Sometimes life gives you a two-fer, and you had best jump on it in full appreciation for its gift of grace. The two-fer I’ve been offered and am now sharing with you is the happy accident of looking for a song on You Tube earlier this week, title now lost to the ether, when off to the side, there flickered a surprise blurb for John Gorka., one of my favorite singer-songwriters, singing a cover of another of my favorites—another John with the last name of Stewart, and his treasure of a song, “July, You’re a Woman.” Stewart first recorded “July,…
Search Results for: brilliant Songs
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What is the purpose of music? The question applies to both listeners and creators. What do you come to music for, what’s the goal of settling in to listen or to make music? No doubt it’s not for one reason alone; there’s almost never only one reason for anything we do or think in life. That’s partly the basis for the tremendous variety of musical genres, instruments, venues and performers we have available to us in the sprawling firmament that music has become since early humans started to explore and appreciate sound for sound’s sake, rather than as simply an…
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“Home” most always represents both a real, particular place and a metaphor with almost unparalleled richness in human life. Home, as the ancient maxim has it, is not only where our hearts are, but also where we lay our heads down on familiar pillows in beloved zones of comfort, where we are (or at least nurture a hope to be) most ourselves and most accepted and understood as the selves we are. It’s where we go to regather ourselves in times of turmoil and crisis, whether of inner identity or outer world upheaval. To “go home” is to “call it…
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To be born female in this world since its very beginning is to have experienced a certain kind of powerlessness, sourced, very simply, in a relative lack of muscle mass and the particular burdens of childbirth. These brute facts of biology have dictated women being less effective hunters of prey, and thus subject to domination by their more physically imposing male counterparts and sometimes companions. (Talk about an old story…) But underneath that competitive imbalance lies an often latent, sometimes wayward, increasingly confident and directed ferocity. An inner strength gathering itself over eons now, cracking the foundations of male hegemony…
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The assaults, the responses, the anguish, the questions, the cruelty, the concern, the reprisals, the relentless tsunami of invective and resultant anxiety. The anger and exhaustion, which is largely the intent. The despair which creeps in quietly underneath, simmering… And still, with Maya Angelou, we must rise. But not today. Not this moment. We must protect ourselves, too, by tending regularly to our zones of joy. Today, beauty, for beauty’s sake. (And our own.) Though with a loop back into history near the end. *** *** Leoš Janáček (pronounced “Lowsh Yun-ahh-check”) was a Czech classical composer who made abundant use…