There are three things that I most associate with “romantic love.” The first is the Franco Zeffirelli filmed version of Romeo and Juliet. This is because my older sister dropped my younger sister and me off at a theater playing the film when I was perhaps ten. She did this so she could go out with her friends, and as I recall, my younger sister and I saw the film a dozen times — but it was probably just twice.

While at that movie, I had a notebook that had some kind of jasmine perfume spilled on it. Yes, even at ten I always carried a notebook around with me. You got a problem with that? Anyway, as a result, jasmine makes me think of the same kind of immature “I love you so much because I know nothing about you!” infatuation that we in America mistake for love.

The third thing has nothing to do with that long night of Shakespearean tragedy. When I was a teenager, I had my first dance during the playing of Dan Hill’s “Sometimes When We Touch” off his third album Longer Fuse. The music was written by the excellent Barry Mann. The sentimental lyrics are Hill’s fault. But I should be clear. While I have a weird kind of admiration for Romeo and Juliet, the smell of jasmine, and the song “Sometimes When We Touch” — I generally think they are dreadful. Or at least socially dangerous. I suppose I’m being a bit hard on jasmine — but it’s a very potent smell, the slightest hint of which makes me go all weepy. And I think Zeffirelli did a great job of bring Romeo and Juliet to the screen, but it’s an annoying play. As for the song: “I wanna hold you til I die; til we both break down and cry”?

But here’s the song:

I’m not a fan of Annie, but I was when I was a kid. I listened to the Original Cast Album over and over. So none of those songs will ever get out of my head. One of those tunes is, “It’s a Hard Knock Life,” which I discussed some time ago in a Morning Music with Jay Z. But the song that most comes into my head is, “We’d Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover.”

That song is a great ensemble piece in the play. It’s also got a simple but compelling melody and clever lyrics. When I was a kid, I didn’t especially know who Hoover was — other than the guy who was president when the Great Depression started. I also knew that conservatives like Archie Bunker thought we could use man like him. Obviously, he wasn’t responsible for the Depression, but he also didn’t manage it well, and became one of the harshest critics of the New Deal.

It makes sense for the for the people destroyed by the Great Depression to blame Hoover. And the song has lots of great lines like the reference to the political slogan, “A chicken in every pot.” The song relates, “In every pot he said ‘a chicken’; but Herbert Hoover he forgot; not only don’t we have the chicken; we ain’t got the pot!” I also like the implied violence of it, “Come down and share some Christmas dinner; be sure to bring the Mis’ess too; we got no turkey for our stuffing; why don’t we stuff you?!”

Here is a surprisingly good good performance of the song by the Young People’s Theater back in 2013:

I think The Ventures are one of the weirdest rock bands ever. I mean that in a good way. They are an instrumental band, yet their music is so simple. It’s just an energetic rhythm section and a single melody lead guitar (most of the time). But somehow, it works. Their biggest hit is “Walk, Don’t Run,” off their first album of the same name. It’s the perfect example of this formula. It’s what The Ventures always do. And they have done it a lot. They have released in excess of 60 studio albums, which is not surprising when you consider just how much work it must take to produce a Ventures album. See, for example, The Jim Croce Songbook, which they put out just six months after Croce died. I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m just saying that they are opportunistic hacks.

Today, they are best remembered for “Hawaii Five-O” off their album Hawaii Five-O. The following performance is most likely from the late 1970s or early 1980s. It includes the main people we think of as The Ventures: Don Wilson, Nokie Edwards, Bob Bogle, and Mel Taylor. Also sitting in on drums is Max Weinberg. Anyway, they all look like they are having a good time and it is almost impossible not to follow along.

Mali is one of the countries occupying large parts of the Sahara Desert, which we Americans don’t think much about. Most of its 15 million people live in the south of the country near the Niger and Senegal rivers. In 2005, two Mali musicians, Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté, produced an album based upon the music from both the north and south of Mali as well as from Guinea to the west, In the Heart of the Moon. It’s mostly just the two of them playing: Touré on guitar and Diabaté on the kora — a kind of harp with 21 strings.

The album must have been a big hit, because it won the Grammy award for “Best Traditional World Album.” I tend not to like the term “world music,” because it makes me think of people who have no taste in music — they just listen to whatever album is featured on PRI’s The World. The music itself is usually great. So here are the two of them performing the first cut off the album, “Debe,” in Brussels. Only a few months after this concert, Touré died of bone cancer, so he must have already been sick. It adds a bit of poignancy to the event.

My friend Will is a big Pretenders fan. I’ve never been quite so hot on them, but I did go through a period where I really liked, Learning to Crawl — especially their third person cover of The Persuaders’ song, “Thin Line Between Love and Hate.” The truth is that the Pretenders are really good at doing other people’s music. Another song that comes to mind is “Stop Your Sobbing,” which is infinitely better than The Kinks’ version.

But my favorite Pretenders song is a Chrissie Hynde original, “Kid.” When I was younger, I always heard the song as being sung to a child. Now it doesn’t sound like that at all. But there is a clear power differential: the singer has it and “kid” doesn’t. It’s kind of like “Thin Line between Love and Hate,” but during a period when the abuser is more appreciative of the love she is receiving, more regretful for the pain she causes.

The Blue Hearts were a Japanese punk band in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They’ve been compared to a lot of other punk bands, but let’s clear: they were the Japanese Ramones. It’s just simple, unpretentious rock music. They are really great. You don’t have to understand Japanese — but if you do, they seem always to have very clear vocals.

Their best known song is “Linda Linda,” of their debut album, The Blue Hearts. I only know it from the film, Linda Linda Linda. It’s about four high school girls who form a band that does covers of The Blue Hearts songs. You can see them do “Linda Linda” on YouTube. It’s very good. But here are the real guys doing it.

I’m not sure about that translation in the video. I’m fond of, “Like a brown rat.” Google translate provides, “To plop mouse Matthew.” Apparently, what the singer is saying is that he may be ugly like a rat but that inside he is beautiful. Or maybe he is referring to Linda. Regardless, “Linda! Linda!”

Who is Jasiri X? I don’t really know. But he seems to show up a lot on Huffington Post. And I first heard him last week while listening to Democracy Now! People refer to him as an activist and hip-hop artist. And that sounds about right.

He recently took a trip to Palestine and the result was the song, “Checkpoint.” (Click the link or the image for a free download.) Here are the first four lines of the song:

Check it out; it’s really great:

Three years ago, I wrote, Jean Ferrandis Slums in Santa Rosa. It was about going to a “Discovery Open Rehearsal” of the Santa Rosa Symphony. The featured performer was flutist Jean Ferrandis. And the high point of the performance was Jacques Ibert’s Flute Concerto. I have a great love of the work of Les Six and other French composers of the early part of the 20th century. So that was no surprise.

Since I was reminded of it over the weekend, I thought I would share it with you. I found this wonderful version of the piece by Slovenian flutist Irena Grafenauer. Unfortunately, I don’t know much about the performance. I assume this is from a tour she did of Japan. And she looks like she is in her thirties here (but I’m really bad at judging — feel free to correct me), so it must be 15 to 20 years ago. Regardless, it is a beautiful performance of a wonderful piece. So enjoy:

I’ve always thought of Cowboy Junkies as the band who did a cover of the original “Sweet Jane” off 1969: The Velvet Underground Live. But I’ve liked all their slow and sensual music. I’ve listened to The Trinity Session to exhaustion. But it is a really long time since I’ve even thought of the band.

I was surprised to find that the band is still together. This is doubtless because Cowboy Junkies is a family band composed of siblings Michael, Margo, and Peter Timmins along with Alan Anton on bass and Jeff Bird on pretty much everything. It’s nice to think that the band being as conflict free as its music. There is a fine performance of the band at the Newport Folk Festival in 2008 available on YouTube that is very much worth checking out. But let me just present “Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis)” here, which is a remarkable fusion of original material with one of my favorite songs, Rodgers and Hart’s “Blue Moon”:

Digby posted the following video under the headline, Everybody Thinks They’re a Singing Star. It is Joe Scarborough singing a song called, “Reason to Believe.” It is not the great Tim Hardin song. It is rather a country song written by the ex-politician and current television pundit. It’s not a terrible song, but it is most clearly the sort of thing that is only released when the “artist” is already famous.

Huffington Post called it a powerful antiwar song, when it was first released. That’s what you get from the media when you are well connected: flattering lies. The song is not at all antiwar. It is sung from the perspective of a parent who has a child fighting in one of our recent post-9/11 wars. The parent doesn’t like that the child is in harm’s way, but still finds a “reason to believe.” Pretty much, the song comes down to this: it sure is sad that there are evil people in the world that require us to be constantly at war.

What’s sad about it is that there are so many sing-songwriters who are vastly superior to Scarborough. But they don’t even get their music produced, much less released by a major record company, much less get booked on The View. But the way to approach this sort of thing is most definitely not to claim that it is garbage. It isn’t. See that guy there playing the the mandolin? He’s great. See the woman singing backup? She’s great. Hear the invisible violin player? Great as well. But what this shows is the absurdity of meritocracy. Even if you think that Scarborough was great as a politician or a television host, he clearly isn’t great as a singer-songwriter. Yet there he is.