Echo’s Children albums: listen free online!
I'm delighted to see that all four Echo's Children albums are now available on Bandcamp, which means that you can listen to them for free online and buy them in a remarkable variety of downloadable digital-music formats.
Echo's Children was one of my favorite music groups. Cat Faber and Callie Hills sang and played lovely harmonies and catchy melodies; a bunch of science fiction and fantasy songs and a bunch of others, almost all original to them.
Some starting points (listen free!) if you haven't heard them before:
- Acts of Creation, Cat's best-known song, a hymn to creating.
- Brown Gal is an a cappella sea song (with a guest singer), and it's a love song to a boat, and it's probably my favorite poly love song.
- Low Among the Roses sounds like a traditional song, but it's not. A sad love song.
- Right and Left Grand is my other favorite poly love song, though I don't know if it was intended that way; it's also about dancing and friendship across distance and over time. “I see at a glance that our lives are a dance and the pattern's a promise I'll meet you again.”
- When the Wind Changes, about loss. Still makes me cry.
- Columbia. I wanted to post a link to this on the anniversary of the Columbia's loss back in February, but it wasn't available online at the time. Another one that always makes me cry.
- Outward Bound, more or less to the tune of “Beulah Land”; a joyous paean to space exploration.
If you can only afford one album, I recommend A Dancing World. I like all of them, but that one has more songs than the others and a higher concentration of my favorites.
You can buy individual songs for $1 apiece, or entire albums for $10 apiece, which is a great deal given that each album contains at least 17 songs. (Those are the minimum prices; you're allowed to pay more if you want to.) (You can also buy the physical CDs for $17 each, but one of them is out of print.)
(If you can only buy two of the albums, As Good As Any is a close second for me. It includes several songs derived from a roleplaying game I ran, but one of the things I especially like about Cat's songs is that they're often sparked by something specific but applicable universally. One of the abovelinked songs, for example, is about characters from that game, but there's nothing in the song to indicate that it has anything to do with roleplaying or even with science fiction.)