I am pleased to present you with the fruits of our Global Game Jam endeavors. It nearly knocked me out (well, I guess it did actually), and it was super fun. Allow me a brief explanation:
The Global Game Jam is an event organized across the world, where sites host game developers and players for a weekend to make games. We are given a constraint or two on Friday afternoon, then we have 48 hours to make a game. It is crazy. It is fun. It is exhausting.
This year we had two constraints, 1) Deception, 2) Rain, Spain, Plain.
Indulge me some romantic fantasizing please. Or, if you’d rather not, stop reading, your call.
I saw this music video on tv getting ready for work this morning:
So a couple things. I like the simplicity of this song. I like the prose-like descriptions, and the accessibility of the metaphor of need.
Also, they both can sing. I mean they can really sing. Check Faith Hill at 1:54 in the video. My great friend Mike always says he likes singers who emote, and they sure do.
And that to me is something I like about Country music, and roots music in general. While the talent is there, you are left with the perception that they are no different than you or I. I can’t sing Opera. I am not a one man Rock Band. I can sing in my car, I can sing in the shower, I can hammer away at a guitar in my house and try to communicate something real. I am not invalidating other music forms that require possibly more skill or more structure and complication, I am just trying to emphasize the importance of real “folk” music, that is to say, music “folks” can make themselves.
One final element that is not overly apparent in this song, but that I have been thinking about lately – in the song there is an attachment to the land that I don’t fully experience, largely because of how and where I grew up. The lyrics in the song allude to this more than once, whether it is Uncle Joe needing the rain or riding across West Virginia, all suggesting that there is a connection to land that can help to define people. I have never felt very attached to a place.
I long to feel attached to a place. Maybe I need to garden or farm for a while to learn a real attachment to a place, a need that transcends providing ground for my house to stand on. Maybe I need to move somewhere breathtakingly beautiful, so I can be reminded of my relationship to land every day I look out the window.
Anyway, true to form this is now a rambling, albeit one long overdue.
I spent some time searching for a recording of the acoustic version of the song I heard this morning not on video to no avail. If anyone knows where i can find it, please let me know.
Sorry for all the video updates, but I am researching 80’s music for a project I am working on and ran into this. Snapping, has never, ever, looked as cool as when Umberto does it.
Hey Folks,