CHILDREN OF COINCIDENCE
DORY PREVIN
from the 1976 Warner Records LP
We're Children of Coincidence
and Harpo Marx
CHILDREN OF COINCIDENCE
If I hadn't made a left-hand turn
If you hadn't made a right
If I'd waited just a moment more
If you'd missed the light
If that car had never blown its horn
If that friend had stopped to talk
We'd have never met at all
If I didn't take that walk
I'd have gotten there too early
You'd have gotten there too late
We are childen of coincidence
Coincidence and fate
Crossed connections
Lost connections
Empty corners
Crowded intersections
Accidents
And incidents
We're children of coincidence
And chance
If he hadn't stopped to pick it up
If she hadn't dropped her book
When she took it if she'd noticed him
How come we never look
If she hadn't been so very white
If he hadn't been so black
Would she smile and say hello to him
Would he have turned his back
If she cancelled her appointment
Would he break his other date
We are children of coincidence
Coincidence and fate
Crossed connections
Lost connections
Empty corners
Crowded intersections
Accidents
And incidents
We're children of coincidence
And chance
If the planets were in perfect place
If your sign was on the rise
If my stars were in complete accord
But the sun was in your eyes
You'd have only seen my shadow
As I passed you on the street
And it might have been a hundred years
Before our souls would meet
And we would still be strangers
Too early and too late
We are children of coincidence
Coincidence and fate
Crossed connections
Lost connections
Empty corners
Crowded intersections
Accidents
And incidents
We're children of coincidence
And fate
Words and music by
DORY PREVIN
© 1976 Warner Records/Rhino Music
Dory Previn, who was born Dorothy Langan on 22 October 1925, began her career as a cabaret performer and lyricist, initially working most frequently with pianist and composer André Previn, the man who became her second husband in 1959.
The couple wrote a number of well-received songs together while working under contract at MGM studios, garnering their first Academy Award nomination for The Faraway Part of Town that was performed by Judy Garland in the 1960 film Pepé and a second nomination for their 1962 song Second Chance which featured in Two For The See-Saw, a popular film starring Robert Mitchum and Shirley Maclaine.
The next six years saw the couple compose many more cinema-related songs together including You're Gonna Hear From Me (recorded by Frank Sinatra among others) and five witty, tongue-in-cheek titles for the 1967 adaptation of Jacqueline Susann's scandalous 1966 bestseller Valley of the Dolls. This is all the more impressive given that Dory Previn suffered a psychiatric breakdown in 1965 that saw her briefly hospitalized to undergo treatment for severe depression.
Previn's transition from witty Broadway-style lyricist to 1970s singer/songwriter was triggered by the second breakdown she experienced after learning that her husband, who had gone to the UK to work as the conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, was having an affair with actor Mia Farrow and had fathered a child by her. Previn's breakdown began on the aircraft she had boarded, despite her lifelong fear of flying, to take her to the English capital where she hoped to somehow salvage her doomed marriage.
Writing, specifically about herself and her emotions, became a key component of her therapy and led to the creation of the songs that would appear on her critically acclaimed 1970 LP On My Way To Where. (This was her second album, preceded by a jazz-based recording of original material titled The Leprechauns Are Upon Me that she released under the name 'Dory Langdon' in 1958.) The album, which featured her accompanying herself on guitar along with other musicians, included the song Beware of Young Girls, a thinly veiled attack on Mia Farrow who married her former husband that same year, an event which saw Previn re-hospitalized to undergo another course of electro-convulsive therapy.
The LP also featured the chilling cut With My Daddy in the Attic that spoke indirectly of Previn's difficult and possibly incestuous relationship with her father, an Irish-American World War One veteran who had been gassed in the trenches and was prone to episodes of extreme paranoia that, at their worst, saw him become violent toward his wife and children and, at one point, keep them literally imprisoned inside the family home for several months. Despite this and his destructive habit of alternately overindulging and ignoring her, Previn's father was supportive of her decision to become a performer after she displayed genuine talent as both a singer and a dancer in her youth.
On My Way To Where was followed by six more LPs of original singer-songwriter material including Mythical Kings and Iguanas (1971), Reflections In A Mud Puddle (1971), the concept album Mary C Brown and the Hollywood Sign (1972), the self-titled Dory Previn (1974) and what was to be her next to last solo effort We're Children of Coincidence and Harpo Marx (1976). She also found time to write two autobiographies, a television screenplay, a song for the controversial 1973 film Last Tango in Paris in addition to releasing the double LP Live At Carnegie Hall that went on to become her most enduringly popular recording.
All of Previn's music features startlingly honest and strikingly original lyrics, many of which are as good as any of those penned by her 1970s singer-songwriter contemporaries, and clever arrangements that make the best use of her limited vocal range. She was never afraid to tackle taboo topics like incest, artistic failure and the bogus spiritualist movement of the 1970s, often disarming listeners with her combination of high intelligence and what, on occasion, could be dark and even macabre humor.
Previn spent the 1980s focusing on stage work, often appearing under the name Dory Previn Shannon, and writing short stories and a novel titled Word-Play With An Invisible Relative. All this work did not prevent her from co-writing the theme song for the 1980s sitcom Two Of A Kind for which she and her songwriter partner Jim Pasquale received an Emmy award in 1984. That same year she married actor and artist Joby Baker, going on to collaborate with him on an illustrated edition of her 1970s song lyrics that appeared in 1995 as The Dory Previn Songbook.
Two years later Previn revived her professional partnership with her former husband André Previn, collaborating with him on The Magic Number, a piece he composed for orchestra and solo soprano. She
allegedly contacted Woody Allen after the comedian was accused of sexually
molesting his adopted daughter Dylan in 1992, suggesting that Mia Farrow had based the story of what had been done to Dylan inside the Farrow home on the
lyrics of her song With My Daddy In The Attic. Nor is it without significance that, like the decidedly menacing father figure in the song, Allen also plays the clarinet.
Despite suffering a series of minor strokes which affected her eyesight, Previn continued to work and managed to release a final LP — another conceptual work about the environment and the threat of nuclear war titled Planet Blue — in 2002, a decade before her death at the age of eighty-six on 14 February 2012.
Use the link below to listen to more great music by lyricist, composer and cabaret/stage performer DORY PREVIN:
Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube. Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.
Use this link to read a long post by JUSTIN LEVINE about the connections between DORY PREVIN and the more lurid aspects of the ALLEN/FARROW scandal:
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