“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” Song selection this week – for the theme of ‘freedom’ – was one of the easier decisions I’ve had to make on a Sunday morning. This seminal Kris Kristofferson song – performed here by Janis Joplin – provides perhaps a different take on what is usually…
This week’s theme for Song Lyric Sunday is a bit of a tester. Helen has asked us to post a song with a word that describes a sound in the title or lyrics, but I don’t think I’m entirely sure what she means. Are we talking about onomatoepia – which is when a word is…
You may not have been expecting this one. Here we are at the halfway stage of My Music Lexicon and so far, by and large, it’s been a litany of guitar-heavy rock, with a dash of folk/protest. Well, it’s what I like. But I have a softer side too, especially for well-crafted songs with lyrics…
“Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon” A song about Dance or Dancing is called for this week by Helen at This Thing Called Life One Word At A Time, so here is a well-known example from what I call ‘second-stage’…
“Daddy made whiskey and he made it well. Cost two dollars and it burned like hell” This week’s theme is ‘Alcohol’; I can deal with that. It’s been a month since I last featured a Grateful Dead song, but here’s one that meets the brief. There is a popular misconception about the Grateful Dead, in…
We’re not quite halfway through this musical lexicon and we’ve already had a few examples of musical epiphany. However, for sheer power and immediacy there has never been anything to match the very first time I heard Led Zeppelin. By the time we got to the Lower Sixth (first of two years of A-level studies),…
This week, Helen at This Thing Called Life One Word At A Time has challenged us to post a set of song lyrics that ‘surrounds a happy memory’. I suppose you could take this one of two ways: either a song that holds links to a personal happy memory (so could, theoretically, be about anything)…
This week, Helen at This Thing Called Life One Word At A Time is looking for a song about the military. Not as straightforward as some of the themes we’ve had – especially having discounted, as I did immediately, Village People’s ‘In The Navy’ – but inspiration struck a little later with this song by…
Looking back at my music lexicon so far, it’s pretty obvious that I’m a child of my time – more specifically from about the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies.That isn’t an apology: I suspect that most people’s musical tastes are largely defined by their formative years. Lucky me. As we reach the letter ‘K’, however, while…
This week, Helen wants a song with a name in the title. No shortage of them, that’s for sure, but to give everyone a rest from the Grateful Dead (‘Althea’, ‘Bertha’, ‘Cassidy’, ‘Corinna’, ‘Loose Lucy’ et al) here’s a very early (1967) single by one of the greatest – and certainly the loudest – rock…
the only deadhead in the hameau 