Fiddle Me This!

Chopsticken - Barrage (mp3)

Life ain’t nothin’ but a funny funny riddle.

This week, my fine wife and I took our children to a special performance at another private school in town. The school played host to the musical “fiddle-fest” known as Barrage.

You take some Stomp!, you add a little Riverdance, and you center it around some kick-ass violin-playing, preferably by disarmingly charming young adults who can sway some mean hips, and you’ve got a totally entertaining spectacle that dares to suggest that fiddle-playing is neither stiff nor nerdy.

Granted, what cannot be removed from any musical spectacle where the description includes “Riverdance” is what we like to call Velveeta, as in highly-processed cheese product. The cheese factor with Barrage is high, and if you don’t like cheese on your musical burger, then you were bound to be a little put off by their schtick.

But children love cheese. Teenagers, in the right setting and mood, love cheese. And adults who don’t cotton to Beethoven or Puccini can handle a little cheese if it lets them enjoy some fiddlin’.

Barrage was born in 1995 and has gone through several member changes, much like Menudo or other groups where the performance is more central than the performers. (I just like writing the word “Menudo.”) Without doubt, energy, sensuality, and flair are all essential concepts to their performance.

The act centered around four hip and happenin’ violinists, two of each gender, all of them phenomenally talented at pickin’ the fiddle and playin’ it hot. The two guys were each charming in their own ways. Justin from Arizona had this kind of Justin Timberlakey feel to him, curly hair and big smiles and imminently comfortable with himself on stage. Mark was the bigger and slightly clunkier stage presence (probably because he was the newest member of the troupe) who could play bagpipe! Both seemed very comfortable connecting to the audience, although Mark’s approach felt like the guy you’d rather have a beer with. You grab a beer with Justin, and he’s too busy scamming on the girls or the guys (whichever way he leans) to pay you much attention.

The girls were a mixed bag. Annette was from Germany and lacked a bit of stage polish. Her biggest handicap, however, was having to perform anywhere near the presence of Christine.

Christine is the kind of presence around which you build an entire show.

Alec Baldwin, in Glengarry Glen Ross, says ABC means Always Be Closing. If real estate is about closing a deal, then stage performance is about opening. Create desire, or create connection. Put yourself out there in some way that makes as many viewers as possible connect you to something they need or want. Seem accessible.

The best stage presences open themselves to the audience and force the audience to take account of them. Wish you were me, or wish you were with me, or believe I’m that friend you never had.

Christine is a highly trained dancer with a focused background in ballet, according to their web site. Her body was its own instrument, and she wielded it with incredible skill. Every movement had purpose, and every position had reason. Everyone else moved a little stiffly. And why shouldn't they? They’re violinists, not trained dancers. That they were pretty damn good at all was pretty damn impressive. The others moved from Point A to Point B; Christine flowed.

She made eye contact with dozens of audience members, as if she was trying to communicate telepathically with us. She didn’t look as often at the guys, probably because they were all drooling, which probably gets annoying after a few hundred times.

But when she did deign to look at the men, her eyes said, “Jenkies, I know you’re drooling, and gosh I’m awful sorry I’m doing this to you, but gee willikers you have no idea the kind of damage I could do to you in 20 minutes.”

My daughters were also awestruck and waited in line for autographs mostly because they wanted Christine’s. On the way home they said more than once, “She looked at us!” If you can make the moms think you’re inviting them for coffee, the dads convinced you’re making goo-goo eyes, and the daughters think you’re the coolest aunt they never had, all done merely with the use of your eyes while you’re shaking your hips and playing some seriously nasty violin chords, then you are an exquisite stage performer.

Bigger than any performer, however, was the joy of watching almost 100 students from grades 6-12 on stage, performing to a captive audience, having enjoyed a lengthy afternoon workshop with some really cool and talented guys and gals. The look on those faces as they walked back off the stage, having participated significantly in the show’s second act, was... well, a barrage of glee. The song "Chopsticken," composed by one of the group's founders, is what they all played together.

The Cult of Emmylou

Emmylou Harris--"Long May You Run (live)" (mp3)
Emmylou Harris, with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings--"Green Pastures (live)" (mp3)

Women don't get it, I don't think. My wife certainly doesn't. She thinks that I live in a state of perpetual heat, a stallion wanting to frolic in the pastures and lie down in the grasses with Emmylou Harris. She thinks that everytime I hear Emmylou Harris' voice it is a trigger for lust.

She is wrong.

While I wouldn't deny that Emmylou Harris is an attractive older woman, it isn't about that.

But she is onto something, my wife, and it may be something far more threatening to a fellow female than her stallion's attraction to another mare.

Most men I know belong to the cult of Emmylou. I do. Don't you?

And yes, "cult" implies worship, and worship is involved. Now, I don't necessarily want to get all Little Mermaid here, but what we worship is her voice. We worship that purity of tone, that bit of country syrup, that fragile, about-to-crack quality that she has developed in her later years. As much as anything, we may worship the way her voice harmonizes with other voices, especially male voices, so perfectly.

After all, if I were so head-over-heels for Emmylou, I'd have everything she ever recorded, wouldn't I? I don't. I've got like 4 CDs. Well, five, if you count that live one, and six, if you add in her Christmas album. She's released 27 studio or live albums. Okay, I might have seven, now that I think of it. And that duet album with Linda Rondstadt.

But really, my E.H. collection pales in comparison to the number of other people's CDs that I have that she sings on--Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Bright Eyes, Elvis Costello, Ryan Adams, Gram Parsons, Guy Clark, Steve Earle, the Vigilantes of Love, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, The Seldom Scene, Buddy and Julie Miller, O, Brother, Where Art Thou?, and Mark Knopfler, among many others.

So here's the problem. Cult? Check. Worship? Check. And then I remind myself that we humans tend to worship what we think is greater than we are. Uh-oh. I read a review about ten years ago that described her as having "the voice of an angel." I agree. Hmmm. That is a problem. Let's see, our women already know that we think that Emmylou Harris is attractive, at least, and now, on top of that, we have deified her voice. So, in effect, we are saying that this woman, or at least her voice, because it's really about the voice, you know, can sound like a heavenly creature, something no mere mortal woman could hope to achieve?

Or maybe it's because there isn't really a counterpart. I mean, who is the male version of Emmylou Harris? The best I could come up with was Eddie Vedder, simply because, at least for awhile, he showed up all over the place, singing with everyone from Neil Young and Pete Townshend to Neil Finn. Maybe it's Phil Collins.

Because I mean, if you start playing music randomly in the rock, folk, and country genres, you're going to hear Emmylou's voice. In fact, you're going to hear it a lot.

And that brings to light the other issue: it's difficult, if not impossible, to get tired of Emmylou Harris' voice. It's like cowbell. You want more. I've only heard her ruin a song once, singing backup on a live version of Steve Earle performing "Christmastime in Washington," where her voice didn't really fit.

There used to be a BASF slogan that they'd use on NPR: "We don't make the products you use; we make the products you use better." That is Emmylou Harris' voice.

You want to make a tender or nostalgic song sound more poignant? Listen to her join in on Neil Young's "This Old Guitar" in the film, Heart of Gold or on "My Sweet Carolina" off Ryan Adams' Heartbreaker. You want a sultry place to seem more magical, check out her word-for-word duet with Dylan on "Mozambique." You want to capture tragedy? Hear how Bill Mallonee uses her on "Resplendent." You want to hear how Gram Parsons or Townes Van Zandt songs should sound now that they are gone? Try her versions of "Pancho and Lefty" or "Wheels" or "She."

I know you wouldn't, but should you want to ignore the heavenly and return to the earthly and crawl into bed with her, then give a listen to "I Don't Want To Talk About It" from Red Dirt Girl.

If you could hear everything that Emmylou Harris has been a part of for the past 40 years, it could serve as a thick primer for what has been good in popular music--the songs she's chosen to sing, the people she's chosen to sing with, the songs she's written.

I'd have to imagine the cult is pretty big, maybe too big to be a cult, and more like a religion. Oh, yeah, she rescues dogs, too.

Thanks to Cover Lay Down for the live track.

Crazy Tender Heart Mercies

My Freeze Ray - Neil Patrick Harris (mp3)
Come What May - Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman (mp3)

Any fan of movies who fails to immediately connect the movies Tender Mercies and Crazy Heart upon viewing the latter... well, isn’t nearly the fan of movies they might think they are. It didn’t take a lot of hard work to find a 10-point breakdown of similarities between the movies. Heck, Robert Duvall all but admits he couldn’t play the main character because he’d already played the guy 27 years ago.

I’ll get to the music portion of this post in a minute, but I’d like to focus on Crazy Heart the movie for a couple of paragraphs first.

Jeff Bridges is easily on my list of top five best actors. (Most days, anyway. My top five would fluctuate more wildly than the DOW.) For him and Maggie Gyllenhaal to share prime acting real estate virtually guarantees I’ll find the movie palatable. Bridges’ acting job is stunning and deserved the recognition it received. Crazy Heart is good, but it’s not great.

The music in the movie is passable. It might even be “OK.” But the problem with almost all movies attempting to show the rise and/or fall of musical gods is that you’re required to believe that songs you’ve never heard before are songs that should have burned into your soul.

It’s a reminder how selective we all are in our suspensions of disbelief. I can watch dudes in outer space clash with light sabers and battle in funky-lookin’ spaceships under the command of an ugly-lookin’ lizard named Ackbar, and I won’t bat an eye. But ask me to believe that some song I’ve never heard of was a famous piece of immortal Americana, and I blanch.

“Foolish consistency...” is my best and only defense.

It’s not just movies that do an injustice to music for me. Books that try to deal with music the wrong way leave me cold as well. My absolute least favorite parts of The Lord of the Rings trilogy is when Tolkein breaks out the lyrics. I just don’t know what to do with them. They’re not poems; they’re supposed to be set to music. So I find myself drifting away into a place where I’m trying to find some tolerable tune that works with the words. And I’m doomed to fail, because if I could succeed, then I’d be off churning out awesome Middle Earth ditties.

Dan Jenkins, author of many a guilty pleasure, is famous for including lyrics to made-up country songs in his books, and those are the only parts of his books I can’t stand. If Tolkein couldn’t win me over, a Texan has no chance.

Music is the tuning fork on my heart, on many hearts. Attempting to translate that into a different medium, into another art form, is to destroy the connection.

Glee? I can totally dig Glee. It’s dark teenage comedy with karaoke. Musicals like Moulin Rouge or Chicago or Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog? They’re creating music for the medium, not crafting the medium around music that supposedly existed in the past but never really did. I can dig that. Soundtracks (instrumental or compilations)? Helllll yeah. Again, it’s about what comes first and about what role the music plays.

My beef with Crazy Heart has nothing to do with country music. Honestly, I don’t even know what “country music” means anymore. Music categories, in the last 20 years, have become as increasingly meaningless as bond ratings.

It’s one thing to translate comics or books into movies. Or to make audio recordings of poetry readings. Or to make a TV show into a comic book. But songs and music are different. They can’t be bandied about across media so easily. And that, my dear readers, is what makes music a unique snowflake of artistry.

AMERICAN SONGS: "Return of the Grievous Angel"

Gram Parsons--"Return of the Grievous Angel" (mp3)

One could probably put together a list of the best American songs and then discover that, wait a second, they've all been written by Gram Parsons.

Consider this list, for example:

1. "Hickory Wind"
2. "Sin City"

3. "Wheels"

4. "A Song For You"

5. "Return of the Grievous Angel"

If you don't know all of these songs, I'll wager you've heard at least some of them, as performed by The Byrds, Bob Mould, Emmylou Harris, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Peter Holsapple, and, best of all, Gram himself with Emmylou singing backup. On his new CD released just this past week, Pete Yorn has taken a shot at "Wheels."

Now I'm not the one to give you a history and a context for the life and curious death of Gram Parsons, his time in the Byrds, his connections to the Stones, and all of that. Those are available to you all over the Internet. I'll only say this: if country-rock has a father, it is indeed Mr. Parsons, and without him, you would not have the Eagles (a mixed blessing), Ryan Adams, and, ultimately, perhaps not even the alt-country movement at all. Without Gram Parson's use of Emmylou Harris as his back-up singer, everyone from Bob Dylan to Connor Oberst would not have been dialing her number for the past 40 years.

But the song calls me tonight, and it is "Return of the Grievous Angel." Yes, to me, it ranks as one of the very greatest American songs, another one that captures the space, the essence, the mystery of our country.

Usually, when arguing for the quality of a particular song, I find myself quoting and analyzing lyrics. I'm not going to do that here, maybe because that approach seems to draw almost no response, except from those already know the song. I'll only give you the opening couplet, because it serves my larger purpose:

Won't you scratch my itch, sweet Annie Rich,

And welcome me back to town.

Parsons has taken a great American tradition and added love, romance, even sexuality to that great genre, the road song.

Without a doubt, there are other wonderful examples of this kind of song--Chuck Berry's "The Promised Land" and the Beach Boys' "Surfin' U.S.A." stand as perhaps the most famous; Peter Case's "Satellite Beach" is an effective, though obscure, rendering of the same kind of journey. I love these kinds of songs that take the listener all over the country, aural road trips to parallel the Great American Journeys--Lewis and Clark, Huck Finn, the Joads, the Oregon Trail, the Great Migration after the Civil War, Jack Kerouac and Neal Casady, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

But Parsons, like I said, adds romance, so even though his narrator "headed west to grow up with the country" and has encounters with "prairies," "waves of grain," "the King," the Bible Belt," nothing touches him as much as returning to the woman he loves. In doing so, he captures the dichotomy of American life--the lure of big cities and wide open spaces and the comforts of home and small town life.

Musically, the song is transcendent, containing, arguably, some of the finest harmonies ever put to vinyl and beyond. When Parsons and Harris sing "Out with the truckers, and the kickers, and the cowboy angels," when they take it even higher on "twenty thousand road I went down, down, down and they all led me straight back home to you," if you don't feel the chills, if you don't feel like an eagle soaring over the land, all I can say is, play it again. And again and again and again. Until you get it.

Treasures from Marshalls!

Hello!  Once again Friday is here... life moves at the speed of light these days!

Here are some treasures that I swooned over while strolling the isles of Marshalls the other day!  I was a good girl and only got two items  :)

Oh, and here is another purple glowing building in Downtown Miami....

Okay, now for all the Marshalls goodies....

Owls!!  The one on the left I found in the Thanksgiving decor section and the one on the right hold a tea light in back to shine through the decorative cut-outs in the owl...  A while back I bought a yellow and orange owl from the same line that look identical but are bird feeders with a chain and hook to hang in your yard.  I gave my mom the orange one and I'm hanging on to the yellow one in hopes that one day soon I will have a yard with a tree to hang it in! :)

Some nice glass lanterns for candles, perhaps to set the mood on ones patio...

A nice Middle Eastern rug...  but I know better than to buy rugs at Marshalls when I can get gorgeous authentic ones for less at my friend Salman's ebay store Pakobel Rugs!  Check out my posts on his store HERE.

A beautiful Moroccan lantern that appeared to be missing its lower half...   Even if it had the other piece it was waaay too much at $49.99!   :(((

A whole wild "piggy bank" display....

 

Funky little lamps.... 

A nice aqua blue tufted lounge/side chair with a Naugahyde/Vinyl/etc upholstery, hehe 

 

I loved this curry/ocher yellow display in the kitchen-ware department...  I had to snap this picture fast and just walk away, I have way too much kitchen stuff already *cries*...

Pretty Powderdy Aqua Ikat Bed Set - with 4 decorative Moroccan-like print pillows too!

And another

A pretty powder blue decorative urn with Moroccanesque cut-outs...

 

And an awesome curry/ocher yellow one too...

And of course, a whole bunch of shoes that they didn't have in my size, or in the case of the beautiful bohemian tan leather Steve Madden sandals below, were coming apart at the back of the heel!  :*( bad luck...

Funky cut and open toe on these brown leather ankle boots by... sheesh, I forgot the designer... on clearance for $32 (or was it $39?...hmm..)

Coral/Salmon pink leather Michael Kors heels with a decorative buckle....  I like the color and design, but the heel is too high and rickety for my taste.... so I just took a picture for memories.. haha...

 

And last, but not least - because it's the only thing I bought out of ALL the stuff that I swooned over....  This curry/ocher yellow collection of ceramic decor including a small urn, planter, cup and mini jewel box.  I loved the circular designs and the color, so I snatched the little urn and the planter and reluctantly left the rest behind....

 

And here is the urn in its new home, for now, on display in my apartment...

 

Here's a close-up...

 

And a view from above... hangin' out with my milk glass and my wood incense burner tower which I painted and detailed with turquoise (I love it!)....

I forgot to get a picture of the planter, which now holds one of my cactus plants, stay tuned for that!

(All images in this post are my own personal images)

The Soul Cages

Island of Souls - Sting (mp3)

I’ve always just been told that Gordon Sumner is completely full of himself and that his solo career -- you might know him as STING -- ruined what could have been a much better denouement for the band known as The Police.

Now, my pal Bob doesn’t much care for The Police, but I categorize them as “a very good band with a handful of supremely great pop songs.”

Having been a modest Police disciple in my late teens, I hopped on board the Sting solo wagon and bought all of his first four solo albums soon after their release dates. Yet I’ve always sat back and accepted the common proclamation that Sting’s solo work lost something, that he was too full of himself, that ditching Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers came at too high a price.

(I also bought Stewart’s following side project, Animal Logic, and absolutely loved it, so in hindsight their break-up just cost me more money.)

Lately I’ve spent some time rediscovering those first four Sting solo albums*. Most especially, I’ve found myself listening to his third album in that group, The Soul Cages. The third anniversary of my father’s death arrives in about a week, and Sting’s song “Why Should I Cry for You?” landed on my iPod shuffle a week or so ago, and I remembered that Sting wrote The Soul Cages as his own form of musical therapy in coping with the death of his own father.

So I’ve gone back and listened to his stuff, most especially this one album. And I’m gonna step out on a limb: Sting’s first-stage solo work is on par, quality-wise, with The Police. His best poppy songs might not quite compete with The Police’s poppiest, but that next level down, the second-best of the best? I think they’re every bit as good if not a little better. A little deeper. A little more complex. A little more soulful.

Fine, maybe they’re also a little more full of Sting being full of himself. But hell, Frank Sinatra names places as his kind of town and does things his way, and somehow an ego the size of Jupiter didn’t seem to destroy his ability to tattoo himself into the pop culture history books, so why should that quality make us hate ol' Gordon?

Sting’s first four solo albums show a musician and songwriter willing to take serious risks with his status. He leapt into faux jazzville with his debut. The next, ...Nothing Like the Sun, was mega-mellow. Like, it was soooo mellow it could’ve been called ...Everything Like Sta-Puft. I can totally envision Sting drunk and wearing shades and leaning against a street light for five straight months while composing this album.

...Nothing Like the Sun was great for an English major wannabe like me, because he was all literary-like and heavy and dabbled in politics. I can still very intensely remember watching my classmates from my sister school perform a dance to “They Dance Alone.” I loved that song already, but it moved up another notch when combined with girls I’d regularly drooled over moving around in skin-grabbing leotards. (And just how terribly wrong and guilt-inducing it is to have to try and hide one's excitement about watching girls dancing to a song about women dancing for their dead sons?? That's sick! That's wrong! I was so ashamed!)

Anyone looking for “Synchronicity II” or “Canary in a Coalmine” or certainly “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” was gonna be sorely disappointed with ...Nothing, because only one song even approaches that kind of BPM level.

If ...Nothing was mellow, then The Soul Cages sinks into a deep depression. It’s a super-mellow concept album about mortality with a shitload -- or boatload, if you will -- of thematic imagery surrounding the sea, sailing, and life in coastal harbourtowns. It’s a mere nine stinkin’ songs. The title song contains an entire section reprising the chorus from the first song. Standard concept album conceit.

The Soul Cages wasn’t remotely a safe play. It was a man on a very deep personal journey willing to risk most of his fame to exorcise something. That he even mostly pulled it off is amazing and admirable and attests to a level of talent some critics seem loathe to acknowledge. I went to his sold out show in Chapel Hill on his Soul Cages tour and absolutely loved it. The album was perfect counter-programming for the grunge and intense guitar rock of Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins and STP that occupied speakers everywhere on campus.

Sting emerged from the bottom of that dark Scottish loch to create Ten Summoner’s Tales, which is a straight-ahead pop album full of pop songs. And mighty catchy, I might add.

So maybe Sting wouldn’t be the greatest guy to invite over for dinner. Maybe he’d spend the whole time talking about how awesome he is. And I’d definitely avoid asking him any questions or having any conversations with him where the word “tantric” might come up (unless you have a 10 or so hours to spare... ba-dump-kssh!).

But as a solo artist? Sting had one seriously impressive 8-year stretch.

* -- Sting helmed several solo albums after Ten Summoner’s Tales, but it’s my humble and confident opinion that I hopped off his bandwagon right before it began its descent down a very steep and crap-riddled cliff.

"There's a protest singer, he's singin' a protest song"

Graham Nash--"Chicago (live)" (mp3)

"Blowin' In The Wind" is not a protest song.

Sure, people may have made it into one, but if you look at it, it doesn't zero in. Here's the most directly critical part:

Yes, how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, how many deaths will it take 'till he knows
That too many people have died?

What is the song protesting? Cannonballs? An archaic notion. Lack of freedom? For whom? For "some people"? Death? Death from war? Is the "one man" JFK, the president at the time? What war had kicked into high enough gear in 1963 to merit a protest?

Taken as a whole, the song seems almost to be arguing in favor of natural law, as if somehow, like nature, we will ultimately realize what should be obvious and true? Perhaps it serves as kind of a precursor to the International Declaration of Human Rights? It is certainly no Common Sense, where Thomas Paine used natural law to argue in favor of revolution so convincingly and metaphorically. No, it's so generalized that seems like it could fit almost any time or any place.

But leap ahead 43 years: Bright Eye's "When the President Talks To God" or Neil Young's "Let's Impeach The President." Now those are protest songs. Consider Connor Oberst's lyrics:

When the President talks to God

Are the conversations short or long?

Does he ask to rape our women's rights

Or send poor farm kids off to die?

Does God suggest an oil hike

When the President talks to God?

Or Young's: Let's impeach the President/ for lying.

Yes, pointed protest songs. But they were oddly ineffective, much as I disliked having George W. Bush as president. Both were so direct, so shrill, perhaps even so obvious, that they didn't carry much of an impact, at least not after the first listening, when you might have been thinking, "Hell, yeah," but without too much enthusiasm. And, already, their moment has passed.

Perhaps that is the genius of "Blowin' In The Wind" or "This Land Is Your Land" or "What's Going On?"

Sing broadly of broad themes and you will always stay relevant. Sing specifically of particular men and actions and flaws and you will seem mean-spirited at first and then, ultimately, dated.

Part of it may be context. If you listened to music in the 60's and 70's, you were likely to hear protest music, heavy or lite, on your radio, on television variety shows, and just about everywhere else. Neil Young's "Ohio" or Graham Nash's "Chicago" (which, hopefully, you are listening to as you read this) or any number of Jefferson Airplane tracks (with lines like "up against the wall, Motherfucker" in beautiful 4-part harmony) were part of the national musical conversation.

And there was actual protesting going on so that the protest music could serve as a kind of soundtrack--swaying people with candles singing "We Shall Overcome" and that kind of thing.

Now, despite whatever anti-government or anti-war or anti-racism sentiments are swirling around, and in some ways, those positions are as strong as they've ever been, protest music has no context in which to thrive or even to survive. Should a protest song even work its way into the rotation, it will spin out just as quickly as any other passing fad.

I really don't know if there's a place for protest, or perhaps even folk, music anymore. Probably, not as genres. But there may be another component that in a songwriter's haste to protest, he or she forgets. There is always a place for a good song, regardless of the subject matter. The modern examples I've cited above, and a myriad other specific protests, fail the cardinal rule of songwriting. They have potent assertions or shocking frankness, but they aren't especially good songs. Dylan and Guthrie and Marvin, and a younger Neil Young on the hastily-written "Ohio" transcend the genre by creating memorable, hummable memories or guitar riffs or harmonica fills. While I like the idea of protest songs, I'd much rather hear a protest SONG than a PROTEST song.

I've always had a lot of affection for Graham Nash's "Chicago," especially sung live with the botched piano notes. Today's listener would probably have no idea that he's talking about the aftermath of the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and the police violence inflicted upon the protestors to that convention under the orders of Mayor Daley, pere. This live version is on CSNY's 4-Way Street.