Ordinary Day

Last night on the way home from work, thanks to current medical developments, I turned like I always do in such times to my comfort music. And if you’ve hung around me for more than five minutes, you know exactly what that is: Great Big Sea. And in particular, “Ordinary Day”.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this song is pretty much the anthem of my life. And this past week in particular, I’ve been feeling the second verse real strongly, since I keep feeling like my system REALLY wants to push me around in a medical sense. I’ll take the liberty of hoping that trying to maintain a positive outlook has helped me make it not get away with that shit; certainly there’s a strong case to be made for that being an excellent coping technique with stress. (I’m serious on that! Dara pointed me at this TED talk over here on that very topic!)

And it’s certainly helped that my belovedest of B’ys have been here through the last 13 years to give me such musical comfort as they do. Especially when they’re the ones who made me pick up a guitar and learn how to play it in the first place.

Now though I’ve got mes gars du Québec, who are pretty much doing the same thing, only this time with a whole extra bonus language to stuff into my head.

Y’all know where this is going, right? Yep. I just translated “Ordinary Day” into French.

Which has apparently been done before, according to my Facebook and Twitter friend (not to mention fellow raving Great Big Sea fangirl) Krista, who gave me a scan of a GBS newsletter from way back in October of 1997, three years before I discovered the band. Krista showed me that after I posted my take on the first verse and chorus last night, and I was rather pleased to discover that a) I could understand just about everything that translation was saying, and b) I still stood by the translation choices I made in my own attempt.

I’ve finished that attempt up as of this post. Those of you who have any French at all will probably figure out fast that this is not an exact translation of Alan’s lyrics. I did direct translations when I could, but when I had to choose between “exact translation” and “close approximation that actually scanned better to the melody”, I went with the latter option. Particularly in the third verse, where I ran into trouble with the concepts of “double-edged knife” and “your ship will come in”–in those cases in particular, I jumped over to concepts that more or less got the same idea across but which let me use simpler phrasing that’d scan better to the melody.

‘Cause, of course, the overall point here is that I eventually want to be able to sing this.

Anyway, here it is, my take on “Ordinary Day” in French!

J’ai un sourire sur ma face, et quatre murs autour de moi
J’ai le soleil dans le ciel, toute l’eau m’entoure, oh oh oh
Ouias, je gagne, et parfois je perds
J’ai été battue, mais jamais meurtri
Ça va pas si mal

Refrain:
Et je dit, yé hé hé, c’est juste un jour ordinaire, et c’est tout ton état d’esprit
À la fin de la journée, tu dois juste à dire, ça va bien!

Janie chante sur le coin, qu’est-ce qui l’empêche de mourir?
Laisse-les dire ce qu’ils veulent, elle va essayer encore, oh oh oh
Elle pourrait trébucher s’ils la pousser
Elle pourrait tomber mais jamais céder
Ça va pas si mal

Dans cette belle vie, il y a des douleurs
C’est un couteau dans le cœur, mais il y a demain toujours, oh oh oh
C’est ton choix si tu passe ou casse
Fais confiance le matin va venir
Ça va pas si mal

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Well, for a small number of bands, anyway! Because apparently this is the week for people to hit my site trying to find out about the instruments played by my favorite groups.

Yesterday somebody came by with the search term ‘what mouth instruments do le vent du nord play?’ Answer: just one! Réjean Brunet plays the mouth harp. You can hear it all over a lot of their songs and you can see it in various live videos. Like this one! The mouth harp shows up in the second song in this vid, “Au bord de la fontaine”, which kicks in around the 6:57 mark. Though I heartily endorse watching the first song, “Lanlaire”, too!

And today’s search term is ‘what flutes do great big sea use’. Answer: none! Séan McCann and Bob Hallett play whistles–Séan plays a small tin whistle but only on “Run Run Away”, and Bob breaks out the big low whistle for things like “Boston and St. John’s”. Behold the whistle in action!

To those of you who came by looking, in case you see this post, I hope this is helpful!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Those of you local to the Seattle area know that Memorial Day weekend is Folklife, and solarbird and I being well, us, of course we’re hitting the festival as much as possible this weekend!

Yesterday’s adventures started off with an Irish session, apparently the first one at Folklife in four years, and which turned out to be hosted by a flute player named Ming Chen. (He was an excellent flute player, it must be noted.) I saw oodles of flute players besides him as well, and each and every one of them had more Serious Business flutes than my Norouet–which only strengthens my resolve to save up for a Serious Business flute from Casey Burns.

Ming described the session as being intended to welcome newbies who aren’t necessarily brave enough to lead a tune in session, and/or who know only a few tunes, in which category I definitely qualify. So I said HI I’M ANNA and told everybody I knew “Blarney Pilgrim” and “Morrison’s” and “Swallowtail”, and got encouraged to try to play something. So I started playing, which was all very well and good except for the part where I was aiming for “Blarney Pilgrim” and what popped out of my fingers instead was “6/8 d’André Alain”! Because um hi yeah, guess what tune’s stuck at the top of my queue of Jigs I Know In D. *^_^*;;

I went “oh shit sorry” and everybody was understanding (Ming found me later on Facebook and said ‘yeah this happens to all of us’, hee, which is reassuring), and I asked for somebody else to start “Blarney” since I was sure I’d remember it once I heard it. Which I did. “Morrison’s” was also played, which I kept up with more or less. And “Swallowtail Jig”, which I also knew. We did NOT do a couple of the other tunes I know–”Road to Lisdoonvarna” or “Banish Misfortune”. But I did more or less recognize “Butterfly Jig” from it having been played in the now-defunct Renton session. And I tried to actively listen to unfamiliar tunes as well to see if I could at least TRY to piece together any of them by ear. It was hard since everybody blazed through about eighty million tunes.

Several familiar faces were in attendance as well, Jason and Miki and Marilyn from the Renton session as well as Valerie and her husband from the current Quebec session I was going to. Saying hi to all of them was definitely satisfying!

And speaking of my Quebec session crowd, there was later on the great satisfaction of seeing La Famille Leger perform, immediately followed by a group called Podorythmie–which contains no fewer than four of the session crowd. Between both performances there were four, count ‘em, four different stepdancers (Dejah with her family, and the three others with the Podorythmie group), and Podorythmie brought along a crankie as well since Sue Truman and Dejah both are really big into those. (If you don’t know what a crankie is, click over to The Crankie Factory, where Sue Truman will tell you all about this old art form!)

Today, Dara and I actually opted to go down for the evening on the grounds that our aforementioned session pal Miki has joined Piper Stock Hill (Facebook link–they don’t have an off-Facebook or off-Myspace website), Seattle’s only band dedicated to the music of Newfoundland. It pleases me DEEPLY that we have such a band, and so Dara and I kinda had to make a point to stop and see them.

Plus, we’d never been down to Folklife during the evening and we wanted to see what it was like. Survey says: a bit more relaxed and groovy, with a thinner crowd. Dara and I scoped out the various craft tents to kill time, at which point we came across a booth FULL OF FLUTES AND WHISTLES. I immediately had to stop, because I’d been highly curious about whether I could play a better whistle, well, better, than the cheap toy one I have now. This particular flute maker had flutes and whistles made out of carbon fiber, in fact, and ZOMG they were pretty.

I was quite impressed by the D whistle they had, and did in fact note that I was able to play it significantly more cleanly than the toy one I’ve got. And I might well have walked off with that whistle as a purchase if I hadn’t then picked up their A flute. Which immediately informed me HI I WANT TO BE YOUR NEW SECONDARY SESSION INSTRUMENT SO YOU CAN PLAY THINGS IN A.

So I went “OKAY!” and promptly bought it. Internets, meet my new flute, shown next to my piccolo for scale!

I Do Not In Fact Have Enough Flutes Yet

After that, Dara and I wandered around some more and wound up finding another bouzouki player–which necessitated stopping to say hi, because HOLY CRAP SOMEBODY ELSE IN SEATTLE WHO KNOWS WHAT A BOUZOUKI IS. And, like we do because we’re US, we wound up improv-busking a bit of Great Big Sea. I destroyed not one but TWO different thin picks banging on Ti-Jéan, reminding myself to my chagrin that when playing ANYTHING by Great Big Sea, um, yeah, I need the medium picks. I think we can declare this guitar well and throughly broken in now, anyway. And that set us up with the perfect frame of mind to go see Piper Stock Hill have their act!

Last but not least, there was Piper Stock Hill! We’d seen them perform at Folklife before, but this time they had Miki! And this time we stopped to say hi to their leader singer after, so that a) I could buy their CD, and b) I could identify myself and Dara as raving Great Big Sea fangirls. We had a lovely conversation with said lead singer and his wife, and his wife particularly charmed me when she was trying to remember Alan Doyle’s name and couldn’t, so she did a hair flip instead. Because OH MY YES, that’s a gesture universally understood by ALL raving Great Big Sea fans. ;D

So all in all, a great time at Folklife so far! We’re going back down tomorrow for the French-Canadian jam/session that the Legers will be hosting. Maybe we’ll see some of you there!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

One of the fun things about Google Analytics is that I can see what people who hit my site might have been searching for. And I’ve seen a couple of people come in now looking for a translation of Great Big Sea’s “Le Bon Vin”, which appears on the new XX album. Presumably they’re keying off of this previous post of mine, wherein I took a shot at transcribing the lyrics as I understood them. My French-speaking friend and fellow Great Big Sea fan Marie-Andrée then gave me her transcription of the lyrics, which told me that yeah, actually, I got most of them correct.

Here now is my take on a translation of the lyrics that Marie-Andrée provided. So if you’re an Anglophone Great Big Sea fan, hope this helps! (Or, for that matter, if you’re a Francophone GBS fan and you have trouble parsing Alan’s accent. Since he does have a heavy Newfoundland accent and that influences his French. And if you look in the liner notes for the album, at least on the boxed set edition, it says that the band had a Francophone from New Brunswick giving them French coaching. So Alan’s take on French may well sound very strange to French-speaking Canadians outside of Newfoundland or New Brunswick!)

A few quick notes going in:

“Bon bon bon” is I believe just getting used here for rhythm and cadence as opposed to being part of the actual lyrics. “Bon” is of course “good”.

“Bis” means “repeat”. I see this a lot in Quebec trad music, as a way to notate when a line is done call and response style. Here, I’ve used it to signify the lines that are first sung by Alan and then sung back by the rest of the band.

“Le Bon Vin” is in fact a Quebecois trad song, from what I was seeing Googling around. I did find longer editions of the lyrics, here and here. (That second link has chords, too!) However, Great Big Sea’s take is much simplified. They’re only sorta kinda doing the usual Quebec song structure of having a repeated first line and a second line, which then rolls over into the next verse to become that verse’s first line. (And I think they’re probably losing a lot of the actual narrative and context of the song, too, simplified as it is. But!)

Not entirely sure of the translation of the last line, but from what I’m getting it’s generally the friend of the viewpoint character snarking on this girl’s mob of lovers, so one could presume the recounting of her lovers makes up the “la canaille”?)

Anyway, here you go!

Chorus:
Le bon vin m’endort, l’amour me réveille (Good wine puts me to sleep, love wakes me up)
Le bon vin m’endort, l’amour me réveille encore! (Good wine puts me to sleep, love wakes me up again)

En passant par Paris, caressant la bouteille (bis) (Passing by Paris, caressing the bottle)
Un de mes amis me dit à l’oreille, bon, bon, bon (One of my friends told me in the ear)

Un de mes amis me dit à l’oreille (bis) (One of my friends told me in the ear)
Prends bien garde à toi, allons poursuivre la belle, bon, bon, bon (Take good care of yourself, (let’s) go pursue the beauty!)

Poursuit qui la veut, moi, je me moque d’elle (bis) (… pursue (the one?) that wants it, I don’t care about her)
J’ai couché trois ans, la nuit avec elle bon, bon, bon (I spent the night three years with her)

Elle a eu trois garçons, tous trois capitaines (bis) (She had three boys, all three captains)
Un à Bordeaux, et l’autre à La Rochelle bon, bon, bon (One in Bordeaux, and another in La Rochelle)

Un à Bordeaux, et l’autre à La Rochelle (bis) (One in Bordeaux, and another in La Rochelle)
L’autre à Versailles, à faire la canaille bon, bon, bon (Another in Versailles, to make the riffraff?)

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Great Big Sea’s Facebook account announced this morning that the the CBC Radio 3 account on YouTube posted a whole MESS of videos from a concert this past November in Ontario.

Really. GOOD. Videos. Like this one of “River Driver”. Jesus Jumping CHRIST on a pogo stick, the bass on Murray in this. +50 to the sound engineers who worked this show, because I have never swooned so hard at the harmony mix on this song.

And there’s MORE OH MY GOD MORE. Enough that I must really hope that this is potential future DVD footage, because I would buy the HELL out of this.

• Ordinary Day
• Heart of Hearts
• When I’m Up
• Good People
• Sea of No Cares
• The Old Black Rum
• Consequence Free
• Run Run Away
• Excursion Around the Bay

It’s an entire MINI-CONCERT! Enjoy this, if you’re starting the three-day weekend here in the States!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Calling all Puget Sound area Great Big Sea fans!

My party gathering for the show at the Moore on March 8th has ONE AVAILABLE TICKET! We were a party of five, but two of us had to back out. One of their tickets has now been claimed, but we still have one left! So if you think you might want to come to this show and you don’t already have arrangements, talk to me ASAP!

Because did I mention–SECOND ROW, Stage Bob? That’s almost close enough for the inimitable Mr. Hallett to hear us singing! So if you’ve ever wondered exactly how high I can boing when The Doyle yells VERTICAL MOVEMENT, now is your chance to find out!

And while we’re on the topic–another OKPer has just relayed to me on Facebook that she’s coming in for the show and is seeking parties interested in sharing her suite at the Moore hotel. So if you’re coming to the show (whether or not you want my group’s ticket!), and you need post-show crash space, talk to me and I’ll put you in touch with that other fan.

Great Big Sea is COMING. The Good Ship Vertical Movement will in our harbor soon! See you all at the show!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

When you do not have the words to properly express your relief at awesome medical news, screw words, go straight to KITCHEN PARTY IN YOUR HEAD! This is exactly how the inside of my head sounds like right now, people–my dream concert of ALL the awesome Quebecois and Newfoundland boys!

De Temps Antan!

And more behind the fold!

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Since Canada is very, VERY nigh, I now present for you, O Internets, this roundup and summary of everything that solarbird and I will be doing while we’re there!

First up, Toronto! Where we will be enjoying the hospitality of the most excellent cow, as well as getting to meet Susan Who Is the Most Awesome of Le Vent du Nord Fans (really, that ought to just be her name from now on, I feel). And Dara will be making musics at Chez Cow!

In Quebec, we’re going to go to Memoire et Racines, at which we will be seeing Les Charbonniers de l’Enfer, with possible bonus sightings of one or more members of Le Vent du Nord depending on who’s performing on what festival event when! I also have high hopes of swooning at any wares offered by instrument makers, and the chances of consumption of proper poutine, as well as any maple-flavored ice cream we can find, are extremely high!

While also in Quebec, I will be scarfing as much French-Canadian SF/F as I can safely carry home from here! I now have five titles on my Francophone wishlist on Goodreads, and it’s a safe bet I’ll be able to find at least a couple of them.

And there will be meeting of scrunchions and hopefully also framlingem, as well as lyonesse if she’s still there when we get there! And bonus meeting as well of one of my Kickstarter backers!

Onward to Moncton, where we will enjoy the hospitality of brightbeak! And there will be more musics by Dara! And visiting of this thing, because GIANT LOBSTER. Visiting of this is REQUIRED, Internets!

St. John’s! The Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival! The Duke of Duckworth pub! O’Brien’s Music, renowned in song and story and Great Big Sea fandom! The Haunted Hike, a walking ghost tour of downtown St. John’s, and I ask you, could I be handed any more excellent a research opportunity for the third Kendis and Christopher book?

And last but oh my definitely not least, the Torbay 250 celebration, at which I need not remind any of you that Dara and I will be singing and bouncing our hearts out for our most belovedest of beloved B’ys. Watch the skies over Newfoundland, people, we may bounce straight into orbit!

We shall be consuming as much Grower’s Cider as we can get our tiny little hands on, but failing that, I will be on the lookout for any excellent local ciders. Because all this bouncing I’m about to be doing? It’s going to be thirsty, thirsty work!

And I will bring Norouet and Chirp, and there will be playing of tunes, and adventures in reading French street signs, and general seizing of days! I’ve already been asked by two different people to post frequent updates–and I will be doing as much of that as the wi-fi availability allows, so stand by for bulletins as they happen! Internets, I am EXCITE! Only a few more days to go! \0/

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

PEOPLE OF ATLANTIC CANADA AND QUEBEC! There are but seven scant days until solarbird and I will be among you for two weeks of hanging out, meeting up with people, and general musical awesomeness!

We are looking very, very forward to meeting up with cow, with fellow Le Vent du Nord fan Susan, with framlingem hopefully (HEY EM ANSWER YOUR MAIL mmkay?), with lyonesse if she’s still in Montreal by the time we get there, with scrunchions, with Krista in St. John’s, with lethendy, and with anybody else we get a chance to talk to at Memoire et Racines, the Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival, or the Great Big Sea show in Torbay!

Internets, I AM EXCITE! Almost as much for the chance to see Les Charbonniers de l’Enfer as I am Great Big Sea, really–because this’ll very likely be my only shot to see the Charbonniers, and did I mention the part where HOLY CRAP THOSE MEN CAN SING? And did I also mention the buying of French Canadian SF/F, and of tasty maple sugar products (I am informed that maple sugar ice cream is a thing that exists and THIS MUST BE SAMPLED IT IS REQUIRED), and of taking the Haunted Hike tour through downtown St. John’s (research opportunity WOO!), and of going to the Duke of Duckworth pub, renowned to me in song and story and Twitter updates?

Save us some bagels and Growers cider! We’ll be there next week!

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.