September 14, 2003

Touch her soft lips and part

It's a wonderful thing to fall in love with a new song. Sometimes you know on the first listen, sometimes you won't till the second or third time. I came upon "Touch her soft lips and part" unexpectedly. Unaware at first of how much the song would mean to me.

Here's how it went: I watched the movie Tadpole, really liked the soundtrack, especially the French songs; since the movie has no soundtrack available, I did some research on the singers involved and found one of the French singers, a group of musicians and vocalist called Mich En Scene; their cd is available on a website called CDBaby, which sells only independent music and I chanced upon a jazz vocalist called Lisa Thorson, sampled the music files, and purchased her CD along with Mich En Scene's album.

The sixth song on Lisa Thorson's CD is "Touch her soft lips and part", composed by William Walton who wrote it in classical form for the 1945 film version of Shakespeare's Henry V. Since then, it's been played in the classical circles and more recently picked up by jazz artistes. The music accompanies a scene in which a soldier leaves his lover to go to war. There are no lyrics, but Lisa Thorson's voice bears the tragedy in a haunting arc that begins and ends with such sad, beautiful notes.

Go here to listen to Lisa or look up some great work by independent musicians.

Posted by Monoceros at September 14, 2003 12:56 AM
Comments

yeah, it's amazing what a good song does to you. it's like you'll feel tinkles up your skin and right down to your toes.

went to have a listen to the song. yeah, it's very haunting. lovely. the human voice is in itself, one of the most amazing musical instruments.

Posted by: joan at September 14, 2003 9:37 AM

Yeah, isn't it lovely? I keep listening to it over and over. So sad.

Posted by: monoceros at September 15, 2003 10:44 AM

i was listening to her other albums as well. pretty good. There's this other singer called Stephanie Porter who's pretty good as well. Found her through one of the links from the URL you put up.

Posted by: joan at September 15, 2003 8:13 PM

Vanny, look up this S'pore-born singer called Corrine May as well. She's been around for awhile. I saw her featured on CDbaby. but i've heard of her a pretty long while ago...sometime last year i think. She writes and sings her own songs. She has also written songs for some pretty big stars as well! Have a listen.

Posted by: joan at September 17, 2003 5:41 AM

Joan, I've had her album for some time now! She's pretty good, actually wrote a song with some famous American singer (forgot the name! The one who wrote one of the popular songs for the soundtrack of You've Got Mail. Why do I know all these unimportant things?). But her song Fly Away is the best one. I think you can find the album easily in Singapore.

Posted by: monoceros at September 17, 2003 11:16 AM