ilanin

The penultimate prompt is "a song you remember from your childhood", which can really only be one thing. My mother used to sing me to sleep with this; I can't remember not knowing the words:



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Today prompt, "A song that breaks your heart", is the last of the difficult ones - I already know what my responses for days 28, 29 and 30 are. I think my answer for this is going to be a copout, because the my best answer, Tall Ships (which I've already mentioned once, I think), is a medley of several songs and therefore probably disallowed.

So what I'm going for here is a song that mostly breaks my heart because of its associations:



In Evita, Another Suitcase in Another Hall is sung by Juan Peron's previous mistress, upon being displaced ("unemployed", according to the libretto) by the title character. It's a song of rejection, and that's the role it plays for me as well; it gets added to my mental playlist when something has just gone horribly wrong. So since I'm sort of used to listening to it when I'm desperately unhappy anyway, listening to it the rest of the time tends to make me feel down (I'm going to stop now). The song I really ought to find heartbreaking from Evita is A Waltz for Eva and Che, especially since I can't really disagree with its depressing fatalism, but for some reason it's never really resonated with me, possibly because the use of Ché Guevara in framing just seems weird.

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Day 25's prompt is "A song by an artist no longer living", which was always going to be a rock and roll piece because it's about the only major part of music that I really like I've not dropped in on yet. By "rock and roll" I am referring to the culuturally fusionist blending of boogie-woogie, country, and rhythm and blues which first appeared in the Southern US in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and not the wider genre of music that evolved from it in the 1960s and beyond. The problem is that while I wrote "fusionist" above I could equally well have written "appropriative"; quite a lot of early rock and roll represented the performance of black American music by white artists, sometimes to the extent of being the same pieces of music. Pat Boone pretty much made a career of covering Little Richard (to be fair to Boone, had he not done so, far fewer people would ever have heard of Little Richard or his music; it's a simple fact that music played by a White American could get wider distribution and airplay than that produced by a Black one). That's not to say there weren't "white" elements in rock and roll, because there were, but overall (like a lot of the 1950s) it's a somewhat problematic subgenre. The thing with this is, where do you stop? The music of the Beatles and similar groups which defined the early 1960s comes from a secondary fusion, that of the rock and roll of the late 1950s with the skiffle craze popular in England at the time, and from that starting point it's not particularly difficult to condemn the entire genre of rock music, which seems somewhat unreasonable.

All of which goes some way to explaining why it is I picked a Chuck Berry song out, despite weirdly feeling that Berry (who died in March of this year) is somehow 'less dead' than my original thought of Buddy Holly (who died in a plane crash in 1959...you've heard the song, right?)



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Today's prompt is "A song you think everybody should listen to". That's a bit pretentious; I'm not sure I think there even is such a thing. Different people like different styles of music and different types of voices; I have fairly demographically predictable tastes and so my list of songs here mostly contains artists who look like I do (or like I do but female). But if we interpret it more broadly as "A song from an artist you think should have a higher profile" then this is clearly an excuse to post more Jess Morgan, and what I'm going for here is this one, primarily for how much fun she's clearly having while playing it:




She clearly loves this song; I saw her play it at Relevant Records a few months back and she was just as obviously having a whale of a time then too. In retrospect, I should probably have asked her about it afterwards but didn't, maybe I'll remember next time I see her. My guess is that it's her repressed rock chick instincts coming out, this being about as rock as she gets.

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This time I don't have an excuse for missing a day, except that this morning's choice of song is better than last night's would have been. I think everyone who knows a lot about my musical tastes must have expected at least one Jess Morgan song and might be surprised that I've not done one already, so here we are:


I have a bit of a "no repeating artists" policy (if that wasn't obvious by now), but it might get ignored for Jess Morgan at some point, due to her very high levels of amazingness.

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Today was Folk by the Oak (it was also the Evans Cycles Wimpole Hall cyclo-sportive, and at various points I was wondering if it was even possible to try both, but a side strain contracted by walking into a pillar and then going for a run earlier in the week put paid to that plan). Like most festivals, it was fun but exhausting; I saw Leveret (meh), This is the Kit (excellent), Kitty Macfarlane (excellent), Shake the Chains (this year's Nancy Kerr-based Folk by the Oak-sponsored collaboration, about protest songs - a lot of fun and also thought-provoking), Eric Bibb (blues singer is bluesy. Not my thing), Show of Hands (excellent as always, the highlight of the day), Kate Rusby (I like her, but she's not really festival music), Sam Kelly and the Lost Boys (looking increasingly like worthy successors to Bellowhead), and the Levellers (oddly flat by their standards, but still damn good and you can't really go wrong by closing out with What a Beautiful Day and fireworks).

Given that, it would seem sensible to have today's prompt be filled by something I heard today; the prompt is "A song that makes you think about life". There were a fair few of those, for one reason and another - I'd love to answer the prompt with Shake the Chains' There's More to Building Ships, but I can't, because there's no recording of that song publicly available at the moment (the album comes out in September, it's probably worth a look). Show of Hands opened up with Cuthroats, Crooks and Conmen which did make me think about things somewhat, but not really topics I'd normally put under the heading of "life". So I ended up here, a song about the value of life and the consequences of taking it:



(unlike at Folk by the Oak, in this video Mark Chadwick didn't have to interrupt his song to tell some idiots who were getting into a fight in the front rows to knock it off, a fact I mention due to the sheer irony involved).

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Day 17's prompt was "A song that you would sing as a duet on karaoke". This is not a thing I have actually done all that much, even if you count playing games like Singstar, but it is a thing which I do find fun so it's certainly not the case that I wouldn't sing anything as a duet on karaoke. It took me a while to think of a duet I might want to sing that would be plausible for karaoke, though (despite my recalling once having commented to atreic about the desirability of Singstar Gilbert & Sullivan, I don't think it's likely to happen any time soon). I'm not sure how much more plausible I'm required to get; does the song have to be from pop or rock music, such that it would actually exist in a karaoke machine somewhere? Assuming for the sake of sleep I'm allowed to create a conceptual karaoke machine which contains a variety of folk music and similar, I'm going for this: 

Day 15's prompt is "a song that is a cover by another artist". I've already done two of these, and in general I don't feel that the original author of a song has any particular claim on producing the definitive performance of it (though any performance of it remains a performance of their song; you don't get to claim authorship by making a derivative work either). So there's quite a lot of covers I like and I'll often listen to several different versions of a song one after another. I initially thought I should pick out a Show of Hands song here, since they've done a lot of pretty clever covers. Originally I was going for their version of Don Henley's Boys of Summer, but Youtube doesn't have a version of it with decent sound quality that's pre-2012, after which they started playing it a bit faster and I don't like it so much. I appear to be too lazy to upload the version of it I do have to somewhere the rest of you could hear it... Then I was thinking about The Devil's Right Hand, but as I was making my way to finding a decent video of it I remembered something pretty special from a Cambridge Folk Festival two years ago, and thought that probably fewer of the people who might see this would be familiar with this one than a Show of Hands song (and that's got to be at least part of the point, right?). There's not a live version of it I like, but here's the studio one...



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Today's prompt is "one of your favourite 70s songs". The 1970s is somewhat the decade that music forgot; countercultural movements became mainstream and didn't know what to do next and so we largely end up with a lot of pointless excess and not much in the way of actually interesting music, and things pick up again in the 80s as people start experimenting with synthesizers and electric music makes an impact on things. Still, it'd be pretty hard for ten years to go by without anything decent being written. Still, the only actual favourite song that comes to mind from the decade is this (and it's mostly for the bass solo, in defiance of most musical stereotypes): 

Sadly there aren't any really good live video performances of this on Youtube (partly because of the fact that TV outside broadcast quality in the 1970s was kind of bad in the first place, and Fleetwood Mac's more recent performances don't sound quite right to me), so the video is just the music. 

This is somewhat late, which was caused by me spending the week on a family holiday/get-together in a rather large holiday house near Lyme Regis. It was quite good fun and I got to see some things that I'd last been to when I was one (and unsurprisingly don't remember), including a violently pink tram and the Fleet Air Arm museum (with bonus airshow from the Red Arrows, who were practicing for an airshow at RNAS Yeovilton [where the FAA museum is] tomorrow...), and some I'd never seen at all such as the very impressive Maiden Castle (the largest Iron Age hill fort in Britain). Good to catch up with my sister, less said about some other relations the better.

Anyway, today's prompt is "a song you never get tired of". This one seems a bit tricky; "never" is an awful lot of time. I tend to listen to songs obsessively for a while, leave them alone for a while and then come back to them (as well as just listening to vast collections of digital music on shuffle all, of course). But I think the song I've loved for the longest time - at least as far as my memory works - is this (also, it lets me get another genre in; I'm somewhat intentionally going round the houses on this):






There's also an entertaining variety of weird ragtime piano party tricks on Youtube, of which this is probably the most appropriate to link at this point.

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