🌱✨ New Song Drop! ✨🌱

I wrote “Montague Road” after reading about the proposed affordable housing and senior apartments in North Amherst.

https://adamsweet.bandcamp.com/track/montague-road

#MontagueRoad #AmherstMA #AffordableHousing #FolkMusic #StorySongs #CyberneticFusion™ #adamrsweet

Free download codes:

Radbo - Starlit Agent

"In a retro futuristic city, a young orphan girl is recruited to an underground secret agent ninja agency and trained for years to be an elite badass."

https://getmusic.fm/l/RStrFf

#bandcampcodes #electronic #synthwave #femalevocals #storysongs #music

Archonaut – Duchess
#Bonn #Krefeld #Köln #ProgressiveRock #Rock #Wuppertal #conceptalbum #conceptual #experimentalrock #progressive #progressivemetal #storysongs #Essen
CC BY-NC-ND (#CreativeCommons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives) #ccmusic
https://archonaut.bandcamp.com/album/duchess

Free download codes:

Radbo - Starlit Agent

"In a retro futuristic city, a young orphan girl is recruited to an underground secret agent ninja agency and trained for years to be an elite badass."

https://getmusic.fm/l/ljUGRY

#bandcampcodes #electronic #synthwave #femalevocals #storysongs #music

Free download codes:

Radbo - Starlit Agent

"In a retro futuristic city, a young orphan girl is recruited to an underground secret agent ninja agency and trained for years to be an elite badass."

https://getmusic.fm/l/Yo9YsQ

#bandcampcodes #electronic #synthwave #femalevocals #storysongs #music

Paul McCartney Sings “My Brave Face”

Listen to this track by one-time Beatles bassist turned pop songwriting elder statesman Paul McCartney. It’s “My Brave Face”, a smash radio single as taken from his 1989 record Flowers in the Dirt. That album saw McCartney returning from a wilderness period of flagging chart results and back into the top twenty again. This was in part thanks to a return to his celebrated Beatle-y sound which for some years he’d mostly avoided in favour of synths and big Eighties-style production. Although McCartney would score hits after this, “My Brave Face” resulted in the last single by a former Beatle as a solo artist to crack the Billboard Hot 100 top 40.

One of the signs that McCartney had returned to his Beatle sounds around this time was in his use of his iconic Höfner bass again. While in Wings in the 1970s, McCartney mostly stuck with Yamaha or Rickenbacker basses for a brawnier rock and R&B sound suitable for big Seventies-style arena shows. Here on “My Brave Face”, his bass playing is lighter and poppier although no less intricate and appealing. The album’s overall sound follows suit, influenced by McCartney’s selection of well-known co-producers. This cut features the work of Mitchell Froom, recognized at the time for his sterling work with registered McCartney-and-Beatles appreciators Crowded House, and later with Elvis Costello; this song’s co-writer.

One of the roles Costello played on this particular song was as an influence to steer it in a more Fab direction, melodically speaking. As broad as his musical vocabulary and reach was becoming by the end of the 1980s, Costello loved The Beatles as much as any of us do, and still does. Use of the Höfner bass on initial recording sessions was purportedly at Costello’s prompting, possibly in the hopes that such an emblematic instrument might help lead them down some familiar sonic avenues when it came time to lay down the track. McCartney knew the score as well as anyone and leaned into it.

Again, it was easy to assume that the musical sunniness heard in this song is all McCartney, and that the downcast lyrics were Costello’s. But, not so! And what of the lyrics to this song, anyway? On the surface, it seems like a standard my baby left me song. But amid all of the musical effervescence of chiming guitars and tight harmonies, the story turns out to be far more complicated. It hints that the former lover’s departure was justified even if her reasons for leaving aren’t really the point. Instead, the focus is on the narrator’s capacity, or lack thereof, to emotionally manage the situation on his own, which is not going well by the time the story begins.

“I’ve been living a lie
Unaccustomed as I am
To the work of a housewife
I’ve been breaking up dirty dishes and throwing them away.
Ever since you left I have been trying to
Compose a ‘baby will you please come home’ note meant for you.
As I clear away another untouched TV dinner from the table
I laid for two …”

– “My Brave Face”, Paul McCartney

This isn’t because of the narrator’s seemingly antiquated view of who’s responsible for household chores or his inability to manage them. It’s more to do with locked up emotions and the limited capacity to express them. These go along with repressing and denying feelings for appearances sake. In this, “My Brave Face” is a real typical guy song, trained as many of us are in acts of emotional disconnection so that we can appear strong even in our weakest moments. In these kinds of situations, brave faces are more important than examined feelings.

This song’s narrator indulges in these same performances of the brave soldier that so many guys feel are necessary to overcome sadness and loneliness. Here, this comes at the cost of knowing what’s really going on in his own heart, with unexamined feelings that keep returning him to the place of heartbreak and unable to move on. He hits the town, does the rounds, and lives a lie without the emotional wherewithal to unpack just what’s happening to him and why, kicking him back to square one again in an endless, heartbreaking loop.

This very relatable tension and sense of the unresolved is why “My Brave Face” works so well as a pop song. Against a poptastic sound that puts a very brave face on a harrowing story, “My Brave Face” is about complex emotions and how disorienting and debilitating they can be even as everything seems sunny and bright on the surface.

As far as Paul McCartney’s ability to write these kinds of stories in his lyrics, this was not new thematic territory for him. In fact, “My Brave Face” could easily be a sequel song to The Beatles’ “For No One”; another tale of a love gone south for emotionally complex reasons. In that song, a woman gains clarity on what she wants and doesn’t want in her relationship, ultimately feeling the need to move on. “My Brave Face” provides a new angle to the story from the perspective of the one she leaves behind. This is a man who has resolved not to change a single thing for sentimental reasons without the awareness that change is as necessary for him as it is to the woman who’s left him.

“My Brave Face” remains to be one of McCartney’s best songs and one that showcases so many of his strengths as a songwriter and musician. Even in his earliest days, he was the one in The Beatles who was the most interested in telling stories about well-drawn characters and their inner lives. This one is a continuation in that tradition. Along with all the jangly guitars, soaring harmonies, and aural Sixties-inspired sunshine, this was another sign of Macca’s return to Fab form that’s just as significant as his reunion with his iconic Höfner bass guitar.

And speaking of reunions with McCartney’s Höfner bass guitar, the instrument he used during his early days at the Cavern Club and on the first two Beatles albums was returned to him last year. That original bass guitar he bought in Hamburg was relegated to back-up bass status by 1963 in favour of other Höfner instruments. It was stolen in 1972 from the back of a van in London. But the bass was recently recovered thanks to the efforts of The Lost Bass Project. It’s almost like the video for “My Brave Face” in which a collector is arrested for stealing that instrument, among other McCartney artifacts, was resolved in real life!

Paul McCartney is an active songwriter and performer today. You can catch up to his more recent movements at paulmccartney.com.

For more on McCartney’s Flowers in the Dirt album, check out this song-by-song reflection from the man himself, courtesy of People Magazine of all sources.

And to go even further into his catalogue of material, here’s a list of 20 great Paul McCartney songs from his Fab days to the 21st century.

Enjoy!

#80sMusic #bassGuitar #PaulMcCartney #songsAboutBreakingUp #storySongs

I love "Story" Songs.

Unfortunately not enough bands do them. The experimental #Band #MC900FtJesus made a number of them where they would tell a story set to background music.

Their #Song New Moon is one of my favorites. They drop their #Rap #Hiphop sound and go all #Jazz for this one. It's great. The #Music here really sets the mood for their story about a girl who loves fast cars!

What are some of your favorite #StorySongs?

Seriously. I want to listen to them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qugb5aGZbEo

Listen to this track by Britpop forefathers and British cultural envoys The Kinks. It’s “Come Dancing”, a huge comeback hit for them that appears on their 1982 record State of Confusion. After spending a chunk of the Seventies as an arena rock band, and scoring less of a return than their peers in that format despite great songs and albums, head writer Ray Davies considered his one-time niche as a songwriter who told stories infused with affection and warmth for down to earth English life. He sought to write a new song that returned to that approach. With “Come Dancing”, The Kinks brought it all back home (literally!), resulting in their biggest hit since 1970.

Label bosses at Arista were initially pretty twitchy about releasing it as a single. They feared that the British music hall references to the local palais would fly over the heads of North American listeners. The band must have felt a sense of déjà vu with these kinds of sentiments about their music which, since at least 1965, had leaned into its celebration of British culture. But this time, what listeners responded to on a global scale was the story this song tells, set in an innocent, idealized world of cuddles and pecks on the cheek after a Saturday night of cutting a rug with a date. What could be as relatable as that on both sides of the pond and everywhere else, particularly by the more jaded age of the early Eighties?

“Come Dancing” was a smash success for the Kinks. But it was more than just a comeback hit. For songwriter Ray Davies and also his lead guitarist brother Dave, this song about a free-spirited sister going out to dance held a deeply personal meaning for them, too, attached to circumstances that were less than joyful.

To set the scene musically speaking, “Come Dancing” is a seamless amalgam of modern rock music as it meets with vintage R&B, big band music, and even a hint of ska and calypso. This musical mélange is the perfect backdrop to a compelling narrative that makes “Come Dancing” one of the greatest story-songs of the 1980s, if not for all time. It definitely made for a great video starring Ray as a pencil-mustachioed London chancer on the make. This was during a crucial time for bands who were seeking to make an impact on new audiences on MTV and other video channels.

The heavy rotation of the music video certainly helped to make this song a memorable hit of the era. It helped to raise The Kinks’ profile during a period when it was time for them to capitalize on the momentum created by the popularity of cover versions of their songs. This included The Pretenders (“Stop Your Sobbing”), The Jam (“David Watts”), Van Halen (“You Really Got Me”, “Where Have All the Good Times Gone?”), and others who paid homage to The Kinks’ place in the rock firmament.

As for “Come Dancing”, the song’s story is as fictional as the idealized 1950s world it conjures. However, Ray and Dave really did have an older sister who loved to dance. Rene, who was 18 and 22 years their senior respectively, married and moved to Canada when the brothers were still children. Rene returned on occasion to visit with her family in Fortis Green, North London; the site of the Davies family home. During one visit, she invested in a Spanish guitar coveted by her younger brother Ray. She gave it to him on on June 21st, 1957; his thirteenth birthday. Rene did this not knowing that one day he’d write a hit song in tribute to her. But she wouldn’t get a chance to hear it.

As much as she loved to dance, Rene had a weak heart due to an illness she suffered when she was a child. On that same visit back to Fortis Green, and on a night out dancing the same day she’d given Ray his present, she died of a heart attack. Ray talked about the impact of these events that were so closely grouped together.

She was an artist herself and seeing her go that way and the impact it had on the family, I didn’t realize what a watershed it was. She gave me my first guitar, which was quite a great parting gift. On the piano she played, the day she died — I wrote most of my early hits in that same room. It’s where I was born, in that room.

-Ray Davies of the Kinks, NPR.org, November 26, 2014
(read the whole article)

The song that came out of his memories of his sister and the world she inhabited had been in Ray’s head for some time. He’d written a sketch of it on a Casio keyboard months before, and then filled out the whole arrangement and laid down the track in his Konk Studios in late 1982. This was in preparation for the single’s release in November of that year. Yet it’s easy to think that the song existed in his artistic brain for far longer before that, going back to his earliest inclinations to write music and form a band.

With the memory of his sister, her artistry, her generosity and supportiveness, all captured in the moment before she went out for a night of dancing never to return, “Come Dancing” redeems the feelings associated with that terrible loss. It celebrates his sister Rene by giving her the life she should have had; married and living on an estate while having to manage her own daughters in the same way her mother had for her, staying up to wait for them when they came home late from a happy night out.

Overall, “Come Dancing” is a time capsule to a memory and an era long gone. It’s also a way to keep a beloved person and her world preserved for all time. In a present time where treasured sites of great personal and cultural importance are so casually knocked down, making way for supermarkets and then car parks instead, it can seem as if those wonderful locations never existed at all. In the end, perhaps that’s what all great pop music helps us to do; remember the worlds and people we’ve left behind along with the physical and emotional geography they continue to represent for us.

As for the Kinks, the boost to their profile that “Come Dancing” provided was their last hurrah as a charting band in the top twenty. Original Kinks drummer Mick Avory left the group in 1984, happy that they’d scored one more big hit song and by virtue of that considering it a good time to make his exit. By 1996, and in time for a whole new crop of British guitar bands to namecheck them in interviews, The Kinks broke up, officially.

Ray kept busy with multiple projects. One of those was the 2008 production of Come Dancing, the Musical which extends the life of what the song accomplished as the story of a family, and along with it, the memory of his sister as well.

For more on The Kinks and their mighty, mighty body of work that goes back to 1964 and stretches across musical epochs into the early 1990s, you can check out thekinks.info.

There’s also raydavies.info to consider as well, with Ray being one of the greatest British songwriters of all-time and being an active artist today.

Enjoy!

https://thedeletebin.com/2024/08/05/the-kinks-play-come-dancing/

#80sMusic #RayDavies #songsAboutChildhood #storySongs #TheKinks

Listen to this track by celebrated classic rock and pop singer-songwriter and hit-maker Sheryl Crow. It’s “All I Wanna Do”, her smash hit song taken from 1993’s Tuesday Night Music Club, Crow’s official debut album. That record was named after an informal group of musicians who would gather on the night in question as a songwriting collective, eventually gathering around efforts to work up Crow’s record. The effort paid off, with six songs from the album released as singles between 1993 and 1995. This song was the fourth of those, put out in the summer of 1994 to significant buzz and becoming her commercial breakthrough.

The track is based on a 1987 poem by Wyn Cooper called “Fun”, which provided the text for the verses and for the first line in the tune: All I wanna do is have some fun before I die. Like the poem, this is a story-song set in a bar, with patrons having their own reasons for being there besides just for the fun of it of course. The narrative is compelling to say the least, delivered in Crow’s half-spoken lilt of a voice with which she precisely communicates the feeling of that beer buzz early in the morning celebrated in the lyrics. The performance won her a Grammy in 1995.

There is something else to be found in this song that goes beyond the impressionistic characters and setting. It’s a series of elements that may explain why it was so resonant at the time it came out.

The lyrics of the song betray its poetic origins, being downright literary with an irregular meter that doesn’t quite follow the standard rules of pop music. Crow manages this effortlessly in the verses that can otherwise be read like a short story. This is before the song falls back on the more conventional chorus that brings it all back home to something that listeners can very easily sing along with. The balance between these two forces of the literary and irregular meeting with the hooky and singable made this cut a real standout on the radio at the time.

Another aspect of the song’s success is its fluid, summery groove that defies any kind of specific musical label. The instrumentation and feel suggest a country music influence, but the song somehow escapes that genre’s trappings. At one point, “All I Wanna Do” was called a re-write of Stealer’s Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You”, a song which gained a resurgence around this same time when it appeared in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Even if the vibe is undeniably similar with its slippery slide guitar part in particular, this reductive pronouncement doesn’t quite capture the essence of “All I Wanna Do” either. Neither does the one about it being a “90s Piano Man”, which is just plain ridiculous.

So, what is it about this song, exactly? What gives it such dimension?

Besides its considerable lyrical and musical charms, what this song does is something that many songwriters seek to do with their music over the course of their entire careers; it captures the zeitgeist. “All I Wanna Do” does this in a very unassuming, unselfconscious way. It was a perfect addition to the soundtrack of Generation X graduating from high school and university, doing exactly as they’d been instructed to do to move forward with their lives as young hopefuls seeking to define their lives as adults, and finding that the road to success did not lead to where it once did.

Otherwise the bar is ours
The day and the night and the car wash too
The matches and the Buds and the clean and dirty cars
The sun and the moon …

– “All I wanna do”, Sheryl Crow

Where one might hesitate to compare this song to generational anthems by Nirvana and other bands of the grunge era, that same spirit lurks here in this song about two barflies watching the world go by from their barside perches. “All I Want to Do” captured grunge’s same sense of despondency in the lives of listeners. These are the people who followed the prescribed path to success their parents followed that instead led them into a wilderness of student debt, fallow fields in job sectors, and rising costs of living unmatched by their salaries at the phone company and the record store, too.

There is something about “All I Wanna Do”, as fun and bright as it is, that suggests that the characters in it have been duped and that they know they’ve been duped. By 1994, that was a very relatable experience among Gen Xers, demonized in the press as a generation of layabouts who didn’t know the value of a day’s work, or that of their parents who raised them. In an environment like that, why not hang around in a bar all day lighting books of matches and peeling beer bottle labels while some guy in a suit washes his car across the street on his allotted lunch break? Both the barflies and the car-washing suit are gaining the same amount of traction anyway.

Did Sheryl Crow and her collaborators set out to create a generational anthem about twentysomething alienation in light of wage stagnation and lack of upward mobility? That is highly doubtful. Like most songwriters aiming for the mainstream, they likely intended to write a good song with a compelling story that would resonate with a record-buying audience.

As far as that audience goes, this song certainly wasn’t considered as any kind of social statement. It’s way too much fun to be that. Instead, it was a summer anthem and a celebration of letting the pressure of life go for a while. This held just as much resonance for a struggling generation as anything. But as the kids now say, a full thirty years later: the struggle was, and still is, very real.

Sheryl Crow is a musician, songwriter, and actor today. Find out more about her back catalogue and recent releases and projects at sherylcrow.com.

Enjoy!

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https://thedeletebin.com/2024/07/22/sheryl-crow-sings-all-i-wanna-do/

#90sMusic #GenerationX #radioHits #SherylCrow #storySongs

Have another #SingAlong from your beautiful boy; LOL! This one: The Palace of Versailles, by Al Stuart, from his Time Passages album, released on my 16th birthday. And, we're off, to the French Revolution! #StorySongs #StorySong #Singing #PopMusic

Hello, Gang! Have a #SingAlongSaturday vid! Y'all are gonna love it! I know, I recorded it mid-week, but decided to share it #today It's Mark Knopfler and James Taylor, in the #StorySong #StorySongs #Stories Sailing To Philadelphia, from Mark's album by the same name. Mark sings the part of Jeremiah Dixon. James sings Charles Mason. Yes, those two blokes, as in the infamous line. I sing both parts and the chorus. #RockMusic #PopMusic #historical #history

Watch The Monkey and The Crocodile Story Song | Cartoon Stories for Children | Story Songs for Kids.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oXQ1j4Nmn0
#StoriesforKids #StorySongs #ShortStories #CartoonsforKids
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