Category Music

How much does success in life depend on how good-looking you are? Do plain or dowdy or even downright ugly people get anything close to a level playing field when they’re grasping after jobs and money and notoriety alongside their better-looking competition?

I think we all know the answer to that question, but just in case you’d feel better with some social science backing, labor economist Daniel Hamermesh covered the territory rather exhaustively in his 2011 book, Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful. In it, he reviews many decades of research to come up not only with estimates for how much more money good-looking people make over a lifetime’s work compared to average or unattractive people (4% and 13% more, respectively) but also that they benefit in every imaginable way: landing the better jobs, the lovelier mates, the easier loans with better terms—and even lighter prison sentence...

We all have our music, right? The songs to which we came of age, awakened, realized there were deep emotional currents riding along with those tunes and their underlying rhythms. For a while after she first discovered the music of her own time, my daughter and I shared the radio controls when driving in my car: she’d get her girl pop stations on the outbound trip, then we’d switch to my jazz and classical or singer-songwriter stations on the return.

After a while, I realized I was missing out on an opportunity, because to know a girl’s music is to know a great deal of her world, of what makes her sing (and sometimes despair) for that world.

Knowing more about her music meant I could better engage her or at least eavesdrop to greater benefit on her chatter or impromptu sing-alongs with friends. That’s when I stopped insisting on maintaining my half of the radio dial and instead went all in on girl p...

Earlier this week, I saw a wonderful warm movie about a very nice man. Got me kind of glowing inside, with an urge to write about it here. But as the week progressed with its normal percolation of ideas in the midst of walks and dishwashing and warm showers, the only real idea that came to me was in the form of a question: Why is it so difficult to say anything interesting about a wonderful warm movie depicting a very nice man?

The answer arrived only as I pondered imagery from a new television show my family recently took up, a cold treacherous show about very bad men. (And even a very bad woman in the most recent episode.)

O.K.—a few details and the dramatis personae. The good man is Bill Withers, a 1970s-80s soulful-romantic crooner and songwriter (Lean on Me; Ain’t No Sunshine). And the wonderful movie about him is Still Bill, a documentary that picks up on him and his life at age 70, decades remov...

I was talking with a friend recently about my previous post on Van Morrison and his mood-laden song, “When the Leaves Come Falling Down.” He was telling me how another Morrison mooder, “Melancholia,” is reportedly Morrison’s only truly autobiographical song and, indeed, also represents my friend’s truest and deepest stance toward life.

This surprised me a bit, inasmuch as my friend, whom I’ve known pretty well for most of my adult life, presents a rather relentlessly cheerful public persona, far removed from the dark brooding pathos of “Melancholia.”

Yet it also put me on notice, again, of the deep sadness that underlies so much of life and so many people, a sadness virtually everyone meets on various and shifting terms throughout the peaks and vales of our brief tenures here.

This sadness is heightened in fall, when death and the loss of light all through nature rather massively reinforc...

I’ve long felt that fall is fortunate to be so gorgeous, otherwise we would never forgive it for all the grief we feel over summer’s end. Yet deeply interwoven into fall’s beauty is its profound sense of melancholy at time’s passage, all the brightness dimming now as the world inexorably darkens and decay and death spread across the landscape, there for us as reminder, as harbinger, as spur to savor the day.

Fall is a time to begin our long hunkering, but the dream of every romantic is to do so with one’s beloved, in a private enclosing world walled off from the coming darkness and cold.

Few artists sketch that world with quite the stark beauty of Van Morrison, and in the vast sprawl of his career over a half-century, few songs have matched the super-charged romantic vision of When the Leaves Come Falling Down.

This 1999 song sees Morrison at both his songwriting and singing best, inhabiting a pl...