If you grow up without any religion, you either avoid all trappings of it like the plague or you absolutely love to explore it. Rocks Off is firmly in the latter camp, and nothing gets us more excited than the culture of Saints in Catholicism. We've written many a letter to Wizards of the Coast suggesting some kind of combat card game utilizing the powers of these holy men and women, but all we ever get is another restraining order for the file.
If there is a single day that you cannot dedicate a feast to some kind of saint, then we haven't been able to find it. Granted, not all the saints are really exciting kind of people. For every one who can restore the dead from dismemberment - Santa Claus, in case you wondered - there's another who just led a quiet, godly life and died in bed.
Of course, the best things about saints is that they have jobs and areas of influence. There's a patron saint of everything, from vague things like lost objects right up to things like the internet (St. Isidore) and Holocaust survivors (St. Maximilian Kolbe). Today is the feast day of a big one, none other than St. Anne, Mary's mother and Jesus's nana.
In honor of her holiness, Rocks Off has put together five songs to honor her various patronages.
St. Anne is the patron saint of carpenters, for obvious reasons, and though we're not fans of the Carpenters, we can think of at least one awesome version of their famous hit "Close to You." If for some reason you haven't seen Mirrormask, the 2005 film collaboration between Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean and the Jim Henson Company, then you are missing out on one of the greatest fantasy films ever made. This scene will either convince you or send you running in the opposite direction.
Yes, we know Bacharach and Hal David actually wrote it, but that isn't going to stop us from plugging this film or making a really lame pun.
Why is Anne the patron saint of equestrians, instead of someone like Joan of Arc who actually had something to do with horses? Nobody has any freakin' idea. Seriously. One theory is that she took on equestrians because Lady Godiva rode naked through St. Anne's Square. Seems an odd thing to connect to the babymama of the Virgin Mother, but who are we to judge?
We've chosen Harvey Danger's "Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo" to celebrate this area of Anne's influence. Surely she would lend her support to a bored office woman whose dream was to competitively ride.