Search results for 'songs of summer'

Although I lack data to support this assumption, I would bet money on a natural human inclination that among songs we are drawn to upon first hearing, that is the version we will prefer for the rest of our lives, no matter how many cover versions follow as other artists explore a great song’s nearly inexhaustible interpretive possibilities.

That said, sometimes we experience a huge “Wow!” as we listen to a cover version of an old favorite.

Sometimes the “Wow!” occurs because an artist brings a different musical genre altogether to a song. Jimi Hendrix’s take on the “Star-Spangled Banner” may be the most dramatic example there, but “Wows! can also happen when a female covers a male’s original song  (or vice versa), or a young artist covers an old artist’s song (once again, vice versa), or any artist goes louder or softer, faster or slower, or emphasizes lyrics that open up another dimension to a song we ...

“Oh senseless, man, who cannot possibly make a worm or a flea and yet will create God by the dozens.” The quote is from the French philosopher and wit Voltaire, poking fun at the universal human penchant to gaze up at the heavens and conjure some supreme creator who waved its hand a few times (because, like us, it has hands) and made everything there is.

Voltaire was right, of course: We are not (yet) God enough to create a worm. (We should note, though, that worms are infinitely more complex than we might think at first glance. Come to think of it, pretty much everything is more complex than we tend to think or tweet self-righteously about at first glance.)

But oh, can our human imagination take us places! It’s one of our more useful, charming, alternately troublesome and transcendent qualities, actually.

Seven more days then unfold almost exactly like the first two, and in nine days I have watched t...

What to do with Stephen Foster? Among the greatest of American songwriters, reportedly the first to actually make a living at it (for a while), regarded by many scholars as the “father of American music.” Many of his 200+ songs written in the mid-19th century are embedded into the very fabric of American culture via countless cover versions by renowned musicians, abetted by millions of schoolchildren taking easily to his infectious, easily digestible tunes (“Beautiful Dreamer,” “Oh Susanna”, “Camptown Races,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Swanee River,” “I Dream of Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair,” “The Hard Times Come Again No More”).

Author of these lines, written for his wife Jane:

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world, heard in the day,
Lull’d by the moonlight have all pass’d away!
… Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

But there was this about...

Last night, at the end of my viewing “The Social Dilemma,” a documentary now streaming on Netflix that launches a howitzer at the purported addictive evils of modern social media manipulation and the technologies that enable it, up popped on my screen one of those “You might also like” blurbs that are attached to most every piece of media these days. They’re designed, of course, to keep us glued right where we are rather than take the dog for a walk or finish up the dinner dishes or read a bit of poetry from a paper book before turning off the bedside light.

“Hmmm,” I said to self, while warmly considering the walk down the hall to the bedroom—“I’ve never seen (the 2005 Bob Dylan documentary) ‘No Direction Home’…maybe I’ll just peek in on the first 10 minutes!”

Two hours later (it was now midnight), I paused it for a moment and saw on the screen that there was an hour and forty-eigh...