By The Landlord
“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.” – Wallace Stevens
“The sound of music is like water finding a path.” – Pam Muñoz Ryan
“A Great Lake can hold all the mysteries of an ocean, and then some.” – Dan Egan
“Music comes from an icicle as it melts, to live again as spring water.” – Henry Williamson
“I always say that the last two things to leave this Earth will be water and music. It's embedded into our souls...” – Quincy Jones
One burnished sheet of living gold,
Loch Katrine lay beneath him rolled,
In all her length far winding lay,
With promontory, creek, and bay,
And islands that, empurpled bright,
Floated amid the livelier light,
And mountains, that like giants stand,
To sentinel enchanted land. – Walter Scott, The Lady On The Lake
Last summer, some younger friends came to stay at our house for the purpose of catching live music, to visit galleries, to shop, go partying and other bright lights of the big city. But of all the many cultural attractions the massive UK capital offers, and bearing in mind here that these people are in their early twenties, they said their absolute favourite thing of all was sitting quietly and gazing in wonder at tiny, speckle-bellied, spotted, smooth newts wriggling in our small, green, murky back garden pond.
And there you have it, of all the things, it's an ancient species that might even exist before the dinosaurs doing their thing in small muddy puddle that, beyond all modern attractions, summons up some timeless magic. Perhaps that's not so surprising after all.
Pond life: smooth newts
So then, not just newts, but much other life springs forth, not merely within our 4-ft wide pond, but other sorts of waters, or perhaps from some tiny brook, a trickling stream, a billabong, a burn, a bayou, a rill, a canal, a reservoir, opening out into vast lochs and lakes, some even bigger than countries. This week our theme is songs about any bodies of water, excluding those thematically explored before - seas, oceans and rivers. It still leaves it all wide open. And while most lakes and other inland bodies are freshwater, some are also salt.
But when is a stream, a brook or canal not a river? Even when also man-made, it can also be both. But for the purposes of this lyrical topic, simply when it's called by a different name in the song might be the easiest course. And when is a pond big enough to be a lake? Either way, whatever size, they both count.
Bodies of water help flow many kinds of narrative or lyrical inspiration. They are variously a source of still, glassy, sky-mirrored wonder, or fast-flowing metaphor, a place of literal and imagined reflection. They exist not merely showing what's above the surface, but also what might be below. They are full of mysteries, romance and murder, the pure and the polluted, of the beautiful and the broken, the marvellous, the mundane, or the monstrous, always containing shoals of shimmering secrets.
Here's a glimpse of many of these in this clip from one of my favourite films, Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, in which the evil preacher Powell, played by Robert Mitchum, claims his wife has run off with another man, but really, as is later discovered by a man fishing, she is lying murdered in the bottom of the local lake in a car, her hair flowing like the reeds in a scene of extraordinary beauty:
Lakes are a source mystery, some so vast they are beyond measure. There are an estimated 300 million lakes and ponds on our planet, and around 32,000 at least 1.2 sq miles in diameter. They may be crater, volcanic, glacial, tectonic, fluvial, shoreline, floodplain, aeolian (formed by wind), or one of several other types, at high altitude, such as the crater Ojos del Salado on the Argentine-Peruvian border (6,390 metres) or the navigable Lake Titicaca in Peru and Bolivia (3,812 metres and the largest in South America, to the lowest, the salty Dead Sea (it's a lake) 418 metres below sea level .
Some have even been formed by extraterrestrial impact, a meteor landing to form them. The majority of lakes are in the northern hemisphere, with around 2 million in Canada alone, and 170,000 in Finland.
Lake Michigan-Huron has the longest coastline at 3,260 miles, and is second in size to the Caspian Sea, which is technically a lake too. But the deepest, and biggest by volume and also still huge by surface area (12,248 sq miles, and therefore bigger than Belgium), as well as the oldest freshwater in the world is Lake Baikal in Siberia. It goes to a murky depth of 1,642 metres. Filled with biodiversity and one of the clearest waters in the world, here it is, with a schematic showing just how deep it goes compared to some of the other Great Lakes:
Lake Baikal in winter and summer
Holding vast biodiversity and mystery, Lake Baikal in Siberia is the deepest and oldest of all Earth’s lakes by some distance
There's much that can be said about bodies of water big or small, but for inspiration, here are some others from around the globe with contrasting aspects. Hopefully they'll inspire an equally international spread of song nominations:
Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon, Iceland
Lake Como, Italy
Laguna Colorada, Bolivia
Lake Louise, Canada
Dead Sea, Jordan, technically landlocked salt lake
Lake Michigan during a 2019 freeze
New Zealand’s Lake Taupō in the caldera of the Taupō Volcano
So then, whether big or small, clear or murky, flowing or dammed, it’s time to turn on the taps of inspiration and suggest your songs on this topic. This week’s Lord of the Lake, Prophet of the Pond, and Captain of the Canal is the terrific TatankaYotanka! Place your nominations in comments below for deadline at 11pm UK time on Monday for playlists published next week. Still waters run deep …
New to comment? It is quick and easy. You just need to login to Disqus once. All is explained in About/FAQs ...
Fancy a turn behind the pumps at The Song Bar? Care to choose a playlist from songs nominated and write something about it? Then feel free to contact The Song Bar here, or try the usual email address. Also please follow us social media: Song Bar X, Song Bar Facebook. Song Bar YouTube, and Song Bar Instagram. Please subscribe, follow and share.
Song Bar is non-profit and is simply about sharing great music. We don’t do clickbait or advertisements. Please make any donation to help keep the Bar running.