Melody Monday - Number Three.

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Time for a short blog post. Between school starting (and it being Senior year), volleyball, and having to share a family computer, posts are going to be even shorter than they were before.

This third post post shall revolve around the great song Poison & Wine by The Civil Wars.

This song is the most beautiful love song I have ever heard (and I don't even like love songs), and it really is the music video that makes the whole thing so amazing. You should check it out on YouTube when you get the chance.

Poison & Wine was The Civil Wars' first single (as far as I know - but I don't have any time to check that right now and still get this in on Monday) and it was number one for a while. Then it came out on their EP (which means Extended Play, in case you didn't know, 'cause I didn't) with three other beautiful songs but Poison & Wine is definitely the one of the best.

Melody Monday - Number Two.

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It's a little sad that I didn't bother posting anything in an entire week but I will stay on schedule with Melody Monday even if nobody really reads this. It's a sad, sad life I lead: always talking with nobody listening... or writing and reading in this case. In any case, onward to far more interesting things than my absent moaning.

Today's Melody Monday focuses on the song Lighthouse by The Hush Sound (as a side note, Katie of Artistical Thoughts just did her Music Monday on The Lions Roar by the Hush sound, you should take a gander at hers as well).

Lighthouse comes from The Hush Sound's very first album, entitled "Like Vines" after one of the tracks. It happens to by my personal favorite from this album but the others are just as good and most of them are a little less dark (although "Like Vines" tends toward the stereotypical dark, teenage, alternative album).

One of the most endearing things about Lighthouse is that it tells a story that is all at once intricate and simple. The song follows two different stories: the first being a girl and possibly her lover (henceforth called the boy and the girl for simplicity's sake), or maybe just a friend or a sibling, and the second being the age-old ghost of a young woman.

The boy and the girl open the song as they flee from their burning city for safety at the seaside. Why the city is burning is never mentioned by the girl believes the lighthouse that she knows on the coast is the only safe place. They flee there with the intent to wait out the burning city and the storm that is brewing on the horizon.

It goes on to tell that the girl once met the ghost of the young woman who saved her from drowning, the one who lives in the lighthouse. The girl tells the woman's story throughout the song. The verse right before the last one tells of how the woman went to the lighthouse to wait for her lover, a sailor, but that the "door locked from the outside" and her lover never came to get her. It is implied that the woman now bears a grudge against her lover for leaving her to die (although the reason why he never showed was not mentioned) in the line "So she sings there, soft as a siren, luring the ships off their course. How alarming."

The boy and the girl make it to the lighthouse with the full intent of being saved from the torment that is happening outside of it, from the storm and from the fire. But the lighthouse where they hide is haunted by the spirit of a dead lover who, seeing the girl and her lover, does not feel as disposed to the girl as she did when she saved her from drowning years before. However, for the way that the song actually ends, you have to listen to it. The ending is part of what makes the song so beautiful.

Although it seems that listening to two different tales being told in the same song would be confusing, The Hush Sound's female lead vocalist, Greta, changes the melody and timbre of the song as she changes between the stories, giving the song the eerie notes and minor tone that meld with the vague spookiness of the story itself.

The beauty of the stories themselves combined with the changes in melody and tempo to make them stand apart but still act as one unified song, makes Lighthouse into a very special kind of song. It is a ghost story but also a love story, a love story but also a ghost story. There is no lovey-dovey, let's-go-make love feel in it like there is in most of the love songs today. There is only good quality music from a group of musicians with a great talent to share.

Melody Monday - Number One.

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My dearest friend Katie (of Artistical Thoughts) often inspires me and she does something called Movie (and/or Video) and Music Monday and I love music more than almost anything so I decided that I wanted to do something similar. I'm not a big movie watcher so Melody Monday is all about music, be it genres, artists, albums, or individual tracks.

This very first installment of Melody Monday is going to revolve around Bart Millard's CD Hymned No. 1.
Hymns have always been near and dear to my heart. Actually, no, just within the past two years hymns have been near and dear to my heart, before I just thought that they were really boring songs. I have great respect for Bart Millard and his attempt to make hymns seem more appealing to a younger crowd.

There are a grand total of ten old hymns ranging from Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior to Power In The Blood on Hymned No. 1. Each track has the kind of swinging back yard rhythm you would expect to find on the front porch of an old, one-room church in the deep south. The style of music differs drastically from the style of the band MercyMe, of which Bart Millard is the lead vocalist but it is a refreshing style for old hymns that follow the same tune for verse after verse after verse.

Most of the songs are upbeat by there are a few that are relaxing enough to whisk you away into a lovely nap if you so choose. Songs like Just A Closer Walk With Thee and Power in the Blood are enough to get people dancing (and by people I mean me and my mom) but Softly and Tenderly is a softer song for those times when you just can't stand anything louder than your own breathing.

Gifts.

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My best friend's birthday was last week but her party was yesterday. My dear, dear friend told everyone that she didn't want gifts because she "has too much junk". So I, of course, ignored her and decided to do something for her anyway and the general consensus of the party guests seemed to be that gifts were okay if they were homemade.

Meagan, my friend, received a clay duck from Gentry, a picture from Lauren (henceforth known as Pixie), a drawing from yours truly, and two bags of sour gummy worms and a card that said "we love your booty" on the inside from three of our mutual guy friends who claimed that they didn't look on the inside when the bought it. The gummy worms and the card don't count as homemade but the duck and two drawings do.

Last year I drew Meagan a picture as well, of a giant M covered in the sheet music of her favorite song ("Fall For You" by Secondhand Serenade, if you're wondering) and surrounded with a variety of her other favorite things. This year she got a picture of me throwing hearts into the air while wearing a shirt that says "Meagan is my home girl" and flanked by two signs that say "Meagan's Biggest Fan (figuratively speaking)" and "If you were a steak you would be of the extra-rare variety". Now, to explain the first sign, it's a joke in the youth group that I'm the shortest girl and Meagan is the tallest girl. Meagan likes to wear really high shoes and I wear flats and sandals all the time. So the (figuratively speaking) part is just an ongoing joke.

The point of this whole post is not to talk about the fact that I like to draw or that Gentry is really good at making adorable clay ducks or that Pixie can draw precious little chibi people, it is to say, in a cheesy kind of way, that the best kinds of gifts are the ones that are homemade.
So the moral of this story is: People who say that they don't want gifts for their birthdays won't turn down gifts that people take the time to make and people don't lose things that people take the time to make.

Now for a shameless plug: my deviantart account is here. And a sample of my work is below:


P.S. Hannah from Following the Muses colors all of my artwork for me. Without her, I would be nothing more than a sad, sad pencil artist.

Pandora Radio.

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So, this is my first post on this blog (I can't say it's my first blog post ever since I unfortunately had one back in my younger years that was embarrassing to a monstrous extent) and of course I decided to make it about music.

I was first introduced to pandora radio by Hannah of Following the Muses and Katie of Artistical Thoughts several months ago and it wasn't until recently that I started really listening to it strictly because I was tired of hearing my younger brother's xBox shriek curse words and blare heart-racing music while he played his newest war game. Pandora has become a beautiful, wonderful addition to my completely drab life and I am glad to say that it usually selects music that I love, the most recent being nearly all of the music of Howard Shore, who created the soundtrack for the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

However, the thing that is truly amazing about Pandora Radio is that it can match the kinds of music you like to the type of music played by the artist (or the type of song) that you put in at the beginning when the make a 'station'. My favorite station started with the song Kiss From A Rose by Seal and has grown further into a station that largely plays classical, new-age-type music that is both soothing and strong enough to drown out the strangely clever array of F-bombs coming from Battlefield: Bad Company II in the next room and Pandora Radio is simply one of the best things that has ever happened to me musically (other than getting my first guitar when I was ten) and it has introduced me to so much music that I never would have found on my own due to my own laziness among other things.