[Probably not such a] Naughty Boy, Sam Smith - La la la (Lyrics / Lyric Video / Letra) #songlyricsunday

7clouds videos are awesome - along with Rachel Reyes - they are my first choice for videos which emphasise lyricism.



and here come the words [thought NOT the style!] for my choice of #songlyricsunday for 5 January 2020:

[Intro] Na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (Tu meri mauja hain) [Verse 1] Hush, don't speak When you spit your venom, keep it shut I hate it When you hiss and preach About your new messiah cause your theories catch fire [Bridge] I can't find your silver lining I don't mean to judge But when you read your speech, it's tiring Enough is enough [Hook] I'm covering my ears like a kid When your words mean nothing, I go la la la I'm turning up the volume when you speak Cause if my heart can't stop it, I'll find a way to block it, I go Na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (I found a way to block it, I go) La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na [Verse 2] If our love is running out of time I won't count the hours, rather be a coward When our words collide I'm gonna drown you out before I lose my mind [Bridge] I can't find your silver lining I don't mean to judge But when you read your speech, it's tiring Enough is enough [Hook] I'm covering my ears like a kid When your words mean nothing, I go la la la I'm turning up the volume when you speak Cause if my heart can't stop it I'll find a way to block it, I go Na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (I found a way to block it, I go) La la na na , la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (I found a way to block it, oh) Na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (I found a way to block it, I go) La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (Tu meri mauja hain) I'm covering my ears like a kid When your words mean nothing, I go la la la I'm turning up the volume when you speak Cause if my heart can't stop it I find a way to block it, I go I'm covering my ears like a kid When your words mean nothing, I go la la la I'm turning up the volume when you speak (when you speak) Cause if my heart can't stop it I find a way to block it, I go Na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (Tu meri mauja hain)

And then I realise there's a reason that YouTube does that when it comes to lyrics - or the 7clouds people did what they did.



When I was a little girl I discovered author Dorothy Edwards and illustrator Shirley Hughes for the first time in a simple novel / anecdote format - the series My naughty little sister.



It was one of my first conscious trips to a beach house; subject to a friend from the civil service.



So in the best traditions, or perhaps defiant/oblivious of these same traditions, I wrecked the entertainment room with Trivial Pursuit cards all over the floor.



The outdoor landscape of that beach house though! It had a big tree at the back. I was trying to trust trees and treehouses again after I had a nasty splinter at home walking on the top of the house [my treehouse had two floors] and it was on my foot. I remember going on the porch to get the splinter out with a needle.



Some three weeks before [12 December 1990] the wonders of the video cassette recorder were revealed to me and one of my very first picks was Pippi Longstocking which was a highly musical version and vivid. I had read the Astrid Lindgren books first in the library especially Pippi in the South Sea Islands with my grandparents so I knew the Ville Villa Kuella.



And Scrubbing Day was incredible - so was Running Away and the whole The First Noël feeling when Pippi and friends came to the orphanage. I loved the Head Girl - the first I recognised as Head Girl. I had not even read Blyton school stories yet in January 1991 - that pleasure was to be some eight months away with Elizabeth Allen and The naughtiest girl in the school.



I too had been considered - one of - the naughtiest girls in my school. I think of Hermoine Granger and that scene in the film of The Philosopher's / Sorcerer's Stone.

That witch really needs to sort out her priorities! - Ron Weasley - Harry and Hermoine's friend

One of the naughty things I did was blow on another student's whistle with the residue of a frozen ice. I did not quite have the mens rea involved [guilty mind in Latin] because I wanted to know how Melisande's whistle worked and if it had nuts in it like the Physical Education teacher's whistle did. The Phys Ed teacher was yet another champion of mine - and a broker into the system. Some years later on she would have us learn and support Italian lessons. And because of this she was a really strong connector - especially when it came to a question on Copernicus/Kopernik when we were studying the stars and astronomy.



Love La la la because it has the idea of preach speech in it and it has been so popular in so many countries.



Here is a quote that shows what I [and Beverley Eley] mean by PREACH SPEECH - it is also a good introduction to a book which showed me so much about biographical craft and graft - The book of David - it is also good for anyone who wants to know It's all right to be different:

[... earlier there was something about Democritus and the atom in that paragraph]Not only is his memory phenomenal, his wit is dry and clever. One day he walked into a conversation about homilies, proverbs and adages. After patting and kissing those close at hand [my emphasis], he walked away with the comment, 'Preach speech ... it's preach speech'.

By what yardstick do we measure someone like the eccentric, yet greatly gifted, David Helfgott? [says Eley on page 7 of The book of David in its 5th printing from 1997]

Eley and Helfgott [David and Gillian] are very good friends and her biographical practice is exemplary. Hoping the Gleniffer house where she and her husband John [who The book of David is dedicated to - for being someone who BELIEVES IN LOYALTY FRIENDSHIP AND JUSTICE - if books were tablets and stones - they would be carved in like that] is okay and the land too. That land is called the Promised Land and again Eley and David Helfgott are neighbours.



Had a great time watching Marianne and Leonard - words of love - so many people came by including in groups. Of course So long Marianne is a very important song. And Marianne was such a very generous and kind person. I think of Axel who is over 60 now and was only 6 months old when Leonard Cohen came into his Hydra life - in all my years I had never heard it pronounced like that so I could imitate it and reference it. Shows you how few of my resources are Greek. And the archivist really made the film, I do believe. I would sell the farm on it. Along with Broomfield of course who had a connection - intimate connection - with Ihlen from Oslo [and Paris and London and Hydra and one more place]



What did I want to talk about with the Naughty Little Sister and my experience?



When she was in a school choir one day; she and her friend Bad Harry la la la la'ed to the Christmas carols particularly Away in a manger which was the very first Christmas carol I connected with in 1985-86. Another early one was The first Noël - ten years later I connected so hard I named a character Noelle. She belongs to the gaggle of Gilberts - the five who were born on a student exchange. [and, yes, that is five at the same time in the same caul so to speak!]



And then I remember the Blubber singing lessons in Judy Blume - especially Miss Rochelle - great name for a musical person. My 1999 self thought this too - one of the times she and my 1994 self were in agreement [the former self was the one who read the book for the first time - and she was up for it six months later when she was sick and the world didn't make sense - she also enjoyed Paul Jennings' Quirky Tales where Linda thought salt was sugar and sugar was salt and No was yes]. So there was a young girl called Rochelle who absolutely loved music and was a flower girl. And then there was breathing and melody and harmony which I confess I really did not get until Grizel Cochrane had lost her harmony book in The head girl of the Chalet School which came with me in a Lion King bag along with a manuscript - that one was about a student called Tadeusz Meliński who studied temporarily at the London Progressive College. I got quite far in the writing of Educating Tadeusz laying and paving the ground [like crazy paving in my last].



Yours truly has also discovered Music from Ceefax which is the British Broadcasting Corporation teletext service. Especially looking for ocean music and ship music and sea shanties. After I watched Little Women in the Greta Gerwig mode and went to a park and a public house, I found many of them. It was when I became sick of Scouting and Guiding songs around the campfire and the Jamboree setting that I wanted to find some sea songs.

Many of you who have read Blubber will remember that Jill Brenner was quite the stamp collector - and she knew how to bargain and broker and write good letters. What she was not so good at doing was keeping her nails tidy and unbitten. Now nerves will do that to any person - and she was carrying around the sort of nervery which would make an animal pace and scratch and do various other displacement behaviours.

People often feel misplaced and displaced too. Especially when they feel their love is running out of time and that their words mean nothing.

Hope your lives feel Funktastic this week and for the Epiphany tomorrow. Imagine that - the first Monday of 2020!

Finally deck the halls with boughs of holly fa la la la la.

La la la  was released at the Jingle Bell Ball of 2013 and subsequently charted in many nations. And it had so many remixes - I chose the Sam Smith one because it had lots of resonance and was best-known perhaps ...

In Australia it peaked at number five; hit number one in the Commonwealth of Independent States chart as it did in the Czech Republic; number two in Denmark and Germany; number six in France; and it's probably time to point out the Hungarian charts and their genre diversity as well as media diversity [stream and radio]. A lot of central European nations [Poland too] have their dance charts and in this La la la came out 9th in Poland and 6th in Hungary. Seems the Romanians loved it and put it on number 1. Top 15 in Venezuela - 14th actually - awesome!

The US charts were much more mixed. Somehow the Brits bought more than a million copies. At least two charts showed top 20 and one was actually 10th. The Rhythmic seems open for debate.

And when hearts can't stop it they find a way to block it.

Trying to block this earworm [though I don't want to so it will stay] of La La Land which I think many of my #songlyricsunday companions and compeers have chosen.

 

#songlyricsunday Andrew Gold's LONELY BOY

Song Lyrics Sunday has a really awesome theme this week - it's about Drifters, Vagabonds, Loners and Transients.

"Listening to music may cause uncontrolled outbursts of joy and happiness and also lead you to becoming more energetic, creative and spontaneous, so stop by for some fun".

Jim Adams made a new picture too or icon. It was so good to see the icon on Twitter. Felicia and others had it up there.

Reminded me a lot of my youth in graphic design and illustration/communication. Where every effect was the best effect and could be all layered on at once in one composition. One example of this was in February 2004 when I was designing a Small Press promotion with a dog and the dog was asking questions that people might need to know about the literary journal. And there was also a woman answering the questions. I used an application called Inspiration which is supposed to be for idea generation and outlines.

I made a much more streamlined musical subject page [this was on paper and pre-press; not the Web] some nine years before and I coloured it in on the weekend. And it did get an elephant sticker and a signature from a young lady friend with whom I worked on a puppet play three months later [it felt like years] and I used it again a year later in a smaller version in a proper music composition book such as I was drooling over back in the 1980s [November 1988 - because of cards and cakes and streamers and Doctor Who and newsagents and stamps of the stamping/scrapbooking kind and Letraset letters which were really cool in the time. Now that newsagent has not been a newsagent since 1997 and there are no newsagents in that village. It is instead a Thai restaurant which has a Bangkok garden feel].

In the 1980s I also thought bits and bytes were very cool indeed and synthesisers - finally got to see how a Roland one works in 1992 and in the late 2000s and early 2010s have made some dips into music production especially through Garage Band. They were on exercise books and lots of definitions/glossaries.

Right now in October 2019 I am learning how Catalina - MacOSX 10.15 - is working. I really love the Visual Notes structure and making new folders for each project like a blog roll. The three new apps are Apple TV; Podcasts and App Store Arcade of 100 games after which you pay a nominal monthly subscription amount. And then I realise the amount is, like, my whole pocket money for 1994.

No wonder I became a writer! Okay, the whole picture is much more complex than that. I will try to explain. There was a Home Computer Show and a lot of humanitarian and anti-poverty aspirations and inspirations. Also Fern Gully inspired me when we saw it as a class in the TV room. I had to learn how to spell bodacious and share it with the form. This was before mass multimedia though we did have classic Macs.

So this video of Lonely Boy by Andrew Gold was one of the very first videos on Music Television in 1979 - the track was made in 1976. And there was a vinyl record which spoke to me in Hunters. Hunters is a secondary market warehouse which I dropped into after a road trip.

Genius.com tells us there is an 8-minute video on YouTube which describes Gold's composition process and how he feels about Lonely Boy and how it fits into the album What's wrong with this picture? The album I saw was a compilation album.

And oh, the Rhino lot are so brilliant.

Noticed that Lonely Boy was also in a 2016 movie called Nice Guys. And then I think of Annastacia and Men are not nice guys.

I think we all want sometimes to be a "nice boy" or a "nice girl" or "nice" in whatever gender format/configuration you come in and find for yourself and evolve.

We want this because we don't want to be lonely or isolated.

Being a loner of course is something else.

Sometimes it is something we choose - something we take on because we can't be anyone or anything else. Sometimes it is a way of letting baggage and luggage go. [Don't forget your toothbrush - as a famous UK and Australian parlour game show used to say!]

There was a lady named Sula Wollf who wrote a really good book called Loners: the life path of unusual children. It came my way some time between 1995 and 1998.

There and these were people who were profoundly content with their aloneness.

Also - big difference - and deep similarities - between being alone and being lonely. Especially hard to understand when we are young and still beginning to form attachments and face the possibility of being abandoned like the narrator does in 1953.

I remember when I read Ramona the Brave and the thing which really moved me was Ramona's Mum talking about how love is not like a cup of sugar. Reflecting on that excerpt and my reactions nearly 30 years later: It is more like Parkinson's law - "Love expands to fill the time for its completion" and when it gets fuller and fuller and fuller - I think I saw love then as like a balloon full of rice or sand - such as might be in a sensory room in 2019 - in a Montessori-type setting for children and seniors together or another intergenerational gathering.

When I was a geographer we talked a lot about resources - finite and infinite - and about phenomena - especially the global variety. There was fishing and overfishing and there was the Aswam Dam in Egypt and Israel. There were so many aspiring geographers who did not even know that Africa was a continent - and that Europe isn't. It's a peninsula extending from Asia.

Further, my writerly self in 2001 had the whole Britain is an eighth continent thing going on - as in, I was against it.

For so long [1950s-1970s] the public servant class/civil servant class called Europe the Continent in their missives and memoranda of misunderstanding and especially in their cocktail parties. By the time yours truly began seriously to think of Europe that usage was more or less depreciated and pretentious. I know that after I read Europe by Norman Davies in December 2001 and Europe: a history by Tony Judt in March 2005 - magisterial texts both of them.

Christian Davies made a wonderful intervention in the London Review of Books. Let us say that if I had been privy to the "fake news" about a "concentration camp" in Warsaw in the Second World War - yes, there was a building; yes, it was temporary ... and ... In 1995 we did not refer to "fake news" or "alternative facts" when we discussed the 50th anniversary of the Second World War. We called that sort of thing "pettifogging" and it was a thing you tried not to do - especially when it came to ghettos and concentration camps.

Danusha Goska who wrote Bieganski and Save Send Delete puts it clearly in the headline: Decent people reject anti-Semitic conspiracy theories

Anyway - Polish parliamentary election tonight / tomorrow morning. And there is a lot of "respect yourself in the morning" in the air / being able and willing to do so.

There are a lot of "watermelon rainbow radish" issues going on - in case you think this is word salad; watermelon radishes are delicious right now. And the rainbow is a coded reference to all the people outside the heterosexist hegemony at the moment.

Ramona had an elder sister in her life - Beezus or Beatrice - and she eventually had a younger brother Algy who was a bit like a rat. I always wondered how Algy grew up with his formidable sisters.

Patrick Melrose has been much on my mind last week and this week - I love the way people have adapted Edward St Albyn for their own purposes and played with the five books. Patrick, of course, was a VERY "lonely boy" and he fills his loneliness with self-harm; self-injury; self-abnegation and of course indulgence in all the substances of dependence that were current from 1967 to 2003. He is very versatile in that regard!

Written By

Andrew Gold

Backing VocalsLinda Ronstadt

Lead guitarWaddy Wachtel

Rhythm GuitarDan Dugmore

BassKenny Edwards

DrumsMike Botts

Electric PianoBrock Walsh

Arp String EnsembleBrock Walsh

Sleigh BellsMike Botts

HandclapsAndrew Gold & Peter Asher

Sampled In

10 AM by Left Boy

Cover By

Lonely Boy by The Almost

MUSIC VIDEO

Lonely Boy
Andrew Gold

[Verse 1]
He was born on a summer day, 1951
And with a slap of a hand, he had landed as an only son
His mother and father said, "What a lovely boy
We'll teach him what we learned, ah, yes, just what we learned
We'll dress him up warmly, and we'll send him to school
It'll teach him how to fight, to be nobody's fool"

[Chorus]
Oh, oh, what a lonely boy
Oh, what a lonely boy
Oh, what a lonely boy

[Verse 2]
In the summer of '53, his mother brought him a sister
And she told him, "We must attend to her needs
She's so much younger than you"
Well, he ran down the hall and he cried
Oh, how could his parents have lied?
When they said he was their only son
He thought he was their only one

[Chorus]
Oh, oh, what a lonely boy
Oh, what a lonely boy
Oh, what a lonely boy

[Bridge]
Goodbye Mama
Goodbye you
Goodbye Papa
I'm pushing on through

[Verse 3]
He left home on a winter day, 1969
And he hoped to find all the love he had lost in that earlier time
Well, his sister grew up, and she married a man
He gave her a son, ah, yes, a lovely son
They dressed him up warmly, they sent him to school
It taught him how to fight, to be nobody's fool

[Chorus]
Oh, oh, what a lonely boy
Oh, what a lonely boy
Oh, what a lonely boy

[Chorus]
Whoa-whoa-whoa, oh, what a lonely boy
Oh, what a lonely boy
Oh, what a lonely boy

Some wonderful instruments in this lot for example handclaps and bells of the sleigh variety. That transition from summer to winter.

That repeat line: They dressed him up warmly; they sent him to school

It taught him how to fight, to be nobody's fool.

My other favourite Nobody's Fool song is Avril Lavigne's Nobody's Fool. And I may have written a lyric / poem around this sort of theme.

Another earworm which is going around is Against all odds - take a look at me now. Phil Collins and Mariah Carey each do an exceptional version - the one which caught me twenty years ago nearly [while seeing The King and I - the one with Jodie Foster as Anna Leonowens] I heard in a cafe/diner situation in December 1999.

The bridge in Lonely Boy - exceptionally powerful. It has a Sylvia Plath feeling "Goodbye Daddy I'm through" - did buy an Ariel this year or at least a Collected Poems.

Thinking of Ryan Michael Hunsaker and how hard it is to recoup - even to recapitulate - eighteen years of basic mistrust - either cumulative or consecutively. Or, really, any period of mistrust longer than a few weeks or months. Hunsaker is a brilliant man who broke away from behaviourism in the education system.

And that We'll teach him what we learned, ah, yes, just what we learned.

Sounds like a piece of cross-cultural and transcultural learning - fatal line in multicultural mental health.

And when he ran down the hall and cried - so many of us did not have a hall or a Hall.

Halls, of course, can serve and function as shelters for learning and for community.

Our Lonely Boy did not have that - it makes a big difference - even and especially to an abandoned two-year-old!

He probably did not even have a place for his tears that was outside of himself. That is such a vital and basic thing. For the children in North Syria who are on Kurdish land.

That whole "Jeffrey Archer and the Kurds" thing!

And you twist yourself in perceptions and justifications and conceptions.

In the face of lies - as you are facing the lies - and, even, yes, telling the lies.

And the sister growing up - that would have been later on in the 1960s.

And the kid's growing up would have been in the 1970s or 1980s.

They say, of course, "If you remember the 1970s you weren't there".

Remembering that wonderful Rebels and Revolution show at Victoria and Albert which is travelling around the world. I saw it the week before the Eurovision Song Contest at a Museum and we ate 1970s food and there were little children there. Children who engage and are engaged.

Engagee is a Sartrean word. And that gentleman wrote Words or Mots. And that was about his childhood.

[Why are all the childhoods I'm talking about here male? Couldn't I have put a feminist spin on Lonely Boy? And it's women who make all the Lonely Boys out there - and are afraid to break them and shake them - isn't it? Whether this is realistic or not...]

Between Wachtel and Dugmore - and Linda Ronstadt's backing vocals - really makes the song three-dimensional and transcendent as opposed / juxtaposing immanent.

If I were to explain The second sex's argument to a questing five-year-old, I would be very careful not to say: "Transcendent is how men think. Immanent is how women think." and I would press on how they are socialised to do this. 

Socialisation is an immanent and transcendent ongoing quest.

I hope my analysis of Lonely Boy and Gold's process has helped you.

#31for21: Dancing with Wombats and Jennie Irving #mentalhealthweek

Irving is a drama and music and dance teacher.

She also has four children who she calls Wombats after their interests, like Dancing Wombat; Train Wombat and Freewheeling Wombat.

I don't know where exactly I found her; though I had probably read about her in a newspaper a few months ago.

Then I realised it was probably in the Executive Functioning page on the Thinking Persons' Guide which Finn Gardner had written and the responses to that page.

Or probably the homeschooling comments.

She writes a lot about the senses that she and her children experience.

This month the family had to rescue their guinea pig. It's interesting to think about the different points of view the children and the family have each.

And there is a poem she wrote about a certain kind of loneliness.

Dancing Wombat is a lot like me at that age! She enjoys reading magazines, taking lots of steps, travelling and she feels successful colouring in.

Dancing Wombat website with blog; music; drama; dancing

Kaye Shanks and her art on Facebook

Hey Sigmund! A Facebook page about anxiety - good for Mental Health Week

Also Mental Health Week has begun around here.

I found Irving's posts inspirational and confronting and challenging as I read through the last year and two for the Wombats and the students Jennie has in her classes. They have done lots of plays and skits about explorers. The Wombats love to explore too.

One very cool thing I have done is to go to the Ian Potter Museum of Art to see the Score exhibition which is on the first floor and the ground floor. There are all sorts of notation experiences like "You" and "Me". "Me" is full of breve-rests and "You" has lots of music in it.

The other exhibition is about Angela Brennan and her experiences in Cyprus. It even inspired people to look up Aristophanes and his satirical plays. Brennan's fellowship was all about pots which bring the 21st century into the Etruscan world. Her votives and vessels are invigorating and imaginative, especially when I felt thirsty.

I wonder what you keep in your votives and vessels? What do you do when you note music?

There was a scroll from the Catholic Church showing music from the Middle Ages - I think Hildegarde von Bingen type music with plain chant and counterpoint.

And there were lots of 21st century musical experiences including multimedia.

Agatha Gothe-Snape had some wonderful mixed-media experiences.

And a lot of people find their music much more colourful when they put it to notes and shapes, like Roy de Maistre, who made an orchestra with a particular chord like D and E. And someone made instruments with different colours and strings.

Someone else had compositions with different shapes and colours like purple and green and orange and yellow and blue and red.

It was so cool seeing a dancer and choreographer do Nijinsky and read his journal which can be full of transcendent experiences.

About THE SOUND which is going on until 5 November 2017.

Forms of Life installation by Angela Brennan

And it was thrilling to see the Songlines of

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, thank you Wikipedia!

.

At the moment I am reading Coslovich's Whiteley on trial. There was an appeal about three paintings which were purported to be the late Brett Whiteley's. Orange, purple and blue/brown and all were meant to be Lavender Bay in Sydney.

Also picked up Autumn by Knausgaard and Harper's new book - Tante is reading the first book, The Dry.

Went to see a transcendent movie called Mountain. There was also a session of Blue with Sea Shepherd and I was able to ask about why they were re-focusing from the whales.

The person said they wanted to make more of a difference where they could. There were lots of enthusiastic Sea Shepherds people around the t-shirts and stickers.

I want to tell more about Mountain and the attitudes of the people: "They demand the most from those who have the least". And "Mountains are disinterested. They don't love us. They don't fear us". And "People who do mountains have half a lust for themselves and a lust for oblivion".

Plus the music by Nigel Westlake and Richard Tognetti and the Chamber Orchestra.

In Lygon Court there is now an organic store called Aunt Maggie's where I bought a kombucha drink of hibiscus. #itoldyouiwasthirsty. They also have shakes and smoothies and skin drops and Karma Cola.

And the new toilets are good. They have dryers which stop when you stop and buttons you can press to make water cold.

We are printers too was one good bit of THE SOUND. And there was one piece about a Deaf woman who has made sound her lifework.

I can identify with that! The printers because of graphic design and all the musical machines at work and I can understand about sound being someone's lifework.

Now I am listening to TokiMonsta and their body of work and Grimes' fairy music and how it's diverging is wonderful.

"When you're on the top of the world, everyone wants to be your friend"... #sotrue

Plays from the Dancing Wombat website

Songs are coming soon to Dancing Wombat

Lesson plans from the Dancing Wombat