Another year, another soundtrack. The first in this site’s regular summings-up of the cultural year from my perspective is music. Spotify’s annual account of your listening statistics informs me that I listened to 3,427 songs lasting 20,271 minutes in total (or fourteen days), representing 1,416 artist performing across sixty-three genres, headed by folk, avant-garde jazzRead More
Category: Music
Bob covers Bob
Bob Dylan’s latest album, Shadow Kingdom, is an intriguing puzzle. The album is the soundtrack of a 2021 concert film, Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan, directed by Alma Har’el. The film was released as a one-off on the live streaming platform Veeps.com, with little information provided beforehand on its form or contents.Read More
Miniatures
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
2022 – the year in music
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
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
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
Alternative Bob
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
2021 – the year in music
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
Harmony constant
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
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
Simple twist of fate
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