The Gaslight Anthem Returns

After the amazing side project the Horrible Crows (which led to some incredible songs like "The Hurricane"), Brian Fallon is back with The Gaslight Anthem.  The first single off the album Handwritten is "45" was released this week.

Hey, hey, turn the record over.
Hey hey, and I'll see you on the flip side.
There you go, turn the key and engine over.
Let her go, let somebody else lay at her feet.

This song is about a breakdown, failure and regret.  However somewhere in the driving beat, there's a voice of reassurance.  Within the complex emotions, there's a simplicity, a symphony of broken dreams that somehow evolves into a sense of hope.

Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper

Cyndi Lauper is so much more than a girl who wants to have fun. 

After releasing her iconic hit “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” she released “Time After Time” as a single, which became her second most successful song.

When I was growing up Cyndi Lauper and Madonna seemed similar.  They both had the same dyed hair and clothing style.  Now if you compared the two, they could not be more different.  While Madonna has continued to work hard to be in the public eye and up with trends in pop music, Lauper has taken a quieter route. 

This artist in this acoustic performance of “Time After Time,” is who Cyndi Lauper has evolved into and there’s hints of this sensitivity and maturity in “Time After Time.”

Lauper takes the cliché of “time after time,” the idea that someone does something persistently, often with a negative feeling into a feeling of reassurance.  With gentle imagery in the first verse and the feeling of longing and sadness she reassures in the chorus that she will be there.

With unforgettable and thought-provoking lines like “the second hand unwinds,” and “the drum beats out of time,” Lauper paints a beautiful picture of insecurity, hope and love.  Lauper has an almost child-like voice.  It’s small, but powerful like Lauper herself.  Within her small stature there is a powerful artists and within her gentle voice there is great expression and depth. 

I grew up with this song and never thought anything of it until seeing it featured in an 8^th grade play I went to last weekend.

The promise of this song is not something that you understand early in life.  When you are young you have parents, friends and sibling and you don’t think that they will ever not be there. 

Then you grow up and people pass away, friends move away and you realize how everything in life doesn’t last forever.  You can’t know for sure that you can always be there for someone but you can promise. 

When you do this, it’s not about lying or being unrealistic, it’s about expressing a feeling.  It’s saying that against the odds, against reality, you will be there.  That desire and commitment to do whatever you can, time after time to be there, is what connects us to the ones we love and motivates us to be not for ourselves but for each other.  

Year 2: Week 31 - Being An Expert

This morning during my middle school orchestra rehearsal I looked down at my score and saw the word “morendo” towards the end of the song.  As the students were playing while I was conducting I racked my brain trying to remember what this word meant.

I asked my students to play an earlier section of the piece and as they played I got out my iPad and looked up the term.  After I stopped the students and gave them some feedback I asked them if they knew the term “morendo.”  After an interesting discussion in which one of my students insisted that it meant “purple” (seriously people?  Context clues?  Why would a composer write a color in a piece of music?)  I informed them morendo was Italian for gently dying away. 

After explaining to them that this meant for them to gradually play softer and not to literally die away (yes, that was a real concern from my students) we rehearsed this section.

One of the keys to being a great teacher is being an expert in the subject that you teach.  Students can see through a teacher who doesn’t know what he or she is talking about in a second.  Think back on teachers that you disliked.  Chances are one reason you didn’t connect with some of those teachers is that you simply didn’t buy them as experts.

Now I’m not saying that you have to have an encyclopedic knowledge about everything associated with your subject, but you should do enough homework so that you have a grasp on the context of what you are teaching so you can answer students’ questions.

Part of the key to being an expert is admitting what you don’t know.  Talking authoritatively about something you know a lot about earns you respect from your students.  Talking authoritatively about something you don’t really know much about does the opposite.  Students don’t disrespect teachers who admit to not knowing something tangentially related to a subject.  But they think teachers are jokes that pretend to know things they don’t.

If a student asks a valid question that you don’t know, admit you don't know the answer and look it up together.  This helps teaches students how to attain knowledge and shows that his or her inquiry is important enough to you that you want to look it up not only for their sake but for your own. 

As much as students are impressed by teachers who are experts they love teachers who are interested in learning with them about things they are interested in.  When you take a question from a student, admit you don’t know the answer and then take time to look it up, it’s an expression of care. 

Be an expert, do your homework, but don’t be afraid to admit what you don’t know.  Yes teaching is about passing on knowledge but it's also about expressing care, and engaging students in personal and meaningful learning experiences. 


Also, it doesn't hurt to keep an iPad within reach.     

Brown Corduroy Pants

One of the memories that came up during today was one time when I was walking down the street with my father.  I was at the age when I was old enough to walk but young enough to need to reach up to grab my father’s hand.

My dad was wearing brown corduroy pants.  As I was walking down the street I made sure to keep my eyes on his pants so I wouldn’t loose track of my dad.  It was a busy sidewalk and the different people and the changing scenery caught my attention.  Every couple steps I’d remember that I needed to stay with my dad so I’d look around find those pants and relax knowing that I was safe.

Then something caught my eye or maybe I had a question for my dad so I reached up and grabbed my father’s hand to get his attention.  Then a voice unfamiliar to me spoke and I looked up and saw that I had grabbed the hand of a stranger.

Where was my dad?  Was I lost?  Before I could panic, my dad only a couple steps ahead saw what happened, apologized to the other man and took my hand.

As we continued walking I was embarrassed but more than that I was confused how I could make a mistake like that.  I was so sure.  I just had to follow those brown pants and I would be fine, but that wasn’t enough.   

I had figured out that all I needed to do was watch what was at my eye level to be safe and to stay with my dad.  But in that moment I realized it wasn’t enough.  I had to look up.  So I learned to look at people’s faces to know who they were and where to go in my life.  As I got through high school, I realized that this wasn’t enough and that I had to look deeper than the surface of people’s appearances to find security and strength in the people in my life.

Reaching up and grabbing the hand of that stranger still haunts me.  That feeling of shock and disorientation has never left me.  I am afraid that that maybe the “brown corduroys,” the goals and the beliefs that I’m using to guide my choices belong to a complete stranger and are an illusion.

I guess the only way to find out is to reach up and grab that hand. 

If the hand you hold is what you think it is then your path is confirmed but if it isn’t well, dad was a only a couple steps away and so just as long as you keep walking and look up, you’ll be okay. 

Jack of All Trade by Bruce Springsteen

Optimism is difficult.

 In a world that so often shows us that people are selfish and mean, being pessimistic and cynical is the logical result. Unless you are ignorant of the darkness in the world, it takes work and effort to be optimistic and hopeful. One way to do this is to simply ignore the fact that innocent people are dying and unimaginable acts of evil are occurring right now in this world.  Or we take the more difficult road and try to reconcile all of the pain and suffering with the blessings in our own lives.

“Jack Of All Trades,” one of the new songs from Bruce Springsteen’s latest album, Wrecking Ball is about the struggle to maintain optimism and hope.


It is one of Springsteen’s most beautiful songs and is also one of his most disturbing works. After four and half minutes of reassurance and hope, Bruce’s final lyrics are of violence and hate: “If I had me a gun, I’d fine the bastards and shoot them on sight.”

Springsteen paints the portrait of a man who is reassuring someone he loves that things will be all right. He’s a jack-of-all-trades. He knows how to do a lot of different things and he’s willing to do them all.

He looks on the bright side of life. As the hurricane blows he thinks of the blue sky breaking and how “we’ll star caring for each other like Jesus said that we might.” He contemplates the economic inequality of bankers growing fat while the workingman grows thin.

There is no anger in these words just a quiet acceptance of how this is part of life. Some people see this line as a attack on Wall Street, I simply see it as a reality of our history and a necessary evil to the growth of our country and the economic cycles that shape our lives. Even though he knows that this will happen again, he says, “we'll be all right.”

They’ve stood the drought, so they can stand the flood, they can handle anything. Along with his partner he will just make do, because they have in the past. But this man is just a man. He’s angry, he’s sad and he’s frustrated.  In the end of the song, he simply has to let it out.

There’s no anger in these words. Just a quiet surrender because there’s no one person to blame for the economic hardships of our times. This impulse is one that he is powerless to make a reality but it haunts him and it’s undeniably part of his life.

I have impulses to lash out to go on rants against people that frustrate me.  We all do.  I have been tempted over and over to use to blog as a forum to vent and rail against people. Part of me knows that if I go in that direction I will probably get more readers, but I can’t. I’m made my choice for this blog and my life.

Every time, I make an optimistic statement I have to brace myself against others who would be cynical, who would rather have their fears confirmed than their hopes proved wrong. I also have to prepare myself against my own doubts and fears that tell me that things can’t happen, that people aren’t good and that the world isn't a good place. But you can’t give up and Bruce doesn’t let us. He shows this not through the words but rather through the instruments.

In the middle of the song there’s a hopeful horn interlude. These notes comfort like a lullaby and give a feeling of security. As we are left shocked by Springsteen words of violence, the horns come back with a beautiful arching melody.  This juxtaposition raises questions and Springsteen has a full minute of music to help us understand what is happening in this song.

Tom Morello provides a guitar solo that starts fiercely and slowly rises up like frustrated cries of anguish and despair. The horns, the hope returns and doesn’t let the pain take over. As the guitar reaches it’s peak, supported by the horns, it releases all of the anger and let’s us forgive the singer for his anger.

Like optimism and hope itself, “Jack Of All Trades” is a difficult song to understand. It takes us to places that are uncomfortable and challenges our assumptions about ourselves, the feelings we hold dear and the feelings we try to ignore.

Optimism is not about denying the bad things in life.  It's making sure we don't miss the great things that happen every day.  If you don't fight for this perspective, when the blue sky breaks you will not be able to feel the warmth of the sun.

Year 2: Week 30 – Patience

One of the traits that people often say teachers possess is patience.  There’s this idea that teachers have an inexhaustible well of patience as they work with children.  Is this really necessary to be a great teacher?

I never considered “patience” as one of my traits.  I’m flattered that people feel this way about me, but it’s not something I feel comfortable with. I guess I am pretty patient with my students.  However, I don’t really think so.

Patience is the ability to work through something with somebody in a situation that you don’t understand.  The reason I have no problem helping a student work through a musical concept is not because I have the patience to do so but because I try to understand why my students are confused. 

We get impatient with things in life that we don’t understand.  Like when a car doesn’t start or the internet stops working.  Most of the times we get frustrated in situations like this because we don’t know what went wrong and we don’t really have the tools to fix these situations.

I understand that modern musical notation is not intuitive at all.  I understand that it’s really hard for my third graders to have a recorder in their hand and not make a distracting noise.  And I also understand school is hard for kids and sometimes affording them a little compassion when they are trying to figure thing out is important.

I don’t always have the tools to help my students understand what I’m teaching, but most of the time I can figure something out.  The key here really isn’t patience but rather it’s a determination and a willingness to try to understand the confusion.

There are definitely times in teaching when expressing a lack of patience is also importance.  I let me students know when they are slipping on basic expectations like raising their hands and how I get frustrated with this issue.  They need to know that there are some things in life that they deserve patience and other things in life that they just have to get together quickly.

Teaching requires a profound understanding of children that I am only starting to develop.  It is in this understanding that we find out who our students are and the best way to help them learn.

There are times when I’m teaching that I feel frustration well up inside and I have to take a step back and try to figure out the way my students are thinking.  We don’t feel like we are being patient with people that we understand.  So instead of looking for that well of patience try to find a memory of confusion to connect yourself with the students you are working with.  

Yes, strive for patience but more importantly work to know your students and with that knowledge you will be amazed the lengths you are willing to go to help them.        

Top 5 Girl Groups

I discussed Boy Bands last week, so it's only fair to show the ladies some love.  Here's some of my favorite Girl Groups songs

5.  "Whatta Man" by Salt-n-Pepa featuring En Vogue

This is what was great about music in the 1990s.  An incredible rap girl group with one of the greatest female vocal groups of the time.  This song exudes confidence, fun and attitude and features an irresistible beat and an unforgettable hook.



4.  "Goodbye" by The Spice Girls


After Ginger Spice left, The Spice Girls recorded this heartfelt song about the transitions in life.  The Spice Girls invigorated pop music in the 1990s.  Recent tours have proved that they weren't just a flash in the pan and that their message of Girl Power truly had meaning (this earlier post discussed "Wannabe."


3.  "Celebrity Skin" by Hole


This movie trailer about the drummer from Hole reminds us the importance of this band. 


This was a great band and while "Celebrity Skin" may be one of their more mainstream songs, it's a delightful but dark confession by Courtney Love that was part of her come back after the death of her husband and rock legend Kurt Cobain.


2.  "Wide Open Spaces" by The Dixie Chicks


One of the comments people often say about the Dixie Chicks is about how well they can play.  I wrote this earlier post about their powerful song "Not Ready To Be Nice," about their controversial statements about President Bush (as well as this post about "Easy Silence").  My first exposure to this ladies was "Wide Open Spaces" a beautiful tribute to nature.  The most amazing thing about this song is musically it sounds so beautiful and open you can almost feel the sunshine.

1.  "There's No Stopping Us Now" by The Supremes


Most people know The Supremes from "You Can't Hurry Love" (which I discussed in this earlier post).  "There's No Stopping Us Now" shows Diana Ross opening up with the elegant Supremes providing Heavenly back-up.