Music

Sunday morning coming down

Featured image John Sebastian celebrates his 80th birthday today. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2008. I had a great time compiling a set of videos in his honor last year. I can’t let Sebastian’s big 8-0 pass without inviting readers to take another look back with this revised and expanded edition. Sebastian grew up in Greenwich Village in a musical family. He is saturated in American music »

Sunday morning coming down

Featured image Listening to a show on the SiriusXM Grateful Dead channel a few years ago I heard one of the announcers mention that Nicky Hopkins played with the Jerry Garcia Band. I hadn’t known that. Hopkins was a fantastic English pianist whose session work is virtually ubiquitous on great rock recordings of the ’60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. Take a look, for example, at this Nicky Hopkins discography. I have been a »

Meet Victoria Victoria

Featured image Star Tribune music reviewer Jon Bream put in a good word for Victoria Victoria last week and prompted me to buy tickets for the show this past Sunday at the Dakota. Victoria Victoria is the name of the band — Victoria Elliott on lead vocal, Charlie Hunter on guitar, Noah Elliott on electric piano and backing vocals, Carter McClean on drums, and Maia Kamil on backing vocals. Jon tagged Victoria »

Sunday morning coming down

Featured image George Harrison was born in Liverpool on this date in 1943. He died on November 29, 2001, in Los Angeles. He added to the beauty of the world as a member of the Beatles and in his subsequent solo career. He also founded HandMade Films to produce Monty Python’s Life of Brian, still funny after all these years. I want to celebrate the anniversary of his birth this morning. In »

Greatness Beyond the Grammys

Featured image My whole family used to watch the Academy Awards every year when I was a kid, but I never watch the entertainment awards shows any more for the obvious reason: too self-indulgent even when they aren’t being annoyingly political, which is too much of the time. So I was slow to hear about the sensation at the latest Grammy Awards of the Tracy Chapman-Luke Combs duet of Chapman’s 1988 hit »

Ray of Hope

Featured image Norman Jewison died last month, so no surprise that Turner Classic Movies was quick to run In the Heat of the Night, which Jewison directed. As Morgan Freeman might say, this 1967 film is really about American cinematic history. Jewison outlived star Sidney Poitier, suspected of a murder in a southern town, but as he explained, “I’m a police officer” and “they call me Mr. Tibbs.” Poitier considered the film »

“Fast Car” jacked

Featured image The video of the Tracy Chapman/Luke Combs Grammys duet performance of Chapman’s “Fast Car” that circulated on X has been removed. The video conveyed a moving performance of a moving song. I found it yesterday reposted on Tracy Chapman’s own X account. Now it’s been jacked by the copyright owner, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. It’s a sad postscript to a happy event. Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs »

“Fast Car” revisited

Featured image Tracy Chapman made a rare appearance on the Grammys last night to join Luke Combs in a performance of Chapman’s “Fast Car.” She hasn’t performed in public for some 15 years. Below is a video clip of the moment via X reposted by Tracy herself [see update at bottom]. Perfect duo does exist! #GRAMMYs pic.twitter.com/sOYNCjztLn — Recording Academy / GRAMMYs (@RecordingAcad) February 5, 2024 Tracy commented on the fortune of »

Much Too Swift

Featured image Taylor Swift has become a fixture at Kansas City Chiefs games, and the Super Bowl is shaping up as the Taylor Swift Show. That invites a look at female singers who do not get the exposure and respect their talent deserves. Consider, for example, Joanna Noëlle Levesque, known professionally as JoJo. Check out her live rendition of Smokey Robinson’s “Who’s Lovin You,” with Smokey on hand to receive the Library »

Ballad for Biden and Beyond

Featured image “Old man, look at my life, I’m a lot like you were,” sang Neil Young back in 1972. Half a century later, Steven Crowder transformed that tune into “The Hunter Biden Song” (below), well worth attention with Hunter’s old man Joe in the White House. At the outset of 2024, a crucial election year, the people could use more material like that. “Hey Joe,” as Jimi Hendrix wondered, “where you »

Just a little lovin’

Featured image We went to see Shelby Lynne last night as she closed out her two-night run at the Dakota. John Hinderaker joined me some 12 years ago when she last played the Dakota. I didn’t particularly like her show or her set then and passed on her 2018 show at the Cedar Cultural Center, but my wife and I went last night because she was performing songs from Just a Little »

Sunday morning coming down

Featured image When Don Everly died in August 2020 I put together a set of videos with previous reflections on the music of the Everly Brothers. This is the season of their birthdays — Don was born on February 1, 1937, Phil on January 19, 1939. I thought I would use the occasion to replay it one more time in the hope that it might capture the interest of readers who may »

Reinventing The Wheel

Featured image A little over 30 years ago Rosanne Cash recorded The Wheel, a magnificent set of songs she wrote about the breakup of her marriage to Rodney Crowell. The album was produced by John Leventhal, whom she fell in love with in the process and married the following year. We saw the two of them at Minneapolis’s old Guthrie Theater when they toured in support of the album. I thought it »

Sunday morning coming down

Featured image We went to see the The New Standards perform one of their annual pre-New Year’s shows at the Dakota on December 30 — the first of two shows they played that night following two shows the night before. We’ve gone for at least the past 10 years and have loved the band since we first saw them at one of their pre-New Year’s shows (they call them “preeners”). The band »

Ye is sorry: A footnote

Featured image Commenting on the “apology” tendered by the rapper formerly known as Kanye West for causing “unintended outbursts,” I quoted the text verbatim. I also drew on Christopher Kuo’s New York Times story reporting on the denial of anti-Semitism reflected in the title track of his forthcoming compact disc Vultures. On the album’s title track, the Times reports, “Ye raps that he cannot be antisemitic because he had sex with a »

Ye is sorry

Featured image I first tuned in to the anti-Semitic ravings of Kanye West or Ye in his October 2022 interview with Tucker Carlson. In the part of the interview Tucker chose to air, Jared Kushner’s promotion of peace between Israel and Arabs in the Abraham Accords was disparaged as self-interested in an evocative fashion. “I just think it was to make money,” Ye said. “Is that too heavy-handed to put on this »

Sunday morning coming down

Featured image This is my slightly revised and expanded edition of secular pop songs that seize on Christmas in one way or another for their own artistic purposes. Here they are in chronological order of release along with notes that might help place them. Noel Paul Stookey (Paul of Peter, Paul & Mary) adapted and arranged “A’Soalin” with Elena Mezzetti and Tracy Batteast including Christmas references – using “God Rest Ye Merry, »