I was watching the fifth or sixth version of Beth Hart’s “Leave the Light On” the other night when I realized my hand had been on my heart since somewhere through the first version I’d heard. I must have placed it there when I began to realize what the song was about and had become fully absorbed in its pathos. The link to the full lyrics is here, but these four lines in the second stanza got my immediate attention, and Hart’s fine elocution and dramatic rendering do the remaining work: Little girl hiding underneath the bedWas it something I…
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I’m increasingly using AI to do basic historical research and quick fact-checking, always careful to check the sources it cites in scraping the history of human knowledge acquisition. In doing so, I’ve also researched enough about AI itself to become increasingly aware of the awesome power it has as a force for both good and evil. And depending on which side of that ledger you tend to gravitate toward, you can find abundant support for your position of elation or alarm. Recently, a Facebook friend posted a song by what looked to be a well-seasoned but heretofore unknown soul/blues singer…
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On one hand, it requires a good deal of pluck to try covering a song by Bob Dylan, the veritable reigning Pope of Folk-Rock-Contemporary Singer-Songwriters. On the other, there is the matter of his nasal twang not being everyone’s cup of song-listening tea. …they bring all that sensibility to bear zeroing in on an aspect of ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ that Dylan, tangled up in the blues and recriminations of his failing relationship, couldn’t bring himself to find. Couple that with the sheer magnitude of Dylan’s musical catalog, chock-full of provocative commentary and soulful balladry on the great social, political…
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Certain tunes lodge in your brain from your earliest years. Depending on your age, you might have heard it on your mom’s “hi-fi,” your older sibling’s music app, or your third grade music education class (“Stand beside her, and guide her…”) before you got back to the business at hand of phonics instruction and the multiplication tables. It’s not much different than certain words or phrases that get imprinted on your brain for better and for worse early in life, words carrying their own music as they do. (“You DID it, yayyy!!”; “Stop that THIS MINUTE!”) An old friend of…
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So I got Chappell Roan in front of me for the very first time when I decided to follow an impulse to check out the fashion getups at Sunday night’s Grammy Awards show. One never knows what might appear there as “clothes,” however scanty, billowing, or seemingly fitted for extraterrestrial giants they might be. Landing on the page, I beheld Ms. Roan’s utterly ridiculous looking “gown” (THIS IS THE GRAMMYS, after all!), which the “New York Times” described thusly: “Ms. Roan arrived in a burgundy, opaque chiffon cape, a custom design by Mugler, that perfectly matched the color of her…