Time, Time, Time

Are those dreams or are those prayers? …

“Time,” Phil Keaggy
“Time,” T-Bone Burnett
“Time,” Tom Waits
“Time,” Tori Amos
“Time After Time,” Allison Crowe
“Time After Time,” Chet Baker
“Time After Time,” Cyndi Lauper
“Time After Time,” Willie Nelson
“Time and Time Again,” Counting Crows
“Time Is a Healer,” Eva Cassidy
“Time Is Tight,” Booker T. & the MGs
“Time to Begin Again,” Billy Crockett
“Time to Get It On,” WNOC
“Time to Goof Off,” Terry Taylor
“Time Will Do the Talking,” Patty Griffin

That Tori Amos video is from her Sept. 17, 2001 performance on Letterman. That same week, our president told us it was our patriotic duty to go out to the mall and do some shopping, so I went and bought a copy of Strange Little Girls.

Here’s a question: Is “The American Songbook” closed, or are we still adding to it? The Chet Baker recording above is the Cahn & Styne standard, but the other three tracks listed as “Time After Time” are the Lauper & Hyman song. At the risk of offending the American Songbook Preservation Society, I’d argue the latter song has, oddly, become just as much of a classic and a standard. It’s being widely performed, recorded, interpreted and reinterpreted — that’s pretty much what “standard” means, isn’t it? Here’s Miles Davis, for example, which has to count for something. …