They just don’t make music like they used to, says Peter Yarrow. Or at least most of them don’t.
“Lady Gaga is sensational,” said the folk music luminary, who will perform at the Flying Monkey Performance Center in Plymouth on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. “Her appearances and what she’s sharing and what she cares about, she’s an artist like Connie Smith. . . . She’s terrific.”
While it would be hard to find two artists more stylistically at odds than the envelope-pushing Gaga and the ever-mellow Yarrow, the ’60s chart topper admires the young pop idol’s desire to change the world through music. It’s what he’s still trying to do after 50 years in the business. And it’s what makes him relevant in an age of profit-driven, often vapid music.
"To a large degree, the music of Peter, Paul and Mary is the legacy that I’m touring, so it’s not terribly different from what it used to be,” Yarrow said in a telephone interview from Wisconsin, where he was waiting out the hurricane after performing at a couple of political events in the battleground state. “You’ll hear the same kinds of messages and the same songs . . . but these songs are not ‘Oh, here’s an archaic song and isn’t it interesting that the world was once like that.’ These songs are very vibrant and meaningful now.”
But now, as always, Yarrow believes that social activism involves more than delivering some compelling lyrics by way of a catchy tune.
