Song 333: This week the playlist gets around to Try (just a little bit harder) by Janis Joplin, written by Jerry Ragovoy and Chip Taylor. This track opens Janis’s album I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama! which got released 2 days after I turned 18 as an incoming freshman at N.U., but because I started my college career with no LPs at all, I had a bunch of others I wanted to get to first (the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, the Doors), and I didn’t circle around to Janis until about a year later, just around the time she left the land of the living. During my HS days, I didn’t really like her vocal style, what little I heard of it, but months before I turned 19, I had developed a much greater appreciation of her singing talent, which this cut showcases quite well. On an ironic note, I wrote a song for my HS group called You Try Too Hard, and if I had heard this JJ piece then, I probably would have felt like my lyrics were the perfect answer to her words here, though I would come to a completely different angle by the occasion of her demise. In that season, I would have relished being the guy who she felt was someone so fine that she would have wanted to show me love with no control. Had I dreamed such a dream in that stretch, I would have wanted nobody to wake me.
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