His sister died as a result of a car crash during a police chase in a residential neighborhood. One of his brothers overdosed on heroin and another committed suicide because he was unable to deal with his addiction to the drug.
When Saadiq was seven years old, his brother was murdered. His early life was marked by tragedy he experienced the deaths of several of his siblings as a young child. Ignore Nicole Kidman’s version and go straight for Laura Benanti’s.Saadiq was born in Oakland, California, the second-youngest of 14 siblings and half-siblings. It is also beautiful, universal and a complete ear worm. It’s about the one that got away, except it's more realistic: it's a song about the friend you could have, in another timeline, married about the partner who is also your best friend the stranger who almost made you risk it all.
It’s the love you only realise you felt in retrospect, when an urge was so powerful it almost took you to a place you’d never been before and you actively resisted its strangeness. The reason “Unusual Way” deserves a space in your love song repertoire is that it captures a very specific type of love. But the love songs? Oh, they hold up spectacularly, like modern jazz standards. Musical theatre songs very rarely translate well into reality: the up tempo numbers rarely work on a dance floor, its most verbose classics unable to hold up to the poetic simplicity of modern pop.
It’s you and your coconspirator against the world, Murdoch says, and it’s thrilling. “Piazza, New York Catcher” perfectly captures that strange phenomenon that takes hold when you meet someone who sees the world exactly the same way you do: tiring hours sitting in coffee shops or pounding the pavement around foreign cities (in this case New York and San Francisco) suddenly become hugely exciting. The result is a love song that doesn’t quite want to admit that it is, a rare moment of earnest feeling from a band better known for sitting on the metaphorical gymnasium bleachers and making sardonic comments while the popular kids make out.
RAPHAEL SAADIQ ASK OF YOU HIGHER LEARNING SCENE TV
(Murdoch once told the New York Times he tried to learn French by watching Godard and Truffaut films on TV with tape placed over the subtitles and, on an early date, he gave his wife a homemade re-creation of the “ New York Herald Tribune” T-shirt Jean Seberg wore in À Bout De Souffle.) Frontman Stuart Murdoch wrote the song about the early days of his relationship with his wife, Marisa Privitera, and you can tell he’s a sucker for a cinematic meet-cute. “Piazza, New York Catcher” is credited to Glasgow indie doyens Belle & Sebastian and while it does appear on the band’s sixth album, Dear Catastrophe Waitress, you’ll only hear one band member out of seven on the track. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. Thomas Barrie ‘Stand By Me’ by Ben E King It’s a quiet, sensitive and honest love song from America’s most talented folk musician.
Mitchell’s textural alto voice adds to the effect, giving the song a slightly thick, choked quality (it also helps her avoid the trite comparisons to her mezzo-soprano namesake, Joni Mitchell, that seem to dog every modern female singer-songwriter). The free-associative, rhythmic run of lyrics, equal parts happy and wistful, are a perfect articulation of how another human can evoke such an intensity of feeling that you want to cry. The point is, it would have been easy to highlight any number of Mitchell’s brilliant and heartfelt ballads, but “Now You Know”, from 2014’s Xoa, just pipped it as the most romantic. All this on top of her best-known work, the Tony-winning Broadway musical Hadestown, which began life as a concept album that set the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in a sort of pseudoclassical Dust Bowl America (it featured guest vocals from DiFranco and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon to boot). She has a deep-seated interest in the historical roots of the tradition and has released an album of rearranged, centuries-old “child ballads”, as well as covering others with her folk supergroup Bonny Light Horseman. She spent the early 2000s writing protest songs against the Iraq War and releasing them on Righteous Babe Records, progressive folk trailblazer Ani DiFranco’s indie label, before starting her own. Anaïs Mitchell takes folk music seriously.