“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),…
I don’t know about you, but I find that the older I get, the lower my boredom threshold sinks. And the shorter my attention span becomes…. Sorry, what was I saying? Oh yes: boredom. Perhaps a jaded appetite is simply an inevitable consequence of having been shuffling around this mortal coil for a long time,…
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…
“All I know, I could not leave her there” It’s been a few weeks since the Grateful Dead featured in Song Lyric Sunday, but this week’s theme of ‘flowers’ provides a good opportunity to redress that. Both words and music of this sweet little song were written by Jerry Garcia’s long-term collaborator, Robert Hunter. Oh…
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…
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…
‘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’…
