SOUNDTRACK: THE HEAD AND THE HEART-Sasquatch Music Festival, May 28, 2011 (2011).
This is the fourth live recording from The Head and the Heart that NPR offers. Not bad for a band with only one album out. This set finds the band even more confident and relaxed (despite their genuine excitement at playing the festival). The band sounds fantastic and I’ve really grown to appreciate the female harmonies on most of the songs now (I’ve not always liked them on every song).
This set has two as yet unrecorded songs in it (one of them was listed as untitled). There’s some banter between the band and the fans (the band is nothing if not jovial) including a great story about how someone in the band went to Sasquatch the year before and swore he wouldn’t remove his backstage pass wrist band until The Head and The Heart band played Sasquatch. I like to imagine there was ceremonial wrist band cutting ceremony on stage, but that is lost in the audio version. Of course the story would be better if it was two or three years later, but it’s still a pretty good one. [See the Five Dials review below for a similar story!]
I found the sound quality of the show to be less than perfect. The sounds are a bit muddied. I don’t blame the band. The Sasquatch venue may be beautiful (so many performers comment on it, I’d love to see the view) but I suspect that maybe the audio was less than stellar.
Nonetheless, The Head and the Heart continue to amaze in a live setting.
[READ: July 3, 3011] Five Dials Number 14
If Five Dials 13, The Festival Issue, was a double live CD, jam-packed with photos and stories and all kinds of wonderment, Five Dials Number 14 is an EP. Even though it contains only one item, it’s more than a single, because the item is long and a lot is packed into it. And that ends my metaphor.
One of the fun things about Five Dials is that it can be whatever length it wants to be. Many magazines offer double issues, but they never offer tiny issues afterwards. And sometimes it’s nice to have a short issue that you can enjoy leisurely, without having to sift through filler.
So this issue consists of exactly two items: Craig Taylor’s introduction and the nobel prize acceptance speech by Orhan Pamuk.
CRAIG TAYLOR-A Letter from the Editor: On Fathers Sons and Skateboards
Taylor doesn’t explain why this issue is so short (and I respect that). Rather he talks about witnessing a scene on the subway where a father and son had a heated argument. It began as a kind of spectacle and then turned uncomfortable for the viewers. This ties in perfectly to Pamuk’s speech which is all about his father. The Skateboard in the title refers to the illustrations. Lauren Simkin Berke paints beautiful skateboard decks.
ORHAN PAMUK-My Father’s Suitcase (translated by Maureen Freely)
This speech was presented to the Nobel Committee in 2006. Pamuk has written many books in Turkish (he was born in Istanbul). The beginning of this letter talks about what it is like to be a writer from a non-Western country where Western literature is the norm. But the more personal, and more powerful, section of the speech comes when he talks about his father.
Pamuk’s father always wanted to be a writer but never officially pursued it. Two years before he died, his father left him a suitcase full of those writings. He never submitted them anywhere for consideration, but wrote notebooks and other things. When he dropped off the suitcase, he asked that Orhan not open it until he was dead. Orhan agonized over this for quite some time. He wanted to see what his father wrote but he was afraid to. He was afraid to learn that his father might really be a writer.
The end of the speech travels further back in time to when Orhan finished his first novel. He couldn’t wait to show it to his father whose opinion he trusted implicitly. His father read it and [moving spoiler alert]:
he told me that one day I would win the prize that I am here to receive with such great happiness.
Good stuff!
And here’s the details about the release of this issue.
I Just Read About That... 
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