songs
Freddie
“Does it mean this, does it mean that, that’s all anybody wants to know. I’d say what any decent poet would say if anyone dared ask him to analyze his work: if you see it, darling, then it’s there!”
Lena Horne – Stormy Weather (1943)
via Melissa
Leonard Cohen – The Stranger Song (1967)
It’s true that all the men you knew were dealers
Who said they were through with dealing
Every time you gave them shelter
I know that kind of man
It’s hard to hold the hand of anyone
Who is reaching for the sky just to surrenderAnd then sweeping up the jokers that he left behind
You find he did not leave you very much not even laughter
Like any dealer he was watching for the card
That is so high and wild
He’ll never need to deal another
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger
connect the pieces
“Folk songs were the way I explored the universe. They were pictures, and the pictures were worth more than anything I could say. I knew the inner substance of the thing. I could easily connect the pieces. Most of the other performers tried to put themselves across, rather than the song. But I didn’t care about doing that. With me it was about putting the song across.”
– Bob Dylan (Chronicles (Volume One))
“How much is the fish?”
Star Dust – Hoagy Carmichael
“Beside a garden wall
When stars are bright
You are in my arms
The nightingale tells his fairy tale
of paradise where roses grew
Though I dream in vain
In my heart it will remain
My stardust melody
The memory of love’s refrain”
Attempting to explain the song’s “eternal popularity,” Carmichael biographer Richard M. Sudhalter credits “some combination of young Carmichael’s heartland upbringing, Bix’s uniquely bardic sensibility, and the unself-conscious emotional directness that characterizes much non-urban American pop music.”
In Casino Royale, novelist Ian Fleming has René Mathis, one of James Bond’s fictional fellow secret agents, make a remark about Bond looking like Hoagy Carmichael. Later in the novel, after looking at his reflection in a mirror, Bond disagreed.
Paul Greer 