Here’s a great track from Dar Williams’ 2000 album, The Green World. Yoko Ono has taken a lot of shit over the years for breaking up The Beatles, the sort of female-shaming that wouldn’t fly so easily these days.
Williams is a great feminist songwriter (see ‘When I Was a Boy,’ one of my very favorite songs) and she takes up for Yoko here quite nicely.
I started the week with Hamilton‘s opening song, so it’s only fitting that I close with the final song of Act One. Following a successful stint commanding a battalion at the battle of Yorktown (depicted in another first act highlight), Hamilton starts a law practice and eventually joins Washington’s cabinet.
This track brilliantly incorporates elements of almost every Act One song, pulling it all together in a rousing finish that will no doubt send my family into fits of ecstatic glee prior to intermission.
Alexander Hamilton is certainly the central character of Hamilton, but you could argue that the lead role belongs to Aaron Burr. Burr serves as the narrator and has more time onstage than Hamilton. He also gets some of the best songs — Lin-Manuel Miranda jokingly bemoaned the fact that he gave two of the best songs he’s ever written to a character somebody else gets to play.
That somebody else is the fabulous Leslie Odom Jr., and today’s SOTD, ‘Wait For It,’ is one of those two songs (the other will show up next week).
Hamilton might be about the Founding Father, but Lin-Manuel Miranda pays proper attention to the women in his life, particularly his wife Elizabeth Schuyler, and her sister Angelica.
The Schuyler Sisters (along with little-seen Peggy) are introduced in a rousing number set in the streets of New York, but they meet Hamilton a little bit later, through a couple of songs that play with time and space in interesting ways.
Most of Hamilton is composed in the hip-hop/R&B style, paired with the sound of traditional Broadway musical theater, but on a few tracks, Lin-Miranda Manuel goes full-on British invasion. Appropriately, those songs are performed by the head of a different sort of British invasion, King George III.
Played memorably (until a couple of weeks ago) by Jonathan Groff, George is foppish and sarcastic and a little bit sadistic. He wants to colonies under his thumb, to quote another British rock band, and he’ll remind them of it ever so melodically.
