Word: songfulness
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...originality has always been most evident in the sheer force and power of their sound. Their 2007 eponymous debut album was unrelenting in its fury, the repetitive, ear-splitting synths enhanced by maniacal drumming that would put most thrash bands to shame. Unfortunately, on that record, the songs were virtually indistinguishable, and the continuous electronic mayhem was overkill. HEALTH urgently needed an induction of discipline. The greatest success of “Get Color” is the way that HEALTH has harnassed its fury, exhibiting greater control and less self-indulgence. At 35 minutes, it is admirably concise...
Born in Louisville, Ky., in 1936, Mary Allin Travers moved as a baby with her writer parents to New York City's Greenwich Village, where she would join the blooming local folk scene in nearby Washington Square Park. In her teens, as a member of the Song Swappers, she sang backup for Pete Seeger and appeared on Broadway in the short-lived folk musical The Next President. She also earned money babysitting; one of her charges was an infant English aristocrat, the fifth Baron Haden-Guest, who as Christopher Guest would direct and star in the 2003 film A Mighty...
...singles were the thriving format back then, and that's where PP&M shone. They scored six Top 10 hits and placed seven others in the top 40. Travers' strong lead on "Lemon Tree," a Brazilian folk song for which Will Holt had written new lyrics, gave them their first hit. It was followed by Seeger and Lee Hays' "If I Had a Hammer." The group changed the phrase "all my brothers" to the more ecumenical "my brothers and my sisters" and helped make the number an anthem for the decade's civil-rights movement. Their rendition was a highlight...
Inevitably, one Grossman act inspired the other: PP&M recorded "Blowin' in the Wind," the first Bob Dylan song to become a hit, and lent a mellow rue to his "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," thus spurring a small industry of Dylan covers and easing the singer-songwriter's emergence as his own wiliest interpreter. They had hits with new compositions (John Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane") and reworked folk tunes (Hedy West's take on "500 Miles"). Other groups had recorded these songs, but PP&M sold them best, with artfully simple musical settings...
...came from within the group. When Yarrow was at Cornell, a fellow undergraduate, future indie filmmaker Lenny Lipton, had written a poem in the spirit of Ogden Nash; Yarrow set it to music, and a few years later the trio recorded "Puff the Magic Dragon." This children's song, with its fanciful friendship and lilting chorus, would dominate the Top 40 and be sung in summer camp forever after. To the cognoscenti, this was a drug song in pop-music code: Puff, drag-on, "little Jackie Paper." Hipsters began referring to the group as Peyote, Pot & Maryjuana - though Yarrow consistently...