A recipe for simple bread for the best toast, and thoughts on toasting over the years.
Simple bread for the best toast
Sea Creatures Stared at Us and We Stared Back at Them
With its mix of musical styles, languages, accents, and voices, the album is a perfect tribute to the witty and self-deprecating, pretty and noisy, relatable and strange, hopefully despondent music of Jeffrey Lewis.
I am the Light of this World: The Life and Music of Reverend Gary Davis
“I’m all the time studying what I can do for my people. You can’t do nothing for yourself unless you do it for somebody else first. You can’t bake a corncake for yourself unless you bake it for somebody else. It ain’t worth the effort. In this world we have to talk a little and hush a heap. Love is just like a vein in a spring: Keeps you with supplements to cherish up what you have.”
My Pop Life: Don’t You Take It Too Bad – Guy Clark
And the idea of living a pure heroic life dedicated to your art is naturally selfish and few attempt it without collateral emotional damage to their nearest and dearest. I get it and maybe that is why the songs move me so much.
My Pop Life: ‘The Emperor’ – Haydn
They are works that make you feel happy. There is a level of complexity in the music that your brain can grasp immediately.
Magpies Mix Tape: Big Ears
I wanted to put together a playlist that was a bit of what you might hear if you had tuned into one of my broadcasts. I hope you find a few things you’ve not heard before – maybe a surprise or two.
My Pop Life: A Salty Dog – Procol Harum
Following the death of Gary Brooker at the age of 74 last week, I feel compelled to pay tribute to his finest song, or perhaps his second finest song. Obituaries have been full of praise for the songwriter and lead vocalist of Procol Harum, concentrating on his first celebrated hit single A Whiter Shade Of Pale which reached Number One in the UK singles charts in the Summer of Love, July 1967. This piece shines a spotlight on a lesser -known song which is nonetheless full of power and emotion.
My Pop Life: The Right Thing to Do – Carly Simon
I’ve often wondered in subsequent years whether a career in acting was The Right Thing To Do. I have a complex relationship with my ghost career as a barrister, and often peek over to see how he’s doing.
Magpie Mix Tape: Songs of Freedom
“I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: NO FEAR! I mean really, no fear. If I could have that half of my life. No fear. Lots of children have no fear. That’s the only way I can describe it. That’s not all of it, but it something to really, really feel. Like a new way of seeing. Like a new way of seeing something.”
My Pop Life: Do What You Gotta Do – Nina Simone
Daunting, difficult, mysterious and magnificent, she defies easy category or glib biography, but she has touched me over and over since 1976 when I first heard her.
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