"Rue's Lullaby" [arranged and sung by ApatheticOnion]
[cover credit: come morning light by wishfulwednesday]
REVIEW: I fell instantly in love this with this melody. She takes Katniss's description of the song ("it is old, very old I think. Made up long ago in our hills. What my music teacher calls a mountain air") and really stays true to it by creating a Gaelic-like folk melody for it. She also has a pitch perfect voice for the tune, and though her recording is accapella, it's flawless. On top of that, it's delivered in a rich tone that I can easily imagine as Katniss's voice ("that made the birds stop and listen"). If I had one quibble, I wish she'd have slowed it down just slightly (so it can be "one we sing fretful, hungry babies to sleep with"). It has a great propulsion for the melody like it is here, but it lacks the tempo of a lullaby and doesn't allow the emotional component to build to it's full potential. It makes me want to campaign for one of the fan composers to team up with her to create an accompaniment and rerecord it in a slower version, because with some very slight changes in approach, it could easily be the most canonically true Rue's Lullaby we have.
COMPARED TO THE OFFICIAL VERSION: The melody takes on a completely different approach than Burnett's version which stuck to a more simple, anesthetic sounding lullaby. I was very surprised after the soundtrack stayed so true to bluegrass and Appalachia folk sound, none of that felt injected into the song that canonically was written as an old "hill song". Taking on a Gaelic folk ballad bend not only gives it that quality, it makes the tune more melodically complex. The official version's only real win over this version is its lullaby meter/tempo and professional recording quality. Give this girl a couple folk musicians, a slight tempo change, and a recording studio, and she'd have the official version topped in all respects.
All this week, we're highlighting the different fanmade arrangements of Katniss's song to Rue. Have a favorite version of Rue's Lullaby? Submit it to thg-music.