Lyrics

Thursday

Christopher Bray

As normal as blueberry pie: Oscar Hammerstein II, through his letters

From our UK edition

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Picasso or Matisse? Lennon or McCartney? Impossible to call? No such quandary with Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein. There are those that laugh at the city smarts of the words Larry Hart wrote with Richard Rodgers. And there are those that weep at Oscar Hammerstein’s home-on-the-range cornpone lyrics. But there is nobody that loves them both. Over to the pros then: while the likes of Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett have all given us their takes on Rodgers and Hart, nobody but Bryn Terfel has seen fit to make a Rodgers and Hammerstein CD. Not that Hammerstein would have worried.

Monday

D.J. Taylor

Is Lou Reed a rock ’n’ roll Dostoevsky?

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. A journalist friend was once ordered to interview Lou Reed in his hotel room. The meeting was not a success. Reed retreated to the closet bearing a copy of the poems of Delmore Schwartz and refused to come out until his guest had paid cash for it, saying, ‘Delmore needs the money.’ Reminded that the author of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities had died some years before, Reed observed, ‘Well, his family needs the money.’ $5.99 changed hands and the conversation continued.

lou reed