Year of Songs: August and Everything Before

I seem to have gotten a little bit behind, eh? Let's lump the summer months together:



August:
August Day Song - Bebel Gilberto
Bebel Gilberto is musical royalty in Brazil - her father João and mother Astrud, along with composer Tom Jobim, practically invented the sound of bossa nova on immortal classics such as "The Girl from Ipanema" (I posted my performance of it here). I really like Bebel - she stays true to the spirit of bossa but gives it a nice modern feel.

August - Rilo Kiley
Sure, Jenny Lewis has done pretty well for herself as a member of Rilo Kiley and as a solo artist, but she reached her peak as an artist at age thirteen when she co-starred in the cinematic masterpiece/shameless Nintendo propaganda film The Wizard:



Perfect Blue Buildings - Counting Crows My favorite song off of the once-ubiquitous August and Everything After. Plus, the lyric "so help me stay awake, I'm falling asleep in perfect blue buildings" fits in well with the oversleeping theme in "Lorelai" and "July" (see below). 

I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine - Bob Dylan
Stretching the August thing a little bit, here's a favorite Dylan tune.

July:

Tears of Rage - Bob Dylan and The Band
Tears of Rage - The Band
One Headlight - Wallflowers
Speaking of Dylan, here's a trilogy of Independence Day-related Dylan songs:
• The song "Tears of Rage" opens with the line "We carried you in our arms on Independence Day." Bob Dylan made the demo-style recording of this song heard here with The Band in 1967 without any plans of ever releasing it. It eventually surfaced on the 1975 collection The Basement Tapes, which is probably my favorite Dylan album.
• The Band then reworked the song extensively and released it in 1968 as the first track on their debut album, Music from Big Pink, one of my all-time favorite albums.
• Jakob Dylan, son of Bob, references Independence Day on one of my high school favs, "One Headlight."
Lorelai - Fleet Foxes
Speaking of Dylan again, this July-related song sounds remarkably like the 1965 Bob Dylan song "4th Time Around." It also reminds me of my girls.

July - Low
The previous song said, "I slept through July," but this one takes oversleeping to an even greater extreme: "They'll never wake us in time Maybe we'll wait 'til July Then August, September October, November or December."

If you don't know Low, check out the fantastic "Try to Sleep," released earlier this year. I couldn't stop listening to it for weeks.

1° de Julho (First of July) - Legião Urbana
My favorite Brazilian rock band. A few weeks ago I played a solo acoustic set at Best Buy (yeah, you read that right) and I did a guitar/harmonica cover of their song "Teatro dos Vampiros (Theater of the Vampires)." If songwriter Renato Russo had written his songs in English, we'd rank him among Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Jim Morrison, and the rest of the great rock lyricists.

Christmas in July - Sufjan Stevens
Suggestion from Amy J: "If you hadn't already thought of it, I think you should include Sufjan Stevens' 'Christmas in July' on your upcoming blog post - it feels like kind of a nice mid-year homage to the Christmas playlist that inspired the year in songs."

June:
June is Busting Out - Benny Goodman
The first song that popped into my head when I thought of June songs. This is from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, but in the context of the show it's way to hard to extract it from the surrounding music and have it stand alone. So I'm glad I found this swingin' Benny Goodman version from 1945 (the same year Carousel opened).

Ghost Town - The Specials
Like "Ohio" on the May Year of Songs playlist, this song was written, recorded, and released at whirlwind speed in June, 1981 in reaction to events that left a nation in shock. In this case the song was written about a rash of race riots that raged all over England that summer, causing the police to enforce a strict curfew in some cities. "This town is coming like a ghost town, all the clubs have been closed down... Bands won't play no more, too much fighting on the dance floor."

Despite its unfortunate origins, this song is just all kinds of awesome and I wanted to find some way to sneak it onto this playlist. Easily my favorite song from my birth year.

Surfin' U.S.A.
"We can't wait for June!" A few months ago I taught a group guitar lesson to nine kids ranging from 8-11 years of age and we learned this song. My song choice at a previous group lesson hadn't gone over very well ("Love Me Do," since the majority of the song has just 2 chords), so I was thrilled that some of them had actually had heard it before - they had learned it in school - and that they liked it (Hey Mikey!).

June Hymn - Decemberists
Back in January they gave us "January Hymn," and now "June Hymn." Even their name is month-y.

A Couple of Swells - Fred Astaire and Judy Garland
A song that lumps the summer months together, just I have done in this post: "In June, July, and August we look cute when we're dressed in shorts." This is most famously used in the film Easter Parade (mentioned in a previous Year of Songs post):



Bonus June Track:
I'll Be On My Way - The Beatles
As I have noted in the past, Grooveshark doesn't seem to have any Beatles recordings in their catalogue. This is a nice little rarity from the Live at the BBC collection released in the '90s. As the album title suggest, this Lennon/McCartney original was recorded live for a radio show, and the Beatles never did make a studio recording of it:

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Believe it or not, September is an extremely fertile month for songs, so hopefully I'll get that one up before the last day of the month. As always, if you have a song suggestion for next month, please let me know in the comments below!

Happy Trails

For my final Master's recital back in 2007, I did an entire program of extended oratorio excerpts: all of the character Jonathan's arias from Handel's Saul, the first big recitative and aria from Beethoven's Christ on the Mount of Olives, and, most ambitiously, the entire first half of Sir Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius.

The Dream of Gerontius is a criminally underappreciated masterwork on a truly epic, Wagnerian scale. In my recital, I sang the role of Gerontius, and I recruited friends from the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City to be the choir (a shout-out to my pianist Emily as well). Most of the first half of the piece is an extended musical monologue for the character of Gerontius with occasional interjections from the chorus. Gerontius is on his deathbed, contemplating the eternal fate of his soul before finally giving up the ghost just before the end of the first half of the work. Seconds after he slips away ("Into Thy hands, oh Lord," he sings), a Priest (a baritone, sung by my friend Tyler at my recital) enters and initiates a glorious chorus to send the spirit of Gerontius off into the next life:

Proficiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo!
Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul!
Go from this world! Go, in the Name of God
The Omnipotent Father, Who created thee!
Go, in the Name of Jesus Christ, our Lord,
Son of the Living God, Who bled for thee!
Go, in the Name of the Holy Spirit,
Who Hath been poured out on thee!

I don't even have words to describe how powerfully this music affects me. For me it thrillingly captures the majesty of this scripture from The Book of Mormon:

Now, concerning the state of the soul between death and the resurrection—Behold, it has been made known unto me by an angel, that the spirits of all men, as soon as they are departed from this mortal body, yea, the spirits of all men, whether they be good or evil, are taken home to that God who gave them life. (Alma 40:11)

Gerontius came to mind two weeks ago when I heard that my grandpa had died. He was 95, had led a rich, full life, had accomplished everything he wanted to do in life, and was healthy up until the end when he slipped away gently in his sleep. He was a tremendously hard-working man, and left an incredible legacy of righteousness for his family. If there is anyone that could feel prepared to return to God, I think it was Grandpa Tanner.

I was asked to perform a musical number at the funeral, and my mind first went to something classical along the lines of Gerontius or old funeral standbys like "O Divine Redeemer" or "You'll Never Walk Alone." Though the sentiments found in those pieces are certainly fitting for the great man that was my grandpa, that kind of music just wasn't his style. My grandpa was a cowboy:

Grandma Tanner (also 95) suggested that Grandpa would have wanted cowboy songs at his funeral. I immediately jumped on board with her suggestion and prepared a medley of cowboy songs mixed in with the hymn "How Great Thou Art." Thematically I thought it worked really well: "How Great Thou Art" expresses wonder at the magnificence of the world that Heavenly Father created for us, and one of the ways that Grandpa partook of that magnificence was out riding his horses.

He loved these old songs too - I remember riding around in his truck accompanied by the sounds of The Sons of the Pioneers and other singers from that era. Here are the two Cowboy songs I mixed into the medley, "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" and "Cool Water":


I was really proud of the arrangement I put together, but I was afraid that people wouldn't get it, or worse, think it was inappropriate that I was up at the front of the chapel with a guitar singing lines like, "I'm a roamin' cowboy, ridin' all day long." I felt good about my performance, but I returned to my pew feeling uncertain about its reception until my uncle Don got up to speak. "I was doing okay 'til Brian got up," he began. "Brian, thank you for capturing the heart and soul of Dad. He loved horses and Heavenly Father. That was beautiful. Thank you."

At that point I just started bawling. I loved and admired my grandpa and I really wanted to honor him. My uncle's comments confirmed that the message of my song - "horses and Heavenly Father" - had been received.

There was one more musical number besides mine, performed just before the closing prayer - a duet with guitar of the old cowboy classic "Happy Trails":


Happy trails, Grandpa, until we meet again.