“Let’s Do It,” the Ballad of Barry and Freda

Some of my best friends in the world live outside of the US, and after two trips to Northern Ireland, I must have caught some kind of UK bug because most all the shows we watch and a number of musicians we like all come from overseas. Britbox could probably charge us double for our streaming service, but don’t tell them that, please.

Some of my favorite comedians are from somewhere in the British Isles as well (we’ll talk about the Nordic countries another time). The first time I heard Victoria Wood was in the early 2000’s, and I was sad to hear of her passing from cancer in 2016.

While American’s can get lost in some of the language differences between US and British lingo (boot for trunk, crisps for chips, chips for fries), today’s song is pretty easy to follow. If you need any help at all, the lyrics at the Genius website have some helpful notes you can check out by clicking here.

We had a lot of serious and heavy stuff hitting our eardrums this week with Valentine’s love songs, both happy and sad, so I wanted to bring a . . . let’s call it a change of pace to wrap up the week. Let’s not take this whole love song thing too seriously. A simple, older couple in northern England face the question of what to do with their evening. Freda has ideas, while Barry is looking for an escape plan.

In Your Love by Tyler Childers

Love Songs by People Named Tyler, Part Four

Taylor Swift not only crashed the Super Bowl, she recently crashed Tyler Childers’ table at the Grammy’s. Apparently, by the time she arrived, all the numbers had been removed from the tables and people didn’t know where to sit. She was nominated for six Grammy’s and walked away with two that night, and though Tyler was not a winner, he did have the honor of being nominated five times this year.

While the focus has been on Swift and Kelce at the Super Bowl this week, the love story I want to tell is in this video that Tyler Childers released six months ago for his song “In Your Love.” Childers has gained a reputation in country music for not only pushing back against “sh*tty country music,” but also for standing up against racism and discrimination of all sorts. In this case, Childers decided he wanted the music video to highlight a rural love story that isn’t usually represented in the genre.

In August, the Rolling Stone talked to author Silas House, who wrote the storyline for the video:

“He said he would like to have it be a gay love story, mainly because his first cousin who’s like a brother to him is gay, and he wanted him to see himself in a country music video,” House tells Rolling Stone. “When he said that, I just thought, ‘So many other people have never seen themselves in a country music video. This would be pretty incredible, to have that kind of representation.’”

You may recognize actor Tyler Haynes from TV shows like Arrow and Teen Wolf, and you may know James Scully from the recent series You. Scully and Haynes play the lead parts in the music video, and I have to say I was really moved when my son Micah sent this to me this past fall.

Whatever your story is, loving another or, as my mother preached to me, learning to love yourself, I hope you have a beautiful Valentine’s Day, and I hope you enjoy the music with Tyler Childers and the Food Stamps. If you do, please consider liking and sharing this. I’d love to be able to tell my brother that he’s got even more viewers, listeners, and readers on Jeff’s Song of the Day.

Love Shack

When I was in my early college days, in my early twenties, Virginia moved with me to the state of Indiana. One of our best friends there was a young lady named Rhonda, and she had a car that was “as big as a whale.” Not a Chrysler as in today’s song, but a big Buick with a flat roof, much like the one in the picture here. I don’t know if she had a name. Do you name your cars? I had Casper, the Friendly Car (white Ford Focus I bought on Halloween), Dolly Dodge, Lizzy LeBaron. Well, if Rhonda’s Buick had had a name, it would have been Bertha.

One day my car, Lizzy was in the garage, so Rhonda and Virginia brought Bertha across town to pick me up at the radio station where I was working at the time, and on the way home we picked up an extra large pizza from our favorite pizza place. Wouldn’t you know that in our goofing around and (probably) singing, we drove the whole four miles, without ever realizing, until we arrived back in front of our house, that the giant pizza box was still on the roof of the car.

Now, there’s something to be said about aerodynamics, and stability, and balance. I wouldn’t know what those things to say are, but if you want a good time that won’t make you lose your pizza, I recommend a big, flat-roofed old classic car, like Bertha.

I guess we’re going to continue where we started on Saturday with a few more days of 80’s warm-weather music to fight off the winter blahs. And yes, we definitely sang this song in that car. I recommend singing “Tin Roof! . . . Rust” as loudly as you can. It will freak everyone at work out and they’ll leave you alone. From 1989 here are the B-52s with “Love Shack.”