Bloggerhythms

Despite its melodrama Elvis Presley's 1968 hit single, "If I Can Dream," is one of the finer performances of his career and has always been a particular favorite of mine. The song was written especially for The King by Walter Earl Brown two months after Martin Luther King's assassination, and the connection between the future classic and MLK was immediately obvious to the singing legend. The world debut of "If I Can Dream" was as the finale to a TV special Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and NBC originally wanted to be a Christmas show. Instead, the superstar rebelled, so the hour-long program became  Singer Presents .... Elvis . It aired on December 3, 1968 and earned the highest rating of any show that season with 42% of all viewers watching TV tuned in that evening. Today, the legendary hour is more commonly known as the  '68 Comeback Special , and it completely revitalized his singing career.  The vocal and arrangement util...

I never held Stax in as high esteem as I did Motown, but they had their great moments too, and "Theme From Shaft," by the late Isaac Hayes is one of them. The single was issued on Enterprise, a short-lived Stax subsidiary, in 1971. Some people consider "Shaft" to be among the very early disco records, but I've always looked at it as more of a funk-soul production. Regardless of how anyone labels it, you have to admit it's unique and a mighty fine tune to hear coming out of your old transistor radio. Maybe I love "Shaft" so much because it always conjures up some nice, personal memories for me related to my years as a newsman and disc jockey at my college radio station. Back then, WMSR, 600 AM, Millersville, PA was only a carrier current outlet that could not be heard off campus. My stint there eventually led to a short-lived, professional, radio job after graduation. Many years have passed since then, and Millersville State Co...

Nicholas Britell has made a name for himself composing music for both television and films. He's a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Harvard where he was a keyboard player for an instrumental hip-hop group. He also has a degree from Julliard. Apparently, he's a very smart dude. Britell's music has been influenced by an unusual combination of artists and composers. Among them are Phillip Glass, Sergei Rachmaninoff, George Gershwin, Quincy Jones and Dr. Dre. Britell has composed scores for over two dozen movies. Even though HBO's Succession was his first effort writing for television, he quickly proved he belonged by winning an Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme. The composer's instrumental arrangement is unique. Most notably, the lead piano is deliberately out of tune. It employs hip-hop beats, a drum machine and a dark, classically based, string arrangement. If Britell's intent was to create a mood for the viewer to match what they wer...

"Woke Up This Morning" has an unusual backstory. It was written and recorded by Alabama 3, a band from London, England. In the United States the group always uses the name A3 instead so they don't have to worry about any delicate or unfortunate legal entanglements with Alabama - the American country group - over the use of the name. It's difficult to categorize Alabama 3 because they don't cling to a specific style. They easily blend jazz, R&B, hip-hop, rock and dance music into something unique. The band wrote "Woke Up This Morning" after hearing about a highly publicized British murder case involving a woman, Sara Thornton, who stabbed her very abusive husband to death. Primary songwriter and vocalist, Rob Spragg, told Q Magazine that "We started with a Howlin' Wolf loop, but a lot of blues lyrics are quite misogynistic. So, I turned it round to be about a woman who's had enough and gets a gun – it's quite iron...

Today's post is about a song that is probably the most obscure piece of music on my entire top ten list. Anyone who puts it on their ballot deserves a huge round of applause because it's a marvelous, moody, blues-fueled, jazz vocal song. More than four years ago I wrote about a virtually unknown soundtrack album from a long-forgotten, 1982 movie that I have never seen. The music to One From The Heart was composed entirely by Tom Waits with country star Crystal Gayle as a featured guest vocalist on six tracks. The sessions were produced by Bones Howe. The celebrated Francis Ford Coppola directed the picture   starring Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr, Raúl Juliá, Nastassja Kinski, Lainie Kazan and Harry Dean Stanton. Bloggerhythms' post about  the complete soundtrack  included a brief discussion on the flick's title track that Waits sang as a duet with Gayle. So, for #8 on my list of greatest songs from movies and TV I'm simply going to lift my own word...

"That Thing You Do," the theme song to the 1996 movie of the same name, was composed by the late Adam Schlesinger, leader of the fun power pop quartet, Fountains of Wayne. This Academy Award nominated record for Best Original Song reminds me of another fantastic one-hit wonder, The Knickerbockers' "Lies,"  a big hit from 1965 that many people believed was actually The Beatles. It's easy to be reminded of the Fab Four while listening to this exuberant production that only reached #41 - especially when you realize the film's story takes place in 1964, the same year the Liverpool guys hit the big time in America. It deserved a much better fate, but power-pop wasn't being played very often on the radio during this grunge infested year of 1996. The fictitious liner notes from the soundtrack CD claimed "That Thing You Do" reached #2 on the Hot 100. The four actors who played The Wonders in the movie didn't record the so...

"Before the Deluge" has always been one of my all-time favorite Jackson Browne songs. Yes, it's political - and therefore controversial - but it also has a gorgeous melody that was helped in no small part by the late, great - and always drug free - David Lindley whose sad violin work on this track is the highlight regardless of its intended message. "Before the Deluge" is one of Browne's most memorable songs. It's from Late for the Sky (1974) - an album most people consider his best. I loved the original studio recording, but it was easily topped five years later by this live version from the historic No Nukes soundtrack that made the original sound lifeless by comparison. To me, it's the definitive performance of this great song and it made me realize just how important Lindley was to Browne's music.  Browne continued to have a long and moderately successful recording career, but I always believed that after Lindley left...

Bloggerhythms has closely followed and often participated in radio station WXPN's annual 885 countdowns they've aired every fall for about the last twenty years or so. After years of counting down the usual fare of best songs, albums and artists the non-commercial station at 88.5 FM - licensed to Philadelphia's University of Pennsylvania - decided to go rogue with some unique lists. Recent themes have included the 885 Greatest Songs of the 21st Century. I don't remember what came in at #1, but John Mayer had more songs on the list than anyone else. Two years ago we all voted for the 885 Greatest Songs By Women. This year the station is offering listeners a fun countdown. They were asked to vote for their ten favorite songs that appeared in movies or on television. Your selections didn't have to be theme songs, they just had to be tunes that were aired on any TV show or featured in any film. They could be from concerts, documentaries, musicals, d...