Wow, I actually forgot what day it was, for purposes of the blog. Sorry about that, folks!
Here’s Danny Kaye and the Muppets.
Later! Inchworm, inchworm….
Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
And time to resurrect this weekly feature.
Older readers will know that I have some respect for the old disco sound, even if an awful lot of disco was crap and generally speaking the disco sound couldn’t really lead anywhere other than where it was when it started. It always was a musical dead end, and a lot of its tropes are easily mocked, but I will go to my grave believing that the disco era, brief as it was, really did produce some good songs. And this is one of my very favorites. This song just makes me all happy inside.
Here’s Donna Summer, singing “Last Dance”.
Dance with me!
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Something for Thursday
Last week’s post here was a cover of a Beatles song, and here I have another one. It’s the Beatles song I never thought I’d like — I mean, for years, I’ve hated this song. But then I watched the movie Across the Universe (which, frankly, blew my mind in a lot of ways). This movie is a musical whose songs are all Beatles songs, almost all of them seamlessly worked into the story in logical ways, and this one comes toward the end, at one of those “movie romance” moments when all hope seems lost.
Here’s “Hey Jude”, from Across the Universe. (The dark-haired fellow is Jude; singing to him, from across the Atlantic, is his American friend Max.)
OK, John and Paul. You win. I give.
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Something for Thursday
For years I thought I hated the Beatles, until I realized that a bunch of songs that I’ve always loved are actually Beatles songs, and I thus concluded that while I don’t care for the Beatles as performers, I think they were brilliant songwriters. I love the Beatles, it turns out. It’s just that I love them when somebody else is singing their songs.
Here’s my favorite of all Beatles songs, “In My Life”, sung by Canadian singer-songwriter Alison Crowe.
Alison Crowe’s website is here; I reviewed a couple of her CDs for GMR a while back, here and here. I like Ms. Crowe’s work immensely, but I must admit that due to my own tendency to be forgetful about things I discover, I forgot about her — and I’ve got an unlistened CD of hers sitting around here somewhere. I’ve got work to do….
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Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
This is one of the most achingly beautiful settings of a traditional song I have ever heard. It is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “Shenandoah”. It was used in the end credits of the movie Nixon, but I first heard this setting my freshman year of college when our choir did it.
Try and find something wrong with the world after listening to that.
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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….