What is a song or piece of music that you associate with the word "home?" This can draw on your own personal experience or a more general abstract notion of what this word evokes.
A caveat: I'd prefer if possible--should you choose something with lyrics--that the lyrics be a secondary consideration. If you can find something with a tone/pace/sound that makes your point it will be most helpful. (Not to say lyrics can't factor in)
Please respond to this post with the title/artist and a sentence or two about the piece.
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"Une Année Sans Lumière" by Arcade Fire... It's heartbreaking and lonely and makes me incredibly homesick for someplace/something/someone I can't place and/or haven't found.
The title song of Elton John's "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy." (I know. I know. It figured prominently in my lab last night--but surprise, my play is about "home"...) I had this on vinyl as an early teen and in college. I got it on CD in the late 80s. It's an album that can relax me, pep me up, take me places in my mind. It's sometimes on as background music, but more often I actually stop and listen to it. It's always there--wherever my home is.
The title song starts very simply and welcoming. Hearing those first chords, immediately draws me into this constant of my life. They're comforting. The lyrics are good, but it's really more about the way his voice sounds than the meaning of the words. As if this song is his promise of the "safety" of the rest of the album.
I'm bringing in a whole album, "We The People" by Schooner Fare. I gotta say, it IS the lyrics, at least in part, that remind me of home. One song, "My Heart's in Cape Breton Tonight," is about someone who has left home on the coast to find work elsewhere. But there's a lot of slow folk violin in it, which is common where I'm from.
I grew up listening to these guys; they're a good example of the maritime/northern appalachian (sp?) folk music you see in Maine and southeastern Canada, music that draws on the typical ethnic roots of people who settled in that region (Scottish, French, Irish). One of the guys in the group also went to the same HS as my dad. I remember going to their concerts as a kid, which were often held right on the coast, in front of a lighthouse called "bug light," or in a local gym.
Anyway...
The Ookpik Waltz by Jay Unger/Molly Mason. This piece feels like home, partly because it is so much a part of a place I go every summer, but mostly because of the way it has become apocryphal in that community. Jay wrote this piece for Molly while he was falling n love with her, and it's always been one her favorites. A few years ago, Molly had major brain surgery and no one was quite sure how much she would get her musical memory back. While she was recovering in the hospital, Jay and James, Molly's brother would play for her. The day that they played this song, Jay on fiddle, James backing up on guitar, Molly groggily opened her eyes and corrected James that he should be playing a seventh chord where we was playing something else. This was a moment that they gleefully shared with everyone who was waiting to hear about Molly's progress.
I guess for me, then, this piece of music is about return - falling in love and hoping that someone is or will return that feeling, hoping that someone you love will return to their old self, even coaxing someone to return from the brink of danger and sickness and death. It feels like home because it speaks to the longing for a place to which you hope to return, not the nostalgia for place gone forever.
I've got more Home songs than you can shake a baton at - some include:
- "The Entertainer" by Scott Joplin - my mom's a piano teacher and the house was filled with music growing up - both she and her students playing in the afternoons - makes me think of home (as most piano music does.
- "Our Town" - a heartbreaking song by Iris Dement about a small town's death. Make a strong man weep.
- "Feels Like Home to Me" - Randy Newman - a great song - kind of a desperate love song - very much like your idea of someone else being home.
"Hello Stranger (Seems Like a Mighty Long Time) by Barbara Lewis...This is one of my favorite songs and has been since I was a child. THis song reminds me of my neighborhood. It reminds me of the simplicity of life. It's quite heart wrenching. Every time I listen to it I'm taken back to my street. My home. my heart. LOVE IT!!!
"The King of Carrot Flowers (Part 1)" by Neutral Milk Hotel, from their album, "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea."
As I searched for a song that encapsulated the notion of "home" for me, I recognized that I was inevidibly searching for a song that dealt with youth and family, and I love the ways that this song (perhaps my favorite non-showtune of all times) explores both the ways in which home, family, and youth intersect and the moments in which they depart from one another.
It is admittedly difficult to listen to this song and not honor its brilliant lyrics, but examining the contrast between the dangerous (if still painfully beautiful) lyrics and comfortable, constant, steadyness of the simple guitar in the background creates that essence of home. While the lyrics frequently illustrate the home that was given ("family") and its imminent danger, the comfortable, simple music is an example of the homes that we choose; one of those homes we create, excavate, and thrive within, a haven from the lyrics.
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