It seems rather appropriate to begin this set of Songs for A Year In The Country with a visit to Summerisle, via this song which conjures a sense of a timeless and atemporal world…
Above: Silva Screen’s edition of the soundtrack artwork by Richey Beckett.
A few years or so ago I posted a series of “Songs for A Year In The Country” and after that I included an expanded version of the list of songs in the A Year In The Country: Lost Transmissions book.
This series of posts is intended to be a revised version of that list and it contains some of the songs that have variously acted as signposts, touchstones, significant markers and discoveries for A Year In The Country.
In some ways the list is also a form of Desert Island Discs but, reflecting the passage of the year, there are 52 songs, as there are weeks in the year, rather than the eight which the guests on the BBC Radio show choose for their imaginary time as castaways.
With that in mind, the selection includes some of the songs that I find myself repeatedly returning to, ones that I’d “save from the waves” or bundle up to take into the storm shelter if a Wizard of Oz-esque twister appeared on the horizon.
