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Showing posts with label Free to Be You and Me. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Free to Be You and Me. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

#405: the New Seekers, "Free to Be You and Me" (1972)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mU8gDKN5sE

If "Free to Be You and Me" were a brand new folk song, I have no idea what I would think of it. Maybe I'd be a fan. It's jolly and bops along at a pleasant pace; the group vocal harmonies, male and female and young-sounding, are nicely done; the banjo is Kermit-esque, and judging by the fact that I no longer own my Bela Fleck & the Flecktones album, being extremely talented at the banjo is a much less effective path to my heart than playing it like you're a green felt puppet.

The lyrics are ... uncomplicated. "There's a land that I see/ where the children are free/ and I say it ain't far/ to this land from where we are". Now, it's a children's song, but my kids have never shown much interest in children's music, so I'd probably fail to adjust much for that. It's also direct enough to be a national anthem, were it interested in anything as artificial as nations, but there are no national anthems in my countdown. It could also strike me as hippie-dippy sloganeering, and I could start parodying it almost without noticing ("There's a shop that's very nice/ where the children are half-price....", perhaps, or modifying "Take my hand, come along/ Lend your voice to my song" into "Use the wi-fi on the street/ give a share to my tweet").