Who Knows Where the Hiring Fair In the Lowlands of Holland Goes?

Haven’t posted in a while. I’ll try to keep posting here every so often, but I doubt there’ll be any regularity to it any more. I’d rather keep posting erratically then stop posting all together, though.

So, theme today is stuff I’ve listened to recently. It usually is, actually. I’m just being a little more blatant about it right now.

First, I’ve played Who Knows Where the Time Goes being sung by Kate Wolf here before, and I tend to think of it as a Kate Wolf song, but this is Fairport Convention playing it. And, you know, the lead singer, Sandy Denny, wrote the song, so it’s actually their song.

Just a matter of where I heard it first, really. They both died way too young, and were great folk singers. Though, if you listen to Led Zeppelin’s Battle of Evermore carefully, it’s actually Sandy Denny singing with Robert Plant, which is cool.

I’ve also been listening to Steeleye Span playing The Lowlands of Holland for some reason. It’s a great folk song that’s been covered by everyone and their mother, really. Note that the singer here is not Maddy Prior, but Gay Woods. This was actually off of Steeleye Spans first album, and she left the band before the next album.

This is sort of tangentially related to the last song, in that Steeleye Span was founded by a former member of Fairport Convention.

And when I say this songs been played by everyone, I mean it. Here is Dún an Doras playing it.

And here’s Celia from Salmon’s Leap singing it.

And lets round things off with Fairport Convention and the song The Hiring Fair.

“My trembling fingers touched her arm, and she placed them on her breast.”

Part of me thinks it’s romantic. And part of me is thinking “Damn, he’s getting lucky tonight”. ^_^

Bobby McFerrin

You know, I don’t think I’ve played Bobby McFerrin on here before. And he’s innovative enough that I really have to correct that.

Check out this performance of the song Drive by him. It’s frankly amazing. This whole performance is a cappella, using his chest as a drum, and singing and making music with both his mouth and throat. I have no idea how he manages it.

This video of I’ve Got A Feeling, now, is just amusing to watch. I think the woman he gropes during the song is his wife. She’s certainly cracking up during the whole thing. And so was I, watching, of course.

Anime Blitz

All right, today I thought it was time to play some anime related videos, so I figured I’d start out with an annoying (but catchy) anime AMV.

Take the song Butterfly, which already fits the category of annoying and catchy. Mix sounds from Pokemon into it. Then add video clips of Pokemon to it, and you get this Pokemon Butterfly Remix video. It works well.

For comparison, here’s the really bizarre video to the original song Butterfly (which is by SMiLE.dk). This is very much a WTF type music video. I swear someone involved in it was on drugs.

And here we have more IOSYS. The song seems to have several translations of the title, but I’ll go with Erin’s Clinic (That People Queue Up For). It’s a very catchy song, and I was able to find a version with good video and sound that was untranslated, and a translated version that the audio and video wasn’t as good for. Here are both, untranslated first.

Cats, Birds, and Ghymes

Sorry about the delay on a post. I just haven’t really been inspired to write anything here. Here are a few things I’ve been listening to in the last few days:

Found this on last.fm’s Irish Coffee radio station. This is Regölés by Ghymes, and don’t even ask me to pronounce that. Really cool music, though. I don’t really get a chance to hear Hungarian music that often.

This is for everyone who was having trouble pronouncing the last song name. It’s listed as “Колыбельные мира. Идиш.”. I was able to find a translation of the lyrics, and they were listed as “Oyfn Veg Shteyt A Boym”. Nice Yiddish folksong, in any case, and the video seems to correspond pretty well to the song. Wish I could tell you who created the video or who the musician is.

This one is for anyone who is curious what the Cat Stevens song Wild World would sound like with lyrics in Zulu. And this is sung by Cat Stevens Steven Demetre Georgiou Yusuf Islam Yusuf.

It might be easiest to just call him the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens. He’s back to creating cds as Yusuf as of 2006, after his whole thing of changing his name to Yusuf Islam in 1977, converting to Islam, and abandoning music.

Peacebone

I was going to post another IOSYS song, but I found another song that intrigued me. I happened to stumble upon a song by the odd title of Peacebone being covered by JacobRuefer. The music video he posted set to scenes from Pokemon seems oddly appropriate, somehow. Very catchy cover.

Having heard that, I had to hear the original, by a band called Animal Collective. So I did. It’s a strange, oddly discordant song, set to a music video involving a girl dating a monster that looks like it’s off the set of Alien. I have to approve.

That said, I actually think Jacobs cover is cleaner, and catchier, and I actually found I enjoyed it more then the original. Still, here’s Animal Collective’s version, so you can judge for yourself.

Note: It’s growing on me on the second listen, but I still feel like I’m on the verge of a headache listening to the original because of what they did to the music in the background. I might just be somewhat sensitive to it…

Skeletons

Looks like there’s more to that last song then I realized. Seems that Little Sir Hugh’s death spurred a bunch of anti-Jewish hysteria and a number of people were killed. Nasty business.

However, today I found a Steampunk band called Unextraordinary Gentlemen. So here they are, with top hats and canes, singing the song Skeleton Goes To Town.

Little Sir Hugh

I’m getting tired of these depressing songs about death. So I picked out a nice happy cheerful song today. About murder.

Well, you know how I like murder ballads. This one is by the band Steeleye Span (yes, I play them a lot), called Little Sir Hugh. You can see the lyrics here, but it’s basically about a little kid who accidentally kicks his ball in a castle everyones afraid of.

The lady of the castle leads him in the castle, stabs him, drains his blood, and throws his body in a well. (Which is probably a good reason to be afraid of the castle, really) Reminds me of Mr. Fox’s Garden, in a way. Which is another murder ballad I really like. Unfortunately, the only video on youtube I’ve seen of it wasn’t good quality…

Edit: Just as a side note, this is based on a historical murder, the death of Little St. Hugh of London.

Hangman

Continuing the thread of depressing songs, here is Peter, Paul, and Mary, with Hangman.

Poor guy; every time someone he knows comes up to where he’s being hanged, they have no interest in helping him at all. At least his true love seems to be there for him.

Get the feeling his family is in for it after the song ends?

Walk That Lonesome Valley

This keeps with two recent themes. This is another song being sung by Joan Baez, but I really wish I’d found it when I was posting about Mary Travers death, because this is a duet with Mary, and is appropriate to the topic.

Walk That Lonesome Valley is a traditional, but it’s well sung. And, no, I’m not intentionally playing a bunch of songs that are depressing or about death. It just seems to work out that way.

(And remember, Sean, if you’re reading this, you can post and change the theme at any time. )

Donna Donna

Before I detoured to comedy and scottish music[1], I’d been playing a bunch of Joni Mitchell music. It occurred to me that I’m remiss in having played a bunch of Joni’s music, but not having played any Joan Baez.

So I thought I’d make up for it. Here is one of her better known songs, Donna Donna.

This is a very serious, sorrowful song, originally written in Yiddish. It is in fact, I believe, supposed to be about Jewish people in Nazi Germany. Here is what it sounds like in Yiddish, as played by Klesmer R’s.

Though, if you remember the laughter from the Beatles “I Am the Walrus”,  I tend to picture that in the chorus about the winds laughing. Rather inappropriate, I know…

[1] Two topics that go well together.