In which I submit "I Can't Keep Up" to Der Yidisher Idol in Mexico City

When I heard there was going to be the second annual "Der Yidisher Idol" this summer I decided I had to enter the competition. I hate competing but I like supporting quixotic causes. I recently held a competition on my telenovela blog and out of the 12,000 visitors we have a day, only TWO people submitted entries. That bummed me out. So if nothing else, I will swell the Mexican contest's applicant pool.

They are calling it the Yiddish version of "American Idol" but it's actually more about songwriting: there's a $750 prize for the best original Yiddish lyrics to an existing tune, and a $1000 prize for the best original Yiddish song, lyrics and tune both. I decided to submit videos in both categories. I've had bronchitis since I came back from snowy Boston a MONTH ago, so I sang these two songs with a lot of coughing in between takes. Lots and lots of coughing. For some reason the second one sounds like I inhaled helium. Oh well.

Here's the first one. A few years ago I fell in love with the 18th century German folksong Stets in trauer and the version I heard was in a Southern dialect that sounded kind of like Yiddish to me. So I decided to write Yiddish lyrics for it. It's a song I really relate to but I wish I didn't. Sadly, I do remember what it's like to be madly in love with a bum and patiently waiting for him to... to what? What do bums ever do? Anyway, here it is, with Roger Lynn Spears on the piano. There are subtitles so you can get the story! Roger did not want to be on camera so I lip-synched this afterwards, a skill I do not have.



So the second one was more of a challenge. I've only written maybe five songs in my whole life and never feel like I have anything to tell the world, so that's a roadblock. I decided to write myself an anthem, why should I not have one? This one, I had to lip-sync and play fake piano because I only have two mics so we couldn't all record it at once.



I used Nahum Stutchkoff's Yiddish Rhyming Dictionary, and his marvellous thesaurus (out of print but you can often find a copy on eBay). And a dictionary. The Yiddish equivalent of "I Can't Keep Up" is Ikh ken nit mithaltn.

I got Sheva Zucker to vet the grammar and help with words - she said some that I'd chosen were "in the dictionary but nobody uses them." Ken Bloom and Jim Baird from our band Mappamundi came for the afternoon to record this as well as priceless songs from the past which will appear here at a later date! (Yaka Hula Hiki Du af yidish and Donkey Monkey Business aka Donki Monki Biznes).