Setting Times stories to music: From KT Tunstall to Lauryn Hill
This has always plagued me when daydreaming about my desert island discs: Should “Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim” be on the list?
Pros: It’s one of the most wonderful pairings in pop history. Each song is like a little jewel. Sinatra’s aging voice has reached its ne plus ultra of regret, especially on “How Insensitive.”
Cons: Well, there’s only one. Its 10 brief songs clock in at under 30 minutes. If stuck on a desert island for the rest of my life, would I get sick of something so short? (Yes, fully recognize that perhaps too much thought has gone into such things.)
Then this week I came across “Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim -- The Complete Reprise Recordings.” With twice the number of songs! Solves the problem, right?
Then I listened to it. Except for the novelty of hearing Sinatra sing in Portuguese, there’s a reason the original album had just 10 songs. The second 10 aren’t as good, not by a long shot.
Let’s hear it for editors, may they be creating a near-perfect album or making stories more beautiful. At The Times, I’m surrounded by brilliant ones who should get a public round of applause more often.
Anyway, in these roundups of the week gone by, I’d like to offer the first paragraphs of each Great Read (or, as they’re known in print, Column One) -- maybe they’ll buy your eye and you can settle in for a good weekend read. And you’ll also get the songs that inspired me while editing the stories, or reading them later if my fellow editor Millie Quan ushered them through. A story-song combo!
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For black infants, a precarious start in life
The cramping came on quickly. Then the bleeding.
Samantha Bradley was only six months pregnant. She had already miscarried once. She knew she needed to get to an emergency room.
“I was in tears,” she said. “The only thing I could think was ‘Get me to a hospital.’“
On vacation in Palm Springs, Bradley and her sister rushed to a nearby hospital. About 30 minutes later, Bradley gave birth to her son.
The baby weighed just 1 pound, 8 ounces — a little more than a bag of coffee.
She got only a quick glance before doctors whisked him away. She saw his rib cage protruding from his tiny frame. He didn’t make a sound.
Black women like Bradley are 1 1/2 times as likely as white women to give birth prematurely, and their babies are more than twice as likely to die before their first birthday.
#storysongs combo: “To Zion,” by Lauryn Hill. A beautiful song from a mother to her child.
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Rousing workers to seek higher wages
The union organizer found Naquasia LeGrand on her lunch break, sipping coffee and wearing a hat emblazoned with the logo of her employer, KFC.
She was about to return to boxing coleslaw and chicken tenders when he introduced himself and asked how she was doing, how she was surviving on $7.25 an hour, the minimum wage. The organizer, Ben Zucker, wanted to know whether she might want to join a group of workers trying to get higher pay.
It wasn’t something she’d thought much about. The job was a detour between high school and that computer degree she was hoping to get someday. A way to help support her aunt, grandmother and cousin, who lived with her in a cramped apartment in one of the most expensive cities in the country.
She didn’t think of herself as someone who needed to join a union or someone who would be a fast-food worker for long.
Still, the two exchanged numbers in front of the restaurant, across the street from tire shops, a bodega and a Latino church. Without knowing it, LeGrand had begun a process that would change her from an apolitical fast-food worker to one of the most vocal members of a growing labor movement.
LeGrand, 22, is the kind of convert unions desperately need as they try to reverse a decades-long decline in membership. The new front in that effort is fast-food restaurants, and union leaders, although they are optimistic, know that unionizing these workers won’t happen overnight.
It took years for a janitors’ campaign that began in Los Angeles in the 1980s to achieve results, for instance, and that effort occurred when unions were stronger.
The fast-food workers movement, however, has been successful in rallying disconnected workers around the minimum wage.
#storysongs combo: “To Have and to Have Not,” by Billy Bragg. Gotta have everyone’s favorite leftie folkie for this story. “Just because you’re going forwards/Doesn’t mean I’m going backwards.”
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Chinese names blend traditions, drama
I have never liked my English name.
My parents didn’t know that Cindy was short for Cynthia. Or that Cindy Brady was the Cindy of the moment. They were only a few years removed from Taiwan.
They chose it because it sounded like my Chinese name, Shin-tzer (pronounced Sheen-dzuh).
Hear the resemblance? Neither do I.
Shin — “heart.” Tzer — literally, “a swamp.” By extension, tzer means glossy, radiant, enriching.
My name isn’t full of flowers, fragrance or delicacy like most Chinese girls’ names. My grandfather wanted me to have strength of character, not mere physical beauty.
“Cindy” seems colorless by comparison. It’s just a couple syllables that sound good together.
I grew up speaking English and eating with a fork. My family didn’t even celebrate Chinese New Year. Yet the Changs are ultra-traditional about names, down to our use of an ancient naming poem, a rare practice even in China and Taiwan.
When the language and the customs are gone, this is the shred that endures: a name.
#storysongs combo: “Different Names for the Same Thing,” by Death Cab for Cutie (have always loved their ripped-from-the-tabloids name).
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America’s Cup sailing is no breeze
The black Lycra suit comes first. Thin and tight, it will not keep out the cold entirely. Shannon Falcone stretches it over his 6-foot-5 frame and muscled shoulders. Then he puts on ankle braces and high-top shoes.
“Injuries are pretty common,” he says. “Ligament issues.”
His flotation vest comes equipped with an automatic homing beacon, a small oxygen bottle containing enough air for 30 breaths and two knives for cutting his way out of fabric or netting should he become trapped underwater.
Extra body padding remains hanging on the rod. Falcone needs freedom of movement for the grueling hours that lie ahead.
“You get pumped putting on your gear,” he says. “You just want to go.”
With the final addition of a crash helmet and harness, his outfit weighs almost 16 pounds and makes him look like a commando. Or a storm trooper from “Star Wars.”
Falcone is neither. He is a sailor in the America’s Cup.
#storysongs combo: “Long Boat Pass,” by Tennis. I read somewhere that this husband-wife duo sailed for seven months down the Eastern Seaboard, and the album that this song is on was the result. Even if untrue, it’s a ’60s-style pop gem.
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Changing faiths at the Crystal Cathedral
Towering like the Emerald City, the cathedral formerly known as Crystal sits at what might be Orange County’s nucleus, a trinity of confluencing freeways, the Angels and Ducks stadium and a glimpse of a sacred place of a different kind — Disneyland.
From that gleaming sanctuary, evangelist Robert Schuller delivered sermons that were beamed to television sets around the world. His ministry became synonymous with the megachurch, designed so the light and the breeze could stream through, a grand replica of his humble beginnings preaching on the roof of an Orange drive-in’s snack shop.
The Crystal Cathedral was to Schuller what Graceland was to Elvis. Now it has been bought by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, which has long coveted having a cathedral that sat at the center of its vast footprint of 1.2 million Catholics.
The name has already been changed to the Christ Cathedral. But the work of liturgical consultants, priests and architects to transform a temple so closely identified as a symbol of Schuller’s sunny, uniquely Southern Californian theology into one that conforms to the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church has just begun.
“The exterior will always be the Crystal Cathedral, at least for a while,” said Duncan Stroik, a professor of architecture at Notre Dame and editor of the publication Sacred Architecture Journal. “Catholic on the inside, but kind of Protestant on the outside.”
Those who have taken on the project recognize that their assignment is an intimidating one, but they also have faith:
They can turn the Crystal Cathedral into the Christ Cathedral.
#storysongs combo: “Made of Glass,” by KT Tunstall. Wow, these opening lyrics: “Fire me in an oven/Until I go hard enough/To deal with losing you.” And wow, this beautiful live version.
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If you have ideas for story-song pairings of your own, tweet the title and artist to @karihow or @LATgreatreads with the hashtag #storysongs.
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