Something for Thursday

UPDATED below.

This is among a handful of songs that spring from my very earliest memories of childhood, when my parents would put their favorite records on the stereo. Frank Sinatra recorded many better songs than this one, but few of those mean as much to me.

I’m always impressed by how Sinatra always, and effortlessly, turned each song into its very own story. He doesn’t just stand there singing or snapping his fingers or doing any of the other “standard singer” stuff; instead he shows what it would look like for the person expressing what the song is saying, what their facial expressions would be, and their gestures. For Sinatra, each song was its own little drama, and he acted it out beautifully.

UPDATE: Geez, I went live with this post and then within twelve hours the video was taken down because of a copyright issue. Because someone might not make a quarter or two because a single Sinatra performance was online. Anyway, you can (for now) hear the song here, but it’s not a live performance so you don’t get to see the stuff I was talking about above. Oh well.

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Something for Thursday

OK. Back when this song was Madonna’s hot new single, MTV had a contest for viewers to make their own videos for the song. I don’t recall what the prize was for the winner, but that winning video was, in my opinion, superior to the “official” video that Madonna eventually made. Unfortunately, all I can find on YouTube of that contest video is this version with cruddy sound and picture, so for my purposes here, it’s the “official” version. And hey, the song is still a piece of bubblegum perfection, in my opinion.

So here’s “True Blue”.

Ah, those wild whacky 80s…how I loved them so….

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Something for Thursday

In honor of Cyd Charisse, who just died the other day:

My problem is that I want to live in a world where this is how you woo a woman.

And a bonus Something for Thursday: Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse again, in the Broadway Melody Ballet from Singin’ in the Rain. I think this number is vastly superior to the ballet from An American in Paris. It’s in two parts; the first little bit here is from the film’s opening credits, but when Gene shows up in the tux by himself, that’s the ballet proper. It’s well-worth the thirteen minutes, folks.

Amazing. Just amazing.

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Something for Thursday

Singin’ in the Rain has so many great numbers, that this one always seems to get overshadowed. Here, Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) has taken Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) into an empty soundstage and set the scene with colored spotlights, a ladder, a fan to make a gentle breeze, a fog machine, and a large silver spotlight to create “moonlight”.

This is one of the songs I sing a lot, under my breath, when I’m working…and in my dreams, maybe once in a while I can dance like Gene Kelly. Maybe. For a minute, before I wake up.

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Something for Thursday

Two cues from James Horner’s masterful score to Braveheart: “A Gift of a Thistle” and that score’s best cue, “The Secret Wedding”.

Gorgeous, dream-like, haunting music — even if Horner used Irish uilleann pipes for his score to a movie set in Scotland, instead of the Scottish Highland pipes!

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Something for Thursday

Ignore the images (from some anime or other) and just listen to Julie Andrews singing as Guinevere in Camelot.

What a terribly sad, sad song! Lerner and Loewe manage to distill, in three minutes, the awful reality of the Guinevere-Lancelot pairing: the awful pain of unspoken love that becomes doubly painful when they can no longer bear the pain of that silence.

If only Camelot had a better book, because the songs are so stunning….

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