I have copies of many of my own CDs as well as CD taken out of the local Library on my Laptop. While working on my laptop, I always have music playing. Occasionally I look for a specific composition, song, composer or genre but most often I just play the next album that comes up in my library on Windows Media Player. When I’ve reached the last of the albums starting with Z I go back to the top of the library and start again with those under A. That means I sometimes move from one album of esoteric classical music (like ‘Ballet music by Tchaikovsky’) to ‘Barbara Streisand’s Greatest Hits Volume Two’! Felt sorry for the others working in our house!
Being a type 5 on the Enneagram means that I don’t do emotions in real life and perhaps that is why I turn for emotional relief to movies and music. That way I can keep it more hidden and if someone says, ‘That music is a bit sentimental and emotional, isn’t it?’ I can response, ‘Yes. Definitely’ and quickly move on to play music which is less emotional.
Song 1: You don’t bring me flowers
I was thinking about this, today as I was listening to Barbara Streisand. There was a song where she sings a duet with Neil Diamond, You don’t bring me flowers’. What drew me to this song? What resonated within me when I heard it while busy working on my PC? Was it the words? Well, they are fairly sad. Marilyn Bergman, who wrote the song together with her husband Alan and Neil Diamond, said that this was a song about a couple drifting apart. The words are sad and nostalgic in nature. They seem speak directly to the listener as if the singers (usually Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond) are addressing us, the listeners, directly. I must admit that I’ve never been a great bringer of flowers or singer of love-songs, but I don’t think it was that that made me stop typing on my pc and listen to the song. I think it was the actual melody and the harmonies that tugged at my heart strings.
The same night I watched a YouTube video where Stephan Fry and Alan Davies went to the Royal Opera House in London to watch the Verdi opera, Simon Bocchanegra. While they were watching they were wired up to different physiological measuring instruments to see how the music affected them. One of the scientists who was interviewed in the YouTube video said that 90% of people will say that they had been moved to tears by a piece of music. When it came to a painting or a piece of sculpture that number drops to 5%, while poetry – both read and heard is about mid-way between. So, music is very much an emotional art form.
What in the melody and harmony of You don’t bring me flowers moved me? Initially I thought it was the rising fifth on ‘flo-wer’ which made the opening phrase so poignant but I’m no musicologist. I found a web site which spoke about the emotional nature of music and gave the emotions one might feel when hearing certain intervals being played or sung. A rising perfect fifth, it told me, creates a feeling of cheerfulness and hope. I had felt anguish and sadness, not cheerfulness or hope, so it was not the perfect fifth in the melody that did it for me.
I found a version with melody and guitar chords online. This showed that the song in the key of C major moves to chord of G with C in the bass on the bar which has ‘flo-wers’ in it. The chord of G has a B in it, which creates a slight dissonance against the C in the bass. This is what presented a feeling of anguish. So perhaps it was that ‘crunch’ in the harmony, quickly resolved back to the tonic (via F/C to C), which attracted my ears attention.
The words are also telling. Streisand and Diamond sing of all the things they had learnt in their relationship together – to laugh, to cry, to love and they think they could ‘learn to say goodbye’. And that is where the song ends, with a chorus of ‘You don’t bring me flowers anymore’. We never learn whether they do say goodbye. This is perhaps typical of many long-term relationships. Things which draw a couple close together gradually disappear from their relationship. The need to say ‘you don’t say you need me’ seems superfluous because they both need each other. But maybe they do need to say it; sometime to stop the drifting apart.
You don’t bring me flowers. From Barbara Streisand’s Greatest Hits Vol 2.
Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond
You don’t bring me flowers.
1… You don’t bring me flowers, You don’t sing me love songs, You hardly talk to me anymore, When I come through the door at the end of the day … I remember when You couldn’t wait to love me, Used to hate to leave me.
2… Now after lovin’ me late at night, When it’s good for you, babe, And you’re feeling alright, Well, you just roll over and turn out the light, And you don’t bring me flowers anymore.
3 … It used to be so natural (used to be), Talk about forever, But used-to-bes don’t count anymore. They just lay on the floor ’til we sweep them away.
4… And baby, I remember, All the things you taught me, I learned how to laugh, And I learned how to cry, Well, I learned how to love, And I learned how to lie,
5… So you’d think I could learn how to tell you goodbye. (So you’d think I could learn how to tell you goodbye) You don’t bring me flowers anymore.
6… Well, you’d think I could learn how to tell you goodbye. Well, you don’t say you need me, And you don’t sing me love songs, You don’t bring me flowers anymore.
Source: LyricFind Songwriters: Alan Bergman / Marilyn Bergman / Neil Diamond
Song 2: Coney Island - Van Morrison
The second song was written and sung by Van Morrison off his album Avalon. I say ‘sung’ but in reality, it is a spoken piece over an orchestral accompaniment. In this song it was the words that touched me.
Only after researching it did I discover that it was not Coney Island in New York but Coney Island, in County Down, Northern Ireland. Morrison is a Northern Ireland singer-songwriter and I should have got the clues from the list of place names he incorporated in the words – Downpatrick, St. John’s Point, Strangford Lough, Shrigley, Killyleagh, Lecale District and Ardglass.
The song is described by Wikipedia as a ‘spoken-word song … [and] is accompanied by lush instrumentation which contrasts with Morrison’s thick Ulster brogue.’
The words of the song describe what he and his mother did as they motored down to Coney Island from Belfast. We have all been on holiday motor trips where, after a turn in the road, a new vista or town brings memories of previous holiday trips. Wonderful memories. The last couple of lines express this exactly and express the desire for the eternal joy found in memories.
I look at the side of your face as the sunlight comes streaming through the window in the autumn sunshine.
And all the time going to Coney Island I’m thinking, wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time.
After some of Van Morrison’s other music, it was the spoken rather than the sung words that made me stop and listen and be moved by Morrison’s nostalgic prose.
Coney Island from Van Morrison’s Avalon
Coney Island
Coming down from Downpatrick, stopping off at St. John’s Point, out all day birdwatching, and the craic was good. Stopped off at Strangford Lough, early in the morning, drove through Shrigley taking pictures, and on to Killyleagh.Stopped off for Sunday papers at the Lecale District, just before Coney Island. On and on, over the hill to Ardglass,in the jam jar, autumn sunshine, magnificent and all shining through.
Stop off at Ardglass for a couple of jars of Mussels and some potted herrings in case, we get famished before dinner. On and on, over the hill and the craic is good heading towards Coney Island.
I look at the side of your face as the sunlight comes streaming through the window in the autumn sunshine, and all the time going to Coney Island I’m thinking, Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time.
Source: LyricFind Songwriter: Van Morrison
Song 3: Hello in there Bette Midler
The third song that moved me was one on Bette Midler’s album Jackpot: Bette’s Best entitled ‘Hello in there.’
In this song the songwriter, John Prine describes the complexity of an older couple’s life, two lovers who now find themselves wandering and adrift in their golden years. ‘We had an apartment in the city / Me and my husband liked living there / Well, it’d been years since the kids had grown, A life of their own left us alone / John and Linda live in Omaha / And Joe is somewhere on the road / We lost Davy in the Korean war / And I still don’t know what for, don’t matter anymore.’
Prine goes further by analysing how painful it is for the elderly to be felt invisible to the world. ‘Ya’ know that old trees just grow stronger / And old rivers grow wilder ev’ry day / Old people just grow lonesome / Waiting for someone to say, ‘Hello in there, hello.”’
Prine wrote the song when he was 22 and has been covered by many other singers. I found a few of versions on YouTube. One was by one of my folk-singer heroes, Joan Baez, but her version of Hello in there, I felt, was taken too fast and more in the folk or Country-&-Western genre style. There is also a duet version of Kris Kristofferson with Joan Baez in which they do take the song at a more leisurely pace. The couple in the lyrics are most definitely still in love with each other, so a duet is appropriate, but it’s Bette Midler’s version that had me nearly in tears.
Bette Midler does change the words to make it a song sung by a woman, changing ‘Loretta’ to ‘my husband’, her friend is now Judy not Rudy and, of course all the necessary pronouns are changed.
The message of the song is a call for people to acknowledge the elderly they might meet: ‘So if you’re walking down the street sometime/ And spot some hollow ancient eyes/ Please don’t just pass ’em by and stare/ As if you didn’t care, say, “Hello in there, hello”’.
What moved me in this song was the similarity the words have with my genealogical research. For example: I find a person in the 1851 Census just born a year or two before. In the 1861 Census the person is listed as ‘Scholar’ but still at home with parents. Frequently, by the 1871 census, the person had married in the previous decade and was now with their new spouse. Census 1881 has them now as parents of usually more than one child! By the 1901 Census a boy child might be away from home serving in the British Army in the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa. Perhaps like ‘Davy’ in the song, he will be lost in that war. By the 1921 Census, the parents have died and maybe a few of the other children served and died in the First world War. This song presents to me a typical family history scenario, summing up all our lives of being born living reproducing and dying – sad but a reality for us all.
‘Hello in there’ from Bette Midler’s album Jackpot: Bette’s Best
Hello in there
We had an apartment in the city,
Me and Loretta liked living there.
Well, it’d been years since the kids had grown.
A life of their own, left us alone.
John and Linda live in Omaha,
And Joe is somewhere on the road
We lost Davy in the Korean war,
And I still don’t know what for, don’t matter anymore.
You know that old trees just grow stronger
And old rivers grow wilder every day
Old people just grow lonesome
Waiting for someone to say, “Hello in there, hello”
She sits and stares through the back door screen.
And all the news just repeats itself,
Like some forgotten dream that we’ve both seen.
Someday I’ll go and call up Rudy,
We worked together at the factory.
What could I say if he asks “What’s new?” “Nothing, what’s with you? Nothing much to do”
You know that old trees just grow stronger
And old rivers grow wilder every day,
Old people just grow lonesome,
Waiting for someone to say,
“Hello in there, hello”
So if you’re walking down the street sometime
And spot some hollow ancient eyes
Please don’t just pass ’em by and stare
As if you didn’t care, say,
“Hello in there, hello”
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: John Prine
So Why?
What made these three songs significant for me? Was it the sentimental words and musical imagery that enable me to let my deeply hidden romanticism and emotions flower? Was it just that I’m getting more nostalgic as I get older. Was it the realisation that I have less time left over in my life? I suspect it is a bit of all three but for me all music creates some sort of emotional response, sometimes sadness, sometimes nostalgia, sometimes joy and excitement. Thank God for music!
I hope you weren’t offended by this personal look at three songs that had moved me. If you enjoyed it, I’m thinking of doing a similar thing with a personal Desert Island Disc, choosing the eight discs I would take to a desert island, so keep a lookout for that.