No Song is Safe From Us

No Song Is Safe From Us - The NYFOS Blog
 |  Elaine Sexton

This ecstatic song needs no introduction. The text for “Happy” is itself an irrepressible extended metaphor for the title, a song built on similes “like a room without a roof”.  “Happy” sold 6.45 million copies in the U.S., alone, in the year after its release in 2013, at the top of the Billboard’s hot 100 […]




 |  Elaine Sexton

“This poet ruined my life,” Leonard Cohen said of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Cohen, a singer/songwriter and poet, himself, took great liberty with the original text of the haunting poem it is based on,”Pequeño vals vienés” (Little Viennese Waltz).




 |  Elaine Sexton

When commissioned to compose a sequence of poems to be set to music to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising the song “I’ll Take You There,” from the same era, was among the first that came to mind. A kind of anthem first performed and recorded in 1972 by The Staple Singers, “I’ll Take You There” was a protest song that reflected a kind of optimism, an instant and uplifting hit.