Music for Funerals

 

I was gone for five minutes. Like five minutes. (Not really five minutes.) And so much happened from my musical favorites list. Unbelievable. Like I was gone for 10 days at most.

And all this new stuff was both stressful (because I couldn't attend to it, tied up as I was with family arriving for my mother's interment, that being the end itself of a five-year long transitioning) and yet it was also very comforting, that I would have something to look forward to afterwards and that something would go on when all the realizations of my mother finally being gone were ready to set in. 

Actual Funeral Music 

This is not actually a post about music for funerals. But my mother did have requests for music, particularly Andy William's singing "Battle Hymn of the Republic" in 1968 (her final political sayonara)... 

...and a recording of a my Dad's cousin (no longer with us) singing "His Eye Is On the Sparrow" which she loved and which is played digitally and posthumously during many of our New Mexico family funerals. 

But National Cemetery ceremonies only give you 30 minutes and with a sermon there's not much time for contemplation through music. So we made a very polished video reel of her life in photos with the help of a friend and we enshrined her music there (with some somber Neil Diamond added) for her celebration of life events in Cleveland and Albuquerque. 

New Barry Manilow (7 days ago), New John Legend and Dionne Warwick (3 weeks ago)

Barry Manilow has just released an album of original material (he's been swimming in covers for years). And as I've mentioned elsewhere, I have not doled out money for a Barry Manilow product since 1990. The only post-1990 Barry Manilow records I have were given to me as gifts. 

This is because somewhere around that time, a few things happened: (1) he started trafficking in Big Show shtick (and I realize some people think all of Barry Manilow is shtick but that line of attack means nothing to me), (2) he started recording all story/character-driven songs. Although never autobiographical, the early period was definitely universal love-song material. And I can understand if he got tired of that (maybe especially at the point where he came out of the closet to himself which also happened around that time). But story songs work better in some hands than others. Cher, for example, is famous for her early 1970s story songs (which she admitted recently is a style of song she doesn't really like) but her songs were close enough to her mythical persona as to be believable performances of the characters (of gypsy, Native American, L.A. actress) and they were all told from the first person (and I think that is key). Barry's story songs are always told (the ones I've heard anyway) from third person point-of-view which makes the songs feel even more remote. And the characters are often thinly drawn. And (3), for all his concern with a song's hook, his latter-day songs are usually lacking a strong melodic hook. And I think this has to do with his growing tired of the pop milieu and preferring musical theater and jazz. 

I know someone who was once a television sitcom writer but who hated television sitcoms and I think it's hard to strike gold in a genre you don't like.  

Anyway all that said, I still enjoy listening to Barry Manilow talk about making things and I like that he has returned to working with his prior songwriters after all these years. I have to say only one song I listened to on this album have I come back to, the last one "Coming of Age," maybe because Manilow sings it from the first person and addresses situations similar to what I imagine Barry Manilow might actually be going through. The music and details are still thin (and there are too many references to the Beatles) but it's the song that stuck in my head. 

Compare this to the golden age of Barry Manilow. YouTube algorithms alerted me this week to these two live performances I had never yet seen before from the 70s era.

"When I Needed You" (1979) - I now contend this lyric is not a healthy approach for adults in failed romances; but when you were in high school this song was a handy sentiment for coping with early love dramas. (It's heartbreaking, Barry, but don't take it out on the piano!)

"Ready to Take a Chance Again" (date unknown, circa 1978) - This is the age of Barry Manilow singing hard things (look at his face after it's all over). 

He's getting what you get when you go for it.

After my mother's interment, my family went to Tomasitas in Santa Fe. It was a somewhat magical family lunch in the Randy Travis room, which delighted my brother also named Randy Travis. My husband even selected the "Randy Travis plate" at which the whole table cheered. As we were seated, the restaurant was playing a Barry Manilow song and I elbowed my oldest brother sitting next to me and he shook his head. In fact, Tomasitas played three (!!) Barry Manilow songs while we were there to my delight and my brother's dismay. He lamented that his early disparagement of Barry Manilow, (which was significantly higher that the disCheragement I also received), did not have its intended effect of squashing my enthusiasm for Barry Manilow.  

I'm going to say more about Barry Manilow later. But I think I can say my current-day, warm-voice fix is now being satisfied by John Legend. I didn't pick John Legend in my top 10 list because I really don't know his oeuvre at all. But this amazing, beautiful duet with Dionne Warwick came out recently and I've listened to it about a hundred times.

"Where Is Your Heart" (2026) - Like Barry Manilow, Dionne Warwick isn't the same young singer she once was but should that matter? (My middle-brother was just days ago standing in my Cher she-shed telling us all about Paul McCartney's good days and bad days sometimes happening over two days). This song proves Warwick's voice can still meld gorgeously with Legend's. 

New Cher (7 days ago)

Usually when I'm tied up with other things, Cher will release something new. This time it was a new hair product commercial with Xochitl Gomez for Garnier Diamond Sleek (officially Garnier Fructis Diamond Sleek Shine-Coat Smoothing Spray) which is a "heat-activated anti-frizz and heat protectant spray." (I'm kinda ready for the frizzy hair look to return, to be honest.) The commercial itself was meh (a longer review to come soon on Cher Scholar), but the Q&A at the launch was much better, more delightfully Cher-like. 

This is an interesting thing about a pop-culture product surrounded as it is by all its assets. It reminds me of remixes that seem more interesting than the album versions. Poets talk a lot about how revised poems sometimes confuse the idea of a "canonical" version. Sally Bushnell wrote a whole book about this, "Text as Process." Sometimes the stronger cultural point becomes something off to the side. 

By the way, this was the first time my oldest "Led Zepplin/Sammy Hagar" brother had seen my Cher she-shed. He declared that he had known me my whole life and had no idea I had all this stuff. I replied that there was a good starter-amount of it to be found in our family basement back in St. Louis. In fact my MCA issue of Cher's Greatest Hits album cover became warped by a basement flood in the late 1970s. 

In that very same shed, my "Beatles" brother acquiesced that it was indeed significant Cher has kept up her cultural relevance throughout all these decades. Which sort of shocked me to hear him say that. I should have taken everyone's picture in there...as evidence! Unfortunately, I'm a terrible evidentiary photographer.

New John Waite (10 days ago)

John Waite was a featured voice on Michael Damian's 2026 remake of his own very-80s-sounding (1989) synth-pop remake of David Essex's 1973 song "Rock On." 

These are all interesting versions. The 1970s version has a nice simple texture (and David Essex). The 80s version injects some interesting 80s technology and bridge drama. The new version is even more full-bodied (on the tech continuum) with its potpourri of studio effects, which sent me in circles for a minute searching for what kind of computer effects were used in the updated version. And you completely can't trust A.I. for these things but it has an unsourced opinion already.

In any case, the result is an interesting collage of texture (including the accentual use of John Waite's voice).

New Sara Bareilles (8 days ago)

And then Sara Bareilles released a new song...about grief! Ugh! And it turns out the forthcoming album will be all about handling grief and loss. What serendipitous timing for a sad little me.

The lead song (are they really singles anymore?) is called "Home" and it's about growth through sharing  our grief. She's been "on both sides now" of this (the squashing and the telling) and this is just brilliant perspective and precision as usual for Bareilles. 

Patti LaBelle (Tomorrow)

Another member of my Top 10, I will be seeing her tomorrow night at Route 66 Casino west of Albuquerque. I don't see many concerts anymore (despite my friend Coolia always sending me new ideas). But this is a real bucket-list concert for me. Interestingly, it was once on my bucket list to see Sammy Hagar and I saw him at this very same casino and the sound was terrible. I could only hear Michael Anthony singing from the other side of the stage. I mentioned this to my friend Daphne (who sees a lot of local concerts) when we went together to Santa Fe to see John Waite and John Cafferty last spring and she told me you have to sit in the middle section of that venue to hear anything. So...duly noted. I'm in the middle section. Stay tuned.

New Odds and Ends and Things New To Me

While I was driving to pick up my niece and her fiance from the Albuquerque airport last week, this song came through my channel surfing through ABQ radio, Sombr's "Homewrecker" (4 months ago). After I got home, I watched the video which is a Western-themed thing and I can't decide if I like it or am annoyed by it. The textures are good (the tried and true false-front western Main Street set), and the video gives a good representation of a technicolor 1950s movie western. But the meta nature of the video (which takes you out of that sweet spot) with the crabby director and his ingenue girlfriend, felt off-putting. I honestly couldn't tell the protagonist from the villain by their faces. And it was kind of too clever by half. (Kind of like the name Sombr.) But I still like the song (minus a silly line here or there).

"I don't wanna talk down on your lover
I don't wanna be a homewrecker
I just know I can be better, be better, be better
I don't wanna talk down on your lover
I don't wanna be a broken record
I just know I can be better, be better, be better"

And after the Sombr song I kept surfing right to the oldies channel and came to Brenda Lee's "Coming On Strong." This was a 1960s-era hit for Brenda Lee but I don't know much about Brenda Lee except for this great Christmas song about sweets. (There's also the iconic "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" but I never knew who was singing the song when I once heard it on Christmas music channels.) 

Anyway...truth from 1966. 

Then days later I was driving my niece and her fiancee back to the airport at 4:30 in the morning when I met this catchy song, OneRepublic's "I Need Your Love" (2 months ago).

"And I don't need a million dollars
Don't need expensive problems"

"And when all of the time starts to slip away
Gonna love those lines
Gonna love your shades of grey"  

 

I'll come full circle with Neil Diamond again. I recently watched and liked the impersonator movie (my mother, the big Neil Diamond fan, never got a chance to see it). But I prefer to think of this song as a phenomenon unto itself (and yet it was never one of my favorite Neil Diamond songs). When I was making a playlist for my mom a few months ago (separate from her photo reel), this song ended up being the last song and I can't listen to it anymore without "getting emotional." 

Because I get it now. I get the song now. How music moves you in one way or another. How cheer can be found in very blue notes and how the saddest feeling can be exposed in the very brightest ones. And the sharp pang to be felt in the gap that spreads between the two. 

"You start to feeling good. You simply got no choice." 😭

"Song Sung Blue" (1972)