The Celtics Invade

Yesterday evening I had a hurried Deepa calling me begging to take one of the cars in the stable to an art gallery event last night. She had asked me to come but I had emphatically refused because it isn’t my style to show up at a glitzy event for no real reason. Anyway, so I gave her the car and told her to be careful because if it got ruined I would pull it out of her income for the next two decades. Things were just fine and the car was returned by 1am. I went this morning to get my glasses fixed and decided to take the car out for a spin although my official reasoning was I needed to drop the car off at the other house where it stays. To my bewilderment, at 8:30am I hear what sounds like a song of off one of those PBS specials with the tapdancing and expressionless people. Okay, I’m not as ignorant as I purport because I recognized the artists as “Celtic Woman” and they actually did play on PBS a few months back but I didn’t get to see the performance. I liked the song playing but that isn’t the point of this post. The point is: who the hell plays a song like this when in this sort of car? Are you just being cute? It’s not like you bump this on your way for a night out. Anyway, I figured I’d upload the song and let you guys listen to it. Next time, put on a real driving song or I’ll drive even if I don’t want to go. All ******** drivers should be insulted. LOL

Hit play if it doesn’t start by itself.

[http://blog.hishamrana.com/media/celtic.mp3]

Oh, if you haven’t figured it out, that’s not English. It’s a Gaelic song written originally by Clannad in 1983 for an Irish drama. Ten years after it was written, the song was played in Patriot Games and Volkswagon played the song in its commericials. This version is just amazing as it demonstrates Orla’s unbelieveable vocal ability. I will say that it isn’t the typic Irish jig and some may say her voice is too perfect, but everything has a time and place.

In Clannad’s own words:

We saw the show of course before saying yes to it. It was a fictional story about Northern Ireland and what it shows is that no one wins in the end. So it’s really in keeping with us, because we’re not really a political band. When they approached us, they wanted to use a track from the album Fuaim which was a Scottish Gaelic song. We thought it would be inappropriate to use it for something concerning Ireland. So we said we’ll write something. My two brothers got together with me, and Ciarán had an old book of proverbs which belongs to my grandfather. In it was this proverb saying:

Imtheochaidh sor is soir
A dtáinig ariamh An ghealach is an ghrian;
Everything that is and was will cease to be.

He elaborated on it with the moon and the stars, the East and the West, a young man and his fame. It was a kind of lament. The Fol lol the doh part was really mouth music, if you think of a fiddle playing; Fol de liddle, taddle do, diddley idle oh. Well we just slowed it down because of the sentiment of what we were singing, we sang it very slowly. We wrote it in a couple of hours and thought, great, it’s a nice tune and everything, but we didn’t realize the sound we created had developed over the six albums before with all the experimentations we did with words and voices and harmonies.

“So when somebody approached us and said; Where did you get that song? We had to stand back and say `What song?’ We were completely taken back by the response. We were in Germany on a tour, when `Harry’s Game’ was on TV and we came back to do the main `Top of the Pops’ kind of show. People were saying to us, `What’s it like to write a hit song?’ and we’d say, `Oh come on, be serious, if you were trying to write a hit song would you have written it in Gaelic?’ Entering the British charts at #5 with a Gaelic song was really something, oh it was brilliant. It was obviously a big turning point in our life with getting a major record deal with RCA and having more time in the studio and writing our songs, because Magical Ring was then half traditional material and half our own.”

Regardless, it’s the wrong song for the car, but I suppose I can let it slide–this time.

Popularity: 1% [?]

July 16, 2005 | Filed Under Uncategorized 

Comments

Comments are closed.