The playlist for yesterday's post

Thanks so much to everyone who wrote in response to my post yesterday. Beyond its power to mirror and memorialize, challenge and celebrate, music can really be such a great uniter.

Many asked about a playlist, so here you go:

1. Tina Turner: Better Be Good to Me, 1984, Private Dancer album

2. The Turtles: Happy Together, 1967, released as a single

3. The Righteous Brothers, You’ve Lost That Lovin Feeling, 1965, You’ve Lost That Lovin Feeling album
   *you must watch the video. No one sings like that anymore.

4. Looking Glass, Brandy, 1972, Looking Glass album

5. The Supremes, Come See About Me, 1964, Where Did Our Love Go

6. The Supremes, You Can’t Hurry Love, 1966, The Supremes A’ Go-Go

7. The Supremes, Back In My Arms Again, 1965, More Hits by The Supremes

8. The Supremes, Reflections, 1966, Greatest Hits

9. Sam Cooke, Bring It On Home to Me, 1962, The Best of Sam Cooke

10. Sam Cooke, Wonderful World, 1959

11. Sam Cooke, A Change Is Gonna Come, 1964

12. The Association, Windy, 1967, Insight Out album

13. Lou Reed, Walk On the Wild Side, 1972, Transformer

14. Linda Ronstadt/The Stone Poneys, Different Drum, 1967, Evergreen vol 2

15. Linda Ronstadt, When Will I Be Loved, 1974, Heart Like a Wheel

16. Barry McGuire, Eve of Destruction, 1965, Eve of Destruction album
    *listen to this and tell me we’ve learned anything. Fuck.

17. The Byrds, Turn! Turn! Turn!, 1965, album of the same name as song

18. The Samples, Weight of the World, 1994, Autopilot

19. Judy Collins, Both Sides Now, 1967, Wildflowers
    *yes, I love Joni’s version too, but for me Judy’s is the creme!

20. Janis Joplin, Piece of My Heart, 1968, Cheap Thrills

21. Taylor Swift, Vigilante Shit, 2022, Midnights

22. John Denver, Thank God I’m a Country Boy, 1974, Back Home Again

23. Simon & Garfunkel, all songs from The Concert in The Park (1981) except Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard (hate that version). Especially The Boxer (originally released 1970), America (orig rel 1968), and The Sound of Silence (1964)

24. Kenny Rogers, The Gambler, 1978, The Best Country Album In The World...Ever!

25. Queen, ‘39, Hammer to Fall, Another One Bites the Dust, Fat Bottomed Girls, and on and on and on, 70s/80s

26. Peter, Paul and Mary, Leaving on a Jet Plane, 1967, Album 1700

Ok, you filthy animals, go listen, dance, and think.

Music: why, who cares why, thank you

Tonight I am alone in WV. Jack flies home from Miami tomorrow, and Tom is home working, and Oliver is at camp, and after many days of extreme gardening and goats and five cats and guinea pigs and code red heat, I’m on a couch (was in a patio Lafuma) listening to favorite songs. I have, over many hours, enjoyed a bottle of French red, and in real time I’m honing my final-island playlist.

I grew up on my mom’s mixed-tape in-car casettes. Tina Turner, The Turtles, Beatles, Righteous Brothers, Temptations, Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Simon & Garfunkel, Sam Cooke, Linda Ronstadt, and Looking Glass’s one-hit-wonder Brandy. To this day, if I hear a song from one of Mom’s tapes, my brain immediately joins a singalong and then moves onto the next recorded tune. We were on Common St, Ryan, Prien Lake, at Tasty Donuts. The tapes kept rolling, Mom crooning, Elia and I ingesting the chords and lyrics and the emotions behind and wrapped in every song.

Growing up, Elia and I heard “Girls, I met your mom when I admired her legs, and she agreed to dance.” “Girls, your father was so quiet, but boy could he dance.”

“If there’s a reason that I’m by her side…I’m willing to wait for it.” -Leslie Odom, Hamilton

It was clear they connected, deeply, on the dance floor. Both loved music and dancing and sweating and spinning and singing and twirling towards and against all the strictures within which they’d been raised. And then they married, and just last week we celebrated their 50th anniversary, a feat that seems both Herculean and obvious.

If I had any superpower it would be voice. A voice of range and power and expression, the sort that comes from both talent and pain, desire and desperation, joy and relentless “I must.” To share, vent, express, scream in profoundly gorgeous and able octaves that move and ensorcel others. That render them begging the bottle to last through another few songs on a humidity-minimal summer night with a spot of breeze. To inspire them to pilgrimage, costume, come out or be out or just, unabashedly, be. Music, its lyrics, its momentum and centrifugal pull, is utterly life-changing.

Take a walk on the wild side, urges a young Lou Reed.

I don’t have no use, for what you loosely call the truth, avers Tina. (And she sure as shit shouldn’t.)

Are you hanging on the edge of your seat? asks Freddie. (You better be, or you’ll probably bite the dust.)

Peter, Paul, and Mary are leaving, Diana and her sisters reminding us to think about, reflect on and embrace love while also knowing that it can go, you need to have someone to come see about you, and ultimately, you’re your own ladder, symphony, and source of strength.

Paul Simon is in Central Park thanking the various civic groups who’ve enabled the live concert (he and Art are still ok). Taylor draws the cat’s eye sharp enough to kill a man, and a surprise playlist cameo by The Samples rockets me to freshman year of Northwestern faster than I can take a breath. John is playing that fiddle to beat sixty; he is the happiest country boy.

I still listen to Happy Together and Windy and Turn, Turn, Turn, and Eve of Destruction. It’s fascinating to consider the somewhat goofy, cis-normative simple croonings of The Turtles and The Association while concurrently vibing to, on many levels, the impending doom of The Byrds and Barry McGuire and the fem-assertive words of Janis, Joan, Joni, Linda, and Carly.

Linda (Ronstadt) is as a go-to for romantic angst and female let-me-be as is any modern woman artist: “ I ain’t saying you ain’t pretty. All I’m saying is I’m not ready for any person, place, or thing, to try and pull the reins in on me.”

And Sam Cooke? Don’t even get me going on A Change is Gonna Come, Bring It On Home, Wonderful World, Cupid…

I could go on forever, but the point, to me, is that many musicians who resonate deeply and across generations and cross-sections of culture and society, thereby changing the world, thankfully, and altering its trajectory, go big and call out what their places are versus should be.

Tony Bennett died yesterday. He was 97 and lived such a full life. Born to Italian immigrant parents and into poverty, Tony was performing by the age of 10. In 1965, at the invitation of Harry Belafonte, he joined the march from Selma to Montgomery in support of Voting Rights, performing along the way under the threat of violence. He’d been supported early on by Black artists, and I’m thankful he had the courage and moral righteousness to pay it back. My Nanny loved Tony Bennett, and I grew up listening to him, too, along with Frank, Dean, Sammy, and so on.

It’s a worthy way to spend a quiet night: listening to favorite songs from the 50s through the present. That’s nearly 85 years of music, a diary of desire, stagnation, change, courage, fury, love, hope, and resignation. It makes you think about life and how you’re living it. Are you living it as if you only have one? Because each of does, just have one, and I think we’d all be well-served to act as such.

“So if you don’t mind me saying, I can see you’re out of aces. For a taste of your whiskey, I’ll give you some advice…
If you’re gonna play that game, boy, you gotta learn to play it right.” Kenny knows. Hold, fold, walk away, run. The secret to surviving is knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep.

Here’s my boyfriend Clyde.

He’s a keeper.

Language as connective tissue

I am SO glad today is almost over. What didn't we do?! We made a 24x36 felt board with the mouse and the houses (do y'all know or remember this? you can hide the mouse behind different colored houses? I've never met a 3 yo who didn't love it, so we made one) and yes, I made the darn board and cut out the houses and mouse; we gardened; we went for frozen yogurt and painted pottery for my in-laws anniversary tomorrow; we went to the gym where mercifully the boys decided they loooved the kids' club- amen; we went out for pizza; I just made mujaddara for 20; and then a nice but rather underwhelming dinner for me: fresh mozz with tomatoes, basil, good bread and EVOO and a small bit of avocado. During dinner, however, I sat down to finally catch up on email, and I found this marvelous link from my sister. I'd never seen this before- it's the concluding act of the Nagano 1998 Olympics opening ceremony, and it will give you goosebumps and chills, especially if you, as do I, adore Beethoven's Ode to Joy, specifically the Hallelujah chorus. This took place concurrently on stages around the world: in the Nagano prefecture concert hall; in Beijing; in Sydney; at the U.N.; at Tanglewood. WOW! Take ten minutes for yourself and watch it.

As I watched people from all around the world, of all ages, cultures, languages, races and creeds, I was struck anew by the incredible connective power of language. Verbal, musical, theatrical and otherwise. Like watching my kids play in Italy with other children, possible even without a common tongue because of the power of play- Legos and soccer as equalizers if you will. Like the summer Tom and I lived in Amsterdam where everyone except the tourists is bi- or tri-lingual. One day at the Cuyp market, waiting my turn at the cheese stall, I overheard some Spaniards trying to ascertain what knoflook kaas was. They couldn't speak Dutch nor the purveyor Spanish and thusly were at an impasse. I piped in and said "knoflook es ajo", translating garlic in Dutch to garlic in Spanish. I've never forgotten that simple, brief moment because, like the Legos, the Ode and so forth, it was a deeper connection than any of us would have had otherwise (about the garlic cheese). I've always really, really wanted to be a polyglot, and this was about the closest I'd come to it.

Like the weeks I spent in Kenya with someone fluent in Kiswahili and the experiences I wouldn't have had otherwise (like flying to the island of Lamu, meeting Hosna and wearing one of her burqas around town; a very surreal experience as only my ankles were showing). Like meeting vintners at tiny agro-turismos in the Loire and Chianti and being able to talk with them about the nuances in their wines because of an elementary knowledge of French and Italian. Like heading south from Paris to Bilbao, Spain, but getting off one stop too early, and pleading, again in extremely elementary French, with a train-station worker to help me purchase a ticket for my final leg. Even like needing to buy a laxante in Spain, being mortified to ask but simultaneously glad I could.

These experiences broadened me, they broaden all those who have them. They are humbling yet liberating, scary yet thrilling. There is much wrong with education in America, but the lack of serious extra-linguistic study, no- mastery, is shameful and short-sighted. In any case, click on the link above, sit back and let yourself be enraptured by the coming together of hundreds of individuals, of many languages but also in just one.