''Farthest Field'', aka ''The Duets Project''One of the most haunting and lovely songs of 2011 was Kentucky-born singer-songwriter Daniel Martin Moore’s cover of Appalachian folk music pioneer Jean Ritchie’s “In the Cool of the Day”, which served as the title track to Moore’s sophomore solo album. Listening to it gives me the shivers every time. I’m not as taken with Moore’s originals, but when he sings a traditional hymn, you get a strong sense of someone brushing a layer of dust off a box of hard luck memories from the attic.
In the not quite 18 months since that album’s release, Moore has kept himself plenty busy with the launch of his own record label, Ol Kentuck, to, in his words “help release some of the beautiful projects that I saw happening all around me.” The first such project was indeed very beautiful – a collection of lullabies by a female vocal trio called Maiden Radio.
Maiden Radio “All the Pretty Little Horses” (2012)
Moore’s latest project is a collection of duets he put together with Maiden Radio’s Joan Shelley. It’s another quiet, intimate album full of delicate, pastoral melodies called Farthest Field and was just released earlier this week. Here’s a video for the album’s first song:
Daniel Martin Moore & Joan Shelley “First of August” (2012)
You can listen to the whole album below. Right now, I think my favorite track of the bunch is the bluesy simmer “Sweetly By” with its rolling melody – Lover, come sweet and slowly, Lover come sweetly by – and great lead vocal by Joan. Talk about making love in the green grass.
Also released in that brand new format, the ''45''It’s ten years ago this summer that jazz and pop singer Rosemary Clooney, (George’s dear aunt, and this dude‘s mom) died of lung cancer at the age of 74. But a new JCPenney ad is making sure she’s not forgotten.
And like the retailer’s April ad featuring a little-known song by 60s teen pop star Lesley Gore (“Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows”), they’ve dug deep and come up with a lovely find – the perfect soundtrack for a morning spent potting pansies and pulling up those pesky thistles in the garden before the guy comes to deliver your five cubic feet of mulch. (I love the smell of cypress mulch in the morning.)
Aww yeah: JCPenney’s new commercial features a 60-year-old b-side! The song’s called “On the First Warm Day”, and it first appeared as the flip side to Clooney’s 1952 78 rpm single for Columbia Records, “Botch-A-Me (Ba-Ba-Bacciami Piccina)” which charted all the way to #2 in its day.
But even that huge hit is largely forgotten, having been overshadowed by another “ethnic” Italian novelty she recorded: “Mambo Italiano,” which has become to mob movies what Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” is to gay movies. I love that JCPenney is running with these lost oldies (what will they think of for June?). I’m a fan of Rosemary Clooney. One of my more recent CD acquisitions is a reissue of her 1956 album with Duke Ellington Blue Rose (featuring this swoony take on “Mood Indigo”). But I’d never heard “On the First Warm Day” until the JCPenney commercial.
Rosemary Clooney “Mambo Italiano” (1954)
Because I first associated Rosemary Clooney (born on May 23rd, in Maysville, Kentucky) with the goofier songs that she’s better known for (“Come On-a My House”, “Mambo Italiano”), I really became a fan of her more melancholy performances. One of my favorite Clooney songs is her gender-reversed take on the song “Hey There”, from the Adler & Ross musical The Pajama Game. The song itself was really inventive – a man having a heart-to-head chat with himself about the crush he’s got on that woman he knows from work (you know, the one who hates his guts). In the musical, he sings the verse into a dictaphone, then plays it back to himself, singing back to it in reply. In this performance, some background singers understudy for that dictaphone, but in the recording (which hit topped the pop charts for 6 weeks in the fall of ’54), she duets with herself.
Rosemary Clooney “Hey There” (1954)
I still love her sad songs best (and I still disdain the goofy ones), but I love the sense of joy she brings to “On the First Warm Day”. It doesn’t preclude the possibility of future sadness, but in its moment, it’s bright and hopeful: “we’ll teach those birds and bees a thing or twooooooo….” The song may not make me want to head right out to JCPenney, but it does make me want to browse their record collection.
For much of its third season, it seems to have been coasting along towards graduation and a much anticipated farewell to a handful of its charter characters; but occasionally, Glee busts out something special to remind us just how a great a TV show Glee can be, and why we ever cared about it in the first place. Last week’s episode was like that.
And it wasn’t just because we got to see Rachel (Lea Michele) fail (in spectacularly humiliating fashion) the audition she’d been preparing for her whole life; although watching her flub the words to “Don’t Rain On My Parade” – twice – especially after she’d (very condescendingly) counseled dear Kurt (Chris Colfer) not to do anything risky in his audition, certainly was a lot of mean-spirited fun (or maybe it was just sweet justice). When you heard Rachel say that she wasn’t nervous about her audition, you knew she was doomed.
Her character’s flameout even delivered some satisfying meta-schadenfreude for those of us who love love love to hate actress Lea Michele. In my head, when I saw Rachel Berry sobbing, screaming, begging, pleading for another chance, I imagined Lea Michele in Ryan Murphy’s offices sobbing, screaming, begging, pleading to let her character flunk out and have to return in Season 4 as a fifth-year senior.
Regrets collect like old friends
Here to relive your darkest moments
I can see no way, I can see no way
And all of the ghouls come out to play
– “Shake It Out” by Florence + the Machine
Kurt, meanwhile, shook off Rachel’s advice, and nervously made an eleventh hour (fifty-ninth-minute) switch to a less-rehearsed audition piece. He performed the number (the very very gay song “Not the Boy Next Door” from the Peter Allen bio-musical The Boy from Oz) with exuberant confidence; he had a blast doing it, and the audition’s jury of one – Whoopi Goldberg, impersonating Mount Rushmore – was duly impressed.
Hugh Jackman “Not the Boy Next Door” (2003)
Still, the episode’s other major plotline managed to upstage even Rachel Berry’s epic Streisand-fail. When Coach Beiste (“Beast”, the always amazing Dot Jones) shows up to school with a black eye, some of the meaner Glee girls make a joke about Coach’s boyfriend Cooter “going all Chris Brown” on her. It’s a joke – a mean one – but clearly a joke: it’s absolutely unfathomable (to the girls on the TV show, and to us watching) that any man in his right mind would even physically threaten Coach Beiste, much less do something so foolish as commit actual violence against her. She’d kick his ass, right? Not that Coach is invulnerable. We’ve seen her break down when, as a new teacher to the school, she was ridiculed and excluded by her fellow teachers. Still, the girls are comfortable making the “Chris Brown” joke because it’s self-evident to them (and us) that Coach is no victim.
But the joke was made within earshot of a teacher played by this Real Housewife of Atlanta, and she, having grown up around domestic violence, is determined to impress upon the girls just how unfunny their joke was. She notes that the American pop songbook is full of songs that commit some sort of violence against women, and (you know this is coming) gives the girls a Glee-signment for the week: take one of those songs and perform it in a way that takes back the woman’s power. Suddenly, visions of the Glee-girls singing this infamous Phil Spector “classic” danced in my head:
The Crystals “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)” (1962)
It’s probably a good thing Glee didn’t go there.**
To this point, the plot is a little bit ABC After School Special-ish. We’ve seen these “special” sitcom episodes before, and we’re expecting a tidy, meaningful, lesson-learned moment. But what may have been a self-evidently preposterous proposition – Coach Beiste as the Tina to Cooter’s Ike – turns out to be exactly what’s going on. While this conveniently proves NeNe Leakes’s point – domestic jokes aren’t funny, no matter the context – that’s the last concession this episode makes to “special episode” tidiness. We learn that self-esteem issues aren’t so easily healed with just a stirring pep talk, a touching musical number, and a hug just before the credits roll.
As far as touching musical numbers go, though, the Glee girls’ nearly a cappella cover of “Shake It Out”, last year’s near-hit by Florence + the Machine, was unexpected, beautiful and incredibly powerful. Florence Welch’s lyrics about confronting the “demons” and “ghouls” that haunt a relationship and play havoc with a woman’s sense of self and worth feel as if they were written specifically for this episode of this show – and they get added sting from the scenes interspersed throughout the song.
Glee Cast “Shake It Out” (2012)
Where Florence + the Machine’s performance of the song is loud, anthemic, cathartic – it fills a room even at a soft volume – the Glee girls’ performance is intimate and quiet, as if giving voice to Coach Beiste’s seemingly unlikely but nevertheless very credible, very real vulnerabilities. The girls think they are singing an apology to Coach for their insensitive jokes, and giving her the support she needs to move on with her life. But instead of moving on, we see Coach moving back in. The girls are finally fulfulling the assignment they were given; sadly, no matter how empowering the song might feel, no amount of pretty harmonies can make Coach Beiste empower herself.
Florence + the Machine “Shake It Out” (2011)
**This song is 50 years old, and it feels – appropriately – shocking that it was ever released as a single marketed to a teenagers. But let’s not shit ourselves: teenagers made Rihanna’s “Birthday Cake” featuring Chris Brown a major hit this year. “He Hit Me” didn’t chart.
