Tuesday, July 4, 2023

Monday Music Appreciation #11 -- down the rabbit hole with Petula Clark

This morning as I walked around my garden, a long lost song sprang into my head. Unsure of the lyrics, I put "Thank you for every tree and flower song" into my browser, and proceeded down an internet rabbit hole, learning about one Petula Sally Olwen Clark, a famous international singer who is now 90 years old somewhere in Switzerland, and who has been singing publicly since she was 7. Petula has had quite a life (it takes a while to read the wikipedia link above), has befriended a lot of interesting people,  and was still performing as recently as January of this year in honour of Stephen Sondheim, God bless her.

Given that my 2023 word of the year is "Appreciation," and we've just passed the year's halfway point, it seems fitting to post Petula's "Thank you" song today. It came out the year before I was born, is sung in five different keys, and has lyrics that can seem rather trite to our more sophisticated sensibilities. 

But should that be the case? 

In a world where so much seems to be going wrong, our so-called sophistication can make it a challenge to remember to say Thank you, but it can't be said (or sung) often enough. 

Thank you, Petula, and Thank you, God.

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