The best-selling song in Britain in 2022 was Harry Styles’s ‘As It Was’. It runs for two minutes and 47 seconds. In a recent piece in iNews, Adam Sherwin argues that that popular music is getting shorter because of the attention spans of the TikTok generation. In the mobile world, a song needs to captureRead More
Next in my reviews of the year is music. Spotify loves to hit you with statistics at the end of your listening year (November to November is how they calculate it), and this year I am told I listened to 1,158 artists performing 2,832 songs spanning 61 genres, for a total of 20,072 minutes (orRead More
Bob Dylan keeps on going. Though there have been hints that he may announce a retirement, at least from touring, at the end of his 2021-2024 Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour, when he will be eighty-three, there is no certainty beyond life’s inevitability. So it is that, after the artistic triumph of hisRead More
It’s curious how we seem to value the recordings of songs over the songs themselves. That is, in times past it was the song itself that mattered and the song that has survived. There might be a known composer, there might be a singer’s name attached to it on sheet music (“as sung by”), orRead More
Up next in my review of the year is music. As with most years, I listened to a great deal: exploring the new; uncovering former favourites not heard in a long time to see if they stood up well; trying out the new recordings of established favourites, sometimes up to standard, sometimes needing more listensRead More
Michael Nesmith has died. You feel like a part of you has disappeared when a voice that has been at the back of your head for as long as you can remember just goes. Nesmith was the droll guy with the woolly hat in The Monkees’ TV show, which those of my age watched religiouslyRead More
Summertime, and the livin’ is easy Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high Oh, your daddy’s rich and your ma is good-lookin’ So hush little baby, don’ yo’ cry Every song has been borrowed. One welcomes originality and should be dismayed by formula, but a song must always have come from somewhere else. ARead More
It’s curious how a fine work of art immediately catches the eye. You walk through a gallery, and there is that picture at the far end whose ideal resolution of form and feeling stops all else except its contemplation. You pick up a book at random and on opening at any page a phrase isRead More
Back in 2017 I produced a post, Covering Bob, on cover versions of Bob Dylan’s songs. It was accompanied by a Spotify list that brought together other people’s versions of Dylan’s songs in chronological order of composition, no song appearing more than once though artists could recur. I rather liked the conceit behind it andRead More
At the start of 2020 Bob Dylan might have been looking forward to a quiet year. He had a few new recordings lined up or completed. There would be around 100 concerts – par for the course. He might weld a few gates, sip a little more whiskey, and rest a while. He was goingRead More