Loreena McKennitt

You’re… patriotic, Sean? Sean, believe in independence, liberty, freedom, equal rights, justice, and all of that. But never, ever, believe in your country.

Your country is George W Bush and Dick Cheney, and they don’t believe one whit in you. I’m with Grace Slick on this one, when she says in the song Rejoyce, “I’d rather have my country die for me”.

I could go on about this, but I talked myself into playing more Loreena McKennitt today, after yesterdays post. Her songs tend to leave me just totally spellbound while they are playing.

She just has such an incredible voice, and music to accompany it. So much so, in fact, that I easily could have done several posts, and it would tend to degrade into posting all her songs.

But I contained myself. She is a Canadian singer, incidentally, who at one point toured with Mike Oldfield. She often pulls songs from sources like Tennysons poetry, if you happen to recognize anything, incidentally.

This first song is without doubt my favorite song of hers, though:

Dicken’s Dublin

This intertwining of her singing with the voiceover really works well in this song. You almost feel like you’ve been picked up and deposited in a Charles Dickens novel. You can even overlook the song name being written wrong on the video.

I’ll huddle in this doorway here
Till someone comes along
If the lamp lighter comes real soon
Maybe I’ll go home with him
Maybe I can find a place I can call my home
Maybe I can find a home I can call my own

All Souls Night

And here is an important pagan holiday. And she gives us some important pagan music to go with it. And what can be more pagan then dancing?

I can see the lights in the distance
trembling in the dark cloak of night.
Candles and lanterns are dancing, dancing
a waltz on all souls night.

Mummers Dance

I don’t know about you, but like many of these other songs, I was drawn in from the very start of the song.

When owls call the breathless moon
In the blue veil of the night
The shadows of the trees appear
Amidst the lantern light

The Lady of Shalott

This poem is one of Tennysons, as I mentioned earlier. It’s also another favorite of mine.

There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay,
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.