I heard about this musical challenge from a fellow blogger so I thought I’d give it a try. Basically, you just have to respond to a weekly themed prompt and share the lyrics of an appropriate song (and the song itself!). Sounds like a bit of a laugh for a Sunday evening….

This week’s theme is, cheerily enough, “Pain”, and the lyrics that first came to mind were this neat little verse:

When you got a headache
An you try to soothe the pain
Go right back to sleep
And you’ll feel all right again
When ya got a backache
Little rubbin’ will see you through
When you got a heartache
There ain’t nothin’ you can do

That’s the start of “Ain’t nothing you can do”, first song on one of my favourite albums – “It’s too late to stop now” by Van Morrison. Elsewhere on my site you’ll see that I’m a bit of a fan of Van the Man and there’s a risk that my participation in this challenge could just end up with me posting a series of his songs. Anyway, for the moment, I can only recommend both this song and the whole live double album that follows it. Difficult to say what style of music this is – it seems to embrace a whole load of styles. Anyway, it’s not only me that likes it – the critics rave about it as one of the “best live albums of the 70s” etc etc…

One nice thing about giving this some thought is that it’s prompted me to find out a bit more about the song. I thought it sounded like a cover and in fact the original version was from 9 years earlier (1964) by Bobby Bland (full lyrics here; songwriters Don Robey/Joe Scott.) Turns out this original Soul version is also well worth a listen:

Van was clearly partial to covering Bobby Bland songs – search also for “Turn on your lovelight” (which bears a clear resemblance to the later, and well-known, “Everybody needs somebody to love” by the Blues Brothers).

OK, better wrap up here before I spend the whole night farting about on youtube. Hope you like these first choices.