Happy music

[kaberett]

It's recently been brought to my attention that most of the music I listen to is... well, put it this way: I ended up trying to defend the lyrics "None of this is going anywhere/and pretty soon no-one left alive will really care/.../We're definitely going to hell" as cheerful.

So. Suggestions, please, bearing in mind that I'm crap at getting involved with music without lyrics?

For context, stuff I listen to regularly, in no particular order:

• Beatles
  
• Indelicates
  
• Ani DiFranco
  
• Queen
  
• Frank Turner
  
• Wise Guys
  
• Leonard Cohen
  
• Morning People
  
• Barenaked Ladies
  
• Eurythmics
  
• Manic Street Preachers
  
• Pink Floyd

I am not terribly broadly listened, okay. (Optional items on the wishlist: minority-male groups, cellos, feminism.)

Comments

[hairyears]

Try Zoe Keating, cellist. Recommended: Into the Trees.

[askygoneonfire]

Was coming in hard to rec the Manics but look! They are there already!

In related music, I would recommend The Joy Formidable (welsh! girl! guitars!), The Boy Who Trapped the Sun (look for Home EP as I think it's better than the album. Bonus points for lyrics which include "You could never be an actress/I know the knife's under the mattress"), and Yeasayer (All Hour Cymbals is a great album)

[sorrillia]

Since I mostly listen to Western classical music and filk, and the former probably doesn't qualify, I'll try to suggest some of the latter. Not that I really listen to music much at all, and a lot of what I listen to is depressing, too.

But a good deal of Sassafrass's <http://www.sassafrassmusic.com/> music is cheerful or at least amusing. They're largely a capella, so no cellos, but the group is approximately all-female. (I think they may have a male vocalist on one or two of their songs, but almost everything is all women, even things like a duet for Loki and Odin.

I think at least some of Heather Alexander and Alexander Adams' songs are happy, too, though I'm less familiar with his work. <http://www.heatherlands.com/index.php?section=1> (They're the same person, but he still uses his pre-transition name for the songs he wrote before transitioning.)

[crazyscot]

Dunno whether this qualifies, being strictly lyric-free, but I got a right bee in my bonnet about the Royal Philharmonic's covers of various recent rock and pop tracks the other month; still get an occasional (v pleasant!) foot-tapping earworm of their cover of U2's Beautiful Day. Their compilations are Symphonic Rock, The Alternative Classical Collection and they also have a number of discs entitled Plays The Music Of....

[rmc28]

Ok, they're a couple of white men, and they're not always very cheerful, but if you like lyrics, I really like Show of Hands. I could lend you lots and lots of stuff by them, and at gigs they explicitly give permission for people to copy & share their songs.

Also I like Scottish songwriter Karine Polwart (who I saw at Cambridge folk festival I think in 2005) and Jenna, whose album was produced by Steve Knightley of Show of Hands.