Notes on a music collection, part 6

[pedanther]

Angel, The Choir of Hard Knocks. This is another song where I don't know if I ever actually liked it or I just heard it a lot in my teens.

Angel's Lullaby, Richard Marx. A song I don't particularly care for from an album I got for one of the other tracks.

Angelia, Richard Marx. This is not one of the other tracks I got the album for.

Angeline Is Always Friday, The Seekers. There's something stylistically interesting going on at the beginning and end, but on the whole it's not grabbing me.

Angels Don't Fall in Love, Bangles. There's going to be a fair bit of Bangles going forward; Different Light was one of the successful cases where I bought an album for the two songs I knew and it turned out I enjoyed all the other songs as well.

Angels Love Bad Men, The Highwaymen. Not actually contradicting the previous song, because one of them is using "angel" ironically and the other means it more sincerely. (Tempting as it might be to make something of the fact that one song is written and sung by women and the other is written and sung by men.) S'okay.

Anna (Go To Him), The Beatles. A song I don't particularly like from an album I got for one of the other tracks.

Anorexic Duck Pizzicati, Babe Soundtrack. Instrumental. Fun.

Another Drinkin' Song, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. A song I don't particularly care for from an album I got for one of the other tracks. This is not the one about drinking a whiskey drink and drinking a vodka drink and drinking a lager drink and drinking a cider drink (maybe that's why this is "another" drinkin' song). That one will be along later.

Another Girl, The Beatles. I'm not sure I've ever heard this before, nor that I'm much interested in hearing it again.

Another Mysterious Pipe Appeared, World of Goo Soundtrack. Instrumental. More effective in context.

Another One Bites the Dust, Queen. I like this one.

Another Saturday Night, Cat Stevens. It's got energy, but I'm not here for the story it's telling or the character who's telling it.

Anthem, Rob Guest (from Chess). Nice enough, but I don't see myself listening to it often. Some of the orchestration sounds Elgar-y.

Antmusic, Adam and the Ants. A song I don't particularly care for from an album I got for one of the other tracks. (It was a decade compilation, not specifically an Ant album.) Some of the percussion is interesting.

Comments

[igenlode]

I encountered the "Chess" Anthem when we did it as a choral arrangement, and liked it a lot, though I've never heard the actual soundtrack and don't know the story. (I'm sort of assuming from the lyrics that this is a Russian chess champion singing, because the sentiments don't really fit the USA....)

I've a feeling that this was the Lloyd Webber musical where people were saying in a disappointed way on the radio when it first came out that it basically only had one hit song in it -- at a point in his career where people were still expecting all-hit musicals -- and that the hit love song was *not* this number, but I can't remember what it was :-)

[pedanther]

Chess isn't actually an Andrew Lloyd Webber: the book and lyrics are by Tim Rice, who did the book and lyrics of many of ALW's hits, but the music is by Björn & Benny from ABBA.

I'm not sure anybody can say confidently that they know the story of Chess; it survives on the strength of the songs, but the book's been substantially rewritten for pretty much every major production without ever quite making the plot work. But there's always a Russian chess champion who's trying to decide whether to defect, and "Anthem" is one of his songs.

[igenlode]

Oops -- I really should have remembered that, given that we did it as part of our Abba season! (Along with "I Still Have Faith in You" from their new album, which I very much liked; it's the healing and reply to "The Winner Takes It All", if you will, with some lovely chords, and exhilarating to sing at the climax. https://youtu.be/Vz2hx4gROMc )


There definitely was an isolated Lloyd Webber hit that got radio play in an otherwise sung-through and somewhat nondescript show, but I still can't remember which song it was -- only that it was apparently misleadingly romantic in the context of a rather downbeat plot...