Just because.
Something for Thursday (Glen Campbell edition)
There are four songs I remember from when I was just a very small child: “Country Roads” by John Denver, “Song Sung Blue” by Neil Diamond, “Love’s Been Good To Me” by Frank Sinatra, and “Rhinestone Cowboy” by Glen Campbell. My very earliest musical memories involve these songs.
Glen Campbell died the other day. He was a wonderful musician, and the world is poorer for his passing…but so much richer for his having been here at all.
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Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
So I’m always a little confused by the way a song’s lyrics relate to the rest of it. Some songs have lyrics that are so indelible that it seems almost sacrilege to put any other lyrics to that tune and vice versa (“New York New York”, for example). Other songs have wonderful tunes but awful lyrics that are so bad they almost make the rest of the song laughable in itself (“McArthur Park” is a good example here). And then there’s a third category, where the lyrics aren’t necessarily good, but rather…just weird. It’s easy in songs like that to get wrapped up in trying to figure out just what the heck a song means, and if the melody and rhythm aren’t good, the song just disappears.
Here’s a song whose lyrics make no sense to me at all. I haven’t the faintest idea what this song is trying to say, if anything. And you know what? Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s just a rhyme that exists for no other reason to fit an incredibly catching melody and compelling dance beat. I dunno…but I know that I love this song.
Here are The Killers with “Human”.
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Something for Thursday
I’ve been reading the memoirs of Hector Berlioz lately, having come to the odd and surprising realization that even though he is my favorite classical composer, I’ve never read his memoirs all the way through! The strength of his opinions is amazing–Berlioz was not a man to ever entertain feelings of ‘meh’.
I’ll have more to say about the Memoirs another time, but for now, here is Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture.
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Something for Thursday (Friday because of a mid-week holiday that has me confused as to what day it is edition)
Oops.
Anyway, why not kick off the weekend with some adventure music? Lead on, Dr. Jones!
There’s a lot to love about Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, just as there’s a lot about it that’s frustrating. The score is magnificent, though! It’s one of my favorite John Williams scores, and that’s saying a lot. The score is just bursting with wonderful melodies from start to finish, the action writing is suitably thrilling, and the whole score is just a wonderful listen. These are a few selections. The second track featured here (“Keeping Up with the Joneses”) is especially interesting as it is barely heard in the film at all, despite a really quite wonderful jaunty theme that turns wonderfully lyrical.
Go find some excitement this weekend, folks!
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Something for Thursday (Twenty Years of HARRY POTTER edition)
The other day marked the twentieth anniversary of the initial publication of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (or Philosopher’s Stone, if you live in Britain–and I guess I should link that first since that’s where the book came first). I could wax poetic for quite a long post about Harry Potter and the enormous effects on culture those books had, but others have weighed in more intelligently than I could on those points. I, like many others, have had my own “personal journey” with Harry Potter, starting with sometime in what must have been 1999 when I started noticing these books with the unusual cover art and title font on the front displays at Borders, and very prominently placed in the childrens’ section. By the time I was aware of the growing Harry Potter phenomenon, there were already three books out, and I bought the first one out of curiosity.
And I loved it, right from the get go–right from the opening paragraph. I mean, that first book’s opening paragraph is some seriously wonderful stuff! Don’t take my word for it, either: look what this fan did with it:
I never looked back, eagerly snatching up each book as it came out and squeezing it into my reading time. By the release of Deathly Hallows, the last book, I was in as much a fever-pitch as anyone, and I remember a kind of Devil’s bargain I made with The Daughter at the time, who was about eight years old: on a Sunday afternoon I told her that she could play videogames for as long as she wanted. Then I went out on the balcony of our apartment and plowed through the last four hundred or so pages of that book.
I’ve been meaning to reread the Potter books for some time now, and perhaps this winter it will finally be time to do so. (In honesty, I associate the books–as I do most fantasy–with the cooler months. I’ve never been sure why that is, because fantasy is not an inherently autumnal genre.) I also need to rewatch the movies, which are, for the most part, excellent adaptations and retellings of the story.
One final note: I included a call-back to Harry in Stardancer. How could I not? While the situation involving Lt. Rasharri’s revelation to Tariana Osono of her powers isn’t so confrontational as when Hagrid tells Harry that he’s a wizard, it was hard not to see this moment in my story as a reflection of the earlier one.
And now, since this is Something for Thursday and all, some music!