three songs for Valentine's Day

Loving hearts, seeking hearts, hurting hearts, hearts wide open, hearts reconciled, hearts and flowers: it’s Valentine season. Three songs to listen to as you prepare and enjoy your celebrations:

Scotland’s national bard, Robert Burns, wrote dozens and dozens of songs about love, funny, bawdy, serious, heartfelt. Eddi Reader has recorded many of them including Ae Fond Kiss. My Love is Like a Red Red Rose, and John Anderson My Jo. Good ones all. On her album Eddi Reader sings more of the songs of Robert Burns she also chose to record a contemporary song, Wild Mountainside, by John Douglas. It’s a fine look at longing, change, trust, and homecoming. all framed it touches of the Scottish landscape. It will work to illuminate love whatever landscape happens to be your place at the moment.


Cathie Ryan draws in images of nature and weather in her song What’s Closest to the Heart, as well, framing a journey of trust, questions, and acceptance in swirling melody driven by John Doyle’s guitar and laced by John McCusker’s fiddle. It is a song that may have you tapping your feet even as you consider the images and questions in English and Irish that Ryan offers. A fine and perhaps a bit unexpected companion to the season of hearts and flowers, you’ll find the song on Ryan's album The Farthest Wave.


Indiana based songwriter Carrie Newcomer looks at love, trust, connection, and staying true in her song Hush. It’s a reflective piece which takes a quiet look at the strength of love beyond the first days of romance - as indeed do Ryan’s and Reader’s songs as well. You will find Hush on Newcomer’s album
Before & After.





you may also wish to see
eddi reader, willie stewart, and the search for haggis
Lovers' Well: Matt & Shannon Heaton



over at the excellent family friendly entertainment blog Reel Life with Jane, Jane Boursaw has made her picks for voting in the 2011 Weblog Awards, also known as the Bloggies. Music Road is one of her choices (thanks Jane!). Follow the link and you can read Jane’s choices and vote for your own if you'd like, through 20th February.