Song of the Day

Song of the Day (206): Damn Your Eyes – Bettye LaVette

This woman can sing, can grab you by the collar, shake you up and make you tremble. A nine-minute song with five verses and a chorus, yet it all comes down to the title line, “Damn your eyes.” With Bettye LaVette, one line is enough. With that single, short line she makes us understand that […]

Song of the Day (205): Homecoming – Tom T. Hall

Tom T. Hall has written hundreds of songs including a dozen number one hits. Some of the songs are not worth the wax on which they were originally recorded, some are mediocre, mere filler, some so full of melodrama that diabetics cannot go near them, but there are some songs that justify his nickname as […]

Song of the Day (204): Birches – Bill Morrissey

Sometimes I think Anton Chekhov came back as a folk blues singer from New England named Bill Morrissey. Morrissey tells such full stories about the people we meet every day, his lyrics delicate and deft, capturing just the right tone, the right observation. His songs are true and what more could one want. In “Birches”, […]

Song of the Day (203): I’ll Be Seeing You – Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday can break your heart. Holiday released her version of this song in 1944 and think of how many listened thinking of a lover across an ocean fighting a war. She puts voice to their longing and the way love can overtake us. Sammy Fain (music) and Irving Kahal (lyrics) wrote this song for […]

Song of the Day (202): Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes) – Edison Lighthouse

Serving you a treat of bubble gum pop confection, “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)”, Edison Lighthouse is a one-hit wonder that turned out this song with its irresistible hook. In 1970, every time you turned on the radio you would hear this song as it rode the top of the charts for weeks. #Songoftheday […]

Song of the Day (201): Kiss Off – The Violent Femmes

In January 1983, I read an article in the Times about this new band and lined up at Folk City to catch the first show they would headline in the City. (They had opened for Richard Hell and the Voidoids at CBGBs). I had not heard any of their music, but that was not unusual […]

Song of the Day (200): It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) – Bob Dylan

This is a young man’s song. The personal made universal as a 23-year-old Dylan tried to make sense of the kaleidoscope world he witnessed and his efforts to find his way in that world. The false leaders become clear, the bromides repeated by parents and teachers fall apart and he fights at the efforts to […]

Song of the Day (199): Eve of Destruction – Barry McGuire

Look around, it may seem like we’re on the eve of destruction or some kind of Biblical reckoning (fires, war, hints of World War III, a felon in the White House). Then again, that is not a unique feeling, one certainly shared in the early 60’s (nuclear war, anyone) and late 60’s and early 70’s […]

Song of the Day (198): Up on Cripple Creek – The Band

Robbie Roberston said it took him time to write this song, that it came to him in pieces while he travelled from Woodstock, to Montreal to Hawaii “just to try to get warm.” He thought about truck drivers ranging across the country and stopping in on all these people he knows. He threw in towns […]