{"id":10981,"date":"2011-12-19T00:01:30","date_gmt":"2011-12-19T05:01:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=10981"},"modified":"2011-12-17T10:54:04","modified_gmt":"2011-12-17T15:54:04","slug":"the-unclenching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/the-unclenching\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unclenching"},"content":{"rendered":"<iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PFa8VZfucaA?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><p>Here&#8217;s a clip I&#8217;ve been keeping watch for on YouTube for some time: <strong>Van Morrison<\/strong> and <strong>Sinead O&#8217;Connor<\/strong> with <strong>The Chieftans<\/strong> on <em>Letterman<\/em>. I never paid much attention to O&#8217;Connor during her hairless peak, but she&#8217;s more worth a few minutes of my time when she&#8217;s got hair on the top of her head. I like Morrison a lot, so the night I was watching <em>Letterman<\/em> and saw them come out together my index finger lifted from the remote control.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not a great fan of &#8220;Have I Told You Lately That I Love You.&#8221; It&#8217;s like Morrison&#8217;s &#8220;Perfect Day&#8221; in the Lou Reed catalog: played to death, easy to digest, sentimental, overpraised, and musically not that gripping to my ears. In this performance, however, I loved watching the contrast of O&#8217;Connor trying to stick to the song&#8217;s script like a\u00a0devout\u00a0fangirl while the song&#8217;s author scats inappropriately and generally seems intent on throwing her off course. In the closing moments Van takes it to the limit, and we witness <strong>The Unclenching<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s a clip I&#8217;ve been keeping watch for on YouTube for some time: Van Morrison and Sinead O&#8217;Connor with The Chieftans on Letterman. I never paid much attention to O&#8217;Connor during her hairless peak, but she&#8217;s more worth a few minutes of my time when she&#8217;s got hair on the top of her head. I <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/the-unclenching\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[24,353],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10981"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10981\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}