When I Fall in Love

Welcome back to Tea with Liya! To finish 2022, I'm playing a ballad called "When I Fall in Love," composed by Victor Young and Edward Heyman. This one has been around for 70 years now, but you might know it because of the famous version by Nat King Cole. I hope you like it!

Listen to the song here
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This isn't really a Christmas song, so I decided to wait until after Christmas before publishing it. (I also didn't record it until pretty far into December.) However, you might convince yourself it was a Christmas song if you had a statement stuck in your head like, "Everything Rick Astley says is the truth."

If you believe that, I am here to prove you wrong. (And I say that as someone who listens to his songs.)

If you looked at the video for his version, you couldn't miss the fact that it's filled with snow and pine trees. His version was also published at the end of the year, so you might quickly infer that it's a Christmas song. However, if you look at the lyrics, they don't really relate to Christmas, unless you try to make a connection with kissing under mistletoe.

Maybe the wintery filming was just done to catch people's attention and potentially increase record sales. There's a long-standing UK tradition of noting what song sold the most copies on the week of Christmas, and in 1987, this one was part of a fight between record companies to earn the "Christmas number one" title.

I once saw a video of Rick singing this song on live TV. The show host said something like, "Anyone as young as him [21 at the time] who comes on national television, and sings live, has got to be congratulated. [There was a lot of lip-syncing happening on TV in the 80s.] He knows he's good enough to risk it live."

You can tell Rick's not taking that. He just looks down and says, "Pff, I don't know. There were a few shaky notes, y'know..."

Should you believe what he says? Everyone who was watching the broadcast had just heard the performance. Do you think they were focusing their attention on the "couple of shaky notes?"

Musicians are doing this all the time. They know that they shouldn't go around talking about how great they are, so to "get out" of praising themselves, they try to talk about something else instead -- which often becomes all the areas in which they could have done better. Therefore, the conversation gets stopped short, as the listeners only want to talk about the positive, while the performers are dismissing their own talent.

Is this how it should be? Maybe it's better to look at our own playing (or singing) abilities as something to be thankful for, rather than something we need to pretend we don't have in certain situations. After all, we're not going to help anyone by covering up our talents. They aren't just something to keep for ourselves, but rather something we can (and should) share with others.

If we're going to be out here filling teacups, we might as well do our best, and not only that, but be able to know that we did our best when we're done.

Keep filling your teacup with music!
~Liya