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Track
Listing
1. Wonderful life (Black) 4.11
2. Golden brown (The Stranglers) 4.06
3. Ghost riders in the sky (The Highwaymen) 4.59
4. San Francisco (Scott McKenzie) 3.17
5. Sweet sixteen (Billy Idol) 4.05
6. I threw it all away (Bob Dylan) 2.34
7. Rhythm of the rain (The Cascades) 3.55
8. House of the rising sun (The Animals) 4.05
9. Can I be with you? (Claudia de Brej) 4.33
10. The twelfth of never (Johnny Mathis) 3.33
11. The last thing on my mind (Tom Paxton) 3.06
12. Blowin’ in the wind (Bob Dylan) 3.22
13. Catch the wind (Donovan) 3.14
14. O willow waly (Ashley Serena) 5.16
15. Tam Lin (Fairport Convention) 8.44
16. Oceans (Hillsong) 5.44
17. I saw the gate of heaven open (Hungarian trad.) 5.57
Total running time 74.15
A word about the songs...
This is my 5th volume of cover versions, after Songs of Love & Chains (a double album) in 2008, Sun, Sorrow, Flowers, Moon in 2014, and God Gave us Flowers in 2020. I have also recorded over 30 albums of my own songs since 1987. As a student with my first girl-friend, Ursula, we used to listen to evening radio in her little uni bedsit in Göttingen, Germany, and share a bottle of Blue Nun wine, and a Vesta beef curry, both of which were considered highly exotic and slightly forbidden by her landlady! From central Europe they used to broadcast cool stuff at the time, like Leonard Cohen, Mike Oldfield, Georges Moustaki, Fairport Convention, Marianne Faithful and the like.
It so much made me want to emulate them, and to re-create that atmosphere for others, and so, do you know, I did! My songs get played on the radio all over the world, and people sometimes write in to say that it inspires them to get their own stuff out there. Not only that, but as an English guy I’ve migrated to central Europe, to Hungary in fact, for spiritual & cultural reasons. My birth mother is Russian, and when I dream it’s always of a more middle-earth landscape rather than a Nordic one.
That early experience with Ursula rather set the tone for how my life would take shape, as it’s turned out. But even as a kid I used to listen to the radio under the bedclothes with a torch, when it was ‘lights out’. That was Radio Luxembourg, and my faves were Elvis, Buddy Holly, Rick Nelson, Bobby Vee and the Everly Brothers. So there was an atmosphere about heart-centered music, night-time, something slightly illicit, and the heartland of Europe that called. I now understand that ‘calling’, because Hungary is the heart chakra of the planet, and I heard the drum beating even as a kid.
The thing that unites my songs is a heart-chakra quality, either musically or lyrically, or both, and my aspiration is to spiritualise the songs where possible, to let them speak of another world beyond the apparent...
~ Asha, October, 2021
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