Arts and Entertainment
My Fave Tunes For October, 2021
Fewer songs this month because, at this time of the year, I eliminate tunes that are on albums that won’t be released until at least January. I’ve already heard four stone-cold killers for early 2022. Can’t wait. However, we’re left with some s-s-seriously good stuff. Including, wait, is that a jam band I hear? On […]
Song of the Day 10/31: The Strangeloves, “I Want Candy”
Happy Halloween. Were you expecting “Monster Mash”? There’s a good reason this song is built around the “Bo Diddley beat” — it started out as a cover of “Bo Diddley,” Diddley’s eponymous song, until producer Bert Berns and the three guys who became the Strangeloves decided to write new lyrics. The Strangeloves were advertised as […]
Song of the Day 10/30: Lorde, “Royals”
I’ll wrap up my songs-inspired-by-photos week with a connection nobody saw coming. When Lorde’s 2013 song made her the youngest person to ever have a No. 1 single, most people probably thought the New Zealand native was referring to actual royalty. Not so. She was thinking about Kansas City Royals Hall of Famer George Brett. […]
Song of the Day 10/29: Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit”
The photograph that inspired the song Time magazine named the No. 1 song of the 20th century was taken on Aug. 7, 1930. The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana, was photographed by local studio photographer Lawrence Beitler, who printed and sold thousands of copies over the next 10 days. One […]
Song of the Day 10/28: The Beatles, “A Day in the Life”
“A Day in the Life” wasn’t directly inspired by this photograph of Tara Browne’s Lotus, which appeared in London newspapers on Dec. 19, 1966, the day after the Guinness brewery heir crashed into a truck at high speed. At the end of the first verse John Lennon sings that he saw the photograph, but the […]
Song of the Day 10/27: Lucinda Williams, “2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten”
This is my favorite song on Lucinda Williams’ masterpiece, 1998’s “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.” When I learned that most of the lyrics were inspired by photos in a book called “Juke Joint,” a collection of photographs Birney Imes took in the 1980s of roadhouses in the Mississippi Delta, I bought the book. Some […]
Song of the Day 10/26: Paul Simon, “René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War”
Plenty of songs were inspired by photographs — I might steal an idea from El Somnambulo and do a theme week of them — but this one is special. It pairs one of Paul Simon’s sweetly melancholy jazz-flavored melodies with lyrics that echo the surrealism of Rene Magritte’s paintings. It sprang from a photograph of […]
Song of the Day 10/24: Glen Campbell, “Wichita Lineman”
This song contains a not-quite-rhyming couplet that many people consider, in the words of British author Dylan Jones, “one of the most exquisite romantic couplets in the history of song.” Jones has written an entire book about what he calls “the world’s greatest unfinished song.” Jimmy Webb wrote it at the direction of Glen Campbell, […]
Song of the Day 10/22: The Guess Who, “Undun”
Randy Bachman wrote a lot of classic rock hits for the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive, most of them on a guitar he bought when he was 19 years old with money he made mowing lawns, a 1957 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins model in western orange with black DeArmond pickups. It was stolen in 1976, […]
Song of the Day 10/21: Crash Test Dummies, “Superman’s Song”
I don’t know if anything was lost in translation, but I hear the Faux News Freakout of the Week is over DC Comics changing Superman’s slogan from “Truth, Justice and the American Way” to “Truth, Justice and a Better Tomorrow.” Never mind that DC Comics are sold around the world, and that the majority of […]
Song of the Day 10/19: Jonathan Richman, “Velvet Underground”
I haven’t seen the new Todd Haynes documentary about the Velvet Underground yet, but many of the reviews make a point of praising his affecting interview with Jonathan Richman. Though VU influenced thousands of bands, Richman is the sole musician Haynes shows talking about that. Richman met the Velvets as a teenager — the documentary […]
Final Call For–Sierra Hull!! Queue Up For–The Claudettes!!
This coming Saturday night. Ordinarily this concert would have sold out long ago. But COVID has impacted ticket sales all across the country. However, this show will likely still sell out as we only have about 50 tickets remaining. Her music starts with bluegrass and then takes off from there. Here is what Sierra is […]
Song of the Day 10/17: Future Islands, “Seasons (Waiting on You)”
I was walking through a metro station the other day when I saw an advertising poster for Future Islands, and my mind instantly flashed back to this performance from 2014, when the band made its television debut on David Letterman’s show. Thanks to frontman Samuel T. Herring’s impassioned delivery the performance went viral, which was […]
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