Ben's Songs

There's something profoundly Jewish about Pixar's WALL-E — the theme of exile, represented visually by broken city-scapes; the way that salvation is communal and primarily concerned with returning to right relationship with the land; and certain very Biblical narrative tropes which I hope to explore in more depth in another post else-web. Running through it all is EVE (the name is not a coincidence, of course) and her "directive", as close to "mitzvah" in robot-speak as we could hope. So (besides the word "wall" being right there) it seemed appropriate to choose "City of Walls", Neshama Carlebach's haunting prayer for Jerusalem, as the base for a WALL-E song.

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This mashup — based on a typo! — of The Last Unicorn (and its theme song) and the Transformers movie may be one of the most 80s things I've ever written.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman
ttto: "The Last Unicorn" by America

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According to Tracy Grammer, Dave Carter was on the verge of coming out as transgender at the time of his* untimely death.  You can catch fleeting glimpses of trans self-awareness in some of Dave's songs, especially the haunting "Phantom Doll".  Of course, what I latched onto is that "Doll" rhymes with "Maul" and Darth Maul is "the phantom menace".  But I did give Darth Maul a gender swap for this song.

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This song was previously released as "Yehudi Mind Tricks".  The song hasn't changed, just the title.

The stories of Moses and of Luke Skywalker match up in a lot of places. Being taken away from their parents. Encountering a deeper spiritual reality. Hearing the Call. Standing up to an Empire. But, most of all, what ties them together is the Desert.

Based on Star Trek VI.

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Surely this pun has been made many times — the challenge was to write a song as rich with irony and disappointment as the original.  The grammar alone should reveal who is singing.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman
ttto: the theme from Jurassic Park by John Williams

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Groundhog Day is an American folk-tradition which is a worn-down remnant of an older European tradition which, while not directly related, occupies the same slot in the year-wheel as the Celtic Imbolc.  It's also a surreal movie in which Bill Murray plays a disaffected weatherman who must live the same day over and over.  This song pulls the concept of the movie together with the themes of Imbolc — the turning of winter towards spring, the stirring of the frozen heart towards hope.

lyrics and music by Benjamin Newman

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