The human voice is one of the genuine sources of joy and wonder. It contains so many clues to how we’re feeling, how we experience the world, And when we sing the breath comes forth like a river, connecting our bodies to our heads, giving feeling a tangible expression that resonates with those around us whose voices are also lifted in song.

Singing Let it Be together can be almost a religious experience 🙂

The Festival of Songs is an opportunity to really go deep into what it is to sing together, to be part of something greater than ourselves, to connect to feelings that are perhaps out of reach of the rational mind but which emerge when we let the songs carry us away.

 In our modern, atomised world, we’re so so hungry for collective experiences, for community feeling. But we don’t want to join a cult. We just want to have all those good brain chemicals that come from being with one another, heart to heart. Singing together is a way of doing this, chanting easy-to-learn songs that are designed to be catchy as hell and at the same time be channels for how we’re feeling.

The whole really is more than the sum of its parts.

The songs themselves may come from India, songs of devotion to Indian gods and goddesses who represent archetypes in the human psyche; there will also be songs from Africa and the Middle East whose meanings may be unclear to us but which still somehow connect within; there will be more hippie songs, preaching the traditional message of peace and love; there will be other singalong numbers of our own creation to get us dancing, screaming and laughing.

The point is rarely the words themselves but rather what we feel when we sing them.