One Half Buddhist, One Half Christian, One Half Pagan

There's a lot of awful stuff going on in the world right now. I'm fighting really hard to not get cynical about it.

This particular recording of Pete Seeger's song "Well May The World Go" is being especially helpful. Lyrically any version of the song makes pretty good mental medicine, but this version also includes Pete himself talking about some of the wonderful things that have happened in his lifetime that no one ever expected. To me, that's magic.

If you can I strongly recommend buying it. If you really can't buy it right now let me know and I'll see what I can do for you.

(Making notes for when I get home and can use iTunes)

Own Your Life

• "If Today Was Your Last Day" by Nickleback

What is your least favorite song by your favorite performer?

Mine is "Revolution #9" by the Beatles. They wrote other songs that were almost as pointless, but I can't think of a single one that is less fun to listen to.

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If it were only one specific recording of one song? I'd go mad so quickly that it wouldn't really matter what the song was.

If it was as many different versions as I wanted of any one song, that would be OK. Not great, but OK. I'd probably go with the hymn "Amazing Grace."

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All of them. :)

Oh, I can't pick that. Hmm...

If I have to chose just one then it's probably "If I Fell" from the Hard Day's Night soundtrack. (That album is my favorite overall.)

Oops, missed the "why" part of the question.
It's beautiful musically, and I like the ambiguity of the guy's motives and feelings.

Following up on this post, I think I've come up with a better song for me to try to learn.

Tramps And Hawkers isn't particularly period, but it's no worse than Old Dun Cow, which gets sung around campfires all the time. I already own two different recordings of it, and there are a dozen or more other versions I can get. I'm not sure I'll be ready to sing it by Pennsic, but maybe by Hunter's Moon.

I sort of want to have a song or two that I'm comfortable singing around the fire at SCA events. The Beggar Laddie, especially variation E, seems like a good one.

The only problem is that I don't think my usual song learning method will work for it. I learn songs by listening to them over-and-over-and-over. For something I'm just going to be singing along with the radio, listening to only one version is fine. For this, where I won't have a radio or other people singing along, I think I'm going to need to hear lots of different versions. Unfortunately this only seems to have been recorded a couple of times. There's the Ewan McColl version, and the version from A Folk Song A Day.

If not this one, then I'll come up with something else.

The Story of Reuben Clamzo
& His Strange Daughter in the Key of A, from Arlo Guthrie's album One Night.

I just have one question: how stoned was Guthrie when he came up with this? It's hysterical, but a sober person would never have created it.

If I ever actually get around to making the playlist of music that expresses my personal philosophy that I've been pondering for a long time the song "Anyway" by Suzzy & Maggie Roche will feature prominently in it.

It's a sung version of the Paradoxical Commandments. Not all the commandments are the same, and I like the ones that the Roches sing better than Keith's originals.

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There aren't any songs I could listen to the same recording of that many times in a day without going nuts, but there are songs I could happily listen to 20 different versions of in a single day.

Amazing Grace
Tam Lin
Silent Night
They Can't Take That Away From Me

There are probably others, but those are the ones that I can think of right now.