Bambi's Musical Musings

Overview I’ve had a strong connection with plenty of songs that are sung in a language I can’t understand. The singer’s voice or the instrumentals stir something in me that doesn’t have to be understood to be felt. But there’s a song which is completely sung in English that fits this bill, as well.   Pearl Jam’s “Yellow Ledbetter” is sung by lead singer Eddie Vedder in such an slurred way that it would be easy to understand if the listener thought it was complete gibberish, even if the gibberish stirs emotion in them. Someone in the YouTube comments for the video said that it was “like opera; you don’t have to understand the words to feel the emotion”, and I couldn’t agree more. Lyrics Though it’s easy to find the lyrics online , I think it’s best to listen to the song without any knowledge of its meaning. It’s clear from Vedder’s gritty and pained voice that “Yellow Ledbetter” is an emotional and soulful song. I think it’s more enjoyable to listen and form your own opinion of its...

As a child, I loved Sesame Street and that love extended to a spinoff movie called Follow That Bird . The plot is actually pretty interesting for a children’s movie, as it involves a well-meaning but misguided bird social worker who determines that Big Bird should live with his ‘own kind’, rather than the caring patchwork-style family of monsters, humans and Snuffleupagus that loves him. After Big Bird is rehomed with a family of feather-brained dodos, he makes the decision to leave in the dead of night to return to his home Sesame Street. But Big Bird is barely a kindergartener at just 6 years old and he’s trying to navigate the world on his own. Without the help of new friends he finds along the way, as well as his family looking for him when they learn he’s missing, he’d be completely lost! The first new face he meets is a truck driver hauling turkeys, played by the country singer Waylon Jennings. Jennings recognizes him as ‘the bird on the run’ which makes me side eye him as an ad...