Music

30 Day Song Challenge, Day 21: A Song That Is Best Heard Live

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…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 23: A Song You Want Played At Your Wedding

Because I’m still catching up on these challenge picks following my elbow surgery, it just so happens that I’m writing today’s post on June 26, the day that the Supreme Court announced its decision declaring a Constitutional right to (so-called) “marriage equality.”  I don’t want to blow my sad trombone today, on a day when so…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 22: A Song You Wish You Had Written

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…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 25: A Song With Utterly Mysterious Lyrics

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…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 24: Your Favorite Song This Time Last Year

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…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 26: A Song That Is An Earworm

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…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 15: The Theme Song To Your Life

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:…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 14: A Song No One Would Expect You To Love

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…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 12: A Song From An Artist You Hate

I’ve made no secret over the years about my dislike for NashVegas wunderkind and fake-country recording artist Taylor Swift.  She even made it into my “Uncanny Valley” series on this blog (see here) as an example of what I called the very Form of the Fake.  Now, I’ll admit I’ve been pretty harsh in my evaluations of Swift–…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 11: A Song From Your Favorite Band

First, let’s just get something straight right away: The Rolling Stones is the greatest band of all time.  Full stop. Several years ago, my favorite music magazine No Depression ran a contest they called “Exile on Main Street vs. The White Album Smackdown” and invited readers to write in and explain why one album was better than the…

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