Suzanne

Leonard Cohen

I never used to like Leonard Cohen. I thought he was rather too dreary and that he didn’t really sing his songs. Now though, I find they speak to me in a way that few others do. Suzanne is probably his most famous song, although the same album it appears on contains many other immense tracks.

Now Suzanne appeals to me, or even breaks my heart, for its chorus:

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind

Before I had cancer and from the age of 16, I thought my body was awful. I’m not going to detail what I hated about it because this idea will resonate with masses of people. It just wasn’t perfect or even anywhere near it. Then last year and the year before (2019 and 2018), I had chemotherapy, radiotherapy and three surgeries. My imperfect body coped with all these assaults on it and each time sprung back ready for the next awful experience. As far as I could, I made it carry on walking the dogs, riding my pony, looking after the garden and so on and so on and so on. Towards the end of 2019, I started thinking what an amazing body I had had and how damaged it is now. I have a few scars – one (liver resection) is pretty big and in a reverse L-shape across my once perfect stomach. I have an ileostomy (hopefully reversible) and am nearly always uncomfortable. Now can you see how this song moves me? You’ve touched her perfect body with your mind. I will never again have that perfect body. I will live with these scars that tell me my body is perfect. It is perfect, perfect, perfect. It is the best body I will ever have and I love it to bits.

Now to the song. I feel this song in my perfect body. I feel Leonard Cohen’s pain and emotion. I feel he can almost not sing this song because it hurts him so much. He sings it so beautifully. God I love this song.

Suzanne

My favourite version is sung by Leonard Cohen, obviously. It’s his voice that makes it. However, there are other versions that are worth a listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o6zMPLcXZ8

This is Cohen. He explains, without rancour, that the rights were stolen from him, and maybe this makes the song better for it never made him rich.

Joan Baez who has the most crystal clear voice ever and a pedigree as long as the tracks of the Danville train (The night they drove ole dixie down).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39eFrEzZmYE

Have I Told You Lately

Van Morrison

This is possibly my most favourite song, but it might not be, because my favourites change with the days, months, seasons. I love Van Morrison’s voice and particularly his slower softer songs, including this one and the absolutely wonderful Into the Mystic, but I also like his more lively ones, such as Bright Side of the Road and Brown-eyed Girl. This is a man that loves his music but never courts publicity or fame. He is taciturn to the point of rudeness, but a while ago I heard him interviewed by Clare Teal on Radio 2 and he could tell he was in good company with someone who understood his music and wasn’t star struck. It was a great interview/chat. I say it was recently but I’m lost in time nowadays with things that seem recent being years ago and things from ages ago being recent. I blame the extreme stress of the last 18 months, but it’s also an age thing. I’m 58. I’ve had a look and the interview is not available to listen to. Sorry.

I picked this song because it reflects my feelings for my husband and the feelings around our marriage and maybe what it means to me. When I met him I was a feisty 30-year-old who’d been badly hurt by love (see Number 5). I really didn’t want love and didn’t believe in it. I had lots of men friends who I enjoyed being with and didn’t really want to give up the single life. However, he was very persistent and solid in his desire to be with me, and in the end I gave in and married him just about two years after we met. Even as I was getting married, I thought, well if this doesn’t work out, I can always get divorced. I’d moved back to Devon and got a job and sort of didn’t want to be totally alone. We’ve been married nearly 27 years (May 1st 1993).

Have I told you lately that I love you?
Have I told you there's no-one above your?
Fill my heart with gladness, take away all my sadness,
Ease my troubles, that's what you do.

See you bastard, you do make me laugh, even when I hate you.

Have I told you lately?

My favourite version is sung by Van Morrison but dear little Rod Stewart has done a couple of wonderful covers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J789GId1kaY by Van Morrison

Of course, I love the piano intro. So beautiful, so sweeping. And that voice. Reluctant but beautiful. Funnily enough in this video he looks rather like my oncologist who I so like and who is so kind.

A Man I’ll Never Be

Boston

I don’t rate Boston that much. I can see the rock appeal, but I think their songs are overproduced and there are too many clashy bangy guitar sounds. It’s all like an over-rich meal that you long to get to the end of. However, this song has been going through my mind recently and has always had a place in my heart. It reminds me of someone I truly loved.

I met Kev when I was at university. A friend had come to visit and we were busy getting drunk in the bar (I may as well be honest) when he came in with some other blokes. My friend was always good at chatting to strangers and she started up a conversation with him. It was probably about rock music. Anyway, for a while I thought of him as her territory, but then one day, I realised I really liked him. I liked his looks, but I also loved his Mancunian accent and his intellectual way of talking. It was unforced. He just used words I had never heard in a way that I never knew you could. He impressed me, and others, by the way he could lie on his bed listening to Radio 4 for hours, then get up, write an essay that took up three sides of A4 and get a really great mark for it.

If I said what’s on my mind
You’d turn and walk away
Disappearing way back in your dreams
It’s so hard to be unkind
So easy just to say
That everything is just the way it seems

Anyway, Pat, my friend, relinquished her rights to him quite happily (sounds awful doesn’t it?) and we got together. We had a few great months and then things started to fall apart. At this time distance (I was at university in the early 1980s), I don’t really know why. By then I knew I loved him, but maybe he wanted to be alone, to be able to study and do “manly” things without this rather over-the-top girlfriend. (I was insecure, to say the least.) At some point he started playing this song to me when he visited my room and I could see what he was getting at, although maybe it was just its great guitar work that he was interested in. Nowadays, I realise that men are often much simpler creatures than women think they are. They don’t really do hints, or at least the ones I know don’t. Direct speak is more their style.

So we split up. And I was devastated. But all was not lost because over the next few months we often got together and listened to music in my room, especially after a few drinks. Eventually we got together again and had about six years in a fun and loving relationship. We ended up in London after graduating and his work opened up opportunities for him that just didn’t include me. When it finished, it was him again who made the decision. It took me years to get over it. I come from a stable family and believed love lasts forever. It’s hard to trust love again when you learn that it falls apart like that. I still find it odd that one person can love another with absolutely no encouragement, even when they’re explicitly told “no I don’t love you anymore”. How on earth can that be. What is love? Now I imagine maybe I did see him as a “man he’d never be” and I am happier without him, but there is still a part of me that will never relinquish that love I felt for him.

For me that line, ‘It’s so hard to be unkind’ has extraordinary resonance because when you have cared for someone, you know exactly how you’re going to hurt them. I’ve never heard the word ‘unkind’ in a song before and it’s such a strong one. The song starts so softly and gently, that’s what draws you in. It gets more rocky and passionate as it progresses with all those electric complex guitar sounds. I’ve read that Tom works forever on his songs and it shows because there is a lack of spontaneity in them. I bet that the start of this one was done in a single session though.

A Man I’ll Never Be

Boston

I’ve recommended the live version because it’s brilliant. There’re no covers to speak of. Sadly, the vocalist Brad Delph committed suicide in 2007. “J’ai un ame solitaire” was written on one of his suicide notes.

Walking on Sunshine

Katrina and the Waves

I defy anyone to listen to this song and not at least jiggle a bit along with the music. I particularly love the beginning “owh”. I bet everyone listens out for that and for the wind instruments coming in (the video doesn’t show them; I’m assuming they’re trumpets – Katrina calls them horns).

The video is hilarious (one of the comments is “so I guess that’s how sunshine in UK looks like”). Katrina is having a great time and the “Waves” look cold and tee’d off. I imagine that’s the point. I love the way the song builds throughout getting a bit more manic as it does until even Katrina can’t really keep up with the lyrics. It’s like she’s so happy she can’t keep herself down.

When I was in hospital having one of my, so far, three operations, I’d have loved to have got the whole ward up dancing to this. I think even the sad demented old ladies would have cheered up.

The song is now 35 years old (2020) and sounds every bit as fresh as it did when it was first released. For some reason I always associate it with Echo Beach by Martha and the Muffins, which is an altogether calmer song, but still has quite a big feel-good factor. It was released earlier (1980 to Walking on Sunshine’s 1985) and was popular on the duke box in the bar at my university halls of residence (Horsham, Fifer’s Lane, UEA). It has a sax rather than trumpets. I love a sax.

Walking on Sunshine

Here’s an interesting article about the song from the woman herself: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/sep/01/katrina-and-the-waves-how-we-made-walking-on-sunshine

Dolly Parton did a version but it’s not really her sort of song. I can’t recommend it, even though I love Dolly, because it has none of the mad charm of the original. Another version is by Ghoti Hook (I know nothing about them). I quite like its smooth punkiness and I love the video.

Posted byJo WeeksNovember 18, 2019Posted inUncategorizedEdit Number One

Old Town Road

Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus

I just love this song, particularly the syncopation that occurs throughout. I love the video too. That Lil Nas dude is so cool. I heard this song driving home from dog walking one evening in the dark after a particularly difficult day. It was a request on Sara Cox’s Friday Night Request Show on Radio 2. I missed the beginning, so I didn’t know who it was at first (had to wait in the car until it finished to find out, didn’t I?). Anyway, the car was rocking all the way home – the drive is only about 2 minutes, so the 2.37 of this song is perfect, but in everyday life it ought to be longer.

I am so old and out of touch that I had never heard of Lil Nas, so I just looked him up and found he is a rapper and this song is his breakthrough/most famous to date. I also read that this remix is genre busting because of Billy Ray who is a country singer, and also that it got kicked off the Billboard chart because it wasn’t country enough. Hah! To me it is a great tune that gets you wanting to dance.

I’ve no idea what the lyrics mean but I hardly think that matters. They’re probably a bit two fingers up to the world and also maybe a little bit rude. Who cares? When I need to feel a bit of rhythm in my life, especially at the moment when I’m in the middle of my second (hopefully last) blast of chemo and suffering all the side effects and sickness that the chemicals bring, I now listen to this, among other songs and it blows away my self pity.

Barbados

Typically Tropical

Imagine a kid used to living in a warm easy climate surrounded by friends of all colours and without any awareness of racism being transported to the bleak wet west country of the 1970s. The children in my new school actually asked me if we’d lived in mud huts in Kenya, such was the insular nature of British country life in those days. So then, imagine this song with the glorious voice of Captain Tobias Willcock welcoming passengers aboard Coconut Airways with the promise of landing in Bridgetown Barbados where the “weather is fine with a maximum temperature of 90 degrees Farenheit.”

I decided that any song I liked that came into my head could be a candidate for my blog, so no apologies for this slightly cheesy classic. I do really love this song. I spent six and a half years of my young life in Kenya, and although it is the other side of the world from Barbados, there is something about this tune that has always made me feel nostalgic for that life, its warmth, freedom and happiness. For me as a kid, Kenya was paradise on earth.

Released in 1975, two years after our return from Kenya, Barbados was part of my early music education. In those long ago days, it wasn’t always a given that kids would be introduced to music on the radio from babyhood. It wasn’t the first song that entered my consciousness, but it was among the first that was able to affect my mood.

Far away from London town and the rain
It's really very nice to be home again
Mary Jane met the Coconut Airplane
Now I know she loves me so

There is nothing very clever about the lyrics, but they are singalong simple and fun enough. I love the synth hook and I like the sound of the aircraft too with the authentic muffled radio voice of the captain. Back then, I could see Barbados in my mind’s eye, and I liked what I saw. Now when this song comes on the radio, I sing along and often there’s a tear in my eye, remembering that little lost girl and the lovely life she’d left behind. There’s a sense of lost innocence and sadness too. But, if it makes me sad, it makes me happy too.

Barbados

I haven’t got any recommendations for other versions, although there is another, so this week I thought I’d add a WOW song. Last weekend I was listening to Dermot O’Leary talking to Cher about her appearance in Cats. He was really bigging up her version of Memory and I was thinking, well he would, they’re clearly good friends. Anyway, then he played it. WOW! For the first time I could see a cat, not people dressed in cat costumes. I felt the sadness and nostalgia and could see the gloomy dark London streets. The power and emotion in her voice was astounding. I like Cher but not that much, but I loved this. It was definitely a sit-in-the-car until-it’s-finished song. I’ve just looked her up and she loves cats, so maybe that’s half the secret. Find it and listen.

For those of you old enough to remember the 1970s, the talented voice mimic Mike Yarwood used to finish his tv programmes with a song sung in his own voice, introducing it with the words “And this is me.” Don’t worry. I’m not going to sing you any songs. Well not in the foreseeable future. But otherwise, this is (part) of me.

As long as I can remember, music has inspired and comforted me, as well as being able to make me cry, laugh and generally just give thanks for being alive. In August 2018, I discovered I had advanced bowel cancer with liver metastases and that I would require plenty of surgery, chemo and radiotherapy, as well as enormous amounts of patience and bravery to survive. Since then I’ve been keeping a diary about how I’ve felt and what treatments I have had. Frankly, it’s been an enormously difficult time, and I don’t want to burden anyone with my stories – well, again, not yet. There are plenty of great blogs out there that can supply you with all the gory details and more. What I really want to do (finally, she gets to the point) is share some of the songs I have loved over the years, that have kept me going through the rough times and what they mean to me. I’m also going to include songs that are new to me, because, let’s face it, there’s a lot of superb music being written the whole time – and I can still have goosebumps on the back of my neck when I hear a great tune.

So…here’s the plan:

• I am going to write a short blog on a different song each week.
• That’s it.

I’m going to keep it short so you don’t waste valuable music time reading waffle.

Will this blog appeal to you?:

• Do you sit in the car after getting to your destination waiting until a favourite song has finished on the radio?
• Do you wait to switch off the radio at home until a song has ended?
• Do you sing along to songs, even when you don’t know all the lyrics?
• Do you sometimes have tears in your eyes or do the hairs on your arms stand up when you’re listening to music?
• Do song lyrics often have a personal meaning to you?
• Have you listened to the same song over and over again just being totally lost in it?

If you can answer yes to any or all of the questions above, congratulations you are a brilliant person. You have a soul and you make your life better by listening to music. You’re one of my kind. (See what I did there?)