Crete
Thursday, 21 June 2007
Every time our four piece family goes on vacation or uses a car for a longer trip I try to make a compilation CD with music for all of us. It has become a tradition that we all enjoy, especially me. Listening to music in a car is special. This year we took an early vacation to Crete and I carefully selected 28 songs to make the many hours in the car a party.
I mixed in some unknown songs among the favourites, which worked very well, and in the end the whole family could sing along with every tune on the CD.
My personal favourites where the MashUps, especially this brilliant MashUp of Tom Jones and Blondie, by DJ Earlybird, and this DJ Moule MashUp of The Jackson Five’s ABC and a song I don’t recognise.
The rest of the family liked the Dutch songs most: Dromen zijn bedrog, by Marco Borsato, Ik wou dat ik jou was, by Velthuis & Kemper en Maak van uw scheet een donderslag by Herman Brood.
But I also put some songs of friends on the CD, and to my surprise these songs were more than appreciated. I have many demos and other recordings from people that our children know as just friends. It felt good to hear them sing along with these songs or even shout “louder!” when they played.
The most requested song was a demo that my brother-in-law Axel made a few years ago. He works as a professor in engineering in Germany, but he has written several songs. The fact that this was their own uncle singing and playing piano, made our children aware that everybody can create songs. But they also really loved this song, even though it is obvious an amateur demo. He wrote it for a new born child of a friend of his. The fact that Axel’s brother, my wife’s other brother, just had become father for the first time, gave this song an extra dimension.
While listening to all the songs many times I realised again and again what music means to me and how important music is in my life. Some songs, like the Marco Borsato song or the Velthuis & Kemper song, touch me deep, even after hearing them three times a day for two weeks, because we had only one CD with us.