BLOGS

Friday Song: Janis Ian’s JESSE

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...

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The Friday Song: Ry Cooder, SHINE (1910)

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...

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Friday Song: Gillian Welch’s ‘Dark Turn of Mind’

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...

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The Friday Song: CW Stoneking, ‘Jungle Lullaby’

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....

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The Friday Song: Davy Graham, ‘The Ballad of the Sad Young Men’

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,...

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The Friday Song – Randy Newman’s ‘I Miss You’

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...

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The Friday Song: Chaim Tannenbaum’s ‘London, Longing For Home’

I've had the idea of once a week celebrating a song which means a lot to me but which is perhaps less well-known than they should be. Like Chaim Tannenbaum's 'London, Longing For Home'. When I saw a rare solo...

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How many books really ‘spark joy’? Damned few….

It has been clear-out time. I have been off the booze, filing the accumulated correspondence of the past three years, tidying up anything within reach. I have become a crashing bore, in fact. And it will be worth it, this...

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‘Twas in the merry month of May, I went to a folk club down m’way…’

When I first started writing songs, about ten years ago, I took them around to folk clubs. One, I discovered too late, took a hard-line, faintly Stalinist, approach to any music that did not belong to what is reverently described...

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Philip Roth: ‘It was my good luck that happiness didn’t matter to me….’

When I'm feeling disheartened by the fiction I've been reading (it happens), I reach for something by Philip Roth. He never lets me down. It's not that his books are all masterpieces of the order of Sabbath's Theater or The...

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Writer's Shed

On...