Headsongs
When I play music, it’s almost always instrumental. If you look at my YouTube channel almost all the videos are of me playing tunes—jigs, reels, and so on.
Most of those videos were recorded during The Situation when I posted a new tune every day for 200 consecutive days. Every so often though, I’d record a song.
I go through periods of getting obsessed with a particular song. During The Situation I remember two songs that were calling to me. New York was playing in my head as I watched my friends there suffering in March 2020. And Time (The Revelator) resonated in lockdown:
And every day is getting straighter, time’s a revelator.
The song I’m obsessed with right now is called Foreign Lander. I first came across it in a beautiful version by Sarah Jarosz (I watch lots of mandolin videos on YouTube so the algorithm hardly broke a sweat showing this to me).
There’s a great version by Tatiana Hargreaves too. And Tim O’Brien.
I wanted to know more about the song. I thought it might be relatively recent. The imagery of the lyrics makes it sound like something straight from a songwriter like Nick Cave:
If ever I prove false love
The elements would moan
The fire would turn to ice love
The seas would rage and burn
But the song is old. Jean Ritchie collected it, though she didn’t have to go far. She said:
Foreign Lander was my Dad’s proposal song to Mom
I found that out when I came across this thread from 2002 on mudcat.org where Jean Ritchie herself was a regular contributor!
That gave me a bit of vertiginous feeling of The Great Span, thinking about the technology that she used when she was out in the field.
I’ve been practicing Foreign Lander and probably driving Jessica crazy as I repeat over and over and over. It’s got some tricky parts to sing and play together which is why it’s taking me a while. Once I get it down, maybe I’ll record a video.
I spent most of Saturday either singing the song or thinking about it. When I went to bed that night, tucking into a book, Foreign Lander was going ‘round in my head.
Coco—the cat who is not our cat—came in and made herself comfortable for a while.
I felt very content.
A childish little rhyme popped into my head:
With a song in my head
And a cat on my bed
I read until I sleep
I almost got up to post it as a note here on my website. Instead I told myself to do it the morning, hoping I wouldn’t forget.
That night I dreamt about Irish music sessions. Don’t worry, I’m not going to describe my dream to you—I know how boring that is for everyone but the person who had the dream.
But I was glad I hadn’t posted my little rhyme before sleeping. The dream gave me a nice little conclusion:
With a song in my head
And a cat on my bed
I read until I sleep
And dream of rooms
Filled with tunes.