Bridge Over Troubled Waters

In honour of its fiftieth anniversary, I was just listening to Bridge Over Troubled Waters, a true emotional tour-de-force, full of beauty, sadness, rejoicing, yearning, and love.

By far, my favourite songs on the album are the title number and "The Boxer." Both truly evocative, written with narrators reaching from a place of weakness, trying to find a friendly hand.

All for Leyna

“All for Leyna”

Billy Joel (Glass Houses)

This song, in the words of a Vulture review of Joel’s entire catalogue, is a “pretty intense, pretty good stalker song. Electric and well sung, especially on the bridge.” While I could not agree more about the musicality and hook, I disagree about the bit about it being a “stalker song”. 

The song, at its core, is about the narrator’s infatuation with a woman with whom he had a one-night stand. In this case, the narrator is a high-school kid and Leyna is likely one of his first sexual relationships. 

In all likelihood, this is meant to invoke Joel’s hopeless romantic trope which, while I can understand this, makes little sense to me. Rather, to my mind, it is an indictment of an entire culture of “meaningless” flings and the fallout when one party develops romantic attractions to someone they were never intended to seriously entangle with. As such, the angst of Joel’s narrator should be better understood through a lens of infatuation, rather than love, in my opinion.

Hello World

Hi, this is blog will eventually be populated by my thoughts on assorted topics, ranging from Judaism, to music, to… something else. I don't intend to make it that cohesive, but if you have ideas, please reach out to me.

The View from No-Man's Land; 105 Years Later

105 years ago today, the worst carnage Europe had seen in a hundred years took a brief respite. Prompted by spontaneous actions and fortuitous circumstances, the guns fell silent across the Western Front. Throughout the cratered landscape, men emerged from the trenches and mingled in the no-man's-land which had, not so many hours before, been a killing ground. They shared smokes, keepsakes, addresses, and humanity. They buried their dead and supported the living; prayed, ate, sang, and worked together for a brief moment which nonetheless echoes down through the ages, though all of their voices have gone silent.

For one brief moment, shared experience ceased to be a burden and a wedge and became brotherhood.