A Moving Experience

Song 357: This week the playlist comes around to There Goes My Heart Again by Holly Dunn, written by Joe Diffie, Lonnie Wilson and Wayne Perry. Is there some hidden meaning to the fact that last week's song title and this week's both start and end with the same letter? Mystery, or destiny, I certainly didn't plan for that, or even notice until I finished typing up the original bit. Anyway, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I listened to a lot of country radio, which sounded pretty good at the time, and while the songwriting didn't come across as musically adventurous, the so-called New Country of that era did feature clever word plays that I enjoyed, with this single serving as a prime example. I certainly understood, and appreciated, lyrics like my heart has a mind of its own, as I imagine plenty of listeners did. One of my songwriter friends said back then that the only place you could hear good songwriting on the radio was the country station, and I essentially agreed with him. Inspired by that style, I went on to craft my own country word play, called As Long as Merle is Still Haggard, and on the second half of the second verse, the line goes, but Dwight was only Yoakam when he said Eddie's Rabbitt died but after what Holly Dunn you should . . . Sadly, Holly died in November of last year, struck down by ovarian cancer at the age of 59. On a happier note, you can find the As Long as Merle is Still Haggard song video here.

Luck of the Draw

Song 356: This week on the playlist you can hear Time of the Season by The Zombies, written by Rod Argent. In the honor society lounge during my last 2 years in HS, a few of us would actually do some studying occasionally, and the ping-pong table got plenty of use, but the most frequent activities were listening to 45s and playing cards, which were pleasures I didn't speak of at home since my extremely religious family did not approve of the devil's music or the devil's deck. I well remember one sunny late spring day in 1969 when 4 of us stepped out of the lounge door and sat down in the grassy area just outside of it to play a round of pinochle. It was the time of the season when our senior finals lurked on the horizon, but at that moment, we had no cares, and this record, though it had peaked a couple of months earlier, provided a perfect memorable piece of that game’s soundtrack. While I knew that the opening lyric used the word love, in my mind, as our pleasured hands passed cards to the sound of this singer’s lines, I translated the phrase to the time of the season when luck runs high, and indeed, it did for us, as my partner and I won the game.

A Whole Other Country

Song 355: This week’s playlist track is Down Under by Men at Work, written by Colin Hay and Ron Strykert. When this 45 hit the U.S. in the fall of 1982, having already topped charts elsewhere, my Berkeley housemate Bob and I watched the group perform it on a TV segment, and he latched onto it right away. It took me a few more radio spins before I got it, but once I could sing along with the lines, the cut’s understated humor had me hooked. At the time, I had an Australian songwriter friend who had already told me about vegemite, so I immediately grasped that lyric, but for most of the other slang I had to guess, and I guessed wrong in more than one case, not that it mattered or affected my enjoyment of the record. Thanks to Wickipedia, I now know that a fried-out Kombi means an overheated VW van rather than a group of wasted traveling companions, but here in the Northeast, just as in the land down under, when you hear the thunder, as I have a few times lately, You better run, you better take cover, so that warning was always well understood.

Mark on the Calendar

Song 354: This week the playlist comes around to Foreplay/Long Time by Boston, written by Thom Scholz.  After walkin' 2 weeks ago and riding a railroad last week, this week's cut aims to Sail on, on a distant highway. Boston's debut LP arrived near the end of summer in 1976, and it marked a rare high point in a largely lackluster era for RnR. Although I understood those who critiqued the album's songwriting as somewhat tame, I liked the record a lot, and I also agreed with those who remarked on the disk's exceptional sound, which came courtesy of band leader Scholz's phenomenal production skills that he had worked long and hard to acquire. I had just begun my own first foray into 16-track recording, and those initial attempts only made me respect Mr. Scholz's work all the more. Sadly, Boston lead singer Brad Delp committed suicide a little over 10 years ago, in March of 2007, but while It's been such a long time since he exited, we the audience won’t forget about him any time soon, despite the words he sang here that predicted he would be forgotten after he was gone.