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The Sweetest Kiss (Eddi’s Song)

November 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

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Eddi is of course Eddi Reader, in my view one of the nicest voices ever to grace the Earth.

I stumbled upon her by mistake, more or less. In a used record store in Pasadena, California. Some of you will know the place: Pooh-Bah’s, at its original location.

This odd looking candy-floss consuming girl on this odd looking CD sleeve: Candyfloss and Medicine, it said.

I’ll take it, I said.

And have I never regretted it. Cooler singers seldom arise.

Years later, it was through her that I then discovered 1 Giant Leap, who recorded her for both of their releases, “1 Giant Leap” and “What About Me?”

Sometimes listening to her I fall in love the same way I’d fall in love with Virginia Woolf when I read her sometimes, as with some ancient and wise one to turn to and curl up against for safety, for comfort, for understanding.

And in one of those curled up moments, I wrote this tribute to Eddi.

Ulf Wolf

PS. To view the video of this song, click the picture, or click here.

PPS. I have set up a YouTube channel for my song(poem)s named VargenUlf (it means “Ulf the Wolf” in Swedish), which you can find here.

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The Quiet Light of Strings

October 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment

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Some time ago, I was looking for a name. I was looking high and low for what to call that inner stillness that on the surface seems so fragile and easily broken but in fact is the unbreakable core of our strength.

I was wondering what to call that thing that certainly doesn’t make a fuss about it, but just goes on shining underneath it all, inextinguishable—literally.

Finally the name just came to me: The Quiet Light of Strings. I believe I was playing the intro to this song at the time. Playing it and listening at depth for the name.

The Quiet Light of Strings. The music within the music, the light eternal.

Ulf Wolf

PS. To view the video of this song, click the picture, or click here.

PPS. I have set up a YouTube channel for my song(poem)s named VargenUlf (it means “Ulf the Wolf” in Swedish), which you can find here.

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For Anna Akhmatova

October 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

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By the time Anna Akhmatova died in 1966 she was one of Russia’s most beloved poets.

Born in 1889 she took the brunt of the Communist revolution and all its insanities and without leaving, as did so many of her contemporaries.

When asked by her friends and colleagues to go with them to Paris (where the persecuted  Russian artist community had formed a new home-base) she refused, saying someone has to stay, endure, and bear witness to the atrocities of the day.

Several biographies suggest that the only reason she survived the Stalin purges was that Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter, loved her poetry—or she would have been killed along with his other millions of victims.

Courage in the face of death. Few things move me more.

The name of my tribute to this amazing woman is “Akhmatova Beriosa.” Beriosa is the Russian word for Birch, one of my favorite trees, and a tree that as a species seems to have made Russian its unofficial home.

Beriosa is also one of the most beautiful words that I know.

Not that Anna Akhmatova was named Beriosa, that is my tribute to her, attaching the most beautiful word to the most amazing woman.

One legend has it that when Anna returned to St. Petersburg (Leningrad, then) from Vladivostok after the Second World War, she stopped off in Moscow, where she took in the ballet one night. Spotted, she was prevailed upon to, after the ballet performance, to take the stage and recite a few of her poems. She agreed to do that.

After this perhaps fifteen minute impromptu recital, the audience, to a man, rose, and gave her an equally long ovation. She was that loved.

When Joseph Stalin got wind of this, only question was: “Who organized the ovation?”

To have had the courage to stare down this regime, with nothing but poems as weapons, and to survive.

That was Akhmatova Beriosa.

This song is my tribute to her.

Ulf Wolf

PS. To view the video of this song, click the picture, or click here.

PPS. I have set up a YouTube channel for my song(poem)s named VargenUlf (it means “Ulf the Wolf” in Swedish), which you can find here.

 

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Words

October 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

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This was the last song I wrote.

When I began writing “Words” I don’t know whether I knew that it would be my last song, but by the time I reached the end I did.

Words, when you stop to think about it, are amazing things. Language is an amazing thing. Too amazing, in my view, for an infant to learn just by being talked at for a few years by swiftly moving grown-ups.

In fact, I believe that as young children we’re simply being reminded. It is simply too fantastic that by hearing language for a while we absorb not only words and their meanings but the gender of things, the inflection of verbs, the cases of things, tenses of things, the whole universe called grammar.

In Swedish, for example, the definite article “the” is added to the noun as a suffix, either –en, or –et, depending on the “gender” of the noun. Now, there’s no rhyme or reason to which noun take –en and which noun takes –et, none. Still, hearing language for a while, the child just knows. And that’s Swedish. I’m not even going to touch German. Or Finnish.

Language has deeper roots somewhere within us than infantile memory, of that I am sure.

That said. “Words” struck as an apt way of telling who I am, what I do, and how I come to you. Not only that, it is also how I see and know.

My songs are my eyes, my ears, my heart. And when I stop singing, I know I am done here.

Ulf Wolf

PS. To view the video of this song, click the picture, or click here.

PPS. I have set up a YouTube channel for my song(poem)s named VargenUlf (it means “Ulf the Wolf” in Swedish), which you can find here.

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