I started singing ‘I Think It’s Going to Rain Today’ when I was out in the rain recently. (I can be a master of irony.) It is a great song by Randy Newman from the mid-Sixties (many artists covered it before Newman released it in 1968). ‘Tin can at my feet/think I’ll kick it down the street/that’s the way to treat a friend.’ The people under 60 who have heard of Newman think of Toy Story and You’ve Got a Friend in Me. Older people mostly remember ‘Short People.’ That saddens me because he did a lot of good work about race. He had a chip on his shoulder, though, and used divisive language just to make a point. That hasn’t aged well.
When I played Collins’s album I realized it is MUCH better than I remember. She did a great job with Pirate Jenny, Suzanne, La Colombe, Marat/Sade, and Dress Rehearsal Rag, for example; I’m embarrassed I didn’t have those on my collection of Songs of Alienation and Despair. La Colombe (The Dove) is a powerful anti-war song that is timeless. Jacques Brel wrote it about French colonialism in Algeria, but it could be about the Spanish Civil War or the Cold War.
converselyspeaking 