A post on Hubzilla this week had me searching the wetware memory banks for a song from the sixties. The tune was familiar, but the title escaped me for a while. In the end it came to me in the shower - it was called Stranger in Paradise, and it was sung by one of…Read more Stranger in Paradise
folk
Gotta Serve Somebody
Normally, I choose the music first and it suggests a theme. This week it's the other way around. The theme is sleaze, and the track I've chosen to illustrate it is Bob Dylan's Gotta Serve Somebody from his 1979 album, Slow Train Coming. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC10VWDTzmU This week a British Member of Parliament, Owen Paterson, resigned after…Read more Gotta Serve Somebody
Tiger
Desire is a tiger ... Rachel Sermanni is a Scottish folk singer-songwriter. There's an originality in her compositions that reminds me of Laura Marling and fully justifies the 'indie' rider in many articles about her style. Tiger, from her 2019 album, So It Turns, is a particularly fine example of both her lyrical and instrumental…Read more Tiger
An Office in Hackney
A pop-up office in Hackney Square park. Grace Petrie is a singer-songwriter with deep folk roots. Her songs have a strong left-wing and gay-rights flavour. Her voice is soapbox clear and her guitar work is protest tuned, but it's her lyrics that seize a listener's attention. Here's a song about the music industry. About the…Read more An Office in Hackney
Rabbit Hole
Cyberspace is full of holes - rabbit holes that lead to wierd and wonderful places. From the familiar safe haven of Spotify I suddenly found myself tumbling through the subterranean halls of pop music, immersed in the stream of a recent release with hardly a sniff of hip hop. How wierd is that? The sounds…Read more Rabbit Hole
Your Power
When this song came up in my Hubzilla feed I could guess from the title that it is about the abuse of power. But who, I wondered, is it addressed to? Is Billie Eilish admonishing a loved one, berating a political leader or even condemning a whole society? But the Crotchety ears were tuned to…Read more Your Power
Te Acheres
I believe the title of this track-of-the-week, Te Acheres, is in the Ethiopian Amharic language1. Unfortunately, I have not been able to work out what it means. The Web does have the lyrics of the song and Google Translate will give a literal translation of them - but it refuses to decipher the title. And…Read more Te Acheres
The Staves
There's an economic and cultural schism in the UK. It's called the North/South divide. In the South the people are wealthy, urbane and sophisticated; in the North they are poor, primitive and uncouth. Colloquially, the boundary between these two regions runs through Watford. When a southerner refers to people living in places "north of Watford"…Read more The Staves
A Temporary Soothing
Siv Jakobsen is a Norwegian mystery. She has no page on Wikipedia. Her Facebook page is uninformative. Even Google struggles to find much information about the singer/songwriter who recorded her latest album, A Temporary Soothing, in the rugged beauty of Devon, UK as 2018 marched on into 2019. But a little perseverance at the Crotchety…Read more A Temporary Soothing
The Priest
Grantchester is a village just outside Cambridge (the UK city famous for its university, not the suburb of Boston, MA). It was the setting for a series of whodunnit short stories, The Grantchester Mysteries, by James Runcie. The books spawned a TV series called simply, Grantchester - the headline picture here is a still showing…Read more The Priest
Crotchety Man 