One of the great joys of listening to music is that every now and then, a song comes along that just absolutely knocks you for six.
Going through the lists 2024 poll, I noted the album “Wheels Within Wheels” from the Norwegian group Meer in the @niallb entry. An album I had not come across, but given Niall’s impeccable taste, something that was worth investigating. It’s a superb album and one that probably would have made my list had I heard it earlier, but there is one track on it – “Today Tonight Tomorrow” – that just really hit the spot. Can’t explain why, it’s just “one of those” that I just immediately fall in love with,.
Anyway – video for a live acoustic version of the song in the comments and thanks @niallb for the recommendation.
and the video….
Thanks @Chrisf That track didn’t do it for me but it got me thinking about the last time a first hearing really connected with me. Not today or yesterday it turned out but years ago…
Thumbs up. See also Suck The Blood From My Wound from the same session.
Thanks for that @Pajp Powerful stuff indeed. Well worth catching a live show I’d imagine.
That’s a powerful song – excellent!
This. On a train last night (cold, bit fed up I was on a train and too many people by half on the same train). I had clicked on the album it came from having been digging into Max Richter a bit of late and this was track 2.
To say that it perked me up is an understatement. I proably played it 6 or 7 times in a row and then let the rest of the album continue. May be best listened to with headphones but it is a spectaculalrly lovely thing.
The 12 Ensemble do a spectacular version of this, should anyone get the chance to see them perform it live.
That does sound rather lovely, and I like the extension of the melody, though it’s frustrating that it never resolves itself like the original. I was waiting for the burst of euphoria at the end, which never came.
Paul Brady. One More Today. A bottom lip wobbler which gets me every time.
This is currently tickling my ears here at my bijou council penthouse. Pure unadulterated joy, utterly gorgeous.
One I always return to:
Soulsavers with David Gahan.
This may be more a track than a song, but it always floors me. I always feel the best dance music is happy and sad at the same time and this is melancholic and uplifting at the same time. The rises and falls are just brilliant. Someone said that listening to this track makes you feel everything will be alright and that’s about right.
This one, “Day After Tomorrow”, sung by Linda Thompson.
Yes. This too.
One of my all time favourites and possibly a Desert Island Disc is this cover of “a Heart Needs a Home” by Loudon Wainwright and Shawn Colvin – banished to a forgotten tribute album.
Another excellent track on this tribute album is by June Tabor: “Beat The Retreat”.
What a line up:
Bass – Danny Thompson
Drums – D.J. Bonebrake
Guitars – James Burton & Martin Carthy
Slide – David Lindley.
Magical.
Forgotten by whom? It’s. great album!
James Grant – Does It All Add Up To Nothing?
In the words of my Mastering Engineer chum, the whole My Thrawn Glory album is “heart-breakingly beautiful”
Which reminds me, James Grant is doing a fair few shows with Norman Love and Bernard Butler….
There’s a trio album coming in the spring.
Norman Blake? And presumably not Gerard Love?
D’oh……
This will always floor me with its simple magnificence
Like most others on this site, I guess, I have dozens, maybe hundreds (probably many hundreds).
Here’s one:
Also Love Has No Pride.
Yep @mikethep. I remember in the mid 70s my then girlfriend (current wife) and I watched the OGWT New Year’s Eve spectacular in her flat, and Bonnie Raitt and Freebo performed this American Flyer classic. I’ve been a fan ever since.
I think (but maybe wrong) that this is that performance:
Never seen that before – beautiful. I often heard the song performed by Irma Cetas at Hank Wangford gigs back then. She did a fine job too.
There’s a video of her singing it with Hank on YouTube @Mikethep.
Never heard of her before but google revealed that she is Melanie Harrold from the wonderful Daphne’s Flight. I have tickets to see her / them next May – I’ll ask her if she remembers you!
Here she is on lead vocal and piano on another “floors you” song:
She won’t, but tell her she has a long-time fan from Pegasus days living in Murwillumbah!
For extra context, you could tell her that I published Hank’s wonderful Lost Cowboys book.
I’m off to find more Daphne’s Flight!
She performed in a double act on the London cabaret scene with Ollie Blanchflower if I remember correctly. I think I only saw her once with the Lost Cowboys but I remember her as a wonderful singer.
She started off as Joanna Carlin (because there was another pesky Melanie on the circuit) before reverting back to her given after an album or so. She was also in the parallel version of the Albion Band that Ashley Hutchings toured while the main version were playing at the National Theatre and becoming th Home Service.
Not sure whether this will work given that it is in Hungarian, but I cannot stop listening to this lately.
This is Amondó by Hiperkarma. First is the official video (the song kicks off at about 55 seconds in) and second is a live version done with the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra at Budapest’s Sziget festival one year.
I speak Hungarian well enough, but the lyrics are too fast for me. I only pick up bits here and there, but I never find the whole thing less than exciting.
… and live….
Was thinking along these lines when I was listening to this yesterday. When the brass comes in at about 1:40 it just floors me.
1:30 actually.
1.42 actually
So I was right first time! See what I mean?
This one, 55 years after I first heard it on the radio as a 15 year old. I used to listen to a programme called “The Top Sixty” on 2YD Wellington NZ on Sunday afternoons JUST so I could hear this.
The other day I was contemplating what to listen to on a 40 minute car journey and I grabbed the Green River CD off the shelf. I don’t think I’d ever listened to the whoe thing, I probably bought it cos it was discounted. I got in the car, cranked up the volume and off I went. Totally floored. 2 minute 26 seconds of greatness.
This is a slightly daggy (as we say in Australia) video but it is from CCR’s “official” site. Barefoot girls not only dancing in the moonlight but also playing guitars. And whoever the 12 year old* was who they hired to do the transcription, it’s “shoo fly” not “shoe fly” FFS
*Homage to the sadly missed Ed Reardon there if you missed it…
Magnificent. The song, that is, not the video.
Another from me.
The marvellous Etta James sounds like she really means it here.
Not sure if this quite matches the brief – I first heard the version on Music for a New Society, and that was powerful enough, with the “Dark Island” outro – but these quiet, solo versions floor me every time. Dawning of the Day by R&L. Thompson can have a similar effect: not sure if weeping openly counts as “floored”, though…
I didn’t follow the brief at all I believe. I just posted what I happened to be listening to and enjoying immensely at that particular moment. As I am frequently floored by music whenever I listen and as this time was no exception to that I thought it allowable. The Shostakovich Violin Concerto No. 1 that follows the Allegro molto appassionato from Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto that I posted above is on the same disc from that boxset and is frankly astonishing btw.
That’s cos you’re a rule breaker and mould shatterer, Mr P!
By the way, I can’t see the video that you posted above – who was the artist, what was the box set?
Takes one to know one.
The box is Hilary Hahn the Complete Sony Recordings.
Superb box – I have it myself. Every one a gem – and one of my favourite Elgar recordings! Proves that you don’t need to be English to play Elgar well…
Absolutely. I have Vilde Frang’s Elgar Violin Concerto with the Deutscher Symphonie-Orchester Berlin arriving later today. Another fabulous rendition that again proves your assertion to be completely correct.
There was never meant to be a brief. As Peter mentions, this was more about a song that I currently fell in love with – one of the joys of listening to music is that songs like this frequently pop up.
So whether it’s a current ear worm, an all time classic, a guilty pleasure….. bring it on.
This site is one of my main sources of new music, so as you probably have noticed, I frequently put out such prompts….
Huzzah!
Good shout. I discovered this on live album Fragments of a Rainy Season and it stopped me in my tracks.
One of my favourite live albums of all time.
I first heard my favourite band, Swedish neo-medievalists Arcana, on a podcast, and immediately rushed to catch up with all their albums. Each one has at least one song, or one moment, that stops me in my tracks, but The Song of Mourning makes me want to grab total strangers and say, “Stop what you’re doing and listen to *this*.”
The combination of music and lyrics, particularly from about 2:10 (“It’s too late, it’s too late now, there’s nothing more to do-oo-ooh…) to the end, grabbed me from the first listen and has never let go.
In a similar moody vein, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. I can take or leave a lot of famous classical music, but this stands out as a stunningly beautiful piece of work. Hearing it for the first time in Platoon, I was so wowed that it distracted me from the film.
I recall the BBC orchestra playing it at a memorial concert shortly after 9/11. Before they started, IIRC conductor Leonard Slatkin asked the audience not to applaud once it finished. The final notes tailing off into silence, after the combination of the music and visuals of that awful day, was absolutely heartbreaking and unforgettable. I was in bits for ages afterwards, and re-watching the clip has finished me off again. Isn’t music just a wonderful thing?
Again I just happen to be listening to this right now and every time I play the Standards Trio I find it staggering that these three musicians can come together and by some sort of alchemy improvise seemingly telepathically to weave bliss.
I think the last time I really took to a song I’d never heard before was a few months ago. The song was All On A Misty Morning by Paul Weller. I don’t know much of Weller’s solo catalogue. I loved Above The Clouds, The Strange Museum and Wild Wood, but then lost interest for some reason. All On A Misty Morning completely passed me by at the time of its release. My bad, great song.
Ps. As regards all-time classics, since losing my hearing and while I don’t really miss music, I have thought occasionally about what song it would be nice to hear again. I can’t decide between The Köln Concert Part 1 or Junior Murvin’s Police & Thieves.
It doesn’t happen much these days, but Backyard Lover by Merce Lemon is one of those songs. It starts quietly enough but builds to a whole world of bitterness and hurt at 3:24 when Merce sings “you fuckin’ liar”. Great song.
A favourite old tune, played exquisitely.
This always floors me – given the subject matter and the environment at the time. Incredible bravery and dignity in the face of such horror.
Sorry, but nothing beats the Scottish Band on this:
Except, maybe, this
Saw Jackie Oates perform this at Folk at the Hall, the year after her father had died too young. Ewan MacColl’s finest, I’d say.