sylvanawood tagged me…

1. Select Random on your MP3 player/Windows Media.
2. List the first five songs and what they mean to you.
3. Tag five people!

I don’t have an MP3 player, and there is nothing uploaded to my Windows Media - for some reason, I always listen to entire albums, so I have never looked for a means to play songs randomly… But for the meme’s sake I picked up the top five CDs from the pile on my desk and picked one song from each. The result is a bit … eclectic :-).



1. Garmarna - Varulven [The werewolf] (from Guds Spelemän [God‘s Fiddlers])
Garmarna is a Swedish folk-rock band. The CD is actually my sister’s; she copied it from the library (bad sister!), and because it looked so sad without a booklet, I designed a cover for it. It is dark, purplish blue with silver lettering and a grinning white satyr on it. I don’t speak Swedish, so I am barely able to make out what the songs are about, but especially for this meme I looked up Garmarna’s website. Now I know that this particular song is about a werewolf who eats a pregnant princess. Cheerful! Normally I hate electric guitars, but here they sound great and appropriately menacing. This is the sort of music that makes me jump up and dance around the kitchen…

2. Madonna - Like a Prayer (from The Immaculate Collection)
Ha! This one has a story too. I first got to hear Madonna when my cousin asked a Madonna tape - the Like a Prayer album - as a New Year’s gift from my parents. I have a distinct memory of my parents being shocked and saying things to the effect that Madonna was the ultimate embodiment of decadence, or something. Nevertheless, my father made me a copy of the tape. I listened to it until it wore out completely. I must have been in my early teens. And I only bought my first (and only) Madonna record a few years ago. I feel a bit guilty about it, but I do enjoy listening to it from time to time, and I always sing along with Like a Prayer *g*. It’s also one of my favourite party songs :D.

3. Sinéad O’Connor - Skibbereen (from Long Journey Home, Paddy Moloney)
Long Journey Home is a soundtrack album produced by Paddy Moloney of The Chieftains for a documentary about the many Irish who emigrated to America in the nineteenth century and beyond. I bought a lot of Irish music when I was in my middle to late teens - the result of my ardent quest for everything Celtic. Oh, the melancholy! Some of these old albums now seem unbearably tacky to me. Long Journey Home - is somewhere in-between. There are songs and singers on it that I don’t like at all (like Mary Black), but others are heartrendingly good, like Sinéad O’Connor’s raw and haunting Skibbereen. Sinéad O’Connor is my pop goddess. She’s as mad as a hatter, but completely amazing. She is probably the only artist of whom I have four albums, and those four make up a sizeable part of my small pop collection. What a voice. What a voice.

4. Thierry Robin - Rumba do Vesou (from Gitans)
Titi Robin is the only artist on this little list whom I have ever seen perform. In fact I saw him twice, which is no mean feat for me, because I rarely go to concerts (apart from the opera, for which I always buy a season‘s ticket). Titi Robin is great. He is a French Gitan whose CDs sound like live performances and whose live performances involve lots of improvisation - the sort of thing the lack of which makes pop concerts totally uninteresting to me. Titi’s wife is Gulabi Sapera, a tiny, caste-less Indian woman who dances like a goddess. To see her on the stage is a breathtaking experience. She sings on this particular CD, but not on the track I picked. This track, Rumba do Vesou, has been from the beginning my chosen theme music for War in Gaul. It has nothing Celtic about it, but somehow that does not matter. It gives me energy and inspiration :-).

5. L’ham de foc - Somniava (from Canço de Dona I Home)
Another song of which I don’t understand a word - L’ham de foc are Catalonian. I walked into Belgium’s craziest CD shop one day, and this music was playing. I bought it immediately. This is folk music that does not sound at all dusty. The instruments are to die for: oud, hurdy-gurdy, pipes, even a rebec - utter bliss :D!


- Oh, right, now I have to tag people. Well, I guess you can just do it if you feel like it :-).