#greater stokes awareness: song spotlight

[greaterstokesawareness]

Stokes Song Spotlight: "A Wizard Every Day"

this second song spotlight is brought to you by the unhinged intensity that Stokes brings to the last verse of this song every single time he performs it ヽ (°◇° )ノ and how insane i feel when he quietly gets to the line "not me.."

"A Wizard Every Day" lyrics by Liz Suggs, music by Nikko Benson

Brian Stokes Mitchell sings this song nearly every time I've seen him perform live and when he intros it, he almost always talks about how it feels like the songwriters didn't know it but they wrote it for him. I just love the notion that even as a performer, a song can feel so right that it's almost meant for you personally. I also love songs by really young people about growing older, like my nerd brain eats those up: Paul Simon wrote "Leaves That Are Green" when he was 23, Jackson Browne wrote "These Days" when he was 16! I'm not saying they always get it right, but it's such an interesting perspective especially so because those artists are touring and performing those same songs into their 70s and 80s. Even though Stokes didn't write this song, he has a real childlike enthusiasm about him and what I can only describe as "nerd energy" in interviews and between songs at his shows that juxtaposes with the more dramatic songs that he's best known for. With Wizard he kind of gets to have that career journey from old-young person to professor emeritus of singing silly songs with your eyes closed. [guys, i love him.]

Now, full disclosure this is a musical theater song that is gonna come at you right out of the gate with all of the goofiness that the genre can sometimes entail. But the feelings get big fast, because the song starts out as something that sounds like a kids song, but quickly makes you feel those big, grown-up existential dread sunday-scaries. And it hits those what-is-being-grown-up-supposed-to-feel-like-levels of introspection that somehow no one ever tells you never actually go away as you get older.

"I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world." --Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Anyway, guys it's just a really cute song that uses the uninhibited nature of childhood imagination to get at the pretty dark underbelly of how we use the mundanity and routine of adulthood to avoid our very real adult feelings. And I am telling you when Stokes sings it with his big voice and his song-acting™ (complete with comedy-little-kid-voice and mid-song dialogue), you won't believe it, but you are gonna feel some feelings when he gets to the end of the song and sings it with his eyes shut tight and his arms open wide.

Links:

YouTube playlist of Stokes singing the song at various appearances including a few of my own videos from concerts (x)

Links for Liz Suggs (x) (x) and Nikko Benson (x)

[greaterstokesawareness]

Stokes Song Spotlight: "Lush Life"

This first song spotlight segment is brought to you by me learning that the word "distingué" exists and what it means (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧

Okay so hear me out, I was on the phone with my mom discussing normal everyday things like Frank Sinatra songs we've never heard before. My mom offered up the recommendation to listen to "Memories of You" from the new Sinatra Platinum release (x). While I was scrolling through this album on Spotify, I saw that "Lush Life" was on there.

"Lush Life" is a song that I had never heard before summer 2022 when I heard Brian Stokes Mitchell sing it at 54 Below. He told the story of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington and how Strayhorn was a black, out, gay man during the 1940s/50s jazz scene. He wrote the song when he was 16! A few days after the 54 Below show, I heard Stokes sing the song on the Boston Pops performance that aired on the radio, and then again two more times live at the Perelman Center (10/5/23) and Ridgefield Playhouse (10/29/23). Ted Firth features prominently on piano, playing a long mood-setting intro before Stokes comes in on vocals and then another solo in the middle of the song.

“where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life, to get the feel of life..”

It’s one of those hypnotic songs, that somehow feels both simple and complex at the same time. I am extremely biased (you know where you are) but I’ll type it out anyway, Stokes’s version is my favorite. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen him sing it live and up close and you can tell he loves it too, but I also think his version is the most mournful. And what I mean by that is he just gets across all the story potential in the song. Like he paints the scene of a guy in a rumpled suit, sitting at a corner table, a fedora pushed back to the crown of his head, hungover and nursing a drink too early in the morning —but in that sad, smoky almost Edward Hopper-like picture you can also see that he’ll be back later, decked out and ready for those brief moments of life that the night brings when the band is playing and everything is right. I know I watch too many old movies it’s true. I guess what I’m trying to say is Stokes makes it cinematic ‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾ My next favorite version is by Sarah Vaughan.

Anywayyyy, I’m not gonna lie I thought the lyrics were “distant gay traces” but they are actually “distingué traces.” I’ve never heard that word before and I had to look it up, it means having a distinguished manner or appearance and it makes the song so much better. It also gave me the idea for doing these song spotlights because I love learning and sharing my dumb nerd research. So please enjoy the links below for more info about Billy Strayhorn and then pop your headphones on and give this song a listen in all its many forms. And here’s hoping that it makes its way onto a Stokes album someday ✨

[side note: looking up stuff about this song also helped me to learn that the aforementioned Ted Firth has an album titled Lush Life with Tony Desare and one of the tracks is, you guessed it, Lush Life!] (x) (x)

Links:

versions of Lush Life by Stokes (x)

playlist with other versions of Lush Life (x) (x)

the lyrics (x)

an NPR interview from 2007 in support of PBS documentary about Strayhorn (x)

Link to Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn by David Hadju on amazon (x)

[greaterstokesawareness]

Stokes Song Spotlight: “This Nearly Was Mine”

this third song spotlight is brought to you by a teenage Lindsey Buckingham obsession and a lifelong curiosity about the everything of it all (✦ ‿ ✦)

I spend a ton of time just coming across a song I really like and finding every single version of it and just like studying for however long I feel like it. This is how I carried the song "This Nearly Was Mine" in my soul for years and this is how I discovered Brian Stokes Mitchell. I first heard "This Nearly Was Mine" in the year of our lord Fleetwood Mac reunion 1997, I was 13 years old and I thought Lindsey Buckingham was just the coolest, weirdest guitar player and performer ever. He was out there on MTV just shaking his entire upper body to get the right vibration of the song. It was the kind of performance that gets you to devote your entire remaining existence to an artist, and that's what I started to do and how I found the masterpiece that is his 1992 Out of the Cradle album. The whole thing is no skips for me and it ends with an instrumental version of "This Nearly Was Mine" that runs into the last track "Say We'll Meet Again" which is really dreamlike and these two tracks are inseparable in my mind; when I think of one I think of the other to this day.

A few years later when I got around to studying movie musicals (just in a nerdy way and not like officially, wait can you do that officially I should really look into that) and I finally watched South Pacific, I heard "This Nearly Was Mine" again and just lost it, I knew this song. It's a really funny feeling that I chase constantly, to find references to things I love in other things I love. Anyway, that's the first time I ever heard the words to it and I fell in love some more. And I don't even know how to explain why I love it, it's not like it's some autobiographical story or that I particularly identify with lost love or anything like that, it just hits me in the center of my chest every time I hear it.

“This Nearly Was Mine” is the 11 o’clock number from the 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific. There’s also a grand-scale 1958 movie musical version. Don’t get me started on movie musicals and their weird tendency to cast dramatic actors and then dub their singing voices. I have thoughts. The song is performed by the male lead Emile de Becque in a climactic moment of sadness and desperation. He eventually signs up for a suicide mission because his love has rejected him (Emile, sir, you still have two children, respectfully wtf).

My nerdy journey that led me to discover Stokes’s version one dark February in the middle of Covid lockdown times goes like this: Christopher Plummer died so I rewatched The Sound of Music for like a week straight, then because I was enjoying Bill Lee’s voice (dubbed for Plummer) I rewatched South Pacific (he dubs John Kerr’s voice), [also Rossano Brazzi you are very pretty, but lip-syncing is not your strong suit] then the nerd journey took me to a YouTube search of all the performances of “This Nearly Was Mine” Philip Quast you are a star ⭐️ And that’s how I found Brian Stokes Mitchell singing the song and the rest is nerd history.

The other wonderful thing about Stokes singing this particular song is that when he sings it in concert he turns off his microphone and creeps to the edge of the stage to sing it out to the last row like they used to do before the technology for personal microphones became a thing in theater. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Stokes sing this song three times and all three of those times I was in the front row. And I swear to you with all the might of my nerdy heart and soul it is one of the most special experiences of all time every time ♥️

Links:

Stokes performance of the song at the Carnegie Hall South Pacific concert, 2006 (x)

My video of Stokes singing the song at 54 Below, 2022 (x)

Song facts, playlists, and lyrics from the Rodgers and Hammerstein official site (x)

Lindsey Buckingham’s instrumental version from Out of the Cradle, 1992 (x) (x) and a live version of “TNWM” paired with the mournful “Street of Dreams” from the same album (x)