Something great can happen when a funny songwriter decides to put humour aside and go for the heart. While the jokes are waiting in the wings, the song taking centre stage acquires a power all of its own. Think of...
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The light, seductive voice of Annette Hanshaw has led me to a song whose history confirms, as well as any song of the 20th century, that music knows no borders of genre, tradition or colour. ‘I Get the Blues When...
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Almost seven years ago, I stood outside the gates of Charlotte Square in Edinburgh. touting for business beside a Big Issue seller and a young bloke handing out flyers for a new McDonalds. I was touting for trade, too. The...
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There’s no Friday Song today – it will be back next week – but several people have asked me about songs I’ve written about in the past. Since I haven’t yet assembled them all in one place on the website....
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Let’s admit, first of all, that this week’s Friday Song has a slightly silly, borderline weird title. I like to think that, when it was written in 1919, Carey Morgan came up with a killer tune and the lyricists Swanstrom...
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Some songs are so great that they survive and thrive down the years in a form that is pretty much unchanged. Who could think of messing around too much with the melody, shape and general vibe of, say, Hoagy Carmichael’s...
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Just now and then, as you’re growing up, an album comes along that shakes and re-orders your musical landscape like an earthquake. For me, as for many others, Highway 61 had that effect, as did the Beatles’ White Album and The Paul Simon Songbook. Less...
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For pity’s sake, let’s have a happy Friday Song – something sunny, celebratory, about being young, about getting out and having fun. Here’s an idea: what better than one of those great songs written between 1955 and 1964 by the...
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Here is a song that has been part of our lives for so long that it has become easy to forget how odd and unusual it is. That problem has been compounded by the countless woeful interpretations down the years...
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One of my favourite tracks on Playing For Time is ‘The Anno Domini Rag’. When I arrived in southern Italy last autumn to record some of the tracks for the new album, it was one of the songs that produced the most...
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