My three-year-old reveres here and my son, at seven, claims she's boring but still sings along and shouts out 'Swiper no swiping!' But I long for the day they both grow out of Dora and I can get those wretched songs out of my head.
No matter how wretched the song's mood — or how generous, as in "You Inspire Me" and "Long Limbed Girl" — Mr. Lowe sang carefully, borrowing Nat King Cole's nearly conversational control and Sam Cooke's sweet melodic curlicues.
A few drinks and wretched pop songs later, I found myself hurrying to the parking lot with another young guy who told me I had "beer goggles" and that my dance partner was very unattractive.
The wretched pun and song somehow bucked me up, and as the boat carried us back upriver in the cooling air toward the camp, I had all but come around when an enormous crocodile crashed into the water from the bank not ten yards away.
Marty's wife is a wretched soul.
The Oscar-nominated songs are always wretched, and no one has seen most of the films.
The encore included three sturdy older songs and one wretched new one, about how writing music puts him on "the edge".
His songs became playful narrative fantasies populated by improbable characters like the "chimbley sweep," whose song of despair ("I am a poor and a wretched boy/ A chimbley, chimbley sweep") Mr. Meloy cannot sing without a grin.
This comes from the part of him that's fascinated by the work of '50s and '60s country songwriters like Leon Payne and Hank Cochran: unreliable-narrator songs packing together the mundane and the wretched.
The song concerns itself with all the strange and wretched miseries a person endures when the only thing he wants is no longer available to him; from that place, the notion of consolation is laughable.
