‘Rain’ is this week’s theme for Song Lyric Sunday, hosted by Helen at This Thing Called Life One Word At A Time. Ideally, I think she would like something upbeat and fun. Sorry about that. For happy songs about rain, I could steer you towards ‘Singin’ In The Rain’, of course, and ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’…
[WordPress’ ‘365 Days of Writing Prompts’ wants ‘the satisfaction of a list’ today. So here’s one – and it’s about music, for a change] Most songs are ‘covered’, in the sense that they are performed by someone other than the writer/composer themselves. Some songs are so popular that they get to be covered by many…
Absolutely no problem at all finding something for H in my music lexicon: the incomparable Jimi. Anyone even half-seriously interested in rock music could almost have been forgiven for becoming blasé about guitarists before Jimi came along, breaking through in the UK before his native USA really caught on to him. By late 1966 there…
This week, Helen at This Thing Called Life One Word At A Time is looking for a road-trip song. There’s certainly no shortage to choose from and, as usual my thoughts turned first to the Grateful Dead – who for many years of touring seemed to be on a semi-permanent road trip themselves. They had…
“There’s something happening somewhere baby, I just know that there is” This week, Helen at This Thing Called Life One Word at A Time wants a song from the 80s….. My initial response was that the eighties was a bit after my time really. I tend to associate that era with New Romantics and bad…
And so we reach the heart of the matter. The band that this blog derives its name from, the band that this blogger listens to more than any other. So what’s so special about the Grateful Dead? I’m by no means a natural evangelist, but a bit of background explanation might help. The bus came…
This week, Helen at This Thing Called Life One Word At A Time has set us the theme of ‘Healing’ for Song Lyric Sunday. I was pleasantly surprised at how many potential candidates I managed to come up with in a short time: Marvin Gaye, obviously; The Beatles ‘It’s Getting Better; even ‘Fix You’ by…
One of the little projects I have in the works currently is to write about songs that no-one should ever even try to cover, because the original artiste has just done the job definitively. There is, of course, a flip side to that, and it happens to be this week’s theme for Song Lyric Sunday:…
When I was eleven or twelve years old, I wanted to be Billy Fury. He could sing, he was handsome, he made the girls scream. It was a very competitive field, British male soloists back then. Let’s be honest, everyone wanted to be the British Elvis. There’s no doubt that the top dog was Cliff…
“But I will still be here, I have no thought of leaving I do not count the time” This week’s theme for Song Lyric Sunday is ‘Time’. I was quite surprised, when I thought about it, just how many songs are, if not actually about time (which is an interesting philosophical and scientific conundrum in…
the only deadhead in the hameau 