Year of Songs: September of My Years

September Song &
September of My Years - Frank Sinatra
Frank Sinatra turned 50 in 1965, and to mark the occasion he recorded the incredibly reflective and age-conscious album September of My Years. Just a glance at the song titles betrays his preoccupation with his age: "How Old Am I?" "Last Night When We Were Young," "The Man in the Looking Glass." The track "It Was a Very Good Year" (the "when I was seventeen..." song) went on to be one of the songs most associated with Sinatra, but for my money the real showstopper on the disc is his performance of the Kurt Weill standard "September Song." So many other singers interpret this song in a glib way, but Sinatra gives it a gravity that makes it profoundly moving.

"September of My Years" is the the album's one newly composed tune, and I have also included it here. It's a nice song, but a little bit on the nose thematically (and some of the lyrics read as a little bit creepy in 2011).

Into the Fire &
You're Missing - Bruce Springsteen
A very different album that came to mind for September was Bruce Springsteen's The Rising, inspired by and recorded soon after 9/11. As the Rolling Stone review put it, "The music is often fierce in its execution, but in essence it is a requiem for those who perished in that sudden inferno, and those who died trying to save them."

"Into the Fire" contains a lot of grief, but it has a surprisingly uplifting chorus. "You're Missing," on the other hand, is just devastatingly sad - a rumination on the negative space left behind by all the lives lost on September 11th.

September Gurls - Big Star
How about a nice upbeat song for a change?  Sorry Katy Perry, but Big Star beat you to the misspelling of "gurls" by forty years - this song was released in 1974.

Big Star is one of those bands that a lot of my favorite bands name-check when listing their influences, and I only recently decided to check them out for myself and I liked what I heard - very Byrds-y, which is cool by me.

The Bangles recorded a surprisingly faithful cover of this song in the 80's:



Wake Me Up When September Ends - Green Day
This song drove me crazy when it came out, but revisiting it now after 7 years (wow - time flies) it's kind of grown on me.

This song continues the "sleep through entire months" theme from the previous Year of Songs post. Who knew there were so many songs on this theme? I feel pressure to find ones for October, November, and December. My favorite song on this theme, however, has to be Belle and Sebastian's "Sleep the Clock Around":



September in the Rain - Dinah Washington
This is a standard covered by a lot of great singers, but I saw an interview today with Tony Bennett in which he compared Amy Winehouse to Dinah Washington, so I thought I'd pick Dinah Washington's version. And it's great.

Try to Remember (The Kind of September) - From The Fantasticks
This is one of the most common songs that voice teachers assign to beginning students. Having lived in that world for many years, I'm actually a little burned out on it. However, hearing this recording while assembling this playlist was actually the first time that I'd ever heard a well-trained singer doing this song. Guess what - turns out it's actually a nice little song.

See You in September - Frankie Avalon & the Four Seasons
In my high school choir we practiced an arrangement of this song for several weeks, and then the choir teacher was like, "Nevermind. Let's not do that one." That's my sole connection to this song.

September - Jessye Norman
And we'll end with this gorgeous lied by Richard Strauss. By the time Strauss wrote this song in 1948, no one was writing lush, Wagnerian music like this anymore - most serious composers had moved on to writing increasingly atonal music. Strauss himself had been at the forefront of the movement towards atonality with his shocking opera Salome in 1905. However, I think it's kind of beautiful that at age 84, when writing his very last songs ("September" comes from a set that is called Vier letzte Lieder [Four Last Songs] and they are literally his last compositions) Strauss returned to the Romantic style of his youth.

In case you're wondering who Richard Strauss is, allow me to jog your memory with what is no doubt his most famous work:


By the way, I picked Jessye Norman's recording of "September" for two reasons: 1) It's exquisite, and 2) She's probably the greatest singer to ever come out of the University of Michigan. Go Blue!

*************

As always, if you have any song suggestions for October, please leave them below in the comments. (Especially if you know of a song about sleeping through the whole month of October.)