Category: music

Today’s Theme Music

This is it: the Final Friday before the election. Come on, doesn’t that make you happy?

Today is the First Friday of November. You can go out on the First Friday Art Walk if you’re in my area, and have drinks and snacks while supporting local artists. Many serve wine, spice apple cider, or hot chocolate, along with cheese, crackers, brownies, cookies and nuts. It’s a happy time.

This is also the Last Friday before the end of Daylight Savings Time for 2016 in America. Get ready to ‘fall back’ and enjoy an extra hour of sleep, or an extra hour of work, if you’re working.

Naturally, I should mention it’s the First Friday of NaNoWriMo. Just three more Fridays remain in November.

And hey, just because it’s Friday, the end of the work week for many, last day of the school week, casual Friday for some (is that still a thing?), donut Friday for others – clap along if happiness is for you. Sing it with Pharrell Williams. Here’s ‘Happy’.

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Today’s Theme Music

“You’re flirting with disaster,” people have told me just about all of my life.

To me, they’re saying, “You’re taking a risk.”

You betcha. Take a risk. Tug on Superman’s cape, pee in the wind…no; those are not flirting with disaster.

Flirting with disaster is about assessing a situation’s intangibles and variables and deciding, “I can do this. I can make this happen.” Others’ impressions that you’re flirting with disaster is more about their state of mind than it is about the situation.

Everything I write seems to be flirting with disaster – which, as an assessment, is about my state of mind. But that’s why we have editing and delete buttons.

Here is Molly Hatchet’s ‘Flirtin With Disaster’, from 1979. It’s a good theme song to hum as you walk the day and make decisions.

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Today’s Theme Music

Well, we’re into NaNoWriMo so I thought we’d bring up a classic.

“Dear sir, or madam, will you read my book? It took me years to write, would you take a look? It’s based on a novel by a man named Lear and I need a job, so I want to be a paperback writer.”

I looked up the lyrics to confirm I remembered them correctly and had one or two wrong, but then the song was a Beatles hit in 1966, fifty years ago, when I was ten.

To all you writers out there and in here, here is ‘Paperback Writer’. It’s not a great recording but it’ll do.

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Today’s Theme Music

Theme music is all about being a signature song. I offer them as a signature song to establish the day’s tone. For today, I’m dropping into the wayback machine and pulling out a little theme song from a television series, ‘Bonanza’.

‘Bonanza’ was a television series produced and aired on NBC from 1959 to 1973. Meanwhile, it was syndicated and shown as reruns. It wasn’t unusual to walk into someone’s house after school and see ‘Bonanza’ on the telly. Most amusing to me is that visiting its set in the Lake Tahoe area really impressed people. Paris and the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramids, rock of Gibraltar, the Louvre, etc…nah. But the house where Hoss, Ben, Little Joe and the rest strutted? Wow. 

The show’s title came from the expression for a big discovery of ore. Hope your day brings you a bonanza. Thank you, Jay Livingstone and David Rose, for creating this music.

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Today’s Theme Music

Staying with a simple theme – it’s a cold morning but the rain has passed me by…for the mo’. All this brings to mind the ‘Sweet Child of Mine’. It was Guns N’ Roses only #1 hit in America and a rousing tune for a cold morn.

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Today’s Theme Music

I dreamed of pretzels. People, mostly women, were pushing around small forest green shopping carts crammed with food. Many had large pretzels in them. I wanted one of those pretzels. I tried asking, “Where did you get your pretzel?” But each turned away as though I wasn’t there. I took to a double-decker bus to find the answer, and returned to the same place where I began. I till didn’t have a pretzel.

Ah, pretzel logic. I always fail to grasp it. ‘Pretzel Logic’ was also the name of Steely Dan’s third album. But this is Fond Final Friday, so I elected to post ‘Black Friday’ from their fourth album, ‘Katy Lied’. Sue me if I got it wrong.

Sing along if you know the words. Fake it if you don’t.

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Today’s Theme Music

We started with a conversation. “Kenny Rogers can still sing,” my wife said.

Beginning with Kenny Rogers and the First Edition and ‘Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town’  (written by Mel Tellis) in 1969, Kenny Rogers had been a singing star our entire adult lives. He’d recently announced he was retiring from singing and touring but here he was singing A Capella with a group on a recent video.

You always wonder who can really sing and who has a sound manufactured in the studio. We discussed that a while, which turned me to one of my favorite recent live performances, live being a relative term, since it was recorded for a television show.

The television show is ‘The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon’. The Roots are the house band. Jimmy will sometimes sing with musical guests while The Roots provide the music, sometimes playing toy instruments, like in this video I’m sharing today. I love this exposure of humanity behind the music and how much fun they’re having.

Here is Idina Menzel and The Roots with Jimmy Fallon, singing and playing, ‘Let It Go’, a good remind that sometimes, we all need to let it go.

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Today’s Theme Music

I think today’s music may be a repeat. I don’t know. I don’t track them.

‘Hallelujah’ by Leonard Cohen is one of my favorite songs. It haunts me for a few days whenever I hear it, echoing choruses and notes that deliver stillness and a smile. The original production is moving, and there are many great covers, but the reason why it’s with me again is because of a new cover. Pentatonix and their A Cappela rendering is all over Facebook. That’s where I heard it yesterday. Now I share it with you today.

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Today’s Theme Music

After thinking through dreams and writing a post, I found myself entranced with a song’s opening lines:

I just wanna stay in the sun where I find
I know it’s hard sometimes
Pieces of peace in the sun’s peace of mind
I know it’s hard sometimes

Yeah, exactly. Some days I just wanna stay in the sun. Today’s music, ‘Ride’ from Twenty One Pilots.

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