Midsummer is upon us, and that means that the crops are planted and growing, the sun is high, and I will be heading to my grove to celebrate in a Norse-focused ritual. And this turned my mind towards one of the mighty goddesses that we will be honoring in this ritual, Sif (pronounced with a long "ee" sound in the middle, if you're not familiar with the name). Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of myths about her in the lore: She's married to Thor. During one incident Loki shaves her head, probably in an attempt to shame her, and the dwarves make her some sort of replacement from gold. In the Lokasenna, Loki also insinuates she is unfaithful to Thor, but that just convinces Thor to show up and promptly kick him out of the hall. Our local group has made the bit of leap of linguistic faith that her name may have some kind of relationship with the modern word "sheaf", and so we've come to associate her with grain, which at the very least doesn't contradict anything we know of. Plus I do genuinely think good food is more valuable than gold or money, and we'd all do well to remember that.
Musically, well, ... in my defense, I started writing the melody in the shower one morning, then sat down to harmonize it, and quickly discovered that I'd fallen into that oh-so-famous / cliche harmonic pattern first popularized as Pachabel's Canon in D. But I had written my song in Eb (guitarists trying to do this song would do well to capo up 1 fret), and it's in 3/4 rather than 4/4 time, so that makes it at least as different as many other things that follow that pattern. But also, this felt like it wanted a classical-style setting, so I decided to go with blatant stealing ... err ... tribute. Unfortunately, I don't have any string quartets in my living room, so you'll have to put up with my synth work on this recording at least.
All works are copyright by yours truly, but may be distributed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 4.0. That means, in short, you can use them yourself and your grove, and play the song to your heart's content both in private and in public, but must give credit where credit is due, and if you're planning on selling something involving this song we need to talk about that first.
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