Top 10 Musical Highlights from Playlist of College Road Trip with Older Daughter

 

 

10.  The Statue of Liberty at sea in Billy Joel and Paul Simon

9.  "...disease’s venereal" (John Wesley Harding, "Captain Courageous")

8.  Suggesting everything from Joni Mitchell to Chicago to Cecilia Bartoli as possible sources for a song for NBHS's Music Maynia

7.  Singing the background breezes for Dylan's "Caribbean Wind"

6.  Realizing Tim Rice's Aida is just Tim Rice's Jesus Christ Superstar

5.  Burning churches in Billy Joel and Paul Simon

4.  The point toward the end of "Save the People"when the entire company of Godspell joins in

3.  Stating with assurance that Bookends is the best Simon and Garfunkel album

2.  Singing the lyrics of the B-52s' "Love Shack" to their "Channel Z" without missing a beat since it's the same song

1.  Remembering my introducing her to The Lovin Spoonful's "Rain on the Roof" one day on a ride into Holmes Elementary School so many years ago!

 

 

 

My top four newspaper song references....

"Headlines," Paul Anka, rates a mention (even though it's a dreadful song), so I won't make this a top five.

4.  "New York State of Mind," Billy Joel

3.  "Overs," Simon and Garfunkel

2. "A Day in the Life," The Beatles

1.  "New Orleans Wins the War," Randy Newman

And, as we approach 2010, who's a songwriter bold enough...

...to set more Edwin Arlington Robinson poems to music?

If we ever needed E.A. more, I'm not sure when.

It's a Wonderful Life

My 13-year-old daughter and I have a little game we play each day.

She takes her lunch to school, so each morning I write a line or two or three from a song on her lunch bag, and she has to figure out the song and artist by day's end.

Yesterday the line came from my favorite Simon and Garfunkel album Bookends (Columbia Records 1968).

The line was "How wonderfully strange to be seventy" from "Old Friends"

It was one of the few she hasn't gotten, and I later learned why: she's not fond of Bookends so hasn't listened to it as much as Bridge Over Troubled Waters and the very early Paul Simon Songbook, et alia...

Dismayed, I popped it into the cd player in the car this morning to show her why she should LOVE this album, only to discover that I had misquoted the line from "Old Friends."

It's NOT "How wonderfully strange to be seventy!"

It's "How TERRIBLY strange to be seventy!"

I fear I am getting old.