, but events in the musical world today compel me to push A Song from my Preteen Years to next week.
Andre Previn has died at age 89.
Previn was one of the great musicians of the latter half of the 20th century, accomplished as a conductor and as a pianist and in both classical and in jazz. He did important film work (he conducts the musical arrangements in My Fair Lady, a film of which I’ll have much more to say in a forthcoming essay), and he did a lot of important work in the concert hall and on recording. Previn is partly responsible for the re-emergence of the complete score of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2, a work which prior to Previn’s adopting it in the early 1970s was almost always performed with extensive cuts. (Why, I have never been able to figure out. A complete performance of the work runs no longer than the Berlioz Fantastique or the Mahler 1st or the Beethoven 3rd.) Previn’s 1973 recording of that symphony (with the London SO) is the one I heard first, and though Vladimir Ashkenazy’s Concertgebouw recording has since overtaken Previn’s as my favorite, I almost certainly would not have heard Ashkenazy if not for Previn’s wonderful recording.
That’s not my selection here, though. Here I’ll go with a selection from one of the finest recordings I’ve ever heard in any genre. This is Previn playing the piano and conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in George Gershwin’s Concerto in F. There is so much vitality to this performance, so much verve and excitement, ripe with the energy of pre-WWII American urban society.
Bravo, Maestro Previn! You’ll not be forgotten soon, if ever.
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Returning to our ongoing song challenge, it’s time for A Song I Never Tire Of. Here’s one that I heard off and on for years on various oldies and classic rock radio stations, but never all that much…until two years ago when the song showed up prominently in the opening scene of Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2. The song’s main story is kind of quaint and old fashioned and maybe even a bit problematic–why would she spend her life pining for a man who can never love her back because “his life, his lover, his lady” is the sea? Heavens, girl, drop his ass and find someone whose head isn’t full of Horatio Hornblower bullshit–but still, the song is incredibly catchy, and its bridge section is one of the best ever. Here is Looking Glass with “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)”.
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Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
Next up on our ongoing Song Challenge (details here) is a song that makes me sad. Well, I can’t really think of too many of those, but this song from the Broadway show Camelot is terribly, terribly sad. It comes near the end, when Lancelot and Guinevere, having pursued their love affair after trying not to, have only seen their entire worlds collapse into ruin and a war that will destroy Camelot and everything King Arthur tried to build. It’s an achingly beautiful song that seems hopeful at first, only to conclude that their love brought about disaster.
Here, for comparison, are two renditions. First Julie Andrews from the Original Cast recording:
And here are Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero from the soundtrack to the film version of the show: