Search results for 'brilliant Songs'

The assaults, the responses, the anguish, the questions, the cruelty, the concern, the reprisals, the relentless tsunami of invective and resultant anxiety.

The anger and exhaustion, which is largely the intent.

The despair which creeps in quietly underneath, simmering…

And still, with Maya Angelou, we must rise.

But not today. Not this moment.

We must protect ourselves, too, by tending regularly to our zones of joy.

Today, beauty, for beauty’s sake. (And our own.)

Though with a loop back into history near the end.

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Leoš Janáček (pronounced “Lowsh Yun-ahh-check”) was a Czech classical composer who made abundant use of his country’s traditional folk music to craft a body of work with a distinct homegrown, nationalist flavor...

All right, so we will let pass without further comment the strange coincidence of the holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.—and all the noble ideals he stood and died for—falling this year on the same day as the inauguration of the incoming president. We shall instead focus on another profoundly decent man who also called us to our better angels over a long career of music-making.

I, perhaps like you, have sung David Mallett’s music out loud on various occasions over many years now without even knowing who he was. His “Garden Song” (“Inch by inch, row by row….”) has been a staple of elementary school students and gardeners of all ages from all over the world since its 1975 debut. Soon after, it was brought to the attention of none other than folk icon and humanitarian Pete Seeger.

“Young fella from Maine taught me this song last year,” Seeger, quite the songwriter himself, tells his concert audience in a grainy film of the time, since brought to You Tube.

In the way...

It’s not every day that a journalist—particularly one as sober and unflamboyant as longtime economics professor and “New York Times” columnist Paul Krugman—has a song written in his honor. But then Loudon Wainwright, whose “deep ache of laughter” I’ve written about before in this space, is no everyday songwriter.

Wainwright’s musings on the human condition most often walk the razor’s edge between heartache and mirth, with “The Krugman Blues” angling decidedly toward the “mirth” end of that equation.

Not that Paul Krugman is big on mirth himself.

Which is part of the reason, no doubt, that Wainwright has so much fun with this song—and happily lets us in on the joke.

Which does nothing but make this pairing of Wainwright the jesting singer-songwriter and Krugman the restrained economist all the more amusing and ripe for dramatization…

Matter of plain fact: In the probably 15 years or so that I have been following Krugman’s public discourses on economics and its natural...

“It’s hard to see the surface…from the bottom” sings Oklahoma-born, Nashville-based singer-songwriter Parker Millsap in his fiery “Dammit” anthem that fuses near-despair with a defiant, emphatic hope. As so often happens, I stumbled across the impressive, infectious body of work Millsap has been producing for the better part of a dozen years now while I was looking for something else to complement a few thoughts I was hoping to draw forth to help get myself—and maybe you?—through these next days, weeks, oh hell, let’s say it: years.

Four of them.

So many feelings sloshing around about that prospect, words pouring forth from them, competing for expression since the tide started turning in an ominous direction as the late dark hours turned darker on Election Night.

Appalled, confounded, dispirited, disillusioned, fearful for what awaits, for what the man has threatened and promised he will do.

The rhyme scheme and beat have a fine frolicsome time there, bowing happily in...

I don’t remember the exact moment I discovered Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” but I do remember just wearing that record out after landing upon it in my early 20s. I then kept the album it was on close by my turntable through that tumultuous decade of struggles and thrashings for identity, vocation, love, the meaning of life and my place in the world.

Kristofferson died this week at a much older age (88) than he had anticipated reaching in his younger years. He was a gifted man in multiple ways—artistic, intellectual, physical—but none of those gifts allowed for escape from the struggle to discover and give form to his life’s work.

In his case, that struggle included climbing out from under a domineering father who leaned on him to pursue a military career and later on, at least an equally domineering drinking habit that nearly derailed his very life through the 1960s-’70s.

Kristofferson sketched the barely flickering embers of his protagonist’s que...