30-Day Music Challenge: Day 27

EDITOR'S NOTE: In the summer of 2017, I answered the 30-Day Music Challenge on this blog. I'll be reupping the best of those posts from time to time.

27. A song that breaks your heart.

Ah, these people.

The thing is, I understand these people. I'm pretty sure I used to be one. I'm pretty sure I'm a recovering "these people", which means there's no used-to-be about it.

See, you grow up with someone who says and does nice things just to get something out of you. Then, they stop doing and saying nice things -- just to punish you for not playing the game by their rules. Just to show you who's boss. Or whatever. What you understand then, beyond the shadow of a doubt, is that they mean to harm you.

When they swing back to being nice, you forget who they were until they remind you with some exquisitely-designed humiliation. Some people figure it out. More people go to their graves wondering why.

You grow up, and when you meet a genuinely-kind person -- and kind, unlike nice, is never superficial -- you can't tell whether they're trying to manipulate you or just being themselves. So you lash out, even when they're so loving it hurts. Even when the air between you is emotionally neutral.

If you're smart, if you're lucky, you grow out of it. If you're really lucky, someone wise tells you the key is to trust someone until they prove that you can't. If you're really, really lucky, someone tells you that both hurting others and being hurt by them are unavoidable parts of life.

If you decide to be kind without evidence, you get what this song offers. And you get more of it than you ever thought possible.

This is Neil Young with "Peace of Mind".

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 14

EDITOR'S NOTE: In the summer of 2017, I answered the 30-Day Music Challenge on this blog. I'll be reupping the best of those posts from time to time.

14. A song that you would love played at your wedding.

This is a song about what you lose when someone you love dies.

This is a song about what you never had, the sickening realization you come to, when someone you love lies.

A wedding would seem a lot less gloat-y, a lot less self-congratulatory if the band played this.

See, if you're at all ready to get married, the thought of being bridezilla or anybody-zilla fills you with disgust. If you're really ready to get married, you know there's at least one guest who doesn't have what this song talks about. And you want them to have it, because you know how utterly bereft you have been without it.

No one should have to -- or choose to -- be that lonely, and that, too, is what this song is about.

This is Shawn Colvin and Loudon Wainwright with "A Heart Needs A Home".

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 15

EDITOR'S NOTE: In the summer of 2017, I answered the 30-Day Music Challenge on this blog. I'll be reupping the best of those posts from time to time.

15. A song that is a cover by another artist.

I had this single -- that's how much I loved this version.

Isn't it funny, though, how an original and a cover can both be brilliant in entirely different ways?

Where Smokey Robinson's original is silky and snake-hipped, the Stones' take on it is muscular, tribal. Robinson croons to us from the luxurious, low-lit confines of an exclusive club packed with Motown's cool kids, but somehow, open to everyone. The Stones come at us just as we crest the hill of a desert music festival, raising heat and dust with that awesome, orchestral thump.

Well-oiled machines both. Here, however, are The Rolling Stones with "Going To A Go-Go".

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 23

EDITOR'S NOTE: In the summer of 2017, I answered the 30-Day Music Challenge on this blog. I'll be reupping the best of those posts from time to time, starting with this one.

23. A song that you think everybody should listen to.

You've probably heard them all -- done badly on some vocal competition show. Let's get the ones you've probably heard, in their original versions, out of the way. Then, I'll tell you about one I think you probably haven't heard, but should.

Ready? Here goes:

Blue Moon Of Kentucky, Bill Monroe
Man Of Constant Sorrow, The Stanley Brothers
Hoochie Coochie Man, Muddy Waters
Smokestack Lightning, Howlin' Wolf
Boom Boom, John Lee Hooker
Hound Dog, Big Mama Thornton
Jailhouse Rock, Elvis Presley
Johnny B. Goode, Chuck Berry
Satisfaction, The Rolling Stones
Dancing In the Streets, Martha and the Vandellas
Good Vibrations, The Beach Boys
R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Aretha Franklin
Bridge Over Troubled Water, Simon and Garfunkel
Let It Be, The Beatles
I Heard It Through the Grapevine, Marvin Gaye
You've Got A Friend, Carole King
Won't Get Fooled Again, The Who
Good Times, Chic
We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions, Queen
New York State Of Mind, Billy Joel
Billie Jean, Michael Jackson
Welcome To the Jungle, Guns 'n Roses
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, U2

You can keep "Stairway To Heaven". Bruce Springsteen isn't as universal as East Coast rock critics think he is. Even though I can't stand her as a person, Sheryl Crow's "Safe and Sound" should be on this list.

What about the one you may not have heard yet?

It lacks the obvious universality of the others. In these days of niche marketing, and identity politics on both sides of the fence, there are those who would actively hate it, making all kinds of assumptions about the women singing it and What They Really Mean. The sad thing is, everybody's been through this.

You might not see it at first, couched as it is in metaphor. Why on God's green earth are these singers rooting for the downfall -- perhaps even the physical death -- of a lone circus performer, even as they remember, with great fondness, her youth and her youthful genius?

The girl's story is not a happy one:

Well, some guy broke her heart and her heart it did ache
So she went to the tent and the lady of the snakes
Who gave her a potion and she drank it in
After that her heart never ached again
After that her heart never ached again.

Still, they can't wait for her to flop:

Yeah, one of these nights, the old girl's goin' down.

On and on they sing the girl's story, shedding their hearts' blood in the verses, then chanting that woeful, prophetic chorus.

By the time they get to the coda, they're singing at the tops of their lungs. And the word they are singing is "Hallelujah" -- literally "Praise God".

Louder and louder they stretch it and shape it -- an arrow, a battering ram, a boulder arcing through the air. With every volley they crush and crumble stone walls three feet thick. Everything must go in this battle -- everything phony, self-insulating, and self-congratulatory.

As the battle winds down, the singers' voices get softer, slower, more hesitant, and more than a little afraid of what they've done as they gaze down from their lofty perch in the stands at the tiny, crumpled thing on the floor below.

Is it the "old girl", or simply her old self?

The final "Hallelujah" feels like the best funeral oration they could give -- elegiac, with the tiniest flicker of hope.

Of peace.

This is Patty Griffin and Emmylou Harris with "Trapeze".

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 30

30. A song that reminds you of yourself.

Whew! We made it to the end, and the hardest challenge of all. I didn't know how I'd answer this one, but then, the answer just came.

Of course.

But for the gender, every line of this song is me. It's what I expect of colleagues and lovers, family and friends.

Anyway, thanks for sticking with me through this musical odyssey. It proved to be unusually intense.

Here's Aaron Neville with "Tell It Like It Is".

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 29

29. A song that you remember from your childhood.

My poor dad! He had a voice like Jimmy Martin's. He wanted to be Eddy Arnold.

To this day, I prefer Jimmy Martin, but there's something magical about this song, which my dad had the good sense to never attempt.

When I was in high school, we went on a church retreat of sorts to Squaw Valley. While we were there, we saw Eddy Arnold at Harrah's in Lake Tahoe (We were clearly not Baptists), with some neighbors who had moved to Sparks, Nevada years before. Naturally, Arnold sang this song. It was as evocative as I remembered.

This is Eddy Arnold with "Cattle Call".

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 28

28. A song by an artist with a voice that you love.

Gritty, soulful, quiet, passionate, sexy, yearning -- good grief!

And I have to pick just one song?

Here's Stephen Stills with "As I Come of Age".

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 26

26. A song that makes you want to fall in love.

This is an odd challenge. I mean, it's the person, not the song, right?

Even so, this song is so sloppy-glad that it makes me wish someone would show up and be so perfectly-suited to me that I couldn't help but feel this way.

Here's Jonathan Edwards with The Seldom Scene and "How Long Have I Been Waiting For You?"

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 25

25. A song by an artist no longer living.

It's an old, old story, and a hard one to tell. If you tell it without sentiment, you risk sounding judgmental; no one is all bad. If you tell it with sympathy, you anger yourself and everyone else who knows that childhood trauma doesn't make a monster of everyone who's been through it.

So. On the one hand, we have a sexist drug addict whose father, on killing him, was only charged with voluntary manslaughter because the son had injured him so seriously in the fight that preceded the shooting.

On the other hand, we have a black man in 1960s America, a survivor of grievous childhood physical, verbal, and emotional abuse who, like his father, was a cross-dresser (See: David Ritz's badly-written but factual book, Divided Soul, based on interviews unfinished at the time of the artist's death).

In spite of all that, or perhaps because of it, we have the artist -- one of the most gifted in the history of American music.

I wish he had made it. I wish he had lived to see abuse survivors and transgender kids grow up, find their true families, and live happy, healthy lives full of love. I wish he had lived to encourage them -- or be encouraged by them.

This is Marvin Gaye, who is no longer living, yet lives inside of so many. The song is Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler).

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 24

24. A song by a band/group you wish were still together.

This record was made in the waning years of the first wave of bluegrass -- 1952, to be exact. Four years later, Elvis Presley would come along, ushering in the period known as the Bluegrass Depression.

During the remaining years of the 50s, the bluegrass faithful deserted the Monroes, the Stanleys, and their second-tier imitators. Audiences that once travelled for miles to see first-generation bluegrass acts flocked to shows by Presley and other early rock figures. Simultaneously, country music moved uptown to Nashville. It got slicker, and less embarrassing to the middle class, in the process.

In the late 50s, college kids like Mike Seeger and Ralph Rinzler discovered bluegrass as a dying art form. They recognized its genius, but they processed it as just another form of folk music, never quite understanding its roots in the blues.

They took bluegrass to American colleges and universities, where it metamorphosed into a musical movement that bluegrass musicians refer to as the Folk Scare, only half in jest.

In the process, bluegrass was saved, but it was lost, too. Today, it sounds like the whitest, safest music you could imagine. I wish this iteration of Bill Monroe his Blue Grass Boys were still together to make bluegrass real and true and dangerous again.

This is Bill Monroe, Jimmy Martin, and all the rest of the Blue Grass Boys with "In the Pines".

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 22

22. A song that motivates you.

This is a strange choice -- a really strange choice. But I think like a musician, not a lyricist. The structure of this song is everything.

It starts quiet; the frustration is palpable. The frustration grows until that last verse slams into a wall of sound, then breaks into a jubilant repeat of the chorus.

I remember being unable to find this song on any local radio station. They played it -- mornings, usually -- on a little, independent station, two counties, 70 miles, and a million light years away.

This is Chilliwack with "My Girl (Gone, Gone, Gone)".

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 21

21. A favorite song with a person's name in the title.

Hate the guy, but love the song. Yeah, Peter Pan never appealed to me. But this song? Oh!

Joshua Rifkin's delicate, tip-toeing orchestration is all kid-on-Christmas-morning astonishment. It is nothing short of magical, and it makes you think someone like Michael might be, too.

All of which makes me want to say, find your own magic -- preferably with someone who isn't always flitting off to the drudgery he said he so desperately wanted to escape.

Here's Judy Collins with "Michael From Mountains".

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 20

20. A song that reminds you of your mom.

Let's see: Leaves you for dead, then tells you how well she'd take care of you if only you belonged to her.

Yup, pretty much.

Shirley Collins with Child Ballad #20, "The Cruel Mother".

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 19

19. A song that makes you think about life.

29 years ago today, I married the best friend I ever had.

32 years ago, I first heard this song, at a time in my life when I felt as though I was drowning. Turns out, it was the life raft that was pulling me under.

24 years after I first heard this song, I met the One who had said these words to the songwriter. I was stunned to discover that it was Jesus, and that He did not hate me. I still have trouble believing that at times.

29 years after I first heard this song, I discovered that it's people who are supposed to do these things for each other; we're not supposed to wait for some Santa Claus in the sky to alleviate the suffering in this world. I still follow Jesus. When it comes to other people, I am a stone-cold atheist (Antihumanist? Apeopleist?)

39 years after I first heard this song, I discovered that helpers are fewer and farther between as time goes on. When you meet one, hold onto them for dear life. Forget the stuff that hurts, the stuff everybody else thinks is important. If someone helps you and keeps helping you, don't let go.

Two years after I first heard this song, I discovered that helping others costs you less and gives you more than you think it will. The man who wrote this song also wrote "It's no secret that a friend/Is someone who lets you help". He was right.

26 years after I first heard this song, I discovered that, if help is not mutually given and received, the relationship is toxic, and it will kill you if you don't get out.

Here's U2 with a song that makes me think about life. This is "Drowning Man".

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 18

18. A song from the year you were born.

Oh, shut up!

Here's Chuck Berry with "Sweet Little Sixteen".

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 17

EDITOR'S NOTE: In the summer of 2017, I answered the 30-Day Music Challenge on this blog. I'll be reupping the best of those posts from time to time, starting with this one.

17. A song that features your favorite artist.

I'll tell you right now, this is a losing game. You don't spend 16 years traveling the road from absolute beginner to semi-professional musician and end up with just one favorite artist.

So, let's pick one.

Once upon a time, from the late 1930s to somewhere in the mid-1950s, bluegrass was country music. The two retained some links throughout the 60s and 70s, so you could hear bluegrass occasionally on the country music variety shows in those days.

Though we watched those shows religiously when I was growing up, I never quite grokked bluegrass. As I've said elsewhere on this blog, any enjoyment I expressed was actively discouraged. Not getting it, then, was a childhood coping strategy. Nevertheless, I kept trying.

Then, I found The Seldom Scene. Their stunning vocal and instrumental precision appealed to my classical training. Their song selection indicated they'd listened to some of the same folk, rock, and gospel records I had.

Their musicianship knocked me out. Just check out the phrase that banjoist, Ben Eldridge plays at about 2:26 on this track. It's simple enough, but he repeats it -- just a little bit louder, and with a soulful, bent string to accent the difference, the progress, the drive.

This was music on a level that the vast majority of artists I'd been listening to hadn't bothered to pursue.

This was bluegrass I understood, and it served as a gateway to the older, more rough-hewn music made by the pioneers of the genre. If The Seldom Scene hadn't appreciated Bill Monroe or The Stanley Brothers, I could never have done so myself.

This is the original and best lineup of The Seldom Scene, live with a number they learned from bluegrass pioneers, Flatt and Scruggs, "Doing My Time".

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 16

16. One of your favorite songs from a movie.

I was at that in-between stage: old enough to go to the movies on my own, but not able to afford it. So, the first place I heard this song was on the Academy Awards telecast. Jennifer Warnes, who performed it on the soundtrack, was not invited to sing it for the telecast. That honor went to some C-list Vegas hack -- the way they did in those days.

These days, the songs are so bad they can't even find five of them to nominate.

I sound old, but not vintage, unlike this song. Composer Randy Newman has an uncanny knack for making songs sound as though they were written at the end of the 19th Century when, in fact, they were written one hundred years later.

This is Jennifer Warnes with "One More Hour" from the 1981 film, Ragtime.

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 13

Mariska Veres in 2006

13. One of your favorite 70s songs.

Now we're talking! The 70s were my time. There are hundreds to choose from, but the one I always think of was the first record I wasn't allowed to buy.

"Well, what does it mean?" my mother asked and, in one respect, it was a legitimate question. The band themselves didn't know what the song meant. They were Dutch, and were taught -- badly -- to sing it phonetically. "A Godness on a mountain top/Burnin' like a silver flame", Mariska Veres sang.

The word, of course, should have been "goddess".

"And Venus was her name".

Like most of us, Mariska Veres got older and chubbier. She died in 2006 of gall bladder cancer, just three weeks after she was diagnosed.

She was still a goddess, even then. And these are still some of the hottest riffs in all of rock 'n roll.

This is Shocking Blue with "Venus".

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 12

12. A song that you love from 2011.

This one nearly stumped me. In 2011, I was listening almost exclusively to bluegrass, and quickly becoming disenchanted with the slick, soulless direction it had taken. Were there any new songs -- not covers, but brand-new songs -- released that year, and were they any good? I had to Google it to find out. Fortunately, the answers were Yes and Yes. How often do you get that on a planet full of spineless commitment-phobes?

From 2011, here are Steve Martin and The Steep Canyon Rangers with "Atheists Don't Have No Songs".

30-Day Music Challenge: Day 11

11. A song that you never get tired of.

I've said more than once that some of Ralph Stanley's tunes hit so close to home that he might have been reading my diary. And, when I say close to home, I mean autobiographical -- what Bill Monroe might have called "true songs".

This one is certainly true for me, in all its vulnerability and pain. These are The Stanley Brothers with "He Said If I Be Lifted Up".