Ten Easy Pieces

Last weekend, we had a get-together at JFM's, and he was talking about a Maureen McGovern performance he'd attended. That got us talking about her song choices... how could she NOT do the theme from "Angie"? For goodness sakes, anybody who can peg that top note ought to be flaunting it. Unless, with the passage of time, she's found it increasingly difficult to reach the female falsetto range... it can happen. (In which case, she should've done the song anyway, sans the falsetto, because I've always liked the song. :-) )

In any case, the fact that a Jimmy Webb tribute was included in the performance got us talking about the songs he wrote. Karla mentioned the Webb album "Ten Easy Pieces", which includes several of the song choices that were in the tribute.

That reminded me that I actually HAVE the album in question, in digital form. So I've been playing it. Good songs. Here's a link to the album itself, complete with the abiity to play song clips, on Amazon: http://ping.fm/QHkVS

P.S. If you like Glen Campbell, you'll like this album, as Mr. Campbell made hits out of a lot of these songs. Overall, it's interesting to hear the actual songwriter's take on music that other artists have not only recorded, but received significant amounts of airtime and had major hits with. Webb's take on some of the music is very different from that of some artists that have used it (cough*MACARTHUR PARK*cough). I like giving my ears a little lesson on how many different ways a piece of music can be interpreted. And in that case, it's hard to go wrong when using the interpretation of the person who WROTE the song in the first place. :-)

Anyway, I've been reminding myself over the past couple of days how I like the album. It's nice to revisit music that I hadn't spent time listening to in a while. ("Listening", as opposed to "used as audio wallpaper while doing something else".) Go try it now, with an album that's fallen into the background in your own music collection, and you'll surely agree with me.