She has decided to listen to some music, and she has chosen Leonard Cohen, the Quebecer singer-songwriter, poet, andnovelist, who was born on a day like today in 1934.
Leonard Norman Cohen (September 21, 1934-November 7, 2016) was aQuebecersinger-songwriter, poet, andnovelist.
His work explored religion, politics, isolation, depression, sexuality, loss, death and romantic relationships.
Cohen was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was invested as a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour.
Cohen pursued a career as a poet and novelist during the 1950s and early 1960s, and did not begin a music career until 1967 at the age of 33. His first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967), was followed by three more albums of folk music: Songs from a Room (1969), Songs of Love and Hate (1971) and New Skinfor the Old Ceremony (1974).
His 1977 record Death of a Ladies' Man, co-written and produced by Phil Spector, was a move away from Cohen's previous minimalist sound.
In 1979, Cohen returned with the more traditional Recent Songs, which blended his acoustic style with jazz, East Asian, and Mediterranean influences.
Cohen's most famous song, Hallelujah, was first released on his studio album Various Positions in 1984. I'm Your Man in 1988 marked Cohen's turn to synthesized productions.
In 1992, Cohen released its follow-up, The Future, which had dark lyrics and references to political and social unrest.
Cohen returned to music in 2001 with the release of Ten New Songs, which was a major hit in Canada and Europe. Following a successful string of tours between 2008 and 2013, Cohen released three albums in the final four years of his life: Old Ideas (2012), Popular Problems (2014) and You Want It Darker (2016), the last of which was released three weeks before his death. A posthumous album titled Thanks for the Dance was released in November 2019, his fifteenth and final studio album.
Leonard Cohen was born in the Montreal suburb of Westmount, Quebecon September 21, 1934.
His Lithuanian-born mother, Marsha Klonitsky, was the daughter of a Talmudic writer, Rabbi Solomon Klonitsky-Kline, and emigrated to Canada in 1927.
In 1951, Cohen enrolled at McGill University, where he became president of the McGill Debating Union and won the Chester MacNaghten Literary Competition for the poems Sparrows and Thoughts of a Landsman.
In 1967, disappointed with his lack of success as a writer, Cohen
moved to the United States to pursue a career as a folk music
singer–songwriter. During the 1960s, he was a fringe figure in Andy
Warhol's Factory crowd. Warhol speculated that Cohen had spent time listening to Nico in clubs and that this had influenced his musical style.
His song Suzanne became a hit for Judy Collins, who subsequently covered a number of Cohen's other songs as well, and was for many years his most-covered song.
After performing at a few folk festivals, he came to the attention of Columbia Records producer John Hammond, who signed Cohen to a record deal.
Cohen's first album was Songs of Leonard Cohen.
Cohen followed up that first album with Songs from a Room (1969, featuring the often-recorded Bird on the Wire) and Songs of Love and Hate (1971).
In 1973, Columbia Records released Leonard Cohen: Live Songs.
In 1979, Cohen returned with the more traditional Recent Songs, which blended his acoustic style with jazz and East Asian and Mediterranean influences.
In the early 1980s, Cohen co-wrote, with Lewis Furey, the rock musical film NightMagic starring Carole Laure and Nick Mancuso; the LP Various Positions was released in 1984.
Cohen supported the release of the album with his biggest tour to date, in Europe and Australia, and with his first tour in Canada and the United States since 1975. The band performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and the Roskilde Festival.
They also gave a series of highly emotional and politically controversial concerts in Poland, which had been under martial law just two years before, and performed the song The Partisan, regarded as the hymn of the Polish Solidarity movement.
Hallelujah was first released on Cohen's studio album Various Positions in 1984, and he sang it during his Europe tour in 1985.
The album track Everybody Knows from I'm Your Man and If It Be Your Will in the 1990 film Pump Up the Volume helped expose Cohen's music to a wider audience.
In 1993, Cohen also published his book of selected poems and songs, StrangerMusic: Selected Poems and Songs, on which he had worked since 1989. It includes a number of new poems from the late 1980s and early 1990s and a major revision of his 1978 book Death of a Lady's Man.
In 1997, Cohen oversaw the selection and release of the More Best of LeonardCohen album, which included a previously unreleased track, Never Any Good, and an experimental piece The Great Event.
After two years of production, Cohen returned to music in 2001 with the release of Ten New Songs, featuring a major influence from producer and co-composer Sharon Robinson.
In October 2004, Cohen released Dear Heather, largely a musical collaboration with jazz chanteuse Anjani Thomas, although Sharon Robinson returned to collaborate on three tracks, including a duet.
Cohen published a book of poetry and drawings, Book of Longing, in May 2006.
Leonard Cohen's 12th studio album, Old Ideas, was released worldwide on January 31, 2012.
Cohen released his 13th album, Popular Problems, on September 24, 2014.
Cohen's 14th and final album, You Want It Darker, was released on October 21, 2016.
Cohen died on November 7, 2016 at the age of 82 at his home in Los Angeles; leukaemia was a contributing cause.
What have in common Jennifer Rush, Céline Dion, Umberto Tozzi and Alphaville? All of them are great singers with incredible hits and all of them have been versioned by one of the most popular voices of the 1980's and 1990's, Laura Branigan, the American singer who became famous for covering these artists with her own versions full of energy and passion.
The Grandma, who is a great consumer of Coke, always remembers the first time that she watched the spot Coke is it! where LauraBranigan sang the main song.
Laura Branigan died on a day like today in 2004. She was too young to die but she will be forever young. The Grandma thinks that the best way to pay homage to her is talking about her career and her life.
Laura Ann Branigan (July 3, 1952-August 26, 2004) was an Americansinger, songwriter, and actress. Her signature song, the platinum-certified 1982 single Gloria, stayed on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 for 36 weeks, then a record for a female artist, peaking at No. 2.
It also reached number one in Australia and Canada. In 1984, she reached number one in Canada and Germany with the U.S. No. 4 hit Self Control. She also had success in the United Kingdom with both Gloria and Self Control making the Top 10 in the UK Singles Chart.
Seeing
her greatest level of success in the 1980s, Branigan's other singles
included the Top 10 hit Solitaire (1983), the U.S. AC chart number one How Am I Supposed to Live Without You (1983), the Australian No. 2
hit Ti amo (1984), and The Power of Love (1987). Her most successful
album was 1984's platinum-selling Self Control.
She also contributed songs to motion picture and television soundtracks, including the Grammy and Academy Award-winning Flashdance soundtrack (1983), and the Ghostbusters soundtrack (1984).
In 1985, she won the Tokyo Music Festival with the song The Lucky One. Her chart success began to wane as the decade closed and after her last two albums Laura Branigan (1990) and Over My Heart (1993) garnered little attention, she generally retired from public life for the rest of the 1990s.
She
began returning to performing in the early 2000s, most notably
appearing as Janis Joplin in the off-Broadway musical Love, Janis.
Laura Branigan
As
she was recording new music and preparing a comeback to the music
industry, she died at her home in August 2004 from a previously
undiagnosed cerebral aneurysm.
In 2019, Gloria was adopted by the NHL's St.Louis Blues as their unofficial victory song, leading to the song entering ice hockey lore as an unlikely championship anthem. Branigan's legacy manager Kathy Golik embraced the trend and traveled to St. Louis to publicly represent Branigan among the Blues fanbase during the 2019 Stanley Cup Playoffs, later stating her belief that Branigan and Gloriawill forever be intertwined with the Blues and the city of St. Louis.
Laura Ann Branigan was born on July 3, 1952 in the New York City suburban village of Brewster, New York.
Branigan attended Byram Hills High School from 1966 to 1970, starring in the high school musical The Pajama Game in her senior year.
Between 1970 and 1972 she attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City, and worked as a waitress.
In 1972 she met acoustic guitarist Walker Daniels and his future wife Sharon Storm, and acoustic guitarist Chris Van Cleave, forming the folk-rock band Meadow, named as a good place for Paul McCartney's band Wings to land in.
In 1973 the group, with bass player Bob Valdez, released their debut album The Friend Ship, featuring the singles When You Were Young, and Cane and Able,which featured the hook line Throw away your cane and you are able. The record was not properly promoted and never re-released. The band broke up, after which Walker Daniels committed suicide. Branigan preferred not to discuss her involvement with Meadow publicly.
During the years after Meadow broke up, Branigan had various jobs, including a stint as one of Leonard Cohen's backup singers for his European tour in April–August 1976.
In December 1978 after meeting him at a party in Manhattan, New York City earlier in the year, Branigan married Larry Ross Kruteck (1936–1996), a lawyer, who died of colon cancer on June 15, 1996.
In
1979, after a chance meeting with manager Sid Bernstein on her return
from Europe, Branigan was signed by Ahmet Ertegun to Atlantic Records.
The strength and range of her voice actually impeded her career for
several years while the label went through the process of categorizing
her as a pop singer, and her 1981 single Looking Out for Number One,
from her unreleased album Silver Dreams, made a brief appearance on the
U.S. dance chart, reaching No. 60.
Laura Branigan
Two other early Atlantic singles, Tell Him and Fool's Affair, followed. None of these three singles or the B-side, When, were included on her first album, but all four songs were eventually released on CD over 30 years later in 2014 as bonus cuts on a U.S. CD reissue of Branigan's first album.
Branigan's 9-track debut album, Branigan, was released in March 1982. The first single from the album was All Night with Me, which reached No. 69 on the Billboard charts in early 1982.
The album alternated four energetic up-tempo songs with five ballads, including one of the few songs written solely by Branigan,I Wish We Could Be Alone.
Gloria, an Italian love song recorded in 1979 by Umberto Tozzi and successful in several European countries, was released as the album's second single.
Branigan's version was reworked with Tozzi's own arranger, Greg Mathieson, who updated its production with fellow producer Jack White to give it what Branigan called an American kick to match the new English lyrics. U.S. radio stations were initially unreceptive to Gloria but after it was embraced by dance clubs it eventually won them over, becoming one of the biggest hits of the 1980s. The album went gold, and the single was eventually certified platinum, sales of more than two million U.S. copies.
Branigan's performance of Gloria was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance alongside Linda Ronstadt, Olivia Newton-John, Juice Newton and that year's winner, Melissa Manchester, becoming her only solo nomination.
In the spring of 1983
Branigan released her second album Branigan 2. Branigan's vocals
propelled her English-language version of the French song Solitaire
toward the top of the U.S. charts. The original Solitaire was written
and recorded in 1981 by French singer-songwriter Martine Clemenceau.
Two
songs included on the album began the careers for two then-unknowns:
the English translation of Solitaire was the first major hit for
songwriter Diane Warren, while the ballad How Am I Supposed to Live
Without You was the first major hit for its co-writer, Michael Bolton.
Branigan's version reached No. 12 on the hot 100 and spent three weeks
at No. 1 on the Billboard adult contemporary chart.
During
the height of her career, Branigan also made acting appearances, first
in 1981 in An American Girl in Berlin for West German television, and
then after the success of Gloria, guest appearances on American
television series such as CHiPs (Fox Trap, season 6, episode 16, in
which she played Sarah, lead singer of the female rock band Cadillac
Foxes), Automan and Knight Rider.
She would later appear
in independent films including Mugsy's Girls, aka DeltaPi, 1985, with
Academy Awards winner Ruth Gordon, and the Australian film Backstage.
She sang on major national television and radio campaigns for products
including Dr Pepper, Coca-Cola and Chrysler, which sponsored her
1985–1986 Hold Me tour.
Laura Branigan
The year 1984 was the height of the European synthpop era, and SelfControl, the title track of Branigan's third album, released in April 1984 became her biggest hit internationally, topping the charts in over six countries, most notably West Germany, where it spent six weeks at No. 1.
The original version was recorded a few months earlier in 1984 by one of the song's co-writers Raffaele Riefoli under the name Raf held the West German number 2 spot during this time period; outside of Raf's native Italy, Branigan'sversion enjoyed more success, hitting No. 4 in the U.S. The song was featured on episode No. 8 of the first season of the TV series Miami Vice titled The Great McCarthy, which aired on November 16, 1984.
Other pop, disco, and adult contemporary hits from Branigan's Self Control album include The Lucky One, which won her a Tokyo Music Festival prize, the continental ballad Ti Amo, another Umberto Tozzi hit, and a No. 2 hit in Australia for Branigan, and the dance hit Satisfaction. The album also featured an understated version of Carole King's Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow; as a counterpoint to all the dance productions, it was a bare-bones piano version.
In concerts and television appearances throughout her career, Branigan accompanied herself on the piano for the song.
In 1984 Branigan's live show was recorded twice, for a syndicated radio concert series and a concert video. Branigan was also nominated for an award at the American Music Awards of 1985 for favorite pop/rock female video artist, won by Cyndi Lauper. Also in 1985 Branigan performed the main theme song for the television mini-series Hollywood Wives, based on the novel by Jackie Collins.
By the time Branigan's fourth album Hold Me was released in July 1985, Self Control was a worldwide success. The hits continued with Spanish Eddie, which was her sixth U.S. Billboard top 40 pop hit in two and a half years.
The subsequent single release Hold Me was a U.S. top-40 dance hit, and Branigan's introduction of the rock ballad I Found Someone, co-written by Michael Bolton, a later hit for Cher, scored even higher on the adult contemporary chart. However, neither song was supported by a music video, and both stalled at the low end of the Hot 100 chart.
On June 13, 1985, Branigan made her fourth appearance on legendary TV music show American Bandstand, performing Spanish Eddie and Hold Me. On July 4, 1985 she performed in Point State Park in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Laura Branigan
Branigan's fifth album Touch,released July 7, 1987, marked a change in her career.
Under new management and using different producers, Branigan took a more active role in her work and in the studio, seeing her return to dance floors with the Stock-Aitken-Waterman-produced track Shattered Glass written by Bob Mitchell and Steve Coe, of the band Monsoon.
Shattered Glass was performed by Branigan on the last episode of AmericanBandstand, hosted by Dick Clark, to be broadcast on ABC on September 5, 1987, becoming their last guest performer.
The album also included a return to the Billboard top-40 with her cover of Jennifer Rush's Power of Love, which was one of the 20 bestselling singles in the U.S. during the Christmas season.
The album's third single Cry Wolf, a top-30 AC hit, did not capture the attention of pop radio stations and stalled; the ballad was recorded two years later by Stevie Nicks, and more recently by its writer Jude Johnstone.
Branigan's sixth album, Laura Branigan (March 21, 1990), brought her back to the Hi-NRG charts and gay clubs with Moonlight on Water, and she scored a top-30 adult contemporary hit with Never in a Million Years.
Branigan added production to her list of credits with her cover of Vicki Sue Robinson's disco-era Turn the Beat Around and the atmospheric Let Me In, a cover of an Eddie Money song. The album also includes Unison, which was the title track for Céline Dion's English debut CD in the same year.
The album's closing track, a cover of Bryan Adams' The Best Was Yet to Come, was produced and arranged by Branigan.
The 1990–1991 Laura
Branigan Tour, which was kicked off with an appearance on The Tonight
Show Starring Johnny Carson on July 13, 1990 was followed by a
performance in the Trump Regency Showroom in Atlantic City, New Jersey
on July 14, and filmed for a syndicated U.S. television show SRO in
Concert, which was released on videocassette and laserdisc; on July 15,
1990 she performed at the Warwick Musical Theatre in Rhode Island.
On Branigan's seventh
and final studio album Over My Heart (August 17, 1993), the singer again
produced, with Phil Ramone, and wrote and arranged. It included Didn't
We Almost Win It All by Branigan and Brian BecVar, released as the
first single, a cover of Cher's song Hard Enough Getting Over You,
released as the second single, a cover of the Patty Loveless single How
Can I Help You Say Goodbye, a cover of Roxette's song The Sweet
Hello, the Sad Goodbye, and Is There Anybody Here But Me?, a smooth
mid-tempo number.
Laura Branigan
After 1990 Branigan's chart success cooled in the U.S., though she was still in demand around the world and went on several global tours.
In 1994, not long after the release of Over MyHeart, Larry Kruteck, Branigan'shusband was diagnosed with colon cancer.
Branigan refused to accept the medical prognosis, and left the music industry to devote her attention to him.
Branigan put Kruteck on herbal treatments, eventually nursing him full-time. Kruteck survived for another two and a half years and died on June 15, 1996, in New York.
In early 2001, Branigan's return to the stage was postponed, when she broke both of her femurs in a 10-foot fall from a ladder while she was hanging wisteria outside her three-bedroom lakeside home in Westchester County, New York, resulting in physical therapy for six months.
In 2002, she performed twice as the singing Janis Joplin in the off-Broadway musical Love, Janis, before dropping out of the show. I left Janis because the producers failed to file with Equity properly, she told the Sunday News in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I was sort of relieved. My voice isn't anything like JanisJoplin's, and there were 19 of her songs in the show.
In later years she continued to record, and dated the drummer in her band Tommy Bayiokos.
Also in 2002, her second official US hits collection, The Essentials, was released, including the long out-of-print hit I Found Someone.
Laura Branigan died in her sleep at her lodge in East Quogue, New York, on August 26, 2004, at age 52. The cause was attributed to a previously undiagnosed ventricular brain aneurysm. It was reported in the media that she had been experiencing headaches for several weeks before her death, but did not seek medical attention. Her ashes were scattered over Long Island Sound.
The NHL's St. Louis Blues began using Laura Branigan's cover version of Gloria as its unofficial victory song when they went on a franchise-record 11-game winning streak during the 2018–19 season. A few Blues players visited a bar in South Philadelphia called Jacks NYB to watch the NFL Wild Card game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Chicago Bears.
After leaving Yasmina with the Amish Community in Lancaster, The Beans have arrived to Washington, DC. They are astonished with Yasmina's decision but, of course, they respect it. She has written a beautiful goodbye's letter to her family explaining her real reasons to not continue the rest of the journey with them.
Yasmina tells that living with the Amish Community will allow her to have the healthiest life, in the quietest place with the most peaceful people who create their own clothes and grow their own food. She has been living a frenetic life as an individual athlete and now she only wants peace, relax and a life under the rules of a community.
The Beans are in the capital of the USA and they have chosen the shore of the Potomac to rest and review their English classes. Today, they have talked about Superlative Adjectives and Neither/Both of them before visiting the Washington National Cathedral.
Washington, DC is a city that has been witness of hundreds of historical past events, lights and shadows of the American history, a city that resume the worst ghosts and demons from the past, lives an intense present and draw the future of millions of people around the world.
The Beans arriving to the White House
It has been a day of incredible surprises because after Yasmina's story, the family has known the last news about the Federal shutdown that affects the most part of places and sights that they wanted to visit.
They don't understand this decision that puts in danger thousands of employments and changes the normal life of the most part of the Federal institutions like museums, monuments or national parks.
This is the main reason because they have visited the White House to try to talk with their inhabitants and try to arrive to a deal to avoid this uncomfortable situation. As you know, all things that happen in the White House are top secret and nobody has access to them but, in that case, some people assure that they have heard an old female voice asking aloud what the hell was happening there and reclaiming her rights to visit the most important and historical places. Other people assure that they had heard sentences like "Do you want to make America great again? Sure? Then, end with the shutdown, pay your workers and open the public buildings now".
Tomorrow, the family is visiting some old Grandma's friends, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, because they need their help to try to solve the mystery of the sinking in Liberty Island, a real X-File. They're a little afraid because they are sure that a ghost rescued them. All of them heard the same song while they were swimming, Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, but as you know, this is impossible because ghosts don't exist, do they?
Suzanne Nadine Vega (born July 11, 1959) is an American singer-songwriter and record producer, best known for her eclectic folk-inspired music.
Two of Vega's songs reached the Top 10 of various international chart listings: Luka and Tom's Diner. The latter was originally an a cappella version on Vega's album, which was then remade in 1990 as a dance track produced by the British dance production team DNA, and was the song used as a test during the creation of the MP3 format.
Vega has released nine studio albums to date, the latest of which is Lover, Beloved: Songs from an Evening with Carson McCullers, released in 2016.
Suzanne Vega was born in Santa Monica, California. Her mother, Pat Vega, née Schumacher, is a computer systems analyst of German-Swedish heritage. Her father, Richard Peck, is of Scottish-English-Irish origin. They divorced soon after her birth. Her stepfather, Edgardo Vega Yunqué, also known as Ed Vega, was a writer and teacher from Puerto Rico.
Suzanne Vega in Barcelona (2008)
When Vega was two and a half, her family moved to New York City. She grew up in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side. She was not aware of having a different biological father until she was nine years old. They met for the first time in her late 20s and remain in contact.
She attended the High School of Performing Arts where she studied modern dance and graduated in 1977. Suzanne discovered the music of Laura Nyro who was a huge influence on her.
At the age of nine she began to write poetry. She was encouraged to do so by her stepfather. It took her 3 years to write her first song, Brother Mine, it was ready at the age of 14. It was first published on Close-Up Vol. 4, Songs of Family, along with her other early song, The Silver Lady.
Vega hasn't learned to read musical notes, she sees the melody as a shape and chords as colors. She focuses on lyrics and melodic ideas, for advanced features, like intros or bridges, she relies on other artists she works with. Most of her albums, except the first one, was made in such cooperation. She claims that 80% of the songs she started writing get finished.
The most important artistic influence on her work comes from Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Some other important artists for her are Paul Simon and Laura Nyro.
I loved the atmosphere of the dance studios, the wooden floors, the big mirrors, everyone dressed in pink or black tights, the musicians accompanying us, and the feeling of ritual the classes had.
Paula Bond is with the family again after spending some days in the Empire State with King Kong, her new friend from Skull Island.
After talking about sugar and its benefits in our lives, remembering Sir Arthur Conan Doyleand his famous character Sherlock Holmes, the family are learning how to use their twitter accounts.
Jaume Bond and his new friend
After that, The Grandma is talking about Romanesque Art in the exile aroundthe world because of the war and she is explaining a story about Roman superstitions.
Finally, Jaume Bond is explaining his experience face to face with a hurt bird which reborn after phoning to emergency services and The Grandma is remembering some beautiful songs of Leonard Cohenand Barbara.
Tomorrow, the family is meeting Fox Mulder and Dana Scully in the FBI Headquarters. Together, they're going to investigate voodoo practices and how to prevent them.
May you need some needles...
No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.
