Sparks from the Fire

James Taylor

If you were to ask me, “Who has been your favorite pop star throughout your life?” I’d have to answer that it is a tie between The Beatles and James Taylor.  Perhaps that dates me; perhaps, on the other hand, it doesn’t.  Both have had such musically triumphant careers and both are sure to be long lasting.

Also both churned out mountains of great music and for me that’s the bottom line.  The Beatles were perhaps more eclectic, but Sweet Baby James was, well, just so sweeeet!

As a lyricist, James can be somewhat impressionistic like Paul and Joni, but also could just nail it down with the best of them.  He wrote this song for a musical, “Working”, and as a story-telling song, it’s one of the best.  It wins my Ira Award for Best Song for a Musical Written by a Pop Star.

(more…)

Welcome to Part 2 of the Ira Awards!  If you have no earthly idea of what the Ira Awards are, then go to Part 1 and find out.  Besides, who would start anything with Part 2?

Joni Mitchell-Self Portrait

If you’ve already read Part 1, then welcome back!  Tonight let’s start with Joni.  In Part 1 I opened with the expression “A poem doth not a lyric make”.  Joni Mitchell, in my book, comes the closest to writing poetry that works as lyrics.  It is her genius to do so.  Even though she can make it work sometimes, I still wouldn’t try it if I were you.  Joni Mitchells only come along once in a lifetime.

Joni writes a lot like Paul Simon – she paints an impressionistic picture.  She is a poet at work on a lyrical canvas.  She sometimes tells a story, but that story often just has splotches of through line and she leaves it up to the listener to fill in the blanks.  She is also, you may already know, an accomplished painter whose work often graces her album covers.

(more…)

A 2 Part Series – Part 1

The Internet, especially when it comes to music, is an ever-changing world. Watchfire Music, in order to be a leader in the Inspirational category, must also be an ever-changing company.

Lately, and once again, we’ve been putting this “Inspirational” term under the microscope and studying and discussing how its definition might evolve. Once again, we’ve been asking ourselves, “Just what is Inspirational music?”

And once again we’re secure in a reshaping of that definition to include within our borders a widening of the umbrella.

The impulse came to me in many different ways because of my day to day dealings and discussions with artists and their new music. Here are some of the reasons why we have widened the umbrella.

In looking back over my own life in music I asked myself what were some of my most inspirational moments. I’ll never forget rushing one day on the way out the door late to an important meeting and being frozen to the floor by the DJ’s announcement of a new Beatles’ single and then standing helplessly before my radio as it played “Hey Jude” knowing full well that I was going to miss the meeting deadline, but not caring. The song was that overpowering, the moment just that riveting. Then, instead of rushing off to the meeting, I rushed to the record store to buy the single. (more…)

God stands at his conveyor belt.  The unborn babies come down the belt one by one as God stands with his hypodermic needle injecting life into the babys’ butts.  He knows he has to push the plunger each time only down to the red line, but even God gets tired of this routine, loses concentration and consequently sometimes his thumb slips and He mistakenly pushes the plunger all the way down past the red line.  “Oops”, He says, “there’s another performer!” And he tosses that baby over into another bin.

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson was one of these. In fact, you might say that with Michael you had the one where God’s thumb slipped the most.  For about a decade he was arguably the most talented man on the planet and definitely the world’s greatest performer.

In my lifetime I would place Michael right up there in the top 5 with The Beatles, Judy Garland, Stevie Wonder and Frank Sinatra.  We watched Thriller until many of us knew all the steps.  We totally rocked out to Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough, I’m Bad, and Billie Jean, and my favorite will always be Man In The Mirror.  That music stop into the big key change will ever be the epitome of great pop music.  Michael was a great rocker, but the King Of Pop.

On top of it all he was a great innovative dancer, right up there with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.  It wasn’t just Thriller that thrilled.  Every time I ever saw Michael dance, my jaw would drop at this wondrous human being.  The rhythm that poured from his body and his music was way beyond the rest of us mere mortals.

I was a fan.  I was in awe of his talent.  I loved him for being a super human performer and then I came crashing down just like the rest of you as he went over some mad crazy edge in his life and lost his balance.  I laughed at him and dissed him and pitied him and finally shook my head and walked away from him as he became more and more confused with his own identity.

He never really had a boyhood — he was always out there entertaining us – and so in his adulthood he turned to playing with boys, hanging out with them and God knows what else.

He was a consummate performer, always trying to make the song, the step, the move new, better, best and he often succeeded.  So it was only natural that he try to remake himself and his look new, better, best.  For a minute there, when he had his long hair and his glove and his white socks, he succeeded again.  But he couldn’t stop tinkering and for some reason thought he might try to make his make-up permanent.  He was great, but he wasn’t God, and he found that out the hard way – losing his nose in the process.

(more…)

We continue the adventure of our Top 3 Inspirational pieces of music by category.  Yesterday we covered Classical, Rock and Folk; today we’ll try to cover Pop (Nearly impossible to pick the top 3), tomorrow on to R&B and Broadway and who knows what else.

The Beatles

Please remember that these are my personal most Inspirational songs – not necessarily my favorites, but the ones that have had the most Inspirational impact on my life as a composer and music listener.

Here goes.

POP
1. Hey Jude – The Beatles / John Lennon and Paul McCartney

In 1968, John Lennon and his wife Cynthia Lennon separated due to his affair with Yoko Ono. Soon afterwards, Paul McCartney drove out to visit Cynthia and Julian, her son with Lennon. “We’d been very good friends for millions of years and I thought it was a bit much for them suddenly to be personae non gratae and out of my life,” McCartney said. Later, Cynthia Lennon recalled, “I was truly surprised when, one afternoon, Paul arrived on his own. I was touched by his obvious concern for our welfare… On the journey down he composed ‘Hey Jude’ in the car. I will never forget Paul’s gesture of care and concern in coming to see us.”

(more…)

I just woke up with this idea — all because I had a song running through my brain.  At first it was to give my own imaginary award for the Top 3 Inspirational songs or pieces of music of my own life.

Bill Haley and the Comets

It rapidly expanded to the following:  Here they are by category.

TOP 3 CLASSICAL
1. Third Symphony, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs by Henryk Górecki

Górecki said of this, “Perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music […] somehow I hit the right note, something they were missing. Something somewhere had been lost to them. I feel that I instinctively knew what they needed.”

Why this first?  Because with it, I was inspired to fall in love with my wife.  An easy pick.

2. Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) by Igor Stravinsky

Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein said of one passage, “That page is sixty years old, but it’s never been topped for sophisticated handling of primitive rhythms…”, and of the work as a whole, “…it’s also got the best dissonances anyone ever thought up, and the best asymmetries and polytonalities and polyrhythms and whatever else you care to name.”

(more…)