In the days before the internet, the range of music available as nerdy inspiration was more limited. Today, one can simply go out and find Jonathan Coulton, Five Year Mission, The Doubleclicks, Tripod, or dozens of other performers with catalogs of geek related songs. I'm certain that there were geek related groups performing back then - filk is a well-established part of science fiction fandom. But to have access to filk and other geek music, one had to be able to travel to science fiction or gaming conventions. And as I was living in Africa for a substantial chunk of my youth, and boarding school for my teen years, attending conventions was never an option. So, when I was younger, I took inspiration where I found it, even when it hung on fairly slender threads.
One of those slender threads was the Fleetwood Mac song Sisters of the Moon. Yes, it almost certainly isn't about anything even remotely science fiction or fantasy related, but the Celtic inspired imagery (and my adolescent crush on Stevie Nicks) was more than enough to set my brain wandering. It is probably because of Stevie Nicks and her ethereal lyrics that I began reading Welsh and Irish mythology and incorporating their influence into my gaming campaigns. More directly, every role-playing game campaign setting that I have ever designed, no matter the genre, has had an organization in it called the "Sisters of the Moon". So, for inspiring me to read the Mabinogion, the Táin bó Cúailnge, and a myriad of other tales of mythology, and for showing up in all of my game settings, I'm including Sisters of the Moon in Musical Monday.
This performance is from the 1982 Tusk tour. In the middle of the song, Nicks leaves the stage and fellow band mate Lindsay Buckingham sings one verse. This was somewhat unusual, and has been attributed to the heavy emotional burden that Nicks was under at the time due to the recent death of her best friend Robin Anderson. It is likely because of this, however, that the rest of Stevie's performance here is so visceral and powerful.
Previous Musical Monday: The Presidents by Jonathan Coulton
Subsequent Musical Monday: Wheel in the Sky by Journey
Fleetwood Mac Musical Monday Home
This is a great song from a great album, and I agree it provides some inspiration. I remember using Secret Journey by the Police (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJi8N8UxTTw&feature=fvst) as inspiration for an AD&D adventure. Sometimes you can find gems buried within otherwise uninspiring albums (uninspiring from a geek perspective, that is).
ReplyDelete@Frylock: In the days before the internet made geek oriented music available with just a few clicks of a button we sure had to take what we could get, didn't we? I'll have a couple more songs from mainstream bands that provided geek inspiration in the future - Journey and Led Zeppelin at least. Maybe a few others.
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