Written 10 years ago, in the week that Leonard Cohen died and Trump got himself elected, this was originally a contribution to Jim’s ‘Song Lyric Sunday’ thread. YNWA Tough week alright, and who could blame Helen for not feeling able to come up with a specific theme for this Sunday? Much as I am a…
“Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful” Whenever the time comes around to select an artiste for a new month here on Song Lyric Sunday, my go-to source is the very comprehensive ihopeidiebeforeigetold.com (and no, I am not being paid for this endorsement). As usual, I started to scroll though the myriad names, sorted in date order.…
Yee-haw indeed: Jim’s sending us way out west for Song Lyric Sunday this week. Deadhead that I am, my thoughts turned immediately to the Grateful Dead and in particular what I always call ‘Bobby’s cowboy bit’: a first set sequence of two or three songs that hark back to the wild west. One of the…
I have an abiding memory from – it must have been about 1990 or 1991 – when our daughter was having a weekend sleepover with a couple of her school friends. I came into the kitchen and there they all were, sitting around the breakfast table, planning their day and occasionally sweeping their hair back,…
The first Sunday of the new month, so we need lyrics from a song written and/or performed by somebody born in October. As ever, there is plenty of choice. In other circumstances I would have plumped unhesitatingly for John Lennon, but he had his (latest) turn last week with ‘Revolution’. However, it soon became clear…
This week, Jim is looking for a song about any of various forms of protest. My immediate idea was Jefferson Airplane’s ‘We Can Be Together’. Looking back, however, I saw that I had already deployed it, albeit back in 2018. Sixties protest songs by Bob Dylan, or maybe Joan Baez, were obviously another potentially rich…
Along with the literally hundreds of artistes I have never heard of, there are certainly some heavy hitters among those born in the month of September. There’s Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen and Bryan Ferry for starters, as well as two members of the Grateful Dead – one still with us (Micky Hart) and one long…
At the end of last year, I posted a Beach Boys song performed by Brian Wilson. This was prompted by my having watched a rerun of his performance at Glastonbury in 2005 – seventy five minutes of sheer joy, as I noted at the time. Fast forward to this summer and, with daughter and grandsons…
I had no problem whatsoever in choosing an artiste born in August for this week’s Song Lyric Sunday. Jerome John Garcia was born on August 1st 1942 and died on August 9th 1995. Deadheads still celebrate his life in ‘The Days Between’ – the period between the first and ninth of this month. The actual…
When I saw that the subject for this week’s Song Lyric Sunday was sweet things, there was only one question that needed to be answered: had I used it before? Happily, the answer was ‘no’ – but I have now. From the seminal 1970 studio album ‘American Beauty, this is a particularly fine live version…
