I was just singing along to myself and I hit upon the deeply weird little ballad "The Lady of Carlisle"--a high-tone lady chooses between suitors by asking them to retrieve her fan from a lion's den, and one of them accepts--and I started thinking about the song in a new and different way. Literary types like to have the brave fellow retrieve the ( Read more... )

So you probably know my predilection for listening to Youtube's automatic playlists starting with a song I know. They tend to drift and it often dismays me to find out where we end up. But usually that's just an esthetic problem. Today I got a shocker ( Read more... )

Lionel Ritchie may be many good things, but to call his music Motown is to render the label useless.

I swallowed Thornlost in five hours after I picked it up but the next book isn't even published. Now I understand the plight of the person who normally reads series books.

Like I said for Elsewhens and Touchstone, I can't describe these books so they sound like good books. But I love them. The key questions of the books are all about the complex ( Read more... )

Words from here, though I do know them by heart. This has a lovely tune, though I like Ewan MacColl's rendition which I can't find for listening to online better than Steeleye Span's. I mean, theirs is lovely and haunting, but his is simple and heartfelt ( Read more... )

When you have an earworm and for once you want to undulge it rather than exorcising it and either you don't know the name of the song or worse, you do know the name of the song and youtube is full of songs with that name or a similar one and you keep clicking and clicking trying to find the particular song ( Read more... )

This video is a pretty literal acting-out of the words of "Dedo mili, zlatni," which ia Macedonian song about how Golden Dear Grandpa and Grandma live out their quaint and loving sunset years eating peppers and smoking pipes and spinning wool and all that ( Read more... )

So I had lent my banjo out and I just got it back, and I'm very glad to have it, but I need to get a new bridge for it ( Read more... )

Lyrics Translate

I now know that Can Bonomo's song "Ali Baba" is not about what I thought it was about, for example. I mean, it is about the character from the Arabian Nights, but the rest is pretty unexpected.

I can't even remember what I read in the weeks I didn't post, which is why I have joined this little game.  Anyway, my bathroom book is A Hundrede Thousand Fools of God which is not about religion especially: it's about everything to do with ethnic music in ex-Soviet Central Asia since before it was ex-Soviet to roughly now. It comes with a CD to ( Read more... )