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Episode #2126 Mike's final show.6/26 How Do You Keep the Music Playing? The two consistent threads in popular music: it varies and it changes. Different…
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Episode # 21256/19 How They Wrote the Songs What’s the trick? How do they do it? Sometimes there’s no story at all. Somebody sat at a piano, wrote a song,…
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Episode #21246/12 In the Land of Fancy Fancy gives us something invented out of the air, something unpredictable and improbable. Not fairy tale kingdoms,…
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Episode #21236/5 Putting a Flavor to Life Everybody expects popular songs to be about love because they almost are, often in predictable, conventional…
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Episoce #21225/29 Ira Gershwin: When Wit Serves Romance Ira Gershwin didn’t like to write conventional love ballads. He always never came out and said “I…
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Episode #21215/22 All Alone Being alone is the toughest time of all in a song. These are songs in which someone listens to a clock tick, plays solitaire,…
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Episode #21205/15 Rodgers and Hart in NYC Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart were born and bred in New York City. They went to Hollywood to work in the early…
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Episode #21-195/8 Arlen and Koehler Harold Arlen was a major songwriter. First, though, he worked as a rehearsal pianist and turned a bit of fooling…
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Episode #21185/1 This Must Be Illegal As boundaries cracked in the teens and then crumbled in the twenties, pleasure became an end in itself. The poor…
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4/24 Episode #21-17 The Wit of Dorothy Fields The crackle of irreverence and intelligence set to the rhythms of everyday speech: that’s Dorothy Fields in…