Day Thirty (the end of the challenge)

your favorite song

 I'm not really a person who has one favourite anything, I don't even have a favourite colour! I don't have one particular book that is my favourite, or a movie I could say I liked more than all the others I've seen. Picking a favourite song is not something that I feel I could do. I definitely have songs that are my favourite for a given moment or emotion but they change as the years pass and my taste evolves and expands. 

When I tried to think what I could possible answer for this question there was one song that jumped into my head, American Pie by Don McLean. It is a song I have heard and sung along to my entire life, I've heard it performed live and I know ALL the words. There are other songs I love as much, whose words I can recite, that I've listened to a hundred times but American Pie holds a special place in my heart. It makes me think of singalongs with my mum and a childhood I loved. 

I also have a list of another 50 songs I would call favourites but as I said the list changes as new music is released, as I discover or rediscover old artists or for a hundred other reasons. Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros is another favourite at the moment as well as Dinosaur by Kisschasey. I like a multitude of Eminem songs and I'm partial to a bit of D12 as well. I adore the music of Angus & Julia Stone, Lisa Mitchell, The Cat Empire (not so much their new stuff), Clare Bowditch, Josh Pyke, Kate Miller-Heidke, Regina Spektor, Mama Kin (much better live than on CD), Soko, John Butler and many many MANY more.

My favourite piece of classical music is The Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg (from the Peer Gynt Suite), I also like the other pieces from this suite as well as the music of Mozart and Pachelbel's Canon in D as well as so much more classical music. I'm also a sucker for classics of a different kind, the music sung by Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Deano and their contemporaries. 

I enjoy music from all eras and all genres and yes I even like one or two Country and Western Songs! Music makes me happy, it fills me with joy. Now after all that rambling I will leave you with some lyrics from The Cat Empire and their song How to Explain

When a room becomes an altar
And what beast that must exist
It flies with music from our lips
And steals a kiss and blows it
Out into the mist
Where castles stand on cliffs
And cobbled streets they wind and drift
And moods are made and set but shift
This place where skies are low
And birds are big

We went to sleep in day
And woke again the same day
We have learned to cheat the time
And find the hours
That the clocks cannot define
As I looked up from that stage
I felt the thing that had been made
And how it raged
And how it raged

How to explain?
Something makes me howl
And shiver to the core
Ah outside if it was raining
Then inside there'd be a storm
We've got a pair of hands for climbing
And a pair of knees to spring
And a pair of balls for strength

And a pair of lungs to sing
And these simple chords
That say: music is the language of us all

To write these songs is to be written
Ah the chorus always knows
What is in store
And what is more the thing that sings us
Is the thing that makes us roar
I felt that beast 'kisso my neck
We clapped our hands
And heard them spread
There was a trumpet and a call
A pack of Spaniards screamed for more
Music is the language of us all
Music is the language of us all
Music is the language of us all
Music is the language of us all

I find it hard to speak emotional
Cos these things are the things that
Can't be said
And when it's struck it strikes
The memory from our heads
Once I wrote to play's
To be immortal for a night
And despite the unknown hours
Something happens
When the light turns out the lights
Then we fade and yawn
To music that's the language of us all