Traces of Love / Dennis Yost & Classic IV
Faded photographs,
Covered now with lines and creases,
Tickets torn in half,
Memories and bits and pieces,
Traces of love
Long ago
That didn`t turn out right
Traces of love...
Ribbons from her hair,
Souvenirs of days together,
The rings she used to wear,
Pages from an old love letter,
Traces of love
Long ago
That didn`t turn out right
Traces of love
With me tonight.
I close my eyes
And say a prayer
That in her heart she`ll find
A trace of love still there,
Somewhere....
(Instrumental)
Traces of hope
In the night
That she`ll come back and dry
These traces of tears
...From my heart.
Photograph / Ringo Starr
Ev'ry time i see your face,
It reminds me of the places we used to go.
But all i got is a photograph
And i realise you're not coming back anymore.
I thought i'd make it the day you went away,
But i can't make it
Till you come home again to stay-yi-yay-yi-yay.
I can't get used to living here,
While my heart is broke, my tears i cried for you.
I want you here to have and hold,
As the years go by and we grow old and grey.
Now you're expecting me to live without you,
But that's not something that i'm looking forward to.
I can't get used to living here,
While my heart is broke, my tears i cried for you.
I want you here to have and hold,
As the years go by and we grow old and grey.
Ev'ry time i see your face,
It reminds me of the places we used to go.
But all i got is a photograph
And i realise you're not coming back anymore.
Ev'ry time i see your face,
It reminds me of the places we used to go.
But all i got is a photograph
And i realise you're not coming back anymore.
Ev'ry time i see your face,
It reminds me of the places we used to go.
But all i got is a photograph
And i realise you're not.
Kodachrome / Paul Simon
When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It's a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of education
Hasn't hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall
Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's
a sunny day
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away
If you took all the girls I knew
When I was single
And brought them all together
for one night
I know they'd never match my sweet imagination
Everything looks worse
in black and white
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Teach Your Children was inspired by Arnold Newman’s portrait of Alfred Krupp and Diane Arbus’s Child with Toy Hand Grenade. Graham Nash writes that seeing the two photographs exhibited side by side «spoke to me about the process of teaching and learning from our children. If we didn’t teach our children a better way of dealing with fellow human beings, then humanity might be doomed. The song was already being formed in my mind. I had bits and pieces, and this experience of the placement of these two images next to each other solidified my ideas, and the song was brought to life.»
Teach Your Children
You, who are on the road, must have a code, that you can live by.
And so, become yourself, because the past, is just a good bye.
Teach, your children well, their father's hell, did slowly go by,
And feed, them on your dreams, the one they picked, the one you're known by.
Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh, and know they love you.
And you, of the tender years, can't know the fears, that your elders grew by.
And so please help, them with your years, they seek the truth before they can die.
Teach, your parents well, their children's hell, will slowly go by.
And feed, them on your dreams, the one they picked, the one you're known by.
Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh, and know they love you.
KT Tunstall’s Suddenly I See was a response to Robert Mapplethorpe’s most famous portrait of Patti Smith. Sean Kelly, who represents Mapplethorpe’s work in New York, writes that the photograph, which appeared on the cover of Smith’s first album, Horses, «almost singlehandedly reinvented the image of the art-rock musician as icon of cool for a new generation of listeners and viewers.»
Suddenly I See
Her face is a map of the world
Is a map of the world
You can see she's a beautiful girl
She's a beautiful girl
And everything around her is a silver pool of light
The people who surround her feel the benefit of it
It makes you calm
She holds you captivated in her palm
[x2] Suddenly I see (Suddenly I see)
This is what I wanna be
Suddenly I see (Suddenly I see)
Why the hell it means so much to me
I feel like walking the world
Like walking the world
You can hear she's a beautiful girl
She's a beautiful girl
She fills up every corner like she's born in black and white
Makes you feel warmer when you're trying to remember
What you heard
She likes to leave you hanging on her word
[x2] Suddenly I see (Suddenly I see)
This is what I wanna be
Suddenly I see (Suddenly I see)
Why the hell it means so much to me
And she's taller than most
And she's looking at me
I can see her eyes looking from a page in a magazine
Oh she makes me feel like I could be a tower
A big strong tower
[x4] She got the power to be
The power to give
The power to see
[x2] Suddenly I see (Suddenly I see)
This is what I wanna be
Suddenly I see (Suddenly I see)
Why the hell it means so much to me
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Philip Glass’s chamber opera The Photographer was inspired by the life and photographs of Muybridge. Stephen Barber, the author of the monograph Muybridge: The Eye in Motion, writes, «Muybridge’s work is focused on repetition and systems, and is obsessed with the nature of time and the human body, so it’s no surprise that Philip Glass responded directly to his work.» Glass was also fascinated by Muybridge’s personal history: in 1874, the photographer shot and killed his wife’s lover, in California, but a jury refused to convict him. Muybridge continued his work for two more decades.
Hannah Starkey and Cindy Sherman’s photographs inspired Jimmy Eat World’s album Invented. Jim Adkins, the lead singer and guitarist, came up with the track Evidence after seeing Untitled Film Still No. 36. Adkins writes, «The story I found in the photograph goes like this: a couple moves in together too quickly. Got a deal on a rent-controlled studio apartment in the pink-cloud phase of dating. Eh, why not? Their differences played out pretty quickly.… In an argument about who should leave, she decides to divide the bed and some of the room with an extra bed sheet.»
Abel Meeropol wrote Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit after seeing Beitler’s iconic photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. Meeropol first wrote a poem called Bitter Fruit, which he then set to music. Holiday’s first performance of the song was at Café Society, one of the first integrated night clubs in New York, in 1939. Sixty years later, Time called Strange Fruit «the song of the century.»
Aaron Copland wrote his opera The Tender Land after seeing Walker Evans’s work in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Jeff Rosenheim, the curator in charge of the Metropolitan Museum’s photograph department, says that the book asks the reader «to look straight at the wretchedness of life. The results are shocking, and the readers feel complicit in the misery, as well as in the author’s intellectual and physical trespass.»
James Taylor’s The Frozen Man was inspired by the anthropologist Owen Beattie’s photograph of the frozen corpse of the nineteenth-century explorer John Torrington. John Geiger, Beattie’s co-author on «Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition, writes, «It is a rare thing to be able to look into the eyes of someone who has been dead for more than a century, and to have him look right back at you.» Taylor’s song, Geiger continues, is «a beautiful, haunting ode to something dead that is alive again in our world.»
Moby wrote Gone to Sleep after seeing Phil Toledano’s photograph The Woods. «This image was made during a period when I was obsessed with using cotton wool for clouds and explosions,» Toledano writes. «It’s all done in camera, with bits of string, clumps of cotton wool, and a model who was slightly peeved at having his face obscured.» Toledano says that he likes the song, but would have preferred to actively collaborate on it. «What can I say? I’m an overachiever.»
Robert Honstein’s «Arctic» was inspired by Chris McCaw’s photograph Sunburned GSP #492 (North Slope Alaska/24 hours). «His piece captures that enduring sense of time I have in the Arctic Circle, and the unending rotation of the planet that most people don’t stop to contemplate,» McCaw writes. «It was a real treat to have Robert reflect on the idea of an unending day, and for his interpretation through sound and timing to take me back to that place.» The excerpt here is from a private recording by the Mivos Quartet.
