Fake Empire

I can't believe I haven't posted The National here yet, my favourite modern band.

Morose and miserable, they describe disillusion (and everything starting with 'dis') like no one else. Into the winter season we go:

Sing to the Moon

This is just amazing...

Music/Musing for a New Season

Learning to adapt to and accept a new season...

This is equivalent to being smacked in the face and embracing a ten-force wind of change! It'll blow the cobwebs right off:

September Sadness

I don't like September. Don't like the seasonal change. Lots of other changes. And the darkness coming in fast.

If Only

'It made me think of you, it made me think of you...'

If only sometimes, we could do the thing we really wanted to do, recognised the moment for what it was - an opportunity, a flight path -  used our wings instead of wishing for them.

Then we wouldn't be haunted by regret (and a fear of flying)

La Vie en Rose

 

Is there any song more beautiful, more magical than this one ~  (or any idea either: that love makes life rose-tinted) 

 

Stars & Lullabies

Band of Horses: Rainy summer night listening. Melancholy and stars. Lullaby and longing. Sorrow and sweetness:

Backwards Walk

Trying to forget about someone, to retreat from all your feelings for them, is like trying to walk backwards... A difficult thing to learn.

Up, Over & Beyond

Let the sunshine carry you up, over, and beyond all that would try to keep you down.
Or - how a keen and sudden realisation is equal to wings; strength, resolve, independence, ~ freedom.

'I will not be a victim of romance, I will not be a victim of circumstance, or chance...'

Love is a Losing Game

Yes, I'm beginning to think it is.

But somehow, melancholy like this, is always softened through song. Yes, love sucks, losing in love sucks, but doesn't this song serve as a lullaby to it somehow? Doesn't it make it - better - somehow? It gets it. It understands. It listens to us, as we listen to it.

You Are My Sunshine

Notice how many songs there are that describe the feeling of being in love to being in the sun? The beloved to glorious sunshine?And love to the sun that brightens our days beautifully. So many! And, so true, the perfect comparison.

Here's a few of my favourites:

The highs of shiny summer love: ~ 'You shine like silver in the sunlight, you light up my cold heart...'

All sparkled awe at new love!: ~ 'I'm yours and suddenly you're mine and it's brighter than sunshine...'

The hesitant fear but over-riding happiness of going from dark to light - uncertainty, pain, longing to - love, sunny love: ~  'I cross the shadow and step into your sun...' 

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: