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Month: December 2019
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Happiness as Anarchy #202: Thanks for the Dance
I listened to Leonard Cohen’s posthumous album today. It’s beautiful and gentle and very Leonard. The songs of a man who knew he was leaving. It needs a lot more listening, and that will be a pleasure because it warms the heart in a dark kind of way. Watch the video for the story of…
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Happiness as Anarchy #201: Sunny trees
I love the way tree branches look like roots or rivers or nerves or lungs or capillaries – an organic and frequently occurring formation. The morning light in the trees in Adelaide created perfect shapes with verdant green.
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Happiness as Anarchy #200: Wine
Today’s title seems simple, but for me it encompasses so many parts of my life. And on beautiful days, I find lots of the good bits swirling together like a great blended vintage. Today, on day #200 of this little blogging exercise, my glass was filled with an Australian Malbec, that I shared with fellow…
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Happiness as Anarchy #199: Singing Harmonies
One of my happiest places is singing harmonies with another human. There’s a big smile on face after singing with Philomena tonight and I’m looking forward to many more harmonies to come. We sang I’ll Fly Away, so here I post Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch for your listening pleasure.
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Happiness as Anarchy #198: Don’t Fence Me In
‘Tis a song that most people associate with country and western, but in fact twas written by the master of music theatre, Cole Porter. He penned the melody in 1934, with lyrics written by Robert Fletcher, for the musical Adios Argentina. However it didn’t become a hit until Roy Rogers sang it in the Warner…
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Happiness as Anarchy #197: Jazz trombone
I walked into my son’s room this evening to see what he was watching on youtube. Turns out it’s this brilliant Swedish trombone player who can tap dance while she plays. I’ll not be surprised if my young man has learned to tap dance by the end of summer just so he can have some…
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Happiness as Anarchy #196: Gillian Welch
I only discovered Gillian Welch a couple of years ago. She’s an extraordinary musician in that relaxed, understated way that the best musicians are. Dear Someone is the first song of hers I got to know. Like an old horse picking it’s way across the desert, it’s full of space and constant movement, just ticking…
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Happiness as Anarchy #195: Paper submission
Sending off the paper, finally, with all the angst of ‘it’s probably still garbage’ and ‘I could do more work on it’, is a liberating feeling. That’s it, nothing more can be done. If it’s rubbish, so be it; if it needs works, the reviewers will tell you; but for the moment there is nothing…
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Happiness as Anarchy #194: Tom Waits tunes
Tom Waits is an incredible songwriter and I’ve been really enjoying digging into his songs of late. One of the things I love is discovering over and over that a song I know from an album I have, or a movie I’ve seen, or just because it’s being playing on the radio for years, is…
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Happiness as Anarchy #193: Rehearsals
Rehearsals are wonderful. Time and space to work things out, experiment and polish. They are also a lovely opportunity to wallow in the sounds and stretch things out in a way that you can’t do in front of an audience. I just had one of the most enjoyable rehearsals I’ve had for a long time,…