Spicy Food and Moving Music
From Tijuana to Eisenach and from Jersey to Canada
I like food that bites back. If it’s not spicy and flavorful (I actually think that’s redundant, for how could food be flavorful without being spicy?), what’s the point in eating it?
About music, I have a similar thought: If it doesn’t move me, why listen to it? What I mean is, if it doesn’t make me want to move (as in dance) or move me emotionally, then it seems bland and worthless.
I’ve had many favorite songs over the course of my life. The first one was A Taste of Honey by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass; after that came Secret Agent Man by Johnny Rivers (written by Steve Barri and P.F. Sloan). Later came Land of Make Believe by the Moody Blues, and New Horizons by the same band. Still later Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark and Thunder Road held top spot with me. There have been others along the way, over the decades, such as Mein Vater War Ein Wandersmann (aka The Happy Wanderer) and Lili Marlene.
But two songs in particular are, to me, downright magical, as far as “moving me” (emotionally) goes. They are as different as night and day musically, and were composed/written three centuries apart: Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, by J.S. Bach, and Forever and For Always by Shania Twain.
I know some dismiss Shania Twain (too commercial?), but I don’t agree with that reaction, especially when it comes to that song. I can’t really explain, even to myself, why these two songs, in particular, touch me so deeply. The best I can come up with is that, for the Bach composition, it’s the ethereal and majestic melody and harmony.
With the Shania Twain tune, it’s the perfect marriage of the music and the lyrics and the perfect human marriage described in those lyrics. It’s the epitome of pop perfection. As I said, I can’t explain why these two songs especially move me, but they touch me so deeply that I could listen to them every day and never become inured to their impact. In fact, if they had a more powerful effect on me than they already do, hearing them would probably kill me outright — a mere human could not endure anything more sublime and dream-worthy.
What’s odd is that I didn’t hear Forever and For Always until twenty years after it was released in 2002, in other words last year (I haven’t listened to the radio much since the 1970s); that’s nothing, though — I didn’t hear Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring until 300 years after it was composed and first performed.Everyone’s preference in music differs, of course. You might hear these songs and not be moved, or even impressed. I can’t understand that, either, but, as they say, there’s no accounting for taste. Anyway, here they are:
One of the many excellent renditions of Bach's composition can be heard (and seen) here.
One of several versions by Shania Twain of the song she wrote with her then-husband Robert John “Mutt” Lange is here.
It’s sad that the two who wrote Forever and For Always with and for and about each other are no longer together. Knowing that makes the song both beautiful and tragic. It reminds me of what Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in To a Skylark, “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”