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Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel (1932)
The opposite to loneliness, this week songs are all about seeking, finding or enjoying being solitary in a happy, meditative, creative, or restorative state from the practical to blissful
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A commemorative model of Apollo-Soyuz on 17th July 1975
To commemorate the Apollo-Soyuz space link up, exactly 50 years ago today, on 17th July 1975, let’s celebrate strange, unusual bonds of friendship in song lyrics and shake hands with the unexpected …
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Doubly great: John "Jabo" Starks and Clyde Stubblefield
Hit it! It’s a lyrical topic, where perhaps the singer might address, direct, encourage, or praise the band's drummer, any real or fictional player, or the beat, rhythm or instruments themselves
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How my living room does not look
With spring cleaning possibly on the to-do list, practical and creative decluttering, not merely in the house, but all kinds of editing out, paring back, chiselling, sifting, trimming, shaving, scaling or downsizing, all expressed in song. Check out some experts’ tidy tips too…
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Lounge lizard
We live much of our waking lives in them – working and socialising, swivelling to dining to reclining, sofas and couches, ornate thrones to humble stools, beanbags, pouffes, to the office, barber’s, dentist’s and beyond, but how do they sit up in song?
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The flurry of first light
Morning always comes, but how might you start it musically? This is a topic not about the morning and everything that goes with it, although those details may figure, but is one more about complementary mood, style, feeling and pace
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Forever falling upwards down MC Escher’s stairs
How to we capture or express it? Through love, art, death, heaven, hell or other forms? Particularly song. This week’s largely lyrical topic ponders on the forever, the permanent, the endless and goes to infinity and beyond …
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Arctic wolves in full song
Hunter or hunted, in a pack or working alone, in metaphor or myth, human connections from werewolf to dire wolf, this week they are all at the door, so it’s time to howl out your song suggestions referring magnificent canis lupus
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Greta Garbo - a singular inspiration for many a song
Welcome to the special Song Bar Singles Night, where, with the help of many special guests who chat freely on the subject, we seek songs on the ups and downs of the single state, from loneliness to blissful solitude, dating and even giving yourself a helping hand …
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The open road … all the way the vanishing point …
It’s the inspiration for so many album covers, not to mention songs, and also an idea of infinity we never quite reach. From literal or metaphorical and lyrical, this week we reach for that imagined line where land, or sea, meets sky
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The tide has brought in John Cooper Clarke …
Highs and lows to ebbs and flows, literal, littoral and metaphorical, specific locations, mudflats and estuaries, wildlife, mudlarking, shorelines and coasts, this week it’s all about the movement of water in and out, and what that is all about
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Elvis. Introduced a whole new language of hip …
Involuntary or practised, revealing or hidden, this week from waving to winking, leaning the lying, aggression and domination to love and tenderness, let’s look out for songs that express these gestures in titles or lyrics
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They get down and do it. Earth, Wind and Fire your inspiration …
You got it, get down on it, it goes on, maybe it’s a wonderland or perhaps there’s blame pinned on it. This week we’re seeking songs where in whatever genre, in lyrics, one or more of these words are spoken, shouted or sung
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Something to reflect on …
Lens me your ears! This week we take more than a passing glance at eyes in song lyrics, whether as metaphor, as objects of beauty, as windows to the soul, and especially in the mystery of how what they see differs from how they are seen
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Jimi Hendrix sandcastle. It was bound to appear here eventually
This week’s lyrical topic offers a broad, varied landscape of metaphor and colour, of passing time, of instability and mutability, of the solid and the fluid, of the barren and the beautiful. Let’s dig deep for some treasures …
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Carrying the ages, via The Simpsons. Insert any music you like …
This week we seek strange combinations from starkly different times – old songs covered on new instruments, new songs played on old instruments, traditional musicians playing with younger, or old styles mashed up with the new
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Spring bluebells quietly getting on with it
Tranquillity, calm and serenity, or concentration, slow stirring, unrest, plotting and revolution? There are all kinds of quiet out there, and this week it’s time to explore these as described or captured in song lyrics
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It’s dragon on a bit. But how will it end? Gratuitous picture that has nothing to do with music
Sex, love relationships, work, politics, and war, appearances all play apart in the game of life, and this week with a huge cast of talent coming to visit the Bar, we discuss and explore the art and topic of false or true in song lyrics
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Big-boned …
Skulls to skeletons, dry to bad, dinosaur to Shakespeare, dead or alive, let's dig deep in our collections and unearth musical examples, inspired here by range of references from Hamlet to Ray Harryhausen
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Arrival of aliens. The human bit? That's where we might have a problem, Houston.
Don't take this the wrong way. Historic shambles to the pitfalls of predictive text, friends falling out to argumentative relationships, this week it's all about songs where language and more is a barrier
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