Word: lyricists
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...venturesome, glittering career. Among those American artists today whose livelihood is linked to words and wordplay, Sondheim holds a unique preeminence. There's no contemporary novelist, poet or essayist who is so indisputably at the top of his or her field as Sondheim is of his. As a song lyricist, he has no plausible peer...
...death, Garcia found any studies intolerable. He didn't bother finishing high school, enlisting in the Army at 17. Eight AWOLs and two courts-martial later, he was back on the San Francisco streets and hooked up with Robert Hunter, a coffeehouse habitua and, within a few years, the lyricist for Garcia's songs. He also met Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann, who would become the Dead stalwarts on rhythm guitar and drums. They formed a jug band, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, and when they went electric in 1965--Bob Dylan having proved it was permissible for folkies...
Grateful Dead lyricist John Barlow, in a foreword to the indispensable handbook Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads, describes the fans' playful ardor as "a religion without beliefs." That sounds about right. For most Deadheads, a concert was a church they attended not so much for the gospel as for the communion and community, the hymns and the incense. A giant mushroom cloud of hallucinogenics would lay over the crowd like a fuzzy blanket...
...about. Of all the fine scores Alan Menken has composed for Disney animated features (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin), this is the most complex and rhapsodic, full of swelling passages that are artfully complemented by the Disney artists' imagery of pristine streams and forests. Menken's lyricist, Stephen Schwartz of Broadway's Godspell and Pippin, has a poetic righteousness that deftly avoids propaganda. Colors of the Wind -- among the loveliest ballads composed for a Disney cartoon, and sung to fierce perfection by Judy Kuhn -- ends with the admonition, "You can own the earth, and still...
Stoller, the kid composer from Long Island, found dozens of cunning variations on the traditional 12-bar blues. And Leiber, the Baltimore-born lyricist, poured his love of radio melodrama into the two-minute song. There was no June moon in the lurid Leiber landscape; it was a night town of train wrecks (Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots) and knife Ūghts (the show's title song), sawmill slicings (Along Came Jones) and countless jailbreaks. Even a love song could sound like a taunt when Leiber wrote it. Consider the capper to the Peggy Lee I'm a Woman...