Music – Page 34

Midweek Music Break: Maggie Björklund and Rachel Flotard

May 4, 2011 by John 2 Comments

Maggie Björklund is a Swedish pedal-steel guitarist and songwriter; Rachel Flotard, a singer-songwriter who has worked with Neko Case and fronts a Seattle-based “power pop/punk rock band” (per Wikipedia) called Visqueen. Together with a handful of accompanists (Johnny Sangster, John Convertino, Barb Hunter, Barrett Martin, and Rusty Willoughby), they put a haunting spin on Björklund’s “The Anchor Song” (lyrics below). If I were a sailor at sea, this would make me long for home; if I were a sailor on shore leave, it would make me long to put out to sea again.

Lyrics:

The Anchor Song
(Maggie Björklund)

shook out the blankets with dust in their eyes
and you’re ancient
wood is eaten through
but uptown they are saying that their
ships are on time

anchors away
we’re chained to the bottom
put away and forgotten
how this feels

busy living most of our lives
on the lexington line
shuffled on subways
our 4 alarm fires are frozen in ice

anchors away boys
we are chained to the bottom
we’ve put away and forgotten
how this feels

somekind of lonesome
that they’ve
translated outwards for us
sleep in your ocean
chest towards the sun
you’ll find love

it’s easier to long for the days
when they left off to thank you
crush and outrank you
with hollows in their eyes

chasing the low birds
who sow up the skyline for us
sleep on your ocean
chest towards the sun
you’ll find love
love

“The Anchor Song,” from her 2009 debut album Coming Home, is today’s selection for NPR’s Song of the Day series.

You Never Know

April 29, 2011 by John 8 Comments

[Image: “Untitled #153,” by Chris Marker. For more information, see the note at the foot of this page.]

From whiskey river:

Only Once

All which, because it was
flame and song and granted us
joy, we thought we’d do, be, revisit,
turns out to have been what it was
that once, only; every invitation
did not begin
a series, a build-up: the marvelous
did happen in our lives, our stories
are not drab with its absence: but don’t
expect to return for more. Whatever more
there will be will be
unique as those were unique. Try
to acknowledge the next
song in its body — halo of flames as utterly
present, as now or never.

(Denise Levertov [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Herb Alpert

April 27, 2011 by John 12 Comments

I didn’t really “get” rock until I was in college (which is weird, when you consider that I grew up right alongside the 1950s and ’60s). My appreciation of a certain Liverpool quartet’s songs was postponed for years thanks to the kids across the street, who stood on the sidewalk and annoyed passersby (and neighbors) by shrieking repeatedly, Yea, yeah, yeah! And in the house where I grew up, it seemed that the big hi-fi cabinet’s tuner had been spot-welded in place — allowing only the sounds of a nearby station’s 24-hour Big Band playlist to enter the living room.

I settled on neither rock nor Big Band music for my first playlist. For some reason, I settled on Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, and bought around a half-dozen of their LPs.

The band had a string of perky pop hits, often including weird special-effects instruments like cowbells and bicycle horns: “Spanish Flea,” “The Mexican [a/k/a Teaberry] Shuffle,” “Tijuana Taxi,” and so on. Of course, these songs made it onto their albums. But the LPs featured other music as well — also “Ameriachi”-sounding, vaguely, but slower and moodier. These were my favorites. What I didn’t know about loss back then could fill a stadium, but these tunes seemed to me drenched in it.

(An ongoing family joke centers around my teenage habit of whistling to myself while doing my laundry in the basement. The songs I whistled most often — at least as I imagined — were Alpert/TJB numbers: the slow ones.)

Here’s Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’s interpretation of “Tangerine,” by Victor Schertzinger and Johnny Mercer:

When first written, the song perched at #1 on the Billboard list for six or seven weeks in 1942. The subject and lyrics? Unusual but not exactly melancholy. No, it’s something about the trumpet which affected me (and still does). Even the little upbeat curl at the very end feels rueful — as if backing the last line of that bitter poem by Dorothy Parker: You might as well live.

Lyrics:

Tangerine
(as performed by the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra,
with vocals by Bob Eberly and Helen O’Connell)

(Male singer)
Tangerine,
She is all they claim
With her eyes of night and lips as bright as flame
Tangerine,
When she dances by
Senoritas stare and caballeros sigh
And I’ve seen
Toasts to Tangerine
Raised in every bar across the Argentine
Yes, she has them all on the run
But her heart belongs to just one
Her heart belongs to Tangerine

(Female singer)
Tangerine,
She is all they say
With mascara’d eye and chapeaux by Daché.
Tangerine,
With her lips of flame
If the color keeps, Louis Philippe’s to blame.
And I’ve seen
Clothes on Tangerine
Where the label says “From Macy’s Mezzanine.”
Yes, she’s got the guys in a whirl
But she’s only fooling one girl
She’s only fooling Tangerine!

Anima

April 22, 2011 by John 5 Comments

[Image: Isle of the Dead (third version), by Arnold Böcklin]

From whiskey river:

Life is a garden,
not a road
we enter and exit
through the same gate
wandering,
where we go matters less
than what we notice

(Bokonon [source: see note below])

…and:

Walking to Oak-Head Pond, and Thinking of
the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of a stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I’m fooled —
I’m wading along

in the sunlight —
and I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead —
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week’s trees,
and I plan to be there soon —
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don’t know where
such certainty comes from —
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind —

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage —
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

(Mary Oliver, from What Do We Know [source])

[Read more…]

RAMH@3: The Mix

April 20, 2011 by John 14 Comments

Today, Running After My Hat turns three years old. Over the last couple weeks, I had the opportunity (if that’s the word!) to go back and read a whole bunch of posts from that time. I thought, y’know, that I could maybe identify more clearly what the blog is (even vaguely, if not exactly). At the very least, it might give me some place to start revising the About RAMH page.

(I should be scuffing my feet in embarrassment to have a hard time answering that question. But I’m sure those of you who’ve been following along understand the problem. Ha.)

One really surprising finding: way more than I’d ever imagined, there’s a lot of music here. In fact, if you count multiple versions of the songs covered in the “What’s in a Song” series, and videos (in the posts themselves and, rarely, in the comments), apparently I include music in a third of the posts at the site . This suggested that I could offer you a “mix post” (like a mix CD) today.

So that’s what this is. [Read more…]

Savage Beasts

April 19, 2011 by John 6 Comments

A first for Running After My Hat: a guest blogger!

Kate Lord Brown is already familiar to some of you as the curator of the blog What Kate Did Next. (She also instigated the Burning Lines experiment in collaborative online fiction of a couple years ago.) More recently, though — and the reason she’s feeling celebratory — she’s published her first novel, The Beauty Chorus.

New Year’s Eve, 1940: Evie Chase, the beautiful debutante daughter of a rich and adoring RAF commander, listens wistfully to the swing music drifting out from the ballroom, unable to join in the fun… 5th January, 1941: Evie curses her fashionable heels as they skid on the frozen ground of her local airfield. She is here to join the ATA, the civilian pilots who ferry Tiger Moths and Spitfires to bases across war-torn Britain.

When Kate volunteered her services as a guest blogger, I thought at once of her own blog posts: light, downright lissome bundles of everyday slices of life, nostalgia, ruminations on and prompts for writing, and… music. All genres. All smoothly worked into the theme of the post du jour. So I asked her what role music had played in The Beauty Chorus itself, or in its author’s mind while writing it. Here’s how she responded.

Charms, eh? The woman hath charms.

[Videos below selected, by me with Kate’s blessing, from The Beauty Chorus‘s YouTube playlist.]

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Earworms of a 1950s Childhood

April 13, 2011 by John 7 Comments

When The Boy was a boy*, he did not know that nursery rhymes and fairy tales and folk songs had already lived lives stretching back centuries. When The Boy was a boy, he imagined that each story, verse, and tune had been crafted just for him and for people like him, all within the last few years. To honor such generous gifts of craftsmanship and art, he took them in, absorbed them, never forgot them. And he did the same with other stories and songs he learned then, because he did not know the difference between a profound message from the deep past and a superficial message from yesterday.

When The Boy was no longer a boy, he knew these things. But by then it was too late; he had memorized them all, equally, the new with the old and the silly with the deep. And long after The Boy was a boy, they would chew their way out of the recesses of his mind, laying claim to his awareness when he really needed to be thinking of other things…

When The Boy was a boy, true, he sometimes wondered about the songs they learned in music class. As printed in the music books, these songs featured black-and-white cross-hatched woodcut drawings taken from ancient sources, perhaps as far back as the eighteenth century. One drawing in particular entranced him: it depicted a raucous sort of restaurant — perhaps something like a diner, furnished in oak instead of chrome — were many people were eating and laughing; they poured huge mugs of something into their mouths, and one arm of each man encircled the waist of a wench…

Many, many songs and stories came to The Boy, when he was a boy, through the small, glowing gray screen in the living room. Many of these songs and stories were brief, lasting either thirty or sixty seconds — exactly — but some were a little longer. They showed up in venues like the beginning and end of each program. And they showed up within some of the programs themselves, like… Captain Kangaroo.

(When The Boy was no longer a boy, he came to believe that the first time he heard that song must have been the moment his politics became set for life. Good old Captain.)

_______________________

* Hat tip to Peter Handke’s poem “Song of Childhood,” featured in the marvelously hypnotic voiceover for Wings of Desire. Here’s Rutger Hauer’s voice reading the English translation, over a short film crafted especially to capture the poem’s essence:

Not Trying Quite So Hard, But It Feels Right

April 8, 2011 by John 7 Comments

[Image: “Comb of Retrospection,” by Michael Leunig]

From whiskey river:

How I Would Paint Happiness

Something sudden, a windfall,
a meteor shower. No —
a flowering tree releasing
all its blossoms at once,
and the one standing beneath it
unexpectedly robed in bloom,
transformed into a stranger
too beautiful to touch.

(Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together: New And Selected Poems [source])

…and:

suggestion

maybe we try too hard to be
remembered, waking to the
glowing yellow disc in ignorance,
swearing that today will be
the day, today we will make
something of our lives. what

if we are so busy searching
for worth that we miss the
sapphire sky and cackling
blackbird. what else is missing?

maybe our steps are too straight
and our paths too narrow and
not overlapping. maybe when
they overlap someone in another
country lights a candle, a couple

resolves their argument, a young
man puts down his silver gun
and walks away.

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

…and (which reminds me of my commenters):

Not just any talk is conversation; not any talk raises consciousness. Good conversation has an edge: it opens your eyes to something, quickens your ears. And good conversation reverberates: it keeps on talking in your mind later in the day; the next day, you find yourself still conversing with what was said. That reverberation afterward is the very raising of consciousness; your mind’s been moved. You are at another level with your reflections.

(James Hillman, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse [source])

[Read more…]

(Delayed) Midweek Music Break: Wailin’ and Waylon

April 7, 2011 by John 12 Comments

The first time you try to describe The Wailin’ Jennys’ music to someone, you may stumble — as I have stumbled — over the inadequacy of language to the capturing of sonic phenomena. Wikipedia punts, dubbing them folk and/or folk-rock. Neither of which feels right to me; I prefer the sense you get from their bio, posted at their site. There you’ll find words and phrases like:

folk-roots
roots music
bluegrass
neo-bluegrass
alt-country, pop, and rock
acoustic
folk-pop
show-stopping harmonies

Because of those vocal harmonies, you may also forget (as I have forgotten) that their music is not a capella: they each play at least one instrument as well. This list is probably not comprehensive:

accordion
banjo
bodhrán
guitar
harmonica
piano
upright bass

The Jennys have a new album out, Bright Morning Stars, and it’s a killer. But their take on the venerable “The Parting Glass,” below, appeared on their first full-length album, 2004’s 40 Days:

Lyrics:

The Parting Glass
(The Wailin’ Jennys)

Oh all the money that e’er I spent
I spent it in good company
And all the harm that e’er I’ve done
Alas, it was to none but me
And all I’ve done for want of wit
To memory now I can’t recall
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be with you all

Oh all the comrades that e’er I’ve had
Are sorry for my going away
And all the sweethearts that e’er I’ve had
Would wish me one more day to stay
But since it falls unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not
I’ll gently rise and I’ll softly call
Good night and joy be with you all

The Wailin’ Jennys got their name, of course, as a play on the name of outlaw-country icon Waylon Jennings (who shared many a parting glass of his own before gently rising at last in 2002). I am not much of a listener to country music, even the outlaw variety, but I’ve always thought Jennings’s cover of “Suspicious Minds” (recorded as a duet, with his wife Jessi Colter) superior to Elvis Presley’s. Jennings’s voice sounds to me less like someone performing, more like someone honestly frustrated by a situation at least partly of his own making. And as a sort of call-and-response duet, the lyrics acquire a complexity which I think they lack otherwise:

[Below, click Play button to begin Suspicious Minds. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:56 long.]

[audio:suspiciousminds_waylonjenningsjessicolter.mp3|titles=’Suspicious Minds’|artists=Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter]

Lyrics:

Suspicious Minds
(by Mark James; performed by Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter)

We’re caught in a trap can’t walk out
Because I love you too much baby
Why can’t you see what you’re doing to me
When you don’t believe a word I’m saying.

We can’t go on together
With suspicious minds
We can’t do our dreams
On suspicious minds.

I saw an old friend I know I stopped to say hello
But I could still see suspicion in your eyes
Here we go again you ask me where I’ve been
You can’t see the tears are real I’m crying.

We can’t go on together
With suspicious minds
We can’t build our dreams
On suspicious minds.

Let our love survive
Or dry the tears from your eyes
Don’t let a good thing die
Don’t you know I never lied to you?

We’re caught in a trap can’t walk out
Because I love you too much baby…
[repeat to fade]

Ineffable

April 1, 2011 by John 10 Comments

[For information about this image, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

There it is; the light across the water. Your story. Mine. His. It has to be seen to be believed. And it has to be heard. In the endless babble of narrative, in spite of the daily noise, the story waits to be heard.

Some people say that the best stories have no words. It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case always the wrong size to fit in the template called language.

(Jeanette Winterson)

…and:

The Magic Mountain

A book opens. People come out, bend
this way and talk, ponder, love, wander around
while pages turn. Where did the plot go?
Why did someone sing just as the train
went by? Here come chapters with landscape all over
whatever happens when people meet. Now
a quiet part: a hospital glows in the dark.
I don’t think that woman with the sad gray eyes
will ever come back. And what does it mean when
the Italian has so many ideas? Maybe
a war is coming. The book is ending. Everyone
has a little tremolo in them; all
are going to die and it’s cold and the snow, and the
clear air. They took someone away. It’s ending,
the book is ending. But I thought — never mind. It
closes.

(William Stafford, The Way It Is)

…and:

The invisible and imponderable is the sole fact.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

[Read more…]