Women's voices: Never lose affection

I wasn’t going to get through the month of Voices without The Divine Miss M. I’ve been a Bette Midler fan for decades. Even though a lot of her material verges on the sappy, she makes it work. She’s like an earth mother—she survives everything. And she laughs at it all.

I’m not saying I don’t have “The Rose” or “From a Distance” on some of my playlists (and “Friends” has a great beat for the gym). But probably my favorite Midler song is “In My Life”. I think it’s my favorite cover of that song, as well.

When I went hunting for a video of it to share with you, I came across this unusual performance—just Midler and a ukulele player. Now there’s a command performance.

For a change of pace, I’m also giving you Mary Black’s version of “Mo Ghile Mear”. This is an example of art transcending the message, since the song is one of about 5,000 about Bonnie Prince Charlie, one of the most useless objects of misplaced idolatrous devotion in all of history, and a prime example of the idiocy of hereditary monarchies.

To my mind, it’s bad enough that the Scots spent all that time in whiney-ass hand-wringing over the “king over the water”—always conveniently forgetting what a plonker he was at both field command and running a government in exile. As far as I’m concerned, they can lament him to their little hearts’ content, and keep on writing those soppy songs about him, since it seems to help with their innate inferiority complexes. But this one has the goddess representing Ireland moaning about him, too; and I think that’s just a tad beyond the beyond.

However, frankly, the sound of the song is lovely, and I can listen to Black sing practically anything and feel better for it. So I’ve included it for today.

(I apologize for this particular video, which features heavy-handedly Scottish-type paintings of a particularly cringeworthy 19^th Century fashion; but it’s the only one I could find that has the best version of Black singing it. So close your eyes and listen. Don’t think of England.)

Like a Sesame Street Rolling Stone

Since I’ve got a musical theme going this month, for my Friday Freak, I’m giving you Rolling Stone’s take on the top ten Sesame Street musical guests.

As you know, I’m a sucker for All Things Muppet, especially musical Muppets. I’m having a hard time choosing a favorite here. Maybe the Yo-Yo Ma one.

But it’s hard without duckies.

Women's voices: The second hand unwinds

I have a love-hate relationship with time. When you’re young, you never think about it, do you—except maybe in terms of it moving too slowly for the speed of your activities. But then, when you’re young, you think you’re immortal, so why would time have any significance for you?

As you get older… Yeah; different story. You come to realize that the days are long but the years are short, and you start feeling that bastard eating away at your joints and forming wrinkles around your friends’ eyes. It’s not theoretical any more.

To kick things off, let’s hear Tracy Chapman sing “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, as part of the 30^th Anniversary Concert honoring Bob Dylan. First of all, I don’t think I could have got through the month without Dylan; his songs framed the infrastructure of my childhood and youth; this one has to be The Anthem of the Sixties.

You hear lots of overblown, over-produced versions of it, but Chapman just comes out with her guitar and that extraordinary voice, and she completely commands it.

Second up is Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time”. I know people who dismiss Lauper as an 80s lightweight, but she has serious songwriting chops, and her career has been strong for going on four decades, thank-you-very-much. Earlier this year her score for the Broadway hit Kinky Boots won her a Tony. “Time After Time” is one of her early efforts.

This video is definitely a golden oldie, direct to you from the 80s.

I confess that I prefer Eva Cassidy’s cover of this, but since my next Voice-on-time is Cassidy, I’m giving Lauper her props. She deserves her interpretation of her own song.

And that closing piece is “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” by English singer-songwriter Sandy Denny. Really, Denny knew what she was talking about, even though she was only 19 when she wrote this.

Many singers have covered “Time”—you’ve probably heard Judy Collins’ version, or maybe even Nina Simone. But Cassidy has captured my heart on this one. For one thing, her voice has echoes of Denny. But her interpretation crystalizes that one line, “I do not fear the time.”

I don’t know that I can make that same statement. But I love how Cassidy makes it real.

Women's voices: Grow in grace & goodness

Family deserves two days if we’re talking about women’s Voices, so let me continue.

I actually can’t recall whether my BFF first brought me to Mary Black’s “Bless the Road”, or I sent it her way. Either way, the song is inextricably woven into my friendship with her, and the mother-child link.

If other artists have covered the song (by Steve Cooney), I don’t know them, and I don’t much care about finding them. Have a listen.

The second Voice today is about a child's plea to her father to overcome his pride and help her win her lover. I think “O mio babbino caro” is just about the most exquisite aria written for the soprano range. But I have a, um, somewhat ancillary association with it.

Back when I was employed by a data networking company in Virginia, my group supported a number of major telecommunications accounts, so I worked closely with the account managers and their lead systems engineers. Some of the latter were what you might call unpolished, although being customer-facing, they certainly had their quota of charm. I walked into the office of one of the rougher and readier SEs, waiting for a project meeting to start, and I was quite surprised (read gobsmacked) to hear “O mio babbino caro” playing on his ghetto blaster.

“Why [Bob],” I said, “I didn’t know you like Puccini.”

“[Bas Bleu],” he replied, “I’m fuckin’ crazy about Puccini.”

Well—hard to cough up a comeback to that, so I just sat quietly until everyone arrived for the meeting.

(Of course, at the time I didn’t realize that he was engaged in an affair with the account manager, who happened to be a coloratura. It made somewhat more sense once I was put in the picture. Years later.)

I must have CDs from six, maybe ten different women singing this, but I’ll give you the lyric soprano Kiri Te Kanawa, as being just about the middle of the range.

The plea works: Lauretta does in fact convince her father, Gianni Schicchi, to put aside his scruples and pull a fast one on authorities so she can marry her beloved. Damn straight, it works; who wouldn't be reduced to a pool of tears after this?

Women's voices: Promises of someday

Women’s lives have traditionally been centered around family, so the Voices often sing about it. For all you parents, I’ll give two examples today.

Singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith has a distinctive voice—you’d never take her as coming from anywhere but West Texas. You’d think that would put her a little outside my particular vernacular, and I’ll confess that (along with some of the other Voices you’ll hear this month) she does stretch my comfort zone.

I may have first seen her in a performance from Belfast with the Chieftains and Roger Daltrey (hey—the Chieftains are serious comfort-zone pushers), but associate her particularly with a concert I attended with friends at Wolf Trap outside D.C., after which I kind of sidled up to her. Think of it as a country dance, if you will, with me weaving in and out, ‘cause I’m a city girl.

Griffith’s got one of those little-girl voices—no matter how old she gets, she sounds like Edith Ann, sitting on a chair much to large for her. But that’s very deceptive; she may be vulnerable, but ain’t nothing but heart and backbone in that voice.

I’ve chosen Griffith’s cover of Malvina Reynold’s “Turn Around” as an example of family concerns. It’s a sentimental song that can easily slide into bathos; but Griffith keeps it moving. Just as you’d expect.

The second offering today is from Joni Mitchell. Mitchell was a huge influence on my youth—I’d never considered that singers could write their own songs, and hers were so distinctive. When she wrote about love affairs, you just knew it wasn’t some kind of theoretical exercise, just as “Woodstock” described her experience at the event. (Plus—that open tuning on the guitar bathed everything in exotic tones.)

As Reynolds wrote about seasons passing for a daughter, Mitchell focused on a boy growing up. She called the song, “The Circle Game”. It appears on her Ladies of the Canyon album, which I heard in my mind every time I drove through Laurel Canyon to get from my gigs at HBO and my home in Van Nuys.

For some reason, when I rode the merry-go-round in Golden Gate Park last month, “Circle Game” kept swirling through my head. Other people have covered it, but I just do not hear them, ever.

P.S. There are a lot of versions of “Woodstock”; Eva Cassidy's has become my favorite. Click here to listen and see if you agree.

Women's Voices: I never made promises lightly

Romantic relationships take you a lot of places, don’t they? Well, they’re supposed to, I guess. I mean—you’re supposed to grow and learn, even when the relationship goes to hell, either in a conflagration of Wagnerian proportions or in a slow fade into boredom.

One of mine went through several of the explosive ends before it finally, truly died a cold, dusty, boring death.

Well, you know the romance is gone when your last words to him are, “Just grow the hell up.” And you deliver them via email.

(Yes, it would have been more dramatic if I’d done it via IM or text, but this is a guy who in 2002 still hadn’t moved up to a Windows-based word processing program for writing the Great American Screenplay that he’d been working on for the 20 years I knew him.)

However, he did introduce me to Eva Cassidy, and for that I am very grateful indeed. She is definitely one of the Voices I listen to when I need anything from consolation to inspiration. She had an extraordinary gift for interpreting everything from “Over the Rainbow” to “Time After Time” to “Imagine” to “People Get Ready”. (Oh, hell—name a song; she either did or would have nailed it.) Her range just knocks me out, and she displays exceptional power; all the more so when you consider how young she was when she died—barely 33.

If you held a gun to my head and ordered me to name a favorite, most of the time I’d probably say, “Fields of Gold”. It’s certainly my favorite version of that song, including the ones by Sting himself and by Mary Black. Cassidy just delivers it without flourishes or drama, and it stuns me every time I listen to it.

You’re going to hear more from her over this month. She's one of the Voices closest to my heart.

Women's Voices: Two-step partner & a Cajun beat

Let’s listen to a couple of the artists from the “Dreamland” video yesterday, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Carole King. They’re both singer-songwriters, and I’ve chosen a signature piece from each of them.

I love “Down at the Twist and Shout”—maybe partly because it was about a club in D.C. that used to book Cajun bands. (Carpenter spent a chunk of her life in the area.) But mostly because I can’t listen to it without wanting to get up and move.

Can you?

This song is purely about having a good time, but in a more subtle way than, say, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”. And Carpenter’s voice is so warm and inviting, you just have to join in on the figurative dance floor.

I’m not ashamed to admit that some of King’s songs got me through some crappy times in my life. King’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” first made the rounds via The Shirelles, but I like King’s version better. It’s slower and more mellow—a woman of a certain age who's indeed had her heart broken when the night met the morning sun. More than once.

Well, haven’t we all?

And that’s why you want places like the Twist and Shout and the example of women who just get up and go on.

Gratitude Monday: helping a friend

For Gratitude Monday I’m grateful (again) for friends.

But this time I’m grateful that a friend in Virginia, who’s been going through an upsetting and frustrating time, called me for comfort, perspective and a couple of paragraphs of text that she’s too pissed off to compose in a neutral, considered manner.

(It’s to do with a couple of homeowner associations. If you’ve ever had to deal with one, you’ll know why 1) she’s pissed off and 2)she needed someone not in the middle of it to tone down the text. Even so it took me six rewrites before I got “destruction” down to “damage” and finally to “alteration”. We’re talking trees here.)

Carol Ann and I go back a ways—to before I moved to NoVa. When I did, she was a ready-made friend who could recommend a vet for the cats and places to get ice cream. Both are extremely important.

For years, until I moved to Seattle, she and I met most weekends for breakfast. We’re far enough out how each other earns her living that we can offer entirely off-the-wall viewpoints. Sometimes that’s useful, sometimes not; but it makes a change from what you get every damned day from your colleagues.

So naturally I’m grateful for a friendship that goes way back. But I’m particularly grateful that this time she called on me for help. Usually (lately, especially) it seems the other way round. There have been some phone calls where I couldn’t talk because I was crying.

It felt really good to know that I was the person Carol Ann wanted around when she vented on this, and that I was able to help.

It’s good to have the opportunity to do that, and to have friends who think you’ll deliver for them.

Women's Voices: We'll leave a light

It occurred to me not too long ago that when I listen to The Voices—the part of me that some refer to as “intuition”—I generally choose things that turn out well for me. And, alas, when I either don’t hear them or ignore them, well…the sight is not pretty.

So I started thinking about what The Voices actually might sound like, if I made a habit of letting them speak to me. And I came up with a number of women with astonishingly beautiful voices, singing about all the things I’m still trying to figure out.

So I figured that I’d collect them all here and share them with you throughout September, a couple per day. Same rules as for National Poetry Month—my blog, my associations, my choice. Feel free to comment on any of them, though.

I’m kicking off with a couple of collaborations, just to get things rolling. Collaborative effort is an especially female thing, and I like it that it’s not hard to find women artists pooling their talents in support of one another.

You’ll see and hear a lot from Mary Black in the next 30 days. She’s got one of the purest voices you’ll find, and she sings about things that go straight to the center of my soul. Here she joins Emmylou Harris (another powerhouse) to sing Eleanor McEvoy’s “Woman’s Heart.”

I really like the way Black and Harris ultimately harmonize on this.

Another woman who’ll make repeat appearances here is Mary Chapin Carpenter, because I find that both her writing and her singing resonate with me. Like Black, she’s a singer-songwriter of great power. Her voice is completely different from Black’s—but her material is at the heart of women’s experience.

I can’t even recall what search led me to this particular video, but she’s joined by a treasure trove of artists to sing one of her most beautiful songs, “Dreamland”. They come from pop, country, folk, gospel, and they blend with easy charm singing a lullaby.

I don’t know where you’ll find a group of male singers from different genres gathering together like this (outside of something like the Bob Dylan 30^th anniversary concert), but I know if they did it would be much more of a “thing”.