Coffee Shop Music Update 2k16

• “Moon River” is a great enough song that it makes you want to drop everything and watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which is not a great movie. Alternate argument: “Moon River” is such a great song that it can carry a flawed movie all by itself. Alternate argument: Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a great movie, but not a good one.

• “Country Roads” is inescapable, irrepressible, undeniable; but listening to John Denver sure makes you want to do those things (escape, repress, deny), because the performance is just so overwhelmingly square. Clarification: I actually kind of love this song. But ohhh, every bar of that chorus, beats two and three just last forever.

• Comparison: Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman.” Now, this song is questionable; but unquestionably, it is not square. Here is a drummer who knows how to play some quarter notes. Wikipedia research uncovers his name—Paul Garrison—but not much else.

• Beach Boys: unassailable. Takes over the room.

• Rod Stewart “Have I Told You Lately”: how is it possible that I did not know this was a Van Morrison song? Stewart’s cover appeared only four years after the original. This live version from MTV is unbelievable. (I mean that literally—not in the colloquial of sense of “unbelievably good”—just simply unbelievable.) Look at him work that mic. Those GESTURES. And the GUITAR SOLO. And the FASHION CHOICES. And the fucking FLOWERS. Unbelievable.

• Above thoughts perhaps explain why I’m no longer able to productively work at coffee shops.