3 May 2023 - Cyndi Grecco - Making Our Dreams Come True

Cyndi Grecco was never a household name.  Her voice, however, was well-known, playing on ABC every week for eight years and for years in syndication afterwards. 

You see, Cyndi Grecco was the vocalist featured on a theme song for a television show called Laverne & Shirley.  A spinoff from Happy Days, it was a midseason replacement show in early 1976, Originally called Laverne Defazio & Shirley Feeney (that title was quickly shortened), the show made stars of Cindy Williams and Penny Marshall.   

And this iconic opening made the theme song immediately recognizable, and brought the terms "schlemiel" and "schlimazel" into the vernacular.  Both are Yiddish terms referring to a chronically unlucky person, and can be best defined with the sentence "the schlemiel spills his soup on the schlimazel."  

Of course, as soon as the show came out and the theme was inserted into the American consciousness, everyone was requesting the song from their local radio stations, and so it was released as a single in 1976.  It became a top 30 hit in the US and Canada.

Despite her flash fame, Cyndi Grecco has not charted again since this song.  Subsequent attempts failed to chart.  Perhaps it's because this song was so earnest and inspiring - and still is.  

2 May 2023 - Gordon Lightfoot - Carefree Highway

I used to say that two celebrity deaths in my lifetime gave me kind of a gut punch - Fred Rogers and Steve Irwin, both for very different reasons I won't discuss here.   

I would have to put Canadian Music Hall of Famer Gordon Lightfoot's passing yesterday close to that as well.  He was arguably the greatest storyteller to ever carry a guitar, a prolifiic songwriter with the husky voice of an angel.  He was absolutelyl brilliant, and I am not exagerationg when I call him a Canadian treasure.  He was the pride of Orillia, Ontario 

The folk music generation has lost their voice with his passing.  Canada has lost a piece of itself with his passing.  His career was long - he performed at a teenager in the 1950. He was there when Bob Dylan (a mentor of his) went electric at the 1965 Newport Jazz Festival.  He was still touring in 2012.  

I had been saving this song for #MapleLeafMarch next year, but is served well at this time.  It was a top 10 hit for Lightfoot in the US and Canada in 1974, and immediately followed "Sundown" as a single release.  The title came to Gord first - he was driving on an Arizona highway (and almost left the title in the glove box of a rental car!), and the rest came months later.  

The beautifully written song is about a man who is driving and remembering a long-past relationship with a woman named Ann - who was real.  Ann was a woman Lightfoot had a relationship with several years before this song - and remembering the time pleasantly, and how she's doing, as you do.  

It remains one of my favorite Gordon Lightfoot songs. 

This version of the song is from a 2012 performance in Reno, Nevada.  Even well into his 70's, he had that audience enraptured.  

Ten years later, in a 2022 performance in Indiana, his voice had lost a little, but his stage presence, well into his 80s, was still there.

28 April 2023 - Lily Allen - Smile

This has been one of the weirdest posting weeks I've ever had.  So I decided to lean in and really get weird.

In 2006, this was Lily Allen's debut single.  On first listen, if you ignore the lyrics, it sounds bubbly and upbeat, but it is decidedly a lyrically angry song - bitter, even.  The song is great, biting, and somewhat humourous.  It ended up being a huge UK hit and a minor hit worldwide.  

That beat you hear is from "Free Soul" by the Soul Brothers.

This is a song that has defined Lily Allen, even if she has grown tired of it at times.  She smartly still performs it live, and does it brilliantly, as she did here in a 2019 performance. 

     

The weird part is that its anger was so polarizing, it sparked a response song, by an artist named Example. He used the same Soul Brothers sample as his background.  It was almost as equally inventive and nearly as bitter.

Wait, did I say that was weird?  No.  That's not weird.

What IS weird is that Lily Allen recorded a second version of the song.  This version of the song is not in English, but in Simlish.  Simlish is the language of the video game The Sims 2, in which Lily Allen was a character.  She found it silly, but also, fun.  It is kind of fun.  But it's also a great way to end what has been a strange blog week.

Next week, we get back to normal stuff.  Maybe. 

27 April 2023 - Miley Cyrus - The Best Of Both Worlds

OK, I know.  At this point, we know that Miley Cyrus is Hannah Montana - or, was.   I debated billing this post as Miley, and not as her television character.  I chose Miley, because she actually performed this song live an awful lot, as Miley (although when she performed it on the show, she was Hannah).

Really, Miley was Hannah Montana, and Hannah Montana was Miley - and, in interviews recently, Miley has expressed a lot of appreciation of Hannah, in getting her to the superstardom she's achieved today..  

This was the theme song to that show, and although she doesn't perform it live anymore (and hasn't, as far as I can see, since 2010), it's a part of Miley, and Miley is a part of it.  The song was written by Matthew Gerrard and Robbie Nevil.

On a personal note, this was a show my daughters watched.  We had the Hannah Montana CD in our car.  I heard this song a lot.  It brings back positive memories.  

There was a second version of the song, partially live, done for a movie to wrap up the series as well. 

26 April 2023 - Barry De Vorzon & Perry Botkin Jr. - Cotton's Dream a.k.a. Nadia's Theme

How the hell did I come to post the theme to the daytime soap opera The Young and The Restless?

Well, if you read yesterday's post, you may have a clue, but it's not directly related.  You see, a different Mary J. Blige song - "No More Drama", which happens to be the title track to the album featuring "Family Affair" - heavily samples this song.  I was doing some research for a future post, and, well, I stumbled upon the history of this song, which is absolutely wild.

The song did not start off as a soap opera theme song, but rather as incidental music for the 1971 movie Bless the Beasts and Children. Barry De Vorson later extended his little piece of music for use on the soap opera.

Fast forward to 1976.  ABC's Wide World of Sports used the song as part of a montage of the gymnastics of Romanian Nadia Comeneci - you know, the first one to bring perfect 10s to the Olympics (in Montreal in 1976) and also six more? She is arguably the best known gymnast of all time, and certainly the best known of her generation.

The voice-over is by famed sportscaster Jim McKay, and it cemented the positive feeling for Comeneci throughout the 1976 Olympic Games.

  

Well, at this point, everyone was not only hyped up over Nadia Comenci, but also "Nadia's theme", as it came to be known.  I, at my very young age, knew her name - it was an effective piece.  

De Vorson and Perry Botkin responded by releasing the song as a re-titled single, which became a top ten hit in 1976, five years after its composition and initial recording.

Incidentally, Comeneci never actually performed to the song that ended up bearing her name.... except during a 1997 episode of Touched By An Angel, alongside her husband and fellow gymnast Bart Conner.  

This is more typical of her floor execises - this performance from the 1980 Olympics in Moscow that won Comenci her fifth Olympic gold medal (an event in which she only won bronze in Montreal).

25 April 2023 - Mary J. Blige - Family Affair

When Mary J. Blige was a current hitmaker, I wasn't a fan.  I can't tell you exactly why.  I just wasn't. 

But times change.  Tastes change.  And I can see the genius that is Mary J.  

This song was co-written by a team including Blige and her brother, Bruce Miller, as well as the producer of the track, a Mr. Andre Young, who you may know as Dr. Dre.   For those so inclined, the song follows a C♯m–G♯m7–C♯m–G♯m7 chord progression, written by Dre a fair bit before he sent it along to Mary J., who added lyrics.  She sings all the vocals on this track, both lead and background.    

This song ended up spending six weeks on top of the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Blige's only #1 hit and her biggest hit song by far.  It was also a chart-topper worldwide.  It was also the first number one song to include the word "hateration".   

There are so many great live versions of this song, so I went with this in-studio one from 2005, which features a full band, including background vocalists that aren't Mary J. Blige. 

I decided to include one more version - this one with a different backup vocalist who does step to lead for a few seconds.

Sorry, Swifties - she doesn't have the range of Mary J.

24 April 2023 - Tim Carleton & Darrick Deel - Opus Number 1

You've never heard of these artists, but you know their work.

In 1989, Tim Carleton and Darrick Deel, two high school friends, wrote a song called "Opus Number 1" and recorded it using a Yamaha DX7IIFD and an Alesis Midverb. They composed it because of its specific auditory qualities - the synth, the taps.  It was a pleasing sound to these high school kids - Carleton was particually into Yanni, so that was also part of the inspiration. The song is 5 minutes and 38 seconds of abslolute new-age bliss.

They went on to big rock stardom no big rock stardom, but the song was never by either of them.  

Both Carleton and Deel went on to become IT professionals in the San Francisco Bay area.  Deel worked for a company called Cisco, who were starting to move beyond routers and switches and into the world of IP telephony.  Deel happened to be one of the engineers on the project for the first IP phones from Cisco, and knew that the project needed default on-hold music.  

He happened to have the perfect song on his phone, and the rest is history.  

So, to all the lazy IT professionals who have set up a Cisco phone system and left the default hold music in place - thank you.  You have helped to make "Opus Number 1" the most popular on hold music in the world, by far.

This music is so pervasive, it was featured in a Super Bowl commercial for Bud Light this year.