Entries by Norman Warwick

DOING IT THE WRITE WAY

In December 2022 Tina Benitez Eves wrote in American Songwriter about this singer-writer who penned his first charting hit at about the age he started to wear long trousers. I remembered him for one of those typically twee songs that became hits around the turn of the fifties and sixties and, of course for one particularly global phenomenon he helped create. So come follow your art down the sidetracks & detours of the USA to find out more, from Tina Benitez Eves in Paste,  about one of the most successful song-writers of all time.

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ARE WE THE BOOKS WE READ?

Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick’s exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has “shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy” she has known.

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PASS IT ON (volume 6 of weekend walkabout from Sidetracks And Detours)

Our daily posts from Monday 26th June to 30th June will introduce you to a chapter of writers, to discuss whether we become the books we read. We also count all the road running by Emmylou Harris and Mark Knopfler in our Knopfler Kronikles series and take a look at a song-writers writer. Of course we will continue building our bookshelf because  we would like to squeeze in Lady GaGa

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KENNY LOGGINS IS STILL ALRIGHT

Your Mama Won´t Dance gives collaborative writing credits to Loggins and Messina. The refrain and first verse is done in a blues format, deals with the 1950s and 1960s lifestyle concerning the generation gap, where the parents oppose the Rock and Roll Revolution of the younger generation, which includes the rebelliousness against the old society that monitors curfews on dating; as well as being arrested for making love with a girl in the back seat of a car during a drive-in movie, which happens during the bridge section of the song.

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BRITISH AND AMERICAN FOLK side by side?

That sense that music needn’t be trapped in the here and now, that it can pull from the past and push into the future, that it exists for more than next week’s Billboard chart or tomorrow’s YouTube clicker, is the essence of folk music. And just when you might fear that music is dwindling away, DeMent, Brown, Avett, Giddens and Flemons demonstrate how vital it still is.

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Knopfler Kronikles (Part 8): MARK AND EMMYLOU

Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris (right) have had long histories of collaborating with and supporting other artists. In addition to 23 solo albums and three successful collaborative albums with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt, Harris has recorded backing and duet vocals with many of the significant recording artists of her generation, including The Band, John Denver, Bob Dylan, Gram Parsons, Townes Van Zandt, Tammy Wynette and Neil Young. Knopfler had also been involved in a number of collaborative projects, recording duets with such artists as Van Morrison and James Taylor, and contributing guitar tracks to numerous recordings by other artists, including The Chieftains, Eric Clapton, Kris Kristofferson, Sonny Landreth, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Sting, Tina Turner, Steely Dan, and Jimmy Webb.

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CAROLE KING

It is only as I post this piece that I realise that despite knowing Carole King´s songs so well, and this particular era of The Byrds being my favourite I am not sure I would have immediately thought of them all sharing the same shaded part of any Venn diagram.

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