Month: June 2024

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,…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

This time last year, I was blogging (the 2014 iteration of) the 30 Day Song Challenge, as I’ve done for the last several summers. So I was listening to a much wider array of music than normal, and a lot of songs that were not necessarily “hits” at the moment.  One of the serendipitous things…

There was a brief moment of time, after the demise of albums with liner-notes and before the Internet, when it really was possible to be genuinely stymied by a song’s lyrics. Now, of course, it’s easy to find the words to any song, no matter how muddled or garbled they may have been delivered in…

Earworms are funny creatures, really. When you find yourself infected with one, it can be either a blessing or a curse. Earworms feed on our obsessive-compulsive tendencies, they activate whatever tacit proclivity for addiction lies deep within us, and the only cure for bad ones is to replace them with good ones. It’s kind of…