The great Burt Bacharach album that nobody’s talking about
Though it stalled on the charts, 'Reach Out' is a sumptuous 11-course aural feast
Though it stalled on the charts, 'Reach Out' is a sumptuous 11-course aural feast
His songs defined the '60s, and our memory of them
The clever lyrics in this clip, subtitled in English, were written by the bestselling author of 'Born to Kvetch,' Michael Wex
Barry Manilow never meant to become a pop star, and his Grammy, Emmy and Tony-winning career as a songwriter is a source of perennial tsuris for his lyric-writing partner Bruce Sussman. If you ask them, “Mandy” came, gave and (forget what you heard) did some taking. That breakout hit diverted the pair’s original ambition: writing…
At the height of his success in 1967, Jay Black, lead singer of the pop band, Jay and the Americans, recorded a popular Yiddish folk song and managed to convince his record label, United Artists, to include it on the B-side of their album, “Try Some of This!” The story, first published by the Forward…
In the past few weeks, I’ve written about everything wrong with Hanukkah today — kitschy merchandise, Christmasification, the Maccabees. So as we approach the end of the eight nights, I wanted to finish on a sweeter note: a pop anthem made for the holiday that, in my humble opinion, does everything right. “Hanukkah” comes from…
Yoel Matveyev, the Forverts’ correspondent in Russia, was sitting alone in a Moscow train station in the middle of the night, when he suddenly got the inspiration to translate the Russian song, “Nadezhda”, about two lovers separated by a long and difficult journey, into Yiddish. Although the song was written in 1971, it remains hugely…
In June, a self-contained — if not quite silent — majority made its presence known to the world. Fans of K-pop, the common shorthand for South Korean popular music, banded together to inflate President Donald Trump’s projected turnout for his widely-publicized rally in Tulsa, Okla. While their scheme, which resulted in a sea of empty…
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