And looking up lyrics of songs and so on, just a nice way to spend an hour:
Your beauty and kindness
Made tears clear my blindness
While I’m worth my room on this earth
I will be with you
Not a bad bit of a decent love song. In fact, that penultimate line I consider to be very good indeed. Will have to steal it at some point.
This is the story of our first teacher
Shetland made her jumpers
And the devil made her features
Threw up her bands when my mum said our names
Embroidered all her stories with slanderous claims
Ahhhh!
Good to know that our gracious host is, underneath it all, a romantic!
” I used to go to all those gay places
those come what may places
where one relaxes on the axis
of the wheel of life
to get the feel of life
fr om jazz and cocktails
the girls i met had sad and sullen gray faces
with slighty distingue traces
that used to be there, and you could see where
they’d been washed away
by too many through the day
twelve o’clock-tails ”
Billy Strayhorn became Duke Ellington’s lyricist and arranger at 17
I could barely tie my shoes at 17, what the hell was Strayhorn’s life like to come up with that sort of rhyming imagery at 17?
Tim
That whole album (sunshine on leith) is one of the most amazing collections of love songs I’ve ever listened to….the writing is just extraordinary……
TC those lyrics are awesome, I `m not much of a Jazz fan but that is rather wonderful. My first love is R and B especially vintage R and B and on so many of those old records the killer bars are provided by the session players who generally had a Jazz background .
I rather like the Proclaimers ( against my principles) but in terms of traditional song writing try the Elvis Costello Burt Bacharach collaboration ,“ In the darkest place “
In the darkest place
I know
That is where you`ll find me
Even though you didn’t have to remind me
I shut out the lights
Your eyes adjust
They`ll never be the same ……
Compare and contrast Gerard Manley Hopkins Poem on Spiritual Despair
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
Continuing the darkness theme maybe my favourite voice of the moment is James Carr. If you have not listened to his incredible voice do yourself a favour and stick on . This is quite well known but I also love his version of the Bee Gees classic To Love Somebody
At the dark end of the street
That’s where we always meet
Hiding in shadows where we don’t belong
Living in darkness to hide our wrong
Quite fun to wander around following this and that theme , lost in music ( caught in a trap)
Btw Tim I am not entirely convinced that there is a little impact form deskilling as you suggested . We know employment is high but wages are very low (considering this fact)and I thought t your dismissive view didn`t really do the subject justice .
Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
What Adam Neusens said.
What GlenDorran said.
The proclaimers’ strength is that they say what they mean, in a straightforward way (I think of them as an anti-Dylan). Sometimes they fall on their faces, they’ve quite a few stinkers, but often it works, and beautifully. Their first 3 albums are brilliant. The song ‘Sean’ showed me what it meant to become a dad long before I was one. ‘The Light’ for honest religious doubt. ‘Don’t turn out like your mother’ for the joy of mothers in law.
GD, BiA
I had a mate whose mate was a roadie for the proclaimers back in their prime, he was an old hand in roadie terms, had looked after a few bands in his time and reckoned those twins were “the most rock n roll” he’d ever met…..didn’t quantify what that meant, but i got the feeling it was a big compliment……