My Favourite Song from one of my favorite singers: The Rose

I first met her on the cover of a "Hi-fi CD" many many years ago. On the bottom right, there's a singer in short hair in a dark dress, her left hand fingers spread out in front of her bosom, a mike in her right hand, her lips parted, her half closed eyes upon her slightly upturned face. She was singing. To the top left, there's that white flare when the lights are too bright when one takes a snapshot of the nightclub ceiling light. The title of the CD? Amanda McBroom: Live from Rainbows and Stars. Rainbows and Stars is a famous nightclub in at the Rockefeller Plaza New York. The time was Nov. 9, 1994. It was a magic moment. The recording was wonderful: you got to savor that peculiar mix of almost conversational ease, her voice whispering, trembling even rasping along with the moods and feelings portrayed by her songs. I still had the CD and I still listen to it from time to time. Every time I heard it, my old feelings came back. I was deeply moved. It was a moving CD. She wrote and sang from her heart.

This is what Chip Deffaa, author of the Voices of the Jazz Age wrote about McBroom: "On this album, you'll hear McBroom herself offer it. And the song has resonance because it's true; the words are a remembrance of her own father." McBroom is a very unique phenomenon: her father an actor, her mother a poet, she's been acting since age 4 and now she writes the lyrics and sometimes both the lyrics and the music of her very personal songs which she sings. It's rare to find so much talent converging in one tiny body. She wrote numerous songs. But there is a song which I love most. It's a short song about love written in 1977 and sung by her and now by many other singers including Judy Collins, Joan Baez. It's called "The Rose", a song which now features in another later CD of hers called Amanda McBroom: Portraits: The Best of Amanda McBroom. I'll let the lyrics tell their own story. They'll certainly do so better than I. Here they are:


Some say love...it is a river
 That drowns the tender reed.
Some say love...it is a razor
 That leaves your soul to bleed
Some say love...it is a hunger
  An endless, aching need
I say love...it is a flower
 And you its only seed.
It's the heart that fears the breaking
 That never learns to dance.
It's the dream that's afraid of waking
 That never takes the chance.
It's the one who won't be taken
 Who cannot seem to give.
And the soul afraid of dying
 That never learns to live.
When the night has been too lonely
 And the road has been too long
And you think that love is only
 For the lucky and the strong.
Just remember, in the winter,
 Far beneath the bitter snows...
Lies the the seed that, with the sun's love,
 In the spring becomes the rose.