Search results for 'brilliant Songs'

Sometimes, a song strikes us as so lovely in melody or phrasing that the singer could be reciting the New York City phone book, as the old saying goes, and we’d be over the moon and humming the thing all day long. Other times, the writing is so poetic or haunting that the melody need not enter our bloodstream, as it were, for us to be moved to tears.

The very best songs, of course, cover both those bases, tickling our melodic bones and stimulating our cravings for language that tells a meaningful tale, suggests a profound truth, or just plain sounds fun and clever and worth repeating to friends.

So it is with Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” a rollicking, witty, and musically complex song that Porter’s publishers banned to the “B” side as a throwaway to the anticipated hit of “Indian Love Call” for the bandleader Artie Shaw when it was first pressed into a record in 1938...

With his back against the San Francisco traffic
On the bridge’s side that faces towards the jail
Setting out to join a demographic
He hoists his first leg up over the rail

With those first four lines of plaintive scene setting just above a simple piano riff, songwriter Taylor Goldsmith of the folk/rock/indie band Dawes places listeners right there behind yet another Golden Gate Bridge would-be suicide jumper, perhaps reflexively reaching their arms out or emitting an involuntary and horrified, “NooooooDON’T DO IT!”

Talk about the power of words to imagine, to relate, to respond.

I am indebted to reader and friend Randall Chet for bringing “A Little Bit of Everything” to my attention in the Comments section of the inaugural entry in this “Brilliant Songs” series. I had never heard of Dawes nor this song, but I have found it staying with and accompanying me on my walks, my garden-tending, ...

So many great songs and songwriters, true poets who weave the disparate shards of life happening before their eyes into something intense, insightful, and profound as that life, every life, deserves. Seeing what we see only dimly or not at all, marching up to questions we shy from and coaxing from them words and images of beauty and inspiration or dead-on-the-money, troubling truth.

So it’s time to have a little more sustained fun with all that, in the form of a series hosted here at Traversing entitled as you see in the headline slot above: “Brilliant Songs.”

I’ll aim for monthly, may slack from or increase that, who knows? (I’m old, and inclined to chafe at schedules…)

What we’ll do is give the song a You Tube play, present, admire and explore the lyrics for a bit (may probe some pure instrumentals as well), draw what we can from them and see where the whole enterprise takes us.

Yes, I’l...

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...

Borrowed a friend’s car last week and the Sirius radio channel was on a classic rock station. I liked classic rock plenty back when it wasn’t classic yet, and can still feel that warm pulsing of nostalgia when a Millennial or Gen X wedding DJ finally sees fit to placate the Grayhairs in attendance by playing something dance-able from that era. (I make a habit of imploring them to play Motown; they always nod agreeably but then don’t…)

So I listened along a while as the heavily algorithmed playlist churned out standard ’60s-’70s fare from the likes of the Bee Gees, Buffalo Springfield, Simon & Garfunkel, et al.

And after a few more, I came to a sudden, definitive realization that shocked me at the time, but which I could then and there boil down to one dismaying word: Boring.

Not all of it, by any means, and not because it was bad music...