Doin' the Friday Shuffle

As seen elsewhere and copied here, I'll dip into the 'ol music collection on Fridays and post the first five songs that come up on random on my Nomad Jukebox (same as an iPod, but cheaper, less cool, and with crappier software--in my personal decision-making process the first item there far outweighs the second and third). For reference, I currently have 6,800 tracks and 455 albums in the machine.

1. Fragile - Sting, America: A Tribute to Heroes (the 9/11 telethon CD)
One of my favorite Sting songs, and likely the song of his that has the greatest chance of living on as a standard in the future. Cassandra Wilson does a nicely smoky, jazzy-bluesy rendition on one of her albums.

2. Escape to India - Phillip Glass, Kundun (score)
I love Glass, but his Kundun score never really grabbed me the way some of his other stuff has.

3. Eleanor's Letter - Michael John LaChiusa, First Lady Suite (musical)
Odd little musical about three first ladies; each (Jackie Kennedy, Mamie Eisenhower, and Eleanor Roosevelt) gets an Act devoted to a small imagined scene from her life, with lots of fantastical elements woven in.

4. Tosy and Cosh - Lerner & Lane, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (musical)
Now THAT'S creepy. 6,800 tracks and the fourth to come up is this blog's namesake. Bizarre. for whatever it's worth, I named the blog out of nothing more than an admiration for the way the phrase sounds. Those looking for deeper meanings will come away disappointed.

5. Talkin' Bout a Revolution - Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman
Great, simply constructed protest song from Chapman's debut album, and the kind of very guitar-driven thing I wish she had concentrated more on in later albums.

6. Balboa Park - Bruce Springsteen, The Ghost of Tom Joad
Springsteen in quiet Guthrie mode.

7. Scarborough Fair/Canticle - Simon & Garfunkel, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, & Thyme
Classic S&G. I almost did this in a pops concert with a friend in high school, but, as he pointed out, it's technically three parts, not two. We ended up doing Homeward Bound instead.

8. Overture - Stephen Sondheim, Saturday Night (musical)
Great old-fashioned, brassy Broadway sounds from a very young Sondheim.

9. Come to Jesus - Audra McDonald and Adam Guettel (written by Adam Guettel), Way Back to Paradise
This is one of my favorite albums, a collection of "new" theater music sung by the incomparable McDonald. This is a song about a woman writing to a man while waiting to get an abortion, and the man writing to her about their break-up, precipitated by the pregnancy. Guettel is a brilliant composer, and I dearly hope to see his new Broadway musical, A Light in the Piazza.

10. "Through the forest I have gone." - Benjamin Britten, A Midsummer Night's Dream (opera)
Some Puck dialogue from the opera (in Britten's opera, Puck speaks in rhythm, instead of singing).

Until Whenever