• Music

    Brilliant Songs #38: Eric Bogle’s
    “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”

    May 26, 2023 - By 

    I learned the Australian folk ballad “Waltzing Matilda” so early in my elementary school years that I don’t remember very much of the life I led before it became one of those anthemic tunes that courses through my blood with ease and gladness whenever I find myself suddenly singing it in the shower or out on a bike ride in the sun-splotched innocence of a spring day. So the genius of Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” is that it uses the freewheeling joy of the original as the backdrop for a deep lamentation on the devastating losses of…

  • Music

    The Art of Song Interpretation:
    “Both Sides Now” From Four Sides

    May 21, 2023 - By 

    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…

  • Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    How to Spend the Day When
    Your Laptop’s Gone Down the
    Highway in Your Pal’s Car

    May 13, 2023 - By 

    Sit down on convenient bench outside coffee shop where he dropped you. Give 10 seconds to wailing and gnashing of teeth and cursing such absence of mind. On 11th second, turn face up to sun. Initiate multiple voluntary deep breaths. Turn attention to coffee and cantaloupe slice you DID remember to remove from car. Reach for phone to catch at least home page of New York Times. Experience familiar exasperation of reading news shoved into hellishly cramped space that used to be your morning newspaper. Think better of reading; cast face back to sun. Espy actual, hard copy local weekly newspaper…

  • Film/TV - Music

    Documentary Two-Fer:
    The Musical Odysseys of
    Leonard Cohen and Jason Isbell

    May 7, 2023 - By 

    One an observant, mystically inclined Jew, born to wealthy, pedigreed parents outside Montreal, a poet by training and temperament, handsome, charismatic and refined, who drifts down to New York City in his early 30s to shore up a wobbly career by throwing himself into songwriting. The other from rural Alabama, the son of uncultured, unmoneyed teenage parents whose loud and bitter fighting drives the pudgy and awkward boy to his room, where he teaches himself electric guitar in order to drown out the noise and his own rage and sorrow. One born in 1934, full of questions, indignation and ardor…