Category Music

“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 ...

Alright, enough, for the moment, of electoral tempests and distempers. The election and the world will be what they will be, chagrined, stupefied or elated as we ourselves may become in observing and then contending with them, as we must. But we need not do so in every waking moment. (Being at the mercy of our night dreams, of course, is another matter.)

Whatever happens come Tuesday and its aftermath, we must also make time for music and dancing and loving, for joshing and jiving, for romping through woods and along shores, for piling into cars and buses, subways, trains and planes en route to both our appointed and freefloating rounds.

For beholding “the lilies of the field, how they grow.”

The curse and blessing of the formative music from one’s youth (starting at about age 14, according to cognitive scientists) is that it demands squatter rights on the residence it took up in your heart and soul back t...

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.

Kristoff...

I’d been watching and listening for a good mesmerizing minute to the second selection in this “Brilliant Cover Songs” series when I tapped the pause button and went back to the beginning to confirm what had suddenly dawned on me just the moment before: Were these guys really creating this seeming symphony of sound without employing any instrument other than their gloriously blended human voices?

Sure enough—the four members of the Dallas-based “Kings Return” only sound like they have the backing of multiple instruments and/or a robust choir as they create a lush musical soundscape powered only by voices that traverse multiple musical genres and what musical cognoscenti call “sonic timbre,” and I call just plain dazzling.

Kings Return is comprised of classically trained musicians whose beginnings trace back to 2016...

You know what makes me happy? That “Happy,” the 48th “Brilliant Song” in this series, has garnered 239,107 comments since it landed on You Tube a decade ago. Along with: 1.3 billion (that’s “billion”-with-a-“b”) views and 8.7 million thumbs-up. (Though for context: the all-time leading You Tube video through early August is “Baby Shark,” a children’s song-and-dance from South Korea at 14.9 billion views since 2016.)

But “billion” is a most hefty number indeed, reflected in a recent comment on top of the “Happy” pile, which exclaims, “WE STEALING THE MOON WITH THIS ONE.”

And so we are with that felicitous phrase that nonetheless implies larceny of something—human happiness— that should perhaps be regarded as a birthright to at least some degree, yes?

Like Bobby McFerrin long before him, Pharrell Williams does something both remarkably simple and ultimately profound: He writes and sings in praise of pure...