Category Archive: Music
John Hiatt
The other day, I put John Hiatt’s Bring the Family into the CD player in my car, and I’ve been listening to it yesterday and today. It’s been a few years since I heard it last. I’d forgotten how good it is. Just Hiatt on guitar, Ry Cooder on lead, Nick Lowe on bass, and Jim Keltner on drums — and a bunch of good songs with quirky lyrics (who else would rhyme “amoeba” with “Queen of Sheba”?).
In a Grave They Laid You
In a grave they laid you, O my Life and my Christ;
and the armies of the angels were sore amazed
as they sang the praise of your submissive love.Right it is indeed, life-bestowing Lord, to magnify You;
for upon the Cross were Your most-pure hands outspread,
and the strength of our dread foe have You destroyed.John Tavener, Lamentations and Praises.
Bach’s Birthday
In honour of the 317th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach’s birthday (thanks, Duane, for drawing our attention to this!)…. On the weekend, I picked up Morimur, which includes Bach’s Partita D Minor for solo violin, a number of chorales sung by the Hilliard Ensemble, and Ciaccona for solo violin and four voices. I gather from the booklet included and from the reviews at Amazon that the theory that undergirds this piece of music is a bit controversial, not to say weird. I knew nothing about those theories when I bought the disc, nor does one need to think about them in order to appreciate the music. I simply saw that it was the Hilliard Ensemble doing Bach. I’ve enjoyed several of their other recordings. I’ve listened to the whole of this one only once so far. Anyone else heard it?
Genevan Psalter
Thanks to George van Popta‘s new blog, I discovered a webpage with much of the Genevan Psalter posted on it. I’m not sure whose rhyming of the psalms appears here, but if you click on the psalm title, you’ll hear the original tune, written by Louis Bourgeois (“Louis the Middle-Class”?) or Maitre Pierre or someone like that. For instance, here’s Psalm 6, one of my favourites.
I hope that eventually all the Genevan tunes will be up on the page. I’m working on learning them, and having them in this format will help a lot. Thanks for the link, George, and welcome to the world of blogging!.
Play It Again
This evening, while I was driving somewhere, I caught part of Tony Dillon-Davis’s show “Play It Again” on CKUA Radio. “Play It Again” is a weekly program which features popular music from the ’20s to the ’50s. Each week, the program focuses on one particular year, and Dillon-Davis talks about the significant events that took place that year, the famous books published then, and things like that. He also lists the number one songs for that year.
What struck me tonight, not for the first time, was how often the same song hit number one. In that era, a song might be covered by any number of artists, and sometimes the same song appeared at number one by one artist for a month or so and then by another artist the next month. That’s completely unheard of today. Sometimes artists do cover songs, but they’d never dream of releasing their cover version a month after the original! Only in jazz music, it seems to me, do the standards get performed over and over again, with each artist giving it his own particular twist.
And that leads me to questions for which I don’t have answers. What accounts for this phenomenon? It strikes me that something, or even several things, must have changed between then and now. Were the changes in the music itself? in the listeners and their expectations and tastes? in something else?
Sam Phillips and Songwriting
The other day, when I was out doing some Christmas shopping, I stopped in A&B Sound and listened to Sam Phillips’s new album, Fan Dance. I’d liked some of her earlier albums, and I’ve always enjoyed T-Bone Burnett’s work so I thought I’d give this one a try. I enjoyed the music a lot. It’s quirky, and she uses a variety of instruments. On one song, “Wasting My Time,” she’s backed up by solo cello. It sounds great!
Lyrically, however, the songs are disappointing. Most of them seem to be free-association, stream-of-consciousness stuff, a combination of words with very little coherence. It reminded me a bit of a song I once wrote with Tim Gallant:
A million blackbirds fly in the night
You don’t understand me
I look in the mirror and you die of fright
You don’t understand me
The sun keeps shining, except when it’s too bright
You don’t understand me
A million reasons to see you tonight
You don’t understand me
You don’t understand me
Not a word I say
You don’t understand me
See the tourist parade
And so forth. It was a long time ago. As I recall, we were deliberately parodying the obscure lyrics of people like Phillips, but it actually turned out to be one of the best songs we wrote together. Which may say something about the other songs, come to think of it. At any rate, I don’t know if I’ll be picking up Sam Phillips’s new CD yet or not. Anyone else heard it?