Michael Owen
speaker
246 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 26 Nov
Michael Owen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
How's he done that?
Yeah.
Technical genius.
That's my favourite ever goal.
Yeah.
We said biggest, didn't we?
So I'll agree with the guys.
We'll go with Maradona.
Their December draws are the biggest ever too.
A share of £38.2 million to be won with you and your neighbours lining up on the same team sheet.
That's 30% of every ticket going straight to charities and community projects.
The kind of stat you actually want on the board.
Fresh Air · Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy · 6 Dec 2024
podcast
The classic songs, Lady Be Good, Embraceable You, It's Wonderful, Love Is Here to Stay, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off, Fascinating Rhythm, I Got Rhythm, I've Got a Crush on You, My Ship, The Man That Got Away, Long Ago and Far Away, I Could Go On. They all have lyrics by Ira Gershwin.
Most of his best-known songs were written with his younger brother, the pianist and composer George Gershwin, but Ira also wrote with Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Kurt Weill. Thank you for having me. Let's start with Ella Fitzgerald singing Lady Be Good from her 1959 album Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook. It's the title song from an early Gershwin musical.
Michael Owen, welcome to Fresh Air. I love the Gershwin's music, so it's a pleasure to be able to talk with you about it. I opened with Lady Be Good because I think it ties together the early part of Ira Gershwin's career with the part in the 1950s when he wasn't really writing much. And his career, his songs, like, needed a boost.
And Ella Fitzgerald's Gershwin Songbook really helped give him that boost. So can you talk a little bit about the importance of both of those ends, you know, the Lady Be Good musical and the Ella Fitzgerald Gershwin songbook?
Thank you, first off, for having me on. 1924 was absolutely a big year for Ira. Ira and George had brought them together for the first time as a songwriting team to write a Broadway show. And because Lady Be Good was such a success, it fostered the rest of their career together. But by the time the late 1950s came around when Ella Fitzgerald recorded the songbook, Ira's career had come to an end.
He might not have known that at the time, but it did. We know that now. And the songbook, one of a series of songbooks that Ella Fitzgerald did of other songwriters of the period, brought a new light, a new focus on the songs that the brothers wrote. And so it was a commercial success. It was an artistic success.
And it brought on a wealth of new recordings of those songs and others in the catalog and helped Ira financially quite well.
George and Ira had very different interests and personalities. George was more extroverted. Ira was more shy or wanted to stay more in the background. And George was very musical. Ira was immersed in words. He read a lot. He kept a record of what happened. He read, he started writing light verse that was published in the college magazine or newspaper and other places.
Showing 121–140 of 246 · page 7 of 13
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