At the year's turning: 5 songs for new year's reflection

At the turning of the year, it is a time of looking forward and looking back. As ever here at Music Road, the stories found in music are company along the way, and guides to help think about the challenges, acceprt the sorrows, and share the celebrations of the turn of seasons.

Carrie Newcomer’s song Singing in the Dark works for this point in the seasons and beyond.

The idea for the song sparked for Newcomer when she spent a bit of time at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. A respected writer, artist, and thinker on matters of the spirit, she’d been invited to experience the place where spiritual teacher and writer Thomas Merton had lived.

While there, she attended several of the services through which the monks keep hours of the day -- matins, lauds, vespers, compline, for example -- some of which occur in the dark of night and the dark of very early hours of the morning.

On new year’s eve and other times, someone is always singing in the dark...

You will find Singing in the Dark on Carrie Newcomer’s album A Great Wild Mercy.

Waitin’ on Mary is a Christmas song, yes. It also works really well with the atmosphere and events going in in the world just now: finding reasons to hope amidst despair, for one thing. Gretchen Peters wrote it. You will find it on her album Northern Lights.

Rani Arbo has set words of Alfred Lord Tennyson to music in Ring Out Wild Bells. Each of the verses she’s chosen speaks to today as much as they did to Tennyson’s time.

You will find it recorded on the Rani Arbo and daisy mayhem album Wintersong.

In Scotland, the celebration of midnight as one year turns to another is marked by and is called the bells. Rani Arbo and daisy mayhem’s song is a nod to that, and so is this...

Auld Lang Syne, as well known as it is, really does belong as a part on one year turning into another. Here’s a fine version of it by Hannah Rarity and Blazin’ Fiddles. You will want to listen, yes, but then perhaps second time round go ahead and sing along.

Bittersweet as the turning of a year may seem at times, it is also a time which invites celebration, connection and hope. Cajun musicians Canray Fontenot and Michael Doucet caught that ideas well in their song Bonne Annee. So did Rani Arbo and daisy mayhem in their performance of it, on their album Wintersong.

Wishing you all the best at the turning of this year, and as the new year unfolds.

You may also wish to see
Three more songs for the new year, from Kris Drever, Fara, and Olivia Newton-John
Ireland, Scotland, and story
December: music for a time of hope and reflection at Wandering Educators
Music for peace, understanding, and connection at Wandering Educators

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New year's eve, and into a new year: 3 songs for company

At the turning of the year, thoughts and ideas of change, of regret, of hope, and many more things arise.

Accept them all, send the ones which need to go, as a friend of mine says, up in the smoke of a new year’s blaze.

Embrace the good ideas, the community, the hope.

With all that in mind, music to accompany you in to the new year

Here’s one to honor looking back and looking forward, and to honor the hope found in community. It is called Just a Lot of Folk, sung by Olivia Newton-John. You will find on an album from the early folk/country days of Olivia’s career, called Clearly Love.

Thrift is a plant that grows at the edge of the sea in Scotland, hanging on through all sorts of weather and circumstance. The song Thrift celebrate hope, persistence, and other good qualities such as that. Karine Polwart sings lead, and in this video you will see her with her musical friends who form the Spell Songs singers: Rachel Newton, Beth Porter, Sekou Keita, Jim Molyneux, Kris Drever, and Julie Fowlis. Engineer/producer Andy Bell, part of the collaboration, is there too. You will find the song on the album Spell Songs II: Let the Light In.

It may have been inspired by the Orkney legend of a witch who sold fair winds to sailors, but...Jeana Leslie, who wrote the song Fair Winds and sings lead, and her friends who form the band Fara have turned it into a song of hope. Kristan Harvey, Caitriona Price, and Rory Matheson -- the other musicians who make up Fara-- join Jeana on the song, which you will find on their album Energy Islands.

Band members tell the backstory of the song ...

You may also wish to see
More about the album Spell Songs II:let the Light In
At Wandering Educators, Music for peace, undertanding, and connection (there’s another Spell Songs video in this, too)
The album Laws of Motion from Karine Polwart,
Thoughtful songs from Ireland’s Cara Dillon: Wanderer.

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Auld Lang Syne

It's a time of year when people all over the world join in singing Auld Lang Syne, a song Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote and adapted from an even older piece of music. Here's a fine version of it with Emily Smith taking the lead vocal, supported by Jamie McClennan and her own band members as well as members of the band Breabach. Smith, an award winning singer and songwriter, is from the area in the southwest of Scotland where Robert Burns made his home.




you may also wish to see
Music Road: Song for the weekend: Emily Smith: Glory Bound
Music Road: Emily Smith, Jamie McClennan, and Robert Burns
Music Road: eddi reader, willie stewart, and the search for haggis

Image of fireworks by Christel SAGNIEZ from Pixabay

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If you enjoy what you are reading here, I've recently begun publishing an occasional newsletter at Substack with more stories about music, the people who make it, and the places which inspire it. Come visit and check it out!

At the turning of the year: music and change

The turning of the years is often a time of change, a time of looking forward and looking back, a time for forgiveness, for beginning anew. The sort of music we meet here along the music road speaks of all these things, at times. Here are several albums which make good companions for such reflection. In the songs on her album Before & After, Carrie Newcomer invites consideration of the joy and hardship of change, and the mysteries involved with it Tommy Sands knows a good bit about change as it plays out through politics, and through the movements of history. Take a listen to how he puts this into song on Arising from the Troubles The gifts of winter and longing for spring are both part of the landscape Jennifer Cutting and her fellow musicians in the Ocean Orchestra explore through their music on Song of Solstice Legend and myth, the natural world, and how those resonate with the courage it takes to risk change are part of what Cathie Ryan considers through the songs she covers and the songs she writes for her album The Farthest Wave you may also wish to see Music Road: rest in music Music Road: Best Music, 2011

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New Year's Eve

Wishing you all good things at the turning of the year.
May each of us share the light and light each other’s ways as we walk through the year ahead -- and may we all share in the music, as well.


Thank you for walking the music road with me, and for being part of a community of readers which circles the world, from New Zealand to Chile, from Thailand to Romania, from Hawaii to Tucson to San Marcos and Austin, to Eden Prairie, Minnesota, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Tallahassee, Florida, to Bloomington, Indiana, to Medford, Massachusetts, up through Halifax, Sydney, and St. John’s in the Maritimes, over to Calgary on the western plains, across the wide ocean to Stornoway in the Western Isles, Aberdeen, Dundee, and Perth in Scotland’s east, all through the central belt from Edinburgh to Glasgow, to Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and over to Ireland, from Waterford to Cork to Kerry to Limerick to Galway to Sligo to Donegal to Tyrone and through Derry, Belfast, Armagh, Down, Louth, Meath, and Dublin.

You’ll know, perhaps, that here along the music road I often write reflections on creative practice with ideas for music to accompany them, as well as writing on music and musicians. At this turning of the year, here is a look back at several of my favorite reflections, and yours, from the year that’s turning.

here are two from the winter holidays
listening to Christmas: Shannon Heaton, Cathie Ryan, Mary Black, Hanneke Cassel
third week in Advent: connection

and three from earlier this year
patrick season: music and mist
trust and music
music and focus

you may also wish to see
Delicious Baby's Photo Friday, where travelers offer new insights to the world each Friday.

-->Your support for Music Road is welcome and needed. If you are able to chip in, here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this. Thank you.