Music
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Another LP From the Closet I am a Tommy infidel. I don't consider it a great album. I don't even really like it all that much. Or at least these things were true many years ago, when I last heard it. It has a lot of brilliant music, and obviously the Who at their best…
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The existence of the term "dad-rock" has only recently come to my attention, although I think it's been around for several years. It seems to be a mostly pejorative label for some of the rock of the '60s and '70s that old guys like, overlapping "classic rock" to a great degree, as far as I…
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I went looking for a musical setting of the Pentecost sequence and found this rather wonderful one. I did not recognize Mark Sirett's name but apparently he is a well-regarded choral composer. He incorporates the text in both Latin and English, which must have been pretty tricky. And the person who made this video shows…
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…treat it as a sort of caution. The man made few concessions to congregations. You can always count on his tunes to veer off from the predictable. We sang, or tried to sing, "Hail Thee, Festival Day" at Mass this morning (I know, it's really an Easter hymn, but it's reasonably appropriate for Pentecost, too).…
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I think I bought the Babylon album on the basis of a review when it was released in 1969. He was known as Dr. John the Night Tripper at the time and was a somewhat mysterious figure. This was his second album, and now that I think about it I may have bought this one because…
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Maybe you remember that a few months ago I got excited about a track by Nan Vernon on a compilation album (see this post). It was a Cruise-Lynch-Badalamenti-sounding arrangement of an old Bobby Fuller Four song. I had never heard of her, but quickly discovered that she had released one album, Manta Ray, in the…
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The AllMusic.com review describes this album as "a bona-fide lost classic." I don't think that's really true, not because it isn't a classic, but because it's no longer lost. It was released in 1968 and sales were negligible. It was eventually discovered, or rediscovered, years too late to benefit the artists very much. It deserved…
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When I wrote that notice of Dawn Eden Goldstein's book with that title, it didn't occur to me that anyone reading this blog would not know that it's taken from a 1967 hit song. But that's the assumption of someone who not only heard the song on the radio a thousand or so times when…
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Subtitled "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs." If you were paying much attention to music in the early 1990s, you probably were aware of it, even if you weren't especially interested in contemporary classical music. This recording was something of a crossover hit: You can read all about the piece itself and its fortunes, especially the fortunes…
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I have a number of CDs full of MP3 music, much of which, as I've mentioned before, I haven't really listened to. One of these was playing in my car a couple of weekends ago when I was on my way home from hearing a guitarist named Michael Chapdelaine, of whom more in a moment.…
Light On Dark Water 