30 Day Song Challenge 2014

[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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

There aren’t many Michael Jackson songs that don’t make me want to dance. But I’m a sucker for the “Little Michael” songs in particular, before he was “MJ” or “The King of Pop” or the tabloid-dubbed “Wacko Jacko.”  Give me the way-back-when, pint-sized wunderkind of The Jackson 5, strutting and mugging and hamming it up in his…

My pick today, perhaps not surprisingly, is a song sung by one of the most heartwrenchingly beautiful female voices in the history of song.  Unless you’re a diehard fan of early-90’s alt-country music, you’ve probably never heard of Maria McKee (or her tragically under-rated and under-appreciated band Lone Justice), which is a damn shame.  I used…

My head often needs “clearing” and, as far as I’ve been able to tell, music is the only thing that can do that.  For others, the cure for a muddled mind is exercise, or meditation, or visit to church, or a good cry, or a long conversation with a dear friend… but none of those…

There are about two dozen songs that every single R&B band in Memphis plays every time they perform.  Whether you’re on Beale Street, or in a local juke joint, or rolling down the river on the Memphis Queen or just down South at the casinos, you’re going to hear all two dozen.  Songs like “Proud…