Music Madness: Another New World

 I want to start sharing with you some of my favorite songs.  Especially the songs that really touch me emotionally.

Music is a big part of our little family and I can tell you that our daughter will be, and currently is, immersed in music.  Nick plays mandolin in a band and he's always practicing with her around.

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This song, Another New World by the Punch Brothers, is currently on repeat. I can't stop listening to this song.  I think I listen to it at least once a week.  It gives me goosebumps.  The lyrics are eerily beautiful. 

It was orginally written and performed by Josh Ritter (listen here), but I love the Punch Brothers' version.

Listen.  Read the lyrics.  Tell me what you think.

The leading lights of the age all wondered amongst themselves what I would do next,

After all that I'd found, in my travels around the world, was there anything left?

"Gentlemen," I said, "I've studied the charts, and if what I am thinking is right,

There's another new world, at the top of the world, for the first one who breaks through the ice,"

And I looked 'round the room, in that way I once had, and I saw that they wanted belief,

So I said, "All I've got are my guts and my God," then I paused, "and the Annabel Lee."

Oh, the Annabel Lee, and I saw their eyes shine, the most beautiful ship in the sea,

My Nina, my Pinta, my Santa Maria, my beautiful Annabel Lee.

That spring we set sail, the crowds waved from the shore, and on board the crew waved their hats,

But I'd never had family, just the Annabel Lee, so I never had cause to look back.

I just set the course north, and I'd studied the charts, and towards dark I drifted toward sleep,

And I dreamed of the fine, deep harbor I'd find past the ice, for my Annabel Lee.

After that it got colder, the world got quiet. It was never quite day or quite night.

And the sea turned the color of sky turned the color of sea turned the color of ice.

Till at last all around us was vastness, one vast glassy desert of arsenic white,

And the waves that once lifted us, shifted instead into drifts against Annabel's sides.

And the crew gathered closer, at first for the warmth, but each day would bring a new set of tracks in the snow, leading over the edge of the world, til I was the only one left.

Then it gets cloudy,

But it seems like I laid there for days, or maybe for months

But Annabel held me, just the two of us happy, to think back on all we had done.

We talked of the other new worlds

We'd discover as she gave up her body to me,

As I chopped up her mainsail for timber,

I told her of all that we still had to see.

As the frost turned her moorings

To nine-tail and the wind lashed her sides in the cold,

I burned her to keep me alive every night in the loving embrace of her hold.

And I won't call it rescue,

That brought me back here to the old world to drink and decline,

And pretend that the search for another new world was well worth the burning of mine.

But sometimes at night, in my dreams,

Comes the singing of some unknown tropical bird,

And I smile in my sleep,

Thinking Annabel Lee's finally made it to another new world.

Yeah, sometimes at night my dreams comes the singing of some unknown tropical bird,

And I smile in my sleep, thinking Annabel Lee's finally found another new world.