Ray pretty much invented soul and then cornered the market. Instead of leaving well enough alone, he went and invaded Nashville, dressing a string of Country and Western classics in his jazz/pop/soul style, but with fiercely personal interpretations. Something new under the sun. Something indelibly beautiful.

“The Band” had a profound timeliness for 1969. But it also has a purity and timelessness, a music that evokes respect for what went before, a modesty and gravitas and resonance rare in popular art. The album is a gift.

The hard-bop jazz vocal sextet Les Double Six of Paris–their sources, their contemporaries and their followers; and why vocal jazz groups loved singing Count Basie.

Earworms, crazy loons, the will o’ the wisp, a gypsy serenading the moon, Oliver Twist (the dance), all these and more in this week’s SoTW!
Especially the elegant and passionate songwrighting of Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer.

Kids, be careful! One little romp in the back seat, whoops, you’re a parent forever. One untimely text, you’re limping through the Pearly Gates at 21. Write a Protest Song at 22, you’re a Protest Singer forever.

Boudreaux and Felice Bryant wrote 23 hit songs for The Everly Brothers. The couple met when Felice was 19. She saw Boudreaux in a hotel lobby, told him she’d seen him in a dream when she was 8, and had been looking for him ever since. ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’ was true autobiography.

John Lennon was murdered 39 years ago today. Paul Simon wrote a song around that event. Even today, my mind gets teary when it lights on John Lennon’s death. He appears in Paul Simon’s song only obliquely, because the song isn’t about John Lennon, and it’s not about Johnny Ace. It’s about Paul Simon, and about you, and about me.

An obscure legend: the beautiful Bryan MacLean demo, of the indelible opening cut of Love’s “Forever Changes”, a gift that justifies all the mothers of the world cleaning out their garages and discovering their little boys’ lost treasures.