Better Together - Top Songs and Lyrics for Friendships

The way I see it, friendship is one of the most important things in the world; possibly the most important!  Strong social support networks are vital for our psychological wellbeing, as is being thankful for the positive things we have.  I cherish my friends dearly and have put together a collection of songs and lyrics that reflect this.  For some people these will apply nicely to romantic relationships too, but since I don’t have one of those at the moment they’re limited to my friendships! 

Time After Time

The original of course was by Cyndi Lauper, but check out Quietdrive’s version for something a bit different.  “If you’re lost you can look and you will find me time after time”.

 

Tethered

Elliot Minor was my favourite band in their day, and this is definitely one of my favourite songs of theirs.  “If you’re walking through the cold, you should have to walk alone you know; it’s dark but not so dark when we’re together”.

Today Won’t Come Again

A beautiful rendition of a beautiful song performed by Jonathan Ansell and Hayley Westenra at the Festival of Remembrance.

Frank D. Fixer

A lovely, chilled song by Mr Jason Mraz.  “Well I wish I was a fixer; I would fix you up inside”.

 
Better Together

“It’s always better when we’re together” – simple!

 

Talk

This song is made up of some lovely lyrics about supporting someone through hard times. 

Sharks

By the lovely Philippa Hanna.  “I’d move the earth to take away the pain you’re going through; I would even die for you”.

  

Fall and I Will Catch You

By Kristian Leontiou.  Beautiful voice, beautiful lyrics and beautiful instrumentals.

Yellow

A Coldplay classic!  “For you I’d bleed myself dry”.

Millionaires

A song all about fun times and a lyric that for me epitomises the value of friendship:  “I swear you may think you’re rich; could have a million euro but you can’t buy this”.    

We Are Amazing

Hello readers!  Apologies for my long silence – most of my time and energy have been taken up with work and cycle training recently – but there is no excuse for not writing and I will endeavour to post a bit more regularly in the future (people tell me one of the best ways to get good blog readership is to post regularly, so I hope I still have some despite my atrocious irregularity!!).

I should take a leaf from his book and blog more often!

I’d like to clarify that the fact I haven’t published anything on here in a while doesn’t mean I’ve lost my enthusiasm for the things I write about.  I suppose I’ve had less energy to think and write about these things because work has been tough going, but right now I’m sort of feeling a new lease of life and hoping it lasts!

Recently I’ve met and had discussions with a fair few people who share my views on mental health, body image, etc.  The feeling I get is there are a lot of us, which makes it even more frustrating that things aren’t changing more quickly.  Anyway, my favourite encounter happened a few weeks ago when I discovered a new musical hero, who by fortunate coincidence was the support act at a gig I went to.  She goes by the name Philippa Hanna, and one of her songs in particular struck a chord with me (pin not intended!!).  Well, more to the point, the sentiment behind the song struck a chord (this is one thing I really like about this girl - she is a proper singer-songwriter and gave a little synopsis of each song before performing it - nice touch!). 

Philippa talked of how in the past she would do things like go on crazy diets to try and conform to the image of ‘beauty’ prescribed by the media.  Sometimes she thought that she couldn’t get a record deal because physically she wasn’t beautiful enough.  Then, she tells us, she realised it wasn’t necessary to do this, that she was beautiful the way she was, that each one of us should be happy with ourselves because “no one else can be you”.  She then wrote a lovely song called I Am Amazing, which illustrates her change of heart and encourage others to challenge negative thoughts about themselves.  I don’t feel I’ve done this justice as I remember Philippa putting it a lot more nicely and eloquently than I have!  But the point is that there are just too many people striving for unrealistic and impossible ideals of ‘beauty’ because it is drummed into is culturally that this is what we should do.  We need to break free from this viscous circle of media distortion and unhealthy behaviour. 

Let's stop striving for unrealistic ideals of physical beauty

Mental illness is on the up, particularly amongst young people, and I feel that this problem is a big contributing factor to this.  Probably my favourite lyric from the song is Not gonna listen to the voices of my enemies today.  I see the harmful ideals being imposed on people by today’s Western culture almost as an enemy that needs to be challenged, and re-shaped into a healthier form.  This is one of several big cultural changes that I strongly feel need to take place, and I’m determined to contribute to making this happen.

After I saw Philippa Hanna perform, I was fortunate enough to have a brief but interesting conversation with her and told her how pleased I was to hear her speaking the way she had about body image and the media.  She mentioned to me that there have been attempts in the past to pass a law the required all airbrushed images to be labelled as such.  Sadly such a law has not been passed.  Personally I think this would be a very positive step towards reducing the current problem whereby such a great number of young people are taking unhealthy steps towards unobtainable ideals in appearance.  Perhaps my next step will be to start a petition to make this happen… Who’s with me?!

My Heart Is Open And The Sky's On Fire...

My heart is open and the sky’s on fire…  “What kind of blog title is that?!” I hear you ask!  Allow me to explain…  It’s one of my favourite lyrics, indeed from one of my favourite songs, ever.  It’s a song called Stars & Lovers from Matt Cardle’s debut album, Letters (a truly underrated and amazing singer-songwriter; please do give the album a listen if you haven’t already), which does a pretty good job of depicting how I feel about life right now.  Here’s how some of it goes:

“…If I could have one superpower

It would be to make you understand

(Chorus):

My heart is open and the sky’s on fire

I hear the drum and I hear the choir

The universe it was made for us and

O-oh, the stars and the lovers

A universe made for us and

O-oh, the stars and the lovers

Don’t let go, hold onto each other”

I love the first line of the chorus because sometimes I feel like I have so much feeling about life, the world and the people in it that I literally don’t know what to do with it and think I might implode!  There are just so many things to be thankful for, and I think people in general perhaps don’t appreciate them enough. 

Firstly, music (“I hear the drum and I hear the choir”).  Music is one of the most important things in my life and it has an amazing ability to make me really feel something, whether it be a positive emotion or a painful one.  But how amazing that a few simple sounds put together can influence human emotion so much.  Even more amazing is the fact that sometimes music can explain how I’m feeling better than I can!  In fact that’s why I’ve chosen to base this post around a song, because I didn’t even realise these were things I felt about life until I really listened to these lyrics and let them take shape in a way that’s meaningful to me.  Anyway, that’s enough about music, because I’m pretty sure I could write  whole post about this sort of thing and this one is already very much at risk of becoming ridiculously long-winded.

Secondly, there are so many beautiful places and so many incredible things to see and do in the world.  Admittedly I’m fortunate enough to live in a lovely area and have lots of stunning places right at my fingertips, but there are always things to appreciate; it’s just a case of taking the time to notice them.  These pictures were all taken at different places close to where I live within the last few weeks.  I hope you’ll agree that it’s impossible not to think the world is amazing when you get to see views like that!  “The universe it was made for us”.  Yes, it’s almost as though the universe was specifically designed to be full of things for us as people to enjoy!  So go on, go out and enjoy them… ;)

 

“Don’t let go, hold onto each other”.  Finally, the most important thing of all: people.  I feel so fortunate to have lots of people in my life who I enjoy spending time with, and think almost everyone can think of at least one person they want to hold onto and never let go of.  Personally, I can think of a few, whether it be family or friends.  Sadly we never know what’s round the corner so I have such an overwhelming desire to hold onto people and appreciate every moment I get to laugh with or talk with or just generally spend time doing nothing in particular with a friend or family member! 

So why all this positivity and overwhelming joy and passion for life?!  To be perfectly honest, I don’t really know.  I mean, I’m only human, and I definitely have my down times like anyone else.  I think it’s partially relief: as those who know me well will know, I had a difficult year last year and spent a huge amount of time feeling really, really down.  Now I’ve managed to get over those feelings and feel such a massive sense of relief that I’m not feeling like that anymore!  And although I didn’t enjoy myself much last year, the root of my feeling bad has now become a relief in itself, plus some really good things happened to me last year – I got my degree, which I’m pretty pleased about, and met a couple of really amazing people who have become good friends of mine.  So I guess a combination of that, having some perspective on life and taking the time to appreciate everything is really what makes me feel so good.  Oh, and lots of exercise!

“If I could have one superpower, it would be to make you understand…”

So what am I hoping to achieve from this blog post?  (If you’ve got far enough through this to find out then a MASSIVE thank you for reading all my ramblings!)  Well, the purpose of this wasn’t to just go on about how great I feel, but hopefully to instil some sort of inspiration in my readers.  Particularly if you’re having a tough time at the moment for whatever reason, I hope this will make you realise that things will get so much better.  I feel like a completely different person now to who I felt I was last year, and I’m confident that this can be the case for anyone else who’s having a hard time!  Someone said to me last year “at least if you’re having a bad time now you know there are better times to look forward to”, and she was so right.  I may not be in exactly the position I want to be in in life but I’m just taking the positives wherever I can and hoping that I’ve persuaded you, whatever’s going on in your life right now, to do the same :)