Music & More

Photo courtesy of the artist Welcome to my happily old fashioned list of the best albums of 2022. I'm old fashioned in the sense that I'm a holdout for the idea that the full length album is still an art form. For me, the album is still the thing, as you'll see on my list (below).  The music industry was altered by Covid in so many ways that in 2022 it seemed as if the forces were retooling to resume some kind of new normalcy going forward. A lot of good music was recorded and released. My cut down picks for the thirty best albums of the year was as fraught as any prior year with so many records wanting to be on that list. So, go to the streaming service of your choice and spin these albums while you read a few remarks about why, in my estimation, they are the best releases of the year.   Album of the Year: Joan Osborne - Radio Waves Nevermind that she hit it out of the park on her first try with the album Relish in 1995. Joan Osborne's reputation as a songwriter was c

  Images courtesy of Zoetrope Studio Gem from the Record Room and from the Movie Shelf:  Francis Ford Coppola wanted  One from the Heart to be a simple romantic comedy, ostensibly the antidote for his then latest film Apocalypse Now; a ntidote in the sense  that it was intended to be everything that  Apocalypse Now was not. No one would ever accuse Coppola of not thinking big, so perhaps it was impossible for him to make a small picture. For starters, he tried to make  One from the Heart at the same time he transformed the then vacant  Hollywood General Studios, that he had just bought, into the Hollywood home of Zoetrope. Even though the story of  One from the Heart  all takes place in one night in Las Vegas, every scene required the construction of a set there on the lot. As if that weren't enough, Coppola conceived a new kind of electronic filmmaking in which storyboards for each scene were recorded on videotape. The video could be reviewed and revised in real time. These dream

Photo: Tourism Media. MacArthur Park, L.A., California Gems From the Singles Box "MacArthur Park" by Richard Harris  reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in June of 1968. Harris has been know to say that although he was not a singer, he approached the song as an actor and he gave it his all. The songwriter Jimmy Webb, who also played harpsichord on the Harris track, had a long and successful career penning hits for the likes of The 5th Dimension ("Up, Up and Away"), The Brooklyn Bridge ("Worst That Could Happen"), and many hits for Glen Campbell (including "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", "Wichita Lineman", and "Galveston"), just to name a few. But Webb really outdid himself when he wrote "MacArthur Park".              Photo:  Larry Ellis/Daily Express When "MacArthur Park" was released as a single, it was one of the longest songs ever to reach the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. For comparison, "