This morning's random song encounters.

1. I woke up and looked at the phone to see that it was 4 in the morning, and it made me think of that Paul Simon song with the soaring line "4 in the morning/Crapped out/Yawning/Longing my life away." I found it on Spotify and played it through headphones, then found this version by Karen Carpenter (singing "crashed out" for "crapped out"):

2. On the way to the sunrise, the car played Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide," which has the line "Even children get older/Now I'm getting older too." Meade said aborted children don't get older, and it made me think of that Byrds recording of a Pete Seeger song with the line "I'm only 7 although I died/In Hiroshima, long ago/I'm 7 now as I was then/When children die, they do not grow":

3. I was reading the news about the dismantling of the "autonomous zone" here in Madison, including a letter said to be from the family of the man who, it seems, drew a knife on the police and was shot to death. It said: "We are entrusting The Pressure Movement" and "We are working directly with The Pressure Movement." What's the Pressure Movement? This song played in my head:

"In both films, the [Barbie] doll ultimately decides she must leave her home."

"For [Karen] Carpenter, this precedes an attempt at healing, away from well-meaning if destructive family dynamics. For Margot Robbie’s Barbie, her journey leads her to discovering true power in the real world, outside Barbieland’s colourful confines. Both films imagine the home as a place of repression, and dolls as a vessel for often contradictory ideas about domesticity, femininity and self-realisation."

I'm reading "The banned Barbie film: her anguished first role as Karen Carpenter/Todd Haynes animated the impossibly slender doll to show what drove the singer to her early death. The film has more in common than you might expect with Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster" (The Guardian).

The Todd Haynes film using Barbie as Karen is "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story." It's existed since 1987, but litigation made it unavailable until recently. You can watch the whole thing at that link. From the Guardian article:

"For All We Know"... there are 2 songs with this title.

The 1934 song:



And the 1970 song:



I'm listening to both this morning after getting way too involved in the use of the word "for" as a conjunction as opposed to a preposition — after a doctor had said "for my wife and I," which is grammatically wrong if "for" is a preposition there. In the song title — in 1934 or 1970 — "for" is a conjunction... or, no... it's a preposition... right??

The Carpenters' song was in the 1970 film "Lovers and Other Strangers," which I've never seen. It won the best song Oscar that year. The older song is something I've heard many times, by so many different singers. It's much more familiar to me. It seems like the better song: "For all we know/We may never meet again/Before you go/Make this moment sweet again." The kindliest love-'em-and-leave-'em song. It's about living in the present. "So love me, love me tonight/Tomorrow was made for some/Tomorrow may never come/For all we know."

The phrase "for all we know" is an acknowledgment of the unknowability of the future. The older song tells us to be here now, because there may be no future at all. The newer song — I'm calling it newer though it's much older than the 1934 song was in 1970 — imagines a very long future and stresses the love that goes on an on forever: "Let's take a lifetime to say/I knew you well/For only time will tell us so/And love may grow/For all we know." Or does that final "for all we know" reveal the singer's doubt?

ADDED: "Lovers and Other Strangers" was the occasion for the first film appearance of Diane Keaton:

"I've been so many places in my life and time..."

We're listening to "A Song for You" here at Meadhouse tonight. The original, by Leon Russell, and this version by The Carpenters.

ADDED: Interesting that the lyric is "life and time," not "life and times." The stock phrase is "life and times." You see it in many subtitles — "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West" — and titles — "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid." "Times" refers to the era in which the character lives, so "life and times" is a reference to 2 related things — the person and the setting where we find him. But "time" without the "s" seems to refer to the period of time that is the character's life. Think of how we say things like: Your time is almost used up or My time here on earth. "Life and time," then, is a redundancy, 2 references to the character's own life, and none to the era. When I listen to the Leon Russell original, I feel that I can hear an implied "s" on "time" (and a similar effect on the word "rhyme" in the rhyming line: "I've sung a lot of songs, I've made some bad rhyme"), but then I listen again and it's not there at all. I check Karen Carpenter's ultra-clear articulation: It's "life and time" and "some bad rhyme." It's odd when you contemplate the meaning of language, but when you think about the sound, closing down those lines on the hum of "m" is so much nicer than hissing into an "s."

AND: 1. "The Best of Leon Russell," and 2. "Carpenters Gold."