Music and other obsessions

I received an iTunes gift card from my dad this Christmas and I wasted exactly zero time cashing it in for some new music.  I love music.  No, I really mean it.  I looooooooove music.  I have no musical talent and I am completely tone-deaf.  But, I love listening and singing along to music, and because I can really relate to the songs, I especially like Canadian music.  My iPod Touch has somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500 songs, and I would say that approximately half of them are by Canadian artists.  We have some pretty amazing songwriters/performers in this country who get little or no attention from the rest of the world.  Which, in some ways, is nice for us (they play in the smaller cities and their ticket prices remain very reasonable), but kind of sucks for them (it's nice to get money, don't you think?).  I try to support them as much as possible.

I bought 3 albums (yes, I'm an album girl - buying individual songs is weird...go big or go home, I always say).  The first album I bought is not Canadian - it is the soundtrack for the movie "Once" (if you have not yet seen this movie, go out RIGHT NOW and rent it), by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova.  Awesome.  Really soulful, mellow and melancholy.  Just what I like.

The next two albums ARE Canadian and they both feature Jim Cuddy.  The first was "Palace of Gold", by his band Blue Rodeo.  Again, soulful and mellow.  Perfect.  Next, I got his solo record "The Light That Guides You Home", which has completely blown my socks off.  Completely.  They're lying on the floor right now.  Blown off.  If I wasn't already married, I would pack my bags and head to Toronto, track him down and camp out on his doorstep until he agreed to make me his love slave.  On second thought, that might seem a *bit* desperate.  On second thought, maybe (to, you know, preserve some dignity), I would just offer to carry his bags everywhere, for the rest of my days.  That doesn't seem too needy and obsessive, does it?

As I mentioned, I don't own a TV.  This leads to me feeling a little out of the loop, sometimes.  I was not aware that Jim Cuddy had a solo album, or else I would have hunted it down a while ago.  I took some time this week to Google him and found the following video on YouTube (do yourself a favour and watch this in fullscreen):



I have been admiring this video for days now, and not just because he's beautiful and wonderful and perfect. Did you SEE that photography? Is that not the most stunning imagery? I'm a sucker for dramatic shots and this just pushed all my buttons. All that deep black (did you notice how in almost every single shot, at least one side of the image bleeds into the black border of the frame - oh, negative space, how I love you)! All that atmospheric blue!  All those saturated colours.

*Sigh*.  Some days I just feel like giving up trying to make art.  I couldn't do any better than this video and to try feels criminal.   Does that make any sense?

Anyway, the feeling obviously doesn't last.  I just had to do something with all this inspiration, so I whipped this up as a little virtual gift for my sister, who is a huge Blue Rodeo fan, herself. Here you go, Trish. This one's for you: