Here we have a sweet sad love song by Dido (full name Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O'Malley Armstrong) who was born in 1971 and is thus younger than many other Songs of the Day. It was a huge hit, hardly obscure (the album Life For Rent sold 10+ million copies). It’s OK to be mainstream sometimes, and White Flag is more than OK, it’s brilliant.
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An Australian story · A dozen years ago we went on a camping trip to the southeast corner of Australia with a dozen or more people, including a few kids. One evening, the little ones were asleep and we were sitting around the fire enjoying a few well-earned drinks when the party’s three pre-teen girls wandered in out of the dark and said they’d been working on a song. They put this dinky little CD player (maybe even cassette, back then?) on the ground, and sang White Flag. They were grubby from camping, thin as twigs, and so were their voices, and after a few minutes, sitting in the dusk listening to their wavery I will go down with this ship/And I won’t put my hands up and surrender, well, there were a couple of tear-stained parents’ cheeks.
Granted, it’s overproduced, synth-drenched, and cliche-ridden. But listen to the vocal line, there’s a lot happening there and her voice is exquisite.
This is part of the Song of the Day series (background).
Links · Amazon, Spotify, iTunes, live video young, on the big stage (max emo) and a tiny trio, ten years later (max music).
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Leonardo Herrera (Feb 01 2018, at 04:08)
It's overproduced because it was the thing to do at the time (e.g. those techno-Gregorian guys, Enigma, oh, and Seal, etc.)
Totally enjoying these posts, Tim. Came to this blog for the insight on standards and dry XML related things (back in the day), but stayed for cottage pictures and music :-)
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