Monthly Archives: December 2016

Longest of Nights

Original Music, Original Video
Here’s a song I wrote for the Winter Solstice, peace, and perseverance.

This started out as a homework assignment from the Burlington Writers Workshop‘s Songwriting Workshop (for December 8, 2016), a wonderful and welcoming group of songwriters meeting every month and led by Vermont multi-talented multi-instrument songwriter Seth Cronin*. We try to have a (non-mandatory) songwriting prompt, and for this month it was:

Prompt for December: Holiday/Seasonal Song – contribute your own musings to the long tradition of holiday and winter seasonal songs. Feel free to be celebratory or cynical, whatever inspires you most during these cold winter months.

I follow the prompt when I can, so I set out to make a secular-humanist Winter Solstice song***. As it turned out, I’d recently broken a string on my guitar and was about to bring the whole thing in for an adjustment (plug: at Advance Music), so it was either do it on keyboard…or maybe just with a hand drum…****

Thanks for taking the time to hear my exhortation for being strong together through the darkest time of the year. May our new year bring peace. Hand in hand we stand, awake and alive.

Longest of Nights

Longest of nights
Glittering lights
Winter in the home and hemisphere
Has arrived

Tilted away
Still here we stay
In the only orbit
That we obey

And when the hard times turn up
We won’t be afraid
A new year’s revolution
Shows the only way
We get to the green time

Longest of nights
Glittering lights
Hand in hand we stand
Awake and alive

And when the hard times turn up
We won’t be afraid
A new year’s revolution
Shows the only way
We get to the green time

Longest of nights
Glittering lights
Hand in hand we stand
Awake and alive

Hand in hand we stand
Awake and alive

© Copyright Nate Orshan

* Who, I just discovered, was recently co-awarded a patent for a system for reserving parking spaces. OK Seth…where’s our song about that?**

** …So maybe he was a little busy getting married this year. Congratulations, Natalie and Seth!

*** Because that’s what I am.

**** And tried lighting the performance with candles for that “we’re just a-sittin’ out here by the campfire” feel. Hopefully that didn’t turn a would-be nice song too creepy-looking…

***** Thanks to the Burlington Writers Workshop for being here for writers, for Seth Cronin, now leading the Songwriter’s Workshop for well over a year (and for being awesome), and for the rest of my fellow songwriters, especially Hannah Hausman, Jim D, Josie, and Candelin Wahl, who were there when I debuted the song, sang along (!), and encouraged me to record it. It’s an honor to grow as a songwriter along with you.