SLS: A Cold Blanket Of Beauty

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For this week’s Song Lyric Sunday Jim is inviting us to play a song that mentions Cold, as he tells us in his post In From The Cold. It sounds as though the weather is terrible across much of the US, so I hope a of you from there are surviving well! This theme sounded familiar and, on checking back, I found something similar back in April 2024. My first thought was that I could cheat and just repeat that post, but where’s the fun in that?

So I’m going back down the English folk music route for one of my favourites. This is actually a Christmas song, from an album of them, but it contains the line I am using for today’s title, which is good enough to qualify it for me! The video accompanying the song is unofficial, a fan video if you like, but it is beautifully sympathetic to the music:

And here are the lyrics:

When the frost is all over and the fresh morning dew,Hangs perfectly still there with its fresh morning hueAnd the blackbirds and thrushes they are shy with their rhyme There you’ll find me, love beside meat this Christmas timeThere you’ll find me. love beside meat this Christmas time
When the frost is all over and the trees shed their tonesA cold blanket of beauty encasing their bonesAnd the blackbirds and thrushes to the pale sun they climbThere you’ll find me, love beside me, at this Christmas timeThere you’ll find me. love beside me, at this Christmas time
When the frost is all over and the stream craves the sea,There are no second glances as it gurgles with glee, And the blackbirds and thrushes they hear the bells chime, There you’ll find me, love beside me, at this Christmas time,There you’ll find me, love beside me, at this Christmas time.
When the frost is all over and the fresh morning dew,Hangs perfectly still there with its fresh morning hue,And the blackbirds and thrushes they are old friends of mine, There you’ll find me,love beside me, at this Christmas time,There you’ll find me, love beside me, at this Christmas time.
Source: LyricFind

Songwriter: Kate Rusby
Although the word Cold only features once in the song, the imagery really builds a picture of that time of year, and uses it to create a wonderful song of love. It is so typical of Kate Rusby, both in its beauty and its effortless simplicity. As I have said before, Kate is one of my favourites: I have seen her several times in concert and she is always delightful. She comes from a part of Yorkshire (in the north of England) which has a very strong tradition of singing at Christmas, and her catalogue of albums reflects this: The Frost Is All Over is the title track of her third of (to date) seven seasonally themed albums. It was released in November 2015 and whilst it didn’t make the charts it is still beautiful to my ears. I bought it as soon as it was released, in the days before streaming took over, and loved it – like I do with all of her records.

I thought that, as a second tune for today, I would go back to one of those I played last time. Back then it was my first attempt for SLS at a song in another language, but the beauty of the music won you over, so I’m hoping it does that again today:

In case you were wondering, ‘kalte’ is the German word for cold. Faun have become one of my favourite bands since I discovered them seven or eight years back, thanks to the accuracy of YouTube’s algorithm for recommendations, which has served me well down the years. They make beautiful music, and aren’t afraid to push the barriers with their videos: a couple of them border on the very naughty! Diese Kalte Nacht (this cold night) is a track from their 2013 album Von Den Elben (of/from the elves), which reached #7 in the mainstream German albums chart – quite an achievement for a band that describes its music as being ‘pagan folk’ in style. It is an adaptation of a traditional song, known usually as either Cold Haily Rainy Night or Cold Haily Windy Night. I first heard a version on Steeleye Span’s second album, Please To See The King, but it has been covered many times by folk musicians from all over the place and not just in English, as this shows. The song is about a young man pleading with his love to let him in out of the freezing cold, though the English lyrics imply another meaning of the phrase ‘let me in’ (spoiler alert – she does). Much though I’m a fan of Steeleye, I shared this version as I think the vocals and musicianship are gorgeous, and the setting of Marienburg Castle, in Lower Saxony, Germany, is perfect in creating the ambience. There are several lyric videos which give an English translation of this, with varying degrees of accuracy (from the poor to the awful) but they lose the beauty of the video. There are several attempts at translations on the web, too, if you feel the need to try them, but don’t be surprised at how we cope with other languages: when I typed in ‘nacht’ autocorrect gave me ‘nacho’ instead! The song is a popular part of Faun’s repertoire, and the video has more than 22m YouTube views. When I opened it up there today I was a little surprised to see that the comment I left several years ago is at the top of that section – somehow I suspect that might not be the case for others!

That’s it from me for today, and I hope I’ve broadened your musical horizons a little with that second one, in particular. You don’t necessarily have to understand all of the words to appreciate the beauty of a performance, do you? Thanks as always to Jim for running such a great show, and I’m looking forward to seeing what others might play for this theme.

I’ll see you again for Tuesday Tunes. Have a lovely day 😊

27 thoughts on “SLS: A Cold Blanket Of Beauty”

  1. I found this while googling to see if Faun’s song was a variant of “Cold, Haily, Rainy Night” (which I first heard as The Imagined Village’s version). I don’t speak any German, but it felt very familiar as I was listening.

    So, anyway, I enjoyed your post. Thanks for answering my question.

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  3. Pingback: Tuesday Tunes 288: Cold | Take It Easy

  7. Hi Clive, I really enjoy “songs in another language” and enjoyed the Faun song a lot.

    Also, when I saw the theme for this week, I thought of Rainbow’s 1982 Stone Cold song… but I like that you found that opening song with the frosty English folk music!

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