Monthly Reviews | Take It Easy

It’s that time again, isn’t it: the beginning of a new month and my opportunity to remind you of what you saw, missed or tried to avoid on my blog last month. There’s no escape – here comes that reminder!

In total I landed in your inbox fourteen times during May, all but three of which were music-related. ‘Twas ever thus! I’ll go through the music ones first, and come back to the others at the end.

As usual, I played you sets of songs each week for Tuesday Tunes, beginning with Tuesday Tunes 250: Return Of The Intros, which of course did exactly what it said on the tin. This is a theme which seems to be a bountiful source of supply, and for my ninth post (over three years) of songs with great intros I played Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Golden Earring, The Psychedelic Furs, and Pink Floyd.

I then repeated the trick with Tuesday Tunes 251: Yup, Intros Again, in which you heard Deep Purple, AC/DC, The Animals, The Band, and The Darkness.

For the remainder of the month (and into this week) I played songs with work as their theme. First up was the imaginatively titled Tuesday Tunes 252: Work, in which I played tunes by Lee Dorsey, Jackson Browne (with CS&N), Glen Campbell, Cat Stevens, and The Waterboys.

And I saw out the month with Tuesday Tunes 253: More Work, in which I gave you music by Sam Cooke, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Dolly Parton, Dire Straits, and The Beatles.

In addition to Tuesdays I also kept a regular date with you for Song Lyric Sunday. For the first one of these in May Jim asked us to play something from a debut album, and I went with SLS: Murmur, the first release by one of my favourite bands: R.E.M. I played three of its tracks and, as I suspected, this was a new album to many.

Our next task was to play a song from a compilation or greatest hits album. I went with SLS: Let The Music Speak For Itself, which was a ‘best of’ by another of my favourite bands, Merry Hell. They are a folk rock band from NW England, who write their own songs and make some great videos for them. The album was released a couple of years ago and is a comprehensive 28 track selection from their repertoire. Somehow I managed to restrain myself to playing just three of them, though I was sorely tempted to go for more!

Following that, we were playing a song from an album made after someone left a band and went solo. You can probably guess who I went for from my title of Song Lyric Sunday: Solo Gabriel. I have long been a fan of Peter Gabriel and he felt like a natural choice for me. I played three, one each from separate albums, and they are all great songs.

For the final May Sunday the selection was from a breakout album. I went back to my teenage years and my folk roots with Song Lyric Sunday: Let’s Get Away, which referenced the first line of the opening track on Pentangle’s Basket Of Light album. I played a couple of its tracks, highlighting the beautiful voice of Jacqui McShee. Highly recommended!

There were three further music posts during May, the first of which continued my tradition of greeting the month, with May Day 2025. As previously I gave you a potted version of the tradition as we mark it here in the UK, and played a couple of tunes, by Oysterband and Magpie Lane. I then opened out into celebrations elsewhere, which gave me the excuse to play a favourite video by Faun – great song and a very NSFW accompaniment for it!

I then went to one of my occasional series with A Classic Album 5, in which I featured Cosmo’s Factory, by Creedence Clearwater Revival. These are posts in which I take a deeper dive into a record, and for this one I played seven of its tracks and provided links to the other four. It is a fantastic album: a view which many seemed to share, judging from their comments.

For my final May musical selection I went to something which is becoming a regular, with New Music May 2025. For this I played a set of songs which had been released during the month, though one was actually a new video for a song more than fifty years old. The tracks came from Great Lake Swimmers, Mary Chapin Carpenter, The Hooters, Lynyrd Skynyrd (spot the intruder!), Noah Cyrus, and I’m With Her. There are some real beauties amongst these, and the new video for Free Bird is fantastic!

That just leaves the three non-musical posts. The first of these was the previous monthly review, That Was April in which I gave you links to all of the posts from that month, and for a change ended with a slightly different video: a wonderfully funny piece of Trump-trolling by the Swiss Tourist Board.

Then came the one occasion last month on which I took up one of the prompts from John Holton’s Writer’s Workshop, with Old Friends. The prompt was to write about a ‘reunion’ and I told of a meeting with one of my old school friends, one of the few with whom I’m still in regular touch. Anyone who knows us both wouldn’t have been in the least surprised that it took place around a football match! And I even managed to squeeze in a favourite tune about Friends from my schooldays.

It is always pleasing when my most viewed, liked and commented post in a month is one of my occasional mental health pieces. That was the case last month, with my post Mental Health Awareness Week 2025, in which I explained the background to this, why it is needed at all, and why it is important to me, given my own history. The comments were wonderful, a couple of people shared it, and it prompted the lovely Yvette to invite me to be interviewed on her blog, the Priorhouse Blog. She ran that last Sunday and if you’re interested you can find it here. Everything you ever wanted to know about me, plus loads more you probably didn’t! But it brings home the importance of this year’s MHAW theme, which was ‘community.’ Blogging is its own community, and we should all be grateful for our place in it. And it’s a helluva lot more ‘social’ than some of the other social media!

So, that was my May. I like to leave you with a video to reward you for schlepping all the way through these posts, and this month I’m reprising one of the tunes I’ve played. This is an absolute beauty, from the New Music post: