Midland

Midland in Nacogdoches, 27 April 2024
 

Roll Away…

Full lyrics available at The Annotated Grateful Dead, HERE.

Gene

 

Mona took me to see Gene Watson at Liberty Hall last night, and he was really, really good.

He's now the oldest performer we've gone to see.  He's 80 years-old, which makes him three years older than Ringo the last time we saw him, but his voice is still strong and clear.  I'm not grading on a curve, here-- close your eyes, and he sounds the same as he did forty years ago.

It was an energetic performance and an appreciative audience, and just a really good time.

Margaritaville

Raul Malo's version is just achingly beautiful:

 

Nothing Compares

Full lyrics HERE.

Forever Young

And that led to this:

Full lyrics HERE.

I guess I will. Every day.

 

She hasn't added new songs in years, which is a shame.  When someone sings just because they love to sing, it gives the song certain charms that can't be replicated.

Full lyrics HERE.

Just: WOW!

If It Be Your Will

It's kind of touching to see Rock Star David Gilmour happily taking a supporting role while his daughter Romany sings and plays lead.

Full lyrics HERE.

Billion Year Old Carbon

 

If you've never heard his version before, you're in for a treat. Full lyrics HERE.

Passing Through

 

Andrew Martin was so taken with this song that he wrote an article about it for the Paris Review. You can read it HERE. 

Full lyrics HERE.

Dance

 

Storytelling is an integral part of folk music, and David Bromberg does a nice job of incorporating the story into the song,

His webpage is HERE.

Full lyrics HERE.

A Secret Chord

 Excerpted from a review in The Spectator of Richard Mainwarings book Everybody Hertz: The Amazing World of Frequency, from Bad Vibes to Good Vibrations:

Imagine that all the frequencies nature affords were laid out on an extended piano keyboard. Never mind that some waves are mechanical, propagated through air or some other fluid, and other waves are electro-magnetic and can pass through a vacuum. Lay them down together, and what do you get?

The startling answer is a surprisingly narrow piano. To play X-rays (whose waves cycle up to 30,000,000,000,000,000,000 times per second), our pianist would have to travel a mere nine metres to the right of middle C. Wandering nine and a half metres in the other direction, our pianist would then be able to sound the super-bass note generated by shockwaves rippling through the hot gas around a supermassive black hole in the Perseus cluster – a wave that cycles just once every 18.5 million years.

Closer to home, how big do you think that piano would have to be for it to play every note distinguishable by the human ear? You’d have to add barely a single octave to either side of a regular concert grand.

And that, of course, reminded me of this:

Full lyrics HERE. Full review HERE.

Jones for this, jones for that…

Some artists are better live than in the studio, and Boz Scaggs is on that list.  

Full lyrics HERE.

Alright

Full lyrics HERE.

Sam Gaillard

Jack Kerouac mentioned Slim Gaillard in On The Road, so I looked him up.  He's mesmerizing:

 

Oh, Well

 Somewhere in heaven, Bob Welch is grinning ear to ear:

Let There Be Songs To Fill The Air

 And that, of course, reminded me of this:

Full lyrics HERE.

Standing in the Doorway

Bob Dylan does not allow his albums to be streamed on YouTube, but he does allow fans to film and post his concerts.

This track below, from his 1997 Time Out Of Mind album, is a wonderful song with pretty good audio quality-- but you're going to make yourself queasy if you try to watch the video.

Full lyrics at BobDylan.com, HERE.

I'm Young, I Know…

The song stands on its own, but seeing Keith Richards pull in Nora Jones to calm her obvious stage fright adds a level of charm to the video: