Search Results for: Brilliant songs

  • Music

    Brilliant Songs #49: Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”

    October 4, 2024 - By 

    I don’t remember the exact moment I discovered Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” but I do remember just wearing that record out after landing upon it in my early 20s. I then kept the album it was on close by my turntable through that tumultuous decade of struggles and thrashings for identity, vocation, love, the meaning of life and my place in the world. Kristofferson died this week at a much older age (88) than he had anticipated reaching in his younger years. He was a gifted man in multiple ways—artistic, intellectual, physical—but none of those gifts allowed for…

  • Music

    Brilliant Songs #48: Gettin’ “Happy” With Pharrell Williams

    August 31, 2024 - By 

    You know what makes me happy? That “Happy,” the 48th “Brilliant Song” in this series, has garnered 239,107 comments since it landed on You Tube a decade ago. Along with: 1.3 billion (that’s “billion”-with-a-“b”) views and 8.7 million thumbs-up. (Though for context: the all-time leading You Tube video through early August is “Baby Shark,” a children’s song-and-dance from South Korea at 14.9 billion views since 2016.) But “billion” is a most hefty number indeed, reflected in a recent comment on top of the “Happy” pile, which exclaims, “WE STEALING THE MOON WITH THIS ONE.” And so we are with that…

  • Music

    Brilliant Songs #47: Jacob Collier’s “Audience Choir”

    June 9, 2024 - By 

    Let me start with what might be an audacious claim that could make for a fun parlor or brewpub back-and-forth next time you feel inclined to jump-start a conversation or veer it away from the sordid unpleasantries that dominate our 24-hour media cycle today. To wit: what, in your opinion, is the highest of the art forms? Much as I love and admire the arts in general and various artists in particular, I have my own unequivocal answer to that question. I think music is the highest art form—the most powerful, soaring and transformative ever devised. Actually, “devised” strikes me…

  • Music

    Brilliant Songs #46:
    Rhiannon Giddens’ and Joey Ryan’s
    “At the Purchaser’s Option”

    April 7, 2024 - By 

    Every now and again an artist comes along who is seemingly hatched from a sky god who has incubated him or her for 500 years, carefully imbuing every last gene with wisdom, intelligence, beauty, enthusiasm, tenacity, curiosity, and a fundamental, overarching decency that makes their entire life a testimonial for the goodness of the human project. At certain moments, we may experience these individuals as antidotes to whatever doubts and despair we harbor in the dark of our souls, little life rafts bobbing along in our psyche that we reach for through the storms of the world and our own…

  • Music

    Brilliant Songs #45:
    Josh Ritter’s “The Temptation of Adam”

    February 24, 2024 - By 

    I knew virtually nothing about Josh Ritter when I walked into the wonderfully named “Haw River Ballroom” earlier this month in the just-as-wonderfullly named city of Saxapahaw (2021 population: 1,671). I’d bought the tickets on a lark, because the blurb sounded interesting and I had a vague memory that Ritter is one of those artists with an intense following who had stayed under my radar over the decades for all the usual reasons (time, proximity, basic inattention) but who probably merited a listen. It required maybe three or four guitar pickings and a few words out of his mouth on concert…