Just play this one out until it explodes into a thousand tiny pieces
What’s your story, universe, you are melody in numbers
You are shapes, you are rhythms, there are signs that we can learn
To place over the heavens, to predict how long we’ll burn
How long will I last, can I turn up the heat?
What star am I circling, what’s circling me?
Now my ebb and my flow, my lack of control
Turning on, turning off
Saying yes, but playing no
Things keep changing…
The Be Good Tanyas, A Thousand Tiny Pieces (album: Hello Love)
So I was in Glasgow this week and actually got beyond the station entrance to walk on streets I’ve not seen in over 23 years. And it was a curiously emotional experience, which I hadn’t expected – to view with old and simultaneously new eyes the glorious sight of Glasgow’s truly beautiful architecture, and feel revived, joyous, happy.
Clearly and thankfully, I’ve reached a ‘rose-tinted-glasses’ view of a time wherein I lived for several years in this city during the early 90s and latterly experienced so much pain and sadness. I’m free of that old woe, free to view the good memories (there were lots!), see it anew… and with this came a level of affection that really took me by surprise.
Anyway… I arrived at HQ slightly late, on account of the deviation into street exploration, and gushed perhaps incoherently to colleagues, before continuing the day without any further startling emotions. But the feeling morphed into a circuitous ramble when I later listened to some favoured music on iPod shuffle and remembered how I’d come across it.
The album is a weird one, I can almost guarantee nobody who’d see this (apart from my estranged husband, kids and the friend who gave it to me) will know this person and her work. The album is ‘Napoli Mediterranea’ by Pietra Montecorvino and is one I’ve been listening to since about 2003 – the year it was released.
It was first acquired by a Scot called Douglas – a dear old online friend who sent it to a mutual friend, Marilyn, with a message along the lines of “tried to like this, but failed, perhaps you’ll enjoy it”. She almost immediately sent it on to me with a message along the lines of “Jesus, Douglas sent me this, awful, what do you think?”
I played it, was utterly hooked, and have listened to it a thousand times since.
Which just illustrates how taste is a fluid and perhaps even random preference, and friends are friends for many reasons but there’s no definitive set of shared criteria… they hated it, I loved it, and yet we all got on.
And thinking about how the CD came into my possession, and subsequently became part of my ‘very special’ collection of favourites… and how these two old friends had entered my life and ‘lived’ with me through some very difficult times… and how we’ve all sort of largely drifted out of touch… and how I was there, back in Glasgow, remembering all this stuff from so many years ago… and still loving Pietra’s music… and now able to re-love Glasgow again… well, I thought it worth sharing in case anyone else can also be moved to adoration by Pietra’s music (for every 9 folk who detest it, there’ll be one lucky soul who ‘finds her’, gets it, and loves it).
Pietra sings in Neapolitan, a distinct dialect of Naples, and I’ve asked fluent Italian-speaking friends to translate her lyrics and they can’t. Neapolitan is perhaps to Italian what Cornish is to English… an utterly separate language. And I love that she sings in such a distinctive and belligerent way – it’s clearly about the music and not the sales.
Here’s a taster… a sexy little duet:
The picture on this blog, incidentally, is a wonderful house I lived in for part of my time in Scotland – probably the most simultaneously happy/unhappy part. Weird. I’d moved out of Glasgow after 3 years or so and headed to the coast – where my novel The Town That Danced is set. And, indeed, this lodge house and the gorgeous castle to which it’s attached, are the very ones fictionalised in my novel. As are some of the local folk. But I could get sued for that, so I’d add that they are all very fictionalised.
And I spent a lot of time, at that point, working freelance for the organisation that now employs me, and so resulted in my recent visit again to Glasgow…
All things come around. All is linked. Circuitous is defined as a route or journey longer than the most direct way. In life, perhaps the circuitous route is the only route to take. Viva Glasgow, viva old friends, viva (re)finding my work tribe, viva life, and viva music that lives with us and stays with us throughout all other turmoil.
So I was in Glasgow this week and actually got beyond the station entrance to walk on streets I’ve not seen in over 23 years. And it was a curiously emotional experience, which I hadn’t expected – to view with old and simultaneously new eyes the glorious sight of Glasgow’s truly beautiful architecture, and feel revived, joyous, happy.
sandie zand 