Girlyman “Easy Bake Ovens”

All Time Top Five Songs that shouldn’t make me cry, but do . . .

This song is just so vivid to me. I can’t believe how it captures an era---of American life, and of my life, too.

The period specific stuff resonates, of course. The sneakers thrown over telephone wires. Bikes racing around cul-de-sacs. Model airplanes and paper crowns from Burger King. And, Nixon and Watergate, not fully understood, hanging over everything.

The mood, I think, is what gets me. There’s this weird, youthful alienation in this song, that I recall vividly, when the neighborhood seemed like a gigantic world, and I was so young and small within it.

I lived on a street where there weren’t really any kids my age, everyone was a little bit older. Or a lot older. And I just rode my bike around, an observer of the teenagers, and the older kids with cars, and the parents who seemed so inscrutable. I was on the outside looking in at this world.

And it’s all weirdly sad, and yet nostalgic for me, tapping into something I’d forgotten about, as I grew up, found out how big the world really was, and can look at teenagers for all they don’t know, instead of all they seemed to know.


And if you’re not touched in the same way, then here IS a reason to be sad and nostalgic: Ronald Howes, inventor of the Easy Bake Oven, passed away this month.

One more thing, Girlyman performs at the Narrows Center this weekend. Stream it live on Saturday night, or find it in the archives next week.





From time to time on Every Day I Write The Blog, I do a week’s worth of my five favorite songs on theme. For the All Time Top Five rules, see this previous post.

Joni Mitchell “If”

All Time Top Five Songs that shouldn’t make me cry, but do . . .

Though she’s one of the greatest songwriters alive, Joni Mitchell used someone else’s words for this song---the 1896 poem by Rudyard Kipling.

In light of yesterday’s post about crying while thinking of my daughter growing to womanhood, you might think that this song makes me cry because it makes me think of my son (who’ll be born in 6 weeks) growing up to be a man.

But no, the fatherhood angle isn’t what makes me shed a tear.

No, it's the Simpson's use of "If" that does it to me, believe it or not.

In the early episode called “Old Money,” Grandpa Simpson meets woman named Bea in his nursing home. They have just begun a romance, when Bea suddenly passes away, leaving her fortune to Grandpa. Grandpa spends the episode trying to figure out how he should spend the money. A good chunk of the episode is about the indignity of growing old, as Grampa is treated like burden by his son, his grandkids and the nursing home staff.

Wanting to do something that will honor Bea’s memory, Grandpa takes the money to a casino, to try to increase his pot so he can help as many people as possible. And when Homer tries to stop him, Grandpa recites an abbreviated version of the Kipling poem:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch - and toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

The episode ends with Grandpa using his money to improve his nursing home, inviting his senior friends inside with the line, “C’mon in Friends, Dignity is on me.”

Gets me every time.



The speech starts at 20:25

Find more videos like this on video.filestube.com.

From time to time on Every Day I Write The Blog, I do a week’s worth of my five favorite songs on theme. For the All Time Top Five rules, see this previous post.

Joss Stone “Free Me”

All Time Top Five Songs that shouldn’t make me cry, but do . . .

I’m not going to pretend like I’m profound by telling you that your perspective is likely to change, if you give it enough time. But I’ll give you an example.

First, I wrote about this song a few months ago, when it was new, and I was questioning whether it belonged on mvyradio or not. We DID end up putting it into rotation, and four months later, I feel like it’s a really great addition to our station.

The second perspective change came after I had heard the song enough times to sing along with it, but not so many times that I had yet processed them.

I knew that this song was a message to her record company, who had been pushing her to record more pop hits, while she was more interested in exploring Soul music. It’s your basic “Don’t tell me what to do” song, the kind that lots and lots of folks have written. I’ve heard them before.

But I’M different now.

So when I found myself singing:

Something that you don’t see every day
A little girl who found her way
Through a world that's designed to break
All of your dreams

I saw my daughter in my mind. And I thought about what prejudice she’ll face as she grows, confronts challenges, and tries to make her way in the World. I know there will be people who will try to limit her because she’s a girl. And I’m doing all that I can, as her Dad, to make sure she grows up to be someone who wouldn’t listen to those voices.

Had I heard this song 10 years ago, there would’ve have been no way to experience the paternal pride that swells when I think of her and hear the line:

If I lose you in my jet stream
Then you only got to raise your eyes
And see me fly

What parent doesn’t get a little misty, thinking about their kid soaring?






From time to time on Every Day I Write The Blog, I do a week’s worth of my five favorite songs on theme. For the All Time Top Five rules, see this previous post.

Reverend Horton Heat “Psychobilly Freakout”

All Time Top Five Songs that shouldn’t make me cry, but do . . .

I can’t say that this song makes me cry every time I hear it. But it did make me cry on one very memorable occasion.

I had gone to The Warped Tour on a hot, late-90s summer day. The ticket said it was being held at RFK stadium, but what they meant was, the concert was in the parking lot outside the stadium. There were a half-dozen stages featuring various levels of punk and punk-offshoot acts, running all day long.

I was already a big fan of The Reverend Horton Heat, but this was the first time seeing them live.

As I expected, the show started off fast, and funny, and tight, and up to my high expectations.

Then they launched into “Psychobilly Freakout,” which is basically a rockabilly instrumental which builds to a crescendo, punctuated by the Rev screaming “It’s A Psychobilly Freakout!” followed by a machine-gun drum-fill and a relaunch into the song.

After a few go-rounds of this, The Reverend starts “preaching,” telling a story of a woman, and his temptation by her. The drums and the bass dig into a groove, rising and falling with his tale.

The story gets faster, more urgent, as the Reverend describes his base urges over-coming him, as his ability to resist becomes weaker, and the woman reveals herself to be the devil incarnate and when the Reverend tries to cast the demon out of his trailer she suddenly grows 50 feet taller, demanding that the Reverend succumb to his passion and as the music builds to a fever pitch and the breaking point of the story has almost been reached the music stops abruptly and the Reverend screams:

“It’s A Psychobilly FREAKOUTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!”

The drums thunder, the amps roar and I swear to you that I gasped and burst into tears, in that spontaneous way one might if you suddenly someone you thought was long-dead walked through your front door with an armload of Christmas presents for you.

I didn’t sob for hours or anything.

But I had become so sucked in by the storytelling, that when he screamed and brought the song back, it caught me so joyfully off-guard, I don’t think my emotional brain knew what to do.

So I cried.

Seems kind of silly if you listen to the album cut. But see him live, and you may just have a visceral experience.



Hear the whole song:


From time to time on Every Day I Write The Blog, I do a week’s worth of my five favorite songs on theme. For the All Time Top Five rules, see this previous post.

Rancid “Golden Gate Fields”

All Time Top Five Songs that shouldn’t make me cry, but do . . .

Punk rock lives on velocity and ferocity. Which is what makes it cool.

But unfortunately, those to traits sometimes obscure the fact that there are punks, who are also poets and keen observers.

Take this album-closing track from Rancid’s 2000 self-titled disc. There’s no way that this song could make you cry on the first listen. And maybe not even on the 50th listen.

And it probably wouldn’t make me cry, if I didn’t sit down one day with the liner notes and really learn the lyrics.

Golden Gate Fields is a horse-racing track in the San Francisco Bay Area. Tim Armstrong of the band grew up across the freeway from the park.

The first couple of verses gallop by with all the urgency and adrenaline of the horse race they describe. And it digs in for me, as the jargon of The Track reminds me of my Dad, who, yeah, has affection for the horses. There’s a culture, a specific scene, that this song recalls vividly for me.

But it’s the third verse that gets under my skin.

The first two are a recollection of Tim’s younger days, when he frequented the track as a kid. The third verse comes to present day. And this isn’t a scene or a story told in the third person. This is Tim, who has come back to the old neighborhood, where he runs into his old friend Big L. He and Big L used to go to the track together, but in between years, their lives have gone in separate directions. Tim leads a successful band and has toured the world. Big L never left the neighborhood.:

I see Big L rollin' up the street
On his little sister's pink ten-speed.
He said "Tim, Tim, don't you remember me?"
"Way back, from 1973?"
And every time I see him
He has to remind me,
Like I would ever forget Big L.

There is such a gulf between the people who leave and the people who stay. I’ve lived this scene with people from my past. They see that you’ve gone off and had success, been places and done things, and something in the insecurity of that makes them wonder, If Tim’s life is so different now, does he remember that we used to be friends? It's touching, and sad, in its innocence.





From time to time on Every Day I Write The Blog, I do a week’s worth of my five favorite songs on theme. For the All Time Top Five rules, see this previous post.

Ellis Paul “Jukebox On My Grave”

One cold February night, last year, my wife said, “Let’s make a list of our 20 favorite songs, and compare them.” She’s always doing stuff like that. She likes lists.

Unsuspecting soul that I am, I was completely unaware that she was looking for birthday ideas for me. Barbara Dacey had asked my wife to put together some songs suggestions. And at my surprise party in March, Barbara got up on stage with Johnny Hoy And The Bluefish, and sang 3 of my favorite songs.

Later in the year, my sister Amy, who’d been fighting cancer for nearly a decade, passed away. And my wife and I put together a slide show for the wake, with music behind it. Not having any guidance from Amy on the subject, we picked what songs we thought were appropriate.

But it did get me thinking . . . when I go, there are probably some songs I’d like played at my wake or my funeral. I’d better start compiling my list.

So I’m starting here, with Ellis Paul, since it seems to pretty much speak to my challenge. And from time to time, I’ll write here about songs that the executors of my will (and vast fortune) should know about.

Ernie “Rubber Duckie”

One of the most famous film lessons of Less Is More, came by accident. Failure even.

You perhaps know the story about how Steven Spielberg had a menacing mechanical shark made for the movie Jaws, but the robotic shark didn’t work too well.

Spielberg just wasn’t going to get these awesome action shots of the metal beast in action. But principle photography was already underway, so he had to shoot around the lack of a shark.

In the finished product, NOT being able to fully see the shark for most of the movie, is actually what made the movie so tense.

But it was all by success by subtraction.

Joe Moss, head writer in the early days of Sesame Street, had written a bath-time ditty for Ernie the Muppet to sing. It was the composer’s job to instruct the studio musicians on the instrumentation.

The story goes, that Moss came to the studio with a box of 100 Rubber Ducks, to create a giant squeaky chorus of Duckies behind Ernie. However, he was informed by the studio engineer that each Duck was considered a single instrument, and as such, he’d have to pay the Union rate for 100 musicians, to get his Duck chorus.

And here, Moss must have embraced Less, as More.

Please enjoy the charm of a single duck squeaking, on the classic (and #16 Billboard hit!), Rubber Duckie.

Reverend Horton Heat "Eat Steak"

There's a song for every moment, an old friend of mine used to say. Which comes in handy around present-giving time.

Once, a couple of years ago, left to my own devices to find a birthday present for my brother-in-law, I just bought him a really nice, thick steak.

When I tried to repeat the feat at Christmas, my wife was horrified. "You can't just wrap up raw beef and put it under the tree. That's gross!"

So we got him something else. What it was, I can't even remember. What I DO remember is that after opening it, he said, "Aw, I thought it might be steak!"

Every birthday and holiday, my wife and I would go round and round. I would say, I really think he wants steak, and she would say, It is disgusting to give someone unrefrigerated meat.

We arrived at a compromise this Christmas, when we ordered steaks online, to be delivered to his home after the holiday. But that left the dilemma of what to actually GIVE to him on Christmas. Because it's boring to just hand over nothing and say "You're meat's in the mail!"

So I made a Steak Compilation CD.

Of course, it leads off with the Reverend song, the most direct Steak song I could find. But there are a few other good meat songs, from Primus and Jimmy Buffett and such. And for extra flavor, I threw in the audio from the good Wendy's and Outback commercials.

Because there is a song for every occasion, including meat-giving for Christmas.


Here are a few of the tracks I included in the steak compilation.

Carolina Chocolate Drops “Cornbread And Butterbeans”

We still have a lot to work out, as a society, when it comes to race.

I was in a public place, chit-chatting with an acquaintance. He was telling me a story about him and his friends. He happens to be white, his friends happen to be black.

So as he’s describing the scene and the dialogue, he’s affecting the voices of his friends.

Standing right next to him, is a young black man. He’s not part of the conversation, doesn’t know either of us. He’s just a bystander.

This guy I know is going on and on. Middle age white guy, doing his version of an older black man.

The bystander is pretending he’s not listening, but you can see by the way he “not listening,” and by his body language, that we’re in an uncomfortable zone for him.

And even if he wasn’t there, we’d entered an uncomfortable zone for me, because all I can think about is this: “Is it racist for a white guy to affect the voice of an older black man, IF he’s not doing a caricature, but a true and fair imitation?”

If I were listening to that conversation as an outsider, I think I would’ve thought, “This guy’s a racist.” But knowing that he wasn’t being cartoony, that he was sincerely trying to imitate someone he knew, made me wonder, “Why is this making me so uncomfortable?”

A short time later, I got in the car, and who should be on the radio, but The Carolina Chocolate Drops. And it posed a whole new set of questions for me.

Why does it feel so wrong, that they’ve titled their album “Genuine Negro Jig”? It’s a phrase I don’t think I’ll be able to bring myself to say on the air.

And if you’ve ever seen them live, you know the band usually dresses in period clothes (1930’s South), plays the jug and the washboard, and even dances broadly. It feel so wildly inappropriate on some level, but, in fact, the band is trying to be true to a tradition that, while carrying a lot of baggage, has great merit.

Intellectually, I know that what the CCD do is perfectly acceptable. But something in my gut still squirms a bit.

We still have a lot to work out, as a society, when it comes to race, and I guess my work starts within me.





Hear a live performance recorded by mvyradio at Newport Folk 2007 and head to the mvyradio archives for more performances from Newport Folk and Merlefest 2007 and Merlefest 2008.

Indigo Girls with Michael Stipe “Kid Fears”

It was Spring 1990, and my college roommates and I had picked up tickets to The Worcester Centrum to see R.E.M. We were pretty dare excited, since a love of the band had played a large part in forging our friendship in the dorms of UMass Amherst.

So as not to miss a minute, we were sure to be on the scene very early and we caught the opening act, some band I’d never heard of.

It’s funny, 20 years later, to remember a time when I didn’t know who the Indigo Girls were. But at the time of this story, I was open ears, and ready to be impressed.

Not surprisingly, they won me over pretty quickly, but the most entertaining part of the night, was when, part-way through the start of a somewhat dark song, a figure emerged from the shadows to join the girls.

Michael Stipe’s soaring vocals joined a song I’d later learn was “Kid Fears.”

From the moment he opened his mouth, the crowd---who was there to see R.E.M., not this no-name opening band---went wild. Seeing Stipe an hour earlier than planned just sent them into spasms of fan-ecstacy.

Then another figure emerged from the shadows. An audible gasp rose from the crowd. Then waves of applause.

Mike Mills? Bill Berry? Peter Buck?

No, it turned out to be a roadie, carrying out an extra mic stand.

Sheepishly, he waved to the crowd, and with a big smile on his face, he faded back into the shadows.