Inappropriate

So we're driving around in the car one day, singing along to Bruce Springsteen's Seeger Sessions - which, incidentally, is an all around great record, particularly well suited to singing along with while driving around in the car. Oh, and don't just download it; get the CD - it comes with a fabulous 40 minute documentary about them making the record in Bruce's house, with the horn section stuck three rooms away and everyone drinking rather a lot of whiskey. That you should probably watch at home, not while driving around in the car, because you're going to want some whiskey with the DVD.

I digress.

We were listening to Jesse James, when all of a sudden, the girl pipes up from the back seat: Mama, this is inappropriate.

I am one of those people who never listens to the lyrics. Actually, I don't really hear them, and I can't remember them; the words just don't stick with me. Hell, I can barely sing along to the national anthem - I know the tune, I know where the fermatas and the high notes are, I just don't know the words.

But Jesse James? Inappropriate? I started listening along.

It turns out that her objection wasn't that Jesse killed people and robbed the Glendale train. That was okay, because Jesse's a Robin Hood-like folk hero, stealing from the rich.

Jesse James was a lad that killed many a man,
He robbed the Glendale train,
He stole from the rich and he gave to the poor,
He'd a hand and a heart and a brain.

Nope, inappropriate was the fact that Jesse got shot in the back, in cold blood.

Now the people held their breath when they heard of Jesse's death,
They wondered how he ever came to fall
Robert Ford, it was a fact, he shot Jesse in the back
While Jesse hung a picture on the wall

It's moments like that, when my kid puts a whole new spin on things, that really take my breath away. I love that she can teach me to listen.

Wedding Music

Because it's my anniversary, it seems the right moment to tell you about the music at our wedding. We had a really simple wedding. No caterer, no photographer, no flower girl, no limousine. No hymns, no recessional, no first dance.

But we did have a processional, with possibly the most idiosyncratic rendition of a wedding standard ever. A long time family friend and down the street neighbor was a professional musician who played every single woodwind instrument out there. Flute, piccolo, all the saxophones, oboe, bassoon, all the clarinets. He played jingles, Broadway shows, big band jazz, saxophone quartets. He was in the Tonight Show band before Johnny moved the show to Los Angeles. And he was on Sesame Street from day one, playing incidental music and Rubber Duckie and the entrance music for Mr. Snuffleupagus.

We wanted our wedding to be personal, eclectic and meaningful, so I asked Wally if he'd play the Mendelssohn Wedding March on the Snuffleupagus contra-bass clarinet.

Wally claims that he'd never in all his born days played a wedding, much less played a contra-bass clarinet solo in anyone's backyard, but he gamely located the score to the Mendelssohn and figured out a solo version. Buh buh buh BUH. You have to understand - the contra-bass clarinet is not a solo instrument. It's not pretty harp music or a soprano singing Ave Maria with a guitar accompaniment. It is NOT what you expect at a wedding.

Before the ceremony, Wally tucked himself behind an azalea. The guests trickled in and began milling around on the lawn. When the time came, Wally let out those first triplet bleats on the horn, and my grandmother said "What is that noise"?

It was a beautiful moment.

Let's Review: Science

"Hank and Patrick watched as one bright star moved across the sky."

I was reading to the girl the other night, reading a charming book called What Happened to Patrick's Dinosaurs? At the end of the book, as the brothers watch the night sky, my girl interrupted me to tell me "a shooting star is not a star, it's a meteor". "How do you know that?" "From the science DVD."

I'd recently gotten her a copy of the latest kid release from They Might Be Giants (thanks to a hat tip from Cool Mom Picks). It's called Here Comes Science, and if you buy the physical CD, it comes with a DVD with cunning videos of all of the songs.

And you know what? It's excellent. It's got songs about blood, and songs about elements. They cover evolution and paleontology, and Roy G. Biv turns out to be the guy at the end of the rainbow.

They play with language, so there's one song about the sun that begins:

The sun is a mass
Of incandescent gas

and another that starts with:

The sun is a miasma
Of incandescent plasma

And the song that taught my daughter about meteors is a lovely little ditty that turns into a clever round.

The whole shebang is a great package - fun for kids, enjoyable by parents, and slyly educational. What more could you want?

---

Disclosure: I bought this record with my own money and no one paid me for this review.

Tunes for Tuesday, Times Two

ONE:
I'm the guest DJ over at Music Savvy Mom today. Go check it out - see and hear the not-kid music that I'm listening to. And consider participating yourself - it's fun.

TWO:
The other day we unearthed a couple of boxes of CDs that haven't been touched since we moved FIVE years ago. So, in the spirit of Tunes for Tuesday, I'm giving away two discs. Leave a comment (before Thursday) and tell me whether you want

Loreena McKennitt: The Visit

or:

The soundtrack to Marie Christine, featuring Audra McDonald.

I'm happy we dug out that box of CDs - we found the Broadway shows that we'll need for our road trip at the end of the week. I'm looking forward to singing along to Hair and A Chorus Line as we sail down the highway on the way to Maine.

Setting the Music Free

I'm cleaning house and giving away some music - all on CD, all by women.

There are three packages, each with a different artist; leave me a comment and tell me what (who) you want - I'll pick three winners on Wednesday the 8th.

1. One CD by Natalie Imbruglia

Left of the Middle

2. Two CDs by Eileen Ivers

Wild Blue
Traditional Irish Music

3. Three CDs by Regina Carter

Motor City Moments
Regina Carter
Something for Grace

wrinkled up scraps of paper

Somehow it became March. Somehow it's a sixth of the way through the year. Somehow, I have nothing at all and everything to write. There are blog posts in my head, to do lists everywhere, piles of paper crying out for attention. I have thing to scan, things to sew, things to sell on eBay. I have to finish the taxes.

This morning, Laurie Anderson wormed herself into my head:

I don't know about your brain, but mine is really bossy.
I come home from a day on the golf course
and I find all these messages scribbled on wrinkled up scraps of paper.*

I don't play golf, but my head is full of wrinkled up scraps of paper.  Full, I tell you.

What's your earworm today?



*from Laurie Anderson's song Baby Doll

How to Turn A Bad Day Around

I got out of bed this morning in a thoroughly foul mood, angry, sad, pissed off, weepy.

Last week, the kindergarten teacher had sent a note home about Valentine's Day saying "you may send in 18 cards...". You MAY? It sure sounded like a command to me. So, because I'm cheap and the kid was disinterested, we used the free cards that came in the back of the High Five magazine, and it was like pulling teeth to get her to write her name on them. So part of the morning's malaise was feeling like a cross between a slacker mom and a curmudgeon.

But I got to the office and got a link for a free Marvin Gaye song from Amazon, and it perked me the fuck up.

Here's Let's Get It On - download it and maybe it'll perk you up too. The link is only free until the end of the day tomorrow - you know, Valentine's Day.

Playing the Flute

In my home town, most kids started playing an instrument in elementary school, in fourth or fifth grade.  My mother wanted me to excel at the piano, so she didn't let me start a band instrument with my peers.  Finally, in seventh grade (in junior high school), she relented and I started flute lessons. I continued with piano lessons until eleventh grade, but I did much better with the flute.  I ended up as a music major in college, performed a senior recital, and spent the summer after graduation at a conservatory in France. And then, for all intents and purposes, I dropped it. I’ve hardly played at all in the past 25 years. But unlike the piano, I could actually pick up the flute again, and someday I will.

And I just have to say that even today, with no chops, I could do better than Sarah Palin did in the talent piece of her pageant.  Oy.  She should have been a toe dancer.

Playing the Piano

I started piano lessons when I was in first or second grade. I used to bicycle over to the old lady piano teacher’s house – until one day, when I got there and found a sign on the door: No Lessons Until Further Notice. It turned out she was dead. The next piano teacher drank. She'd offer you a little glass of juice, and she always had a little glass of juice for herself. But hers was laced with vodka. The third one was a short horrible woman with tiny hands. I have big hands – I can easily span an octave. She couldn’t. And she’d tell me to finger something the way she would, and my big hands would get all tangled up. I loathed her.

My fourth and last piano teacher was the music teacher in my junior high school. He was a metrosexual, long before that term was coined. He worked out at Jack La Lanne, drove a convertible, and created a clicque of personality around him. He also taught us a lot about music. His classroom was very close to the cafeteria, so it became a lunchtime hangout for the music theory nerds amongst us. Painted onto the blackboard was a thermometer shape – like the kind the Community Chest puts up in front of the post office each year to show how the fundraising is going – but in his classroom, it was the Hostility Meter. If too much sass and sarcasm started flying, someone would run up and increase the level of the Hostility Meter. He also dated the widowed mother of a classmate, and years later, was accused of impropriety in the classroom. I know he was verbally inappropriate in my day, but now it’s politically incorrect and therefore verboten.

All those years of piano lessons, and I can’t play a damned thing on the piano except the Bach Prelude in C where you never strike more than one note at a time.

We Shall Not Be Moved

I was going to post a picture for Wordless Wednesday, but I got waylaid by Julie’s Hump Day Hmm topic – music: What does it mean for you, in your life? Do you simply listen? Are you a singer? A musician? Were you one? The picture can wait. The earworm in my head is trying to crawl out.

My musical upbringing was idiosyncratic, completely.

I grew up with show tunes and folk singers on the stereo – Hair, Joni Mitchell, A Chorus Line, Tom Paxton, Candide, Odetta. I grew up with a favorite recording of Britten’s "Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra" – a rare recording without narration, because who needs narration when the music tells you what’s happening?

By high school, I was hanging out with a geek crowd. Other than classical music, the only two songs I remember listening to in high school were “Stairway to Heaven” and “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”. Pretty lame, huh? Don’t bother with the math – I graduated from high school in 1978.

I ended up as a music major in college – and therefore listened to and played mostly classical music. And I went to a lot of concerts. The aberration was Bruce Springsteen – I spent many an evening listening to Bruce while drinking Mount Gay rum & Tab and playing Boggle.

The fall after I graduated from college, I spent four months in London, working but alone. I still had my student ID, and I used it to go out to concerts, operas, ballets 5 or 6 nights a week. And while in graduate school, I went out a lot – to concerts, operas, ballets, and the occasional night club.

But gradually, slowly, I’ve very nearly given up attending live performances of classical music. I’d simply rather not be in a concert hall. Because, it’s boring. And that saddens me. Because if I can’t bear it – me – who used to play the flute and who majored in music in college and who actually knows some stuff about what's going on – where the hell is the audience going to come from? I don’t even listen to all that much classical music anymore – because too often I’m in the car or on the train and I just don’t have the attention span that a 25 minute symphony requires, not to mention the fact that many of my CDs never got unpacked when we moved more than three years ago.

I’d much rather listen to stuff on my iPod – I’m addicted to shuffle. I put the thing on random and enjoy the felicitous (or not) juxtapositions of Bob Dylan against Stephin Merritt, Wilco followed by Sweet Honey in the Rock, Emmylou Harris after Brian Wilson, Billie Holiday next to the Talking Heads, Morphine before Jeff Buckley. Or sometimes I listen to all the versions of "Hallelujah" in a row (I've got five). And I add stuff – I rummage around on the web or in iTunes, I follow through on suggestions, I hear what co-workers are playing through their computers in the office, I buy the new Springsteen record. I own one Fiona Apple song because I heard it on Jonathan Schwartz’s weekend radio show – and it’s divine, though nothing else of hers grabs me. I even downloaded a free song that I got because I bought a cup of coffee at Starbucks. And that’s today’s earworm: Mavis Staples singing We Shall Not Be Moved. It’s a great song, a protest song, and she does it with power and subtlety. It’s so good that I think I need to buy the whole record.

Julie - you pushed a couple of buttons. I think I have at least two more posts related to this one, if not more. Because I didn't talk about playing music. I didn't talk about singing. I didn't talk about the future, I didn't talk about the joys of modern technology. So, stay tuned.

Just What is an Opera Singer, Anyway?

When I picked up Miss M. at daycare yesterday, she announced to me: I'm going to be an opera singer when I grow up, when I'm 16.

Later in the car, while listening to Springsteen's Girls in Their Summer Clothes, she declared that Bruce Springsteen's a good opera singer.

And this morning, with Ella Fitzgerald singing over breakfast, she wanted to know who it was and then asked Is she an opera singer?

I think her musical education needs a little work.

What a Wonderful World

All's right with the world - the little girl is asleep in her own bed, before 9:00. And she fell asleep in my arms while I was mangling the lyrics to What a Wonderful World. Here's the master:

And the lyrics, if you need them:

I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world...

Always

I read the many paid obits for Kitty Carlisle Hart in today's Times - and was struck by the one from her boyfriend Roy Neuberger. At the end, he quotes from Always, the Irving Berlin song that she sang often. I had the great good luck of hearing her sing it about 10 years ago at a benefit for the organization I then worked for. She was an elegant, warm and witty woman, with a sweet, slightly quavery voice, and a passion for the arts. She did three songs that night, ending with Always, and getting the audience to sing along with her. As soon as I heard that she'd died the other day, Always popped into my head and became an earworm.

I'll be loving you always
with a love that's true, always
When the things that you planned need a helping hand
I will understand, always, always Days may not be fair always

That's when I'll be there, always
Not for just an hour
Not for just a day
Not for just a year, not for just a year I

'll be loving you always
with a love that's true, always
When the things that you planned need a helping hand
I will understand, always, always Days may not be fair always

That's when I'll be there, always
Not for just an hour
Not for just a day
Not for just a year, but always.

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

For Dr. Seuss's birthday, Mother Reader offers this up:

If you haven’t heard it yet, you may want to try out Dylan Hears A Who for a bit of the surreal in your life.

It rather made my day.

Need a new ringtone?

If your ringtone is annoying everyone around you, maybe you need this one by John Cage.

[Thanks to Mother Reader for the link, and a good laugh at lunchtime.]

Mozart

My new favorite website is the complete Mozart archive. It is completely searchable, and returns pdfs of everything he wrote. Everything. I keep printing things out, like I'm going to sing the Queen of the Night aria next week. If I did, I might sound a little like Florence Foster Jenkins.

Silent Night

At last check, I have 36 versions of Silent Night in iTunes.

A particularly wonderful one is Silent Night played on the musical saw, on the Asylum Street Spankers Christmas record.

[Can you tell how old I am? Records are still records, even though they're CDs.]

Christmas Music

I have a sickness. I have 2.7 days worth of Christmas music in iTunes. More than 30 versions of Jingle Bells. 36 of Silent Night. 20 of O Holy Night. It goes on. The next door neighbor suggested that perhaps my husband needed a support group.

But there are others out there! Sweetney posted a whole holiday mix tape - she's my kind of girl.