Wooden Heart

"Wooden Heart" ("Muss i denn" lit. Must I then) is a song best known for its use in the 1960 Elvis Presley film G.I. Blues. The song was a hit single for Presley in the UK Singles Chart, making No. 1 for six weeks there in March and April 1961, but was not released on a single in the United States until November 1964, where it was the B-side to "Blue Christmas". Presley performed the song live during his Dinner Show concert at the Hilton Hotel in Las Vegas in 1975, a recording available on the Elvis Presley live album Dinner At Eight.

A cover version by Joe Dowell made it to number one in the US at the end of August 1961, knocking Bobby Lewis' "Tossin' and Turnin'" off the number-one spot of the Billboard Hot 100 after seven weeks. Dowell's version also spent three weeks at number one on the Easy Listening chart.

"Wooden Heart", created by Fred Wise, Ben Weisman, Kay Twomey and German bandleader Bert Kaempfert, was based on a German folk song by Friedrich Silcher, "Muss i denn", originating from the Rems Valley in Württemberg, southwest Germany. "Wooden Heart" features several lines from the original folk song, written in the German Swabian dialect, as spoken in Württemberg. Marlene Dietrich recorded a version of the song sometime before 1958, pre-dating Presley, in the original German language, which appears as a B-side on a 1959 version of her single "Lili Marlene", released by Philips in association with Columbia Records. The Elvis Presley version was published by Gladys Music, Elvis Presley's publishing company. Bobby Vinton recorded his version in 1975 with those lines translated into Polish.

Wooden Heart (novel)

Wooden Heart is a BBC Books original novel written by Martin Day and based on the long-running science fiction television series Doctor Who. It features the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones.

Synopsis

Martha and the Doctor discover an apparently deserted starship, and soon, a village appears in the middle of the craft. As they try to work out the mystery of the village, and its connection to the ship, they find out that the village has other problems - fog and monsters surround them at every turn, and their children have been going missing.

Plot

The Doctor and Martha arrive on the Castor, an abandoned prison ship floating in space. Whilst exploring they find a fully populated village and forest, whose inhabitants appear to be unaware of the spaceship outside, and whose children are mysteriously disappearing. Later, The Doctor and Martha find a creature from another dimension, who, because of its telepathic powers, was used to remove the evil from prisoners in the Castor. To keep itself sane, it expelled the evil, creating a separate being which killed the crew. The telepathic creature then created the forest and village in an attempt to balance itself with goodness, but, due to low power supplies, it is having to remove small parts of the 'program', such as children, to conserve power. The Doctor offers to pilot the ship closer to a sun to give the creature more power to run the program, and a woman from the village absorbs the evil into her body, before exiling herself, so she can learn to control it. The Doctor and Martha then leave the creature to maintain the forest world.

Listener (band)

Listener is a spoken word rock band that started in 2002 in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The current lineup consists of vocalist and bassist Dan Smith, guitarist Christin Nelson, and drummer Kris Rochelle.

History

Listener originally started as a solo underground hip hop project of vocalist Dan Smith beginning with the commercial release of the album Whispermoon on Mush Records in 2003. He has also contributed to several collaborative albums with the groups Deepspace5 and Labklik, both of which he is a founding member of.

With his second release Ozark Empire in 2005, Smith began his first "Tour of Homes". This consisted almost entirely of traveling from home to home around the United States (the European leg of the tour was titled the "European Tour of Homes") in a grassroots style of touring. The European leg consisted more of performing in standard live music venues as well as houses, coffee shops, art galleries and warehouses. It was also during this period that Smith invited drummer Andrew Gibbens and guitarist Erik Olsen to join him on tour, thus starting the transition away from traditional hip-hop performances toward a live band format. Gibbens and Olsen remained until they departed the band in December 2006. Regardless of using the name Listener for his solo work, Smith decided to continue using the name as the project developed in to a live band.