Tom Lehrer has died

https://tomlehrersongs.com/

I, Tom Lehrer, individually and as trustee of the Tom Lehrer Trust 2007, hereby grant the following permissions: All copyrights to lyrics or music written or composed by me have been permanently and irrevocably relinquished, and therefore such songs are now in the public domain. All of my songs that have never been copyrighted, having been available for free for so long, are now also in the public domain. In other words, I have abandoned, surrendered and disclaimed all right, title and interest in and to my work and have injected any and all copyrights into the public domain.

The permission granted includes all lyrics which I have written to music by others, although the music to such parodies, if copyrighted by their composers, are of course not included without permission of their copyright owners. The translated songs on this website may be found on YouTube in their original languages. Performing and recording rights to all of my songs are included in this permission. Translation rights are also included.

In particular, permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action.

Some recording, movie, and television rights to songs written by me are merely licensed non-exclusively by me to recording, movie, or TV companies. All such rights are now released herewith and therefore do not require any permission from me or from Maelstrom Music, which is merely me in another hat, nor from the recording, movie, or TV companies involved.

In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs.

So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.

NOTICE: THIS WEBSITE WILL BE SHUT DOWN AT SOME DATE IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE, SO IF YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD ANYTHING, DON’T WAIT TOO LONG.

Tom Lehrer November 26, 2022

Tom Lehrer has been my go-to source of acerbic wit and brilliant satire since I first encountered him when attending the Norwegian University of Tecnology and Science; a group I joined there held Lehrer in high esteem and I, too, was blown away by how timeless a lot of his songs were; a lot of satire ages very quickly, but chances are my unborn grandchildren will laugh hysterically to 'Who's Next?' or 'Wernher von Braun' after doing the mid-21st century equivalent of googling to find out who WvB was, of course.

Godspeed, Tom. This has been a rough week - three of the heroes of my formative years have checked out of existence - Lehrer, Ozzy and author Ingvar Ambjørnsen. Sigh. Who's next?

As sad as today is, the one ray of sunshine here is that Tom Lehrer’s obit was written so long ago (and saved for the day it would be needed), that no one updated it with the subsequent revelation that his work at the Atomic Energy Commission was actually a cover story for his far more sensitive work at the fledgling National Security Agency.

Seeing the New York Times publish wrong out-of-date information has been funny since Judith Miller.

"Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?" (2024), 170 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40439810

"Tom Lehrer releases song lyrics to public domain" (2020), 130 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24833683

"Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire" (2018), 80 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774608

I loved Lehrer growing up- my parents had his record "That Was the Week That Was" which I think is his finest work. Anyway, when I went to college (UCSC), I took his 'Nature of Math' course, which was quite enjoyable. He was a great presenter, I learned all sorts of neat stuff like the the quartic factoring challenge and the pigeonhole principle/birthday paradox (at the time, I didn't know much about hash tables and didn't make the connection).

I almost ended up TA'ing his class the next year but I had to focus on my undergraduate thesis instead. I would have loved to get to know him better, as his sense of humor was incredible.

I also had Ralph Abraham- a chaos theory guy and psychonaut who taught hist class (Nature of Math) in a natural amphitheater- at points, I could almost picture him wearing a toga, lecturing us on greek math.

What a wonderful soul.

> Reflecting on his bicoastal life in a 1981 interview for Newsday, he said he planned to keep his Massachusetts home “until my brain turns completely to Jell-O, at which time I will of course move to California full time.”

To think he is only a couple years younger than Mel Brooks.

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, my father loved Tom Lehrer - had all his records. My brother and I joked about the “sliding down the razor blade of life” lyric a lot.

"In German, oder Englisch, I know how to count down Und I'm learning Chinese!" - as relevant as ever. Maybe less so German and more matrix multiplication

RIP Mr. Lehrer.

I'd only heard of him from a song of his, "Poisoning pigeons in the park", that has been available on DECtalk since way back.

Searching for this, I just found another of his, "I got it from Agnes", that has also been adapted for DECtalk. Similar dark humor!

https://chordify.net/chords/i-got-it-from-agnes-by-tom-lehre...

Did he have a song "when you're dead" about when you learn that someone is alive that you thought was dead? Because google ai thinks that he did but I can't find it...

I used his songs as examples in a web audio project a few months ago - as others have mentioned Lehrer generously put all his music in the public domain making it perfect for use in other projects.

Originally I was going to use one of his albums but I found that his humor still hits hard after all these years, to the extent that I thought the songs would detract from my project. In the end I just used my three favorite song: The Elements, We Will All Go Together When We Go, and the absolutely brutal takedown of Werher Von Braun.

In "An Evening Waster With Tom Lehrer" he chats a little between songs and tells a short story about someone who becomes a doctor: "He soon became a specialist, specializing in diseases of the rich. He was therefore able to retire at an early age".

"Diseases of the rich" has always seemed like a useful metaphor for one way to decide on what product you are going to build. Does it heal a "disease" of the "rich"?