Songs in the key of my life: John Cale - Sabotage

My German Rock-Lexikon set John Cale's album Paris 1919 on their list of the 100 most important albums in rock music. I got the album and my disappointment was immense: I expected a more aggressive effort from one the Velvet Underground's founders, but this was in my ears a very mellifluous work. This was in the 70s, and although I eventually did find appreciation for this album much later, I dismissed John Cale for the time being. However, a few years later, 1979 actually, one of my favourite radio jockeys, played Sabotage on his show, and this song really knocked me off my feet. Here you had a full force aggreesive song with messy cacophonous guitar lines and a militant message ("Read and destroy everything you read in the press Read and destroy everything you read in books"). In comparison most contemporary punk songs sounded lame. It took me decades to get the album on cd, but I had it on cassette, copied directly from that radio show. I've heard it numerous times, and for years it was also useful for scaring guests away.

Songs in the key of my life: Massive Attack - Teardrop

There are always certain melodies that come back to my mind very often, and this song is one of the most frequent. For many years I had known the tune very well, but could not find out where I had it from. Only recently had I caught the idea that it might be by Tricky, but didn't find the song on his albums. I thought it somehow unlikely to be by Massive Attack, but I went through all their albums title by title till I found 'Teardrop' on their album 'Mezzanine'. Now it all fits together: the singer is Elizabeth Fraser whose voice is so well-known from This Mortal Coil's interpretation of Tim Buckley's 'Song to the Siren' and her voice is just as heavenly-otherwordly on this song. Allmusic.com say:  "The blend of earthy with ethereal shouldn't work at all", but to me that is quite a good description of trip hop in itself. Needless to say that it's a bit embarassing I hadn't listened to this particular album in 10 year...


Massive Attack - Teardrop von blackcandy

Songs in the key of my life: Umm Kulthum

I've always been interested in the music of other cultures and fascinated that there are far more different musical concepts than what we know from our Western education and musical traditions. The problem is that it's difficult to find literature and examples for such music (but the internet has made it incredibly more easy by now). A friend of mine, an acclaimed mathematician, who I meet only occasionally (and haven't seen in many years now) once invited me over to his place having a few drinks after going out to eat. He had a disappointedly small record collection (maybe 10 records), but there was one album that caught my eye, obviously of Arabic origin. It was by the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, and my friend explained to me that he had once heard her songs in a special radio show and fell in love with her music. The same happened to me, when he played the record for me. It took me years to find out about her and to get a cd of her music. One reason alone was the fact that her name is spelt in various variations including Om Kalsoum, Om Koulsum, Om Kalthoum, Oumme Kalsoum and Umm Kolthoum. I learnt that she was and still is the most beloved and honored singer in the complete Arabic world. Wikipedia says: "More than three decades after her death, she is widely regarded as the greatest female singer in Arab music history." and adds a quote from Virginia Danielson:"Imagine a singer with the virtuosity of Joan Sutherland or Ella Fitzgerald, the public persona of Eleanor Roosevelt and the audience of Elvis and you have Umm Kulthum".

I haven't mentioned a specific song, since I really couldn't pick one out, but there's another reason: her songs are not what we would expect of a song, the duration is not fixed and is measured in hours rather than minutes. Therefore they are better called 'epics' than just simply 'songs'. Of course the topics are as in most cultures about love and longing and loss, but as an outsider listening to her I can only get a grasp of the music itself. I guess you can say that her music is based on old traditional Arabic music and her style was to improvise at great length. She'd take a phrase and repeat it over and over and over, varying slightly in color and tone and creating a sort of ecstatic frenzy in the audience. It is said that the audience often requested that she repeat such 'sequences'.

I recommend to read the quite informative Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umm_Kulthum

Songs in the key of my life: Pram - Mother of Pearl

Working for an online retail stores we occassionally get some remainders on special occassions, books, cds and dvds. Since this stuff is so varied, there is only rarely something that suits one's interests, or you pick what is absolutely new to you and hope for a rare discovery. Over 10 years I only made 2 such discoveries: Bright Eyes and: Pram. It was the latter's EP "Somniloquy" as promotional copy, which contained parts of their "Museum of Imaginary Animals" and remixes by different artists. 'Mother of Pearl' was the first song on the EP and was a big surprise to me: this was otherwordly and mysterious music that sounded like it came from a different era. Pram are often compared with Sterelab and Broadcast, but while they do share a very British quirkiness, Pram's music is much more surreal and even a bit creepy and sometimes sounds as if played under an aquatic bubble. Pram were founded in 1990 and still active today, and I haven't missed an album since.

Songs in the key of my life: Erik Satie - Trois Gnossiennes

My relationship to classical music has always been a bit complicated. Although I attended a better school, the music lessons were unsystematic, half-heartedly presented by overburdened and often very conservative teachers, and consisted of endless writing and practicing music scores. Believe it or not we didn't hear much music at all. My piano lessons with my great uncle didn't help much either, since he prefered German children and folk songs, and I prefered improvising wildly over practicing up and down scales. Nearly everything I know about classical music I picked up at a later age and all by myself. Therefore there are giant gaps in my knowledge and my preferences are very selective. There are not too many composers whose work I admire in its entirety, but Erik Satie is certainly one of them and he ranks high in my admiration. I came upon his work crabwise through his score for Rene Clair's classic short film 'Entr'acte' and his association with Dada. However, Satie's eccentricity as person and as artist was genuine compared to some Dadaists for whom Dada was just an attitude, and he was that way long before that artistic movement came to life. The 'Trois Gnossiennes' were actually composed as early as 1890 and published 1893. Satie composed quite a few series of piano compostions like the Gymnopédies, the Sarabandes, the Nocturnes, all worth listing here, but I'll put my attention on the Gnossiennes. The reason is that they are really the first of these compostions that I came across and, although I enjoy the Gymnopédies nearly as well, those have been misused so much in popular culture (even in advertising!) that I kind of avoid listening to them too often. And besides I still love 'Gnossienes no. 1' the most. The Gnossiennes are (as all the others) extremely short pinao compositions, and the scores have no barlines, therefore no time signature, I guess you can say no preconceived rhythm, and the instructions are often quirky as in "with astonishment" or "with doubt" or "tip in yourself", therefore the performer is quite free to interpret his version, and there are actually many quite differing performances. Basically there is consent to play them slow, and most controversy is about the tempo of a performance (to some the YouTube version I chose is much too fast!). The melodies are very simple and harmonious as if in an oriental key and their repetitiveness convey a sense of timelessnes and infinity and utter beauty. They are composed in a completely new manner, Satie was intending to reinvent classical music, and these compositions are considered today as the first true examples of minimal or ambient music. While preparing this note I have become newly enthusiastic of his music. If you have a chance do check out his eccentric orchesrtal works 'Parade' and 'Relache' and all the other piano miniatures I ighly recommend them! I also decided to start practicing to try and play these tunes.

Songs in the key of my life: Joy Division - Komakino

I'm ashamed to admit that I came across Joy Divison much too late. That is: I did know about the band and I was intending to look into their music some time later, but Ian Curtis commited suicide and that was the end of the band named Joy Division (the remaining members continued as the immensely successful New Order). In 1980 the single 'Komakino' was released posthumously as a 7" flexi disc limited to 10,000 copies and given away free in selected record shops and it was introduced on that Bavarian radio show I have already mentioned so often. The song is quite unusual compared to the band's previous releases, it is driven by a more tribal beat and appears like as if mechanically driven, of course the result of the band's impeccable timing. Still, it undoubtedly couldn't be mistaken that this is any other band than Joy Division, and this particular last title might have been directing to what they would be doing in the future. This song led me to purchase all of their previous music, and I can easily say Joy Division is one of the best and most important bands in rock history. There is not a single song by them that is less than perfect.

Songs in the key of my life: Laughing Hands - Dog Photos

The internet is an amazing thing. While compiling this list of songs I have come upon quite a few titles that I have had in my head for decades, but was always unsuccessful to find and purchase. These last few weeks I have been very successful, and I'll be reporting about them all in due time. Only today a song came back to my mind that I had heard on that Bavarian radio show 'Zündfunk' in 1981. It was a fascinating and weird peice of electronica, I'd say it was like the Residents playeda Kraftwerk song, and the listener was informed it was by an obscure Autralian band named Laughing Hands. That's 30 years ago, and I've been searching for that band ever since. In those days it was really not easy to get the music you were searching for. There was no internet, you lived in a provincial Bavarian town with record stores who hardly sold truly independent music, even in Munich the specialty stores didn't sell 'everything', the same goes for mail order companies. I never came across that Laughing Hands album. Stupidly I did come across a cd by a band of the same name and bought it, I guess it was the mid 90s, but unfortunately that was a nice, but otherwise not particularly world music combo from Denver, Colorado (who are still active, it seems). Alas, just today I decided to do a new research online, and though it can be said there is little information available, I was tremendously successful: I found out that there is a Japanese cd compiling both albums of the original Laughing Hands and I ordered it. And even better: that one title that has been lingering in my head since 1981 is on Youtube! It has no title, it's simply track 6 on thier 'Dog Photos' album. Amazingly my memory has stored the music as exactly as it sounds. More information was to be found as well: Laughing Hands were the first band of the Australian electronic composer Paul Schütze, a legend ever since, who has produced quite a few remarkable ever since. So this is another artist I'll be looking into more in the near future.

Songs in the key of my life: Rex Gildo - Fiesta Mexicana

When we emigrated to Germany in 1971 I was in for quite a culture shock. One of the worst things I realized was that Germany probably has the worst popular music in the world. It is bad in any sense of the world. One evening a few weeks after our arrival my parents took my grandparents out for a dinner, and my sister and I stayed with a teenage boy who babysitted us for the few hours they were away. We were at his place, and he fed us with Mon Cheri confection (which contains alcohol!) and watched the show ZDF Hitparade with us. That show was hosted by a very vile guy, Dieter-Thomas Heck, something like a greasy used car dealer celebrating 'German' pop music. The songs were what actually was popular among the older German population, but was watched by nearly everybody. The songs presented were to be sung in German, the rule being that only 3 words could come from a different language. I think much later they changed that rule completely. The music was usually simple conventional songs with a 'catchy' refrain and a monotonous stomping rhythm. Most popular were such songs that had simple lyrics that everybody could clap and sing along to, and even better if the singer and the song had some kind of exotic context. Out of a perverse fascination I have watched most of the shows in the 70s, and although I hate all of them, many songs have remained in my memory - unfortunately. Therefore I could come up with quite a few titles, but I picked this one, since it fits the cliche quite perfectly and was a hit in 1972. Oh, I forgot to mention: like 'Fiesta Mexicana' the more successful songs were not just one-hit wonders. These are played to this day in beer tents and fairs all over the country, everybody knows these songs, if they like them or not. Rex Gildo was successful performing as if he were a Hispanic singer, but actually he was a Bavarian born and raised just a few miles from where I live here, his real name was Ludwig Franz Hirtreiter. Behind the in-the face fake cheery Spanish boy image he must have been a troubled human being. He died in 1999 aged 63, having spent three days in an artificially-induced coma after attempting suicide by jumping from the window of his apartment building. He was said to have been suffering psychological problems. After his death, it was reported that he had been gay and involved in a relationship with his secretary with whom he lived, for seven years.

Songs in the key of my life: King Crimson - Lark's Tongues In Aspic, Part I

I found King Crimson through the book 'Zoom Boom' by Raoul Hoffmann, the same source that led me to Frank Zappa. The chapter about innovative 'avantgarde' rock music described King Crimson's album 'Lark's Tongues In Aspic' in length, and since I was very much interested in what you now call 'prog rock' I was instantly convinced. I was in for a surprise, since this music was quite different to what I had expected. In fact, the first piece 'Lark's Tongues In Aspic, Part 1' starts in near silence, and if you're not patient you might have the impression something's wrong with the record. The piece is a swooping 13 minutes long, and there seems to be no apparent structure, although it does have that long silent 'build-up' and there are different parts, even some you could call 'heavy'. Later on the album there is a 'Part 2' with no coherent connection to the first part. Nevertheless, it consistently keeps up your interest and leaves you wondering about the concept of it as a whole. I still don't really understand it, but love to listen to it every so often - since more than 30 years. And yes, the whole album is great, but that first peice has stuck with me ever since.

Songs in the key of my life: Snakefinger - The Picture Makers vs. Children of the Sea

When mentioning The Residents, Snakefinger (real name: Philip Charles Lithma)always comes to mind. He's the guy who plays the manical guitar solo on their cover version of 'Satisfaction', and he was their off-and-on guitarist for nearly 2 decades. The Residents also contributed to his solo albums, which contain amzingly original and quirky music. 'The Picture Makers vs. Children of the Sea' is on his album 'Greener Pastures' and is a wonderful 9-minute sci-fi mini-opera. When I bought the album in 1980, this song immediately fascinated me and I couldn't get it out of my head. More than 30 years later it still doesn't sound dated.

Songs in the key of my life: The Residents - Satisfaction

The Residents is another band that has been accompanying me since the mid/late 70s and the one I've seen most often live in concert. When Punk rock became popular, I must admit I hated most of what I heard; to me it was mainly rehashed rockabilly with Bryan Ferry wannabee vocalists. The whole attitude concerning 'old' rock music, the 'boring old farts', seemed contrived and insincere, because rock wasn't really that old and what these bands were playing wasn't really that new either. Therefore, when I first encountered The Residents' cover of 'Satisfaction', it was so much more the real thing: a malevolent crazy destruction  of a classic rock song that sounded like nothing else I had ever heard before. It had mean ugly vocals and probably the most otherworldy guitar solo of all times, an ingenious new kind of music! All of their albums (and those of guitarist Snakefinger) in the 70s underscored this first impression and I've been collecting thier work ever since, they're still as prolific as ever. It's diificult to describe their music, at the time I would have said they were reinventing music with toy instruments, but with continuous listening you'd recognize much more finesse. Luckily I was an early fan and was able to see them with Snakefinger live several times, before he died in 1987 (on the day of his death his single, "There's No Justice in Life", was released). There will be many more songs on this list from both The Residents and Snakefinger to come. oh, and I still have that 7" single in yellow vinyl.

Songs in the key of my life: The Beatles - A Day in the Life

In the late 1960s my Dad attended night college after his daytime job. His English class must have been quite modern, because he bought two albums by the Beatles, 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' and 'Magical Mystery Tour' - they were discussing the lyrics at college! Still, it probably was a bit simplistic, my Dad since then is convinced that 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds' is code for LSD. I really wouldn't bother with such interpretations, the albums were so much more than just mere adolescent wisecracking.
I guess those two records are the ones I havelistened to the most often in my life, although not much recently. And I could probably mention any song from them in this list. I was just a child, but I became completely enthralled by this music, and despite my innocence and musical ignorance I clearly realized that 'Sgt. Pepper's' had an invisible concept behind it. Of course, the superficial framework of the album was as a show being presented with an opener and an end, but the songs themselves held a quality of their own and still there was some kind of inner coherence. 'A Day in the Life' is the most unusual title, first as it is played after the show as something like a bonus or afterthought, but also it is thematically going somewhere else. Someone's reading the newspaper and then drifts off into a strange dream. Again you could interpret it as another song about a trip, but as a child you didn't need to know what drugs are to go along with the concept. Kids do it all the time - without any drugs. More than just a song it seems to combine two or more songs in one grandiose epic (much like Frank Zappa loves to do), the orchestral parts expanding the dimension of the music into another realm. It's still hard to pinpoint the song's impact or to decipher the lyrics completely, but it remains one of my favourite songs, although I can hardly listen to most of the Beatles' other hits any more. I'm glad I was able to hear this as a child, later on in life I might have not appreciated it as much after having heard even more sophistacted music by then.

Songs in the key of my life: Broadcast - Black Cat

On MySpace I had a pal, Nayfo (real name: Ugo), a higly talented musician in London, with whom I discussed music a lot. Unfortunately, I haven't heard from him for quite a while. He once recommended the band Broadcast (actually a duo, James Cargill and Trish Keenan), who created very innovative electronic pop music and were known for their perfectionism in the studio. I checked them out, of course, and instantly fell in love with 'Black Cat', a title from their album 'Tender Buttons'. It is a lovely simple and catchy (and quirky) tune ('curiouser and curiouse') and pops up in my head every so often. Naturally I got all their albums and was never disappounted. Broadcast were not just an obscure band known by insiders. Their last album 'Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age' was announced best album of the year 2009 by the music magazine The Wire (in my opinion the best music mag there is). It's doubtful, though, that there will be more music under the band name. Tragically, lead singer Trish Keenan died of the swine flu on 14 January 2011 at the age of 42. 'Black Cat' has become their swan song to me, the line 'Awkwardness happening to someone you love' can bring tears to my eyes.

Songs in the key of my life: Dinosaur Jr. - Little Fury Things

Dinosaur Jr. are one of my all-time favourite bands - and luckily they have re-united recently and are still releasing great albums. In the late 80s they re-establised the lead guitar as the central instrument in alternative rock combining Sonic Youth's noise with more conventional songs and a touch of Neil Young, or like Allmusic.com says: "they injected late-'80s alternative rock with monumental levels of pure guitar noise." 'Little Fury Things' is the first song on their album 'You're Living All Over Me' and it goes off with a bang! In fact the first 3 songs go on with the same immense power, before some more slower titles are played. In concert Dinosaur Jr. were quite overwhelming, I got to see them once in Munich at the time the album came out. A still little-known band called My Bloody Valentine were support, soon to be another one of my favourites! We arrived early at the concert hall, actually a small pub in a more suburban part of the city, and J Mascis was standing around and asked me where to go to get something to eat. Unfortunately I had no idea, the area was surrounded by depressing apartment complexes, but no stores or shops besides this pub...
'Little Fury Things' has remained something like a personal anthem for me.

Songs in the key of my life: Pere Ubu - Final Solution

Some songs turn into your personal anthems and some bands accompany you all your life. Pere Ubu is one of those bands to me. My pal Arno and I would meet on evenings at his place (this was in the late 70s/early 80s), we'd drink a huge bottle of Retsina wine with some cheese, and we had a list of songs we'd play at full volume and which we'd sing along with. 'Final Solution' was one of those anthems. I'll be mentioning the other ones over time. We pretty much got acquainted to Pere Ubu's music from the start, I had their early singles, and of course I immediately got their first album on its release, 'The Modern Dance', easily one of the great classics of rock music. I wasn't into punk, I prefered music with a bit more sophistication. Although 'Final Solution' comes along mightily as a punk song, the lyrics are more of a parody than to be taken seriously. But you can sing along very easily. Pere Ubu is one of those bands I've seen live most often (I also have their complete catalogoe of releases), they are great live performers and a legend, but they hardly ever get an audience of more than 100 people, sadly. It was a sensation to us that Pere Ubu currently are on tour performing their early singles and first album in a retrospective kind of program. Of course, Arno and and I were there and we sang along to 'Final Solution' - together with the few other people that found their way to the concert.

The girls won't touch me
Cos I've got a misdirection
Living at night isn't helping my complexion
The signs all saying it's a social infection
A little bit of fun's never been an insurrection

Mamma threw me out till I get some pants that fit
She just won't approve of my strange kind of wit
I get so excited, always gotta lose
Man that send me off
Let them take the cure

Don't need a cure
Need a final solution

Buy me a ticket to a sonic reduction
Guitars gonna sound like a nuclear destruction
Seems I'm a victim of natural selection
Meet me on the other side, another direction

Don't need a cure
Need a final solution

Songs in the key of my life: The Mothers of Invention - Uncle Meat

For a long time in my teens and beyond I was a huge Frank Zappa fan, still am today, but at one time most friends and acquaintances would see me as that Zappa guy. Only recently I visited a used record store and the guy behind the counter came right up to me to ask a specific Zappa question, although I didn't know he was!
My luck was that I had a very bad start with Frank Zappa. Inspired by Raoul Hoffmann's book Zoom Boom on innovative rock music that was a great help to me finding inspirational music I bought the soundtrack 200 Motels. Besides having heard some (sensational) titles by Zappa on radio this was the first album I actually purchased. It was quite a shock and gave me nightmares for at least 3 days. I hated it and even tried to sell it, in vain, of course. I still don't cherish the album that much, but I worked myself through the album piece by piece, bit by bit, until I understood it musically. To make a long story short, I was not done with Zappa yet.
So I got the Uncle Meat album, another recommendation from a book, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos' and Barry Graves' Rock-Lexikon, one of my first 'bibles' on music. It was on their list of the 100 rock albums essential to a collection (till 1976, that is), and I was immediately taken in. This was to me an ingenious collage of all kinds of music, very much in the style of the creepy pop-art cover. There are so many surprises, so much humor (musically and lyrically), wonderful melodies set in almost as throw-aways and powerful atonal passages, it's overwhelming. I still love to listen through it, at best in complete (it's a double album). At the time my family took a vacation in a small mountain town in Austria, and without a record player I quickly copied the 2 records on cassette for the trip. All through that rainy foggy horror week in the Alps I spent every free minute to listen to Uncle Meat, I even learnt to play the Uncle Meat theme on piano, although I couldn't really play piano. Most of the main melodies pop up in my head every once and while even today, especially the main theme and King Kong.
Interestingly, Zappa used a lot of the music from here and integrated it into his The Yellow Shark composition which was performed with a classical orchestra here in Germany. I can only recommed that album as well.

Songs in the key of my life: Kraftwerk - Autobahn

Kraftwerk's 'Autobahn' was one of those many songs I loved to hate, only after a few decades am I able to respect their contribution to music a bit better. Although I had some friends in the 70s who were Kraftwerk fans, I always stayed clear of their music. Later in my industrial music years one of my band members supposed that we come from two different strands of pop reception, he was from the Kraftwerk side, and I came from the Frank Zappa side. I never really agreed. Kraftwerk was just too commercial to me.
It was very clear to recognize what Kraftwerk were doing musically, to me it wasn't new to use minmalism in pop/rock music, bands like The Velvet Underground, King Crimson, and others were already doing it, sometimes with more radical results. Minimalism was by then an almost old genre in classical music. I thought the idea was of preference: Frank Zappa would never have had a problem composing something similar, it was just not his kind of thing. Surprisingly, I can't recall that he ever bothered to parody the genre either.
I also understood Kraftwerk's attitude, a somewhat ironic take on a music of the future, presenting themselves as robot slaves to the music, simultaneously celebrating new technologies and warning us about them. 'Autobahn' was a particularly twisted anthem celebrating the modern highway. At the time you could come upon older Germans who'd regularly argue that Hitler was certainly bad because of the Holocaust, but he built the Autobahn! Besides being a hideous comparison that statement was also historically incorrect, since the building of highways was simply a continuation of policies established in the Weimar Republic before Hitler's regime. Any German would recogznize the reference, though.
By today you can't underestimate Kraftwerk's influence on modern pop music (nor Zappa's, for that matter). And I was also a bit wrong about 'Autobahn', since - at least in the long 22-minute version - there's a lot of interesting things going on in the song.

Songs in the key of my life: Captain Beefheart - The Spotlight Kid

One of my favourite rock journalists on the Club 16 radio show was Carl-Ludwig Reichert. His shows influenced my musical taste immensely. On one occasion he presented an hour of what you could call unusual blues songs, I guess that was the rough theme of the show. In that one single hour I heard for the first so much incredible music by rarely heard artists, almost every song could be listed among my alltime favourites, and I'll be introducing them all in the course of time. For the very first time I was able to hear a tune by Captain Beefheart, an artist I had read so much about, but so far had never heard on radio, and it was at the time unthinkable to find any of his records at our local record stores. 'The Spotlight Kid' really knocked me out, a blues song like nothing else I had heard before. It begins with Captain Beefheart a cappella in a broken sprechgesang voice: "Said the momma t’ the baby in the corn you are my first born you shall here on in be known as The Spotlight Kid"and then on goes a slowmo warped blues song with an electric guitar and a xylophone playing in unison (or maybe not really). The quality of the song was truly otherworldy , the lyrics just as surreal as the music. I've been a huge Captain Beefheart fan ever since, and I've got nearly all there is from him on record and in books. Sadly he died last year in December at the age of 69, 3 days after my birthday.

Songs in the key of my life: Wings - Silly Love Songs

After emigrating to Germany in 1971 I was terribly homesick for the States and I especially missed the music, since the German mainstream pop is probably one of the worst kinds of music on earth (I still had to discover German rock music). So I spent most of the 70s listening to the American billboard charts on the American Forces radio (AFN) which was broadcast throughout the country. A lot of songs from that radio will be popping up on this list. Despite the difference in quality both American and German pop music had one thing in common: love songs. Even for a badly love-torn teenager the abundance of these songs got to be too much over time, and I therefore applauded any song with a different topic or a new take on the love theme. 'Silly Love Songs' was bit like that, at once agreeing that they're silly, but then kind of defending them ("and what's wrong with that?") and presenting itself as a another one of those silly songs. I liked the angle Paul McCartney took and the song sounded like an update of what the Beatles might be playing if they still existed. I feel a bit guilty, since this song is not really that sophistacted, but it had some great musical touches, and Allmusic.com agrees it's "one of his [McCartney's] most accomplished and playful songs". 'Wings at the Speed of Sound' is probably the first album I bought on my own money, to my defense the other ones were Bob Dylan's 'Greatest Hits Vol. 2' and Ornette Coleman's 'Science Fiction'. I still like to listen to 'Silly Love Songs' once in a while, just not too often.

Songs in the key of my life: Brenda Lee - I'm Sorry

Brenda Lee's 'I'm Sorry is probably the first song I consciously considered as a favourite song. It was sometime in the mid 60s, when I found my Dad's collection of 45s and a small protable record player.
There were mayeb about 30 or 40 singles, a nice little stack, and I soon learnt how to operate the record player by myself. Although I did listen to all the records, A and B sides, the only artist I can fully remember is Brenda Lee. (I'm quite certain there was some Elvis Presly there, but he never really made a great impression on me).  Both her songs, 'I'm Sorry' and 'Sweet Nothin's' made a huge impression on me. Especially, 'I'm Sorry' was probably the first song I intently listened to concerning composition and lyrics. To me as a young child it was the perfect musical expression of regret, and I imagined the singer to be the most beautiful woman in the world, solely based on her singing, since none of those singles had any picture sleeves. Little did I knowthat the song was actually recorded, when Brenda Lee was 15 years old, and held back for publication, because it was thought that nobody could believe that such a young teenager could sing such a heartfelt song of broken love. They were wrong, of course...