MUSIC FOR JANUARY 2025
‘BLUE SHADOWS’
(encore presentation)
First posted as the Song of the Month! for December 2022, “Blue Shadows” certainly qualifies as a Yuletide number — although, as a song about lovers disappearing without a word, it may serve better to end your holiday party than to launch it.
But that melancholy theme actually suits January better than December in some ways. Where the Christmas season is supposed to provide various anesthetics against the realities of life, January is just the opposite, complete with thin sunlight, ample snow, bare branches, cold dry air, broken resolutions and other symbols of harsh truth.
The sunlight, snow and obstructions like bare branches, in fact, make the shadows of the song title. Yet, thanks to climate change, less and less snow falls in southern Maine. Which raises an interesting question for the (not so distant?) future: What will happen to a piece of work when its dominant image is no longer meaningful to most people?
Will “Blue Shadows,” like the long-lost, still-cherished lovers it depicts, ultimately live on only as an exercise of memory? (And where do I send the bill?)
And by the way, Happy New Year!
Hear “Blue Shadows” below! Buy it on Bandcamp! (“Blue Shadows” copyright © 2022 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Photo above: Saugus and Randolph streets, Portland, Maine, photographed by Doug Hubley. Photo below: Doug in the snow in South Portland, circa 1968. Hubley Family photo. NOTE: This recording uses sound posted under the Creative Commons 0 License by DBlover on the Freesound website: https://freesound.org/people/DBlover/sounds/505999/)
