Music to ride by (or avoid)

["odd farm" <jsalas@tampabay.rr.com>]

I can't stand to do anything without music. I have radio's and CD's everywhere. I love to make my own tapes to ride to. I have hip hop dancing music for galloping and songs to sing along with when it is time to slow down.

 

The number one song in the US right now is Alicia Keys "I keep on Falling". If that is not a riding title, I don't know what is. Then when you listen to the song, you just know she is talking about a relationship with her endurance horse. Actually, it sounds like something my trainer Wendy would have wrote. But those are other funny stories!

 

The song starts off with "I keep on falling in and out of love with you. Sometimes I love you, sometimes you make me blue". You know you love your horse to death after a great ride, but if there was one spook involved, you are feeling blue alright. Black and blue. Or maybe blue in the face because you have just had the wind knocked out of you and can't breath.

 

Then she sings, "Sometimes I feel good, sometimes I feel used. Loving you darling makes me so confused". We feel so good when we buy the best hay and feed, the prettiest saddles and comfy pads. Then when we go to feed them they turn up their noses or dump it in the poop.  Or they will roll on that really expensive saddle as if to say "Yuck, this thing is ugly." So then we look our empty check book, empty cupboards and naked kids with no shoes and feel really used and  confused.

 

In the next verse she asks "How do you give me so much pleasure and cause me so much pain? Just when I think I've taken more than would a fool, I start falling back in love with you." Haven't you ever wondered why after your lover boy has stepped on your foot and you spent the day at the emergency room you still go out and give him carrots? Or while your beauty girl is munching the beauty hay and your cleaning her stall in between bouts of passing out from starvation, every time you come to you say "Yeah, your a beauty girl and momma loves you." What are we, sick?!! Is this a love/hate relationship, or what? We should all be in therapy but who can afford it?

 

There are many other endurance riding songs like "Haven't Got Time For The Pain", "I'm a Survivor", which are self explanatory. Then there is one "Say My Name" which I think was really written by a horse that won't slow down. As in say my real name and stop calling me all those OTHER names! (my name is not WHOA, DAMN IT!) Space Cowboy is a funny song because it says "up in outer space there's no gravity to fall." So for those of us who get tossed, we are not going high enough to avoid the gravity pull. I like Madonna's song "Frozen" She says "You only see what your eyes want to see" and then "Your Frozen". If that don't describe a spook big time! I think the song that describes us endurance riders the best is "A Man of Constant Sorrow".

 

Endurance riding. It is music to my ears. Lisa Salas, The Odd fArm