The first time I heard (or even heard of) Janis Joplin was on the BBC’s classical music station, Radio 3. Back in 1968, it also brodcast ball-by-ball cricket commentary on England test matches. It being the school holidays and I being a bit of a nerd, I was planning to score the upcoming test match…
First of all, many congratulations and best wishes to Helen from This Thing Called Life One Word At A Time on her marriage yesterday (which, quite unrelatedly, was also my 65th birthday). Appropriately, the theme for this week’s Song Lyric Sunday is precious metal or stones. This song is not about love in the romantic…
“There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences.” – Robert Ingersoll This week, Helen is looking for a song that deals with ‘consequences’, whether good or bad. As she rightly points out, lots of songs are, in one way or another, about some consequence of an earlier action, as any…
The letter ‘I’ isn’t exactly awash with possibilities for a Music Lexicon – unless you genuinely are/were a fan of INXS, which I’m not/wasn’t. Fortunately though, for me there was one standout candidate to fill this particular vacancy – The Incredible String Band. ‘Psychedelic folk’ is a fair enough shorthand description of the Incredibles, so…
“Oh I’ll be a good boy Please make me well” The theme for this week on Helen’s This Thing Caled Life One Word At A Time is ‘pain’. As Helen rightly points out, there’s no end of songs that seek to convey the feeling of pain. However, many – perhaps even the majority – of…
‘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…
