Post-Wedding Song(s)

A nice little song that A3's husband played for me the day after his wedding. I like it -- it's called "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt. (Also, the song Goodbye My Lover was so sad but I really liked it.)

My life is brilliant.
My love is pure.
I saw an angel.
Of that I'm sure.
She smiled at me on the subway.
She was with another man.
But I won't lose no sleep on that,
'Cause I've got a plan.

You're beautiful. You're beautiful.
You're beautiful, it's true.
I saw you face in a crowded place,
And I don't know what to do,
'Cause I'll never be with you.

Yeah, she caught my eye,
As we walked on by.
She could see from my face that I was,
Fucking high,
And I don't think that I'll see her again,
But we shared a moment that will last till the end.

You're beautiful. You're beautiful.
You're beautiful, it's true.
I saw you face in a crowded place,
And I don't know what to do,
'Cause I'll never be with you.
You're beautiful. You're beautiful.
You're beautiful, it's true.
There must be an angel with a smile on her face,
When she thought up that I should be with you.
But it's time to face the truth,
I will never be with you.

Luckiest

Apparently it's more like song of the month. I was busy with my band, Angerhard Eclectic, rehearsing for our Amishville gig last weekend. And now I'm out of town for A3's wedding, but luckily I have a couple tracks already online. Here is our band's own Luckiest Girl in the World. Our band leader and main singer wrote it just before her boyfriend broke up with her, so it's sort of tragic. But we had tons of fun with it, even though our guitar player told me my piano stuff sounds like the theme song from Alf. Hmmmm.

I worked out some better piano riffs and found a nicer piano sound for the concert version of this -- hope to get a better recording some time since this is a really rough demo. But I love it anyway!

I Stop And I Breathe

One of my favorite Elton John songs is on his recent album Peachtree Road. The song has a great reminiscent, bittersweet quality. These lyrics are really great and I keep forgetting that they're actually Elton John, without help from Tim Rice.

The Winner Takes it All

I've listened to this song a ton in the past couple years, and I never get sick of it somehow. It is perhaps ABBA's best song -- see the Wikipedia article on the song, "The Winner Takes it All". I've been on an ABBA kick recently after having seen Mamma Mia! on stage, which was in incredible experience. It really blew me away and I had a great time. My only regret is that I couldn't see it a second time because I got food poisioning the day I was going to go see it again.

I tried to do a little Schenkerian analysis on this piece for fun, but I'll refrain from posting more on that until I finish the actual analysis I have due as a final project.

Immigrant Day

On a more positive note, here is an inspiring little song, "Buffalo Nickel Photoplay, Inc." from the musical Ragtime. The character singing is an immigrant named Baron Ashkenazy who starts a motion picture company -- it seems fitting with the recent visibility in the media about the push for granting citizenship to illegal immigrants in the U.S.

I love the B section in this song because of the sudden change in orchestration that adds the high descending piano sixteenth notes. It's such a shift in texture that it reminds me of a key change even though it's just moving from the tonic to the subdominant. After 8 measures, though, it does modulate up a half step. Like many of the pieces from Ahrens and Flaherty, this modulates a lot -- I count 5 times in just 2 and a half minutes.

Neil Diamond Requiem

My friend sdoic inspired me with her daily poem list to set up a daily song. Of course, it will probably be more like one every several days or worse depending on my schedule. I'll just leave songs up for a short time span after each post.

Sadly, I have to start out on a somber note with some songs I've listened to recently while remembering a guy I knew who died in a plane crash last week. Robert Samels (that's his photo to the right) was an amazing musician and all-around outstanding person who I miss and mourn even though I only knew him through the several weeks during which he conducted the choir I was in this semester. The music school set up a blog to help memorialize each student in the plane -- Robert's certainly elicited a bunch of comments.

I found a surprising number of songs about loss and stuck them in a playlist, so I'll choose one of these for the first song of the day. The most appropriate piece, of course, would be the "Pie Jesu" from Robert's own Requiem which was performed at his memorial service yesterday. But since I don't have a recording, we'll settle for something else. Lots of Dave Matthews Band songs seem appropriate, as do songs from Wildhorn's musical The Cival War or Bernstein's Mass, but perhaps the most fitting is a short song, "Done Too Soon", written by Neil Diamond who said he was inspired during a scary airplane flight to write a song about life ending too soon.

Written by Neil Diamond

Jesus Christ, Fanny Brice,
Wolfie Mozart and Humphrey Bogart and
Genghis Khan and
On to H. G. Wells.

Ho Chi Minh, Gunga Din
Henry Luce and John Wilkes Booth
And Alexanders
King and Graham Bell.

Ramar Krishna, Mama Whistler,
Patrice Lumumba and Russ Colombo,
Karl and Chico Marx,
Albert Camus.

E. A. Poe, Henri Rousseau,
Sholom Aleichem and Caryl Chessman,
Alan Freed and
Buster Keaton too.

And each one there
Has one thing shared:
They have sweated beneath the same sun,
Looked up in wonder at the same moon,
And wept when it was all done
For bein' done too soon,
For bein' done too soon.

For bein' done