A to Z

In a prior posting I wrote about playing my iPod playlist in the bathroom alphabetically by song title. I really don't know how many songs are on this iPod, but just a few days ago I got through the As to the last song 'Azure', a song sung by Emily Saxe, who years ago recorded a few albums and disappeared back into her law practice.

Many years ago I saw Emile Saxe perform in the Rose room at Lincoln Center, a room that dramatically overlooks Columbus Circle. Johnathan Schwartz introduced her.

Kids still learn their alphabet in elementary school. Mine looked like the photo above, with upper case and lower case letters of the alphabet in sculpted script circling the room over the blackboards. (Yes, they were blackboards. Slate, written on with chalk, and erased with felt erasures.)

Learning the alphabet was a good foundation, and alphabetizing was a good exercise. So when the song selection went from Az to Ba I was hardly surprised.

What did surprise me to no end was how many mornings it took to go from Ba, Baby titles to the next one, Bach. Yes, I've added some short classical pieces, probably ones that were background music to whatever I might have been watching and was taken with. You really can download nearly any title.

Prior to this endeavor I was wondering to myself what word is the most common word in any pop song ever written. I figured it was "baby" but had no means to quantify it.

I still have no way of telling you how many songs start with Baby in their title, but I'm here to tell you it took several days to plow through the Ba's and get to Bach. I've looked at my master iTunes list and counted 28! songs with Baby in the title.

The first one up is 'Babies Making Babies' by Miranda Lambert, closing out with 'Baby's Gonna Kick' by John Hiatt. There are only three selections that are Bach, before the list moved on to "Back at Sou- Chou Prison,' soundtrack from the movie 'The Spy Game.'

As the different artists unfold it sometimes strikes me how many of them are no longer with us. Just looking through the As I find that 43 artists are no longer recording due to no longer breathing. A few more are still alive, but no longer recoding, like Linda Ronstadt.

I've imagined that when someone was teaching a class at Columbia School of Journalism on obituary writing, they asked the class to practice writing their own. I have to say I've thought about some clever sentences that might appear in my own if written by someone whose tongue is firmly planted in their cheek, but I've never actually completed the exercise with dates, cause, achievements, and names for survivors.

But playing this playlist back in alphabetical order has gotten me to thinking of what could be a perfect lede.

"....passed away yesterday just before hearing songs in his bathroom start with U in their title..." No cause was given.

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