5/30/2025

 Friday, May 30, 2025

D+184/129

1431 Hundred Years' War: 19-year-old Joan of Arc was burned at the stake by an English-dominated tribunal in Rouen, France

1912 US Marines were sent to Nicaragua

1965 Viet Cong offensive against the US base Da Nang began

2023 400 leading AI industry experts signed a letter warning, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority” 

2024 A jury in New York City found Donald Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records

In bed before 10, awake at 3, and up at 3:30, unable to sleep, with thoughts of past relationships, and Brandi Carlisle's "Everytime I Hear That Song' earworming me.    53°, high of 73°, faux summer.  I put a load of laundry in the washing machine and emptied the dishwasher.

LTMW  The cardinal couple are on the tray feeder by 5:15, just as the sun rises.  Our red-bellied woodpecker starts his day working on the orange above the tray feeder, while a robin works the ground down below.  The day begins, and I'm thinking about a nap.

Brandi Carlile.  I'm a big fan.  One of the reasons is this song, "Everytime I Hear That Song," which she wrote with her longtime collaborators, Phil and Tim Hanseroth.  Phil is also Brandi's brother-in-law, having married her younger sister, Tiffany.  They all reside in homes on Brandi's land in the State of Washington, home state of all of them.  Brandi is a lesbian and has been married since 2012 to Catherine Shepherd, with whom she has two daughters.

A love song was playing on the radio / It made me kind of sad because it made me think of you

And I wonder how you're doing, but I wish I didn't care / Because I gave you all I had and got the worst of you

[Chorus]

By the way, I forgive you / After all, maybe I should thank you

For giving me what I've found / Cause without you around

I've been doing just fine / Except for any time I hear that song (Ooh)

And didn't it break your heart / When you watched my smile fading?

Did it ever cross your mind / That one day the tables would be turned?

They told me the best revenge / Would be a life well-lived

And the strongest one that holds / Would be the hardest one to earn

[Chorus]

When I woke up in the morning / I was choking on some words

There were things unsaid between us / There were things you never told

That's twice you broke my heart now / The first was way back when

And to know you're still unhappy / Only makes it break again.

(Chorus)

Carlile and other songwriters are poets, and the ones who sing their own songs (and others') are troubadours. It was great that Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature.  Power to the people!  I admire and appreciate so many great songwriters and lyricists, and probably many not-so-great ones.  I love old pop classics, with Sophisticated Lady at the top of my list (lyrics by Mitchell Parish, born Michael Hyman Pashelinsky), followed by hundreds of others.  I love country and western classics, written by poets named Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Hank Williams, and Willie Nelson.  Unlike so much of what is passed off as modern poetry, the poetic lyrics of these songwriters are meant to be understood by everybody, Joe Lunchbucket and Betty Babuska.  It's poetry about love and loss, God and Man, betrayal, addiction, heartache, homelessness and restlessness, loneliness, family and friends - the most basic elements of life.  The poems are meant to be sung, not read, and heard, hopefully by men and women who will be moved by them as Brandi Carlile sings "any time I hear that song."  We have a perfect marriage of lyrics and music, the emotional pull or punch of the song is irresistible, as it is with Sophisticated Lady and, thankfully, so many other great songs/poems.  As I write these words, I think of the tribute Brandi Carlile gave on the death of her friend John Prine, singing his sad, simple, and beautiful song, Hello, In There.  I think too of another sad, simple, and beautiful song that I always associate with war and the loss of friends, My Buddy.  I am powerfully moved by powerful poetry, like Yeats's Vacillation, and Whitman's Come Up From the Fields, Father, Kenyon's Otherwise, and Maggie Smith's Good Bones, and no less moved by powerful songs, poems in their own right.  I am surprised by how easily I am emotionally moved by music in my old age, much more than when I was younger.  Any orchestral concert or ballet performance involving the concerted efforts of a great many people will do it, but so doew watching the 2021 "Official Music Video" of Janis Joplin's Me and Bobby McGee, not only because of her great recording of Kris Kristofferason's great song but also becasue of its reminder of her death, for which I can't come up with a fitting adjective.