A Mixtape for Lao New Year, Plus Karaoke Videos
ສະບາຍດີປີໃຫມ່ and Happy Lao New Year! It's me, Catzie, Creative Director for Laos In The House, here to bless you with a mixtape "Fawn Lum Guhn" and help get your celebrations in order. Ok so, technically it's not a mixtape because there's no "tape" aaaaand I'm also not a real DJ (this will become obvious in my transitions). Anyway, I made a music mix and I'm sharing it as my good deed for year 2560. Listen to it and download it here.
The title means "Dance Lum Together", and my inspiration for this mix came from our very first #BLESSED Pop-up Dinner last year, where I made a Youtube playlist that set the soundtrack backdrop, because karaoke videos were what I often saw playing in the Lao homes I visited. This music mix grew out of that, so I thought I'd bring it full circle by providing the videos that go with each track.
I'd like to first get this out the way and say: This is not meant to be an ultimate playlist. I am no way claiming these are the must-have, must-learn, must-know songs for a proper LNY celebration. What these 19 songs represent are simply my favorites when getting in the mood for "Lao things". In my role as CD for LITH, I've listened to and used Lao songs for various occasions, including our Laos In The House recap videos. As MC and Program Coordinator for Legacies of War's Fashion For Philanthropy Fundraiser (two years in a row, baby!), I've had the lucky job of setting up the dancefloor for lumvong. This mixtape was a natural next step. Heck, maybe next year I'll be in a band. Ehhh... maybe not.
For song titles, I used both their official Lao/Thai names and what I think is the best English transliteration for consistency. Because there aren't equivalent letter/character sounds between the two languages, there's spelling variations in the English titles - for example I use "lum" whereas the accompanying Youtube video might spell it "lam", but in Lao it's always ລຳ. As mentioned before, I have a personal emotion attached to each song, so a story will accompany my descriptions for them.
Before we get started, I just wanna shoutout my friend Chantala Khommanivanh for providing the #FawnLumGuhn cover illustration. As a visual and musical artist himself (he's also releasing an album with his group Maintenance Crew, later this month) Chantala was the perfect person for this project. Plus he's pretty damn talented. We collaborated on ideas and ending up with this masterpiece - see if you can spot the silhouette of a certain U.S. President doing lumvong (Hint: he went to Laos last year).