This week, I’ll be sharing a new song each day to remind you (and myself) that how we use this time at home is as varied and limitless as our collective imagination.  There’s at least one song, if not hundreds, for everything we’re experiencing in this singular moment, and it wasn’t easy to pick five!  But I hope my choices delight, inspire, move, and comfort you, as they do me. 

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Be careful what you wish for.

I’m guessing I’m not the only overworked person who often wished for a little more free time to read, to spend with my significant other, to cook nice meals, take walks, watch movies.  Even though I’m working from home, the pace of life is certainly more tranquil than usual. And maybe because the stakes are so high, time feels more precious than ever.  

Today’s song is from 1924: “Lazy”  by Irving Berlin, arguably the hardest working songwriter in American music. Credited with penning as many as 1,500 songs, Berlin wrote this one while on vacation with his wife in Florida.  Even if laziness wasn’t in Berlin’s nature, he wrote a great song about wondering what it would be like!

Here are the incomparable Joan Morris and William Bolcom performing the song from their 1990 recording, Blue Skies.

“Lazy” by Irving Berlin (1888-1989)
Joan Morris, mezzo-soprano; William Bolcom, pianist