Music posts

In honor of tonight's super blood moon (three, three, three lunar events in one), a sampling of moon songs from my iTunes roster. 

It's not a bad list but I thought there would be, I don't know, more songs, I guess. It is the moon, after all. It's the ultimate romantic heavenly body. In China, they even have a holiday for it. 

The Shivaree song is really about wishing for the morning and fearing the night, but it's such a good song I had to include it.

On the way home from a hike today (Snow Lake/Cascades), Patricia and I were listening to shuffle on the iPhone, and for some reason it was giving us a Beatles-heavy rotation, particularly The White Album, and including, eventually, Paul McCartney's lovely song “I Will”:

But these words stuck out for me in a way they hadn't before:

Will I wait a lonely lifetime?
If you want me to, I will

That's a bit much, isn't it? Or mooch? A lonely lifetime? Why would anyone want anyone who wants them to wait a lonely lifetime? Or even half a lonely lifetime? Or a couple of crappy months? That's like agreeing to wait for a sadist. 

It's lines like these that make the opening of the Rutles' “With a Girl Like You” so perfect:

Shoot me down in flames if I should tell a lie
Cross my heart I promise that it's true...

Paul had a tendency to overdo it. 

It's amazing how relevant it all still is. It shouldn't be. We‘ve had massive progress on many fronts, yet Bob Dylan’s words about the assassination of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Miss., on June 12, 1963, still ring true for the racially motivated church killings in Charleston, S.C. on June 17, 2015:

A South politician preaches to the poor white man
“You got more than the blacks, don't complain.
You‘re better than them, you been born with white skin,” they explain.
And the Negro’s name
Is used it is plain
For the politician's gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game

Reprise:

 One of the best first lines of any song, btw. 

This came on iTunes the other day. Hadn't heard it in years. So powerful. And Michael Stipe's favorite? I think he's stated so in the past.

I think something like this every other day, particularly the “wear me out” part:

You come to me with positions

You come to me with excuses
Ducked out in a row
You wear me out
You wear me out

Not to mention:

Crazy what you could've had

 I think this on a maddening loop.

Are these some of the best rhymes ever? Beats glove/love, charms/arms. Ira Gershwin had the mad rhymes, yo.

How can I be civil
When hearing this drivel
It's only for nightclubbing sousses
Oh give me the free-and-easy
waltz that is the Viennese
And go tell the band if they want a hand
The waltz must be Strauss'!

“Free and easy” and “Viennese.” Fuckin' a.

It helps when it's sung by Georges Guétary. I should check out more of his stuff. I'm a Gene Kelly fan but I never did get Leslie Caron throwing over Georges for Gene. I still climb stairs sometimes as he does in “Stairway to Paradise.”

I‘ve been on a The National kick lately. It’s nice to be on a kick:

“We don't bleed/ When we don't fight” should be required hearing in Congress. And at GOP conventions. And maybe on the Op-Ed pages of The Wall Street Journal and The Economist.

I've been listening to this song a lot this year:

“I still owe money to the money/ To the money I owe” should be our national anthem. 

Music suggestions welcome.

A blind man looks out from your eyes ...

New album is out in spring.

I’ve been on iTunes for about 10 years now, and if you sort by number of plays, Joe Henry’s “Ohio Air Show Plane Crash,” from his album “Trampoline,” ranks fifth with 198.

These are the other top Joe Henry songs on my iTunes hit parade:

1. Ohio Air Show Plane Crash, Trampoline, 198
2. Our Song, Civilians, 147,
3. You Can’t Fail Me Now, Civilians, 100
4. Dirty Magazine, Tiny Voices, 88
5. Fat, Fuse, 72

It skews recent, of course. I began listening to him about 10 years before iTunes, in 1992, when “Short Man’s Room” was released and he went on tour with the Jayhawks, whose tour manager was my good friend Dave Paulson. Joe gave Dave a book, “Willie’s Time,” by Charles Einstein, about Willie Mays and the 1950s, and Dave gave it to me, and I almost completed the circle at the Tractor Tavern in ’93 when Joe opened for Jimmie Dale Gilmore. I had the book in my backpack, and Joe was sitting by himself in the corner, but I didn’t work up the courage to go over. Bad form. If you’re there for the opening act, let the opening act know.

I think I’ve seen Joe five to 10 times since then—at the Showbox, at the Pier, at Bumpershoot one year—and last night Patricia and I caught him at the Triple Door in downtown Seattle. A far cry from the Tractor for both of us. Before he came on, I talked up a few of his songs to poor Patricia, stuck there with me, this Joe Henry bore. We both love “Our Song.” I mentioned the great lines from “You Can’t Fail Me Now” that I wrote about last year:

We‘re taught to love the worst in us
And mercy more than life, but trust me:
Mercy’s just a warning shot across the bow

I talked up the epigrams of “Fat”:

If this is our finish let’s begin
Gambled I would lose, guess I .... win

For some reason I quietly sang the opening lines to the title song from Joe’s 1995 album, “Kindness of the World,” which I’d always loved:

I’d like to see your badge
Who are you to be so brave
With one arm free to catch yourself
And you’re using it to wave

Recently, in some online forum, someone had stated the obvious and I replied with these lines from Joe’s song “Dirty Magazine,” which I (missing the irony) also repeated to Patricia:

Just tell me everything I’ve heard before
Like it was news
Like it was news

So of course Joe opened with “Dirty Magazine,” played both “You Can’t Fail Me Now” and “Our Song,” and closed with “Kindness of the World.”

“That just doesn’t happen,” Patricia said afterwards.

“He missed ‘Fat,’” I said.

It was a quick tour, just four acoustic shows in northern towns (Minneapolis, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Seattle) during the first week of December. When the weather gets warm he heads south, to Durham, N.C., to record a new album. He played about five of those songs last night. His voice sounded stronger than ever. The stories accompanying the songs, including playing ”Kindness of the World“ in Hiroshima, Japan, were better than ever.

I kept flashing back on semi-forgotten things. He played ”Short Man's Room“ from 1992 and I remembered a poster from that album (”You‘re only as good as your knees“) hanging in my room for who knows how many years. I listened to ”Our Song“ while cleaning the kitchen in the new place Patricia and I bought in the fall of 2007, the exact wrong time to buy a new place. I also flashed on that first show at the Tractor in Ballard in 1993. I biked there from Green Lake on a drizzly evening with ”Willie’s Time“ in my backpack. I carried both the book (because of lack of courage) and my slicks (because the weather had cleared) on the ride home, and both helped cushion whatever was thrown at me from a car of teenage boys out looking for mischief at 1 a.m. They peeled out and I circled back and found an egg, cracked, in the middle of the street. They'd hit their target but missed. I was unsplattered. There was just this sad egg in the middle of the street.

That was a long time ago. Last night I drove to the Triple Door, had to wave off valet parking, bought a bottle of red wine before the show. It was freezing outside but warm inside. The place was packed. All the men there looked like variations of me.

Here's ”Fat," the song he missed.

Our holidays morph, don't they? FOX-News is right about that but it's not a war and it's not specific to Christmas. It's just change, which FOX-News, absolutists all, can't comprehend. Washington's Birthday becomes Presidents Day (here's to Warren Harding! Herbert Hoover! George W. Bush!), while today, the day Word War I ended, Armistice Day, becomes, in the states anyway, Veterans Day. It's not much of a holiday in that most of us still go to work. If it were a true holiday, if it made sense as a holiday, then veterans would get it off. Why not? Why should I get a holiday for their service? And why shouldn't they for theirs?

According to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, Nov. 11 became a legal holiday, Armistice Day, in 1938, three years before Paul Simon was born, and in 1954, when Simon was 13, it became Veterans Day, a day to honor the veterans of all of our many wars. So Simon certainly remembers when it was Armistice Day. That phrase may even be tinged with nostalgia for him. It may be why he wrote the song “Armistice Day” in 1968:

On Armistice Day
The Philharmonic will play
But the songs that we sing
Will be sad

There's also these words that never go out of style:

Oh, I’m weary from waiting
In Washington, D.C.
I’m coming to see my congressman
But he’s avoiding me
Weary from waiting down in Washington, D.C.

Anyway, here's to the war to end all wars.

John Lennon would've turned 73 earlier this week. I thought of that sad fact while reading a great piece by the New Yorker's John Seabrook on the latest hitmaker in what's left of our hit parade: Lukasz Gottwald, aka Dr. Luke, who, with Max Martin, a Swede, has written top-10 hits for, among others, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Kesha. The money graph:

In writing lyrics, McKee [one of Gottwald's protegees] adheres to the Swedish school of pop songwriting championed by Max Martin. Words are chiefly there to serve the melody. “It's very mathematical,” McKee explained. “A line has to have a certain number of syllables, and the next line has to be its mirror image.” I asked for an example, and she sang, “California girls, we're unforgettable, Daisy Dukes, bikinis on top,” then said, “If you add one syllable, or take it away, it's a completely different melody to Max. I can write something I think is so clever, but if it doesn't hit the ear right then Max doesn't like it.” Don't these strictures make the songs formulaic? McKee doesn't think so. “People like hearing songs that sound like something they've heard before, that's reminiscent of their childhood ... people still just want to hear about love and partying.”

Imagine.

The talent in the room: Britney, Katy, Kesha, Miley

Last “Les Miserables” post of the day.

I first saw the cinematic “Les Miserables” before I was familiar with the music, and the music I became familiar with after seeing the movie was the original Broadway cast album, which has great singing performances from, among others, Robert Billig and Michael Maguire.

The movie has great performances, too, but the voices don't soar quite so much. Director Tom Hooper went for verisimilitude. He had his performers singing live, rather than to a studio-recorded playback. I still like that choice, that chance. This is what I wrote last December:

There’s power in these songs, and from these actors, that you don’t normally get from lip-synching to playback. You definitely feel it in Hathaway’s signature song. You feel it in Hugh Jackman’s early numbers, too, with his red eyes burning into you (“What Have I Done?), and in Redmayne’s great song of survivor’s guilt, “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables,” which is my second-favorite number in the movie. 

This week I saw the movie again on HBO, and the standout this time was Eddie Redmayne as Marius. Particularly “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables”:

Apparently “Les Miserables,” as a musical, began as a concept album in the 1970s, then became a French musical in 1980 that closed after three months. It was revived in its English-language form in London in 1985, where it became a hit, and then on Broadway in 1987.

So it was written long before the AIDS crisis. Even so, I can't hear this song without thinking of AIDS and the havoc it wreaked:

Oh my friends, my friends, forgive me
That I live and you are gone
There's a grief that can't be spoken
There's a pain goes on and on

Watching this video several times today, I also thought of the Onion Cellar from Gunter Grass' “The Tin Drum”: that place where stoic people go to cut open onions and cry and feel. That's movies, too. The better ones?

It's less a lazy Sunday than a Les Miz Sunday.

To go along with my sister's chance encounter with Hugh Jackman at the Toronto airport, here is part of my Q&A with Michael Maguire, who played the original Enjolras on Broadway, and is now a family law attorney in Beverly Hills:

Q: You won a Tony for playing Enjolras in the original Broadway production of Les Miserables. You perform with symphonies all over the country. So I have to ask: Why law?

A: I wanted to go to law school for years. I just wanted the intellectual challenge. I mean, I do recognize that I have a physical gift. It’s almost like being a fast runner or something. I have a talent that I needed and still need to share.

But while I was singing with symphonies, I was also buying and restoring old houses in Hancock Park in Los Angeles. I love historic restoration. I made good money doing that. But the market started looking soft to me in 2005 and I thought, “If I’m ever going to go to law school I should do it right now before I’m just too old and lazy to do it.”

Q: And why family law?

A: I had a nasty divorce. During the course of that divorce, I started recognizing that my attorneys were billing me a tremendous amount of money for basically regurgitating what I told them. Or they were checking boxes that I could have checked. And they didn’t understand numbers like I did because I’d been a broker on Wall Street prior to going into the theater. I just had a mission in my life, and it continues to this day, to try to keep other people from going through that. ...

Q: Does it ever get in the way of your family law practice—the fact that you played Enjolras?

A: I don’t tell anybody about it.

Q: Right, but …

A: So if somebody knows, it may, and only for a minute, get in the way. Actually, if anything, it gets in the way of the opposing counsel. Because they think, “Oh, this guy’s just a singer.”

Q: So they’ll underestimate you.

A: They underestimate me big time. And that’s their big mistake.

Maguire dominated the “Les Mis” cover of Newsweek magazine in 1987. In a bit of coincidence, that cover was designed by Patricia.

Maguire's voice still gives me chills, by the way, particularly the way he sings the following:

With all the anger in the land
How long before the Judgement Day?
Before we cut the fat ones down to size
Before the barricades arise?

It's my favorite part of the musical, give or take an “oo and ah.” Or an empty table or empty chair.

You can hear the person sing here. He shows up at 1:54:

Do you remember your President Nixon?
Do you remember the bills you have to pay?
Or even yesterday?

-- David Bowie, “Young Americans,” 1975

See also: “American Car,” “American Idiot,” “American Tune,” “American without Tears.”

Patricia's brother Jack posted this on Facebook the other day. Two words: Holy shit.