Category Music

Gretchen Peters has been making music for a long time now, and as befits a singer-songwriter who looks in about equal measure around at the world and inside herself for her material, her music changes with the years. This is even as her core obsessions, if you will—seeking a measure of consolation and sense of identity in a fractured, wounding world—continue to propel her creativity.

Last year, at age 61, she released “Dancing With the Beast,” a deeply felt set of meditations on aging, change, depression, family pain, even truck stop prostitution (no, that last one is not autobiographical).

All manner of topics, in other words, that befit an artist who confided to NPR last year in an interview: “I have a theory that there are two kinds of people—there’s people who find sad songs depressing, then there’s us.”

As someone who counts himself quite happily among that “us,” I found t...

Three summer-themed songs the first weekend of every summer solstice—that’s been the formula these past six years. And being as fond (some might more sardonically say “enslaved”) by ritual as I am, I can’t see any reason to give it up, at least until we run out of summer songs (sometime in the year 2525, perhaps, if man is still alive, if woman can survive, to cite a decidedly unsunny song…).

As always, suggestions for future songs are welcome, and if you want to check your suggestion against songs already duly honored in this series, all past selections are listed at the end of this iteration. Or just follow the link here to scroll through each year’s You Tube selections.

So: to the music, yes?

***

Bruce Springsteen does an acoustic version of this song from a 2014 concert in Perth that was tempting to offer up here, but ultimately, Bruce is so identified with that rollicking band of his doi...

The trouble with Doris Day—besides the wreck of her marital life that left her at various times by various husbands abused physically, emotionally and financially—was that she never stopped sounding and looking and being, at least outwardly, so darn nice. Still is, actually, as evidenced by a nice, if characteristically formulaic, written interview she gave to “The Hollywood Reporter” on her 97th birthday three days ago.

That niceness of the midwestern, sunnyblonde film star who wore a relentless effervescent smile was a problem for Day chiefly because it tended to obscure just what a fabulous singer she was.

No one mistakes, say, Nina Simone, as anything but a kickass singing talent, all that smoldering, sometimes volcanic expulsion of words and emotion cementing her place in history as a singer of extraordinary passion and skill.

Day, however, exuded such an overt “America’s sweetheart” ki...