Daily News Channel
LONG WAY DOWN Tom O’Dell (Sony) The BRIT’s critics choice winner, who spent a year of his childhood in New Zealand, is the best kind of everyman songwriter. Somewhere in between the soaring and earthy vocals, where a song such a Hold Me, has Beatlesque influences and throbbing piano flourishes O’Dell shows he has the touch of a classic tunesmith about him on a debut album which is unfashionably accessible, self-aware and confident.
The only time I ever met Henry Ford, he looked at me and probably wondered, “Who is this little s.o.b. fresh out of college?” He wasn’t real big on college graduates, and I was one of 50 in the Ford training course in September 1946, working in a huge drafting room at the enormous River Rouge plant near Detroit.
In his 11 years in power, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, has cultivated an everyman image of himself, in stark contrast to the formal, distant mien of his late father and predecessor Hafez. The late president was feared more than he was loved.