The Aviary

I have had Crooked Still's version of Wind and Rain stuck in my head for about 12 hours now. Let me tell you, that's a fun song to unconciously sing around other people and watch them slowly realize what the lyrics are.

On a related note, I would like to restate my lack of objection to having my body made into a musical instrument after my death. Y'know, in case anyone wants to. I'll try not to haunt it, so that you'll be able to play more than one song.

Heading to Seattle to hang out with my sisters and listening to my Stan Rogers collection on the ferry.

How do I have three different versions of The Mary Ellen Carter and not one of Barrett's Privateers on my iPod? Not that I dont love The Mary Ellen Carter, but still. Badly done, past me. Very badly done.

Maybe I'll just listen to The Nancy on repeat instead.

One of my favorite things to learn to sing are old ballads (or songs that sound like old ballads), especially if they contain either fairies or murder, because they're long and tell a story and you can usually sing them well unaccompanied. (Also, because I enjoy singing pretty songs about over-the-top violence. Like in Lambkin, where they kill a baby by pricking it all over with a pin and then keep its blood in a silver basin for no apparent reason.) I learned the Fairport Convention version of Matty Groves a while ago and it's one of my absolute favorites. But two of the great things about ballads are 1) that you can learn many different versions of them and 2) Appalachian versions. And the other day, I was on 8tracks, listening to someone's playlist of ballads and came across Elizabeth Laprelle.

Here she is, singing Mathey Groves.

Oh my god, you guys, the voice on her. It's gorgeous and I now have to go buy all of her albums.

And learn that version of Mathey Groves, because it has hilarious extra violence.

One of the wonderful things about the internet is that you can somehow end up on the wikipedia pages that tell you the plots of all the Child ballads, which will then link you to the lyrics of the ones you like. And then you can go on youtube and find videos of people singing them and learn workable melodies.

And that is why I currently have a song that ends with a person getting drawn and quartered stuck in my head.

Internet, what are your favorite murder ballads?

Today while shelving, I happened to glance at a book of lullabies and came across one that I vaguely remembered from when I was little. (It was the Gartan Mother's Lullaby and, after a bit of google and listening to things on youtube, I determined that it was the version I knew was the one sung by Meryl Streep on the For Our Children album).

Which led to me tracking down and listening to other music that I knew and loved as a tiny person. Which eventually led to Sesame Street songs because who doesn't love Sesame Street? So I listened to my favorite songs from Follow That Bird and then I thought, "Y'know, I spent pretty much my entire sophomore year of college listening to a streaming radio station that played nothing but Muppet Music. I wonder if that's still around."

It totally is.

You're welcome. 8)





A word of warning: Sometimes, when I used to listen to it all the time, they would play the Jim Henson Memorial version of Just One Person. Now, it's entirely possible that you can listen to that without crying, but I can't, so I feel I should tell people in advance so they can be prepared.

Things, various and sundry:

- Today is the first day of the winter session of chorale! Hooray! I don't know what we're singing yet but I am excited.

- On a vaguely related note. So my dad and sisters and I do this thing where he plays the guitar and we sing and then we make cds to send to my aunt. (We pretend we are a band. Collectively, we are Quinn and the Eskimos because my dad's name is Quinn and really, there aren't that many songs you can reference if that's your name.) This time, I got him to play a Mountain Goats song with me. So, if you've ever wanted to hear me and my dad doing a Mountain Goats cover, here is your opportunity. (It is Woke Up New, because that one's easy and doesn't involve monsters or drugs or death. Because, y'know, singing with my dad.)

- Last night, I watched the first episode of the Raffles tv show, which I got from the library. I spent at least half of it going, "Oh, Bunny!" Which is pretty much my reaction when I read the books - he's such an adorably hapless little rabbit - so that bodes well for the series. The actors don't quite fit right for me - Raffles is all right, but in my head Bunny is a good bit shorter and also much blonder* - but I think that they'll work. Today is a crafting day, so probably I will be watching more of that.

- Or the Going Postal miniseries, which I downloaded because I have been listening to the audiobook at night for the past week or so and have been reminded of how very much I love Moist von Lipwig and Adora Belle Dearheart. I should look for fanfic, because I want stories and stories of those two having wacky adventures and Miss Dearheart not putting up with Moist's nonsense and also kissing. The actual books are all right for the first two, but they fall down a bit on the kissing front.







*Making Bunny one of the very few people who I have ever pictured in my head as being blonde. Fictional people are never blonde in my head. It's not that I don't know that blonde people exist or anything, but their presence in fiction always comes as a bit of a surprise. People in fiction have dark hair. Except for Lucy Westenra, Bunny Manders, and, to continue from above, Moist von Lipwig. But that's mostly because, contrary to all reason, I've always pictured Moist as looking a great deal like the Sixth Doctor.

Things I have meant to post about today, but have been away from my computer and thus unable to:

- So, someone donated a bunch of hymnals to my church. We've never had hymnals, so we're trying to ease into using them and today was the first time we did so. Which meant that I spent most of the sermon leafing through the hymnal. I wish to share with you John Wesley's Rules for Singing, which were in the front of the hymnal, because I find them utterly charming.

( Here they are: )

"Sing lustily and with a good courage." Isn't that marvelous?


- When I work on Sundays, I drive there straight from church. Sometimes, as today, I get there quite a bit early, so I spend the time reading in my car while I eat lunch. Today, I was starting The Haunting of Hill House, which I haven't read in far too long. Hill House has one of the best opening paragraphs ever so, being through with my lunch, I read it out loud. And then didn't stop.

I forget how much I enjoy reading aloud to myself, because I don't often have opportunity to do it. I flatter myself that I read aloud fairly well, with the right sort of book. I do quite nicely with Shirley Jackson and it was lovely, reading to myself all alone in the car with the rain tapping quiet on the roof.

I forget, too, how good Shirley Jackson is. I do occasionally find it a little disquieting, how easily and completely I identify and sympathize with her protagonists, but I love her stories and her characters and her use of language. I should buy a book of her short stories. I haven't read those in far too long either.

Went out to dinner tonight with la familia and on the way back, we had a long nostalgic conversation about Camp Pecometh, the Methodist summer camp that Megan and I went to several times as kids. Which, of course, led to enthusiastic renditions of church camp songs,* and then favorite hymns. I've been the accidental choir leader for about five years now - I have a lot of favorite hymns.

That's a big part of why I still go to church and why I continue to be the accidental choir leader, despite my avowed heathenry. I love hymns. I love hearing them, I love singing them. It's no secret that I feel a strong connection between my experience of making music and my experience of the divine. There is something powerful and holy about singing hymns in a group, about singing words that people have sung thousands of times before you and will sing again long after you're gone.

O, for a thousand tongues to sing my great redeemer's praise, the glories of my God and king, the triumph of his grace!

Be thou my vision, o Lord of my heart. Naught be all else to me, save that thou art.

Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day. Earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away.
Change and decay in all around I see; o, thou who changest not, abide with me.

Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say "It is well, it is well with my soul".

How can I keep from singing?

I have a deep, deep envy for the Christian musical tradition. I envy the Christians a lot of things, really - their millennia of unbroken tradition, their ability to find a church in any town in this country, their badass religious jewelry - but it's the hymns and the ritual prayers that I really covet. I find that I am hungry for that, lately - for that feeling of adding my voice to a river of other voices that have spoken before. I can write my own prayers and say them often enough that I feel a faint echo of that but I have no talent for writing music. It makes me sad, not being able to properly sing for my gods the way I want to.

Growl, growl. Where is the heathen Charles Wesley, that is basically what I want to know.





*I am going to know all the words to Pharaoh, Pharaoh till the day that I die.

So...I listened to the soundtrack to The Wicker Man in my car on the way to work this morning. Which, in a way, is a good thing because I enjoy the music.

On the other hand, it does mean that I have a constant loop in my head of Christopher Lee singing a bawdy song about a tinker. Which is not precisely library-appropriate.