Category Music

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...

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 bee...

I always keep two questions in mind when I broach the idea of adding to the 600+ posts I’ve navigated through in the nearly 12 years of this blog’s existence. 1) Do I have anything new to say on this topic? 2) If I’m saying something old, can I say it in a new and fresh way?

I try to apply those two questions to virtually every creative work I engage with in my life, whether my own or someone else’s. It applies even to the occasional light and frivolous fare that a given mood or energy level will call forth as a momentary bulwark against the world’s relentless available diet of misery.

In this third iteration of “Brilliant Cover Songs,” we broach an old warhorse that you’ll hear get a whole new twist down below.

Johann Pachelbel composed his much-beloved “Canon in D Major” to a warm but not wildly popular welcome sometime in the late 17th or early 18th centuries...

“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...