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Rostam — Wood
Album: Half-Light
Avg rating:
6.1

Your rating:
Total ratings: 927









Released: 2017
Length: 5:41
Plays (last 30 days): 2
Sunlight on your eyelids
You were sleeping
Ah, ah ah
Sunlight on your back
You were dreaming
Ah, ah ah

And I lay inside a field
Beneath a cherry tree
And listen to the grass
And horses as they pass
And wake up in the light
Across the mountainside
And I sleep beside a fire
I built with burning tires

Sunlight on your eyelids
You were sleeping
Ah ah, ah ah ah
Sunlight on your back
You were dreaming
Ah ah, ah ah ah

Oh oh oh oh oh...
Comments (28)add comment
Oh boy... I haven't heard this song for a few years. My eldest daughter was born in 2017 and we had this album playing a lot that year. Wonderful memories.
A promising start, then it falls into a  mumblecore lullaby. Good for insomnia.
Reminded me a bit of Robert Plant's newer stuff - heard this on RP for the first time and spent ages trying to Shazam/search for this song under Robert Plant's name to no avail....I now know why!

Thanks Bill + Rebecca for keeping it fresh and different. Onwards and upwards!
Reminds me of David Byrne's solo work.  Very nice!
What's great, and better than most anything else, is how he perfected MIXING the SOUND when it was produced.  Mixing the right, or the left, often favors that side by 90%-10%.  But, only for some of the instruments.  Bass was always 50%-50%, because you'd never expect or hear any directional information from the lower bass in the real world. 

For a bad example of mixing L-R poorly, some of the early Beatles would switch 100%-0% Left channel to Right channel, at odd times, and switch the bass portions, as well as all of the sound elements, which you'd never hear naturally in the real world.  By including the bass as well, that ensures that it seems unnatural, since this would be impossible.   Just when used for special effects though, it does work for for DeadMou5's "Imaginary Friends".
Reminds me of ELO
 hubbert wrote:

@BillG, How the heck do you find this stuff? I mean, I know he is a member of Vampire Weekend, but one never hears him on the Radio? Are you a music-archeologist?



I think we all know the answer to that last question is Yes!

Wow! 

7 => 8
 RoaringMouse wrote:

! *would swear this is a David Byrne joint!


Hahaha I was expecting his voice too!
Great song though. Never heard of him. Magical. 
! *would swear this is a David Byrne joint!
off to Bancamp I go 😎
Came across this on one of his interviews (https://tidal.com/magazine/art...) describing some of his thoughts on this song.

One of my favorite tracks was ‘Wood.’ To me, it sounds like George Harrison doing a raga or something. Can you tell me about the instrumentation and song structure for that one? Because it seems like such a traditional story. You know, a simple story of the horses and the grass.

I used a regular old 12-string acoustic guitar for a lot of the
second half of the song, but I tuned it in the way that you would tune this Persian instrument called the Tar. The most ancient music that I’m referencing on the whole record is this Persian form called the Rast Panjgah. It’s a collection of melodies and you’re touching on those melodies over the course of the performance. I think it’s a few thousand years old.

I guess I was trying to make connections between Indian music, Bollywood music, Iranian music, American folk music. I guess I wanted to present my vision of how those things should live together.

This has become quite an earworm for me. Was 7, now +1 to 8!
I'm liking this a LOT more than Vampire Weekend...
I wanted to like this Pretty Good track more than. I did by the end.  Maybe future spins will leave me with a different perspective.  
 dmcgrath383 wrote:

The fact that Rostam is one of the founding members of Vampire Weekend, I'm not surprised at all by the divergence and congruence of sound here. This is an auditory piece of art. 

Graffitti?

The fact that the image to illustrate the artist is a miniature of Rostem's illustrious fight in Shahnameh is a happy mistake! I hope BillG keep it this way :)
@BillG, How the heck do you find this stuff? I mean, I know he is a member of Vampire Weekend, but one never hears him on the Radio? Are you a music-archeologist?
Interesting...
Bill, thanks for more Rostam.
good stuff
Musically, it reminds me of that of Ravi Shankar. To me, the singing in it is very similar to that of David Byrne, as others have mentioned. What impresses me most, however, is that the message in the lyrics here seems to be of a very powerful, timelessly aware, big-picture kind:  We must wend our way through the sufferings, shadows, and dreams within dreams of this life and pass into the realm of Light... I also love how Rostam in Farsi resembles a mounted, charging horse -- how cool!
 sfoster66 wrote:

Well, this certainly charges madly off in all directions, doesn't it?  



Bill just quoted this comment when he backsold the song. 
The fact that Rostam is one of the founding members of Vampire Weekend, I'm not surprised at all by the divergence and congruence of sound here. This is an auditory piece of art. 
!
Well, this certainly charges madly off in all directions, doesn't it?  
Wow... This is mixing it up
Got to second the LLRP in the first post...
Nice cut, BillG, ended up going 6 +1 +1 while listening to this for the first time; another 8-off-the-bat today; you're killing it! 

LLRP