Articles by Michael Anderson

If you grew up watching Eddie Murphy and Jo Piscopo parody Stevie Wonder and Frank Sinatra, or have only seen recent performances by Wonder in which he looks almost like a self-parody of what Murphy was doing, you probably don’t ‘get’ why so many call Stevie Wonder one of the great geniuses of modern popular music. When you look back at the period from the early and middle 1970s in particular, his compositions – songs like You Are the Sunshine of My Life, Higher Ground, Superstition, My Cherie Amour, Signed-Sealed-Delivered, and the entire albums Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale,…

Last week on Glee, the ‘Abstinence Club’ wanted to provide counterpoint to the raw sexuality of Gwenyth Paltrow’s Holly Holiday character, and chose the song ‘Afternoon Delight’ by the Starland Vocal Band. If you are old enough to remember the song, you know that it is amongst the most bright & cheery songs of the 70’s … and also blatantly sexual as it describes grabbing an afternoon ‘quickie’ rather than waiting until the night time. It is a classic representation of a song that sounds upbeat but is really very different, masking a message with an innocent harmony and innuendo….

When you look at the history of jazz drumming, there are many towering figures with names like Williams, DeJohnette, (Jo) Jones, (Philly Joe) Jones, (Elvin) Jones … and a guy from Springfield, Massachusetts names Joe Morello. Morello was a gifted drummer who had a great sense of time and adding appropriate color. His longest gig was with Marian McPartland’s band … But he is best known as the drummer laying down the tight beats on Dave Brubeck’s Time Out recording. The song Take Five was generally used as a solo vehicle for Morello in live performances, such as the Carnegie…

If you watched the Grammy Awards and saw the segment featuring Eminem, you might have noticed that Rihanna was terrible ‘singing’ Love the Way You Lie. In fact that whole song was pretty lousy, and it only got better when it transitioned into Dr Dre’s section. And even then for me the highlight was the haunting voice of Skylar Grey. She had some feeling reminiscent of Sinead O’Connor tied in with her own haunting and fragile sensibilities. Since then I was sent a link to a YouTube video of the original demo for the song by Skylar Grey who actually…

Until relatively recently, so-called ‘cover songs’ were a staple of every artist’s repertoire. Whether it was classical artists playing compositions of folks like Bach or Mozart or singers doing the ‘great American songbook’, historically artists have established themselves by working through the existing tradition. Not any longer – now the great songs of the past are merely another source of familiarity to be bought and sampled to give your new song a familiar tune to differentiate it from the other similar sounding club dreck. This came up as we were watching ‘Don’t forget the lyrics’ and the song Savin’ All…

Phil Collins is an interesting figure in popular music – he began as the talented drummer of the progressive rock group Genesis, then suddenly became the frontman when Peter Gabriel left in 1975, leaving the drummer’s throne for the microphone as Bill Bruford and later Chester Thompson filled his former role. As Genesis vaulted from experimental rock to pop superstars, Collins simultaneously launched a massively successful career as a solo artist. At times it became hard to separate Collins from Genesis, and as his pop ballads became more and more overplayed on radio his core fans started to desert him….

Billie Holiday is famous for two things: her amazing vocal talents, and her tragic downward spiral due to drugs and alcohol. Lester Young was a famous swing-era tenor saxophone player who never quite adapted to the new bebop and other post-war jazz stylings, yet had his best commercial successes in the late 1940’s before beginning his own alcohol fueled spiral in the 50’s. Billie & Lester began working together in 1939 and made a series of wonderful recordings together before all recording was stopped for a number of reasons for a few years. Those records are at the pinnacle of…

For more than 50 years the Billboard Hot 100 has tracked the most popular songs in the country. Of course, for nearly that any years there have been payola scams, chart manipulation and other industry shenanigans that have tainted the songs that appear on the list. But make no mistake – whatever means are used to get a song to #1, the result is a lot of recognition and sales. Last week on Buzzfeed a user had compiled in two segments five seconds of EVERY #1 song from the inception of the Hot 100 until 1992. Over the weekend someone…

After starting my ‘Music Diary Songs of Note’ I quickly realized that I wanted to look at both pop music for the music video trends, and also at some of the great jazz and other recordings I hoped to feature. So I’m going to use the ‘Music Diary Songs of Note’ label for the times I want to focus on the MUSIC, and now I’ll use “Pop Goes the Music Diary” when I am looking at the music industry. In case you didn’t know, Britney Spears has a new song out called ‘Hold it against me’. It sort of reminds…