Melanie (aka Melanie Safka, the folk singer) - Search and Destroy

If you listen to the absolute energy & power she infuses into her music it will make the hairs on the back of your neck tingle & definitely bring a tear.

There are so many songs to choose from the words are remarkable, often sad & yet hauntingly they draw you to want to play them again & again.

Without doubt the most memorable line from all of her songs has to be

‘The hardest thing under the sun above is to say goodbye to the ones you love'

Taken from Melanie Safka ‘The Saddest Thing’

Forget ‘Brand New Key’ (that just put bread on the table for her family)

Try her cover version of ‘Rag Doll’

Sadly, I only know the hits.

http://www.melaniesmusic.com/index.html

You will not be disappointed

So I wound up seeing Melanie live and in person tonight. She played for TWO AND A HALF HOURS. The woman is made of happiness, raisins, and oatmeal -- there's not a dark bone in her body. At one point she sang a song she wrote right after 9/11 and the chorus went "I love people who smile" and she made the whole audience repeat "I love people who smile" over and over for like 5 min. Later, she finally sang "Brand New Key" but with an extended section where she told a story about that song that involved a quack doctor and a 27-day water-only fast, and after each section she encouraged the audience to do the "hump ha ha" part and she said "HUMP ha ha" like 500x. She played her ~ 3 hits and a metric ton of new songs.

Overall, Melanie appeared to be a congenial performer, decent singer even after all these years, terrible lyricist, and extremely tenderhearted mom.

saw her a couple years back. she was heckled relentless from one table that was eventually asked to leave by the venue at which point another table picked up the slack. pretty weird scene and def no sing-alongs

I saw her in Nottingham two years ago. We only got TWO WHOLE HOURS. The show ended with a birthday cake being brought on stage, in honour of the Woodstock Festival. She said "Happy 40th Birthday, Woodstock!" and blew out the candles. Her son Beau played with her - she credits him with enabling her “artistic re-emergence”, and her new songs were co-composed with him. Told us that Brand New Key "doomed me to be cute for the rest of my life!" Loads of wonderful, funny stories, although my companion had heard her tell most of them before. Likes her Tequila.

Her son was there last night too. His presence added considerably to the musicality of her songs and clearly made her feel more comfortable on stage. She didn't seem very comfortable, in the way that sometimes people who talk too much seem uncomfortable.

Anyway, she seemed pretty relentlessly good-natured and affable. Not really a born musician or songwriter, but I'm kinda interested in her persona as a "folk singer". She has such a strange/interesting voice, and I would genuinely like to hear what she would do with trad folk material. Maybe it would be like Marianne Faithful, where her voice changing as she gets older makes the songs have a whole new meaning. She doesn't really have to be cute for the rest of her life if she doesn't want to. I think that's just her way, though.

when we were teenagers i sang 'look what they done to my song, ma' to my best friend's younger brother in a melanie voice and i switched all the english verses into french and then the french verse into english at which point he flew into a rage and so she sang 'lay down (candles in the rain)' to make him peaceful and he hit her with a rubik's cube.

la lechera, i think you are a very good concert reviewer, you have a clear eye and a wry voice.

:)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlp3wmE4bbI

God, how fucking nuts is "Lay Down"? Near six minutes of a tripped-out campfire freakout scaled up to what sounds like the entirety of Woodstock (actually the Edwin Hawkins Singers) shouting along, which was no doubt intended to convey utopic qualities but somehow comes off as the cusp of the apocalypse. Seventeen weeks on the Hot 100, peaking at #6! Topped the charts in Holland! I have always been so baffled by this.

I LOVE THAT SONG SO MUCH AAAAAAHHHHH

(okay so the single edit was probably more like the three-and-a-half-minute rendition above. but still!)

Absolutely love "Lay Down." Dig this live-in-the-studio version (from Dutch TV, I believe):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJp7zbjn7Wo

I read that she was nervous about going on stage at the Isle of Wight in 1970, so Keith Moon spent time joking around with her, cracking her up enough so she'd forget her nerves.

http://cypressrosewood.com/melanie/who1.jpg

Yeah, this song is spectacular. My gf heard it for the first time a couple of weeks ago when I was shuffling through some tunes. "Who is THAT? ...Wait, you mean 'Brand New Key' Melanie?!"

Was she involved in Sc1ent0logy at all? She was chummy with the Incredible String Band in their dying days, so...

She had been a follower of Meher Baba for a number of years, but apparently is no longer.

Not a Sc1en0logist, though.

Astonishingly this was the flipside of Brand New Key. Even the Will Oldham cover can't match the emotional punch of the original. That voice! Those strings!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf5Zdh7cTVE

This was posted up thread, but reposting with a little bit of an interview at the beginning and as an RIP Edwin Hawkins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ52lk9wjZI

I love this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSpkaBeZckY

I don't love this.

I love this
https://youtu.be/tb63PdPweDc

It's not her fault Brand New Key kept me away from listening to any of her other work for so long, it's mine, but wow I've missed out.

RIP

Lay Down is so so so good

https://variety.com/2024/music/obituaries-people-news/melanie-dead-brand-new-key-singer-woodstock-1235886892/

Okay what:

In early January, according to her label, Melanie recorded a cover of Morrissey’s “Ouija Board Ouija Board” for a forthcoming tribute album celebrating his music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heANHRhCP8Y

I'd forgotten how much I like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r44Ach4mXE4

RIP. I love 'I've Got New York' her contribution to the 6ths' album 'Hyacinths and Thistles'

RIP.

Arlo Guthrie on FB:

About a week ago, I was joking with my wife, Marti about Woodstock. I told her that Melanie would be the last one standing. I was obviously mistaken as Melanie passed away a couple of days ago.

I'd never really gotten to know her, although we were friends. We'd done some shows together over the years and decades. I remember the tour we did with others called "Woodstock In Europe" 1979. The 10th Anniversary tour. That was fun. Joe Cocker, Richie Havens, Country Joe, Melanie and I traveled around Europe in a tour bus - Great times.

But the one thing I'll always remember was the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival. I'd been invited to perform at Bethelwoods (which owns the original site), and also invited by Michael Lang for the event he was producing somewhere in upstate New York. Financially, these were great offers, but I declined them all. I was bound and determined to return to the original site 50 years to the day and perform for free to anyone who was there.

To make that happen, Bethelwoods promised a free stage, lights, sound system - All the stuff you'd need to do a gig. When I arrived absolutely none of those promises were kept. There was nothing but a vacant field, where 50 years ago it'd been filled with people.

I grabbed a guitar and sang a song on the original site where the stage had been. Later that afternoon we did a gig farther up the hill, where Bethelwoods had built a stage attached to their buildings (gorgeous by the way). The free show was limited to the first 5,000 people who showed up.

None of the original performers were there - Except one - Melanie. She had retuned to the site to celebrate. Seeing her there warmed my heart. Thank you, Melanie for keeping the dream alive as long as you did.

As a kid I adored this song from my folks' Melanie LP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWHVcg6FCDo