If Joan Armatrading was born to do something, it is this song: Warm Love…bathe in this song after a rough day!

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=iArIn5uGNQ4

Robert Palmer with a great version of Mercy Mercy Me/I Want You…RIP

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=RMT-oiiY7DE

A beautiful song by Marta Sebestyen: Szerelem szerelem…used in the soundtrack to The English Patient..lovely voice..click on “more info” for lyrics in English and original Hungarian.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=9WYVr-qdAXU

Want to forget all your worries?

Let this wash over you…Baïlèro from Chants D’Auvergne by Joseph Canteloube…sublime song sung in the French dialect of Occitan (related to Catalan) from the South of France.

Canteloube believed that “peasant songs often rise to the level of purest art in terms of feeling and expression, if not in form”

(“les chants paysans s’élèvent bien souvent au niveau de l’art le plus pur, par le sentiment et l’expression, sinon par la forme”)

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=39VtPtm9m18

The meadows (with words!) in the video above can be a bit too twee for some, so try a live version by Anne Sofie Von Otter…

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=AmNmFVvRHp8&feature=related

Current favourite from Duffy off her Rockferry album

Stepping stone…what a voice

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=6mTbSFMAKYw

A favourite from Donald Fagen

Great lyrics!: “90 minutes from New York to Paris – More leisure for artists everywhere!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX5V53Trngo

A great singer who made “real” music. Her classical arrangement on the piano changed this song into something else and when she sings “I wish I’d never lived this long!” really breaks your heart and at the same time leaves it soaring…it’s worth 10 mins of your life!

Relatively unknown performance by Nina Simone, but an absolute classic…worth listening to the preamble as the words really start to move her..often just whispering – at one point the audience sing back softly..ominous driving piano arrangement is moving..this is raw emotion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbXYm7PLkew

A haunting version of Somewhere over the Rainbow by the big man (in every sense of the word..but the voice of an angel)…Israel Kamakawiwo Ole…..final sequence is of his ashes scattered into the Pacific http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brRsRTTp1Pw