The composer, Maurice Ravel, was born on March 7, 1875 into a musical family in the town of Ciboure, where the River Nivelle meets the Atlantic Ocean in the Basque country. (We are catching up with some missed dates for In The Key Of Pisces…) He was an innovator and a rebel. Rejected by the [...]

I woke up this morning feeling violently happy, which made me think of Icelandic songstress and musical genius, Björk. I wondered if she was born on an eclipse.  So I checked: she was born the day before one in November 1965. If you want to know about the surge of emotions of an eclipse, I [...]

I think we’re beginning to get a feeling for the weaving, watery, complex Piscean sound. The work of Heitor Villa-Lobos (March 5), probably Latin America’s most famous 20th century composer, exemplifies this in many works. Many of his compositions are so woven into the soundtracks of our lives [...]

Thanks to my friend and reader, Sabrina, for pointing out that the late-lamented Italian singer-songwriter Lucio Dalla was born on March 4, 1943. He has a solo Sun in Pisces with other planets extraordinarily evenly spread through his chart. Sun does make a lovely trine to Jupiter in [...]

Mama Africa: Miriam Makeba. Born on March 4, 1932. Makeba, along with her husband Hugh Masakela, was one of the most prominent artistic exiles from South Africa during the apartheid era. Although South Africa revoked her passport, 10 other countries stepped in to offer her citizenship. So she [...]

“I definitely believe in God. How can you look at anything and not be overwhelmed by the miraculousness of it?” said Pisces singer-songwriter and Coldplay frontman, Chris Martin. There you have it. The sound of Coldplay has woven its way into the fabric of the past decade and a half — [...]

This first fortnight of March is composers’ week. Yesterday was Chopin’s birthday; today the “father of Czech music”, Bedrich Smetana, was born in 1824. Smetana was a Czech patriot and one of the generation that rose up against the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the Revolutions of 1848. The [...]

Beauty, mystery, melancholy, passion, melody: let Chopin’s music take you into a wordless place. There is some dispute about his birthday, but I am sure it is today, March 1. Of course, his work endures for all time and all cultures — Neptune conjunct Saturn. His music makes private emotion [...]

This extraordinary month promises to bring changes for many of us. To find out how the super-strong wave of energy breaking on our shores affects you, click here. Please take a moment also to look at the eclipses and aspects page for more information.

Johnny Cash, Johnny Cash, Johnny Cash, Johnny Cash. Pisces Rising, Pisces Sun-Mercury-Mars opposite Neptune in Virgo. It was all about the music. The drink nearly killed him. Love saved him. He hurt. Oh and that black shirt? Moon in Scorpio — so deep and yet so simple. Born February 26, [...]

So far, we’ve been looking at a musician (or two) for the correct day of the Pisces, but today we’ll digress a little. Yesterday’s musician, George Harrison, is credited with popularising Indian music in the West. One of his most beautiful compositions My Sweet Lord, is a [...]

Today’s musician: George Harrison, the most sensitive Beatle, the one who found God and made a garden — for more on his astrology, click here. He was born either on February 24 or 25, give or take half an hour. But the 24th gives him a Rising Moon. Harrison’s only planet in [...]

Imagine a time when the Thames was the busiest highway in London, and the king’s barge a most glorious water-borne rolls-royce of golden curlicues. What could be a lovelier accompaniment to a balmy summer evening bobbing along the river than music wafting across the water. King George I [...]

We are already into the energy of the eclipse on March 9. As soon as the Sun moved into Pisces, you may have felt it in your “waters”. Something big is giving way. It may feel like ice breaking under your feet as you crunch over a puddle that could turn out to be a well, or […]

English singer-songwriter James Blunt must have been eating Neptune crackers when he made this unbelievably Piscean video for his huge hit You’re Beautiful. He’s soaking wet for most of the performance, his shoes seem to play a central role and it ends with a dip in the ocean. He [...]

Nina Simone — singer, composer and activist — was born on February 21, 1933 in North Carolina. She has Moon in Capricorn — a singer’s placement (read more on this here), Sun, North Node, Mercury and the Part of Fortune in Pisces in the first house of self and cusp of [...]

Kurt Cobain, lead singer and songwriter for the group Nirvana, probably doesn’t need much introduction. He died at 27 from a heroin overdose after making some of the most angst ridden, crazy, intense music of the late 20th century. How many Pisces things in that paragraph? Nirvana, crazy [...]

Pisces, ruled as it is by Neptune, the planet of pure music, is a sign stuffed full of singers, composers, songwriters and probably maraca players and backing singers too. Starting today, I’ll try and find a Pisces for each day of this sign this year and see if we can hear a silvery [...]

Here we are at the dawn of the Year of the Fire Monkey and already the results of the New Hampshire Primary in the United States are telling us that this could well be the year of maverick. In Chinese astrology, the Monkey is just what you’d expect — clever, quick, a trickster, a [...]

February looks a lot nicer than January — potentially it’s quite an exciting month though. And the square between Uranus and Pluto is always with us, so it’s not going to be stress-free. On the other hand, it does look like a good month for a holiday for many signs. Some days [...]