The Album Thing: Karrin Allyson, Collage

Time for today’s album! (If you don’t know what I’m doing, look at some of the previous posts.) When we moved back to Missouri, Karrin Allyson kind of welcomed us back. She was still based in Kansas City then. We still see her every chance we get. Even though she’s in New York now, you can still hear the Midwest in her voice. She does so much so well: upbeat scat bebop, blues, ballads, sambas, pop . . . she could sing the phonebook, and it’d be great! And she doesn’t get enough credit as a band leader.

It was hard to pick one album by her, but Collage is one that always makes me smile.

This album welcomes you with its first song, “It Could Happen to You/Fried Bananas.” (Would you call this a “mashup”? With “Fried Bananas” in it?)

A vocal version of Clifford Brown’s classic “Joy Spring.”

I said she can do ballads. Here, she does tribute to a Thelonius Monk classic, “Ask Me Now.”

And yes, blues. She’s a big Bonnie Raitt fan, and here’s “Give It Up or Let Me Go.”

And, for fun, a live version of the above.

The Album Thing: Horse, God’s Home Movie

Okay, y’all here’s today’s album! (If you don’t know what I’m doing, look at some of the previous posts.) God’s Home Movie has a special place in my heart because Sue and I bought it together, soon after we started dating, and it’s got a song on it that we would’ve played at our wedding, if we’d had a wedding with music in it.

And yeah, I’m a huge fan of Horse McDonald. What an amazing performer.

The title track is the one we especially love. We would’ve played this song at our wedding.

Another song from this album, “Imitation,” has an odd juxtaposition of a bouncy upbeat feel with lyrics about being dumped. When Sue and I met, we were both rebounding from some awful relationships. When you’re starting to feel good again, you can shake your head and kind of laugh. Lyrics: “Another innocent in your trail of destruction / left behind like a tree hit by lightning / all my senses you worked so hard at persuading / they don’t know what’s real and the great imitation / I was so sadly mistaken”!

Okay, a bonus song from Horse’s first CD; this video’s from some kind of German TV broadcast. I thought it was pretty fun. Americans have called her “the Scottish k.d. lang.” It’s not a perfect description at all, but the time was about the same, and the androgynous look was similar, and they both have great voices.

The Album Thing: Ferron, Phantom Center

The album thing! (If you don’t know what I’m doing, look at some of the previous posts.)

Phantom Center is another album that came into my life at a time when I needed to hear the things it said. (By the way, the photo is of the cover of the original version of this CD. I guess it’s a collector’s item now. The remake version of Phantom Center is used in my links below.)

“Stand Up” (yeah, that’s the Indigo Girls doing supporting vocals)

“The Cart” is one of Ferron’s best songs, I think, which automatically makes it one of the best songs ever. The “wheel,” of course, is metaphorical. (Like, Buddhism.)

“Sunken City” is an amazing song, too. Whoa, nelly, watch it build. “Some things just pull so strong, like the map of the sky is the map of your heart” . . . “Let’s go on a hunch and give this a name.”

If you’ve never heard of Ferron, I feel sorry for you. That’s like never having heard of Leonard Cohen. “Our Purpose Here” is one of her earlier masterpieces (from another album).

Ferron’s best songs have some trace of darkness (which she can have in abundance; for example, see “White Wing Mercy” from Phantom Center). Here’s the (autobiographical) title track from her album Shadows on a Dime. Another masterpiece. Like Joni Mitchell, she’s a poet first.

Finally, if you don’t care for Ferron’s voice, listen to what others can do with her songs. Here’s an example.

The Album Thing: Indigo Girls, Rites of Passage

The album thing again! It’s a Facebook fad that’s going around. You’re supposed to post a picture of albums you especially love. Since I’m going to the trouble to share it on social media, I might as well share it here, too.

Don’t worry, eventually we’ll get to the instrumental selections, and you may find some musicians you’ve never heard of. If this is annoying, then blame Facebook. But here's today's selection.

There are so many good songs on this album. The album helped me pivot from depression into hopefulness. “Love Will Come to You,” in particular helped me learn how to talk hopefully to myself—something that had been difficult-to-impossible when I’m in the midst of depression. But this song helped me to make that pivot.

Having hopefulness is a helpful illusion, I think. Sometimes in the deeper parts of depression, hopefulness feels like the cruelest hoax. At such times I have hunted for songs that offer the kind of bittersweet hope that only a fellow sufferer can convey. “Joy” isn’t the word for it, but it opens the door to the party at least.

Music has sometimes functioned like a drug for me, and often not in a good way. I don’t listen to the Indigo Girls much anymore. Most of what I listen to is instrumental. The vocal music I listen to tends to be classical or jazz, where the artistry and styling accentuates the theatrical aspect of the lyrics, which helps me remember that the singing is a performance, a role, a mask, and not necessarily a personal truth.

The Album Thing: k.d. lang, Absolute Torch and Twang

The album thing again! It’s a Facebook fad that’s going around. You’re supposed to post a picture of albums you especially love. Since I’m going to the trouble to share it on social media, I might as well share it here, too. How many do you think I’m gonna end up posting?

The influential album du jour! You knew k.d. lang had to come up sometime. This here was her big one for me. Isn’t it fun how certain albums are associated with certain times in your life?

This album, with its self-assured opening song “Luck in My Eyes,” was, for me, Phoenix, and it was also San Francisco. Do I need to say more? Ah, youth, and its confidence.

I don’t even really like country that much. But boy, it sure can convey all the trouble love can get a stupid young person into. Here’s to “Pullin’ Back the Reins.”

By the time I left Arizona for Montana . . . so many regrets. Wow. “Trail of Broken Hearts” was my new theme song. I was a mess.

The Album Thing: Meg Christian, Turning It Over

The album thing continues! It’s a Facebook fad that’s going around. You’re supposed to post a picture of albums you especially love. And why not share it on my blog, too. This is fun! Today I’m sharing an album that few probably know, but it changed my life, for the better. Of all the women’s music performers I used to hear on KOPN radio, Meg Christian was always my favorite. I loved her tasty classical guitar playing, and her clear, expressive, but unaffected singing style.

The title track, “Turning It Over,” refers to twelve-step programs (turning it over to a higher power). More generally, however, it is about being grounded, true to oneself, focused. It spoke to me when I was in ninth grade, and it speaks to me now. (No, I don’t know why the video shows a covered bridge.)

Meg Christian helped me learn the vocabulary of my people. And songs like “There’s a Light” helped me get in touch with my true feelings, which was indeed difficult for me.

And then there’s “Southern Home,” also from the album, about reconciling love of one’s homeland with hatred of old-school bigotry. This is an album about softening oneself and learning to let go of what one cannot change. This album came out well before the Indigo Girls, k.d. Lang, REM, etc. made it okay to be a liberal southerner or small-town/rural inhabitant. I’m not a southerner, but as a midwesterner, I can relate. Columbia was, and still is, an island of progressivism in a sea of cultural conservativism. It’s possible to love your homeland while still detesting its bigotry and small-mindedness.

The Album Thing: Original Broadway Cast, Annie

The album challenge. It’s a Facebook fad that’s going around. It was supposed to be ten albums, but who are we kidding. I have lots more than ten albums to be happy about!

This is my nod to Broadway, to junior high when I learned to appreciate the glories of the American musical theater, and to Tricia Edwards, wherever she may be today. She turned a bunch of midwestern middle school monsters into Annie aficionados, Broadway buffs, Camelot connoisseurs.

Also, something that really instilled this as a favorite musical, is that my little high school self was lucky enough to be tapped to play the first trumpet part in our high school musical my senior year, and guess which musical it was. Indeed, our high school’s performance of Annie in 1984 happened to be the first amateur performance of that musical in our state, and I got to play the first notes of the musical as a solo. “The sun’ll come out tomorrow . . .”

Seriously. The overture starts with a trumpet solo.

A few more words about Tricia Edwards, the vocal teacher at Oakland Junior High when I was there. She made waves with her ambitious school musicals for such young students. She had junior high kids doing Broadway shows (including Once Upon a Mattress and Bye, Bye Birdie). She said it was actually easy: you just need to treat the kids as if they were able to do the jobs, show them how to do it, and they rose to the challenge. . . . Fact is, another ingredient is that we all adored her.

Her class in the American Musical Theater put us light years ahead of where we might have been; it gave us an overview and history of an important part of American performing arts culture. One of her personal friends had been an original cast understudy on Broadway for the role of Grace Farrell (Daddy Warbucks’ assistant). Mrs. Edwards made something very, very remote from our little Missouri lives seem somehow within close reach. (If you watched Glee, she was basically Mr. Schue, only thirty years before Glee; Matthew Morrison was just an infant.) I wish I could write her a letter to tell her thanks. Mrs. Edwards, if you’re still out there, I hope you find this post.