Monthly Reviews | Take It Easy

Regular as clockwork (Oh I wish!) here I am again with my usual reminder of what you might have seen or missed on my blog last month. Whilst April didn’t quite live up to the stellar heights of March it was still a good month: behind only March in delivering the second highest number of views in well over a year. I am very grateful for everyone who visited, and especially so for those who left a like or a comment – or both.

April saw a total of thirteen posts. Due to the vagaries of the calendar it didn’t begin with the previous review, but that duly arrived a few days later in the shape of That Was March, the usual regurgitation with a bit of self-congratulation thrown in for good measure. The month had already started for me with the first of the five Tuesday Tunes posts I gave you. This was Tuesday Tunes 193: Lightning, which concluded the brief series I had begun the previous week with one on Thunder. The music came from Aerosmith, Richard Thompson, John Travolta, Jake Bugg, and The Afters. I found that theme to be a bit of a struggle but you guys seemed to like it, which was nice.

For the rest of the month I devoted the series to revisits of themes I had previously used, but for which I still had plenty of tunes to play. The first of these was Tuesday Tunes 194: Birds The Third which, as its title suggests, was the third time that I had played songs with birds in their title. The tunes came courtesy of The Steve Miller Band, ABBA, Derek and the Dominos, Elton John, and Bad Company. This was – just – the most liked Tuesday Tunes post of the month, though not the one that received the most comments.

Next up was Tuesday Tunes 195: Celebrity Revisited which, unsurprisingly, was a second set of songs which commented on the merits or otherwise of celebrity. They came from Dire Straits, Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, Taylor Swift, Joe Walsh, and Nickelback.

I ran four posts last autumn of songs with recognisable intros, and as I still had a very long list of candidates for this I closed the month with two more of these. The first was Tuesday Tunes 196: Intros 5×5 which had music from The Rolling Stones, Procol Harum, Little Feat, Sniff ‘n’ the Tears, and the Moody Blues. I deliberately threw in a couple of less familiar songs for that one, but I love them both and their intros are worth it!

I returned very much to the mainstream for the final one, three days ago, in the shape of Tuesday Tunes 197: Intros 6×6. The title rather gave away the fact that I was marking this sixth post on the theme with an extra tune, as there are still so many to play for it! For my money this was a set of absolute corkers, from Deep Purple, Queen, Fleetwood Mac, R.E.M, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin. I’m guessing you’ve heard of most of those?

As usual, I took part each week in Song Lyric Sunday, and there were four of those last month, all of which were suggested by Nancy (aka The Sicilian Story Teller), as part of her ten week residency. The first of these was to play songs which include the lyrics ‘cold, frozen, frigid or icy’ and I gave you Song Lyric Sunday: Cold Day And Night, which had two beautiful tunes, one from The Chicks and the other from my favourite German pagan folk band, Faun.

The next week’s theme was to play songs with lyrics that included ‘hot, fire, burning or blazing’ and believe it or not I went with Dolly Parton, in Song Lyric Sunday: Fire, Fire, Burning Higher. This gave me the chance to play a track from Dolly’s most recent album, Rockstar, which is a mammoth collection – just the 39 songs – many of which are collaborations with rock musicians. The song I played was World On Fire, with an amazing live performance by Dolly with assorted singers and dancers at the 2023 ACM Awards show. If you missed it, do take a look – Dolly as you may not have seen her before, proving that at 77 she definitely still has it.

That was followed by a week playing songs featuring two prominent performers. It was an easy first choice for me, in Song Lyric Sunday: When The Shadows Lengthen, with an utterly beautiful duet between Roseanne Cash and her father Johnny, which was made all the more poignant by being the last recording he made before his death. And for good measure I gave you another gem, from Mary Chapin Carpenter and Joe Diffie.

The final April Sunday gave us the theme of songs with an orchestra and/or a chorus, which was another that was easy for me, though there was a late change to the programme in Song Lyric Sunday: Streets And Sunset. The main song in this was a re-recording by Ralph McTell of his song Streets Of London, accompanied by the Crisis Choir, which was released as a single at Christmas 2017 raising funds for the Crisis charity, who do wonderful work with homeless people. The addition was a track from the Moody Blues album Days Of Future Passed, which I played as a tribute to Mike Pinder, who died last week.

The first of the three remaining posts saw a revisit to one of my occasional series, in Friday Funnies 6. This was an unrelated collection of things that made me laugh, and featured Chris Pratt in an outtake from Parks And Recreation, a couple of clips from the UK tv show Pointless, proving that both the public and celebrities can be incredibly stupid, a Professor who made his maths class interesting, a wedding speech, a parody Trump ad, the wonderful Barry Humphries as Sir Les Patterson, and a classic Monty Python sketch.

Another of my midweek posts came out in three of the categories I use: Music, Thoughts, and Dates to Note. This was a post for Earth Day 2024, in which I gave some background to the day and why it was important, shared some videos about it and then played some songs to illustrate the message. The music was a set that I had played for this day in previous years, but they are all still relevant, sadly: Yusuf/Cat Stevens, Jackson Browne, Queen, and The Eagles did it for me. This post had the honour of being reblogged by two fellow bloggers, which I’m sure contributed to it being the most liked and commented of my April offerings.

The remaining piece is another that I wrote for the Writer’s Workshop prompt. The one I chose was to tell you about my first experience of public speaking: it wasn’t actually my first, but it was an early one and by far the largest audience I have ever been given. This was Be Careful Who You Upset and if you don’t get that reference, you’ll need to read the post!

So, that was my April, and I hope you enjoyed at least some of it with me! I’ve been doing these reviews for almost four years now, and for all of them, until last month, I have chosen a title based loosely on a song, which I then played you. I went away from that last month and am doing so again today. This time, I’m playing one of my favourites from all of the songs I played you last month. It was a very hard choice to make, but I eventually went for this one, from my Earth Day post: