For space is wide and good friends are too few.
“Ophelia” by Playing Rapunzel, a gorgeous song for a missing scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Lyrics are available on Bandcamp.
Content warning – this song is set immediately before Ophelia’s suicide by drowning, and delves pretty deeply into her headspace at the time. Be especially careful if suicidal ideation is an issue for you.
“Merlin,” a fantastically creepy interpretation of Arthurian legend by Doug McArthur, performed here by Kathy Mar. If you’re familiar with the BBC TV show version of the character, this is… pretty much the exact opposite of that.
Lyrics are available here, and the song is available for free download from Prometheus Music.
15 years…
Columbia has fallen, from a brilliant azure sky,
And left a wake of smoke and flame, thirty-eight miles high,
And seven of our very best, are gone forevermore,
Flesh and steel paid the supreme price to explore…
[submitted by rocket-song-acoustic]
Some filk songs narrate Serious, Philosophically Meaningful first contact scenarios… this is not one of those filk songs.
Today in found filk: “The Griesly Bride,” a murder ballad adapted by Tom Campbell from a poem written by John Manifold.
Despite being written in the mid-20th century, it sounds like a traditional ballad, and has a very filkish supernatural twist. It’s actually so filkish that when I was first trying to track down the origin of the song, I found some folks who were convinced it had been written by filker Cynthia McQuillan.
Quick content warning for an implied threat of sexual coercion, though it’s never followed through, and the woman who’s threatened is not the one murdered in this ballad.
And it’s way hey, me lads, click on refresh again
There might be a new posting by one of your friends
Yes it’s way hey, me boys, leave a comment or two
It’s not like you’ve got something better to do
“Livejournal Shanty” by Brooke Abbey with John Caspell. Because as Brooke puts it, “I wanted to write a sea shanty. But I don’t exactly spend all day working on the sea. Or working on anything, really. ‘Gee,’ I thought to myself, ‘what DO I do all day?’ Oh. Oh yeah.”
And as the lyrics prove, while many of us have migrated away from Livejournal, it’s not like things have changed that much.
erdariel asked:
Hi! Sorry if this is a stupid question, but do you think poetry could be considered filk too? Because I wanna try writing some filk stuff, but I’m terrible with music, and even changing the lyrics of already existing songs so that it still works with the music seems like a bit too big challenge to me (especially in English, since it’s not my first language), but I can write poems. Not very good poems, I have to admit that, but poems anyway.
Definitely! I’ve heard a few people read poetry at filk events. Sometimes it’s a song they don’t feel confident enough to sing but want to share anyway, and sometimes because they found or wrote a very filkish poem that was never intended to be sung.
Go forth! Write things!! And there’s always a chance that someone else will be able to set something you write to music later!
I know at least three songs about spaceport bars. Here is one of them.
A Dalish lullaby I wrote. It uses the tune of Rozhinkes mit Mandlen, a Yiddish lullaby. I used Project Elvhen to construct the sentences (I’ll put my translation and explanation below the cut so people can have a go at translating it themselves if they want)
Lyrics:
Sura esha’lin’es eranain
Gara eir’ne julseithe hallain.
Ane ne halla’amelan.
Juvianvallasir
mar Ghilan’ain’es vallaslin.
Era, esha’lin.
Era, esha’lin.
I got the replicator malfunction blues
It messes up whatever I choose
Chief come and fix it and don’t be late
We never had this trouble on Deep Space 8
It’s driving me crazy, and I’m losing weight
And I got those replicator malfunction blues
“Replicator Malfunction Blues” by Chris Conway, a song about the trials of living on a certain space station.
Lyrics available on the Deep Space Love CD page (scroll halfway down the page to get to the lyrics section).