A very wise man, Yogi Berra, once said:  “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”  The state of my NCAA basketball tournament bracket this year shows just how right Yogi was.  Instead of invoking the spirit of Nostradamus for the Song of the Week two weeks ago, I should have simply hoped to be lucky.

There are many songs about luck, and one of them is the new Song of the Week, “Lucky” by Jason Mraz and Colbie Caillat.

Colbie Caillat?  Does this mean I am trying to build the appeal that the Song of the Week may have to teenage girls?

Or the song itself – “Lucky”?  Could it be that future brides and grooms will want to link to this website to find music for the first dance at their reception?  Following its 2010 Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration With Vocals, this song has been very popular at weddings.

The answer is probably “no” to both questions.  Besides “Lucky,” I don’t think I have ever listened to a Colbie Caillat song all the way through.  Her father produced a couple of Fleetwood Mac albums and she has a pleasant voice, so it is not surprising that she ended up in the music business.

Jason Mraz is a little bit more interesting.  Sort of an All-American kid, he grew up in Mechanicsville, Virginia, where he was a high school cheerleader.  He attended the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York for a little over a year before he dropped out and eventually drifted westward until he reached San Diego.  He sort of had to stop going West, so he hung out with musicians and played at local coffee houses.

His landed his first major recording contract in 2002, and his early recordings seem to target a teenage audience (you could say the same of rock and roll a half century earlier, but Jason’s “targeting” was more record company marketing; so it wasn’t the same).  His music and songwriting have matured over the years and now give listeners an interesting sound influenced by folk, rock, reggae, hip hop, jazz, Brazilian music and who knows what else.

Jason has also become active in many humanitarian causes which have taken him to places such as Ghana, to bring attention to efforts to liberate children sold into slavery, Myanmar, for a concert to raise awareness of human trafficking in that country; and Antarctica, with a group led by Al Gore focusing on the effects of climate change.  He has worked with the Nature Conservancy and various LGBT groups and he is active in projects to protect and preserve the world’s oceans and beaches.

His music is also influenced by his healthy lifestyle, as Jason eats mostly a raw vegan diet, practices yoga and is one of those California surfing dudes.  And – perhaps most interestingly – he owns an avocado farm outside of San Diego.

“Lucky” is a song that is pretty much pure pop.  It is pleasant, with a catchy tune.  The instrumentation is subdued, and works well.  The video is nice, too.  Half of it was filmed in Kauai – a place I enjoy very much.  The other half was filmed in Prague, which is interesting because Jason’s ancestors lived in what is now the Czech Republic until his grandfather came to the USA in the early 20th Century (mraz, I am told, means “frost” in Czech).  I have never been to Prague (I have seen the Czech Republic from a hill in Poland), but I hear it is nice.

It is also nice and lucky to be in love with my best friend.  I do like that (and have for more than 35 years).

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Here it is, a beautiful day on the first weekend of Spring.  I had intended to pick Madeline Peyroux’s version of Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” as the Song of the Week.  It is not particularly about Spring, but, to me at least, Madeline’s performance conjures a feeling of the season.  However, as I was looking on the internet to try to find the copyright information, I was reminded of her song, “The Things I’ve Seen Today.”

Madeline Peyroux has a name and a voice that make you certain she is a French chanteuse, and possibly a reincarnation of Edith Piaf.  In fact, she was born in Georgia (the American State, not the European country) in 1974.  She has described her parents as “hippies” and “educators.”  When she was a child, her family moved several times as her father, a college professor, accepted positions in Georgia, Southern California and New York.  Her parents divorced when she was 11 years old.  She and her brother then moved to Paris (the one in France) with her mother.  So there you have your French chanteuse.

Madeline seems to have been a rebellious child.  She did not fit in well at the French schools, so she was sent to an English boarding school – the kind with bars on the widows.  Upon her return to Paris she began hanging out with street musicians, and in her later teen years she toured Europe singing and playing guitar with various other musicians.

She recorded her first album, Dreamland, in 1976.  It featured covers of old standards by the likes of Patsy Cline, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith and Edith Piaf.  Each of those – as well as others, like Ella Fitzgerald – have definitely influenced Madeline’s style; yet it is her own beautiful voice that makes the stylization work so well.

Madeline Peyroux is best known for her cover versions of songs written by others.  “The Things I’ve Seen Today” is an original song which she co-wrote with violinist/vocalist Jenny Scheinman.  It appeared on Madeline’s 2011 album Standing on the Rooftop, which did not sell very well in the United States.

Jenny Scheinman seems like an interesting person, about whom I would like to learn little more.  She grew up in Northern California in what she says is the “westernmost house in the continental United States.”  It was an isolated area where the few residents formed a high school with only six students so they would not have to send their children two hours away to the public high school.  That was where Jenny learned music.  She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, and then began performing professionally.

She was influenced by an interesting family.  She said they lived outdoors in the summer and that her parents were folk musicians with whom she traveled extensively around the US and Europe.  Her grandfather was Telford Taylor, a brigadier general in World War II and the chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.  He was a vocal opponent of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and of the Vietnam War in the 1960s.  Her uncle is Victor Scheinman who was a pioneer in robotics and teaches mechanical engineering at Stanford.

I think her activist grandfather would be proud of her for collaboration with Canadian musician/activist Bruce Cockburn for several years in the Bruce Cockburn Trio.

So, without further ado, here is Madeline Peyroux performing “The Things I’ve Seen Today.”

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The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament starts this week.  I need to get my bracket filled out; and to psyche myself up, I picked Al Stewart’s “Nostradamus” as Song of the Week.

As you probably know, Nostradamus was a 16th Century Frenchman who is famous for publishing hundreds of quatrains in a book entitled Les Propheties (“The Prophecies”).  Nostradamus was born Michel de Nostredame (“Michael of Notre Dame’ – not to be confused with the Hunchback of Notre Dame, who was Quasimodo and not Michael) in 1503.  He initially worked as an apothecary and developed a reputation as a healer.  After his first wife and children died – presumably victims of the plague – he traveled throughout France and Italy, married a rich widow with whom he had six more children and developed an interest in the occult.

The occult was not looked upon as a good thing, especially by the Catholic Church, so to avoid persecution, the prophecies he wrote were intentionally obscure.  In the nearly 500 years since they were written his readers and the popular press have conjectured that he has accurately predicted such things as the London Fire of 1666, Napoleon, Hitler and World War II, the Kennedy assassinations, 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden, etc.

Who knows?  Maybe he did.  Most of his verses are simply too obscure to really know.

Nostradamus died in 1567 from complications of gout.

Skipping forward four centuries brings us to Al Stewart, who was born in Scotland in 1945 and was an influential figure in the British folk music revival of the 1960s.  He seemed to know everyone, perhaps because he was a host at the Les Cousins Folk Club in London where many soon-to-be-famous musicians got their start.  Paul Simon was his roommate for awhile and he knew Yoko Ono before she ever met John Lennon.  He reached that level of influence primarily because he was a fine musician and singer and an excellent songwriter.

His song writing is especially notable for its incorporation of literary and historic references.  For example, his best known song, “Year of the Cat,” mentions a morning from a Bogart movie and Peter Lorre contemplating a crime.  He wrote about the French revolution in “Charlotte Corday” and the escape of the last Shah of Iran during the Iranian Revolution in “Shah of Shahs.”  His “Sirens of Titan” is based on Kurt Vonnegut’s novel of the same name.

The historical bent to his writing is perhaps most obvious in Stewart’s 1973 album, Past, Present and Future.  In the liner notes, he states that he originally intended the album to have a song for each decade of the 20th Century.  It didn’t quite work out that way, but there are songs based on the life of Admiral Lord Fisher (“Old Admirals”); Warren G. Harding and his scandals (“Warren Harding”); Hitler’s purge of political opponents, known as “The Night of the Long Knives” (“The Last Day of June 1934”); the German defeat in Russia and Stalin’s subsequent gulags (“Roads to Moscow”) and British politics following the Second World War (“Post World War Two Blues”).

There was a major flaw in Al Stewart’s concept.  The 20th Century still had several decades to go in 1973.  He neatly solved that problem by finishing the album with “Nostradamus” – a look back at prophecies supposedly fulfilled and forward to the future events that may have been included in Nostradamus’s prophesies.

Stewart’s interpretations of those prophecies were based on the work of an English Scholar named Erika Cheetham, who published The Prophecies of Nostradamus: The Man Who Saw Tomorrow in 1965.  Many years ago, after hearing this song, I was initially quite impressed with Cheetham’s work.  I am not so impressed any more.  I won’t go into detail, but will simply say that her translation is not always accurate and her interpretations seem more geared toward selling books in the mid-1960s than really trying to understand what Nostradamus had written. (The same problems with trying to interpret the quatrains as applying to contemporary events may be seen in the images that are part of the YouTube video embedded below.)

One final comment and then I will quit.  This a long song – nearly 10 minutes.  There is a guitar break that is a good show of Stewart’s musicianship, but it could have been shortened.  The last two minutes or so are a semi-operatic vocalization (without words – so that the same as humming?) by a fine singer named Krysia Kocjan.  Perhaps that could have been shortened, too; though I think it gives the song a mystical quality that fits perfectly.

Now, on to basketball . . . .

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Break Week is over, and I think it has been well used.  I got into Denver International Airport at about 7:00 p.m. on Thursday.  My eyes and mind were glazed and I thought, “When I woke up this morning I was in Shanghai yesterday afternoon.”  I had traveled more than 15,000 miles since leaving home; but you travelers out there know it is not about the miles as much as it is the experiences and the people you meet.

Out on the road, the people come from everywhere, for all kinds of reasons, and they become your friends because fate has brought you to them to share a moment of their lives.

Out of all those folks, the most interesting are those like the young German who had spent a month in India and another month in Thailand and was passing through China on his way to Russia to ride the Trans-Siberian Railroad back to Europe.  He certainly had stories, and will create many more before he is back home.

Yes, the most interesting are the business travelers who are winding down after hammering out the agreement to supply zippers or thread to the garment factory that is going to send your local Walmart the latest American fashions.  Those folks have quite a lot to tell their bosses and co-workers.

In fact, the most interesting are those in the tour group, in the country for a 10 day vacation and then back home.  They have real lives back there – not like those who are always on the move.  They bring the perspective of one looking at a new land through new eyes.  Listen to what they have to say and you will find great insights.

The most interesting, though, are the few who have come to this foreign country to live and work among its people for a whole year or more.  They have a unique understanding and their stories will help us all better understand the international community.

That is why the most interesting folks you meet here are the aging pensioners who have never left this province in their entire lives.  They move slowly with bags of rice in the carts and stop to complain to neighbors – or to anyone who will listen – about the burden of the outrageous government taxation.

Of course there are also your family members who are the most interesting people because each of them can share observations with you from a common and shared set of past experiences.  There is no one else who can give you more personal stories that fit your unique individual understanding.

And there is not a single one of these people who is more interesting than the Observer who is somewhere inside you.  That Observer sees and hears all that is around you and knows – absolutely knows – that what you see and hear are not stories of the past or the future; they are all with you right here, right now, this moment.

Ah, but that is the Observer’s story.  Our human brain is wired so that we cannot process anything we see or hear for several milliseconds after the so-called “physical sensation.”  Consequently, the Observer is leaning forward on its bar stool telling more and more stories about the recent past.

The song “Yesterday’s Wine” was written for Willie Nelson’s 1971 album of the same name.  That was a concept album that told the story of the “Imperfect Man” from birth until the day he died.  On the album, Willie explains its purpose by saying,  “Yes, there’s great confusion on earth, and the power that is has concluded the following: Perfect man has visited earth already and His voice was heard; The voice of Imperfect Man must now be made manifest; and I have been selected as the most likely candidate.”  In this song, the narrator recognizes one who appears widely traveled and asks that traveler to sit down and tell his story.  When you and I are on the road we understand that there is a camaraderie among travelers.  Willie understands that all the time.

This song has also been on several other Willie Nelson albums, but it was never a big hit for him.  Still, it did help Willie to eventually pay his taxes because it became a Number One hit for for Merle Haggard and George Jones in 1982, and it has been recorded by many other artists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ7sYvYexAs

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