Busy Being Free: A Lifelong Romantic is Seduced by Solitude

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I love words as much as most avid readers. I did an English degree and especially enjoy poetic writing on topics that resonate with me such as this one, but the context in which these words were used (i.e. talking about her husband’s obsession with a Kanye West song or her toyboy being ridiculously cool) just annoyed me. We get it. You can use uncommon, fancy words. You know famous people. It took away from the real life situations she was describing rather than add anything to them and this grated on me at times. During the COVID crisis, Barbara streamed the music from home to social media platforms -- over 70 episodes in all! For her series of #72andsong, GO HERE.

Busy Being Free, Emma Forrest (Hardback) Busy Being Free, Emma Forrest (Hardback)

During the COVID crisis, times were tough for all of us, including performers. Like so many of her colleagues, Barbara streamed out the music from home. For her series of #72andsong, GO HERE. This is the most romantic book you’ll ever read about deciding to be single. This is a memoir about love and heartbreak, about sex and celibacy, about marriage and divorce, and what comes after that. Further reading Some things she wrote beautifully about : how we can think our life is going one way and ends up going some where different and how the place you grow up is the source of all shame.Especially for women. Especially as we are deemed, with each passing decade, to be of diminishing value. Because someone who is that crazy, someone who takes beyond their fair share with their broken energy, cannot be the one to tell you you no longer exist.” Dance-in-the-living-room romantic... She can sigh a song without making it flimsy, declare sentiment without weighing it down. Jaunty numbers like her now-familiar jazz rendition of 'The Surrey With The Fringe On Top' (performed with a smile in the vocal) are also included. 'Hurry On Down' adds Warren Vache's cheeky cornet to superb effect." ~ Alix Cohen, Broadway World BUSY BEING FREE finds Barbara Fasano in peak form ... an assured singer with a warmly appealing sound who does full justice to the lyrics of the songs that she performs ... exhibits superb taste ... The band is all a singer could want, with each of the players making solid contributions to the whole ... a consistently engaging album by a terrific singer and the cats who surround her."~ Joe Lang, Jersey Jazz Magazine

Busy: A badge of honour or a big lie? - BBC Worklife Busy: A badge of honour or a big lie? - BBC Worklife

Barbara Fasano's BUSY BEING FREE is sheer perfection. This is a CD from a singer who has thrilledme from the first time I heard her. She is in full command and has established herself as one of the top singers of the day." ~ DavidKenney, WBAI "Everything Old Is New Again"Forrest, now 45, had a hugely successful adolescence. A teenage columnist for The Sunday Times, she became a music journalist and published her first novel, Namedropper, aged 22. She went on to write more novels before leaving journalism to work as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Her 2011 memoir Your Voice in My Head detailed her experience with mental illness, suicide attempts and the death of her psychiatrist, and in part examined her relationship with the actor Colin Farrell. Karma from NyShe's singing about being free and the guys who want her to settle down with them. She thinks she might love them all but she doesn't want to settle down. She doesn't want to hurt them but hey, would you settle down if you looked like Joni, had her intelligence and talent and was just getting started? I know I wouldn't. But yeah, it must have hurt to have so many wanting a committment from her; kinda selfish on their part in my humble opinion. Nonetheless, I think it made her feel bad...guilty...that they were hurt. She still wanted to see them but she didn't want to see one of them only and be tied down. Good for her.

Busy Being Free by Emma Forrest | Hachette UK Busy Being Free by Emma Forrest | Hachette UK

Mike from West Linn, OrI'm not sure that this is a fact ... more of a personal view. The lyrics here concern a woman who seems to yearn to be free and to be accomplishing that freedom. But her heart is "full and hollow, like a cactus tree". As I heard the lyrics the woman was very happy being free, going from man to man as she wished, living the free love life of the times. I'm grateful for these supportive words about my work ... "Barbara Fasano sings with such deeply felt belief in her material that the art she practices is closer to pure expression than interpretation. Her take on 'Photographs', in which she brings at least three levels to the song at the same time, is worth the price of the CD." A few years later a female roommate of mine was appalled that I thought that. To her the woman was miserable and unhappy ... hollow. We argued about this more than once. A girlfriend, at about this same time saw it both ways, as I now do. Having said that, there were parts of the book that I really enjoyed and that also made me reflect on my own experiences in a new light. She redeemed herself for the fact I had to keep looking up words. Barbara’s many New York headline engagement include concert appearances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center’s American Songbook at the Appel Room, Rose Hall, Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, New York Festival of Song, Town Hall and New York’s 92nd Street Y’s Lyrics and Lyricists series. Starring engagements in cabaret and nightclubs include Birdland, Jazz at Kitano, The Algonquin, Feinstein’s, The Carlyle, Iridium, 54 Below, Café Sabarsky, the Palace in Stamford, CT, Night Town in Cleveland, Live at Zedel and Pizza Express Live in London and the Royal Room at the Colony Hotel in Palm Beach. Arts centers and music festivals across the country include Saratoga Jazz Festival, Music Mountain Festival's Twilight Jazz, Kravis Center, Caramoor, Arizona Jazz Festival, Jersey Jazz, Kanbar Center, Cooperstown Music Festival, Provincetown Cabaret Festival, Sheldon Concert Hall and Jazz at The Bistro in St. Louis, Night Town in Cleveland, Prince Music Theatre, and Kerrytown Concert House.For someone whose career has started in journalism, I didn’t ask anybody anywhere any of the most basic questions. I asked some interesting abstract ones. I think this made for good interviews and less successful life choices.” A look at what it is to be a woman, and what it is to define oneself outside of the framework so often ascribed to women – Busy Being Free is an absorbing account of being alone, and one you’ll want to read in a single, insatiable, sitting. Busy Being Free Summary

Barbara Fasano - BIO

Lauded by everyone from Nigella Lawson to Lisa Taddeo, the title of Busy Being Free is taken from the song Cactus Tree by Joni Mitchell, in which Mitchell sings about an unnamed woman’s need for freedom and resistance to romantic commitment. In every case, the woman “thinks she loves them all” but ultimately is always “too busy being free.” – a notion which ties in beautifully with the melodies of Busy Being Free.

Fabulous song, terrific lyrics which can take on a different meaning to each listener, not once but many times over the years. The Guitar is also very underrated! I was at the cemetery, admiring the flowers and books at the graves of Karl Marx and Douglas Adams. The thing found most painful about divorce is that there was no Mark spot at which to leave offerings…. Songs are the place to leave offerings by everything you lost and everything that stayed - and they’re the flowers too.” Utterly unique yet totally relatable. A book that made me think about sex and desire in completely different ways and the tender painful brutality of love. A totally intoxicating read, that fascinated me from start to end -- Abi Morgan In some studies, it was found that people use busyiness to “hide from… laziness and fear of failure”. “We burn valuable time doing things that aren’t necessary or important because this busyness makes us feel productive,” he wrote. “As it turns out, you really do have to slow down to do your best.”