The really important question (as cartoonist Shannon Wheeler reminds us) remains: what happens to your ideas once you get them?
[Cartoon scanned from April, 2013 issue of The Funny Times; click to enlarge]
Midweek Music Break: Simone Dinnerstein and Tift Merritt, “Only in Songs/Night and Dreams”
[Photo: Simone Dinnerstein and Tift Merritt]
As far as I’ve been able to tell, this duo first met following a concert by classical pianist Dinnerstein. Country-ish singer-songwriter Merritt wrote of that experience:
I talked with Simone the day after I saw her play an intimate concert in New York City. Her father, painter Simon Dinnerstein, talked with me for a moment after this show. He had caught me trying to wipe tears off my face while Simone played. It was such a pleasure to meet such a tremendously talented, disciplined, thoughtful musician. “I’m going to practice much more,” is what I told myself after we talked.
Later in 2008, the British magazine Gramophone brought them together again, nominally assigning Merritt to interview Dinnerstein about “Second Album Syndrome” (4MB PDF). (The interview seems to me much more like an extended, who’s-interviewing-whom back-and-forth.) Says the article’s intro:
As Merritt interviewed Dinnerstein and they shared their experiences, they immediately hit it off. Both are passionate about music, are around the same age, given to genuine self-reflection, and share a common friendship and fanship with the starry country singer and songwriter Lucinda Williams. By the end of the evening, they were already chatting about the possibility of a musical collaboration. Americana Bach, anyone?
By January, 2011, they were sharing a stage in concert at Duke University and talking about an upcoming album (the one which they just released this week). Later that year, Dinnerstein took a turn as “guest DJ” on NPR:
“I tend to be introspective,” she says. “I tend to like music that is sensitive, slow and I like stuff that’s kind of dreamy.”
Dinnerstein’s also drawn to musicians who pursue her own aesthetic, especially those rhythmically free ones who are not afraid to tug on the musical line — expanding or contracting it — as a means of expression.
Among the music she chose for that program was Merritt’s “Feel of the Moon.” (With Judy Collins’s “Suzanne,” the only non-classical selection.)
Now, finally, we’ve got the (first?) product of all that mutual admiration: their collaborative effort, Night.
It may seem a curious mixture, on the surface. Merritt’s own compositions are scattered among a handful of pure-classical pieces, as well as a couple of original songs by others. In the video below, the duo perform the first two songs from the album: one of the Merritt-penned numbers, and Schubert’s “Nacht und Träume” (“Night and Dreams,” here sung in an English-language translation).
Curious mixture or not: the instruments these two wield (not by any means excepting Merritt’s sweetly penetrating voice) are things of powerful beauty.
In all honesty, until a few days ago I’d never even heard of either performer. Jules, over at 7-Imp, just casually mentioned in a post that she looked forward to a new CD coming out this week — she didn’t name the artist or the album, just provided a link. Because I trust Jules’s musical tastes, I clicked right on through to that article at the NPR site. I’m so glad I did; thanks (again), Jules!
I was rushed at the time, though, and had a chance to listen only to the duo’s version of the traditional “Wayfaring Stranger”:
[Below, click Play button to begin Wayfaring Stranger. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:38 long.]
[audio:wayfaringstranger_simonedinnersteintiftmerritt.mp3|titles=’Wayfaring Stranger’|artists=Simone Dinnerstein and Tift Merritt]
From the first notes, I pretty much knew I’d be buying the whole album.
_____________________________
Bonus: For almost five years, Merritt has hosted a podcast of interviews for radio station KRTS, in Marfa TX. (That link takes you to the iTunes page for the series.) The program, called Marfa Spark, or just The Spark, puts Merritt together with people who work in various art forms (musicians, artists, broadcasters, photographers…). From a note at The Spark‘s site:
I speak with an artist, regardless of genre, about how they make their work and their lives. How is meaning is made of making things? What does it look like to be an artist over a lifetime? What kind of wisdom is necessary? What is learned from the working?…
After five years of The Spark episodes, I have found that my guests, all making their own distinct work and way, encounter so many of the same shadows and joys, but are often off doing their own thing and don’t realize what all they have in common. Their lives are as unique and inspired and carefully hewn as the work they love to make. I make this collection of conversations with these incredibly creative characters — pioneers of sorts — because I have such a wonderful time stumbling upon them, losing myself in their work, and then asking them for tea. Like proof of life off the map, they comfort me, inspire me, make me brave and send me back to the world with a little wisdom garnered for making my own handmade string of paper days.
(Isn’t that great?)
In July 2008, sometime after first speaking with Dinnerstein, Merritt invited her to The Spark. Here’s that interview, nearly a half-hour in length:
[Below, click Play button to begin The Spark: interview with Simone Dinnerstein. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 27:35 long.]
[audio:thespark6_merritt_dinnerstein.mp3|titles=’The Spark: interview with Simone Dinnerstein’|artists=Tift Merritt]
Spirits Tossed, Lost, Messed Up, Redeemed
[Lyrics here; see additional notes at the foot of this post.]
From whiskey river (which seems to have had a rough week):
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you.
(Philip Roth [source])
…and:
Willow flowers, snowflakes, the same . . .
They’re feckless.No matter whose garden they fall in,
They’ll always follow the wind away.
(Yuan Mei [source])
…and:
What does it feel like to be alive?
Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!
It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
(Annie Dillard [source])
Waypoints
[Image: possibly the oldest surviving map of the world. Mesopotamia/Babylon, about 700-500 BCE. Click to enlarge; see the note at the foot of this post for more information.]
From whiskey river:
In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for.
(Paul Auster [source])
…and (italicized portion):
The spiritual life — or the writing life — depends above all on fidelity to objects.
I wrote that sentence and looked out the window. It has rained for three days and in today’s sun the late roses strain, soggy as wet tissue, toward light coming just in time. Fidelity, I was saying, to objects…
Whatever your eye falls on — for it will fall on what you love — will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go.
It doesn’t matter how unprepossessing the world we look at, though it may seem to the lust of the eye that blue sky and late roses are more amusing to look at than dead winter growth. This mistake I make over and over.
(Mary Rose O’Reilley [source])
Midweek Music Break: Crosby, Stills, and Nash (with a twist), “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”
Numerous times here, I’ve alluded to my late blooming as an appreciator of rock music. This strikes many people (including me) as an oddity for someone who headed off to college in the late ’60s. How could I have slept through the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, et al. ad infinitum? (My freshman-year roommates thought it hilarious that I came equipped for college with the complete oeuvre of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.)
Eventually I got on board, and I hope the phrase “of course” is understood. The first rock album I bought while in college (ever? holy cow, was I so out of sync that I can even seriously ask that question?) was Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s (pre-Neil Young) self-titled debut. Ye gods, but I loved that album. I’m not even sure what made me get it in the first place. It may well have been recommended by the guy in the next room, named Bruce, who was the only person I ever knew who’d actually attended Woodstock; Bruce was funny, mild-mannered, smart as heck, and — like me — a fish-out-of-water Northeastern US native attending a college in North Carolina. Our suitemates from the South tended to favor rather louder music, which I had difficulty adjusting to, but it’s easy to imagine Bruce off-handedly saying something like Listen to this… and putting (say) “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” on a record player.
And what a “song.” As Wikipedia notes, it’s a true suite of several songs. I imagined that that word merely punned on sweet. It did that, all right — “it” meaning both the song itself, and the Judy in question (Collins). But it also met a more formal standard. The mood and the rhythm wandered all over the place from verse to verse, without becoming chaotic. Steven Stills seems to have poured into it everything he could think of, musically and lyrically, without straying outside the country-rock lines.
(When you consider that he apparently wrote it almost explicitly in desperation to keep Collins from leaving their relationship, you maybe can see why he’d throw everything into the mix.)
What a performance, for that matter. Among the other things Wikipedia asserted which I didn’t know: “CSN actually formed in order to record ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.'” Stills’s emphatic guitar, the almost weirdly perfect harmonies… Well, now I’m straying into wordlessness; the thing still transports me. (If they’d chosen any other song to open the album, I wonder if I’d have ever listened to the rest.)
Anyway, here’s the song:
[Below, click Play button to begin Suite: Judy Blue Eyes (CS&N). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 7:24 long.]
[audio:suitejudyblueeyes_cs&n.mp3|titles=’Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’|artists=Crosby, Stills, & Nash]
Edit to add (2013-03-16): [Lyrics]
So anyhow, a couple days ago I was enjoying revisiting the song (and the album it came from) when I came across another version of the song — a possibility which would have struck me as ridiculous a moment before. This is by a group known, implausibly, as the Vitamin String Quartet.
I had something of a hard time pinning down who, exactly, the Vitamin String Quartet comprises. (It seems that the membership changes every now and then.)
But information lies thick upon the ground when it comes to wondering what music the VSQ has recorded. They’ve recorded a bazillion rock songs… all arranged (obviously) for string quartet.
I mean, really — they’ve recorded a LOT of albums, not to mention songs. (One site I saw online concluded that at least one of the Wikipedia entries, however, was bogus. Which makes one wonder.)
Here’s the VSQ’s take on “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” — almost exactly the length of the original:
[Below, click Play button to begin Suite: Judy Blue Eyes (VSQ). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 7:26 long.]
[audio:suitejudyblueeyes_vitaminstringquartet.mp3|titles=’Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’|artists=Vitamin String Quartet]
A funny old world humans have made for themselves, isn’t it?
Update (later in the day): There’s a really good behind-the-scenes/making-of story about this song here at Sound On Sound. (It’s an interview which will probably hold even more interest for readers who, like, actually know about music.) One of my favorite bits:
It still gives me goose bumps when I listen to that recording, aware that [Stills] blew through seven-and-a-half minutes with all the time changes, all the pauses, all the everything in just one take,” [engineer Bill] Halverson says. “No edits, no nothing.”
Clumsy Delights, Deftly Managed
[Image: “Duck with Slinky- 1,” by user SteveTaint at sxc.hu]
From whiskey river:
The Afterlife
While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals — eagles and leopards — and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
(Billy Collins [note: first stanza not always included in quotations around the Web])
…and:
It’s a weird thing, writing.
Sometimes you can look out across what you’re writing, and it’s like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer’s day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you’ll be going on your walk.
And that’s wonderful.
Sometimes it’s like driving through fog. You can’t really see where you’re going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you’re probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you’ll still get where you were going.
And that’s hard while you’re doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn’t exist in that order down on paper, half of what you’d get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.
And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you’re doing and where you’re going, and you couldn’t see or know any of that five minutes before.
And that’s magic.
(Neil Gaiman [source])
…and:
Living is all clumsy delights. Sitting here in this room, for example, listening to you turn pages, overhearing you breathe.
(Seon Joon [source])
Midweek Music Break/What’s in a Song: “Makin’ Whoopee”
[Sheet music from the original Broadway show. Note implication that
“whoopee” just refers to a cowgirl’s yell: yeah, right.]
Over the weekend, a couple of TV experiences converged to drive this song into my head:
On Sunday, we watched the great Otto Preminger-directed film of 1959, Anatomy of a Murder. Jimmy Stewart plays a defense attorney for a confessed killer, an Army lieutenant played by Ben Gazzara. The killer was driven to it impulsively — so goes his defense — when he learned that his wife had been beaten and raped by the murder victim.
At one point, the lieutenant’s wife (Lee Remick) takes the stand in his defense. Although the prosecution has argued strenuously (albeit ineffectively) to keep the rape out of the testimony, they can’t help trying to turn it to their advantage. Lead prosecutor George C. Scott, practically leering, compliments the wife on her cute little dog (who’s just made a courtroom appearance), and then attempts to paint her as a tart who dresses and acts in a way almost guaranteed to lure men from the straight-and-narrow path of chivalry and honor. He calls attention to her beautiful hair, her tight clothes, her drinking, her playing pinball, her occasional disregard for even common everyday decencies like wearing underwear—
Jimmy Stewart leaps to his feet to object. Your Honor, he demands rhetorically, is the assistant Attorney General from Lansing pitching woo, or is he going to cross-examine?
The Missus and I snickered: pitching woo. Like, huh? woo???
But in fact the synaptic groundwork had already been laid in my head. Earlier, I’d watched an episode of the late SyFy show, Eureka. In this episode, the beautiful-but-tough-as-nails deputy sheriff, named Jo Lupo, suddenly starts behaving out of character. In particular, she reveals a sudden (and heretofore unrevealed) interest in the nerdy assistant-to-geniuses named Fargo. During a karaoke session in the local cafe, as Fargo plays the piano, Jo — in a slinky gown — goes into a rendition of “Makin’ Whoopee”… crawling around on the piano, and concluding with a kiss.
That scene in Eureka, red dress and all, was so close to another — Michelle Pfeiffer on the piano, Jeff Bridges at the keyboard, in The Fabulous Baker Boys — that it had to be intentional.
So I already had the song in my head. And then (as one does) I started to poke around on the Internets…
The Possibilities of Treeness
[Image: Tree on the Hill (2012), by Patrick Winfield. 24×23.5 inches, film and Polaroids on panel]
From whiskey river:
Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air. We all have it in us — every man, woman, and child — and with enough hard work and concentration, every human being is capable of [the feat]… You must learn to stop being yourself. That’s where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That’s how it’s done. The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground.
Like so.
(Paul Auster [source])
…and:
Tree
All day I waited to be blown;
then someone cut me down.I have, instead of thoughts,
uses; uses instead of feelings.One day I’ll feel the wind again.
A moment later I’ll be gone.
(Dan Chiasson [source])
…and:
We end up stumbling our way through the forest, never seeing all the unexpected and wonderful possibilities and potentials because we’re looking for the idea of a tree, instead of appreciating the actual trees in front of us.
(Charles de Lint [source])
Midweek Music Break: Hannalee, “Valhalla” and “Never Been to Memphis”
Seattle’s Hannalee comprises the almost impossibly photogenic threesome of husband-and-wife Michael Harley* and Anna-Lisa Notter, and childhood friend Fidelia Rowe. When you look at any of their group photos — even without having heard their music, or knowing anything more about them — you might think: Wow. I thought I’d heard of most of the San Francisco groups from the ’60s… how’d I miss them?
If you take a gander at some of their other photos, like this one, you may find the San Francisco folk-rockers comparison almost too apt for coincidence.
Looks (as we all know) can be deceiving. But in Hannalee’s case, you might not be far off the mark. Oh, they don’t specialize at all in psychedelia or any such genres; but the sense of the late ’60s is there, all right — the sense of distant possibilities, brought suddenly within reach via music.
It’s folk music, sort of, and that’s how they seem to identify themselves. (Their Bandcamp profile says: “Blending the sounds of traditional folk music with elements of dark, neverland whimsy, Hannalee creates a unique music strange and familiar at once.”) But their three-part harmonies can also verge on something older, even choral. And of course, if they’re singing in an old church (Seattle’s Fremont Abbey) with strings behind them… The song is “Valhalla,” from the first of four seasons-of-the-year EPs (the autumn title, Cucurbita — the pumpkin genus — just released a few months ago):
[Lyrics]
And here’s how they sound in the studio, also on the Cucurbita EP; the song is “Never Been to Memphis.”
[Below, click Play button to begin Never Been to Memphis. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:28 long.]
[audio:neverbeentomemphis_hannalee.mp3|titles=’Never Been to Memphis’|artists=Hannalee]
[Lyrics]
The series’ winter release, Brassica, just came out last week.
By the way, I don’t know how they chose the name Hannalee. But The Kingston Trio (among others) recorded a song called “Hanna Lee.” (It was written by a Stan Jones — perhaps the one who penned “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky.”) The words to that song, at least as performed by the Kingstons, go like this:
Your dusty eyes were soft and glowin’ when first I met you, Hanna Lee.
There was no way for me a-knowin’ the sorrow your sweet caress would
bring to me.Chorus:
High, high, high is the gallows. (Yeah, and it’s long) long as the rope that
waits for me.
High as the gallows. They’ll hang me for your sins, my Hanna Lee.You shot and killed your cruel husband because you found you loved but me,
And then you lied before the jury and they blamed for your sins, my Hanna Lee.Chorus:
Down at the jail on hangin’ mornin’, I heard you tell them you had lied.
Your dusty eyes were soft and glowin’ and I saw you hang your head and cry.
I can’t quite wrap my head around the idea that this song and Hannalee’s ethereal look and sound might be connected, but who knows? Musical history, especially of the folk variety, traces some mysterious pathways.
[Hat tip to Simon of Beat Surrender for the intro to Hannalee.]_______________
* Is Michael Harley’s last name really Harley? It’s very confusing: Web sites seem split about 50-50 in identifying him as Michael Notter or Michael Harley. At Bandcamp and their own site, he goes by the latter. I tossed a (loaded) coin.
Consider the Things We Miss (Then Consider Our Missing Them)
[Image: Where Are You, by user “code1name” at the sxc.hu site]
From whiskey river:
Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge — none of that tells us very much.
(Paul Auster)
…and:
My Love
(excerpt)It’s not the lover that we love, but love
itself, love as in nothing, as in O;
love is the lover’s coin, a coin of no country,
hence: the ring; hence: the moon —
no wonder that empty circle so often figures
in our intimate dark, our skin-trade,
that commerce so furious we often think
love’s something we share; but we’re always wrong.
(Don Paterson [source])
…and:
The Storm
Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.Oh, I could not have said it better
myself.
(Mary Oliver [source])
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