A while back I wrote a post, listing ten of my favourite "Love Songs". The list is, of course, skewed as it is impossible for me to list only ten songs and also because my favourite songs oscillate depending on my mood.
It is no secret. I'm a Sheryl Crow fan. It started while I was still in high school. Her cover of "Leaving Las Vegas" (from Tuesday Night Music Club) would sometimes play on television and I'd be enthralled. But it wasn't until I went to university that a good friend of mine bought her second album and shared it with me. Her second album is still my favourite with such great songs as "Every Day is a Winding Road", "Maybe Angels", "A Change Would Do You Good", "If It Makes You Happy", "Hard to Make a Stand" and not to forget "Love Is a Good Thing" with her doing that horrifically sexy scream somewhere in the middle of the song that sends endorphins through my body every time I hear it.
At this moment I'm preparing for a class that I'll be teaching this coming semester. The class is called "Special Topics in English: Poetry in Music". It is an elective class and it is the first time that it will be taught. I'm solely responsible for the syllabus and decided to cover the history of contemporary music starting with the hymns, gospels and spirituals, and working my way up through blues and jazz all the way to contemporary R&B and Hip-Hop; all the time focussing on the lyrics (as these are the "poetry" in the music).
Along the way we cover Country music and it's variants, such as blue grass, folk rock and country rock. To get back to Sheryl Crow; although she is a rock artist, there is a very clear country influence in her music that qualifies her as a "cross over" artist. This means that her music is sometimes marketed in more than one genre; i.e. rock and folk rock / country rock. Another cross over artist is Kid Rock, a rapper that also blends blues rock and country music into his oeuvre. And somewhere in between Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock got together to sing the beautiful love ballad below. It was written by Kid Rock; the title is "Picture".
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