Carsongs

   There are songs I sing that I only sing in the car. I spend a lot of time in my car and, for much of that time, am alone. This gives me the perfect opportunity to break into song.
   I have been singing essentially the same songs for years now. They are songs that, for a lack of a better term, have always struck a chord with me. Many are songs from old albums my parents used to play. A couple of them are folk songs from a live Harry Belafonte album, "Hene ma tov" and "La Bamba". Ironically, one is an Israeli song and the other has whole sections in Spanish, the translations of which I have never actually known but they are both melodic and beautiful and I am happy to sing them anyway.

   Harry Chapin plays a prominent part in my car songbook. "Cats in the Cradle" and "Taxi" (yes, the whole thing--minus the high part) get a lot of play. I also do a specialty version of "Taxi" in high speed, it takes only about a minute and 45 seconds and is good for a giggle, although only one other human has ever heard it and he is with the angels as we speak.
   Various songs from the original album version of "Jesus Christ, Superstar" get frequent airplay, my favourite is "Hosanna" (I sound like Jesus and I sound like Caiphas...)
   There are several songs I like to think of as perfect songs. Their perfection has something to do with their message, their poetry and their symmetry. Included in this particular list of car songs is Leonard Cohen's "Sisters of Mercy", Traffic's "John Barleycorn", Paul Simon's "Duncan" and Paul Stookey's "The Wedding Song (There is Love)".
   Lastly, there are my songs, songs I've made up, some serious, some pretty light-hearted and some downright silly. Some I wrote when I was a teenager and then on into my early twenties, mostly about girls and work and many of them, to coin a phrase, angst-driven. After I discovered that my Mum's remains were interred in common ground at Mt. Pleasant cemetery, I ended up writing a song called "The Buried-In-Common-Ground Blues". I wrote this simply while driving around, without having to put a lot of deep thought into it. Generally, this is when the best songs happen. At the other end of the spectrum, I wrote a song about a guy whose girlfriend won't have sex with him because, as it turns out, she's in love with a tennis player. To make matters even worse for the young man, the tennis player turns out to be Martina Navratilova. Probably the crowning achievement of my car songwriting career has been a take-off on Puccini's great aria from "Turandot"--Nessun Dorma. In my version, the title becomes "I Knew Norma".

   Unfortunately, no one has heard or will likely ever hear any of these self-written car songs. The glory of singing in the car is the anonymity and relative privacy. I do tend to turn down the volume a touch at stoplights and in slow-moving traffic. Once I'm back up to speed, though, all bets are off.
   So if you see me in traffic someday and it looks like I'm talking to a passenger in a very exaggerated and demonstrative sort of way and you look and you notice that there is no passenger...well, that's just me and my car songs!