Ah Music, a Magic Beyond All We Do Here…

I am a person of obsessions. I don’t do things by halves. I’ll suddenly get bitten by a bug, and then I’ll go after it with everything I have ’ I’d get an idea for a short story and then work on it till 5 am because I’m afraid I’ll lose the “vibe” if I leave it till the morning; I discover some cool 3D drawing software and spend two weeks using every free minute to design and draw a house, complete with ensuite bathrooms, sloping landscaping and a pool; or I suddenly get the taste for home-made hummus and make a fresh batch every other day for a month.

Most of those obsessions disappear as suddenly as they arrived. My second short story sits unfinished on my desktop (I’ll finish it some other time… soon), I have not run that 3D software since I finished drawing a second house (it took about a week for me to stop dreaming about walls and windows or trying to zoom in on something on TV with my remote), and I don’t even want to smell home-made hummus any more, let alone eat it.

I have a few passions, however, that may wax and wane at times, but that never truly desert me. One of these passions is music. I love music. Like Albus Dumbledore, I believe music is magic; it can comfort, it can invigorate, it can define and it can unite.

Music has been a part of my life since I was very little. I have clear memories of being strapped into the seat on the back of my mother’s bike, no more than three or four years old, singing a made-up song about a star at the top of my lungs. Then, at the age of seven I was finally allowed to take piano lessons ’ which I had been dying to do since my sister started taking lessons two years earlier. For years I wanted to become a concert pianist, an ambition brutally crushed when I lost a finger tip in a freak accident with the door of the school gym. Fortunately, puberty hit, and playing the piano and practicing every day wasn’t cool enough any more. So I joined a band, which gave me enough cool credit to be transformed from a studious Hermione into the female equivalent of a Stubby Boardman. But from university onwards, my active enjoyment of music gradually made way for a more passive appreciation. I stopped playing the piano, said goodbye to the limelight and only sang in the shower if I was certain no one would hear.

And then there was filk.

I was first introduced to the concept of filking by the 2006 Valentine’s Day edition of Pottercast and it just was me. Filking suits me to a T. It is the perfect outlet for my obsession with obsessions. It combines so many things I love; music, singing, writing, fiddling with nifty software, my need to tweak and polish something for days until I know it is as close to perfect as I can get it, and of course Harry Potter. The joy isn’t in being the best singer in the world, but simply in the singing, and you do it in your own living room. And if my old hands can’t pick up that Nocturne by Chopin or that Impromptu by Schubert any more, surely they’ll still be able to squeeze out a little Desperado. And the funnest thing of it all is that you can do it together with friends from all over the world.

So I am obsessed with filking. And I want to share this obsession with you. This blog will be part personal experience (anecdotes and stories behind the filks I have made or collaborated on), part “how to” (backing tracks, harmonies, sound editing). I will promise to update approximately once a week, but don’t bite my head off if I don’t. I will also promise to try my best to be entertaining, and if I fail in that pursuit, at least to be mildly informative. I cannot, however, promise not to be long-winded.

Before I kick off officially, I have a few quick thank yous to bestow. Thank you to Aislinn and Yinna for helping me make that cool banner at the top of my blog. Yinna, if she reads this, will probably think “what’d I do?” ’ but she bought me that awesome mug with the piano key print about twenty years ago, and since then I don’t think I made myself more than a dozen cups of tea in another mug than that one (and I have about a dozen cups of tea a day). Aislinn actually put in the hard graft for the banner, patiently accommodating my “can you zoom out a bit more? No, not that much. Yes like that, but then actually with that other picture” until she quietly informed me I was running out of my PITA allowance for the day.

Also, I want to thank the amazing Bandersnatch and weirdsis for generously allowing me to steal the line “the what, the why, the which, the where, the how and the You-Know-Who” from their filk entitled “The Prophecy” for my bio ’ I think it just simply is one of the cleverest lines in any filk ever.

Now let the games begin!