Week 39 – Think Bensonium

Day 273: Time’s are a changing, Bob Dylan

Roderick Benson — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Never have I wanted the main lyric of this song to be true as in 2020. I so much hope and pray that the wicked spell of far right politics is broken in 2021. So tired of the Trump’s, Putin’s and Johnson’s of this world.

Day 272: No Surprises, Radiohead

Roderick Benson — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There is something very sad and true about this song. Perhaps it is just me, but there are lyrics in this song that I have related to at different times in my life. Probably the lines that I most relate to at this present time are:

Bruises that won’t heal
You look so tired, unhappy
Bring down the government
They don’t, they don’t speak for us

A very dark song by Radiohead which let’s face it, along with the video, is full of suicidal images.

Day 271: Angel of the Morning, Juice Newton

Roderick Benson — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Another very beautiful song from the 1980s. I beginning to think that perhaps the 80s was one of the best decade for contemporary music or perhaps, more likely, it was just my formative years when I was developing my musical taste and collecting lots of albums.

Day 270: It’s Magic, Pilot

Roderick Benson — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

OK so this song is at the extreme end of pop. Some may argue the worst of the seventies. I include this song however for a very specific reason. My autistic daughter is unable to hold a conversation so understanding what she is thinking and feeling can be challenging at the best of time. Yet yesterday she was singing a fragment of this song. At first I was unable to work out what she was singing but finally got the line “It’s magic”. My guess is she must have been listening to this song from her own little ipad. How she accessed this song I have no idea but thought since she was able to find it, and obviously liked it, I would include it in my Covid Island discs just for her.

Day 269: Baker Street, Gerry Raffery

Roderick Benson — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Another timeless classic. One of those pieces where the saxophone really become the key instrument in making the song so distinctive.

Day 268: Sister Golden Hair, America

Roderick Benson — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Funny how after so many weeks of posting I have yet to put a song by the band America. I think this is one of their best songs. One lyric in this song contains a very clever use of the nightmarish number of homophones that exist in the English language, which always trip people like me up who are not strong spellers, is this lovely line:

“I’ve been one poor correspondent, I’ve been two, too hard to find”

Day 267: Big Yellow taxi, Joni Mitchell

Roderick Benson — Sat, 12 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Another classic song from Joni Mitchell. The title of this song comes from this classic lyric:

Late last night I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi took away my old man
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot (Ooh, bop-bop-bop-bop)

And to think when this song was written global warming was not even in our public conscious. Paving paradise seems to be only the start of our problems.