Word: songe
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...debut album, Fortress Round My Heart, Maria opens with the perfect song for her aesthetic. "Oh My God" is basically just a few frantic chords and two repeated phrases--"Find a cure/Find a cure for my life" in the verse and "Oh my God" in the chorus. One lyric is a prayer for control; the other a realization that she has none, and Maria plays the former like someone meditating before a hurricane and the latter like the hurricane itself. She roars from the back of her throat, timing the G in God to the crash of the snare...
Things I would never think to write a song about: tax software programs, White House cabinet members, Paul Krugman. Now, I might write a song about Maureen Dowd (tentative title: "I Wish You Would Disappear"), but Krugman? Yes, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist has a gift for breaking down complicated economic situations into easily digestible concepts, but he rarely inspires within me a sense of passion. Apparently songwriter Jonathan Mann disagrees...
...Johnathan Mann were Sting, "Hey Paul Krugman" would be his "Roxanne." His "Layla." His "Hey Jude." Sure, Mann writes a new song every day - on everything from the decline of print media to Battlestar Galactica - but those tunes are just fluff. "Paul Krugman" is his Pet Sounds...
Read about a love song to Paul Krugman...
...couldn't be entirely certain they were working from the same sheet music. What's more - a heresy to even suggest - I wonder if this score really belongs in the very top rank of American musicals. The jazzy, modernist, Gershwinesque rhythms of some of Bernstein's music - "The Jet Song," "America" - are still striking and original. But is there a duller love ballad in any major American musical than "Maria" ("Maria! I've just met a girl named Maria"), or its Muzak-ready twin brother, "Tonight" ("Tonight, tonight/ There's only you tonight")? Who would know that the lyricist would...