And then John said "Dig this, for here's Paul, whistling Clarabella..." and a little girl who loved the Beatles thought that was a good idea.
Music, movies and the other things that make the world go round,
~~~2014~~~ I never quite get over my amazement at how a piece of music can unite seemingly-unconnected, disparate people. I should hardly be surprised: the power of music upon the human soul is, after all, my life's study. Yet sometimes, something truly extraordinary comes along.
For the first time, 100 Awesome Things takes on two pieces of music at a time... and once more, grief and music are entwined. ~~~2013~~~~ One of the things about grief, in whatever form it takes, is how it eventually just is. Perhaps it takes a very long time, but it's something one absorbs into the fabric of one's soul, one's existence, one's life. It simply is.
For anyone who saw the Entertainment/Culture section of their news this week, or anyone who has ever spoken to me for any length of time, I don't suppose today's subject will be any surprise.
I was in Milan last weekend. It was my first visit to the city, which is far more 'real' and 'working' than the city-sized museums of Florence and Venice. I liked it very much, though I can't say I loved it as I do amata Firenze.
On the Friday we did some art and wandering around; on the Saturday we had tickets for Da Vinci's Last Supper, which in real life is way more powerful than any print or copy will ever be; and on the Sunday morning we visited the museum at Teatro alla Scala. The deal is simple: if they're not in the middle of rehearsals, you can go into a box and experience the auditorium itself. Given how outrageously expensive tickets to actual performances there are, this was my only chance to see inside.
Milan is the kind of place where it feels like everyone is richer and better dressed than you (in my case this is almost certainly true for almost everyone). La Scala is the kind of place which doesn't like the hoi polloi. This can be gathered from the prices in the gift shop, where fridge magnets were 12 euro and a small cloth bag was nearly 20.
I posed for a pic with the bust of Mascagni, who composed my favourite opera ever, which remains the only time I've seen live opera to date (ENO at the London Coliseum with Pagliacci and it was great)... and then went into a box, joking with my dad about the most inappropriate thing one could sing at La Scala.
I decided on A Hole In The Ground by Bernard Cribbins. So while I took some pictures, I sang it very quietly to my dad, who laughed. And yes, I am the kind of person who knows all the lyrics to comedy records from the 1960s. You expected anything else?
Anyway, as almost everyone who reads this blog (hi, both of you!), I am a singer. I'm not the world's greatest, but I have some skill. My dad had joked about me "singing at La Scala". It was quiet - there weren't many tourists visiting and there were only a few lighting tests going on - so I didn't think it would be the end of the world if I suddenly burst into song. Which to be honest, I do at any given time/place and singing at La Scala would be one of the more relevant places. I almost chickened out, embarrassed and scared that what would come out would be awful.
Then again, while visiting the Motown Historical Museum in Detroit, of my dearest friends pushed me forward to sing into their echo chamber and I sang a snip of "Dancing in the Street" at Motown in front of a large group of black American seniors and didn't offend so...
Something occurred to me: Mario Lanza. As far as I'm concerned, there have been no greater singers. Caruso was good, sure. John McCormack was OK. Pavarotti tolerable. I grant that this is very much personal opinion and is not a statement of fact.
Simply, for me, Lanza is the tenor I love the best. We were formally introduced to each other via a documentary on TV that I watched with my Granddad not long before he was hospitalised (Granddad, not Lanza). My granddad was a lover of things Italian, like food, music and people to marry, and we enjoyed the documentary so much that I went and bought a 3-disc set of Lanza music that same week.
I quickly discovered that some of the songs are utterly execrable. Some of it's that god-awful 1950s schmaltz with the dolcissimoclose-harmony backing singers which I dislike on Dean Martin songs and detest on Lanza's work. Can you say 'surplus to requirements'? However, no matter how crap the songs or the arrangements, the Lanza Voice remains tremendous at all times, though regularly mismatched to the song.
I watched The Student Prince and laughed as Lanza's voice issued from weedy, charisma-free actor Edmond Purdom, and wished Lanza had played the part himself as originally intended. I watched The Great Caruso and wished that Caruso had lived in a time of better recording technology but was glad Lanza was there to fill in the blanks.
Yes, I loved Lanza's voice and grieved for the lost opportunities and tragedies of his life. Stood in La Scala, I wished to have heard his voice using the theatre's rightly-renowed acoustics. And so I opened my mouth, took a deep breath down to the diaphragm and without fully conscious thought, the first verse of "Because You're Mine" issued forth.
Next I thing know, my dad's tapped me on the shoulder. The security guard has apparently told me off for singing in a theatre. All the previous embarrassment flooded back as we shuffle out the box. He scowled and scolded in Italian so I just said sorry and that I wanted to know what it would sound like. He then proceeded to stare at me as I made my way through the rest of the theatre museum (Franz Liszt's piano! Portraits of the great and good of the opera world! Nureyev's costumes!)...
Perhaps I violated some great, sacroscant rule of the theatre, I don't know. I can't be the first museum visitor to do so.
However, most important to me: I SOUNDED FUCKING AWESOME. The acoustics are truly fantastic and I projected right through that damned gilt and red velvet auditorium. I sounded GOOD, man. The nearby English visitors made some such comment to my parents but I was too busy being overwhelmed by the sound of my own voice rising through the theatre.
Lanza didn't sing at La Scala. He bloody well should have, but life can be cruel and we are sometimes our own worst enemies and sometimes even the hugely talented have bad luck. On the sliding scale of singing talent I'm probably closer to One Direction than Lanza: I'm a girl, not a tenor, and untrained... but for some probably mystical reason, it felt only right and correct that his song should be heard in that moment in that place. Maybe I broke some rule or tradition or something but... I'm sorry for disrupting the lighting crew for twenty odd seconds.
To the rest of you, this video of awesome is of Lanza's performance at Sunday Night at the London Palladium in 1957, which was neatly featured in an episode of the brilliant and prematurely cancelled The Hour. The first song is "Because You're Mine" and is followed by some operatic pieces. I get it if it's not your bag, if you don't particularly dig opera or 'classical music'... but I hope you'll give him a smidge of a listen anyway, because he's that good. A voice heard only once every century, as the saying goes.
You see, those people you hear on those Cowell shows? Some of 'em are OK. Some of 'em have some skillz... but this is what "great" sounds like. I think sometimes we've forgotten what "great" looks and sounds like and so settle for "mediocre" and "tolerable".
I truly don't say this to be snobby or elitist. I mean, I like "A Hole In The Ground"! It's not about 'opera good, pop bad'. We deserve great in all things. "Mediocre" and "tolerable" have their place and if you love it then it's all good, but... It's voices like Lanza, Caruso and the rest that are why I don't dig the Cowell stuff, just as guitarists like Green, Kossoff, Hendrix, Gallagher ensure I'm unimpressed by so much/most current guitar music and so on.
We all deserve the best of everything, whether it's opera or rock or pop or any of those things. We all deserve "great". C 2013.
I knew I'd written a lot about Philip Lynott but I didn't realise quite how much until I was going through Ye Olde Blog to find anything worth keeping. I'm not sure that this post will say much I hadn't already said, or have said since, but it felt wrong to ditch it entirely. So here goes... ~~~2011~~~
It is twenty past eleven on the night of 4th January 2011. I am sitting in my cold living room, curled up in a duvet and I am watching a DVD called Thin Lizzy – Greatest Hits. At the O2 Arena (the Point last time I was there) in Dublin, a band calling themselves Thin Lizzy are on stage. At Vicar Street in Dublin, my favourite live music venue ever, the 25th Vibe for Philo is in full swing. According to the line-up on the website, the Hoodoo Rhythm Devils & Glen Hansard are playing as I type. Although his name isn't splashed all over the place, Philip Lynott has not been forgotten today.
Part 26 of 100 Awesome Musical Things, dedicated with all my heart to the Marquise Rachel, Mr Rachel and Small Rachel. ~~~2013~~~ I'm a quarter of the way through this particular challenge and it's been more than a month since I last posted. There's a whole lot of reasons for the absence, of which some are good and some are not.
One of the reasons was that I spent the last month listening to Bowie a lot. That was a good reason. Another reason is that I was really sick the last couple of weeks. That was not so good.
The main reason was that I spent most of the energy I reserve for creative endeavours on rehearsing for a particular performance which meant rather a lot.
My dear, dear friend Rachel got married a couple of Saturdays ago. Some months ago I got an email from her asking if I would possibly consider performing at her wedding during the register-signing. I couldn't have said 'YEAH' any quicker, so the only question left was 'what to play?'
The bride and groom's requirements were as follows:
"All we really know at the moment is that we wanted you, we wanted something not traditionally wedding-y, and it mustnt't make me or Mr Rachel want to throw up on each other!".
I also needed a song which I could play by myself without too much hassle. I sent a list of songs which included "Because You're Mine" and "Speak Softly Love", "Nature Boy" and "True Love Ways" but it turned out 'not traditionally wedding-y' wasn't the same as 'something essentially obscure in this year of 2013'. Whodathunk?
Then the groom came up with the subject of today's Awesome.
Bright Eyes - "The First Day Of My Life"
Now, let me first say that I was very glad he picked a song with a simple chord structure: C E Am F G C, basically, with a D7 chucked in occasionally.
Confession: According to the tab I found online, there's a "Dm sus2" in there too, but I didn't like the sound, so I just went for a straightforward Dm. And in my arrangement I only picked out the bass line. But I had to sing at the same time so ner.
Before I lose everyone but the guitarists, that's as 'technical' as I intend to get. Basically, it's pretty easy to get the guitar parts sounding OK. The words? A trickier proposition.
To be honest, they gave me the song in September or October. On 22nd February, the day before the wedding, I still didn't have the lyrics set in my head. I do not know why but they just wouldn't fix themselves where they needed to be.
Second Confession: The first perfect run-through I managed, after months of rehearsals (on and off), was the morning of the wedding. To suggest I was a bit nervous is to understate. I was stood in a Cornish holiday cottage with my newly-short hair wet from the shower, and only then did I get it, with fully fifteen minutes to spare before I needed to leave. I say 'to spare', I mean 'to dress and find my shoes and then leave, trying to actually remember to take my guitar'.
Long story short: It went brilliantly. The vocal performance was very different to the one I'd rehearsed, but I somehow found the magic key to the vibe of the event and it was on, despite the cold weather threatening to take my hands out of commission.
If I had fucked up, I don't think I would've forgiven myself, not at her wedding. This is a friend who has saved me from myself many times since we became friends, so this really was about the least I could do.
It's not a song I would have chosen to listen to. Bright Eyes aren't my bag, mostly because I don't dig Conor Oberst's voice. I hear Bright Eyes, I think "ah, hipsters...", rightly or wrongly. I don't say they're bad, just not my thing.
But I like that it's pragmatic and honest about love. It isn't 'I love you loads and loads and loads and I've never loved anyone before or since and it's all gonna be sunshine, roses, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates and it ends at Happy Ever After.'
Because that isn't realistic. It's also not love.
Love is way, way more powerful and entirely more complicated than "Happy Ever After". There is magic in the big moments to be sure, but the power is in the little things and the everyday. The power is in the decision one makes each morning to say "Yes, this is what I choose for myself", the power is in the choices made to bear witness to another person's life, to (sometimes) put them before yourself in matters both minor and major. That's what Disney lied to us about.
I couldn't get the lyrics straight in my head for months. I kept switching lines in my head and because of the rhyming structure, the song fell apart each time that happened.
It was not easy and it took more persistence than I would've liked. Just like most worthwhile things.
We're finally a quarter of the way through 100 Awesome Musical Things... This post was written not long after David Bowie surprised us all with a new album, back in 2013 when we didn't know we only had three more years left with him...
~~~2013~~~
Did you hear that David Bowie released a new song?
Let's try that again, because I'm not sure you're excited enough:BOWIE IS BACK.
I hadn't realised how much I'd missed his work unti his return. Hearing Where Are We Now? was like sitting down with a dear old friend I'd lost touch with. I'm not going to analyse the minutiae of the Where Are We Now? video and what it may or may not mean.I'm not going to drive myself crazy trying to second-guess Bowie, the World's Greatest Troll.
Like the last couple of entries in this series, this post was time-sensitive. It was originally posted on 5 Jan 2013, which was a little later than intended...
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I started on this challenge in Spring and wanted to get a final post in before the Year of Suck ends. And then I didn't.
This has been a fascinating experience so far. So often I sit down with a specific video or theme in nind and almost always end up going in a different direction, sometimes even choosing a different video.
This time may be the same. I don't know yet. I've had this particular post in mind for awhile but the chosen video has changed each time I considered it.
