Your daughters may also enjoy the way Sarah Jarosz covers Billie Eilish. I may have posted this on the thread long ago, but I'm too lazy to check.

My Future

Bad Guy

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She's intriguing.The few times she's bubbled up in my world she's captured it with her artistic depth and the causes she takes up and integrates into her public image. I think her best work is yet to come.

Thanks for bringing her into this.

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I haven't been keeping up with this thread, but, yeah, Roger, pretty good. It's the breathing as she sings more than the lyrics, in my opinion. It really makes an impact. With all the overdone singing these days, the breaths in the song are unusually intimate, striking.

I've had several students use her videos in my comp classes (I use a music and image theme), and the videos and songs lend themselves to good analysis. Incidentally, there's another version of the video for that song that is quite interesting -- minimalist in all the best ways.

A couple of students have used "Happier than Ever," and while the soft-to-loud progression is nothing new (nor is the general break-up theme), I do love how the video reflects the change... Even more impressive is that she herself directed it.

She reminds me a bit of Kate Bush -- not musically, but just in that she got a very young start, but was able to blossom creatively, even under the immense pressure of a major label etc.

Roger, we enjoyed the covers thanks. Sarah Jarosz has a beautiful voice.

My next video is not Billie Eilish but, speaking of young female talented musicians, this popped up on my YouTube feed yesterday. Presumably because of the search I did for the MTV Nirvana Unplugged earlier in the week.

The song has simple chord progressions but I thought it was an interesting solo arrangement and playing melodies on guitar takes a lot of skill I imagine (not being a guitar player myself).

https://youtu.be/eIvlCRtQbIw?si=2lojXM5onxjnDXrr

Anybody heard of Roberto Vecchioni? Not a lot of music moves me anymore, but his “Le lettere d’amore,” about Fernando Pessoa, brings a lump to my throat every time. It did even before I knew the lyrics, which you’ll find translated below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf-IBqrMJHY

Love Letters

Translated by: Francesco Ciabattoni

Fernando Pessoa asked for his glasses and fell asleep
and those who wrote for him left him alone, finally alone.
Thus the oblique rain of Lisbon abandoned him
and he finally ceased to fake papers, to hurt papers.

He ceased to hide behind so many names,
forgetful of Ophelia, seeking a meaning that does not exist
and eventually asking her, “I’m sorry I left your hands
but I had to just write, write, write about me.

Love letters are just ridiculous
Love letters would not be love letters if they were not ridiculous
I too used to write love letters,
I too was ridiculous:
love letters, when there is love, are necessarily ridiculous.”

And he built a delusional universe without love,
where all things are tired of living and a wide open pain
but it escaped his mind that the meaning of the stars is not the same as a man’s
and he saw himself in the pain of that useless shine, that faraway shine.

And too late did he realize that in that tobacco shop
there was more life than in all of his poetry;
and that instead of tormenting himself with an absurd world
it would be enough to touch a woman’s body, reciprocate a look.

And write about love, write about love, even if it’s ridiculous;
even as you look at her, even as you’re losing her, what matters is writing.
And not be afraid, never be afraid of being ridiculous:
only those who never wrote love letters are truly ridiculous.

Love letters, love letters of an invisible love;
love letters I had begun, perhaps without realizing;
love letters I had imagined made me laugh
I wish I was still in time to write you some.

The translator, a professor of medieval Italian literature at Georgetown, writes:

“With a shade of bitterness and self-effacement, Vecchioni rewrites Fernando Pessoa’s poem with the same title. “All love letters are ridiculous, but only those who never wrote love letters are truly ridiculous.” … By building a narrative frame around Pessoa’s original text, he describes the Portuguese poet as he falls asleep surrounded by his literary personalities (“those who wrote for him”, the heteronyms that Pessoa created to respond to the many intrusions of society) and re-proposes alienating points of view. Ofelia Queiroz was, however, the true unrequited love of Fernando Pessoa.

“Vecchioni portrays the poet in his latest hour, when he is about to die yet still wants to write and, therefore, needs his glasses. The Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi, on the wake of João Gaspar Simões, wrote that Pessoa’s last words were “give me my glasses.” The poet thus abandons the heteronymous masks (Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and Bernardo Soares) that had accompanied him in his life and literary activity. Unlike the historical Pessoa, Vecchioni’s Pessoa lets go of Ofelia by relinquishing his love for her in order to write about it, thus making a radical choice between living life and writing about it.”

If that did something for you, here’s the full video with three additional, no less beautiful songs, including “La Bellezza (Gustav e Tadzio),” based on A Death in Venice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZSmpNp6Z0k

Roberto Vecchioni turned eighty in June.

Well, maybe not "great," but great spirit. La Sandunga

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Greatness cannot exist without spirit, imo.

What makes it so great is its (apparent) off-the-cuff-ness.

This is my favorite post thus far on this thread. It is truly what I was hoping for. The whole thing: the after-hours restaurant setting, the amazing acoustics of the room, the unbridled passion of the woman, the indifference of the employees as they move room to room in the background, how she is positively bursting with creative talent, her look — spectacular performance!


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That's what I call great, Roger! Joy!

Reminded me of one of my favourite performances, with the same spirit of JOY.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3cXgge69_Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Ip-uUhaoI
Gente da Minha Terra (People of My Land)