When I first started this Sharing Music I Like project, my intent was to share songs that I've either newly discovered, or songs that were generally obscure.
Now that I'm a few years into this project, however, I'd like to pivot to sharing songs that I've loved for a long time, including songs that are not so obscure.
Which I guess raises the question: how obscure is A Change Is Gonna Come? I mean, on the one hand, it's one of the most beloved soul songs from the 1960s. On the other hand, it never gets any radio play.
I grew up on oldies stations in the 1980s and 1990s, and I never heard this played on the radio. So my take is that unless you are particularly into old soul music, you might never discover this song. And if so, hopefully this blog post will help you discover this wonderful song.
But what's your take on it, dear reader? Have you heard this song before? How did you discover it? Did you ever hear it on the radio? Leave a comment and let me know.
And does anyone know why this song is never on the radio?
The first time I remember hearing this song, or at least noticing it, was in 2001 when I was re-watching Malcolm Xin Japan.
For whatever reason, Malcolm X is a movie that took me a few times to really appreciate. The first couple times I watched it, I felt a bit exhausted by the long run time of the movie. It's a movie you really have to be in the right mood to appreciate, because the pacing of the movie is slow. But the third time I watched it, I was settling into the slow pacing of the movie, and I began to appreciate just how powerful the movie was.
Now, if you've seen the movie, you know that at the end of the film, the movie essentially just stops so that A Change Is Gonna Come can play. It's the kind of pacing decision that exasperated me the first couple times I saw the movie, but when I re-watched it the 3rd time, I was able to appreciate it. And I noticed what a beautiful song it was.
This was back in 2001, when the Internet was still in its infancy, so it took me some time to actually track down what the name and singer were for this song. There was no Wikipedia to go to, no Youtube to search, and no reddit to ask.
I bought the soundtrack to Malcolm X (which I was actually able to find in a CD store in Japan) solely to get a copy of that song, and then was disappointed when that song wasn't on the soundtrack.
[Note: The Wikipedia article for Malcolm X (soundtrack) lists A Change Is Gonna Come as track 14 on the soundtrack, but it was definitely not on the Malcolm X soundtrack I bought in 2001. Perhaps there were different versions of the soundtrack released? I also don't know why A Change Is Gonna Come wouldn't be included, but perhaps it was a rights issue?]
Anyway, after several Internet searches, I did figure out that name and artist of the song from the end of Malcolm X, and then was able to buy a copy of Sam Cooke's greatest hits in Japan. Then, once I had finally tracked this song down, for several years afterwards, I became a big evangelist for this song.
I shared it with my old Calvin friend Brett, and my JET friend Ryan (neither of them had ever heard this song before, both of them loved it immediately.)
I used this song in my English classes in Japan, and have gone on to use it in my classes in Cambodia and Vietnam. See:
This is a reread. I originally read it in high school. But as this is my first time reviewing it on this blog, according to my new rules, I'm doing this as a video only review.
[Note: This is another video where I got cut off by the 30 minute time limit on my camera. There's a lot more that I could have said about this book, but I ran out of time.]
I've decided to subsume my Sharing Music I Like Index into a more general Music Reviews Index. There are a couple reasons for this:
1) Labelling these posts as "reviews" helps fit the current theme of this blog, and allows me to list these posts as one of my Reviews Indexes.
2) It also allows me to include my posts about songs or albums that were a bit more on the critical side--e.g. here, here and here.
My other review projects are comprehensive (e.g. every single book I read or movie I watch has to be reviewed). But in this case, obviously I'm not going to attempt to review every single song I hear. I'll just post about music as I feel like it.
In one episode of the TELFology podcast (I forget which exact episode) one of the TEFLologists remarks that one of the dirty little secrets of the industry is that many English teachers are very poor language learners themselves.
Alas, c'est moi, mes amis. Despite the fact that I've studied applied linguistics and second language acquisition, and have been working for the past 24 years as a language teacher, I've always been embarrased by my own poor track record with language learning. (*1)
If I were in any other profession, I would probably just give up and find another hobby. But I've decided that for as long as I'm a language teacher, I should also be a language learner.
When I was living in Vietnam, I focused all my energies on learning Vietnamese (*2). I at times flirted with trying to study other languages at the same time--like I mentioned here and here--but in the end decided that living in Vietnam was the perfect time to focus all my energy on learning Vietnamese. If I ever left Vietnam, I told myself, then I would go back and try to consolidate all the languages I'd studied.
In addition to Vietnamese, my other languages are:
* Latin--which I studied for 3 years in high school, and 2 semesters in college, and
* Japanese--I lived in Japan for 8 years, and during that time studied Japanese both independently and through organized classes. (*3) , (*4)
My initial idea was to just concentrate on Vietnamese, Japanese and Latin. (Three languages should be enough to keep anyone busy.) But after some thought, I eventually decided to add one more language to the mix--I'm going to try to learn some Spanish as well. (*5) As long as I'm working in ESL in the United States, it's probably going to be useful to know some Spanish.
So, 4 languages now: Vietnamese, Japanese, Latin and Spanish.
So, my goal is to come up with a system where I can study each language a little bit each day, but not have it take over all my free time.
Duolingo is the obvious choice, since this is exactly what duolingo was designed for. And I have already started studying all 4 languages on duolingo--my target is at least one lesson a day for each of these languages.
However, as I've discovered, while duolingo is very convenient, it is not by itself sufficient to learn a language.
For Japanese, I'm only using Duolingo. Japanese is the one language that I feel confident enough in that I don't need any extra resources. Everything I've come across in the Duolingo course so far has been stuff I already learned. (*6) Maybe this will change when I work my way up into the more advanced levels of the Japanese Duolingo course, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
So that's my list of resources. Now, how to make this all manageable so that it doesn't take over my whole life?
I've been keeping to this system the past couple months, and I usually manage to keep my language study time down to 40-60 minutes a day. Which I think is reasonable. I mean, I still grudge the time somewhat, because this is time that comes out of my reading time, and consequently means I won't get through as many reading projects this year. But, as I said at the top of the post, I believe it's important for someone in my profession to dedicate some time to language learning. So here we are.
This is also the minimum for each day. If I have extra time, and I feel like it, I may sometimes study a bit more. But this is what I force myself to do as a minimum.
Once again, I have my excuses. When I first arrived in Vietnam, I was focused on studying for the Delta, and viewed studying Vietnamese as a secondary priority. After I got married to a Vietnamese woman I realized I would always be connected to Vietnamese, and that I should prioritize studying it. But then, by that point we were having kids, and it was difficult for me to take Vietnamese language classes in the evenings because I needed to help with the child care.
(*4) At various points, I've flirted with the idea of learning other languages, as I've described on this blog: Korean, French, Cambodian, and German. But I never got far with any of those languages, so I'm not considering them as languages I've learned.
Part of me is tempted to write up a much more detailed account of my language studies--a sort of language studies autobiography, in which I would explain among other things why I started studying Latin, why I stopped, why I became proficient in Japanese, but never learned Cambodian, etc. But this post isn't the place to get into all that. If I do decide to write that all up, it would be in a different post--which I might or might not write someday.
(*5) As I wrote in a couple previous posts (here and here), I never actually learned Spanish in school, because I took Latin instead. I did a couple years of Spanish club in 7th and 8th grade, but that's as far as I got.
(*6) Arguably what I should do is just skip ahead to a higher level in Japanese. (Duolingo does actually give you that option.) But, you know me, I like to do things systematically--start at the very beginning, and then work my way all the way to the end.
