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May 7, 2008 13:32:21 GMT -5
Post by Moe on May 7, 2008 13:32:21 GMT -5
I think that Amarantine, overall, is a very good CD (though I do know some who would dispute that), but I must admit some unease about some of the lyrics (we'll omit the Loxian songs right now ). For example, the title song with its "love is love is love" still, after the passage of time, leaves me a bit cold. Maybe it's just me, but the earlier albums seemed to have more imaginative lyrics. OK, throw a pillow at me.... ;D
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May 7, 2008 15:20:08 GMT -5
Post by Treecat on May 7, 2008 15:20:08 GMT -5
The pillow I'm tossing is a soft one. The lyrics on several of the songs could have been much stronger. LLJ is so pat: "long long journey out of nowhere, long long way to go..." Amarantine itself is very weak. I've wondered if they weren't trying for lyrics that would be immediately accessible. "Let's not use any words over 2 syllables, okay?" "Oh, yes, wonderful!"
OTOH, I've sometimes wondered if, on Watermark, Roma had not already written the lyrics, as poems, and Enya set them to music. The time signatures and phrasings of the WM music are very unorthodox sometimes -- On Your Shore, La Hersh (I'm not gonna look up the correct Gaelic spelling of that...), etc. It's as if she was handed a poem and had to fit music to the poem's rhyme scheme, instead of the other way around.
I love Amarantine. It's the most Watermark-like album she's done since.. WM... but it's a flawed diamond. In a way, that's part of its appeal to me.
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May 7, 2008 16:10:28 GMT -5
Post by oregonwinebaby on May 7, 2008 16:10:28 GMT -5
*hides all the pillows* I tend to agree. The lyrics are not as profound. Maybe they were trying to appeal to a larger group of listeners who tend to listen to more lyrically basic music? Maybe Roma just had writers block? Maybe they wanted to focus more on the melody than the words? Maybe this could be another topic, but I wonder what everyone thinks the story behind Someone Said Goodbye is...and also IICBWYA. Even though the lyrics are a little more basic, the songs are still left up to interpretation, which I like
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May 7, 2008 16:56:01 GMT -5
Post by Treecat on May 7, 2008 16:56:01 GMT -5
Someone Says Goodbye sounds like a boyfriend I tried to get rid of who just couldn't take a hint. I think it's about the end of a relationship and one of the parties doesn't realize that it's over.
IICBWYA: about two people in love separated by distance, separated for a long time without knowing when they'll be together again.
Amarantine is not a good album to listen to if you're depressed about a relationship...........
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May 7, 2008 19:09:28 GMT -5
Post by riene on May 7, 2008 19:09:28 GMT -5
I like the lyrics from A Moment Lost, Amid the Falling Snow, and If I Could Be Where You Are. All of them seem to express a longing or sadness, something not right in a relationship. It always makes me wonder if they are just stories, based on Roma's thoughts, or Eithne's.
Amarantine bores me to tears, and I can't stand Sumiregusa. People criticize Long Long Journey for its simplistic beat, but it makes me think of homecomings--soldiers on leave, students returning, etc.
Loxian is my least favorite. I know Roma has "meaning" behind them, but nothing in it triggers any emotional response or interest. I'd far rather have had Gaelic, Latin, Welsh, or even nonsense syllables.
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May 7, 2008 19:21:32 GMT -5
Post by Moe on May 7, 2008 19:21:32 GMT -5
Confession: I always skip Sumiregusa - I just cannot stand that song either. However, as the lyrics are in Japanese, I don't feel I can comment on them [goes and hides]
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Angoid
Member
Bogus Book
Posts: 105
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Lyrics
May 8, 2008 6:48:04 GMT -5
Post by Angoid on May 8, 2008 6:48:04 GMT -5
Sumiregusa is also a "go nowhere" song to me; I don't know what it's supposed to do, but whatever it is, it fails miserably for me I like LLJ because it is more upbeat and positive, but the "relationship is over" ones also depress me somewhat. Yes, LLJ is very simplistic, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing....
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May 12, 2008 7:30:57 GMT -5
Post by skyscape on May 12, 2008 7:30:57 GMT -5
The lyrics on Amarantine are less than perfect. It made me thik, did Enya write some of the lyrics herslef on these songs. Her Gaelic lyrics are very simplistic, it could be that Enya was part of the lyric-writing process this time around? I would have preferred of Roma had used some of the elemental imagery from the WSTHH book in the album lyrics. Riene: I completely agree. Loxian was derivative of all the Tolkien stuff and a misjudgment IMO.
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May 12, 2008 7:45:47 GMT -5
Post by Treecat on May 12, 2008 7:45:47 GMT -5
The Loxian, to me, worked perfectly. I understand though that to a lot of people it doesn't, especially when it appears to take the place of Gaelic and Latin on the album. It's interesting to read that some can't find emotion in a song like WSTHH, when I think it's so beautiful and so full of emotion. The mixed harmonies just sing of a longing for lost love or peace for a turmoiled soul. LTAP sets up the album's theme -- the quest song; WSTHH ends it -- the search unreconciled, but perhaps not hopeless. In the middle of the album, TRS--as energetic and joyous as a Class 4 rapids. The mistake on Amarantine is Amarantine itself, certainly the most banal lyric I've ever seen come out of the House of Aigle. Sky, I've wondered if one of the daughters (which one is it who writes?) might have helped pen the lyrics this time around. Whatever--I hope the next studio album shows a return to the stronger lyrics of China Roses, Hope Has a Place, Pilgrim, and the playfulness of Flora's Secret. What I would also like to see come to the end is the reliance on the mouth-music breaks that have dominated since ADWR: "da da da da daaaa da" etc. Everytime I hear LLJ, I want to pen a lyric in that break. I can hear a lyric branching off from the main theme of the song (the joy of traveling home): something about "I've been away so long" etc. Roma managed to pack a lot of good words into the songs in WM and SM; she ought to go back to it.
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May 12, 2008 8:46:38 GMT -5
Post by skyscape on May 12, 2008 8:46:38 GMT -5
That's a good point you make about mouth music TC...it's a very strong feature of Irish music and is known as "port an bhΓ©il (lit: tune of the mouth) or 'lilting' and is where actual words are replaced with "da-da-da" and the like.
I thought 'Lazy Days' used this too much and could have done with a worded chorus and I agree that it's been overused since ADWR.
Re: Loxian. I do not understand Enya saying "We tried this in Gaelic, English and Latin and, um.. it didn't work so we came up with a new language"...Uh hello, isn't that what a lyricist is forr?
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May 12, 2008 12:21:47 GMT -5
Post by Moe on May 12, 2008 12:21:47 GMT -5
Re: Loxian. I do not understand Enya saying "We tried this in Gaelic, English and Latin and, um.. it didn't work so we came up with a new language"...Uh hello, isn't that what a lyricist is forr? ;D While I am OK with the Loxian, I have to smile at this comment. When I first read that statement from Enya I really did wonder "how can that be?" If English/Gaelic/Latin didn't work, maybe that was because the wrong words were tried. Where Loxian "loses" me is in the fact that I expect I'll never figure it out. There is no grammar, no guidance, etc. At least with Gaelic I can use a dictionary, etc. OTOH, I think Roma has a great imagination and must be a sci-fi fan, which makes me like her even more!
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May 12, 2008 13:08:29 GMT -5
Post by Treecat on May 12, 2008 13:08:29 GMT -5
I would like to see the English lyric for WSTHH. I'm sure it's nothing like the Loxian to English translation.
I kind of take Enya's statement with a very fine grain of salt. I wonder if Loxian wasn't planned to begin with. The whole Amarantine project seems designed to showcase the Loxian songs, the Loxian mythology and Roma's book. Nothing wrong with that--Enya is a trio after all, and I suppose everybody gets to toss their oar in the water.
But I also have to admit that I have a hard time 'hearing' WSTHH in anything but Loxian.
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May 12, 2008 13:40:05 GMT -5
Post by skyscape on May 12, 2008 13:40:05 GMT -5
Watermark was based on a poem by Roma and ADWR was similarly created with lyrics in its first incarnation so I once tried to 'hear' what kind of lyric it may have been based on and I think it might have been Latin. That said I do think a creative lyricist could have mae the song work in an authentic language as opposed to a conlang. I mean the song could have started as something like:
"Journey of Journeys, The heart remembers, how unrequited, his lost love faltered..." or similary Romaesque musings, so to say it couldn't work is the tradesman blaming the tools.
Tolkien's language is a much more extensively developed concept than Roma's. That said, I LOVE Roma's lyrics and poetry and the book fires my imagination. So my criticism is of Loxian per se rather than all of Roma's output.
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May 13, 2008 5:59:50 GMT -5
Post by ardens on May 13, 2008 5:59:50 GMT -5
I like the Loxian lyrics very much. I can't understand them but they sound great and fit the music well. Listening to the English lyrics, I sometimes wonder whether Roma has paid more attention to the sound of the words than to their meaning. "Someone said goodbye" is a wonderful song and the rhymes and "ei"- sounds fit in there very well. But at the same time, this also influences the quality and the meaning of the lyrics. For me it is an advantage that English isn't my first language. This way I can at least try to ignore the meaning of the lyrics and enjoy the sound. This is certainly much more difficult for native English speakers and therefore I can understand that some people do not like this song. There are many catchy songs an "Amarantine" that seem to demand rhymes and make narration difficult. In the past, Roma dealt with such songs quite well by writing humorous lyrics. "Anywhere is" is an example of this. But maybe funny lyrics wouldn't have fit the songs on "Amarantine" well. Some of them seem to be sung from a person's point of view who feels many contradtictory feelings at the same time. There is optimism and pensiveness, there independence and longing. Connecting this mixture of feelings with relationship aspects is a very reasonable approach and it makes sense. But on the other hand relationship is a topic that almost everyone sings about and this makes finding extraordinary phrases difficult. I can imagine that writing lyrics for the songs on "Amarantine" was a very difficult job and considering this, the lyrics could have been worse. In fact, I even like some of them although they are a bit simple. And considering Roma's wonderful book, one can see that she has neither left her wonderful style behind nor lost her talent for writing excellent poetry.
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May 13, 2008 12:53:02 GMT -5
Post by Moe on May 13, 2008 12:53:02 GMT -5
I would like to see the English lyric for WSTHH. I'm sure it's nothing like the Loxian to English translation. Yes, I agree - the Loxian to English "translation" seems ungainly to me, though I admit I am not qualified in Advanced Loxian. I find this theory quite plausible. Roma could well have thought about writing a book years ago, and thus come up with the idea of Loxian. I do think the placement of the songs indicates how important the Loxian "motif" is: at the start, in the middle, at the end. It's like the Loxian songs "frame" the entire album. But, TC, if you toss your oar in the water, you may end up stranded. Ardens, I think you're right on here. "Sound" certainly dominates the Loxian songs, while the English lyrics at times seem banal but keep on rhyming. Roma's poems display a superb poet, released from the bonds of lyrics; this is why I'd love a complete book of her poems - they fly far beyond the constraints of lyrics.
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