cataloging + curating + critiquing / effluvia + ephemera + et cetera

When I was in middle school, my older sister and I pooled our babysitting money and joined a music club.  Both Columbia House and BMG Music Club had addresses in Indiana, and as dutiful small-town Hoosiers, we were excited to be members of a club headquartered (or so we thought) in our home state.

One of the cassette tapes that I selected was by UK band The Sundays.  I’d read a gushing review in seventeen magazine and looked forward to being the cool kid at math camp the next summer, what with big-kid music blasting from my tape deck.

Unfortunately, I hated the album upon first listen.  But as a girl raised by parents who apparently personally knew lots of starving kids in China, I didn’t want to waste this music!  So, I kept it on my walkman, playing it over and over until, one day, it clicked.  I heard the beauty, the magic, my ears let go of the rules that Top 40 pop music had written onto my brain — I was forever changed.

The Sundays’ second album contained “Wild Horses” which I would later learn was a cover (I would also later learn what a “cover” was).  But to me, this song belonged to the bright, often incomprehensible voice of The Sundays’ Harriet Wheeler.

You know I can’t let you slide through my hands
Wild horses, couldn’t drag me away
Wild wild horses, couldn’t drag me away

Lovely female phenom Susan Boyle, also from the UK, covers “Wild Horses” in her debut album I Dreamed A Dream.  For me, hers is a cover of The Sundays’ version.  And it — perhaps in part because of Ms. Boyle’s beautiful, delicate background story — moves me just as much as the “original”.  Perhaps she and Harriet can share.

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Looking for music to put you in a thoughtful, quiet space for the new year?  Et voila:

• Susan Boyle’s “Wild Horses”
• The Sundays’ “Wild Horses”
• The 5 Browns’ “Carnival of the Animals – Aquarium”
• The 5 Browns’ “18th Variation from Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini”
• Brad Mehldau’s “Elegy For William Burroughs And Allen Ginsberg”

Here’s hoping that these quiet tunes can drag you away — without the use of wild horses — from that which you would like to leave behind as 2009 turns into 2010.

Photograph (c) 2008 Anna.Andres

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