Naya Rivera - "If I Die Young"

It wouldn’t be 2020 if there weren’t a slew of unexplainable, regrettable, terrible events happening. The tragic loss of Naya Rivera is just another of these incredibly unthinkable events.

I don’t know why this loss strikes me so. I only watched Glee sporadically for a season or two, but in that time it was obvious that Naya was a star. She was luminous in a way that made others shine with her. She was so terribly young, it seems like such a waste of that incredible talent.

So today, with an unexplainably sad heart, I choose Naya Rivera’s cover of “If I Die Young” originally by The Band Perry, as my, keep trying for that brass ring, hold me close, cover me in flowers, song for a, we won’t give up on you, thank you for showing your color of the rainbow, one more small dream left floating on the breeze, Thursday.

Peggy Lee - "Nice Work If You Can Get It"

Norma Deloris Egstrom (May 26, 1920 – January 21, 2002), known professionally as Peggy Lee, was an American jazz and popular music singer, songwriter, composer, and actress, over a career spanning six decades. From her beginning as a vocalist on local radio to singing with Benny Goodman's big band, Lee created a sophisticated persona, writing music for films, acting, and recording conceptual record albums combining poetry and music.

Lee was born Norma Deloris Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota, on May 26, 1920, the seventh of the eight children of Selma Amelia (née Anderson) Egstrom and Marvin Olof Egstrom, a station agent for the Midland Continental Railroad. Her family and she were Lutherans. Her father was Swedish-American and her mother was Norwegian-American. After her mother died when Lee was four, her father married Minnie Schaumberg Wiese.

Lee first sang professionally over KOVC radio in Valley City, North Dakota. She later had her own series on a radio show sponsored by a local restaurant that paid her salary in food. Both during and after her high-school years, Lee sang for small sums on local radio stations.

Radio personality Ken Kennedy, of WDAY in Fargo (the most widely heard station in North Dakota), changed her name to Peggy Lee. Lee left home and traveled to Los Angeles at the age of 17.

She returned to North Dakota for a tonsillectomy, and was later noticed by hotel owner Frank Bering while working at the Doll House in Palm Springs, California. Here, she developed her trademark sultry purr, having decided to compete with the noisy crowd with subtlety rather than volume. Bering offered her a gig at the Buttery Room, a nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel East in Chicago. There, she was noticed by bandleader Benny Goodman. According to Lee, "Benny's then-fiancée, Lady Alice Duckworth, came into the Buttery, and she was very impressed. So the next evening, she brought Benny in, because they were looking for a replacement for Helen Forrest. And although I didn't know, I was it. He was looking at me strangely, I thought, but it was just his preoccupied way of looking. I thought that he didn't like me at first, but it just was that he was preoccupied with what he was hearing." She joined his band in 1941 and stayed for two years.

In 1942 Lee had her first number-one hit, "Somebody Else Is Taking My Place", followed in 1943 by "Why Don't You Do Right?", which sold more than one million copies and made her famous. She sang with Goodman's orchestra in two 1943 films, Stage Door Canteen and The Powers Girl.

In March 1943, Lee married Dave Barbour, a guitarist in Goodman's band. Lee said, "David joined Benny's band and there was a ruling that no one should fraternize with the girl singer. But I fell in love with David the first time I heard him play, and so I married him. Benny then fired David, so I quit, too. Benny and I made up, although David didn't play with him anymore. Benny stuck to his rule. I think that's not too bad a rule, but you can't help falling in love with somebody."

...when she left the band that spring [1943], her intention was to quit the footlights altogether and become Mrs. Barbour, fulltime housewife. It's to Mr. Barbour's credit that he refused to let his wife's singing and composing talent lay dormant for too long. "I fell in love with David Barbour," she recalled. "But 'Why Don't You Do Right' was such a giant hit that I kept getting offers and kept turning them down. And at that time it was a lot of money, but it really didn't matter to me at all. I was very happy. All I wanted was to have a family and cling to the children [daughter Nicki]. Well, they kept talking to me and finally David joined them and said 'You really have too much talent to stay at home and someday you might regret it.'"

She drifted back to songwriting and occasional recording sessions for the Capitol Records in 1947, for whom she recorded a long string of hits, many of them with lyrics and music by Lee and Barbour, including "I Don't Know Enough About You" in 1946 and then "Golden Earings" and "It's a Good Day" in 1947. Her recording of "Golden Earrings", the title song of a 1947 movie, was a hit throughout 1947-1948. With the release of the U.S, number-one-selling record of 1948, "Mañana", her "retirement" was over. In 1948, Lee's work was part of Capitol's library of electrical transcriptions for radio stations. An advertisement for Capitol Transcriptions in a trade magazine noted that the transcriptions included "special voice introductions by Peggy."

In 1948, Lee joined vocalists Perry Como and Jo Stafford as a host of the NBC Radio musical program The Chesterfield Supper Club. She was a regular on The Jimmy Durante Show and appeared frequently on Bing Crosby's radio shows during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Her relationship with Capitol spanned almost three decades aside from a brief detour (1952–1956) at Decca.For that label, she recorded Black Coffee and had hit singles such as "Lover" and "Mister Wonderful".

In 1957, she recorded a popular version of "Fever" by Little Willie John, written by Eddie Cooley and John Davenport, to which she added her uncopyrighted lyrics ("Romeo loved Juliet", "Captain Smith and Pocahontas").

Keep Trying, you’ll get it eventually.

So today, with a little hope and a lot of help, I choose Peggy Lee’s version of “Nice Work If You Can Get It” as my, keep trying, you’ll get there, two steps forward and one back, song for a, walk on, hold hands, help hearts, Tuesday.

Leonard Cohen - "Anthem"

Leonard Cohen, the legendary Canadian poet and singer, is well-known for a set of powerful lyrics from his song “Anthem,” off the 1992 album The Future. The message, of hope in darkness, is particularly striking for many in the wake of the US election:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

In dark times, poetry and music often become more important to us, providing the kind of transcendence we need to interpret painful events in a wider context. And Cohen wrote “Anthem,” one of his most beautiful and hopeful songs, in a tumultuous global period.

I hope we are strong enough as a nation to find our way out of, and survive our time within this darkness.

So today, with bells ringing all around me, I choose Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” as my, let the light in, remember there is light, and with lightness you can rise above the mire beneath you, song for a, twist like an acrobat through the snares around you, lift your eyes to the goal in front of you not the lack of net below you, remember that you are the product of every part of your story - the good and the bad - honor all of it and be the best version of you that there is.

In all honesty, I love Leonard as a writer and performer, but I think Rufus does an incredible job telling the story and evoking the emotion of this song, so that’s the version I chose.

Surfaces - "Sunday Best"

Surfaces is an American music group based out of College Station, Texas. It currently consists of vocalists/guitarists Forrest Frank and Colin Padalecki. Their music can be described as a blend of jazz, soul, pop, reggae, and calypso. They have released three studio albums. Their first independent studio album, Surf, was released in 2017.

Surfaces were formed in 2017. Colin Padalecki began creating music in high school with his cousin, singer Alexa Padalecki. Colin began to upload his music online while attending Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. Forrest Frank, a recent Baylor University graduate from Seattle, reached out to Colin after hearing his music and invited him to record music at his houseboat. They released their first album together under the moniker Surfaces in December 2017, entitled Surf. The album's third soundtrack, '24 / 7 / 365' has over 30 million streams on Spotify. After the release of Surf, Forrest Frank had released a project with producer Biskwiq under the alias Forrest. in July 2018. Notable tracks from the project include "Your Soul" and "Why Not Me" which have each amassed over 20 million combined streams on Spotify. The band released their second album Where the Light Is under the labels Caroline Records and ten thousand Projects in January 2019. The seventh track from the album, "Sunday Best", has become a top 40 hit in Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as the top 100 in Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland. The song has collected over 270 million streams on Spotify as of May 2020 and was believed to have gained its popularity from the social media video-sharing platform TikTok. It was released to radio in March 2020. A music video for the track was released on YouTube on July 11, 2019. Their third album Horizons was released on February 28, 2020. The music duo has released numerous singles as well, including "Keep It Gold", "Good Day", "Bloom", and "Lazy", all of which were included as tracks in their 2020 album Horizons. They also released two independent singles, "Palm Trees", and “Take Some Time” in 2019 which was not featured in any album. Other singles include "Be Alright" and "Falling" which were both released in 2017. The single "Low" was released in 2018. Surfaces made their debut on late-night television on March 2, 2020, performing "Sunday Best" on Late Night with Seth Meyers. In June 2020, the band released "Learn To Fly", a single in collaboration with the singer Elton John, produced and recorded online, during the COVID-19 pandemic, therefore respecting the social distancing. By June 12, 2020, it charted 20 on Billboard Hot 100.

Someday’s you just need a few extra good vibes, some extra giggles, and a handful of friendly smiles. If this song doesn’t get you grinning I don’t know what will.

So today, with a smile I can’t keep in, I choose Surfaces’ “Sunday Best” as my, put on your Sunday Clothes, shine up for yourself, listen to the happy beat of your heart, song for a, go on and dance, spinning wildly through the grass, like an inner-tube on the river in August, Friday.

Le Youth - "Me Without You (feat. Tay Beckham)"

Wes James, better known by his stage name Le Youth, is an American electronic musician, DJ, and producer. He is known for combining R&B with 90's house music and he had a monthly radio show called Le Youth's Friday Night House Party on Capital Xtra. James was raised in Ohio and currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

Le Youth gained attention on the internet when his track "Cool" featuring a sample from Cassie Ventura's Me & U rapidly received over 200,000 plays on SoundCloud in a short period of time. The single was picked up by Ultra Records and the Cool EP was released on July 2, 2013. The music video for the song was directed by Renata Raksha and was released on April 9, 2013. On July 22, 2013 "Cool" was selected as the Record of the Week on BBC Radio 1.

Sometimes, the only way to see yourself without something is let go of it.

So today, with a bittersweet smile, I choose Le Youth’s “Me Without You (feat. Tay Beckham)” as my, joy abounding, adventures unfolding, dreams for the growing, song for a, little miracles in each seed, sow the fields of hope, the only constant is change, Thursday.

June Christy - "Something Cool"

Though she was the epitome of the vocal cool movement of the 1950s, June Christy was a warm, chipper vocalist able to stretch out her impressive voice on bouncy swing tunes and set herself apart from other vocalists with her deceptively simple enunciation. From her time in Stan Kenton's Orchestra, she inherited a focus on brassy swing from arranger friends like Pete Rugolo. Rugolo would become a consistent companion far into her solo days, too, arranging most of her LPs and balancing her gymnastic vocal abilities with a series of attentive charts.

Born Shirley Luster in Springfield, IL, she began singing early on and appeared with a local society band during high school. She moved to Chicago in the early '40s, changed her name to Sharon Leslie, and sang with a group led by Boyd Raeburn. In 1945, after hearing that Anita O'Day had just left Stan Kenton's Orchestra, she auditioned for the role and got it early that year. Despite an early resemblance (physically and vocally) to O'Day, the singer -- renamed June Christy -- soon found her own style: a warm, chipper voice that stretched out beautifully and enlivened Kenton's crossover novelties ("Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy," the million-selling "Tampico") as well as the leader's intricately arranged standards ("How High the Moon"). As she became more and more popular within the Kenton band, arranger Pete Rugolo began writing charts with her style especially in mind. After the Kenton orchestra broke up in 1948, Christy worked the nightclub circuit for awhile before reuniting with Kenton for his 1950 Innovations in Modern Music Orchestra, a very modern 40-piece group that toured America. She had already debuted as a solo act the year before, recording for Capitol with a group led by her husband, Kenton tenor saxophonist Bob Cooper.

Christy's debut LP for Capitol, 1954's Something Cool, was recorded with Rugolo at the head of the orchestra. The album launched the vocal cool movement and hit the Top 20 album charts in America, as did a follow-up, The Misty Miss Christy. Her 1955 Duet LP paired her voice with Kenton's piano, while most of her Capitol LPs featured her with various Kenton personnel and Rugolo (or Bob Cooper) at the head of the orchestra. She reprised her earlier big-band days with 1959's June Christy Recalls Those Kenton Days, and recorded a raft of concept LPs before retiring in 1965. Christy returned to the studio only once, for 1977's Impromptu on Musicraft.

So today, letting the heat burn off, I choose June Christy’s “Something Cool” as my, ice clinking in the glass, water rippling with light, gentle breezes through jasmine vines, song for a, bring out the little joys, remember the life worth fighting for, days ahead just have to get better, Wednesday.

Reid Lee - "I'll Take Care of You"

Times are tough, and things break down, including people. Take the time to take care of each other. At the end of the day, each other is all we have.

So today, with grief and resilience hand in hand, I choose Reid Lee’s version of “I’ll Take Care of You (feat. Marley Otto)” as my, keep on keepin’ on, one step ahead of the other, circle your wagons, song for a, hold the hands that need helping, save the souls that need singing, help the hearts that need hearing, Monday.

Tycho - "Japan"

Sometimes you just need a MOOD to get you through the day. Today, instrumentalist, producer, and mood-maker Tycho is just the ticket.

So today, with a little more chill and a little less care, I choose Tycho’s “Japan” as my, me and my breakdown” , one more sun, none of it is worth your emotional well being, song for a, shape the world you want it to be, each hard little step is still moving in the right direction, sometimes you just don’t get to rest, Friday.