Archive for category: Music

I look back to when I was one and twenty, as A E Housman would have had it, and feel sure I was in my salad days. I had fallen in love with a generation of songwriters and was enjoying the folksy, pastoral music that was a gentler sibling of rock. We had a stereophonic recording player that was like a piece of furniture and it had a sliding door over the turntable and I often tried to squeeze my head into the cabinet so that I could hear, even better, the fierce emotions wrapped in such laid back and softly sung arrangements. When I married and had a home of our own I was enjoying listening to how this generation of Canadian songwriters began to influence the writers who would forge what we now call Americana.

The hundreds of incoming e mails that drop into the sidetracks & detours each week present a pretty much accurate picture of what is happening on the arts  We can trace back to one off or isolated events and explore their growth into new likes and trends.

Em Casalina, writing recently in American Songwriter, picked three particular songs from the entire Led Zep catalogue as being cuts  that typify  the group and their attitude to their music, which she rightly reminds us,. is loaded with rich lore. but these three songs are particularly interesting. She then took a quick look at the lore behind three of Led Zeppelin’s most famous songs that every diehard fan should know!