This is a week in which there are so many possible songs for the week that it is difficult to pick just one.  Monday (the 20th) is my wife’s birthday; Tuesday (the 21st) is my friend Annette’s birthday; Wednesday (the 22nd) is the 45th Earth Day; Thursday (the 23rd) is the anniversary of the release of “We Are the World” (which could be someone’s song of the week); Friday (the 24th) is traditionally recognized was the date of the fall of Troy.

With so many choices, I would like to say, “Happy Birthday, Cathy.  Happy Birthday, Annette.  Happy Earth Day, everyone”  Let us stop there.*  Earth Day seems important enough to focus on for a few minutes.

The first Earth Day, back in 1970, was, as much as anything, a demonstration. The Baby Boomers had recently recognized that the thousands of people losing their lives and homelands in Southeast Asia were victims of a greedy military-industrial complex, and they had become good at organizing mass protests as a step toward changing what was perceived as a flawed social and economic system.

It was also apparent that the same social and economic system was causing tremendous ecological damage to the entire planet – poisoning the water and the air and destroying many irreplaceable natural resources.  Many of the same people who had been protesting the war in Vietnam extended the civil protest model to bring attention to what was an even more serious threat to the lives and homelands of everyone on the planet.

In many ways, the Earth Day movement and consciousness has been successful.  Hundreds of thousands came together across the entire United Stares on that first Earth Day.  Forty-five years later, more than a billion people throughout the world will be participating in activities designed to improve the environment.

Less than a year after the first Earth Day, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency was established and two years later Congress passed the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973  The percentage of water in the United States that is safe for drinking and swimming has more than doubled and the level of emissions of many major air pollutants has been reduced to less than half of what it was.

On a personal level, most Americans now know the advantages to recycling, reusable shopping bags, fuel efficiency and the “green” lifestyle.

Yes, there have been very clear movement in positive directions since the first Earth Day.  However, it is still necessary to recognize that the darned old greedy military-industrial complex is still there.

Few people do that better than Neil Young, who has been socially conscious throughout his career, with songs such as “Ohio,” about students killed by National Guard troops during an anti-war protest at Kent State University; “After the Gold Rush,” with its dream vision of a future environmental disaster; and “Rockin’ in the Free World,” presenting a harsh look at societal problems.  His Living with War album was one of the strongest artistic protests of American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Young focuses again on both social and environmental issues in this week’s Song of the Week, “Mother Earth.”  The video below is a live performance for an “Honour the Treaties” concert meant to bring attention to the plight of some of Canada’s native population.  It includes scenes of land where the devastation of the strip mining by the Canadian tar sands industry is eye-opening and appalling.

I am not sure exactly where the aerial scenes were filmed, but I believe it was near Fort McMurry, Alberta.  Here is a quote from Neil Young:  “The fact is, Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima. Fort McMurray is a wasteland. The Indians up there and the native peoples are dying. The fuels all over – the fumes everywhere – you can smell it when you get to town. The closest place to Fort McMurray that is doing the tar sands work is 25 or 30 miles out of town and you can taste it when you get to Fort McMurray. People are sick. People are dying of cancer because of this. All the First Nations people up there are threatened by this.”  Al Gore has called these mining sites “an open sewer.”

On the positive side, though, the major oil companies engaged in this mining – like Shell and Sunco and Imperial Oil – do make written materials available for their shareholders in electronic form so that it will not be necessary to kill quite as many trees.**

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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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Recently, and from time to time, I have read comments from people who say that Tom Waits has got to be the most underrated artist around today.  While Waits is unique and his fans are sometimes described as part of a “cult following,” he is certgainly not “underrated” by those in the know.

Waits’ raspy voice has been described, with some justification, as “like how you’d sound if you drank a quart of bourbon, smoked a pack of cigarettes and swallowed a pack of razor blades. . . . Late at night.  After not sleeping for three days.”   Many of his songs give the impression that they were recorded at 3:00 a.m., after the bars all closed, before he crawled back to his Old ’55 Chevy to sleep it off.

Whether that characterization may have been accurate at sometime in the past, I can’t say.  I believe that now, however, it is part of an artistic persona that Tom has fostered and publicly maintains because it serves him well.  In fact, he is a very talented individual who seems to be very much in control of his career decisions and creative endeavors.  He has been recording for more than 40 years and has released more than 20 albums.  Two of those albums have won Grammys and he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

He has also acted in more than 30 motion pictures – I think the most recent was Seven Psychopaths in 2012.  He was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the soundtrack on Francis Ford Coppola’s 1982 musical film, One from the Heart (which was not a very successful movie aside from the soundtrack).

As another indication that Tom Waits is quite successful and not as underrated as some might think, look at the consequences of his staunch refusal to let his songs be used for advertising.  That position was well known even a quarter century ago when Frito-Lay produced a commercial based on his song “Step Right Up,” which is a “jazzy parody of commercial hucksterism.”  Since it was known that Waits would not participate in the project, a sound-alike singer was found and the commercial was made and played on the radio.  Tom sued and was awarded more than $2.5 million.  On appeal, Frito-Lay claimed that Waits was not “widely known” enough to warrant legal protection of his “distinctive style”; but he Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed.  The quotes above about the bourbon and razor blade voice and commercial hucksterism are from that appellate opinion (which you can read here).

Ad agency folks seem slow to learn at times, and only a year later Levi’s used a version of Tom’s “Heartattack and Vine” in a commercial.  Again he sued.  The commercial was withdrawn and Levi’s publicly apologized in a full-page ad in Billboard.  In the 21st Century, Audi ran a commercial in Spain with music very similar to Waits’ “Innocent When You Dream” (after Tom had refused to participate or permit the use of his music), and he recovered another judgment in the Spanish courts.  In 2005, another car company, Opel, tried to persuade him to sing for their Scandinavian commercials, then hired a sound-alike singer when he refused.  Opel claimed the commercials used music composed by Brahms.  Hmmmm, it would be interesting to hear Tom sing Brahms.  Anyway, Opel did settle the resulting lawsuit for an undisclosed sum, which Waits reportedly donated to charity.

Tom Waits has been married to Kathleen Brennan for nearly 35 years, they have three children, he has not drunk alcohol for several decades and he lives close to my good friend Annette and her husband Mark DeBacker in the lovely and thoroughly middle class town of Santa Rosa, California.

Now for the good news:  next week is going to be another Break Week around here.  I won’t be posting anything new for a couple of weeks.  It seemed good to sail into Break Week with an old favorite.  Here is Tom Waits’ ” Shiver Me Timbers” from the 1974 album, The Heart of Saturday Night.  (For some reason this video goes on for a minute or so after the song ends, but it is just silent).

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“You sorry old soldier, go home
‘You sorry old bad girl, go home
Cause by now you’ve seen it all
Just relax now and recall
All your stories forever and ever.”
 -from “All Your Stories” by Jesse Winchester

Jesse Winchester seemed a gentle man with a quiet delivery and a low-key style of putting the stories of everyday life into song.  I was lucky to see him twice in the last three years before he lost his life to cancer just a month short of his 70th birthday.  During those two performances, the story he seemed to have the most fun singing was “It’s a Shame About Him.”

That song was included on Jesse’s 2009 album, Love Filling Station.  The album version is somewhat “slick” sounding for a Jesse Winchester song, with a fiddle featured almost as prominently as Jesse’s voice.  At least to my ears, that recording does not convey the true flavor of the song.  The version chosen for the Song of the Week is a live performance with just Jesse and his guitar.  The sound quality is not that great, but the performance is.

I could write on for pages about Jesse Winchester’s songs, but I will spare you that for the moment.  If anyone would like to really get a feel for Jesse’s story and his personality, I would recommend listening to the American Routes program that was presented by NPR on January 21, 2015.  On that show a full hour was devoted to an interview with Jesse and several of his songs were played.  You can hear it by clicking here.  You can also see a short piece I posted after Jesse’s passing by clicking here.

Just before his death, Jesse completed the recording of his last album, A Reasonable Amount of Trouble.  In the liner notes for that album, Jimmy Buffett wrote:

“In my way of thinking, Jesse may no longer reside in the world of matter, but his energy sure as hell does. It is timeless and eternal and will be with us always from Montreal to Memphis, to those red skies off toward New Orleans [this last phrase being a reference to Jesse’s song ‘Biloxi.’ -law]

I am grateful that we still do have that timeless and eternal energy with us.

Keeping in Mind that the songs on A Reasonable Amount of Trouble were written as Jesse’s life in this world were coming to an end, I think I will move this post toward the end by quoting a few lines from a song entitled “All That We Have Is Now”:

“Oh my my, look at the time fly
Sorry I really have to run
Oh I just love being with you
Really the whole thing was such fun

The sun is going down
There’s shadows all around
And I feel more than wine
We must do this again sometime
But I can’t tell you when
But what a joy it’s been
All that we have is now”

And now, “It’s a Shame About Him.”  If you had been at this performance, you would have probably been laughing.  Watching it now should at least bring a good smile to your face.

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