Leigh M. Johnson

That couch-full of awesome to your left is my best friend, Dr. Adriel Trott, mugging like a boss at one of my favorite local nightlife hangouts Mollie Fontaine’s. I met her for the first time more than a decade ago in March 2001, when I visited Villanova University as a prospective graduate student.  Due in part to…

I’ve gotten a few days behind on this month’s 30 Day Song Challenge, so today’s entry is going to be semi-brief, partly because I’m trying to catch up but in larger part because there’s really no reason for any of us to spend too much time thinking about what I do in the shower. For…

I tried– and I mean I REALLY TRIED– not to pick a Beach Boys song today, but all my efforts were for naught.  Asking people to associate a song with “summer” and expecting them not to pick a Beach Boys song is like asking them what they associate with shooting a man in Reno and expecting…

There’s a world of difference between something that’s funny and something that makes you laugh.  Over the past decade or so, the real magnitude of that difference has been lost, what with all the ubiquitous lol‘s (and “lol”-variants) showing up in our texts, Facebook feeds and Twitter pages. The truth is, it’s really not that easy…

I may be interpreting the 30 Day Song Challenge prompt (“a song that reminds you of something sad”) a bit liberally with my pick today.  As much as I tried, I couldn’t think of a song that reminded me of any particular sad thing.  There aren’t any songs that I associate with my grandparents’ funerals, or the…

[Ludwig von Beethoven and Friedrich Schiller] Today’s prompt in the 30 Day Song Challenge presents a very tall order.  A song that has a new meaning every time you hear it?  The way I figure it, this selection had better be either (1) a song you don’t hear very often, (2) a song that is written in…

My selection for today is a song that, if you gave me nothing else but the title, I’d most likely say “yeah, I can relate to that.”  I’m picking “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World”— yes, that’s three uses of the male possessive–  originally recorded in 1966 by James Brown and intended as a pun on the…

As a rule, I don’t like the category “Guilty Pleasure” when it’s applied to music.  You like the songs you like. Full stop. Most of the time, when asked to report their “guilty” music pleasures, people tend to name artists like ABBA or Neil Diamond or Shaggy or Boyz II Men— all of whom I…

Full disclosure: I picked my song today mostly just so I could force you to watch the video again, which features a FAR more sketchy and morally-questionable spelling-lesson than I remembered from my childhood days watching Sesame Street. As you may or may not have heard, the early episodes of Sesame Street have recently been released as a…