Last night, I scanned through the Sonic bids submissions to the music review section of this blog. This time around, I’ve gotten much less submissions. During my first period, I had 71 submissions. In the end, I reviewed 16. With one week left in this submission period, I’ve only received sixteen listings to review. I’ve now reviewed 7 of them.

There are a few interesting groups that I am considering reviewing. A couple have interesting videos or interesting backgrounds, but none of them really fit my feeling for this week.

You see, Saturday afternoon, my aunt died. I wrote a bit about it then, and I’m still feeling a bit blue. None of the listings jumped out at me on this. However, several tunes that often rattle around in my head have been with me for the past couple of days.

I like to write about songs that most people have not heard, yet there is one well known song that captures my mood fairly nicely. River by Joni Mitchell.

Two other songs are about bigger struggles that people go through. The first is Chris O’Brien’s “Blood Like Yours”. I first heard Chris at Falcon Ridge this year. His song about struggling with his father’s alcoholism is powerful and comes back to me from time to time.

In the same way, David Silva’s song “It will all be perfect” often comes back to me. David submitted a listing to Sonicbids earlier this year and I featured him in a review. This is a song about domestic violence. It comes from the abused’s perspective with the haunting line, “It will all be perfect baby, please don’t hit me anymore”; the hope that things will be okay when deep down, you know they aren’t, and won’t be without some sort of major changes. I suspect that the broader sense may be something many of us can relate to, even if we have no immediate experiences with domestic violence.

With that, I come to Harpeth rising’s “Can’t find the revolution”. They also came to me via a SonicBids submission. I reviewed Harpeth rising back in June. They will be playing in Middletown, CT in January and I’m working out details for them to appear on Fiona’s Radio Show this weekend to talk about their music and their upcoming show.

Back in June, I mentioned “Can’t find the revolution” as one of the songs that I really like, and it has been coming back to my mind a lot during these past few days. It talks about a woman who used to be a rambler and now she’s trapped inside a swivel chair and that she can’t find the revolution, but she’s looking every day.

When confronted with death, we may stop and wonder how our lives are going. Are we doing something we want to be doing, something meaningful? Have we found the revolution, or are we trapped inside a swivel chair. My new job is still new, and I’m just starting to find the frustrations that I suspect I’ll have to fight, but at least right now, it feels like I’ve found the revolution. But that’s a different blog post waiting to be written.

Ending things off is Calaveras’ “Ready to Fly”. I heard Calaveras at Falcon Ridge in 2009. Their song “Ready to Fly” grew out of some time that they spent with elderly people in nursing homes. “I am not dying, I’m getting ready to fly.” It is an incredibly hopeful look at the final days of loved ones.

So, as I mourn the passing of my aunt, I am spending time with some of my close friends. Just like my human friends, these musical friends might not be the most popular, but they carry incredibly deep meaning, and I hope that everyone spends time seeking similar friendships.