The Road Goes Ever On And On

The song Bilbo sings after he lets go of the Ring and is about to leave the Shire forever.

The Walking Song

I love the version Billy Boyd sings in the movie, but his version is not a walking song. This one is. In general, all my LOTR songs are less musically advanced than others I've heard, and less pleasing as music you might passively listen to for entertainment, but I feel that they are more like what the actual characters would have sung in the "real" world.

The Drinking Song

From the start, I heard this as a round. What could be more natural for a drinking song? So I recorded an audio file of myself singing it and piped the playback through my stereo so I could accompany myself.

The Bath Song

The song the hobbits sing in the bath when they reach the house at Crickhollow.

The Songs of Tom Bombadil

The melody I used for all of Bombadil's singing was the least satisfactory of the tunes I created, because his "songs" aren't structured in neat stanzas. I only cover two scenes in this video: the first appearance of Bombadil, where you can hear the entire melody and see how it needed to be rearranged at times, and its later use by Frodo upon meeting Goldberry.

There Was An Inn

The song Frodo sings at the Prancing Pony. I love it that Tolkien got the idea to create this earlier version of the well known children's rhyme. It's an example of how Middle Earth isn't just built on a meticulously imagined Past, but is itself an imagined past to our current world.

Tinuviel

Aragorn's translation of part of the Lay of Luthien. This is the first of the Human songs I set to music, and as you'll see, it's quite different from the Hobbit songs or the singing of Bombadil. I tried to develop a distinct musical style for each of the races of Middle Earth, and generally found it easiest to bang out the simple Hobbit songs, harder to do justice to the Numenorean and Dwarven chants, and almost impossible to evoke the Elvish.