Who am I?

I’m not a professional musician, but languages and guitar playing are two of my longest-standing passions. Over the course of my life, I’ve studied (to varying extents) a fair amount of languages, including: Russian, Old Church Slavonic, French, German, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Hindi, Albanian, Georgian, Chechen, Macedonian, and Bulgarian. Over the course of this, I’ve come to deeply love the poetry and folk traditions of these countries, and have decided to see what would happen if I filtered these traditions through a very different musical sensibility.

What are these songs?

There are basically two sources for the songs you can find here. Some songs are derived from poetry that I’ve put my own music to, while other songs are adaptations of folk songs. I’ve included translations with all the songs. I can’t say that I’ve taken any particular approach to translation per se – they’re not entirely literal, nor are they artistic adaptations of the original. I guess I’ve tried to stay as literal as I can while still being readable? Anyway, I’d appreciate comments.