Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Remember His Song

“My Song” isn’t my favorite song from English poet and musician Labi Siffre, but it is the one that makes me the most intensely nostalgic for the 1970s. The instrumentation, the vaguely Burt Bacharach-ian quality of the melody, and the earnestness of the whole thing immediately reminds me of the generally pleasant if unremarkable music that seemed to surround my childhood. But it becomes especially powerful when we can hear Siffre performing it now that he’s in his 80s. The hint of defiance in the lyrics is stronger when you know that he survived some of the most tumultuous times to be a gay man. And the line “I know that as long as I live, I will sing my song for you,” no longer feels like the romanticism of a man in his 20s. Knowing that the men he dedicated his love songs to have now passed away, it becomes clear that he’s being true to his word. I get the impression that Siffre’s music keeps being re-discovered over and over again every five or ten years, as a new generation of…