The Three Wiseman: The weather has been awful, The countryside is dreary, Marsh, jungle, rock; and echoes mock, Calling our hope unlawful; But a silly song can help along Yours ever and sincerely: At least we know for certain that we are three old sinners, that this journey is much too long, that we want our dinners, and miss our wives, our books, our dogs, but have only the vaguest idea why we are what we are. To discover how to be human now Is the reason we follow this star.

I'm quite interested in what words can be, if it's very few words, and it's a kind of club track but it has a sort of uplifting or spiritual kind of feeling to it. Somehow, something bigger than just the words on the page happens when you hear it all together. Sometimes I notice when I'm DJing, I put on a lot of tracks that feature vocals. I guess for me, it's just from growing up loving songs, so maybe I'm geared slightly more towards dance music that features a song element.

The culture's changed massively. The kids are different, with the phones and stuff. Even if you like a song, you don't really know who the artists are, it's a lot more faceless, it's a lot less tribal. When we were growing up it was much more tribal - it was rock, it was grunge. Now people like songs, [but] they don't necessarily know the song's origins. I don't know how you would feel angry at the world, or distressed, because most people are constantly distracted or consumed.

This was the first time that he has ever looked into the labyrinth of the human soul. He was very far from understanding what he saw. But what was of more value, he felt and suffered with her. In years that were yet to come, he relived this memory in song, in the most beautiful song this world has known. For the understanding of the soul's defencelessness, of the conflict between the two poles, is not the source of the greatest song. The source of the greatest song is sympathy.

Under the Mountain dark and tall The King has come unto his hall! His foe is dead, the Worm of Dread, And ever so his foes shall fall. The sword is sharp, the spear is long, The arrow swift, the Gate is strong; The heart is bold that looks on gold; The dwarves no more shall suffer wrong. The dwarves of yore made mighty spells, While hammers fells like ringing bells In places deep, where dark things sleep, In hollow halls beneath the fells. -from The Hobbit (Dwarves Battle Song)

Ultimately, we as a band just write what we write. Some of it's very serious, and even in the serious songs, there's sometimes an angle of levity. I think that's just how we communicate naturally and to shy away from that would be, first of all, boring for me, but also it wouldn't ring true to who I am or the way I relate to people or the way we relate to people as a band or the way we relate to the audience. Humor is a big part of it, but we also take our craft very seriously.

My faith, I mean, that's such a personal aspect that a lot of times, of course it's going to come out through the song. But at the same time, I'm not a religious salesman. I feel like God doesn't really need a salesman, and what these songs are are simply my interactions with this life and learning. I guess the bottom line is the songs are really honest, you know what I mean. That faith is going to come through. If the listener is looking for it, that's definitely a part of it.

Poetry is like a portrait of a moment or person, and the poem is almost like looking at a photograph; it slaps you in the face and kisses you at the same time. Nothing else does that, with that brevity. Songs try to do it, but that's three minutes. A poem, you read it and it kind of changes your life and you don't know how it happened and you can never forget it. It's like the best song lyric, the best line from a film-everything in the world that's short and great put together.

I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men." "Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

Perhaps I will die too, she told herself, and the thought did not seem so terrible to her. If she flung herself from the window, she could put an end to her suffering, and in the years to come the singers would write songs of her grief. Her body would lie on the stones below, broken and innocent, shaming all those who had betrayed her. Sansa went so far as to cross the bedchamber and throw open the shutters ... but then her courage left her, and she ran back to her bed, sobbing.

I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism. I can play about thirty Bohemian folk songs ... on my mouth-organ. My oldest friend, who is Czech and a patriot, cannot bear to hear me play them because he says I do it in such a schmalzy way, 'crying into the mouth organ'. I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs, which happen to be my favourite form of music.

George Jones has been a major part of my personal and professional life for a long time. I have been inspired by his music for the last 50 years and for 42 of those, I had the pleasure of knowing him personally and professionally. He was IT to me. George was and will always be my guy. I am luckier than a lot of people on this Earth because God let me be a part of George's life and him a part of mine. And on this day, his song couldn't be more true: 'He Stopped Loving Her Today.'

In all honesty I think, sometimes with the LGBT community, if you look at anything else surrounding it, there's always been this oddness and sense of humor. I really appreciate that. It's kind of a hard world to take yourself too seriously. It's a good balance check. It's not serious all the time. I'm that way too, even though I write a lot of depressing music. A lot of times our shows are not very serious at all. We joke a lot and then we play a sad song and then we joke again.

Music is the highest art form.I still think that. I wish I was really talented in music because then I would be doing it. I felt that I could write a decent song, but it was a big struggle. It took a lot of time and effort for me, whereas a lot of my peers and other people seemed to have a much easier relationship to it. But I profoundly love music, and I still dream that I might one day try to write some new songs and record something - just for myself, to see what would happen.

Whence came I, whither go I? Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears. Science is reticent too when it is a question of the great Unity – the One of Parmenides – of which we all somehow form part, to which we belong. The most popular name for it in our time is God – with a capital ‘G’. Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.

Seasons may change winter to spring, but I love you until the end of time Come what may, come what may, I will love you until my dying day Suddenly the world seems such a perfect place Suddenly it moves with such a perfect grace Suddenly my life doesn’t seem such a waste, it all revolves around you. And there’s no mountain too high no river too wide Sing out this song and I’ll be there by your side Storm clouds may gather and stars may collide But I love you until the end of time

...and suddenly it occurred to him that the birds, whose twitters and repeated songs sounded so pretty and affirming of nature and the coming day, might actually, in a code known only to other birds, be the birds each saying 'Get away' or 'This branch is mine!' or 'This tree is mine! I'll kill you! Kill, kill!' Or any other manner of dark, brutal, or self-protective stuff—they might be listening to war cries. The thought came from nowhere and made his spirits dip for some reason.

So Nemerov showed us this picture, which is of Apollo flaying Marcius. You don't think of Apollo as being the sort of person who would skin someone alive. But the story behind it was that there was this guy who was a really great musician, and all the women loved him, and people started saying he was the best musician in the world, so Apollo got jealous and he challenged this guy to a musical dual. They would each play a song and the muses would judge who was the better musician.

A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.

With smoking axle hot with speed, with steeds of fire and steam, Wide-waked To-day leaves Yesterday behind him like a dream. Still, from the hurrying train of Life, fly backward far and fast The milestones of the fathers, the landmarks of the past. But human hearts remain unchanged: the sorrow and the sin, The loves and hopes and fears of old, are to our own akin; And if, in tales our fathers told, the songs our mothers sung, Tradition wears a snowy beard, Romance is always young.

I love you," he writes again and again. "I can't bear to live without you. I'm counting the minutes until I see you." The words he uses are the idioms of popular songs and poems in the newspaper. And mine to him are no less cliched. I puzzle over the onionskin, trying to spill my heart onto the page. But I can only come up with the same words, in the same order, and hope the depth of feeling beneath them gives them weight and substance. I love you. I miss you. Be careful. Be safe.

I see a steady downward slope toward oblivion over the next three years. I'm pessimistic. Everything that's happened to me so far has been kind of flukey. I went into Twentieth Century because I wanted to work for Hal Prince. The part was too small according to my agent. I had been doing only leading parts, and he thought I should continue that. But the part was enlarged in rehearsal: songs were added, and it became more physicalized and showy. Then I won awards and got attention.

Our whole intention was to make a record of songs that we grew up with and change them up a little bit, but we kind of stumbled on writing "Joseph's Lullaby." The irony is when I originally wrote the song, it was called "Mary's Lullaby." I wrote it from Mary's standpoint and it was in a higher key, a real falsetto, and it just wasn't right. One day, the producer's wife said, "Well, it's kind of odd that you're singing from Mary's perspective, being the guy. Why don't you do Joseph?

When "Here Comes the Sun" started, what happened? No, the sun didn't come out, but Mom opened up like the sun breaking through the clouds. You know how in the first few notes of that song, there's something about George's guitar that's just so hopeful? It was like when Mom sang, she was full of hope, too. She even got the irregular clapping right during the guitar solo. When the song was over, she paused. "Oh Bee," she said. "This song reminds me of you." She had tears in her eyes.

I am certain that over the course of your own life, you have noticed that people's rooms reflect their personalities. In my room, for instance, I have gathered a collection of objects that are important to me, including a dusty accordion on which I can play a few sad songs, a large bundle of notes on the activities of the Baudelaire orphans, and a blurry photograph, taken a very long time ago, of a woman whose name is Beatrice. These are items that are very precious and dear to me.

So, you’re hitting on Clare the Fair.” “I’m not hitting on her. I’m exploring the possibility of seeing her on social terms.” “He’s hitting on her,” Owen said around a mouthful of chips. “You’ve still got that thing you had for her back in high school. Are you still writing bad song lyrics about heartbreak?” “Suck me. And they weren’t that bad.” “Yeah, they were,” Ryder disagreed. “But at least now we don’t have to listen to you playing your keyboard and howling them down the hall.

I'm always interested in hearing how other people read and react to my songs. I hadn't thought of it in just that way. One of the things I love about doing things that are creative is that I feel like it's my right as an artist not to be affected by the reactions of those people that are going to hear my songs. But I also feel like it's the right of the people hearing them to have their own interpretations of what these songs mean. Sometimes people will see things that I don't see.

A mockingbird has moved into our neighborhood. It perches atop a telephone pole behind our backyard. Every morning it is the first thing I hear. It is impossible to be unhappy when listening to a mockingbird. So stuffed with songs it is, it can't seem to make up it's mind which to sing first, so it sings them all, a dozen different songs at once, in a dozen different voices. On and on it sings without a pause, so peppy, even frantic, as if its voice alone is keeping the world awake.

It has affected me very much in the last 10 years. I get it from my grandmother. She was very superstitious as well. I'm funny about numbers. It's become a phobia, so I have to watch it. It affects your day a lot. Before I go on stage, there are certain things I do that are semi-sort of Gypsy superstitious things, but I'm coping with them. It hasn't affected the music, thank God. If you got really bad, you'd say "I'll pick that note instead of that one or sing this song before that.

Ah, drink again This river that is the taker-away of pain, And the giver-back of beauty! In these cool waves What can be lost?-- Only the sorry cost Of the lovely thing, ah, never the thing itself! The level flood that laves The hot brow And the stiff shoulder Is at our temples now. Gone is the fever, But not into the river; Melted the frozen pride, But the tranquil tide Runs never the warmer for this, Never the colder. Immerse the dream. Drench the kiss. Dip the song in the stream.

She was coming. I watched the slight figure grow out of the dusk between the trees, and the darkness in which I had walked of late fell away. The wood that had been so gloomy was a place of sunlight and song; had red roses sprung up around me I had felt no wonder. She came softly and slowly with bent head and hanging arms, not knowing that I was near. I went not to meet her - it was my fancy to have her come to me still - but when she raised her eyes and saw me I fell upon my knees.

LATE will always be the most important song to me. I used to struggle to perform it live without getting upset but have performed it a lot now, which has really helped. Very often it makes people in the audience cry, and that means so much to me that they can relate to the emotions in the song. It was actually a really easy song to write, I wrote most of it in one day... it sort of flowed out of me. I was never good with dealing with emotion, so I think I kind of needed to write it!

North Korea invites parody. We laugh at the excesses of the propaganda and the gullibility of the people. But consider that their indoctrination began in infancy, during the fourteen-hour days spent in factory day-care centers; that for the subsequent fifty years, every song, film, newspaper article, and billboard was designed to deify Kim Il-sung; that the country was hermetically sealed to keep out anything that might cast doubt on Kim Il-sung's divinity. Who could possibly resist?

It's one thing having a great song, but I think for me if you take it to the next level... say you had a guitar and a vocal, and the song was amazing but the vocalist wasn't that great and it just was a guitar and vocal acoustic track, switching that to something like an amazing voice singing the exact same song with the instrumentation being really nice and lush or unique in some way and interesting and diverse... I think it's all about the instrumentation and textures in the sound.

I had a dream that Louis Armstrong was playing the 'Swept Away' melody. I have no idea where it came from. But Louis Armstrong was playing it and singing the song to me. I woke up-it's a borrowed melody no doubt-and wrote it down. If I hear a song and I choose not to put it down, that's me neglecting to accept that song. I think there's a very spiritual and godly-type ting that happens, and it happens to way more people than we know. It's just that very few of us choose to engage it.

I think Justin Bieber played a couple of songs up the block from it - and they said that some-one in his camp came and got him a burger. We had been talking about him a lot. Especially actually, last time we came to Australia, C.T. was on a real big Justin Bieber kick. I just thought it was really interesting to finally cross paths with him in New Zealand. And like really - the TV, everyone's just talking about it on the radio - it's a big deal that he was here. I think he just left.

Lina couldn't sleep at first, thinking of the old songs and what they meant. Someone, long ago, had hoped that at least a few people would survive and had wanted them to remember her city and the treasure it held, the treasure that was most valuable of all - herself, her family, and all of the generations of people who had lived in that secret place, their purpose, though they didn't know it, to make sure that human beings did not vanish from the world, no matter what happened above.

Maybe it's naïve, but I would love to believe that once you grow to love some aspect of a culture-its music, for instance -you can never again think of the people of that culture as less than yourself. I would like to believe that if I am deeply moved by a song originating from some place other than my own homeland, then I have in some way shared an experience with the people of that culture. I have been pleasantly contaminated. I can identify in some small way with it and its people.

When you're really bummed out, the last thing you want to hear is up-tempo and positive. And it lets you know that you're not alone, that somebody has hurt before. It works the same way with chick songs as it does with political songs. When you hear somebody singing about these things, you know that you're not alone, that somebody else is suspicious of what's going on around us in the world. So you don't feel like you're crazy, and you feel like you might be able to make a difference.

To get large groups of people to dance, there needs to be something accessible about the music. The beat can't be too esoteric, but unless we're talking about prog or etherealist composition, I think there's something simplistic about most music. What's completely insane to me is that people would consider music that's simple to be dumbed-down. Couldn't simplicity be a deliberate, smart choice? Those people aren't really listening; they're judging a song off of a beat, off of a pulse.

Gail Anderson-Dargatz has a noticing eye, a voice as unique as the countryside she writes about, and a heart large enough to love her entire cast of distinct and memorable characters. In The Cure for Death by Lightning she fashions an irresistible song out of the joys and dangers of growing up, the mysteries and wonders of life on a farm, the thrilling terror of trying to outrun the awful unseen force that pursues a growing girl. This novel opens a door to a shining, surprising world.

My artistic goal was to write something that's one hundred percent real and true to me and to this world. I tried to touch on truths that really connect with people from every avenue of life. Ultimately, when you write from a vantage point of faith, humility and openness to the world around you, people have to respond because those same truths are instilled in them. Honestly, I don't have any agenda other than being sincere, real, and passionate about these songs and the music I make.

What inspires me is anxiety and the quest to try to change things in my life. ...I got addicted to endings and beginnings and to the idea of always moving around. ...Obviously, whenever you're going through something that's the best time to create, if you're going through something amazing, or horrible, or nothing at all you should be creating. Unfortunately the songwriters of today generally torture themselves to make sure they're writing good songs and take it a little too seriously.

I fell like a lot of times, when I write a song, it is coming from an introspective perspective that my faith always kind of factors. Faith is either part of what factors in to my decision making, or it is part of what factors into my fears and my doubts. It is either the positive or the negative part of it that is afflicting me during times of conflict, which is normally when you write songs about yourself when you find some sort of conflict or you are seeking some sort of resolution.

What can you think when one review says "this album is brilliant, and all the songs flow into the utmost brilliant song 'The Upside-Down Cross'" then another review says "this album is brilliant, except for that horrible and pointless song 'The Upside-Down Cross'," and another review will say "Jeffrey really sounds confident and relaxed on this new album", the next reviewer says "Jeffrey sounds more depressed and awful than ever" - these totally contrasting reviews happen all the time!

All power is God`s power; we are only vehicles. He pulsates in our hearts. He breathes through us. He sings a thousand and one songs through us. Sannyas means to let this understanding become the foundation of your life: We are not, God is. Let the ego disappear, evaporate, and you will find infinite contentment. With the ego there is only misery; without the ego there is only God; and God is bliss, and God is benediction, and God is ecstasy. Die to the ego so that God can live in you.

Meditation is totally different. When you concentrate you close your mind to everything else. Meditation means just an openness, a relaxed openness. It is not concentration. While listening to me you are listening to the birds singing in the trees too. The wind passing through the trees singing its song - you are open to it too. The aeroplane passing by, or the train - you are open to it too. This is meditation - you are simply open, available, conscious, available, all doors are open.

I laughed and pointed out that "Hash Browns Mean Nothing Without You" was a pretty good name for a band. "Or a song," the Duke said, and then she started singing all glam rock, a glove up to her face holding an imaginary mic as she rocked out an a cappella power ballad. "Oh, I deep fried for you / But now I weep 'n' cry for you / Oh, babe, this meal was made for two / And these hash browns mean nothing, oh these hash browns mean nothing, yeah these HASH BROWNS MEAN NOTHIN' without you.

That's what I've always loved about music, that I could go be another guy for two hours. But ultimately it all comes back to: do you have the songs, can you sing them, do you have a great band that can play them with you? You're charging money to have people come watch you play; I want them to feel taken someplace good or provoked into thinking my way for an hour and a half or two hours. I have been a provoker and I'll probably always be one in the public arena for the rest of my life.

People always say that music is a universal language. It was very, very true. We could show up anywhere with any people speaking different languages and we could just be like, "You want to play that song? Yeah, okay." We would usually want to play Latin American songs, and they would usually want to play Santana or Jimi Hendrix and stuff like that. So we would trade off. So yeah, we were able to make a lot of friends that way and meet a lot of local musicians. It was a great experience.

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