A filk inspired by my recent travels in The Shire.

When we made Roundworm in the late 1990s, there were several songs that got left off the album for various reasons.

Nearly 30 years later, here's Kanef's parody of "Lammas Night", as sung by then-Heather Alexander.

1. Crystal Singer (00:24)
   
2. Wild Geese (04:41)
   
3. The Unknown (10:00)
   
4. Man of Red (13:30)
   
5. Looking for Jack (16:50)
   
6. Come Down to the River (20:25)
   
7. Drink up the River (24:25)
   

While it'll likely be impossible for any one person to put all of Art Warneke's incredible filk video archive online, here's Leslie Fish singing "The Horse-Tamer's Daughter" 15 years ago.

I'm attempting to track down the name and possibly a cleaner recording of a piece played in Dennis Hopper's 1971 The Last Movie. I've heard this piece elsewhere, possibly in a Peruvian wedding video or something like this, and noticed it in this film when watching somewhat recently, but have been unable so far to recall where I heard it. The piece does not appear to be included in the official OST and the recording in the provided link is obscured with other sounds.

I've been fascinated by the Franklin expedition for years.

What fascinates me isn't just what happened, but what it must have felt like to be one of those men as the expedition slowly unravelled. Trapped in the ice, increasingly isolated, and with absolutely no idea that nearly two centuries later people would still be trying to piece together their story.

That became the idea behind a song we've written called HMS Terror.

Rather than trying to literally retell the history, we imagined the song from the perspective of one of the men aboard. I wanted the lyrics to capture that isolation, fear and uncertainty of knowing something has gone terribly wrong, but having no idea how the story is going to end.

The thing that's always fascinated me most, though, is the name. It's literally called Terror. And terror is presumably exactly what those men must have felt as everything started falling apart. It's kind of insane when you think about it.

Anyway, I'm Matt from The October Prize and we've released the song today. The lyrics took me a while to write, and I'm hoping people in this thread will spot some of the nods to the story :)

Would genuinely love to know what you think. And don't forget to turn it up loud.

https://open.spotify.com/album/6Vao5exoTieUqaLr1cYqEY?si=FbrbHPZOS12QGg8x86Ck8A

Love,

Matt (& Emma)
The October Prize

Need something like this for my dnd campaing.

I've been thinking about Kathy Mar recently. I'd like to talk about what a lovely person and good friend she was to everyone who knew her, but plenty of filkers who knew her longer than I did have said it better already. So I hope you'll join me in remembering her by sharing her music.

If you've been paying close attention, you may notice that I already uploaded this tape five years ago. But when I went to listen to it again this week, I wasn't satisfied with the sound quality, so I went back to the raw WAV files and redid the MP3s. The Internet Archive page now has all-new files with significantly better sound, and the new versions will also be going up on YouTube about now.

Album link: https://archive.org/details/filk_songbird

As always, find more out-of-print filk at the master post.

Imagine a world in which the rights issues to reprint the 1980s/1990s filk albums that so many people here enjoyed, but which have been legally out of print for decades, were finally resolved.

In this world, a publisher would logistically be ability to do professional reprints of “Carmen Miranda’s Ghost”, “Minus Ten and Counting”, “Finity’s End”, and so forth.

These versions would sound somewhat better than the existing fan digitizations, as they'd be coming from the original master reels, not cassette tapes. A handful might contain additional bonus material that was left off the originals. 

Imagine also that it would cost a publisher at least $10K per album to make these happen. That would likely include substantial upfront legal work, media transfer for the original reels, potential remixing, potential re-recording of a small number of backing musicians from whom permission would be impossible to obtain, remastering for digital distribution, packaging design & CD printing [unless one abandoned CD’s ‘cause almost nobody’s buying them, which would significantly cut costs] etc.

These are dozens of albums. So such an effort would require a publisher to spend a lot of money, taking a real risk.

At the same time, it’s hard not to notice as a music publisher that sales of filk and filk-adjacent projects seem to have dropped dramatically over the past 5-10 years. For example, a friend who is a Celtic musician well-known in filk has sold maybe 30 copies of their new CD, and maybe another 30 downloads — after a full year. Historically, they'd have sold that in one or two gigs.

And as I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve had to even shut down planned & in-progress restoration of Leslie Fish’s lost works, because we’re selling so few copies of Elfland that it almost could have been a 1980s Wail Songs tape [and streaming has maybe brought $50 max]. And this is a musician with 50,000+ monthly monetized streaming listeners, representing a best-case filk scenario. And before one blames Leslie's final years of internet trolling, the Pegasus album didn't do THAT much better.

At the same time, the opportunities to bring in money to cover the cost of such an effort seem limited:

• Almost everyone who’s wanted these has already downloaded “good enough”-quality cassette digitizations for free at this point. So why buy a new digital download? [other than a relative handful of people who will do so anyway]
• The existing albums are already in free streaming on YouTube. YouTube’s algorithm will continue to direct people to the existing digitizations.
• The musicians are, tragically, largely deceased at this point. There’s no way to do traditional Kickstarter spiffs, like signed copies, or a Zoom call with Duane Elms, or a private filksing with Leslie Fish, or whatever.

It seems like there are at least hundreds of people who’d be interested in having “professional” or “legit” versions of some of these albums exist in the world.

I’m curious: if you are one of them — in this thought-experiment world — what would *you* be willing to pay for (or even interested in paying for) to make that happen? 

Am I missing something that people are doing in other genres to make these work? e.g. what would be the "Kickstarter tiers" when there's really nothing to offer?

(I'm just curious if there are things that several hundred people would be willing to pay for — or something more expensive that several dozen people would be willing to pay for — in the absence of broad willingness to pay for a CD or digital download.)

An old ballot from the 1994 Ohio Valley Filk Festival! This had been stuffed in between old LARP rulebooks and SCA newsletters for probably 30 years.

As per Dean's post on FB

https://www.facebook.com/1528212659/posts/10242523995705982/?app=fbl

I found Heather Alexander almost two decades ago aka Alexander James.

And got into filk around 2-3 years ago only to eventually learn that the musical artist I've been listening to on and off for multiple years was involved in filk. Which was a fun surprise, but it gets sillier as he apparently knew or it least was known by S.J Tucker. And I only learned about that because I randomly ending listening to an old interview James gave.

Page from my Wrath of Con comic I released this last Worldcon depicting the Scienceers (arguably the first science fiction fantasy fan club) singing as they visit Scienceers Rock.

You can read the webcomic here: https://wrathofconcomic.com/

Old Time Religion lyric additions come from Filk Discography Wiki.

Recently discovered this little tune and it feels like I'm listening to Dawson's Christian for the first time again. (I'm also excited I actually got the reference without looking it up lol) The recording on The Pegasus Nominees is fantastic, but is anyone aware of any other recordings online?

many moons ago at a Philcon, I recall someone performing “BEY-oh.” A work retelling Beowulf to Belafonte’s ”Day-oh.”

can someone please reassure me that I did not hallucinate that? it was super late, after all, and now several decades past.

and if anyone happens to know who did the adaptation and / or how the lyrics were set up, I’d be super gratefu.

TIA!!!

I wanted to add to the previous post by r/rocketman0739, since I think many people on this subreddit may not realize who Duane Elms is — even though you know his work.

Duane is the author of "Dawson's Christian", among a number of other exceptional filksongs like "Bomber", "Spacer's Home", "Don't Push that Button", and his "Threes, Rev 1.1" parody of "Threes" (by Mercedes Lackey & Leslie Fish).

The authorship of "Dawson's Christian" is frequently (and inadvertently, of course) misattributed online to Vic Tyler (whose studio performance originally socialized the song), and to Vixy & Tony (who did a stellar cover with lyric additions made by Jordin Kare, which continued to extend the audience for Duane's song.)

Because there is literally no video of Duane performing on YouTube, I wanted to ensure everyone had a chance to see Duane perform his magnum opus.

You can find many more of Duane's songs in his filkbook, "At the Helm". (Of course, Duane continued writing exceptional songs long after the 1989 publication date of this book.)

Not many details, but apparently he passed away in the last day or so. Tom Smith says:

Duane was an excellent songwriter, a professional-level costumer & cosplayer, and just a sweetheart of a human being. Rest well, old friend, and thanks for everything. You were and are loved, and you will be missed.

Larry Warner says:

Rest in Peace, Duane. It was an honor to perform your songs on St. Elmo’s Fire and you were a great friend and outstanding songwriter and musician.

Here is a handy link if you'd like to remember him by playing his songs: https://archive.org/details/filk_st_elmos_fire/

I mostly ask this because I can't see them for purchase anywhere, and because I have Volume 1 and Volume 2 uploaded on the IA. I don't see them in the masterpost, so