Still a Week Ahead!

Completed: "A Groovy Kind of Love"

What is a groovy kind of love? Have you ever had it? Sunday, I began planning my work for the coming weeks, loading up my MP3 player with stuff to listen to. I'm getting over a bout of illness and this was my first day upright since last Thursday, but a new arrangement fell in my lap before the day was through. Sometimes you just see something all at once. So I stay ahead of the curve and I'm still entitled to a week off. I might need it!

A Groovy Kind of Love was written by Toni Wine and Carole Bayer Sager. The delightful melody is based heavily on the Rondo movement of Sonatina in G major, op. 36 no. 5 by classical composer, Muzio Clementi, which means it's got "class". The pop song was composed in all of 20 minutes, although Mr. Clementi probably labored a bit longer on his bit of work. Still, sometimes great stuff emerges all at once. In 1965, this song rocked the US as part of the British Invasion when it reached #2 on the pop charts in a cover by The Mindbenders. A cover by Phil Collins took it to #1 in 1988. It's about the joys of physical love:

"When you're close to me, I can feel your heart beat,

I can hear you breath-ing in my ear."

Bubble-gum Pop and the Joys of Love

On the surface, the song is about young love. The Mindbenders' 1965 cover was true bubble-gum pop from the era of Peace and Love, but the Phil Collins version displays a stunning reverence for this tender and powerful expression, taking the song to another level entirely. If you've known a connection that fulfilled completely, you know it's definitely a lot more than "groovy". Phil Collins' cover definitely achieves success taking the song to a higher level.

What can a song like this do in performance? It has the potential to awaken some very powerful emotions. Allow me to digress for a moment.

Touching the Fire

A couple of years ago, we performed another song about love (and loss) at one of our gigs. A woman came up to me afterward telling me it was terrible and we should never have sung it. The song had no foul language, the performance had gone pretty well so I was pretty curious why she was so upset. She confided that it reminded her of her lost husband and it had awakened her pain. While she thought our singing this song was unforgivable, it's really one of the reasons we perform songs with emotional content. We touch memories so folks reconnect with their memories and with profound love. The process refreshes us all in ways impossible to fathom. This is hot stuff!

We're looking forward to sharing "A Groovy Kind of Love" with our audiences. Here's a snippet where you see I have the background patter echoing a text from an earlier verse. It's a mechanism I've been exploring lately layering several texts to more deeply underscore the emotional content: