Lullaby for Grown-Ups - Meditations

The first major snow storm of the season has arrived. They're forecasting 6 to 8 inches by Monday morning. The snow made me think of this video, Meditations: A Year of Changes. Harry G. Pellegrin performs El Noi de la Mare, set to images he took along the Mohawk River in New York. I like that the images aren't the usual perfectly-lit, heavily composed nature pictures you see so often. They remind me of the parks near me - I'm still in nature, but need to look deeper to see the beauty and meaning of what is around me.

Lullaby for Grown-Ups - Tramuntana

The glory of autumn has passed, and we are faced with a brown and gray landscape, a chill in the air and the darkest day of the year still more than a month away. So here is a remedy - a lullaby featuring beautiful nature images from the island of Cres in Croatia. The lovely, relaxing music is New Born by Matt Chernishov. Enjoy the lullaby as we head into the holiday week.

Song of the Northern Lights

Seeing the Northern Lights dance on a clear winter night is a wonderful spectacle. But hearing the aurora is another experience entirely. In this video from the Minnesota Planetarium and Space Discovery Center, sound recordist Steve McGreevy discusses the aurora as a natural radio source and what it takes to record its strange song. Here's the location of the original YouTube video, which includes several links of interest. (And in case you're wondering, the video was originally designed to be projected onto the planetarium dome, hence the circular imagery.)

Lullaby for Grown-Ups - Arlo Guthrie

Arlo Guthrie supplies our lullaby tonight - that classic American folk song, City of New Orleans. Poignant and nostalgic, it portrays a lost era, when rail travel was supreme, and all the romanticism that went along with it.

Lullaby for Grown-Ups - Gregory and the Hawk

Here's a lovely song from Gregory and the Hawk, entitled Boats and Birds. In its early days, this young band bypassed the usual music industry apparatus and relied on the internet to build a fan base. Now signed with a record label, they continue to produce original, wonderful songs.

Another Namesake

Well, it turns out, I'm back on the night shift, working second-shift hours again part-time. This means the usual time I blog is unavailable, at least for another week, when my permanent schedule kicks in.

So for this week and possibly next week, things will be a little quiet around here. After that, though, I plan to start a new series that I think will be fun and interesting. So stick around. And there will always be a new lullaby on Sundays.

In the meantime, enjoy this video, Night, the Beloved, which was sent to me by a friend. Since we had a "Lullaby for Grown-Ups" a couple weeks ago, it seems fitting to have a video named after the blog here as well.

This is the introduction of the film, meant to capture the mood of some of the videographer's dreams. I especially like the music and all the water images.

Lullaby for Grown-Ups - Andy McKee

Here's a smooth and mellow acoustic guitar lullaby. Andy McKee performs a song from his CD Dreamcatcher. McKee developed an international following after two of his performance videos were posted on the internet and went viral, achieving more than 17 million views. I hope you enjoy this amazing music.