Upon my rolling to-do list is laid the burden of "listening post", and due to my inconsistency in the past Quite Some Time, my meta-thoughts will accept any contribution.
Therefore, please consider: my new favourite song:
Now, be it noted that when I first saw the album title "Land Shanties" I was not endeared, I was annoyed, not even first because I know the difference between a true shanty and a capstan shanty/sea song/etc. I am in fact QUITE liberal about that, including enthusiasm for, eg, music-hall songs which may or may not have transitioned to sea-songs, as in
Shores of Botany Bay / Good Ship Ragamuffin, the total illegitimacy of which can be confirmed by the fact that it has two names and each name has a better-known song with the same name and neither of those is a shanty.
No, friends: I am ENTHUSED by non-shanties. But I was suspicious of "land shanties" in a significant part because I know of so many shearing, droving, etc songs which are either *actually work songs* closely related to the narrowest definition of shanty, or ballad-type songs with a high overlap.
GOOD NEWS: I was wrong!
"The Lady of the Map" is a banger and expresses my feelings toward GPS entirely.
ALSO it turns out that if you give me music venue speakers such that I can't keep track of what /I/ sound like, I... have chest voice. Do I think I'm in tune? No, but we're talking about FAMILIAR arrangements. Surround me such that I cannot hear myself and suddenly I have a chest voice I haven't heard since 2022 - AND if the band are in front of me I can identify exactly who I think I'm following (badly, perhaps, but nevertheless).
ME: HOLY SHIT I'M NOT A TENOR
My Second Thoughts: Well no fucking shit. We SAW Great Big Sea in 2012 and we HAD this realisation. You're no Sean McCann.
My quibbles: but... I feel like the reason I remember dwelling on Sean or Alan is that I couldn't keep up with EITHER of them when they were showing off their tenor range, and also sometimes when Alan led I knew I ought to follow Sean...
Exactly one concert of data, different band: ... oho. JD has an amazing range (his party trick appears to be shifting down an octave, whereupon Andy will have the vapours). But there are times where Robin (madcap mid-range vocalist, why yes I have a type) is leading but I instinctively gravitate to the higher support line. But as per my second thoughts I... believe I am gravitating to the lower support line, now. I previously had difficulty distingishing Alan Doyle and Sean McCann: with that knowledge, I can confirm that I have NOT had difficulty distinguishing JD and Robin; that difficulty is now all on the lower end of the range.
Refer back to: my interest in bluegrass harmonics. It is possible that Hanging Out With Choirs has kind of skewed me here.
However what is most discombobulatingly imporant is: I ... have chest range. Can I use it? not really. Is it in tune? Definitely not. Did I sing along and have the _felt_ experience of at LEAST getting back the chest range I lost, maybe more? Oh hell yes I did.
I have MANY musical thoughts (see above) but I suspect that the thing to actually do is to sing "drunken sailor" a lot, and look for youtube arrangement instructions for drunken sailor, etc.
There is a whole other story about well-intentioned lavatory signage gone wrong, in this case, overlaid over actually shockingly IDEAL actual toilet layout. Whole other update about that later.
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kenjari
