dolorosa_12: (mucha music)
[personal profile] dolorosa_12
Welcome back to another one of my crowd-sourced Friday open threads. This one is a prompt from [personal profile] dhampyresa, and is close to my music-loving heart.

The prompt is: what's your favourite song and/or the one that most speaks to or inspires you?



My favourite song is, and has been for more than fifteen years, 'Mezzanine' by Massive Attack. I love it for so, so, so many reasons, chief among them being the interplay of really, really clever lyrics (and for a band whose signature is basically 'clever lyrics', this song takes that to a whole other level), and the sound, which slips easily between ethereal and menacing, between sinewy physicality and floaty, unearthly inhumanity. It just hits me in the blood and bones.

A song which has always spoken deeply to me (to the point that if I'm in the wrong mood, it reduces me to a sobbing mess) is Paul Kelly's 'Deeper Water'. This is what I wrote about it in a previous post (which also has bonus commentary on 'Mezzanine'):

This is a deceptively simple song about the passage of time, using the motif of a person going from childhood, to adolescence, to mature adulthood, and to parenthood, swimming in the Australian ocean, being helped out beyond the breakers, and helping his own child in turn. I identify with this imagery so much, because it was my own experience: I first swam in Sydney's beaches as a one-year-old child, held by my mother at the shore, and as I got older, she (and sometimes my father) took me, and later my sister, out beyond the breaking waves to the deeper water, where we could not stand up, but where the waves were rolling and gentle, and those same beaches and waves have carried and held me throughout adolescence and adulthood, and one day I will carry my own children into them, and so on and so on, until the seas boil dry.


I'm looking forward to hearing some excellent music as a result of everyone's replies here!

Date: 2020-10-09 02:34 am (UTC)
skygiants: Nice from Baccano! in post-explosion ecstasy (maybe too excited . . .?)
From: [personal profile] skygiants
He is kind of like klezmer Billy Bragg! I really dig his brand of socialist Yiddish punk -- I first discovered him through my beginner Yiddish class and it was one of my favorite things to happen in that course.

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