Here’s an entire BBC concert by Joni Mitchell, filmed in September, 1970. I’ve always thought that BBC concerts were the best, as they will always live and without accompaniment.  This one is 48 minutes long, and she had long career after this with some great albums (“Blue,” “For the Roses” and “Court and Spark”).

I have nothing to add to this music save to say that I think she’s the greatest combination of singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist of our time, and like most boys my age (I was 21), I was hopelessly in love with her. James Taylor, who also had a BBC concert that same year, rivals her on the male side for the trio of talents, but Joni has the overall edge.

Oh, and some of my favorite songs here are “Chelsea Morning” (at the start), “My Old Man” (16:47), “Woodstock” (25:10), “All I Want” (31:00, on the dulcimer), “All I Want” (31:45), “California” (36:45), and of course “Both Sides Now” (44:25)

Can you imagine being in the audience and hearing these songs for the first time?

The first comment is ineffably poignant:

A bit more than a week ago, I posted Rick Beato’s video critique of the NYTs list of the 30 Greatest Living Songwriters that you can find here (archived here).  Many of their choices, like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, were no-brainers, but Beato deemed others, like Bad Bunny, as bizarre. I agree.

Here he’s gotten his hands on some podcast footage of NYT staffers—three critics and the project’s editor—who helped compile the list, and for once he discards his geniality to make fun of these people in a nine-minute video. Beato even mocks the way they talk.  They do indeed come off as pompous and largely ignorant: Beato harps on their lack of formal musical education, though he says it’s not essential to evaluate music. (The participants went to Harvard, Yale, NYU, and Princeton; none has a degree in music.)

John Carmanica, the NYT’s pop music editor, is particularly annoying with his definition of a “songwriter” and his dismissal of Billy Joel as “not a hitmaker.”

As a whole, Beato says the NYT group is “Four Ivy League educated people—you’ve got two from Yale, one from Princeton, and Mr. Harvard there—that are the most pretentious, cork-sniffing, smug people that are all music critics with no background in music: exactly what you’d expect from a New York Times music critic.” He adds, “These people’s takes are absurd. All you need to watch them talk about music. It drove me nuts watching it.”

As for Carmanica’s claim that Billy Joel wasn’t a hitmaker but a person who wrote “one or 1.5 kinds of songs,” have a gander at this list:

Piano Man
It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me
She’s Always a Woman
Movin’ Out
My Life
Uptown Girls
Just the Way You Are
The Longest Time
Only the Good Die Young (This is my favorite of his; it’s extremely inventive and a good critique of Catholic repression of sexuality. The lyrics are a work of genius.)
New York State of Mind

And others. These run the gamut from hard rock to love ballads to biography, and how can you say his range is limited to one to 1.5 types of song? Cork-sniffing pedants!

And it’s great watching Beato blow off steam.

My favorite:

The NYT published a list of the 30 Greatest Living Songwriters that you can find here (archived here), and while many of the choices are no-brainers (Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Brian and Eddie Holland of Motown’s Holland/Dozier/Holland, Carole King, Smokey Robinson), but I immediately saw people whose songs I knew a bit about and don’t belong. Those include Taylor Swift (she doesn’t write most of her songs alone, but with a group, and I don’t think they’re “great” songs anyway), Bad Bunny, and Fiona Apple. And where the hell is Joni Mitchell, for crying out loud? What about Donald Fagan, or Laura Nyro, Marvin Gaye and of course, Paul McCartney, who is still alive, James Taylor, and Robbie Robertson? If you think that Bad Bunny is better than these, you have either a tin ear or a screw loose.

But don’t listen to me; listen to Rick Beato, who pondered the list and came to a similar conclusion: there are great songwriters on the list, but others whose presence is bizarre. Beato notes that the list is for American songwriters, so you can immediately exclude Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell as candidates. But music is a worldwide endeavor, and if you’re using only Anglophones, do you have to exclude people from the UK and Canada? Neil Young was born in Canada, but he’s now an American citizen, and dammit, he should be on that list!

Beato’s choice of notable omissions include Stevie Nicks/Lindsey Buckingham, Billie Corgan, Steven Tyler, Ann and Nancy Wilson. I disagree with some of these.  For those with solo careers who were omitted, Beato mentions  Jimmy Webb, Donald Fagan, James Taylor, and Billy Joel, all of whom belong.

Now Beato seems to use “number of plays” as an important criterion for greatness, which is a reflection of popularity rather than quality. And the NYT uses “mass appeal” as well, and I take issue with that. If you used the same criteria for literature, you’d have a bunch of dire but popular novelists like Ayn Rand and Barbara Cartland listed as “the greats”.

Now have a look at the NYT’s list and listen to Beato, and weigh in if you want. Beato asks people to put in his YouTube comments the singers would shouldn’t be on the list. Go tell him!

I heard this song yesterday on Facebook, where the melody was used as background for a video of a man walking two kimono-clad cats in Kyoto.  I hadn’t heard “Sukiyaki” in many years (it came out in the U.S. when I was 13), but I remembered the tune instantly, though the words of course are in Japanese. The Japanese title was changed for play in other countries, but changed into the name of a dish, for crying out loud. And I didn’t know how popular the song was (see below).

It’s a song of loneliness, though it inspired by politics. The details below are from Wikipedia.

It was 12 years ago when I posted the first video below of Sarah McLachlan singing what is perhaps her most famous song, “Angel.” I came across it again yesterday and decided to pair it with another version.  The first one, recorded in her home studio, shows her well-known ability to go between her “chest voice” (normal range) and “head voice” (high notes, like a falsetto or yodeling). It’s a lovely song, and was written by her and usually performed only with her own piano accompaniment (there are a lot of versions on the Internet). My earlier post describes what the song’s about.

When I looked up the song on Wikipedia, I found this:

On 8 April 2000, McLachlan performed “Angel” with Carlos Santana on guitar at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in Pasadena, California. The show was televised on Fox TV and released on the DVD Supernatural Live – An Evening with Carlos Santana and Friends.

And of course I hoped that song was on video, too, as I’m a Santana fan. Sure enough, it was, though Santana humbly embroiders the voice and piano with soft accompaniment and a short solo (starts at 2:24).  I would have preferred to see him cut loose with an electric solo, but of course it’s not appropriate for this song. Santna’s bit, though, was apparently improvised.

I can’t say that the version with Santana is better than the solo version, but how often do you get to hear two such different musicians play together?

In my view, “Blackbird,” a Beatles song written by Paul McCartney and released on the Beatles’ “White Album” in November, 1968, is one of his finest works.  Here we see him rehearsing it in the the EMI’s Abbey Road Studios on the very day it was recorded: June 11, 1968. (The released version is here.)

A few notes on the song from Wikipedia:

McCartney explained on Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road that the guitar accompaniment for “Blackbird” was inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s Bourrée in E minor, a well-known lute piece, often played on the classical guitar. As teenagers, he and George Harrison tried to learn Bourrée as a “show off” piece. The Bourrée is distinguished by melody and bass notes played simultaneously on the upper and lower strings. McCartney said that he adapted a segment of the Bourrée (reharmonised into the original’s relative major key of G) as the opening of “Blackbird”, and carried the musical idea throughout the song. The first three notes of the song, which then transitioned into the opening guitar riff, were inspired from Bach.

The first night his future wife Linda Eastman stayed at his home, McCartney played “Blackbird” for the fans camped outside his house.

. . . Since composing “Blackbird” in 1968, McCartney has given various statements regarding both his inspiration for the song and its meaning.  He has said that he was inspired by hearing the call of a blackbird one morning when the Beatles were studying Transcendental Meditation in Rishikesh, India, and also writing it in Scotland as a response to the Little Rock Nine incident and the overall civil rights movement, wanting to write a song dedicated to people who had been affected by discrimination.

You can listen to Bach’s Bourré here, but for the life of me I can’t hear the germ of “Blackbird” in it.

The sound is off at the beginning but starts 16 seconds in. There are a few other breaks in the sound.

It’s clear that the song was tweaked right up to the end, including the tempo, the pause, and the raising of the voice on the word “life” halfway into the song.

The guy speaking to John and Paul is of course George Martin, who contributed so much to the greatness of the group’s songs.  Notice that Paul breaks into other songs from time to time, including Helter Skelter and Mother Nature’s Son, both also on the White Album. At about 6:15, Lennon tunes his guitar to McCartney’s, as if wanting to accompany him on Blackbird. But no accompaniment was needed.

Check out Macca’s shoes! The woman sitting in the corner and then next to McCartney is identified by a commenter:

Francie Schwartz is the lady appearing in the video alongside Paul. She was Paul McCartney’s girlfriend during the summer of 1968, which coincides exactly with the White Album recording sessions. She wrote about her time at Abbey Road in her memoir Body Count (1972), giving a firsthand account of those legendary sessions.

This is McCartney at the apogee of his powers. The song is a work of genius.  In all my life I will never figure out where the ability to produce songs like this comes from. All I can guess is that there’s a kind of neuronal wiring in such people that can turn thoughts into wonderful music.

Paul McCartney was—and I use the past tense—one of the two greatest songwriters of the era that comprised the apogee of pop music. (The other was John Lennon; I’m excluding Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell as were folkier).  Sadly, he’s still making music, and, save for George Harrison, each of the Beatles immediately lost their touch after they went solo.

Here’s a McCartney song touted in the NYT as the “What’s New” in music we should pay attention to. It’s from a new album he’s releasing in May. Their blurb:

Paul McCartney, ‘Days We Left Behind”

“The Boys of Dungeon Lane,” to be released May 29, will be Paul McCartney’s first solo album since 2020; it’s named after a Liverpool street in the neighborhood where he grew up. In “Days We Left Behind,” a cozy ballad carried by acoustic guitar and piano, he sings about places and memories as both fragile and lasting; he mentions Forthlin Road, the street where he lived and wrote early songs with John Lennon. “Nothing stays the same,” he muses, but he also insists, “No one can erase the days we left behind.” His voice is shakier than it once was, only making things more poignant.

Listen for yourself. Yes, his voice is shaky, a mere shadow of his voice from the Sixties. Worse, the song is lame in both melody and lyrics, though the melody is worse than the lyrics, which are at least tolerable (I give them below).

I realize that Macca was made to create music, and probably can’t stop doing it.  And this song is still better than a lot of the dreck that passes for pop/rock music these days, but compared to the earlier McCartney, well, it’s sad.  If you leave the video on, you’ll see a horrific AI-generated video in which all four Beatles are stuck in.

Lyrics:

Looking back at white and black
Reminders of my past
Smoky bars and cheap guitars
But nothing built to last

Nothing ever stays
Nothing comes to mind
No one can erase
The days we left behind

See the boys of Dungeon Lane
Along the Mersey shore
Some of them will feel the pain
But some were meant for more

And nothing stays the same
No one needs to cry
Nothing can reclaim
The days we left behind

We met at Forthlin Road
And wrote a secret code
To never be spoken
I stand by what I said
The promise that I made
Will never be broken

Nothing ever stays
Nothing comes to mind
And no one can erase
The days we left behind

In the skies the skylarks rise
Above the sounds of war
Since that day I knew they’d stay
With me for evermore

’Cause nothing stays the same
And no one needs to cry
And no one is to blame
For the days we left behind
The days we left behind