Monthly Archives: December 2009

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Song of the Day #508: ‘Fifteen’ – Taylor Swift

My wife runs an annual talent show at the high school where she teaches and watching it every year is a very stirring experience. It’s wonderful to sit in an auditorium full of 500 screaming kids going absolutely nuts over something my lady put together.

I’m also impressed by the talent onstage, especially the dancers, who perform acrobatic moves and come up with some very clever choreography. The music is mostly hip hop and the crowd knows every song, erupting each time a new beat kicks in. During the most popular songs, the whole room moves like a living thing as hundreds of bodies bounce up and down in unison.

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Shakira – She Wolf

Of all the artists I listen to regularly, Shakira is perhaps the biggest test of my recent conclusion that it’s music — not lyrics — that means the most to me.

For one thing, Shakira’s best work has been recorded entirely in Spanish, so I have very little idea what she’s saying at all (and I don’t care). And second, her English-language songs alternate between generic love proclamations/condemnations and some of the most oddball, head-scratching lyrics you’re likely to find in a contemporary pop song. This is a woman who once titled a song ‘Poem to a Horse.’

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Song of the Day #507: ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’ – The Beatles

Here’s the “favorite song” from Please Please Me I alluded to yesterday. There’s something so simple and lovely about this tune, which you can say about so many great Beatles songs. And I love the use of the intro before the main melody kicks in… similar to Lennon’s opening to ‘If I Fell.’

George Harrison handled lead vocals on this one. Normally George sang only on the tracks he wrote (about two per album, starting with the band’s second release) but he also handled several of the covers (‘Devil in Her Heart’ is a standout among that group) and occasionally, as in the case of today’s song, John and Paul let him take the lead on one of their compositions.

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Song of the Day #506: ‘Please Please Me’ – The Beatles

I started these Beatles weekends with the first track from their first album — ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ on Please Please Me. I’ve since dedicated a week to every Beatles album (with the exception of the lame Yellow Submarine) so I’m circling back around to again focus on their debut.

The band famously recorded the whole album in just under ten hours, essentially capturing on tape the live show they’d been performing for months in the Cavern Club (that’s where they racked up those 10,000 hours of practice Malcolm Gladwell writes about in Outliers). Six of the songs were covers while the eight originals made it clear right out of the gate that Lennon and McCartney were expert songwriters.

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Song of the Day #505: ‘America’ – Simon & Garfunkel

Simon & Garfunkel released only one more album (so far), though they have reunited a number of times since 1970. That release was The Concert in Central Park, a 1981 recording of the most memorable of those reunions.

Simon had been scheduled to appear solo, playing a free concert on the Park’s Great Lawn, but word got out that Garfunkel might appear and the show turned into something much bigger, both in size and importance. More than 500,000 people filled Central Park that night, celebrating not just the reunion of a classic group but the era they represented.

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