When the daily news is a grim daily carnival of human inadequacy and ugliness, that’s when we need music most. A rhythm, a tune, feeling – perhaps even a thought or two – put to a melody can remind us of the good, the bright and the hopeful in human life And few songwriters do… Continue reading Friday Song: Oliver Mtukudzi, HEAR ME, LORD
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Everybody likes a drink. Everybody loves a drinker. There’s nothing like booze to make life a little more colourful, fun and generally worth living. Right? Well, maybe not exactly. Most of us know that, like any other highs, alcohol has its lows. For some, it has the nasty habit of destroying lives. Yet it is… Continue reading Friday Song: Mary Gauthier, I DRINK
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Has there ever been a song so widely covered, and so often ruined, as the astonishing ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’ Even though it is one of my very favourite songs, I have struggled to find a version that truly does it justice. Why is it so good? And why so badly interpreted, even… Continue reading Friday Song: Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney, BROTHER CAN YOU SPARE A DIME?, sung by Teddy Thompson
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Would Nigel Farage enjoy this week’s Friday Song? It would seem, on the face of it, unlikely. The great Italian songwriter Paolo Conte is sophisticated, arty, earthy and shamelessly foreign. He doesn’t even speak English, for heaven’s sake. He was once a lawyer – a gleam of hope for Nigel there – but gave it… Continue reading Friday Song: Paolo Conte, VIA CON ME
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A reliable indicator of songwriting talent is when a writer takes a hoary, overworked theme, one that has been mauled and murdered in countless second-rate songs, and makes it entirely new. Janis Ian, one of the great unsung heroes of the modern song, has done it several times in the half-century she has been writing.… Continue reading Friday Song: Janis Ian’s JESSE
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If there were ever a song that illustrates the muddle we are in about race, tolerance and offensiveness, it’s my Friday Song this week, ‘That’s Why They Call Me “Shine”‘. The song has taken a peculiar journey over the past century which, as far as I (or, rather, Google) can see, has never been recounted.… Continue reading The Friday Song: Ry Cooder, SHINE (1910)
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I was introduced to the extraordinary, unearthly music of Gillian Welch by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro in 2002. He was on Desert Island Discs and his last choice of song was ‘I’m Not Afraid To Die’ from the 1998 album Hell Among the Yearlings. There comes a stage in our lives when vanishingly few songs… Continue reading Friday Song: Gillian Welch’s ‘Dark Turn of Mind’
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As every songwriter knows, one of the basic requirements of the job is to get the hell out of the leafy suburb of Clichéville, where everything is familiar and has been done before. The trick is to make it new. A few writers do that by creating their own peculiar imaginative universe, a parallel world… Continue reading The Friday Song: CW Stoneking, ‘Jungle Lullaby’
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I first heard ‘The Ballad of the Sad Young Men’ in the mid-1960s, sung by Davy Graham on his astonishing second album Folk, Blues and Beyond, and it has stayed with me ever since. I’ve always loved its opening lines, ‘Sing a song of sad young men/ Glasses full of rye/ All the news is… Continue reading The Friday Song: Davy Graham, ‘The Ballad of the Sad Young Men’
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Embarrassment is a tricky emotion to convey in a song. And when it is used (I think Madness once had a song called ‘Embarrassment’), it tends to swamp everything else. It becomes shame. In Randy Newman’s ‘I Miss You’, from his 1999 CD Bad Love, embarrassment is there, but so is regret, love, humour, guilt… Continue reading The Friday Song – Randy Newman’s ‘I Miss You’
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