Month: June 2015

I’ve written a fair number of songs in my life, some of them pretty good, most of them average. My experience with songwriting is of two kinds: either (1) songs come to me almost whole cloth and all I have to do is just transcribe them, or (2) pieces of songs come to me– a…

I love gospel music, which in every instance I think is best heard live.   Gospel music is the music of praise, of solicitation, of lamentation, of supplication and of celebration . It is meant to be sung, not merely listened to, and it is meant to be sung with others.  It is a testament…

My entries for the rest of the month are going to be brief, because I just had elbow surgery and am now living what, if it were a sitcom,  I’d dub “My So Called One-Armed Life.”  My options for typing now are either henpecking or voice recognition software, both of which are time-consuming and neither…

For the most part, bar band songs become “bar band songs” in the first place because they’re the sort that people can hear over and over again without tiring of them. So I don’t really have a beef with most bar band songs.  I wish that Beale Street bands didn’t play “Sweet Home Alabama” so frequently,…

I’m resisting every last urge of my lesser self to pick “Sweet Caroline” today. You’re welcome. First, allow me to set the proper mise-en-scene for today’s prompt. There is, blessedly, a wide variety of live-entertainment bars in these more-or-less-blessed United States, with a correspondingly wide variety of  what counts as “appropriate” music to play in them.  And…

I do not abide total silence well and so, as a consequence, it is hardly ever completely quiet in my living space  I turn on NPR first thing in the morning, I listen to music or news-programming when I’m in the car, I always have something playing in my home or office while I work,…

Falling out of love with something (or someplace, or someone) can be awkward to experience, even more awkward to explain.  Our affections are mercurial, often unpredictably so, and there isn’t always a neat and clean account to be given for why you stopped to stare amorously into one of life’s store-windows only to then, well,…

It seems like bad juju to pick the theme song to your life before you’ve finished living it, but oh well. [*throws salt over shoulder*] I miss the days when television gave us real theme songs, by which I mean songs with words, not the sonic mood-setters typical of so many popular programs now. (Listen:…

I suspect today’s will be the most difficult prompt of the month, because it requires me to step outside of myself and try to think about what others think about what I think about music. Others know that I think a lot about music, so what I really have to consider is what others think about me, my tastes, my…

As a rule, I don’t like the category “guilty pleasure” when it’s applied to music.  You like the songs you like.  No harm, no foul Most of the time, when asked to report their “guilty” music pleasures, people tend to pick from artists like ABBA or Neil Diamond or Boyz II Men— all of whom I love, by the way– but what…