A new tra la la song for every day in January!  And today, UK readers of this blog can actually grab a mixed case with a couple bottles fo Trah Lah Lah wine at an incredibly discounted price.

Thursday, I posted the wildly popular Ding Dong Song by Gunther and the Sunshine Girls.  But the truth is that song’s famous chorus “Ooh, you touch my tra la la/ ahh my ding ding dong” comes from another song!

Here is the original Tra la la song by the Dutch band Phil & Company.

 

Have I blown your mind?! So boys can sing Tra la la like Gunther and girls can sing tra la la like Phil.  Ding dang dong.

Stay tuned for more exciting trah lah lah music history. ;D

Every day in January promises another Tra la la song to sing when you drink a bit of our Trah Lah Lah wine. But yesterday’s ding dong song was so over the top ridiculous, I feel like we should get back to something more serious.

Today’s song is from Bizet’s opera Carmen. The first bit is dancing and instrumental, but the Tra la la’s come in around the 2:00 mark. And once they start, they don’t stop.

That’s Agnes Baltsa singing “Les tringles des sistres tintaient”. Since nobody knows what the heck a sistres is or what it would sound like when it taintaients, it’s often called the “Gypsy Song”. A sistre is a type of percussive instrument like a tambourine that has sort of small metal rods that will clink together. Tintaient is a form of past tense for light ringing/jingling (like when you ring a bell without letting the clapper hit the side of the bell).

The more famous performance of this song is probably Maria Callas, but then you don’t get to see video of them dancing around tensely to the instrumental. I have to make choices!

Anyway, if you’re too serious to ask people to touch your tra la la, your ding ding dong, then you can sing some operatic Tra la la’s from Carmen instead.

We’re posting lots of songs about tra la la, and encouraging you to sing them after drinking a bit of Trah Lah Lah wine. While today’s song is embarrassingly cheesy, I’d be remiss to ignore it.

I vaguely remember the first time I saw this music video. I believe it was in college, before YouTube. So you had to find a quicktime video or download it on kazaa. 2004 was so recent, how can I be so nostalgic already?

Well, when you see the glint in Gunther’s eye, you understand the true meaning of nostalgia. Enjoy this absurdly over the top Eurodance classic “Ding Dong Song” by Gunther and the Sunshine Girls.

And now you know why I snicker every time somebody asks to taste my Trah Lah Lah. However I should take a moment to deny rumors that we’re working on a cuvée Ding Ding Dong.

Alright. it’s January 2012. I’m full of ideas and energy.  I just finished up the Trah Lah Lah 2010 blend (it’s awesome) and I want to celebrate that.  So I’m going to post songs with a lyric like Trah Lah Lah or Tra la la or Tra Lee Lah or whatever until I run out of songs.  Feel free to contribute your own favorites by email or in the comment section.

Here is the first TRAH LAH LAH January post!

Gene Kelly and Oscar Levant perform Tra La La in the film adaptation of An American in Paris

How much Trah Lah Lah do you have to drink before you start tap dancing?

 

For all the O’CD O’Vineyards-fans, I’m posting some pictures of a cork project I have in the works.

After seeing somebody make a beautiful portrait out of corks, I started tinkering with the idea of doing small framed panoramas of the Cité de Carcassonne with O’Vineyards corks.

Here’s the original video that I saw where somebody makes a portrait out of wine corks:

The first step seemed to be to collect and organize the corks. I decided to sort them by color in a box. Well, they’re all red-hued, so it might be more accurate to say that I organized them by level of saturation. Anyway, the box looked pretty cool when I was done classifying them all.

This is 120 corks which turned out to be way too few to make a meaningful image.  I struggled for about an hour to make something aesthetically pleasing with about twice this number of corks.  It was just not happening.  I did find an alternative though so we do have a pretty new project after I take some nice photos.

But even if this turned out to be something of a waste of time, the process of sorting the corks was fun.  And I figured somebody would appreciate the first step of this project on its own obsessive compulsive merits.

🙂