Word: songed
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...long can an upmarket myth linger before tatty reality rubs it out? The legend of old Broadway-when stories of poor boys winning the hearts of rich girls served as metaphors for the irresistibility of American ambition, and debonair stars introduced songs that instantly found a spot in the everyone's internal juke box-is a good half-century out of date. No #1 Billboard hit has come from a Broadway musical since Judy Collins' "Send in the Clowns" from the Steven Sondheim A Little Night Music in 1973. No Broadway musical has put a bunch of its tunes...
...different ways: as the first line of the verse ("Dawn, go away I'm no good for you"), as the resolution of the bridge ("Big girls don't cry") or as the entire bridge ("I'll go on living and keep on forgiving..." from "Ronnie"). To ramp up a song's intensity, they'd modulate chords like crazy. One Seasons website asserts that "Opus 17" "ties Bobby Darin's "Mack The Knife" for the largest number of chromatic key changes in a Top 40 hit." (Five, if you were wondering: from F# to G to A-flat...
...Excuse me, you say-wha? You've heard most of the Seasons' songs, and the mood wasn't achy-breaky; rather bold and uptempo. It's true that "Sherry," the first Seasons' hit, was a standard girl-name song (they had a lot of those) with a you-look-so-fine, gonna-make-you-mine lyric. But listen to their later, more mature (I want to say Blue Period) work and you'll hear little pop poems about hard-won love lessons, wrapped in fairly complex narratives...
WHAT ARIA DO YOU MOST LIKE SINGING? The Song to the Moon, from Rusalka, is my signature piece...
...still intact. It's what draws you first when you hear the smoky timber of her voice, the leisured elegance of her phrasing ... Says jazz critic Martin Williams: 'She's not only good and tasteful, but SHE ALSO HAS THAT WONDERFUL SENSE OF DRAMA THAT CAN TURN ANY LITTLE SONG INTO A THREE-MINUTE ONE-ACT PLAY' ... She still understands need: all kinds of need, from longing to desperation, with all the melancholy shadings in between. Maybe that's the secret of her music. Not only the musical dexterity but the heart that's always open and eager to share...