Category: music

“Sukiyaki”

April 27, 2026 • 12:15 pm

I heard this song yesterday on Facebook, where the melody was used as background for a video of a man walking two kimono-clad cats in Kyoto.  I hadn’t heard “Sukiyaki” in many years (it came out in the U.S. when I was 13), but I remembered the tune instantly, though the words of course are in Japanese. The Japanese title was changed for play in other countries, but changed into the name of a dish, for crying out loud. And I didn’t know how popular the song was (see below).

It’s a song of loneliness, though it inspired by politics. The details below are from Wikipedia.

Ue o Muite Arukō” (Japanese: 上を向いて歩こう; “I Look Up as I Walk”), alternatively titled “Sukiyaki“, is a song by Japanese crooner Kyu Sakamoto, first released in Japan in 1961. The song topped the charts in a number of countries, including the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in 1963. The song grew to become one of the world’s best-selling singles of all time, selling over 13 million copies worldwide.

Sakamoto died at 43 in a plane crash.

“Ue o Muite Arukō” (pronounced [ɯeomɯiteaɾɯkoꜜː]) was written by lyricist Rokusuke Ei and composer Hachidai Nakamura. The lyrics tell the story of a man who looks up while he is walking so that his tears will not fall, with the verses describing his memories and feelings. Ei wrote the lyrics while walking home from participating in the 1960 Anpo protests against the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty, expressing his frustration and dejection at the failed efforts to stop the treaty. However, the lyrics were purposely generic so that they might refer to any lost love

In the US, “Sukiyaki” topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1963, one of the few non-English songs to have done so, and the first in a non-European language. It was the only single by an Asian artist to top the Hot 100 until the 2020 release of “Dynamite” by the South Korean band BTS. “Sukiyaki” also peaked at number eighteen on the Billboard R&B chart, and spent five weeks at number one on the Middle of the Road chart.

Can you name an American chart-topper in a European language? I can!

Here’s “Sukiyaki,” which has both the Japanese words written in English transliteration as well as the English translation.

“Angel”

April 13, 2026 • 12:45 pm

It was 12 years ago when I posted the first video below of Sarah McLachlan singing what is perhaps her most famous song, “Angel.” I came across it again yesterday and decided to pair it with another version.  The first one, recorded in her home studio, shows her well-known ability to go between her “chest voice” (normal range) and “head voice” (high notes, like a falsetto or yodeling). It’s a lovely song, and was written by her and usually performed only with her own piano accompaniment (there are a lot of versions on the Internet). My earlier post describes what the song’s about.

When I looked up the song on Wikipedia, I found this:

On 8 April 2000, McLachlan performed “Angel” with Carlos Santana on guitar at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in Pasadena, California. The show was televised on Fox TV and released on the DVD Supernatural Live – An Evening with Carlos Santana and Friends.

And of course I hoped that song was on video, too, as I’m a Santana fan. Sure enough, it was, though Santana humbly embroiders the voice and piano with soft accompaniment and a short solo (starts at 2:24).  I would have preferred to see him cut loose with an electric solo, but of course it’s not appropriate for this song. Santna’s bit, though, was apparently improvised.

I can’t say that the version with Santana is better than the solo version, but how often do you get to hear two such different musicians play together?

McCartney rehearses “Blackbird” on the day it was recorded

April 11, 2026 • 10:15 am

In my view, “Blackbird,” a Beatles song written by Paul McCartney and released on the Beatles’ “White Album” in November, 1968, is one of his finest works.  Here we see him rehearsing it in the the EMI’s Abbey Road Studios on the very day it was recorded: June 11, 1968. (The released version is here.)

A few notes on the song from Wikipedia:

McCartney explained on Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road that the guitar accompaniment for “Blackbird” was inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s Bourrée in E minor, a well-known lute piece, often played on the classical guitar. As teenagers, he and George Harrison tried to learn Bourrée as a “show off” piece. The Bourrée is distinguished by melody and bass notes played simultaneously on the upper and lower strings. McCartney said that he adapted a segment of the Bourrée (reharmonised into the original’s relative major key of G) as the opening of “Blackbird”, and carried the musical idea throughout the song. The first three notes of the song, which then transitioned into the opening guitar riff, were inspired from Bach.

The first night his future wife Linda Eastman stayed at his home, McCartney played “Blackbird” for the fans camped outside his house.

. . . Since composing “Blackbird” in 1968, McCartney has given various statements regarding both his inspiration for the song and its meaning.  He has said that he was inspired by hearing the call of a blackbird one morning when the Beatles were studying Transcendental Meditation in Rishikesh, India, and also writing it in Scotland as a response to the Little Rock Nine incident and the overall civil rights movement, wanting to write a song dedicated to people who had been affected by discrimination.

You can listen to Bach’s Bourré here, but for the life of me I can’t hear the germ of “Blackbird” in it.

The sound is off at the beginning but starts 16 seconds in. There are a few other breaks in the sound.

It’s clear that the song was tweaked right up to the end, including the tempo, the pause, and the raising of the voice on the word “life” halfway into the song.

The guy speaking to John and Paul is of course George Martin, who contributed so much to the greatness of the group’s songs.  Notice that Paul breaks into other songs from time to time, including Helter Skelter and Mother Nature’s Son, both also on the White Album. At about 6:15, Lennon tunes his guitar to McCartney’s, as if wanting to accompany him on Blackbird. But no accompaniment was needed.

Check out Macca’s shoes! The woman sitting in the corner and then next to McCartney is identified by a commenter:

Francie Schwartz is the lady appearing in the video alongside Paul. She was Paul McCartney’s girlfriend during the summer of 1968, which coincides exactly with the White Album recording sessions. She wrote about her time at Abbey Road in her memoir Body Count (1972), giving a firsthand account of those legendary sessions.
You can read about Schwartz here.

This is McCartney at the apogee of his powers. The song is a work of genius.  In all my life I will never figure out where the ability to produce songs like this comes from. All I can guess is that there’s a kind of neuronal wiring in such people that can turn thoughts into wonderful music.

Paul McCartney’s abysmal new song

April 7, 2026 • 12:30 pm

Paul McCartney was—and I use the past tense—one of the two greatest songwriters of the era that comprised the apogee of pop music. (The other was John Lennon; I’m excluding Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell as were folkier).  Sadly, he’s still making music, and, save for George Harrison, each of the Beatles immediately lost their touch after they went solo.

Here’s a McCartney song touted in the NYT as the “What’s New” in music we should pay attention to. It’s from a new album he’s releasing in May. Their blurb:

Paul McCartney, ‘Days We Left Behind”

“The Boys of Dungeon Lane,” to be released May 29, will be Paul McCartney’s first solo album since 2020; it’s named after a Liverpool street in the neighborhood where he grew up. In “Days We Left Behind,” a cozy ballad carried by acoustic guitar and piano, he sings about places and memories as both fragile and lasting; he mentions Forthlin Road, the street where he lived and wrote early songs with John Lennon. “Nothing stays the same,” he muses, but he also insists, “No one can erase the days we left behind.” His voice is shakier than it once was, only making things more poignant.

Listen for yourself. Yes, his voice is shaky, a mere shadow of his voice from the Sixties. Worse, the song is lame in both melody and lyrics, though the melody is worse than the lyrics, which are at least tolerable (I give them below).

I realize that Macca was made to create music, and probably can’t stop doing it.  And this song is still better than a lot of the dreck that passes for pop/rock music these days, but compared to the earlier McCartney, well, it’s sad.  If you leave the video on, you’ll see a horrific AI-generated video in which all four Beatles are stuck in.

Lyrics:

Looking back at white and black
Reminders of my past
Smoky bars and cheap guitars
But nothing built to last

Nothing ever stays
Nothing comes to mind
No one can erase
The days we left behind

See the boys of Dungeon Lane
Along the Mersey shore
Some of them will feel the pain
But some were meant for more

And nothing stays the same
No one needs to cry
Nothing can reclaim
The days we left behind

We met at Forthlin Road
And wrote a secret code
To never be spoken
I stand by what I said
The promise that I made
Will never be broken

Nothing ever stays
Nothing comes to mind
And no one can erase
The days we left behind

In the skies the skylarks rise
Above the sounds of war
Since that day I knew they’d stay
With me for evermore

’Cause nothing stays the same
And no one needs to cry
And no one is to blame
For the days we left behind
The days we left behind

Rick Beato: Taylor Swift vs. The Beatles

April 1, 2026 • 11:45 am

You can call me a curmudgeon for saying that rock and pop music today are dreadful compared to that of their years of apogee (yes, my teenage years!), but you’d have to call Rick Beato a curmudgeon as well. And he knows a ton about music, being a musician himself, a producer, a music analyst, and a teacher. So he surely has more musical cred than I. Nevertheless, we generally share opinions about music, in particular the view modern rock and pop is tedious, repetitive, and boring. And I’ll argue strenuously that it’s not just because I like the music of my youth, and other generations like the music of their youth. Nope, metrics like musical complexity, the frequency of autotuning, and so on support the decline of rock and pop.

In the ten-minute video below, Beato compares the Beatles with Taylor Swift, and you can guess who comes off worse. (The “kids” may disagree, but they also are largely ignorant of the Beatles.) I have to say that I’ve listened to a fair amount of Taylor Swift, trying arduously to find out what it is about her music that’s made her the world’s biggest pop sensation. It can’t be her tunes, which are unmemorable, so perhaps it’s her lyrics about the bad guys she’s been involved with—something that surely resonates with her (mostly) female fans.

In this video Beato reacts to a 2024 NYT article (archived here) that discussed whether Taylor Swift is bigger now than the Beatles were in the past. That article concludes that both were huge and, if you use the right metrics, Swift can be seen as even bigger than the Beatles:

The length of Swift’s career has allowed her into the Beatles’ vaunted ballpark by giving her the chance to evolve her sound, grow her loyal audience and take full advantage of technological advances.

Yet as wild as it is for the Beatles to have accomplished so much in so little time, Swift’s longevity might be considered equally impressive in pop music, which often overvalues the new and — especially among female artists — the young.

Swift is of course still active, so we can’t measure something that I consider important: will their music be listened to twenty years hence? And how will it be regarded several decades after Swift or the Beatles stopped making music? We’ll have to wait, of course, for the answers to those questions, and I’ll be underground.

However, in this video, Beato details his experiences with Swift, having attended a number of her concerts and having a deep acquaintance with her music, as he has with the Beatles. But Beato is concentrating on quality, not sales or chart position.  He notes that many of Taylor Swift’s melodies were written by a large number of people who change over time, compared to only three for the Beatles (Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison). And it shows in the lame melodies (Beato likes Swift’s lyrics better than “her” tunes.) Further, Swift’s instrumentation itself was largely produced and performed \ by people other than Swift—something that, says Beato, is simply “how pop music is made” these days.

Although one would think that the Beatles don’t need to be extolled by Beato, since he’s done it so many times before, but he does mention great melodies of Beatles songs like “Lady Madonna,” or “I am the Walrus.”  (I could mention a gazillion more.) In contrast to Swift, he argues, the Beatles did not repeat ideas, and “they came up with all those ideas themselves.” He winds up calling Swift a “content creator”, who picks the brains of other people when she wants to change her music.

Beato asks for comments on his opinion, and I welcome yours below. But I doubt I’ll change my opinion that rock and pop music peaked several decades ago, and has gone downhill ever since. Swift’s immense popularity only proves that.

I have never heard a Taylor Swift song that comes close to the quality of this Beatles classic, and it isn’t all that complex compared to their later work. George Martin’s interpolation at 1:42, however, is a piece of genius:

The song was recorded on 18 October 1965, and it was complete except for the instrumental bridge. At that time, Lennon had not decided what instrument to use, but he subsequently asked George Martin to play a piano solo, suggesting “something Baroque-sounding”. Martin wrote a Bach-influenced piece that he found he could not play at the song’s tempo. On 22 October, the solo was recorded with the tape running at half speed, so when played back at normal pace the piano was twice as fast and an octave higher, solving the performance challenge and also giving the solo a unique timbre, reminiscent of a harpsichord.

“Little Darlin'”: cover or parody? Or is it two, two, two songs in one?

March 23, 2026 • 11:30 am

Reader Thomas from Marginal REVOLUTION sent me the linked article piece, which shows a video of the 1957 doo-wop hit “Little Darlin'” by the Diamonds. If you’re my age, you’ll remember it.  I always thought it was a serious song, and apparently so did most Americans, but the first comment says this:

From what I recall, the Diamonds were a conventional vocal group who recorded “Little Darlin'” at the end of a session as a kind of joke song – a parody of the Ink Spots and Mills Brothers. Fortunately for them, the studio musicians joined in with perfectly irresistible beat and the song became a rock and roll hit. Early rock and roll was born as parody as much as anything else, like Elvis’s Jokey rendition of Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” turning out to be the founding document of rockabilly.

Really? And then they present the video, which, unlike any music video I know from that era, shows the group clowning around. Have a look at the video for a hit song (more cowbell!). But yes, this is the original song. which went to #2 on the Billboard charts.

To get to the bottom of this, I sent to AI, in particular Grok. Sure enough, the bot pronounced it a parody after scanning what’s published about it.

“Was “Little Darlin'” by the Diamonds a parody song?”

Yes, “Little Darlin'” by The Diamonds (1957) is widely regarded as a stylistic parody/satire of the doo-wop genre—not a lyrical parody like a Weird Al track (the words and melody are the same), but a deliberately exaggerated, campy cover that poked fun at the over-the-top clichés of the style.Here’s the story, straight from music historians:

  • The song was written by 16-year-old Maurice Williams and first recorded in January 1957 by his group The Gladiolas (on the Excello label). Their version was a straight, heartfelt R&B/doo-wop track with a Latin-tinged rhythm, falsetto, spoken bridge, and percussion. It charted modestly (#11 R&B, minor pop crossover).
  • The Diamonds (a Canadian quartet) rushed out their cover just a month later on Mercury Records. It was reportedly a last-minute, end-of-session lark—they had about 15 minutes left, no drummer, so they improvised with castanets. Lead singer Dave Somerville and the group leaned hard into the nonsense syllables (“ai-ya-yi-yai-yai-ya,” “wella-wella,” etc.), hamming it up with theatrical flair. They even performed it in an over-the-top way on TV (like The Steve Allen Show).

AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine noted that the vocal phrases “verge on self-parody… which may be why The Diamonds’ version is superior.” Radio historian John Gilliland (on the Pop Chronicles series) explicitly stated that their recording “was in fact a parody of the genre.” Other sources describe it as a “joke song,” “satire of doo-wop,” or “intended as a satire” with “campy vocal delivery.”Despite (or because of) the tongue-in-cheek approach, it became a monster hit: #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 for eight weeks (behind only Elvis’s “All Shook Up”), the biggest version by far, and now the definitive classic. The original Gladiolas take is respected by R&B fans but far less known.It’s a classic example of a white cover version (common in the 1950s) that amplified the style for mainstream appeal—here with humor that stuck. Later, Elvis Presley covered the Diamonds’ arrangement on his final album Moody Blue, and Joan Baez even recorded an actual lyrical parody.

From Wikipedia, we learn that the hit version was actually a re-recording of a song recorded just a month earlier by a black group, the Gladiolas, one of whose members wrote the song. There’s also a brief not about the parody aspect:

It was written by a 16-year-old Maurice Williams with both melody and doo-wop accompaniment strongly emphasizing a calypso rhythm. First recorded in January 1957 by Williams’ group the Gladiolas, it was quickly released as a single on Excello Records, a small swamp blues label owned by Nashville record man Earnie Young, who was responsible for creating the song’s Latin feel, naming the group and ensuring Williams would retain the song’s publishing.

The recording, inspired by a book Williams was writing, and originally called “Little Darlin’/ The Beginning,” is noted for its trademark doo-wop falsetto by Fred Mangum and its spoken bridge by Williams (“My Darlin’ I need you …”). The Gladiolas were from Lancaster, South Carolina, where they had been together since high school.

The Diamonds‘ successful cover version followed a month later. The Diamonds were a Canadian pop group that evolved into a doo-wop group. The Diamonds’ version reached number two in sales for eight weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. Billboard ranked this version as the No. 3 song for 1957. In Canada, the song was No. 11 on the premiere CHUM Chart, May 27, 1957.

The Diamonds’ version is generally considered superior. AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine argues that the Diamonds “Little Darlin'” is an unusual example of a cover being better than the original:

[T]he Diamonds’ take remained the bigger hit, and over the years, the better-known version. Normally, this would have been an outrage, but there’s a reason why the Diamonds’ version has sustained its popularity over the years: it’s a better, fiercer recording. Both versions are good, even if they’re a little silly, because it’s a good doo wop song, giving each member of the quartet a lot to do. At times, the vocal phrases verge on self-parody — the “ai-ya-yi-yai-yai-ya”‘s or the “wella-wella”‘s — which may be why The Diamonds’ version is superior.

On the Pop Chronicles, host John Gilliland claimed that their version was in fact a parody of the genre. Nonetheless, “Little Darlin'” (primarily the Diamonds’ version, but to some extent the Gladiolas’ version) remains an all-time rock ‘n roll R&B classic.

Here’s the original version by The Gladiolas, and sure enough, it’s pretty much like the parody (or cover), including the talking interlude. It was not a hit. Is this cultural appropriation?

“A Day in the Life”

February 27, 2026 • 11:15 am

I’ve said several times that the best rock/pop song I know of is “A Day in the Life,” the last track on the Beatles’ 1967 “Sgt. Pepper” album.  As usual, its composition is credited to “Lennon/McCartney”, but in this case the lyrics and melody are mainly from Lennon. But McCartney and also Harrison and Ringo contributed, with important additions by producer George Martin. (I’ve put the released version at the bottom.)

The video below by David Hartley, called “The world’s greatest song that simply shouldn’t exist”, was put up only a month ago. It shows how the song was inspired and constructed, and includes verbal quotes from the Beatles (and George Martin), early takes of the song, and snippets of the final song itself.

Why shouldn’t it exist? You can see how a lot of accidents, both sung and played, found themselves into the song, with sporadic suggestions from Martin and the boys, and yet the song worked together not just as a whole, but as an “organic whole,” looking as if it were planned.

Far from it!  At that time there were only four tracks available to mix for the final version, and a lot of manipulation was needed.  The ending was particularly problematic, and how George Martin helped finish it, using half of a full orchestra at Ringo’s suggestion, is fantastic. (Martin actually wrote all the orchestral parts that sound like random noise.) Likewise for the final extended chord, which began as a sung note but wound up, at Paul’s suggestion, with a long instrumental chord played on three pianos and a harmonium.

If you like the song, this analysis is fascinating.

 

There’s also a breakdown of the song by Rick Beato, which you can see here (unlike wasn’t allowed to play snippets of the song). Beato calls it “the best Beatles song.” He’s right, which means it’s the best rock song ever.

I’ve put below a screenshot from Hartley’s video apparently showing an early take of the song, with Paul on Hammond Organ, John on piano, Ringo on congas, and George on guitar:

Here’s the final released version (official video):