Today I thought we’d listen to something classical, or should we say romantic. The piece I want to show you today comes from harpist Laura Silberberg, who does mostly or perhaps even exclusively relaxing music. I’m not extremely familiar with her, I only started listening to her a bit last year. This piece is her interpretation of the famous theme composed by Pyotr Tchaikovsky for the ballet Swan Lake, or Lac des Cygnes in French. This theme will always remind me of a Swan Lake musical box I used to have as a child, which had small looking glasses on each side and a surface in the middle which was supposed to be a lake, with two figurines moving on it. I had a time in my life when I loved sophisticated figurines and collected them so I really liked this.
Recently I’ve shared with you Obsolete by Regina Spektor, and I thought I’d share one more song by her, one that I really like musically and that I think has quite interesting lyrics, which, just like with Obsolete and I believe most of Regina’s songs, can be interpreted in many ways.
The way I understand it is, that it’s more symbolic than literal. I think the lake is some kind of serious life problem that people are experiencing and deal with it in different ways. Some – the neighbours – sweep it under the carpet and prefer to pretend that it doesn’t exist or at least it’s very much a taboo thing. Others – the kids – take it very lightly, make fun of it and don’t really care even if the problem gets worse, because of some fun aspect to it that they can see, so maybe this problem is drugs or something like that. – And then we have the genius, who I think represents anyone who is intelligent but also quite sensitive, who seeks some meaning in life but all he does is “wipingclean the ketchup bottle labels” instead. He actually wants to confront the problem head on and I guess also be somehow acknowledged for doing so, but overestimates his capabilities and ends up drowning under the weight of it because he can’t cope – commits suicide in the “lake”, I think. Perhaps he’s somehow too immature for that or something hence the “foolish child”? But has some feeling of fulfillment before he actually dies – the “orgasm”. Or maybe he actually doesn’t confront it but simply uses it as some sort of counter-weight to his dull and uninspiring life, which would make even more sense if we’re indeed talking about drugs or some other addictions.
I could be totally off with that, but since I don’t think we know officially what the song was meant to be about, I don’t really care, and I’ve seen both similar and different interpretations of it.
I think I haven’t posted much Welsh music lately, not as much as I used to. So I’m going to share with you this song by Mei Emrys, and perhaps a few more in the near future. He is a Welsh singer-songwriter, whose music, as many other artists’, I discovered thanks to the online Welsh radiostation called Cymru FM, which plays mostly music, and exclusively Welsh language music (apart from a track here and there in Cornish or Breton that I’ve caught occasionally). He does kinda rock music, or maybe it’s pop rock, something along these lines. And I quite like many of his songs.
