Sundar Pichai gave the 2026 commencement speech at Stanford University

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sundar Pichai (the CEO of Alphabet and Google) gave the 2026 commencement speech at Stanford University on June 14, 2026. There is a 14-minute YouTube video. That speech was published in Vital Speeches of the Day for August 2026, on pages 176 to 178 with the title Three Filters That Have Helped Me Get More Moments Right Than Wrong. Five headings from it are:

 

Very few moments in life are make or break

Choose optimism

Work on hard things

Do what excites you

Conclusion

 

The chorus from folksinger Kate Wolf’s song Here in California accurately has said:  

 

“Here in California

The fruit hangs heavy on the vine

There’s no gold, I thought I’d warn you

And the hills turn brown in the summertime”

 

Under Choose Optimism  (at 7:50)  Sundar’s seventh and eighth paragraphs instead say that:

 

“If you’re not from here, California is advertised as being really lush and green. But when I looked out the window, it was more...brown. I guess I said this out loud, I’m not sure why. My host, Mrs. Jane Earl, gently corrected me. ‘We prefer to call it golden,’ she said.

And that’s exactly what I mean by choosing optimism. It’s about reframing for the positive: Where I saw brown, she saw golden. This slight change of perspective had a huge ripple effect on how I thought about the world around me.”

A portrait of Sundar came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Living in the Present with John Prine is a memoir by Tom Piazza

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On April 14, 2020 I blogged about Remembering John Prine – a great storyteller. There is an article by Tom Piazza in the Oxford American on October 8, 2018 about that singer-songwriter titled Living in the Present with John Prine. John selected Tom to write a memoir with the same title – a 2025 book Living in the Present with John Prine. Near the end, on pages 157 to 160 his lead guitarist Jason Wilber described John’s combination of abilities:

 

“John loved performing, for sure. He had a really …I want to say he had a natural talent for it, but that, I think, underplays what I’m trying to communicate. I’ve said this before, to other people, but I feel like I stood there with John onstage for twenty-four years, and watched him do a magic trick over and over … and over. It always worked, he pulled it off every time, and I still don’t know how he did it. He had this ability to communicate on an emotional level through his writing. ‘How in hell can a person go to work in the morning, come home in the evening and have nothing to say?’ I don’t think there was a time I heard him sing that line onstage that at least one person in the audience didn’t cry out, and go ‘Whooo!’ or respond in some way, and usually lots of people. Think about that. That’s not, like, a normal thing. You know what I mean? That line is not asking you to comment in some way. It’s not saying, like, ‘Hey, everybody put your hands in the air…’ It’s a spontaneous reaction to a line that communicates something of such emotional depth and resonance that people are prompted to spontaneously cry out. And I heard that happen over and over. Almost every night.

 

So that’s just the writing part. But he also had the ability to do that as a performer, as a live in-person communicator. He just had this emotional intelligence that was off the charts. He was a genius in his way. And I know that’s not news to you. Or anyone! But that is really what struck me about being onstage with him. It’s not just that he could do a good show, and in fact, if you reduce this to technical execution of music, he was not that ‘good.’ And I mean that with complete respect. But, like, if you just wanted to measure this with scientific instruments, John’s show wasn’t good because his vocal intonation was perfect, or his guitar technique was perfect, or his guitar was perfectly in tune, or because he was making no mistakes … Quite the contrary! But it didn’t matter. Because his ability to deliver the rest of it – the emotional part – was so in the stratosphere that none of that shit mattered.   

 

And for me, as someone who spent their whole life practicing, and trying to learn how to do things exactly the way I was trying to do … It took me a long time to understand that, like, wow, John is actually doing the things that I thought … I thought I was on the path to what he was doing, but now I see he’s doing it with none of those things. It didn’t matter if he made mistakes on the guitar, or he was out of tune. In fact, when he messed up people loved him more. He would make a mistake and people would cheer! Because of a look he would make, or the way he would react to it.

 

But here’s the other part – it wasn’t only onstage. He just had this ability to communicate with people. If you only knew John superficially, you could say, ‘He’s a regular guy. Just a nice guy.’ And he was. But he was also … his emotional intelligence extended into the interpersonal. The same way he could connect with a whole room full of people, he could sit across the table from you – not that he was always connected, because sometimes he would be off in Archie comics land – but when he was there with you he could be really tuned in to you and know a lot about where you were, even maybe more than you knew.

 

He had a pretty good read on almost everybody and every situation. I think that allowed him to trust people … He could read people quickly. He had an idea of who you were and what you were about. He wouldn’t say it, he didn’t talk about it, but he knew. He was super, super smart, in his own way. Not like he knew the atomic weight of water, or whatever, but he was smart in all these other ways that really mattered. I think his talent was in some ways a mystery to him as well. He knew that he had this talent, that he was off-the-charts good at this one thing, but he didn’t necessarily understand why he was. But he knew it. And he knew he could trust it. 

 

I used to think if you work hard at something you can get as good as anybody else. But those things I just talked about, about John – writing, performing, communicating, reading people – communicating with people based on his reading of what’s happening – I could work on them until the end of time and never be nearly as good as him.”

 

A good way to get to know John is to watch ten Youtube videos of his live performances from Sessions at West 54th:

 

Sam Stone

Hello In There

Spanish Pipedream

Lake Marie

Souvenirs

All the Best

Far From Me

Six O’Clock News

In Spite of Ourselves (duet with Iris Dement)

The Jet Set (duet with Iris Dement)

 

There is another article at Country and Midwestern titled John Prine Explains the Origin of “Lake Marie”. And still another article by Clayton Edwards at American Songwriter on October 28, 2024 titled “Midwestern Mindtrips”; Why Bob Dylan Names John Prine Among His Favorite Songwriters Ever said Bob liked Lake Marie best.

 

The 2016 image of John Prine is from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

In the public library they didn’t shelve this CD where I had expected

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ken Jenkins was Toastmaster at last Wednesday’s meeting of the Pioneer Toastmasters Club. His theme was Early Rock n Roll Music, and among other things, he played part of an Everly Brothers song. The Wikipedia article says that The Everly Brothers:

 

“were an American rock duo, known for steel-string acoustic guitar playing and close harmony singing.”

 

A few days ago I went looking for an Everly Brothers CD under Rock at the Ada County library on Victory Road. All-Time Original Hits by The Everly Brothers was not there. As shown above, it instead was shelved earlier in the alphabet under Pop & Easy. But the Caldwell library has another CD, The Very Best of the Everly Brothers, shelved under Rock. At Ada on Victory I also found Ladies of the Canyon, the 1970 third album by Joni Mitchell, shelved under Pop & Easy. To me it obviously instead belongs under Folk.

 

How things should be classified may not be obvious. Before I go to either the Lake Hazel or Victory Road library I usually check in the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) and write down where to find a book, CD, or DVD of interest. Wikipedia defines taxonomy as:

 

“the practice and science of categorization or classification”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A book or otherr item may be classified in more than one category, as shown above. A primary one gets chosen. Public Speaking books are shelved under 808.51, while Business Presentations are under 658.45.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown above, hose washers are rubber seal rings which sit in the female end fitting on a garden hose. Where would I find them shelved at a home improvement and hardware store like Lowe’s? Are they inside, in the aisle with plumbing supplies, near the other faucet washers? No,  they are outside in the Garden and Lawn department, next to the garden hoses.

 

How to write a song or a speech that matters

 

In 2022 singer-songwriter Dar Williams published a 276-page book titled How to Write a Song That Matters. It follows her having given a decade of annual retreats titled Writing a Song That Matters. I was curious to read it because a typical five-to-seven-minute Toastmasters speech takes the same time as a song (but without music or poetry). Her book is divided into seven sections:

 

INTRODUCTION(S)

INSPIRATION

NARRATIVE

WORDS

MUSIC (IN OTHER WORDS…)

CROSSROADS AND ENDINGS

BRINGING OUR SONGS INTO THE WORLD

THE SONGWRITER (YOU AND ME)

 

In the section on INSPIRATION a chapter titled That First Inspiration begins on page 15 with:

 

“I call it ‘The Window Opens.’

 

Children’s author Natasha Wing calls it ‘Getting the Tinglies.’

 

Novelist Stephanie Kallos calls it ‘Open for Business.’

 

There is a sensation we get when we know that something we’ve heard, or the thought we’ve just thought, has the makings of a work of art.

 

We just have that feeling: this full moon, this stone in my hand, or this strange headline has just presented itself in a certain way. I’m open for business; I get the tinglies; the window opens.

 

In 1994 my housemate, Sarah Davis said, ‘I think you’re going to want to write a song about this news story. There was an ice storm in Philadelphia, and the deejays asked people to turn off their electricity so they could power the hospitals. And everyone did.’

 

That was interesting. I nodded my head. It was a good story about neighborliness. It was great fodder for someone’s song, maybe not mine. Then Sarah added a detail.

 

‘They said you could watch the lights going out in entire buildings. Even the businesses.’

 

This wasn’t just about neighbors. It was about civilization. I wrote a long song called ‘Mortal City.’ “

 

Dar left off that it happens in Philadelphia. She wrote a seven-minute song about a woman having a very strange first date - with the brother of the guy she worked next to. You can listen to it here on YouTube and read the lyrics here on her web site. He walked over to her apartment during an ice storm, and they had a spaghetti dinner. But then he couldn’t go home because of the continuing awful weather. Her radiators were not working, but normally she used electric heat. They wound up in her bed talking while “wrapped up like ornaments waiting for another season.” On page 166 she describes how alternating between two variations on an Em chord that reminded her of a life-support monitor became the basis for that song’s melody.

 

In the section titled NARRATIVE there are brief chapters titled Where Did I Go?, Where Did I Really Go?, What Happened?, What Really Happened? How Does It Feel? How Does It Really Feel?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The chapter titled Tell the Story and Notice How It’s Heard begins on page 99. She discusses a James Keelaghan’s song, about the Mann Gulch Fire, which I blogged about on February 7, 2022 in a post titled Cold Missouri Waters – a folk song about a smokejumper tragedy. Dar asks:

 

“How did James distill all of those pages into five verses with no chorus? Maybe James told fifty people the story, or maybe he took some long walks and followed his own narrative intuition. Either way, the song strikes a powerful balance between an exciting plot with intimately observed details and universal perspectives with crushing emotional lessons.”

 

She mentions having performed a cover version of that song with her friends Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky, which you can listen to on YouTube.   

 

In the section about WORDS, on page 119 she discusses the song As Cool As I Am, which you can watch here on YouTube and find the lyrics here on her web site. (The Wikipedia article about Dar mentions that song as being an unofficial anthem for Bryn Mawr College). The first line in the last verse first began as:

 

“Oh – and that’s not easy. I don’t know why you had to get so low-down and sleazy.”

 

But she felt it wasn’t quite right, went back, and revised it to instead be:  

 

“Oh – and that’s not easy. I don’t know what you saw, I want somebody who sees me.”

 

A chapter in BRINGING OUR SONGS INTO THE WORLD titled Performing For An Audience begins on page 243 with:

 

“The words that helped me break through and find my equilibrium as a performer were ‘You are giving a gift to the audience. You are not asking for something.’ The relationship went from ‘Do you like me?’ to ‘This is what I’m offering. I hope you like it.’ A show that feels dead or badly received can still do a number on me. But performing for an audience of ten people or more is how we can find out how our songs connect with the world, imperfect a science as that is, and sharing our art is part of a bigger personal and overall human experience than we have when we keep our songs to ourselves and our pets.”

 

When I read the title of her book, the song I immediately thought of was the first one on her 2012 album, In the Time of Gods. You can watch her sing I Am The One Who Will Remember Everything live on YouTube, and read the lyrics here on her web site. She discussed it in an article by Mike Ragogna at the Huffington Post on July 11, 2012 titled ‘In the Time of Gods’: A conversation with Dar Williams. She said:

 

“Well, it's looking at a cycle, which is something that gives me a lot of priorities to look at. When I heard, after 9/11, that the Taliban was mostly comprised of the orphans from the war between Russia and Afghanistan, my response was, ‘So how do we get in right now to places like refugee camps? How do we avoid conflicts so that you don't have these incredibly marginalized kids who grow up with no parents to sort of temper all of the terrible things of the world and nurture you through it? How do we avoid the kinds of situations that create generations of grown up orphans with no parents, who have no compassion, who know war, who create war, who do things out of fear and a sense of need? How do you break the cycle?’ "  

 

Bonnie Raitt’s song Just Like That tells how a life can change just in a moment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On August 8, 2022 I blogged about Down the Hall, A poignant song by Bonnie Raitt about a prison hospice. It is the last song on her latest album, titled Just Like That.

 

The five-minute title song is another excellent example of telling a story in only five minutes. You can listen to it and see the lyrics here on YouTube. An review of the album by John Parlees at the New York Times on April 21, 2022 titled Bonnie Raitt faces mortality with compassion and hope explained:

 

“Another kind of solace after death arrives in the quietly poignant title track of ‘Just Like That…,’ also written by Raitt. Its story unfolds at a measured pace. A stranger shows up on the doorstep of a woman who has never stopped blaming herself for the death of her son. The man has sought her out because he’s the one who got her son’s heart as a transplant: ‘I lay my head upon his chest/And I was with my boy again,’ Raitt sings, with sorrow and relief in the grain of her voice.”

 

A long interview with Zane Low, which you also can watch on YouTube, explains how she wrote it by reimagining what she saw in a television news story.  

 

A poignant song by Bonnie Raitt about a prison hospice

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Down the Hall is the tenth, last song on Bonnie Raitt’s new album Just Like That. You can watch a lyric video of it on YouTube. She tells a poignant story backed by a lovely mixture of guitar and organ. An article by Tina Benitez-Eves at American Songwriter on June 9, 2022 titled Bonnie Raitt inspires on album ‘Just Like That’ explains:

“In May of 2018, Raitt was also affected by a story she read in The New York Times Magazine about a prison hospice program in Vacaville, California where inmates work as caregivers for fellow terminal convicts. Staggered by her reaction to the intimate photographs and stories of volunteers devoting their time to those incarcerated at the end of their lives, she wrote her own story on ‘Down the Hall,’ singing from the perspective of the caretakers: I asked if they let family in / She said not really at the end / Truth is a lot don’t have someone, no friends or next of kin / The thought of those guys going out alone, it hit me somewhere deep / I asked could go sit with them, for some comfort and relief.

‘I just immediately felt how many segregated, separated, polarized segments of our population out in society are reflected in microcosms in prisons,’ says Raitt. ‘Those pictures, without any explanation, were such a beautiful testimony of how the need of one human being to have compassion from another, and empathy, and care was just so moving. I’m moved by it now. I can barely sing those songs without getting touched again.’ ”

The image of a prison hall was cropped from one at Wikimedia Commons.

 

Cold Missouri Waters – a folk song by James Keelaghan about a smokejumper tragedy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The tragic Mann Gulch Fire happened back on August 5, 1949 in Montana. 13 of 15 U. S. Forest Service smokejumpers who parachuted in to fight it were killed when the fire surrounded them. Norman Maclean (who had written the novella A River Runs Through It that became a 1992 film) wrote a whole posthumously published book about it titled Young Men and Fire.

 

The U. S. Forest Service video about it, Mann Gulch: The Wrath of Nature, takes ten minutes to describe what happened. Could you tell that story in a five-to-seven-minute speech at a Toastmasters club? To do so you would need to pick a viewpoint, and eliminate lots of details. James Keelaghan did it in a folk song titled Cold Missouri Waters, originally on his 1995 album A Recent Future. He told it in just five verses, as a confession by the foreman, Wag Dodge hospitalized with terminal Hodgkin’s lymphoma. At YouTube you can watch a 5- 1/ 2 minute lyric video of that song it by Wolf Loescher, and another 10-minute lyric video by the Fiddlin’ Foresters.

 

The image of a sign came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

Remembering John Prine – a great storyteller

On April 7, 2020 the country-folk singer-songwriter John Prine died. In Billboard there was an obituary article by Annie Reuter titled Americana legend John Prine dies at age 73 from coronavirus. In Rolling Stone there was a longer article by Stephen L. Betts and Patrick Doyle titled John Prine, one of America’s greatest songwriters, dead at 73. There also was an article on April 13, 2020 by Patrick Doyle titled John Prine: The last days and beautiful life of an American original. And in 2017 there was another article by Patrick Doyle titled Inside the life of John Prine, the Mark Twain of American songwriting.

John excelled at telling stories via songs. His very first album in 1971 included two of my many favorites - Sam Stone, a song about a veteran who died from opioid addiction and Hello In There, a song about the elderly. At Performing Songwriter on October 10, 2016 there was an article by Lydia Hutchinson titled Behind the songs of John Prine. She mentioned eight songs (for which I have links to live versions on YouTube): Dear Abby, Spanish Pipedream, Sam Stone, Hello in There, Souvenirs, Illegal Smile, Paradise, and Donald and Lydia.

Some of John’s lyrics are hilarious but strange, like those for Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone. There also are humorous stories about how some songs came to be, like Donnie Fritt’s dream house in Nashville leading up to The Oldest Baby in the World. Living in the Future describes how wrong predictions can be:

“We are living in the future, I’ll tell you how I know

I read it in the paper fifteen years ago

We’re all driving rocket ships and talking with our minds

And wearing turquoise jewelry and standing in soup lines

We are standing in soup lines”

One of his recent songs from the last album, The Tree of Forgiveness, on the topic of lust and farmer’s daughters, is Egg & Daughter Nite, Lincoln, Nebraska 1967 (Crazy Bone). John described how the setting became Lincoln rather than Norfolk –  the latter is poor for rhymes, so instead he said:

“If they knew what you were thinkin’, they’d have run you out of Lincoln

Just blame it on that old crazy bone”

and previously:

“When you got hell to pay, put the truth on layaway,

And blame it on that old crazy bone”

I previously blogged about another song on how It’s a Big Old Goofy World in a February 25, 2020 post titled Two songs stuffed with bagfuls of clichés. Finally, John even told us what he would do When I Get to Heaven.

Room at the Table: a song for Thanksgiving

A well-crafted song tells a memorable story with both words (poetry) and music. In April singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer released her latest CD, A Permeable Life. Six of the twelve songs are out as lyrics videos on YouTube. Her song Room at the Table fits very well with the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.



The other five songs with lyrics videos are:  

A Light in the Window

Every Little Bit of It

Abide

Forever Ray

Visitation

You can download all the lyrics in a pdf file here.

The other six songs are:

The Work of Our Hands

Thank You, Good Night

The Ten O’clock Line

Writing You a Letter

Please Don’t Put Me on Hold

An Empty Chair

The lyrics sheet explains that An Empty Chair was inspired by seeing the Oklahoma City National Memorial. It has a field of 168 empty chairs representing each person who died in the April 19,1995 bombing of the Murrah Building.

The image was adapted from a 120 year-old Harper's Bazaar cover.

Update

The November 26th episode of On Being was Carrie Newcomer: A Conversation with Music.
On November 5th Carrie appeared on Mountain Stage.

Storytelling - songs of revenge or hope

Feuding families are a familiar theme in literature - Capulets & Montagues, Hatfields  & McCoys, etc. Last month the History Channel did a six-hour mini series on the latter. I avoided watching it, since I didn’t need to see all those pointless cycles of revenge. One reviewer whined: 

“Hatfield vs. McCoy vs. Hatfield vs. McCoy vs. Hatfield vs. McCoy ad nauseam isn’t dramatic. It’s tedious. Somewhere around the three-hour mark, all you want to do is have both families line up opposite each other, pull the trigger and fade to black.”





If you want much the same effect in six minutes instead of six hours, you can listen to the Drive-By Truckers song called Decoration Day. It tells a very similar story about the Hill and Lawson families. (I previously blogged about another less bitter Drive-By Truckers song called 18 Wheels of Love).

About a week ago I started hearing an unfamiliar song on a local alternative FM radio station. It had gorgeous three-part harmony, an unusual mix of instruments, and hopeful, wistful lyrics. A couple lines were:

“That wind is calling my name
I won’t wait, or I’ll never get on”





Eventually I tracked down that it was Half Moon by the Portland, Oregon group called Blind Pilot. (Lyrics are here in the comments on that video).  I didn’t know that in April it had been featured on the finale to the TV show, One Tree Hill. There’s also both another studio version showing the whole group, and a duet. Enjoy!

Lessons on stage performance from singer-songwriter Livingston Taylor

Earlier this year Livingston Taylor released the revised edition of his book on Stage Performance, which came from a class he teaches at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. You can look inside it at Amazon.com. He discusses how we should have a conversation with our audience. The July 29th issue of the Vineyard Gazette has an article which describes how he practices the Gentle Art of Audience Seduction.

In the first meeting of class (page 15 of the book) he teaches how to introduce yourself, and says you should:

"1. Walk onstage.
2. Face the crowd.
3. Find a spot where you’re comfortable and well lit.
4. Be still and see your audience.
5. Say your name. (This is the performance).
6. Be still and look at your audience. Make sure they received what you gave out.
7. Bow slightly.
8. Accept applause, if appropriate.
9. Leave the stage."

Livingston is a compelling speaker. Watch here to see how he interacts with some students.



There are more YouTube video clips from his summer lectures in 2005, 2006, and 2007, and a 2011 faculty interview.

I found the first edition of his book from 2000 (indexed under the subject of public speaking) at my public library, and read it from cover to cover.

One story about professionalism that impressed me appears on page 56 of the revised edition. He discussed arriving at a small theater in Sarasota, Florida before headlining a show. The glass front doors were smudged, so he started washed them. Two hours before the show the opening act walked right past him, without saying hello. Their image of a professional didn’t include a window washer. (On page 52 he also mentioned once cleaning the bathroom of a club, since he didn’t want his audience putting up with the dirt).

Stories in words and music: country edition

Like folk music, country music has its share of great singer-songwriters. Hank Williams is the first one I think of, particularly his I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry. He also wrote Move It On Over, Honky Tonkin’, Cold, Cold Heart, and many more.     

Johnny Cash is the second one I think of, for his songs like Folsom Prison Blues, and I Walk the Line. His daughter, Rosanne, eventually sang his Tennessee Flat Top Box.

Rosanne Cash started with conventional country songs like Seven Year Ache, and What We Really Want, and gradually evolved to a more folk style like in The Wheel and Will You Remember Me. Johnny sang on her song September When It Comes.

Rosanne’s first husband was Rodney Crowell. Rodney wrote I Couldn’t Leave You If I Tried, and After All This Time. He and Rosanne sang It’s Such a Small World. Rodney also had the audacity to write I Walk the Line (Revisited), and then got Johnny Cash to sing on it.  

Mary Chapin Carpenter also started with conventional country songs like Down at the Twist and Shout, I Take My Chances, and Why Walk When You Can Fly. Later she wrote longer songs like John Doe No. 24, On and On It Goes, and Houston.

One of the funniest country songs has a last verse that contains almost every possible cliche. David Allen Coe had the hit version of You Never Even Called Me By My Name. Writers Steve Goodman and John Prine tell their own versions.

The lap steel guitar image is from here.

UPDATE - September 6, 2011

On August 30, 2011 Ty Bennett blogged about What Country Music Taught Me About Public Speaking.

Stories in words and music: folk edition

In a previous post I mentioned that if you were in a rut and wanted to change how you tell a story you could, in order of increasing difficulty, either:

1. Make your story into a poem (become a poet)

2. Add music and make it a song (become a singer-songwriter)

3. Sing that song a capella

4. Make a music video of that song

The best songs are “instant oldies.” After you hear them once or twice they seem to have always just been there. We now have YouTube and other video repositories where we can find both studio and concert performances of songs. Here are three folk singer-songwriters.   

Josh Ritter grew up in northern Idaho. In the chorus of Wings he says:

“...Well, it’s my home. Last night I dreamt that I grew wings.
I found a place where they could hear me when I sing.”

Early in his career Josh played in Ireland, and you can find three of his songs in clips from the video Other Voices: The Other Side, Me and Jiggs, and Come and Find Me. 

Since there is a Blarney Stone in Ireland, there also should be a Bone of Song. Josh sings about it accompanied by the classical violinist, Hilary Hahn. 

Two of Josh’s other recent songs are Long Shadows and Folk Bloodbath.

Quaker singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer describes a whole soap opera worth of the regulars and refugees who eat at Betty’s Diner. The chorus says:

“...Here we are, all in one place
The wants and wounds of the human race
Despair and hope sit face to face
When you come in from the cold...”

Her twelfth album is Before and After, which along with the title song contains the song Stones in the River. I heard her play in Boise when she was working on her previous one, The Geography of Light. It contains both Geodes and the hilarious e-mail lament, Don’t Push Send.

In his most blatantly bipolar song To Live is To Fly, Townes Van Zandt said:

“...Well to live is to fly, all low and high,
So shake the dust off of your wings,
and the sleep out of your eyes.”


Four of his other songs (with lyrics) are: I’ll Be Here in the Morning, Like a Summer Thursday, She Came and She Touched Me, and the heartbreaking Tecumseh Valley.  

The image of an acoustic guitar came from here.

Stuttering and Richard Thompson

I did not realize that the critically acclaimed singer-songwriter and guitarist Richard Thompson had a problem with stuttering when speaking in public. Back in the early 1980’s I saw him headline the Ann Arbor Folk Festival. He walked onstage with just his acoustic guitar, started singing, and held a theater audience spellbound for over an hour. That day no stutter was evident in his remarks between songs. Thompson’s name appears in this list of famous people with speech disorders.

Recently I saw an article in Performing Musician magazine that mentioned his stutter. I also found a BBC TV documentary about him called A Solitary Life. At ~3:00 minutes into the first segment of the YouTube video you can hear his stutter come out, prompted by the high stress of being followed around by a camera crew. Thompson played lead guitar for Fairport Convention, and then began writing songs for them. Later he left them, and his wife Linda sang while he played guitar. Eventually Richard began singing.

The Stuttering Home Page is one of the best online sources for information about stuttering. Pamela A. Mertz writes a blog about stuttering called Make Room for the Stuttering that recently passed the landmark of 200 posts.

You can find many songs by Richard Thompson on YouTube. Fairport Convention play Meet on the Ledge here. Linda Thompson sings the title song from the album I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight here. Richard sings 1952 Vincent Black Lightning here. He and Jo-El Sonnier perform the break-up polka song, Tear Stained Letter, here. Sonnier also has a Cajun nightmare video version here. Bonnie Raitt sings Dimming of the Day here.

The photo by Kevin Smith shows Richard Thompson playing at Croperdy, during the 2005 Fairport Convention reunion.

Get out of a rut and add some pep

One public speaking trap for folks in marketing, sales, or training is that constant repetition eventually can lead to a bored, emotionally disconnected delivery. An article by David Stoppard in Presentations magazine back in 2005 discusses how to Put Some Pep Back Into Your Speaking Style.

One of David’s suggestions is to change your persona. I saw this done yesterday morning at the Toastmasters Leadership Institute here in Boise. George Jolley of Boise Club (aka Club 61) was Toastmaster for the meeting, but appeared as “Ralph Smedley” (the founder of Toastmasters International who died in 1965).

Recently I experienced getting in a rut. I was trying to finish the Technical Presentations manual at Toastmasters. The fourth project was presenting a technical paper (in 10 to 12 minutes). I had been avoiding doing it, although I previously had given that paper (as much longer presentations) four different times.

The topic of the paper was corrosion failure analysis of fire sprinkler systems. I gave it at the annual NACE Corrosion conference in New Orleans back in 2004, and also at the SIEO/NACE Winter Symposium in Sun Valley, Idaho in January 2008. Between those two presentations to corrosion professionals I also gave it at two different chapter meetings of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers.

I had to completely reorganize the presentation for the nontechnical audience at Toastmasters. My focus had to switch from specific details to general concepts.

There are other possibilities for completely changing the style of a presentation.

You could try giving part (or even all) of your presentation in verse. In a recent blog post Nick Thomas discusses Speechwriting in verse? Well, you could do worse! If you can’t write poetry, you can even buy it from places like the Poem Store.

The next step up from poetry is to add music and turn your presentation into a song. If that is not difficult enough, then you also could try singing a capella, like in this segment with Stan Rogers performing part of his song, Northwest Passage. It sounds like an ancient sea shanty, but Northwest Passage was the title song of his last album (released in 1981).

Or, you even could package a song as a rap music video (complete with karaoke lyrics), like the very geeky Large Hadron Rap. This video is about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) recently built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). It is pretty amazing to see an abstruse topic like particle physics explained in less than five minutes.

How many slides should you use in a PowerPoint presentation?

You should use just enough slides to tell your story, and no more. The preceding question and its answer are pretty close an old joke. When Abraham Lincoln was asked: “How long should a man’s legs be?” he replied “Long enough to reach the ground.”

How many slides should you present per minute? You can just follow Spiegel’s Law, which states that the answer to any question will turn out to be “about three” when the question is asked in the correct units. A guideline of “1 to 2 slides per minute” is often stated, but this is for the mythical “typical” slide. Obviously it matters whether you have zero, five, or fifty words on a slide. The Global Health Education Consortium makes the sensible suggestion that you should: “consider 1 – 2 slides per minute for those that have text or graphic content, and perhaps up to 3 – 4 per minute for photos”.

The Director of Media Services at the Oshkosh campus of the University of Wisconsin, Nick Dvoracek, gave a 12 minute Macromedia Breeze talk on Effective Presentations which has 41 slides, or 3.4 per minute. His web site also contains much more information about using PowerPoint.

Is it possible to pack even more slides per minute into an effective presentation? How about over TWICE as many as Nick Dvoracek? Earlier this year Alvin Trusty gave a 45 minute presentation with 327 slides (7.2 per minute). At TeacherTube you can view a video of his amazing “Beg, Borrow, but Don’t Steal (How to give a great PowerPoint without breaking the law).” While Alvin seems a bit rushed, he still is perfectly understandable.

How many still images per minute can be presented for the very special case of a music video, where the song tells the story? The video for the Carrie Newcomer song Angels Unaware has over 115 images in just 4-1/2 minutes. That is over 25 “slides” per minute, although these images are enhanced by “pan and zoom” camera movements (in the same style Ken Burns employed for his documentary on the Civil War).

Storytelling: The Endless Tale

The Endless Tale is the title of a column on storytelling in the wonderful quarterly folk music magazine, Sing Out. It is written by Dan Keding, and also has the breathtakingly long subtitle of Storytelling: its events, tellers, stories, organizations, resources & points of discussion. Some of Dan’s columns open by telling specific short tales. Two examples are:

Spring 2008 - The old woman who outwitted death ( web link here).
Summer 2002 – A full cup (web link here)

The first column also contains a discussion of endings. The second column also contains a discussion of short (or small) tales, and lists four books that contain collections of them.

If you want to see more stories, then try this list of some storytelling web sites.

Folk songs are poetic tales set to music, like Richard Thompson’s Beeswing.