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This ecstatic song needs no introduction. The text for “Happy” is itself an irrepressible extended metaphor for the title, a song built on similes “like a room without a roof”. “Happy” sold 6.45 million copies in the U.S., alone, in the year after its release in...
“This poet ruined my life,” Leonard Cohen said of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Cohen, a singer/songwriter and poet, himself, took great liberty with the original text of the haunting poem it is based on,"Pequeño vals vienés" (Little Viennese Waltz)....
Save the people, save the childrenSave the country, everybody save the countrySave the country, save the country, save the country now The Pollyanna in me reaches for something hopeful today. The political climate we are living in certainly calls for more protest...
When commissioned to compose a sequence of poems to be set to music to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising the song “I’ll Take You There,” from the same era, was among the first that came to mind. A kind of anthem first performed and recorded in...
The first opera I ever experienced live was at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the great Verdi soprano Leontyne Price’s last performance of “Aida”. In those days (1985) there were no super titles, no digital text translating the words in real time. The thrill that...