Anders Osborne

Anders Osborne (born 1966, Uddevalla, Sweden) is an American singer and songwriter.

Early life

As a teen, Anders started playing guitar and listening to Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, and Joni Mitchell records. He fell in love with the vocal styles of Ray Charles, Van Morrison and Lowell George. Then he heard the blues of Robert Johnson and recordings of African drumming, and suddenly, everything clicked. "Blues connected everything together for me," Osborne recalls. "The early rock, the R&B, the jazz, the singer-songwriters. Blues was like a thread running through everything." He began playing in Open D tuning (a rare choice for a guitar virtuoso), which gives his fretwork a signature sound and feel. "I first heard Open D on Joni Mitchell's Blue," he says, "and my fingers just fit the tuning."

Anders left home at age sixteen, and hitchhiked and played music throughout Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the United States. He settled in New Orleans in 1985 and still calls Louisiana his home.

Homecoming

Homecoming is the tradition of welcoming back alumni of a school. It is a tradition in many universities, colleges, and high schools in the United States. It usually includes activities for students and alumni, such as sports and culture events and a parade through the streets of the city or town. Homecoming should not be confused with prom, as they occur at different times of the year. Homecoming usually occurs in the fall, and prom usually occurs in the spring.

United States

Homecoming is an annual tradition in the United States. People, towns, high schools, and colleges come together, usually in late September or early October, to welcome back alumni and former residents. It is built around a central event, such as a banquet and, most often, a game of football, or, on occasion, basketball, ice hockey or soccer. When celebrated by schools, the activities vary widely. However, they usually consist of a football game played on a school's home football field, activities for students and alumni, a parade featuring the school's marching band and sports teams, and the coronation of a Homecoming Queen (and at many schools, a Homecoming King). A dance commonly follows the game or the day following the game. When attached to a football game, Homecoming traditionally occurs on the team's return from the longest road trip of the season. The game itself, whether it be football or another sport, will typically feature the home team playing a considerably weaker opponent. The game is supposed to be an "easy win" and thus weaker schools will sometimes play lower division schools.

Home-Coming

Home-Coming is a short story by Franz Kafka. A young man returns home and finds that his father does not express any feelings towards him. He recognizes the familiar terrain, such as his family's farm, but feels like a stranger. He stands at the door waiting, and feels a dread as it becomes apparent that he will always be on the outskirts both of his family and of his community.

It has been suggested that the story is essentially the tale of the Prodigal Son inverted.

References

Homecoming (poem)

"Homecoming" is a 1968 poem by Bruce Dawe. Written as an elegy for anonymous soldiers, "Homecoming" is an anti-war poem protesting Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War during the 1960s. Dennis Haskell, Winthrop Professor of English and Cultural Studies at University of Western Australia, has called it "the most highly regarded poem about Vietnam written by any Australian", and Peter Pierce, the editor of The Cambridge History of Australian Literature has described it as "one of the finest threnodies in the war literature of Vietnam".

The anti-war sentiment in "Homecoming" is more direct than in Dawe's other well-known war poem, "Weapons Training", written two years later. The ironic use of the word homecoming, with its usual connotations of celebration, as the title becomes apparent on reading the poem, in which the acts of collecting and processing the bodies of the war dead and shipping them home are described in a highly repetitive fashion, with a rhythm that evokes the beat of a funeral drum. Although the poem was written in 1968, the year Dawe left the Royal Australian Air Force, it had its origins, according to Dawe's biographer Peter Kuch, in Dawe's earlier "political awakening in Melbourne in the mid-1950s" and in particular his personal reaction to the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Before joining the RAAF, Dawe had worked as a postman. John Kinsella has proposed that Dawe's experiences during that time are echoed in the final lines of "Homecoming":