Underneath the Stars

The Heart and Soul Nebula

'I defy you stars!....' ~ Romeo - Romeo & Juliet, William Shakespeare

If there's any sound for the pain of forbidden love, with all its soaring and falling, joy and despair, it's this one:

Songs for a Rainy Day

Awake

Some days it's hard to keep awake. Not physically awake, but every other kind.

And what's worse, it feels like everyone else is sleeping too. And each hour is a tiresome trek.

But still, I keep myself awake. Do you? We have to.

Love Will Tear Us Apart... or Not?

This song is a strange one. With every listen, its meaning seems to morph and change.

With its upbeat tones, it seems optimistic. Accepting. Affirmative. Love will tear us apart, yep, but that's ok. We get it. That's the way things are meant to be. (~ Original version)

Then, at other times it seems more morbid. Sad. Fated to sorrow and not willing to fight it. Defeatist. Tragic. Doomed. (The cover version really brings this out)

But both, striking so. 

Summer Kick-Start

Oh, the highs of sunny summer mornings, feeling free and easy, and the anticipation of the get-up-and-go the season has in store sounds something like this:

Possibilities

 

Maybe my favourite song ever!

This is what possibility sounds like, flaring and sparking like fireworks on the horizon. Possibility - impossible to ignore, impossible to resist.

This song is shot through with adrenaline, rising hope and all the dizzying heady heights of what could be, what should be.

And how it's all down to us, to ourselves, to get up and go after what we want in this life, to light the spark of our own possibilities and follow through the flame - 'if we don't make it/ nothing changes'

Emotional Excess

You know those songs you hear playing at critical emotional climax moments in TV programmes - songs that accentuate the feelings in a particular scene, songs that seem to plant an amp beneath the emotions of the scene and blast their magnitude at you until you can feel it resonate with you so much your eardrums tingle and some complex feeling of your own - previously wordless, shapeless, soundless - suddenly shifts itself into a legible luminous clarity and you feel immersed, for that few seconds, in a personal epiphany of huge proportions?

Yeah? Well, here's one of them. Emotional extraordinaire, The Cary Brothers: 

Gatsby

I love The Great Gatsby, one of my all-time favourite books.

I think this song from the Baz Luhrmann film, sums up the story best, captures all the conviction and hope that Gatsby had in his heart, which turned out to be all for nothing in the end, and thus, tragic.
A heart breaks worse the more hope it has it seems. That green light ~ a blessing and a curse.

Bluebird

Bluebirds are not just a symbol of happiness it seems, but bitterweet sorrow too: