Tag Archives: Music

What Bad Taste I Have: Everyday Magic, Days 284-285

Posted on May 2, 2011 | Comments Off

Driving home from Kansas City late last night, a blast from the past transported me back to being a kid, jumping on my bed in music-induced ecstasy because my favorite song, “MacArthur’s Park,” was being played on Cousin Brucie’s Top 40 station. What can I say? I had really bad taste, leaping from chair to bed in time with lines I pondered for years, such as “The sweet green icing flowing down/ Someone left out the cake out in the rain.” There was even a time when I was about 12 that I finally solved the mystery of the song’s illusive and just plain awful lyrics although the meaning was so abstract and fleeting that I quickly forgot it.

Yes, I sang diva-style on my bed, using my hair brush as a mic, “I don’t think that I can make it” and “I will take my life into my hands/ and I will uuuuuuse it,” feeling so strongly every nuance — I was sure at the time — of those words. I changed dance moves and speed for the three different tempos of that very long song, and I even cried on more than more occasion when Richard Harris sang, with such feeling too, “After all the loves of my life/ you will be the one/ and I’ll be wondering why.” This song convinced me that love was intractably tragic, and one could never recover from the one who got away.

I’m happy to report that the song’s message was false although kind of delightfully, in an over the top kind of way, lushly romantic like nobody’s business. Also, just as I went from Rod McKuen (oy!) as the first poet I loved only to redeem myself by graduating quickly to T.S. Eliot and e.e. cummings (a lovely married, British couple, I told myself), I went from Richard Harris, lyricist supreme in my young brain, to Joni Mitchell, a goddess of songwriting I could easily stick with and learn from my whole life.

Still, when I hear Harris sing, “There will be another dream for me” for that strange line about “Never catch me looking at the sun,” my heart points toward the song and melts just a little.

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Christmas Carols 24/7, Springsteen or Show Tunes: Everyday Magic, Day 157

Posted on December 23, 2010 | 1 Comment

First off, if you love Christmas carols, I apologize already, and also issue this disclaimer: I love a few of them too, especially “White Christmas,”  anything Bobby McFerrin-ized, or of course that great John Lennon song. If you love hearing Christmas carols 24/7, I support you — truly — but with the caveat that such a passion is akin to my passion for show tunes or all-Bruce-all-the-time. I love hearing the score to “Carousel” while cleaning the house or “Westside Story” while driving from here to Topeka, but I have found that most of my loved ones don’t exactly share this passion. Actually, they tend to look for sharp objects when I turn up Gordon McCray or hit the button to replay “Darkness at the Edge of Town.”

So when I turned on the radio today, I was trying to open my little heart a bit to the wonders of Christmas carols, especially since that song “In excelsis deo” was playing. I was reminiscing to my kids about how we used to sing the chorus as “Sooooooooooooooooooolar Power! In..ex…pen…sive…energy!” I told them how we used to sing the one where “shepherds watch this flocks at night” with the words “shepherds wash their socks at night.” But I digress.

The Christmas carol morphed into another one, something about Christmas time in the morning, and eventually, in my numbed-out state, I heard, “Mom…..Mom…..Mom…..” until I paid attention enough to answer. “That song is making me die inside,” Daniel said, and I snapped out of my carol stupor and put on Etta James.

This is all to say that Christmas carols can be great, but this week, they’re everywhere: radio channels, stores, and in between places. How would life be if, everywhere I went, someone was belting out show tunes. Would it get old after awhile, or would life just be continually coming up roses? Or what about Springsteen songs 24/7? Would it work for us as a culture, or would we all be especially born to run?

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The Miracles of Laura Nyro: Everyday Magic, Day 138

Posted on December 3, 2010 | 3 Comments

I’ve been thinking about Laura Nyro a lot and listening to her music. This started yesterday when I realized that one of my characters in a novel I’m working on has a lot in common with Laura Nyro, and so I began the search for videos of her to see how she moved. Turns out there’s little of her filmed and on the web, but lots of music, and lots of music already in my itunes. I realized there are three miracles of Laura Nyro that always blow me away: her voice, her songwriting, and her decision to pull away from the music industry and be her own woman.

Her voice is so strong, delicate, high, low, wide and full. Just listen to her at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, a gig, she was convinced she blew. Or check her out at Kraft Music Hall about the same time when she launched into “Save the People.” There’s so much range in her emotions, her passion, her conviction that it’s impossible for me to pull away when I hear her. She sings like smoke, water, height and dept.

Then there’s her songwriting — this is a woman who wrote “When I Die” when she was 17, and just kept going with “Walk on By,” “Eli’s Coming,” “Stoney End,” “Stone Soul Picnic” and so many others. She says on her biography, on the website she helped put together before she died, “I’m not interested in conventional limitations when it comes to my songwriting. For instance, I may bring a certain feminist perspective to my songwriting, because that’s how I see life. I’m interested in art, poetry, and music. As that kind of artist, I can do anything. I can say anything. It’s about self-expression. It knows no package – there’s no such thing. That’s what being an artist is.”

Finally, there’s her story. In 1971, at the age of 24, Nyro announced she was retiring from the music business. It wasn’t that she wasn’t writing and performing — she was — but that she refused to stay stuck as a hit machine of certain limited strip, and she walked. In Michelle Kort’s biography on Nyro, Soul Picnic, she lays out the whole story, and adds “I can’t imagine Laura Nyro being famous today unless she was thinner, more stereotypically beautiful and showed a lot more skin!”

Nyro died in 1997 of ovarian cancer after over two decades with Maria Desidero, the love of her life. What she left behind, in addition to her son, was music but also the spark for so many others to make music. Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times: “If not for Laura Nyro the music of Rickie Lee Jones, Joni Mitchell, and Teena Marie might have been very different.” Long live her music. Long live her spirit.

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I Love A Parade: Everyday Magic, Day 64

Posted on September 18, 2010 | 1 Comment

I can’t help myself: I hear the drums, and I start crying. This is especially embarrassing when I’m standing in front of a junior high school marching band in which the kids are staring out aimlessly and hitting the drums with no passion. It still gets to me. Good thing my kids never went into drums — they would be humiliated by the constant crying of their out -of-control mother.

So there I was today, running down Massachusetts Street, camera in hand to hide my tears as I snapped pictures of the Lawrence High School Marching Lions, of which my son Forest is in a member, playing trombone. They played the fight song, and I snapped away.

I figure it’s the way the drums catch my heartbeat and amplify it. Or maybe how seeing these kids makes me feel the acute passage of time. Or perhaps just the way they all earnestly march with such care and self-consciousness. In any case, I love a parade precisely because of how it breaks open the surprise in the middle of life. Carry on, our not-so-wayward sons and daughters, and don’t forget to throw candy.

Pictures (from top): LHS band (wonderfully directed by Mike Jones), the middle trombone player is Forest, the fiddle float with the great and inspiring Rachel Dirks (director of orchestra), and finally, anybody who parades as sushi gets to be on my blog!

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Twin Cities, Two Dreams, One Family: Everyday Magic, Day 47

Posted on August 30, 2010 | 2 Comments

This morning as I walked through Dinkytown, where we’re staying at the fabulous Wales House bed and breakfast, I realized every time I visit these cities, something happens. The first time in Minneapolis was for a conference, which I had to leave early because my long-suffering grandmother finally died, propelling me to re-unite with a cousin and aunt I hadn’t seen for 35 years because of my parents’ crazy divorce in 1973. It was healing for all of us.

The next time I came to Minneapolis to attend a conference, I ended up blowing off most of the sessions and wandering the city, traveling the light rail without any sense of where I was going, and recommitting myself to get my writing published despite years of intense rejections. I ended that trip leaning into the small opening of 18th floor hotel window with a Cuban fiction writer and Domician poet, all of us dropping tiny pieces of paper out the window with our writerly wishes written on them.

Last fall, one of my granted writerly wishes — to have my memoir published — led us to St. Paul for both the Midwestern Booksellers Convention and for Natalie to check out the McNally Smith College of Music. Signing books for a long line of people (even if my publisher was giving out the books for free) was a delight, and we were all smitten with the college.

Now I’m back to move Natalie into that college today, and last night, I received word that after 10 years of trying to find a literary agent, a very good one is going to represent my next book.

While I continue to live my writer dream, Natalie is here to embark upon her singer dream, in the twin cities where earnest wishes, hard work, surrender to the forces of chance and karma, and catalysts for true healing seem to always find me. I wish for her to find her own dream large and generous, unfolding for her as mine unfolds for me all life long.

Photos: even the houses here are twins!

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Listening to My Daughter Sing: Everyday Magic, Day 44

Posted on August 27, 2010 | 3 Comments

When Natalie was a toddler, she didn’t talk: she sang. In fact, she narrated whatever she was doing or feeling in song, kind of like an ongoing improv opera from her carseat. “We’re going to buy shoes, we’re going to buy shoes,” she would belt out at age 2 or 3. As she got older, she started writing her own songs and soon learned to accompany herself with a few guitar chords or on the piano. She even performed some of these songs at the annual recital of her then voice and guitar teacher, Marianne Carter.

It’s no wonder that today she sings regularly, having immersed herself in many choir opportunities throughout junior high and high schools. For the last who-knows-how-many years, Ken and I would creep like mice to her closed bedroom door to spy on her practicing. We both loved not just her voice but the little grace notes and nuances she came by so naturally.

Last night, she sang “Why Don’t You Do Right,” a jazz standard, as part of her final recital with Vanessa Thomas, her voice teacher for the last three years. Sunday, I drive her to St. Paul to study jazz vocals at the McNally Smith College of Music. What she’ll do as a singer is as mysterious as moving toward any art that calls us, but I love that she’s following her voice, which also reminds me of Gayle, a college friend and roommate.

Gayle sung constantly, and especially loved the song “Landslide.” When she died from cancer our senior year of college, I vowed to give her name to any daughter I had. So I named my only daughter Natalie Gayle, and just as I write this post in a coffee shop, Stevie Nicks’ version of “Landslide” comes on to remind me of the power of voice, how it can take you up an mountain and bring you home again, and how the song lives on and on.

Pictures: Cultivating her jazz diva with Forest many years ago, and last night with Vanessa.

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Songlines to Stories: April Write From Your Life

Posted on March 31, 2010 | Comments Off

Listen to a podcast of this column!

The traditional Aborigine in Australia follow “Songlines” wherever they walk: notes and melodies to sing depending on where they’re walking, each place they step having a part of a song that they all know. While their songlines relate to place, you can also explore your songline through the songs important to you at various points in your life.

Maybe you’re driving your car when the song comes on the radio, and you remember being 19 again, driving alone down a blue highway in the middle of the night while belting out “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” with the radio so many years ago. Or maybe you’re pulling weeds, and you suddenly remember your grandmother singing “You Are My Sunshine.” We all have songs that mark moments throughout our lives, even encapsulating those moments into a wisp of a provocative lyric or long-held note.

For this month’s WRITE FROM YOUR LIFE, let’s turn to the songs of our lives not just to connect with glory or not-so-much-glory days, but to see what these songs can generate in our poetry and prose today. Here’s a two part exercise to try on your or with friends or family:

ONE: Get a long piece of paper, at least three or four feet long (you may need to tape together several sheets of regular paper), and write the year you were born on one end, and then the year it is now — by all accounts, 2010 — on the opposite end. Between your birth year and this year, write in all the years. Then, under the appropriate year, write the name of a song important to you at that age. When I did my songline, I had “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” as age five, “Here We Come” by the Monkees at age 11, “Just the Way You Are” by Billy Joel at age 19, and so on. See what you can come up with right now, and then hang the paper somewhere in your home that you pass by often, and over the next few weeks, keep adding in other songs that come to you. Over time, you’ll find that the memory of one song triggers the memory of another, and through those songs remembered, you can recall more of your life and find more material for your writing.

TWO: Whenever you’re ready, look at your songline, and see what song calls to you at this moment. Then sit down and write the story of that song in your life: what does it remind you of each time you listen to it? Where were you when you first noticed this song? At that time, what might you have been doing, wearing, thinking, feeling, worried about or excited over? You might even listen to the song a few times if you can easily find it.

You can continue to add to your songline over the rest of your life, and return to your songline to find new inspiration for writing from your life.

Thank-you to my friend and colleague Jim Sparrell, a lover of music and writing, for the idea for this writing exercise.

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