47 posts tagged “music”

If you haven't heard The Wheat Pool, a Canadian alt-country-ish band, it's time you did.  Just click play to hear five cool songs.  The Wheat Pool's new album, Township, is highly recommended.

• On his 50th birthday, BBC News offers an interactive timeline of the life of Prince. Highlight for me: In 1981, Prince opened for the Rolling Stones, "[b]ut the crowd [did] not appreciate the moustachioed musician's sexually ambiguous look and boo[ed] him off stage." I wonder what those fans say now. In Prince's honor, I think I'll listen to Sign O' the Times today.
  
  
• A law professor who posited that there was a 50-square-mile swath of Yellowstone National Park, the Idaho part of the park, where you could (literally) get away with murder writes about the difficulty he had (free registration) getting any legislators or judges to take him seriously. Happily enough, though, the National Enquirer did.
  
  
• NPR's Day to Day featured Teitur, the Faroese singer I blogged about a few weeks ago. There's a piece to read, you can listen to critic Christian Bordal talk about and interview the singer, or you can just listen to Teitur singing live in the NPR studio. It's a great way to spend a few minutes, I swear.
  
  
• Dan Berry visits Butte County, South Dakota, for his NYT "This Land" column. Butte County contains the geographic center of the United States, but the true center isn't all that well-visited. I love the, er, beautiful emptiness of the northern Great Plains....
  
  
• Yesterday, a NYT piece covered the dispute in Juneau, Alaska, over whether the state's remote capital should—finally—be accessible by road. I guess you know what I think: Beautiful emptiness is apparently what I'm after. Sadly, I've never been to Alaska....

Here's what captured my attention this week:

• The New York Times Dining Section took a look at miracle fruit, a small berry from West Africa that causes the tongue—temporarily—to perceive foods as sweeter than they are.  In New York, apparently, hipsters are attending miracle fruit parties, where lemons, Brussels sprouts, and cheap tequila suddenly become rapture-inducing.  If those parties have made their way to Philly, I'm just not hip enough to know it, I guess.
  
  
• At Modern Art Notes, Tyler Green is understandably baffled by all the obituaries and critical appraisals of Robert Rauschenberg that failed to mention he was gay.
  
  
• I know that Texas Monthly is the best magazine currently being published anywhere.  Believe me, coming from an Oklahoman (originally), that's a high compliment.  The current issue, which features the Top 50 BBQ Joints in the state, helped me pass the time on the trip from Santa Fe back to Philly.  Yum, barbecue.  Who's going with me to try out, oh, 10 or 15 of these places?
  
  
• Two very different ministers come together to officiate at a funeral, in a smart, thought-provoking piece from the Spring issue of UU  World.
  
  
• Spin offers an oral history of the Village People's "Y.M.C.A."—beloved by two of my favorite groups, gay men and sports fan.  Note how  clueless the interviewees from the sports world are about the gay origins of the song.  (Link via Towleroad)

What were you reading this week?

I spent a couple of days at the end of the week in Atlantic City. I'm not really an Atlantic City kind of guy, I swear. (I'm a Vegas guy. [Yeah, right. I wish.]) I'm not interested in playing slots, saltwater taffy doesn't do that much for me, and I don't have pleasant childhood memories of the Jersey Shore to draw on (I grew up 1,500 miles away, after all). Plus, when you venture about a block away from the boardwalk, you find yourself in what's really a pretty sleazy, depressing town. If I want to get that I'm-about-to-be-mugged feeling, I can do that a lot closer to home.

So what drew me to Atlantic City? Country singer Gary Allan. I've seen him in concert three times now, and I have to say he's pretty darn amazing.

Now, I'm not at all a fan of what passes for music on modern country stations. My tastes run toward "real" country music: Hank Williams (Sr., of course), Ernest Tubb, Kitty Wells, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, and the like. But in my opinion, Allan—who somehow manages to get radio airplay—is the real deal. He's got the voice. He's got a Johnny Cash-quality swagger. And he's damn good in concert, where he really connects with the fans.

I first paid attention to Allan when I heard his cover of Vertical Horizon's "Best I Ever Had (Grey Sky Morning)." Actually—and this is a little bit embarrassing—I didn't realize for quite some time that Allan's "Best I Ever Had" was the cover. He just owns the song. His version makes it one of the saddest, most heartfelt country songs ever:

So you sailed away into a grey sky morning
Now, I'm here to stay, love can be so boring
Was it what you wanted?
Could it be I'm haunted?

But it's not so bad
You're only the best I ever had
You don't want me back
You're just the best I ever had.

I've grown to like Vertical Horizon's dreamy, alternative "Best I Ever Had," but it doesn't make me feel the heartbreak like Gary Allan's does. And, in fact, that entire album of Allan's, 2003's Tough All Over, has some of the best sad songs I know ("Life Ain't Always Beautiful," "Ring," "He Can't Quit Her," "I Just Got Back from Hell"). If you know the back story, that makes sense because Tough All Over was sort of Allan's musical processing of his wife's suicide. I'm a sucker for a sad song, and Tough All Over has good, quality sad songs aplenty. I'd have to say it's one of my two or three favorite albums ever.

Allan is touring with a new album now. Living Hard isn't quite so thoroughly sad, naturally enough. It rocks some ("Like It's a Bad Thing" and the title track, for instance), but it's got some quality sad songs, too. I'm particularly enjoying "She's So California," "Half of My Mistakes," and "Watching Airplanes."

So, yeah, Gary Allan drew me to Atlantic City and the House of Blues. I sat back, armed with a significant quantity of Jack and Coke, and enjoyed. He fired the place up. He made Atlantic City seem like a good place to be. And for me, that's really saying something.

I've blogged before about my fondness for Teitur, the adorable Faroese singer-songwriter. Well, tonight I rented a car and drove down to Wilmington, Delaware, to see him perform at the Grand Opera House—which, by the way, isn't all that grand or operatic. It also wasn't nearly full enough tonight. That's a shame because Teitur has an amazing, strong voice; he's pretty darn charismatic, too.

Tonight, Teitur mostly did songs from The Singer, his cool new concept album, a collection of "story songs." If you're new to Teitur, his earlier albums may be a more natural starting point. I think you'll be drawn into whatever he's singing, though.

This YouTube video is for one of his earlier songs, "Sleeping with the Lights On," which he did tonight from the piano.

On Saturday, three friends and I went to Philly's Kimmel Center for the last installment of this season's Fresh Ink series, which features crazy weird strange "new" music. I've been a subscriber of the series for several years because, well, I like to experience, er, "new" things. Saturday night's concert was my favorite of the season.

The program featured works of contemporary composer-guitarist Phil Kline. I was particularly looking forward to Fear and Loathing, a song cycle built around the writings of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. (Remind me to explain sometime how/why HST's Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 changed my life.) But it was a different piece, Zippo Songs, that really captured my attention.

Zippo Songs is a song cycle of poems written by Vietnam-era American GIs and engraved on their Zippo lighters. The texts are shrewd, funny, profound, imaginative, crisp. As an example, here's a snippet from one poem that seems to summarize, in an incredibly cogent way, the American experience in Vietnam:

We are the unwilling
Led by the unqualified
Doing the unnecessary
For the ungrateful

An amazing vocalist, Theo Bleckmann, sang the Zippo Songs. At once ethereal and soldierly, Bleckmann's vocal performance was the talk of the theater at intermission. And it's what my friends and I talked about during an after-concert debriefing over beer, wine, and Italian food. I've been checking Bleckmann's website out tonight, and I'll be investigating his CDs soon. In a single night, I developed a real music-crush on him....

If you're interested in Zippo Songs, and you ought to be, check out this NPR story from 2004. On that same page, you can listen to three of the songs, performed by Bleckmann. Highly recommended.

The Ex and I separated in October 2004. I haven't written much about him here, and that probably seems odd. It seems odd to me. After all, we were together for six-and-a-half years. Plus, I've posted repeatedly about the Soulmate-Who-Got-Away (SWGA), the man I fell for twice—once before I ever met the Ex and once after our separation.

But SWGA is probably the man I'll always think of as the love of my life. He's been the "problem" I needed to resolve for the past couple of years, so I've written about him. I haven't had the same need to write about the Ex, I guess.

That said, I absolutely loved the Ex, too. (And I still do.) It was a different kind of love, of course—a more adult, less dizzying kind of love. When I was with SWGA, I always felt like I was under the influence of some powerful chemical. With the Ex, it seemed like we'd used our brains and decided to be together. Unfortunately, it just didn't always seem like we'd necessarily made a good decision....

Anyway, a year ago this past Wednesday (yup, on Halloween), the Ex got married. To a woman. I passed through some of the usual your-ex-is-moving-on feelings when he told me. I was jealous that he'd found someone else, and so easily. I was miffed that I hadn't found someone else. I knew it meant he'd never play a large role in my life again. Ever.

I also passed through some fairly unusual your-ex-is-moving-on feelings. Was the Ex straight? Had he been straight when we were together? Had I been an experiment? Did his new life cast our six-plus years in a different light?

I eventually got a grip, though. Although the Ex had self-identified as gay when we met, I knew he'd dated women—and not all that long ago. So he probably wasn't 100% gay. But he definitely wasn't 100% straight, either. When I really thought about our time together, I knew we'd had something. I knew he'd been attracted to me. I knew he'd loved me. I was no experiment.

I wasn't invited to the wedding, and I definitely wouldn't have wanted to go. The Ex and I were right, I suppose, to separate. But it just made no sense to me that he'd moved on so quickly. And I certainly didn't think he should spend the rest of his life as a straight man. I hoped he hadn't trapped himself in a miserable life. I wanted him to be happy, but I just didn't see how this marriage would work for a lifetime.

A year later, I feel pretty much the same.

When I think about the Ex's wedding—and I guess I'll think about it every Halloween now—I think of "Your Sister Cried," a song written by Fred Eaglesmith (and covered beautifully by Mary Gauthier). I follow along with the song, imagining that I went to the Halloween wedding, with the Ex's sister, both of us knowing that something terribly wrong had happened:

Well, I stared out of the windshield into the rain so light
And I turned on my dims, and somebody flashed me their brights
And I reached over and turned the radio way down low
Your sister cried all the way home

Lightning crashed, and the road shone like a mirror
A dog came out of the ditch, then he disappeared
And I remembered a conversation we once had on the phone
Your sister cried all the way home

I'll never know how you got into such a mess
Why do the bridesmaids all have to wear the same dress?
Everybody said you looked real good
But I think you looked stoned

Your sister cried all the way home
Your sister cried all the way home
Your sister cried all the way home
Your sister cried all the way home

Tonight, I miss the Ex.

When I was a kid, growing up in rural northeastern Oklahoma, I would look through atlases and play with my globe, imagining all the exotic places I'd visit when I grew up. As I've mentioned before, during that time, I developed a real crush on New Zealand. But I dreamed of lots of other places, too: Denmark, Uruguay, Liechtenstein.

And the Faroe Islands.

The Faroes are a group of islands between the Norwegian Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean. They're sort of midway between Iceland, Scotland, and Norway. Although officially a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, the Faroes are mostly autonomous. Fewer than 50,000 people live in the Faroes, and the economy is dominated by the fishing industry. The Faroes also have their fair share of sheep.

I know all that, by the way, because of the various term papers I wrote in school about the Faroe Islands. (I was a quirky kid, ok?) And, oh, because I just glanced at the Wikipedia entry for the Faroes.

Anyway, at some point along the way, I started to be interested in Faroese pop music. (I'm a quirky adult, ok?) For a relatively sparsely populated place, the Faroes have produced a lot of good pop music. These days, I'm listening to good, recent albums from Eivør Pálsdóttir, a rootsy balladeer; Páll Finnur Páll, a rock band with a social conscience; and Teitur Lassen, a singer-songwriter.

Of the three, Teitur, as he's known, may be the most accessible (and most familiar) to American ears. His debut album, 2003's Poetry & Airplanes, was amazingly accomplished, and it attracted the attention of John Mayer, who championed the album. Teitur's lyrics are smart, and his English seems to be better than mine. Plus, he has a real way with melancholy, and that's always appealing (to the lovelorn me, anyway). Teitur's second album, 2006's Stay Under the Stars, was also quite good.

This year, Teitur released Káta Hornið, his first album in Faroese. The album is available on iTunes, and I've really been enjoying it. If you're adventurous, or even just curious about what Faroese sounds like, I'd recommend it. Now there's a video for "Ongir Pengar," one of the songs on Káta Hornið. Directed by Marianna Mørkøre and Maria Arnell, it was filmed at an abandoned salt silo in the Faroes. I think the video is an awfully cool piece of work.

When Assassins, the Stephen Sondheim musical, opened off-Broadway in 1990, I was intrigued. How could it work? Would audiences really respond to a musical in which the principal characters were presidential assassins (or would-be assassins)? What would these characters have to say? How could the show not be perverse and macabre?

There were a lot of other skeptics, of course, and that iteration of the show didn't make it to Broadway. I did purchase the cast recording, though, and I fell for it. The music—propelled by a sort of carnival theme—stayed with me. And just as importantly, I suppose, I decided that the characters had quite a bit to say. About disenchantment and loss. About social ills. About what America looks like from a very particular, skewed point of view.

When a new production 0f Assassins finally made it to Broadway in 2004, I really wanted to be there. Neil Patrick Harris (née Doogie Howser, M.D.) played Lee Harvey Oswald! But I just never got my act together, and soon Assassins was gone. I'll be kicking myself for that for a long time.... Once again, though, I picked up the cast recording. The music still worked for me. (For what it's worth, I prefer the recording of the 1991 Off-Broadway cast to the recording of the 2004 Broadway revival cast. On either, check out the bizarre "Ballad of Guiteau," with its infectious refrain of "I am going to the Lordy.")

So when the Arden Theatre, one of Philly's best companies, announced that it was going to open its 2007-08 season with Assassins, I was psyched. And on Thursday night, two friends and I caught a performance. If you're in Philly, I highly recommend the show. I'm sure the cast—with an exception or two—wasn't quite Broadway-level, but I smiled, enjoyed the music, and found myself experiencing the peculiar, startling brand of Americana championed by Assassins.

Two of the actors really appealed to me. Mary Martello ably provided comic relief with her ditzy Sara Jane Moore (one of two would-be assassins of Gerald Ford). But it was Scott Greer as Sam Byck—the angry, Santa-suited would-be assassin of Richard Nixon—that I'll best remember. In one of the best scenes in the musical, Byck tape records a message to Leonard Bernstein, telling the musical giant that what the world really needs is more love songs. Greer's Byck is just a regular fella, sort of(!), but one who is profoundly and palpably both angry and vulnerable. What the world really needs is more actors like Scott Greer.

Assassins is edgy and wonderful, and I'm glad I—finally—had a chance to experience it.

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