Can music save your mortal soul?

Don MacLean asked this question in the lyrics of “American Pie”. My answer is an unequivocal yes.

Yes, music has saved my soul (and my heart/mind/sanity/body) over and over and over again. Music is always important to me, but the crazier my life gets, the more it becomes necessary to my daily existence. And trust me, my life is c-r-a-z-y right now.

The melodies and lyrics of my favorite songs provide comfort, solace, joy, distraction, wisdom and so much more. They move me to meditate, to ponder the meaning of life, to dance, dance, dance till I drop. Lately I’ve had this insatiable need for music; new discoveries, old favorites, happy music, sad music, upbeat music, peaceful music, music with a message, music that makes me want to move.

I was perusing YouTube the other day (love that site) and started searching for some of my favorite songs – figured it would be fun to post them here. The longer I searched though, the more I remembered – so this post got longer and longer. These are in no particular order, just randomly as they came to me, and I’m sure I could come up with twenty more favorites with very little effort, but I’ve got to stop somewhere!

Leaving On a Jet Plane – Peter Paul and Mary
This one goes way back to my childhood, when we had a Peter, Paul and Mommy record that we played over and over again. Jet Plane is one of my ultimate sing-a-long songs, along with “If I Had A Hammer”. I can’t count the number of road trips I’ve taken with my sister with those songs blasting on the car stereo, and both of us singing for all we were worth. Quite likely the most boring video ever, but at least you can hear the song.

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Me and Bobby McGee - Janis Joplin
Janis rocks. A million people have done this song, but nobody does it like her. End of story. I love “Mercedes Benz” too – but nothing comes near Bobby McGee for me. This is one of the songs my daddy plays when he gets out his guitar at home too, so it is special to me because of all those memories. Someday I’m gonna learn to play the guitar again, and I’m gonna rock this song. Feeling good was good enough for me….uh huh.

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River - Joni Mitchell
This is one of my all-time favorite songs. Ever. I’ve heard some wonderful versions (Indigo Girls, Sarah Maclachlan – heck, even Robert Downey Jr) but nothing even comes close to approaching the incomparable Joni Mitchell. Her voice is beyond comparison – this song just takes me away. It makes me feel wistful, melancholy, but in a good way – if that makes any sense. Couldn’t find a video of Joni singing, so this is some random figure skating compilation – but whatever. i. love. this. song.

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Ice Cream - Sarah MacLachlan
Ah Sarah, she’s my home girl. Not only a Canadian, but from my hometown (think we were probably born at the same hospital even). I once worked with a guy who went to elementary school with her; he said that even then kids would crowd around her on the playground at recess and beg her to sing. That voice, nothing like it. Choosing a Sarah Maclachlan song is difficult, but this will always be my favorite. I listened to it constantly during both of my pregnancies, it always makes me feel grateful for the people in my life that I love the most.

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Hallelujah – KD Lang
It’s hard for me to put how I feel about this song into words. It’s plaintive, nostalgic, profound, but full of grace – as one review said “simultaneously heart-breaking and redemptive”. It moves me. I love words, and the lyrics of this song are pure genius (thank you Leonard Cohen – another good Canadian boy). Again, there are so many brilliant versions of Hallelujah (Jeff Buckley, and Rufus Wrainright come to mind) but man, my girl KD steals it with this song. Her voice lifts this song to something beyond melody and lyrics for me – she takes my spirit to another place.

“It’s, as I say, a desire to affirm my faith in life, not in some formal religious way but with enthusiasm, with emotion…. It’s a rather joyous song.” ~ Leonard Cohen, creator of the song, Hallelujah

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In Your Eyes - Peter Gabriel
Okay, first off, this man is genius. This song is my favorite of many (Shaking The Tree, Kiss The Frog, Blood of Eden, etc), but it HAS to be the extended live version. This is another song that carried me through my pregnancies, it’s one of the pieces of music that can almost effortlessly center me – I just have to close my eyes, sit back and listen. It’s just great music, end of story.

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Me and Julio Down By The School Yard - Paul Simon
I heart Paul Simon. His greatest hits album is probably one of my favorites (and most played) of all time. Diamonds On The Soles of Her Shoes, Graceland, Mother and Child Reunion…what’s not to love? This one though, is toes-a-tapin’, smile on my face good times. “I’m on my way, I don’t know where I’m going”….that really sums it up, doesn’t it?

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I Can See Cleary Now – Holly Cole Trio
I remember singing this with my amazingly talented friend Jennifer over and over again at university, in dorm rooms, sitting outside, at the cafeteria – wherever. It was our song, I never hear it without thinking of her. I love the original (because really, how can you not love Bob Marley?), really I do, but this is the version that has been my ‘chill-the-f***-out-and-calm-the-f***-down-cause-it’s-gonna-be-okay’ song since college. Whenever I feel myself start to totally wig out, I just have to hunt down this song, sit down somewhere quiet and breathe through it. I always feel a million times better in seconds.

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Three Little Birds - Bob Marley
Speaking of Bob…this is probably my favorite of his. I’ll never be able to hear his music without thinking of my ‘honeymoon’ in Hawaii while I was pregnant with Jules. We only brought one CD and listened to it constantly while driving in our kickin’ orange jeep. Another reminder that life is good, “ Don’t worry about a thing, ‘cause every little thing gonna be alright.” Yea.

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Somebody’s Crying - Chris Isaak
Chris Isaak – ah that voice. Husky, smooth, ummmm…good. I like a lot of his stuff, but this one was the first I discovered, and always my favorites. It makes me think of drives down a costal highway with the top down and the wind rushing through my hair. Walking down a sandy beach with sand between my toes. Cuddling on a blanket under the stars with the waves pounding in the background. Ahhh…..

More to come - including more of my all time faves, current songs I can’t get enough of, and some awesome local/indie artists I’ve heard lately. If you feel like playing along - I’d love to hear your faves too. Post them on your blog, and be sure to send me a link.

From my photoblog…but decided to post it over here too.

I just got finished a weekend workshop with amazing child photographer Skye Hardwick and as part of the workshop we had to write an essay answering the question "Why are you are photographer?"  Here is my answer.

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Why am I a photographer?   Good question.

For most of my life I assumed that I was just not a creative person.  I was surrounded by creative people, yearned for a little of that magic myself, but thought that I just didn’t have it in me.  Sure, I had my writing, but until recently, I didn’t consider the exercise of stringing words together a creative process.  Therapy, maybe – but not creativity.  In fact, it wasn’t until my love affair with photography that I realized that my writing is also art – because I go to the exact same place when I write as I do when creating photographs.

I have always been obsessed with holding on to memories.  My own brain has a fairly limited ability to retain details, so my life is a series of diaries and photo albums and memory boxes – all collected in an attempt to hang on to the specifics of my life. 

That is where it started. 

I wanted to capture memories, and because I believe that anything really worth doing is worth doing well – I wanted to be good at it.  So I got my camera and I set out to learn to be good at it.   Strangely enough, it wasn’t quite as easy as I imagined.  The road from there to here was a bumpy one, filled with months of self-doubt and thousands upon thousands of mediocre pictures.  More than once I was tempted to give up and toss my camera in the garbage.

Then somehow, after my shutter had clicked what seemed like a million times, things started to slide into place.  I started seeing something in my images and - wonder of wonders - it seemed that other people did too.  Instead of just capturing technically acceptable portraits – I was starting to really *see* potential images all around me.  Suddenly, art was everywhere, even when I wasn’t behind the camera.  Colours took on new qualities; light danced, shadows whispered, scenes called out to be frozen in time.  There was nothing in my life that was not a photograph waiting to be taken.  Nothing.

My computer darkroom went from being a necessary evil, perhaps even bordering on cheating, to being part of my artistic expression.  I learned to harness Photoshop to enhance my vision of what my work could and should be.  Curves and levels and masks and textures used to make a fleeting fragment of time sing forever in the form of a photograph. When I’m deep at work on an image, I feel a buzz…a high that is unlike anything else.   I lose myself and find myself in the magic of taking an image from raw potential to final creation.  When I get to that place where I feel the image becoming what it was meant to be, time disappears and it is almost as if the image itself takes over – because there is a point were both artist and art become one.

This creative process has taught me to think less, and do more.  To rely on instincts and personal style and what my eyes and heart tell me, and to worry less about focus and perfection and the directions from some forum or expert or book.  To develop my internal style based on what feels right to me in the moment, because the very best art has to intensely personal and deeply experienced by the artist, otherwise it has no soul – and art with no soul cannot be received.

And so slowly I realized that this was my work, my passion, my calling, my creativity.  This entire process, from beginning to end, this was my art. 

In the process of just wanting to be good at something, I learned something far more important.  I discovered that I had art inside me after all. 

Why am I a photographer, you ask?  How could I not be?