I accidentally stumbled upon an Ethiopian radio station the one night I was driving home from work. I was cruising through stations while driving and just stopped at one because it was in a language I had never ever heard before, but I kept listening because it was freaking beautiful.
Turns out it was Amharic. I had never heard Amharic spoken before, but it might be the most beautiful language I have ever heard, so I just kept listening until it faded out to static.
Anyway, when I got home, I looked up the station [KETO-FM], and it is owned by and serves African immigrants & refugees.. mostly from Ethiopia. They have a website & a gofundme. Their gofundme is severely under goal.
Apparently, they are Colorado’s first and only radio station serving African immigrants in the state, soooo donate if you can!
OOOOH THIS STATION I’D HEARD IT AGES AGO I’D ALWAYS WONDERED. They’re great, doing a real service and also have amazing music.
Whew … okay. This is many, many months in the making. It feels like I have waited forever to post this, only because I kept working on it, and feeling it wasn’t perfect, and working on it some more. I still have the feeling that it’s not there, but I’m gonna post it anyway.
Okay, @thursdayplaid . I read Wee Doctor ages ago when I was on a break from college. I didn’t sleep much as I read the entire trilogy in a few days, completely hooked. When I finished it, I went out and talked my mom’s ears off about it, how it made me feel, how the characters were so complex and shaded and motivated, how it was so different from any fanfiction I’d ever read. I thought about it almost constantly for weeks after. The tragedy of W, John’s devastating determination personified at the core of him; the original John, trapped, doing everything he can for a Sherlock that no longer existed…
I began composing this piece soon after, needing to process the emotions of Wee Doctor my way—through music. It has gone through many iterations, revamps, and redos. I knew the song was going to be about loss. At first, it was just John’s loss of his Sherlock. But then, slowly, it also became about Davey’s loss of self, and Rooster’s loss of stability, and Tim’s loss of family—and then I finally got it, what my music was trying to show me.
So the piece got its final title: Lament of the Lost Brothers. All these characters have lost their worlds, and they can never get them back, and they have to deal with that the whole story. They try, and fail, and hold each other up while trying to prevent it happening from anyone else. And in the process, they become family, brothers.
@thursdayplaid I hope you can hear through my music how much I loved Wee Doctor, and I hope you like it. I know it’s not what you envisioned in your head those years ago, when I first asked you what kind of music you thought would be best for your story … I always end up adding more instruments the more I work on something. ooooops. but I hope you enjoy it just the same. Merry Christmas!
A beautiful piece of instrumental music plus an homage to the classic Thriller video.
(Now I’m suddenly being surprised there wasn’t a nod to that in the Buffy ep “Once More With Feeling”. But that might have been a little too on the nose.)
Speak with Tenderness 