Soundcheck
Pop Music's War of Words
Thursday, March 27, 2008
The top songs of the 1960s contained an average of 176 words. These days, hit songs regularly top the 500-word mark. (Chris Brown and T-Pain plowed through "Kiss Kiss" with 740 words.) Today on Soundcheck, we debate quantity and quality in pop-music lyrics. And later: jazz vocalist and pianist Loston Harris pays tribute to Carolyn Leigh, a songwriter whose work was immortalized by the Rat Pack.
Pop Singers Gasp for Air
Word counts in pop-music lyrics have been climbing since the 1960s, when instrumental songs often made the charts. These days, Top Ten songs regularly surpass the 500-word mark. And instrumentals? Forget about it. We’ll talk to Slate.com contributor William Weir, who says excessive lyrics are ruining pop music, and to Don Wilson, founder of the Ventures, as we debate the power of words.
Article: William Weir, "Are Excessive Lyrics Ruining Pop Music?," Slate.com
The Ventures web site
Loston Harris
Grab your martini glass. Jazz vocalist/pianist Loston Harris is known for blending traditional jazz riffs, gospel, and blues. He's singing in a tribute concert to Carolyn Leigh, the songwriter of "Young at Heart," "The Best is Yet to Come" and other songs made famous by the Rat Pack. He joins us to preview those, and to talk about his career, which took off when he was a member of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra under Wynton Marsalis.
Sat-Mon: Loston Harris will be participating in "I've Got Your Number: Romance, the Rat Pack and Carolyn Leigh." Also: The Loston Harris Trio plays weekly at the Carlyle Hotel.
Researchers Discover a Real Golden Oldie
History was changed today. It turns out that "Mary had a little lamb," recorded by Thomas Edison on a sheet of tinfoil, was not the first recorded sound after all. Researchers have unearthed a recording of the human voice made by a little-known Frenchman that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades. Slate.com Jody Rosen broke the story in the NY Times today and he joins us.
Jody Rosen's NY Times article on 19th-century recording
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