This is our last day together, all you amazing folks who support NYFOS!!! I can’t believe I only get to share one more song with you. I’ll have to beg Steve to let me do this again sometime in the summer. For my final selection, I want to say Thank You. However, because life is never quite what you expect, I have decided to throw you a curve ball.
Read MoreDay Four! Only two more! How will I choose??!? For Thursday’s treat, you delicious NYFOS supporters you, I give you “A Quiet Thing”. I sang this right after I graduated high school in response to my co-stars’ song “Marry Me” in a Portage Players’ Production of Kander & Ebb’s And The World Goes ‘Round.
Read MoreWe have come to Day Three. Hump Day. To get us over the hump, I must offer you John Lennon’s “Imagine”. I sang this, barefoot, at one of my high school talent shows. Friends of my father, who live in the tiny town I’m from, still remember that performance. Or, at least one of them does. We need this song. Let’s all sing it together.
Read MoreFor Day Two, I have chosen for you, beloved NYFOS supporters, “Maybe” from Annie. This song taught those of us raised on classic musicals as I was (thanks, Mom!) one of our first lessons in empathy. I never really sang this song, but lord I loved it!
Read MoreI’m delighted to be curating the NYFOS Song of the Day project on Facebook! As a singer/musician raised in a very musical household, I am finding it incredibly difficult to pick only five songs! My mother was a classical pianist. She played John Cage, Alban Berg, and Franz Schubert for her graduate recital in 1979. My father is a big-hearted character who owned a record store for 25 years in Kalamazoo, MI called The Bop Stop. He called my twin sister and I the owners, and worships the Beatles, John & Yoko, and Neil Young. Rock ‘n Roll, Daddy!
Read MoreIt’s a day for favorites: My favorite composer, Richard Strauss, my favorite song, “Ständchen”, and my favorite singer, Kathleen Battle. As soon as I declare a favorite, my mind immediately thinks of a dozen other “favorites,” but I don’t intend to be dishonest! You music lovers know what I mean. There are always many favorites.
Read MoreAs I was listening to songs to share, today I kept coming back to Barbra Streisand. Love her or hate her, there is something timelessly vulnerable and honest about her sound. Authenticity is what a listener craves, and Barbra always delivers.
Read MoreFor years, I have adored the Chants d’Auvergne, folk songs from the Auvergne region of France in the local language, Occitan. The collector and arranger of these landscape-inspired songs was Auvergne native Joseph Canteloube, who took more than thirty years (1924-1955) to complete his compilation.
Read More“The singer recounts all the lovely memories of spending new year in Iran: the smell of the flowers, the excitement of people buying new clothes, the smell of gift wrap papers, the sound of grandma’s prayers, etc. Then he repeats (chorus): With these memories I am able to get through the winter. With these thoughts I can comfort my tired mind and body.”
Read MoreI am grateful and excited to contribute to this week’s Song of the Day, which gives us something beautiful to ponder about in the midst of chaos. Today, I have chosen a song by the great Leonard Bernstein: “Silhouette,” or “Galilee.”
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