My wife and I caught a wonderful benefit concert with Andrew Peterson, Eric Peters, and Concerning Lions last Saturday. I wish I could share some of it with you. I saw a couple video clips of the Chattanooga-based Concerning Lions on their site, I believe, and you should be able to catch songs from the other great musicians through The Rabbit Room and elsewhere on the inTerweb. I wanted to introduce myself to Mr. Peterson and shake his hand and if possible bless him in some way (Mr. Peters too, who looked like he could use a shot in the arm) but I didn’t take the opportunity. I didn’t want to talk about myself for 30 seconds, and what else would I talk about.

The concert was to raise money (and attention I suppose) for a very good counseling center in our city, Richmont Community Counseling Center, which is dedicated to helping those who cannot afford counseling from other sources. If you can’t tell from the website, they do some great work. May the Lord continue to bless them and others through them.

Somebody put up the “He’s Gonna Marry Me” video again. Enjoy it while you can.

Sissel and some guy singing Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

That song always takes me back. I remember a night in college, when a friend was leaving because he’d flunked out (turned out in the end he had a learning disability). We took him out to our favorite haunt, Mitz & Bert’s diner in Lake Mills, Iowa, where you could get a tremendous hamburger and a big plate of hot-enough-to-burn-your-mouth french fries, plus a chocolate malt, for $1.03 (I had to watch my dollars in those days, so I remember). Before we broke up for the night, somebody played this song on the juke box, and it was like a benediction.

That was some time after my high school graduation, which is on my mind because we’re having a sort of informal class reunion this weekend, down in Kenyon. Every molecule in my body is screaming, “DANGER! STAY AWAY!!!!!!” but I guess I have to go, because I missed the last regularly scheduled reunion.

I’ve never understood why people invite me to things, or register disappointment when I fail to show up. Is it my unsmiling, expressionless face they miss? The way I sulk in the corners and avoid eye contact? My bitter, self-pitying jokes? Or my early exits with lame excuses?

No wonder I can’t talk to people. They’re strange.

This is a new song from Andrew Peterson, and I love it.

I was fairly pleased with my post yesterday, but it’s left me depleted. I feel like I’ve said everything I have to say for the moment.

Also, I’m bummed because Hunter Baker, author of The End of Secularism (don’t read it–it’ll only give him a swelled head) is now getting mentioned on Adam Baldwin’s twitter feed. Yes, that Adam Baldwin, the guy who plays Casey on “Chuck.”

Have I mentioned that I hate Hunter Baker?

In closing, here’s Sissel Kyrkjebø doing a little Grieg. “Solveig’s Song” from “Peer Gynt.” Comfort food for the soul.

This is not the melody from Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances that runs through my head so often, but it’s worth sharing today.

For your St. Patrick’s Day enjoyment, one of my favorite Irish songs, done by my favorite Irish group, the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem.

I suspect I may have posted this clip before. I don’t care. It’s only once a year, and this song embodies one of my favorite aspects of Irish culture—the joyous hyperbole of Hibernian rhetoric. C.S. Lewis recalls in Surprised By Joy how his father (an Irishman, of course) used to launch into Ciceronian philippics denouncing the horrific misbehavior of his sons, to the point where sometimes they had to restrain themselves from laughing. One of my favorite stretches of my own writing was Father Aillil’s curse against Erling’s enemies, near the beginning of The Year of the Warrior. One of the reasons I enjoy inhabiting Aillil’s skull is the opportunity to declaim on the large scale, unrestrained by reason or good taste.

Ireland has opened the world’s first Leprechaun Museum. Judging from the story (which might, I’ll grant, provide an incomplete description) it seems to be primarily an exercise in feeling very small, walking around among giant-sized furniture. If that’s the idea, I’d say it misses the point of leprechauns entirely. Continue reading We're doing leprechauns wrong →

Speaking of enjoying music, and in honor of the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day holiday, I offer one of my own favorite Irish songs, one considered quaint today, but which I find deeply moving, “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms.”

The lyrics were written by the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852), who also wrote “The Minstrel Boy” and “The Last Rose of Summer.” I believe there’s a story that Moore wrote it to reassure his wife, after she contracted a skin disease, but I don’t put a lot of faith in such tales. Let me know if you have verification.

The idea of life-long love seems to me to have fallen on hard times in the 21st Century. Does anybody write love songs anymore (as opposed to sex songs) outside of Country music? (Not that Country doesn’t count. I just find it remarkable that a large segment of popular music seems to be devoted to songs that aren’t devoted—songs about booty calls and hotness.)

The clip above isn’t exactly what I was looking for, but it’s nice and the singer does both verses, with the words roughly right. I note that his last name is McLarsen. I wonder what the story behind that is. I know of a family named McCarlson, whose ancestor came to America and added a “Mc” to his name to a) differentiate himself from all the other Carlsons in a Norwegian town, and b) be more American. My own great-grandfather did something similar, but changed his last name altogether.