"I built my house from barley rice..."
I'm not sure why Cat Stevens has such a calming effect on me, but some of his songs make me remember Friday nights at home with everyone playing pool and laughing, and I'd sitting on the couch and read or watch. Sometimes I'd play, but usually I just liked watching everyone else play.
I like the songs that make me remember when everyone was done playing pool, and the music was still loud but we would all just sit around and hang out. It's funny, but I'm beginning to understand the songs my parents listened to. Peter, Paul, and Mary were usually pretty straightforward, but the meanings of their songs changed for me over the years. I still remember the first time I realized what Puff the Magic Dragon was about--it was pretty traumatizing. Not half as traumatizing as the first time I understood Queen's The Prophet's Song, though.
I think that's why I prefer the older songs to the ones that are "popular" today. For one thing, the older ones have more personal meaning for me, but mostly it's because they aren't all about sexual relations. And there are some good songs today that are about sexual relations! But I like the older ones. I don't know. Maybe it's like poetry. I love free-verse poetry, I think it's about as close as you can get to conveying emotion through the written word, but part of me really misses the rhymed poetry. Given the choice between the two, I think I'd choose free-verse, but it really depends on what I'd be reading. Some rhymed poetry I do not care for, some of it is amazing; same goes for free-verse. And some prose is more heart-wrenching than some poetry.
Music is where it's at, I think. It's poetry and mathematics and outpouring of emotion and if you do it right, it triggers that spot in the brain and clicks into place just here, inside. The senior girls in choir sang a four-part arrangement of "Bring Me Little Water, Silvie" with hand rhythms that Dr. Shelley found on YouTube, and twice when I heard it, it made me cry like a child. Once at Patrick's, and once at a dress rehearsal.
The same thing happens with "Set Me." Not every time, but sometimes when we sing it at concerts in the round I can't help but cry, especially when we get to the soaring neither can the floods, the floods drown love, and then I look around and half the choir is in tears. And usually we're on tour (statistically speaking, I mean; we do one Spring concert at the college and between seven and ten abroad), and a good number of folks in the audience might not speak English but they know that half the people singing at them are having Emotional Moments.
I don't know what it is, but I love it.
I like the songs that make me remember when everyone was done playing pool, and the music was still loud but we would all just sit around and hang out. It's funny, but I'm beginning to understand the songs my parents listened to. Peter, Paul, and Mary were usually pretty straightforward, but the meanings of their songs changed for me over the years. I still remember the first time I realized what Puff the Magic Dragon was about--it was pretty traumatizing. Not half as traumatizing as the first time I understood Queen's The Prophet's Song, though.
I think that's why I prefer the older songs to the ones that are "popular" today. For one thing, the older ones have more personal meaning for me, but mostly it's because they aren't all about sexual relations. And there are some good songs today that are about sexual relations! But I like the older ones. I don't know. Maybe it's like poetry. I love free-verse poetry, I think it's about as close as you can get to conveying emotion through the written word, but part of me really misses the rhymed poetry. Given the choice between the two, I think I'd choose free-verse, but it really depends on what I'd be reading. Some rhymed poetry I do not care for, some of it is amazing; same goes for free-verse. And some prose is more heart-wrenching than some poetry.
Music is where it's at, I think. It's poetry and mathematics and outpouring of emotion and if you do it right, it triggers that spot in the brain and clicks into place just here, inside. The senior girls in choir sang a four-part arrangement of "Bring Me Little Water, Silvie" with hand rhythms that Dr. Shelley found on YouTube, and twice when I heard it, it made me cry like a child. Once at Patrick's, and once at a dress rehearsal.
The same thing happens with "Set Me." Not every time, but sometimes when we sing it at concerts in the round I can't help but cry, especially when we get to the soaring neither can the floods, the floods drown love, and then I look around and half the choir is in tears. And usually we're on tour (statistically speaking, I mean; we do one Spring concert at the college and between seven and ten abroad), and a good number of folks in the audience might not speak English but they know that half the people singing at them are having Emotional Moments.
I don't know what it is, but I love it.