Playing (Old) Favorites

I grew up listening to my Mom’s records on the console TV and Record Player in the living room.   My mom played show music like South Pacific and The King and I (she had a crush on Yul Bryner).   She played classical music from an RCA record subscription that delivered a new masterpiece every month.  As I recall, her favorite piece was the Grand March from Aida.   Then there was big band music, primarily Glenn Miller.  Moonlight Serenade was a favorite of both of us.  Then, babysitting for the next door neighbors, Lou and Muffy, I discovered Artie Shaw in Lou’s record collection.  Shaw’s unique clarinet sound became a favorite of mine in songs like Begin the Beguine and Moonglow.

Earworms

I woke up this morning with an Earworm.  No, not an earwig.    You don’t know what that is?  Yes, it is different than an earwig. According to Mirriam Webster, an Earworm is song or melody that keeps repeating in one’s mind after it is no longer playing.  According to Psychology Today, one study found that nearly 92% of people report having such an experience once a week or more frequently.  I definitely fall in the more frequently category.  For me, there are good earworms and bad earworms.  A Bad Earworm plays and replays catchy songs that I hate or even worse, commercial jingles.  Think Meow Mix (Meow, meow, meow, meow. Meow, meow, meow, meow. Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow).   My Earworm today is a good Earworm, meaning it is a song I really like even though I’d like to turn it off for a while.  I contracted this Earworm listening to a live performance by on YouTube.   A forgotten song pops up, often by a performer I haven’t heard in a while, always with catchy lyrics and tune, and … CLICK … the music player in my brain starts playing it, over and over.  Today’s Earworm is typical …the tune is On the Radio by Donna Summer, a great song by a performer I perhaps underappreciated.

Burt

This morning I awoke to the news that Burt Bacharach had died at the age of 94.  I occasionally write about the sound track of my life, the hundreds … maybe thousands … of songs that not only touched me but connected with something that was happening in my life at the time they came out. We are so fortunate that Mr. Bacharach hit his stride as a composer in the sixties when sentimental lyrics set to catchy tunes featuring majestic harmonies with abrupt key changes and ornate time signatures (per The Washington Post) were part of the pop music landscape.  He would have been a magnificent songwriter in any era but is hard to imagine him adapting his style to today’s soulless auto-tuned,, hip-hop driven pop music. I am happy to have had his writing prime coincide with my young-adult listening prime, even if that means I’m 78 years old.

Playing Favorites 7/16/2022

My daughter Amy is visiting today from Texas, where they recently moved.   After having them only a few miles away in Utah for three years, it is good to see her … even if two of the grandkids are still in Texas and the oldest is off with his Utah friends until Sunday.   Having her here makes me nostalgic, and given my nature, being nostalgic brings my attention to the soundtrack of my life, Amy edition.  Today’s favorite could be Jon Denver’s Sunshine which I sang for both of my kids, back when they were little and I played the guitar.  But I think I’ll choose a song that reminds me of just Amy.

Playing Favorites 8/6/22

 

I seem to have fallen into the habit of posting Playing Favorites on Saturday the tagging it a Friday Favorite. At first it was write a draft on Friday, then revise and post it on Saturday. Well, this post is written, revised and posted on Saturday, so I suppose I can’t tag it as a Friday Favorite. For the sake of honesty, I’ve dispensed with the Friday tag in favor of calling it simply Playing Favorites. This is a four-layer favorite, a beautiful song, written and performed by my favorite pianist for one of my favorite movies, which happens to have the most beautiful opening titles of any film I can remember. Add performances by Katharine Hepburn by Henry Fonda and you have a four-layer favorite with frosting. If you have not seen On Golden Pond you owe it to yourself to track it down. Yes, its old (1981) and a little dated, but if you are reading Bud’s blog, you are used to that. Henry Fonda is the perfect curmudgeon and Katherine Hepburn the ever-optimistic wife taking care of him as he slows down. The cinematography is, including the opening title, is done by Billy Williams.

Playing Favorites 07/30/2022

I wonder if anyone in my small cadre of readers watches Rick Beatto on You Tube.  According to Wikipedia, Rick is an American YouTube personality, multi-instrumentalist, music producer and educator. He is known for his YouTube channel, Everything Music, where he covers different aspects of rock, jazz, and popular music, and interviews well-known musicians and producers.  Watching Rick, I know he loves music like I love music … and understands it as I never will.   One of his features is What Makes This Song Great in which he dissects the performance of a song both literally by playing different instrumental and vocal parts separately and figuratively by talking about the chord progressions, playing styles, and instruments.  The latter is far beyond my limited music education but I still enjoy it and hearing the way a performance is put together is fascinating.

Playing Favorites 7/22/2022

My plan a few weeks ago was to post a song on Oldereyes-Bud’s Blog every Friday.  Good intentions?  Yes, though my Mom probably would have said, Good intentions are the road to hell.   A most peculiar saying … without good intentions would we ever do good deeds?  It just seems as I get older, absolutes like every and always and for certain seem, well, a little TOO absolute.  Posting on Oldereyes every week may become every other week or once a month.  In this case it is three weeks since I posted Playing Favorites.  But here I am, ready to grace your speakers with another one of my favorite songs.   The odds are pretty good that my weekly favorite will be either rock or jazz, depending on what playlist or what Sirius XM station has provided the current earworm as I sit down to write.

Playing Favorites 4/29/2022

I try to be scrupulously honest here on Bud’s Blog … except, of course, for those times where my tongue is firmly in cheek or my Inner Curmudgeon has taken control of the keyboard.  So I have to admit that when I decided to post my favorite duet, I knew exactly where I was headed.   That’s probably a bit surprising since I’ve been listening to pop music for over sixty years during which I suspect hundreds … if not thousands … of duets have made it to the charts.  And thousands more have appeared on duets album by artists like Frank Sinatra and Kenny G that featured an assortment of vocal stars singing with the top-billed artist.    There were duet groups like Sonny and Cher or Peaches and Herb, and one-time duet hits like Endless Love by Diana Ross and Lionel Ritchie or We’ve Got Tonight by Kenny Rogers and Kim Carnes.   One of the most famous duets, You Don’t Bring Me Flowers by Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond was manufactured from solo performances by an enterprising program manager before it was released as a duet by 1978 … and performed live a the Grammy Awards Show in 1980.  Online there are dozens of greatest duets list:  there’s a Top Forty from Billboard Magazine (with Endless Love as number one) and a Top Fifty from the UK’s Telegraph. (with Lee Hazelwood’s and Nancy Sinatra’s Some Velvet Morning as the winner.  Those Brits.  Go figure.). Rolling Stone’s 20 Best Dramatic Duets of All Time selects Kenny Rogers’ and Dolly Parton’s Island in the Stream as number one.

Playing Favorites 4/22

Do you remember Borders? Back in the early 2000s, it was one of the three largest bookstores in America. It featured not only books but music and specialty items. You may recall the store had a coffee shop and cafe as well as comfortable chairs and sofas sprinkled around among the books, inviting you to not just buy but to stay and read. They even had light entertain on weekends. Our local store in Anaheim Hills became a hangout for my wife Muri and I. Borders declared bankruptcy in 2011 and our beloved Borders is now a Sprouts grocery store (not a good place to hang out). My favorite feature of Borders were the listening stations that were set up along the top of the CD racks. Each station had its own set of headphones and featured a new release CD. You could skip through tracks or stand and listen to the whole album. Borders sold me quite a few CDs that way.

MyTube

If you’ve been coming around here for a while, you know I am a music lover (there are 88 posts under the category, music).  I have often said that we live in a marvelous time to be music lovers.  My old-fashioned stereo now lives in my office, ready to play any of the hundreds of CDs and small collection of LPs that I kept when we moved to Utah (I sold most my record collection before moving, keeping mostly the classical recordings).  Amazon Alexa sits on the shelf in the office and at my bedside, ready to play music on request.   Digital media allows me to carry my entire music collection (some ripped from CDs or from vinyl) with me whether on my cell phone or on my portable high-resolution player that delivers near audiophile sound.   Streaming media and the ubiquitous availability of wi-fi gives me access to practically any song by any artist anywhere through resources like Prime Music, Spotify and Sirius XM.  Wherever I am I can listen on high quality portable speakers, my Bose noise cancelling headphones, Bluetooth earbuds or high-resolution wired earbuds.  In my car, I can access Pandora, Sirius XM or play my music from my phone via Bluetooth.   It is pretty remarkable when you consider what I had in my teenage years, like my not-so-portable radio at the top of the page.