One of my favorite musical themes of all time, Ennio Morricone's masterful The Ecstasy of Gold from his soundtrack for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

My favorite version is the one performed by Yo Yo Ma on his Yo Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone album.

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This article has me more excited than usual about Rush's new studio release due in early 2007. This extended quote from drummer and lyricist Neil Peart especially piqued my interest:

"You try to put your own way of seeing the world into some kind of congruence with other peoples, and that's difficult for me... I mean, I see the world in what I think to be a perfectly obvious and rational way, but when you go out into it and see the way other people think and behave, and express themselves on church signs, you realize, 'Well, I'm not really part of this club....'"

"I looked for the good side of faith.... To me it ought to be your armor, something to protect you and something to console you in dark times. But it's more often being turned into a sword, and that's one big theme I'm messing with."

What particularly interests me about this is that he has already touched on the "faith as sword" theme in the song Peaceable Kingdom from Vapor Trails (lyrics and some commentary here), which was a pretty obvious condemnation of jihadist Islam.

Peart is familiar with the church signs he mentions based on his wide-ranging motorcycle tours of North America (chronicled here and here -- the latter one notably recounting his painful journey through the continent to deal with the grief of losing his wife and daughter within a year of each other.)

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