I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: COURTNEY BARNETT-Tiny Desk Concert #348 (April 14, 2014).

The first time I hear Courtney Barnett’s “Avant Gardener,” I fell in love with it.  A nearly spoken word almost slacker style vocal delivery of some really funny and very clever lyrics.  Plus a catchy chorus.  Swoon.

Then WXPN started playing it to death and I got a little tired of it. Thankfully, they found another track on the album (two eps together with the delightfully odd name The Double EP: A Sea Of Split Peas).  And that proved to be just as good.  Then I saw her live on a late night show and her live delivery was different and even more compelling.

In this Tiny Desk Concert, she plays the guitar differently on “Avant Gardener”, bringing in some new textures behind her accented Australian voice.  The second song “History Eraser” is another song from the EPs.  She has mentioned loving Nirvana, and I can see a similar style of guitar playing in this one.   The chorus reminds me of Liz Phair’s “Flower” which is no bad thing.

The final song is a new one about a suburb near Melbourne called Preston.  The song is called “Depreston,” and its about house hunting.  It’s another interesting story telling song with a great melody.

Barnett doesn’t do staggeringly original music, but it’s all really enjoyable.  And it’s fun to see just her and her guitar in this setting.

[READ: June 11, 2014] “The Emerald Light in the Air”

This story begins as one thing (which I liked) and slowly turns into something else (which I also liked but not as much).

As it opens, we see a man driving his father’s (and his father’s before that) Mercedes in Charlottesville.  There had been thunderstorms that afternoon and one of the roads is blocked by a large tree.

What I liked about the story was the way his present (driving, planning his dinner for his date tonight) was interspersed almost on a paragraph by paragraph basis with moments from his past.  The past is brought up by the present events–he is having a date with Mary Doan, the woman he lost his virginity to.  They happened to run into each other after all of these years.  Humorously, she didn’t remember him, even though she was a huge part of his life.

He is also thinking about his ex-wife.  He has some of her drawings and paintings in the trunk of his car.  He’s planning on taken them to the dump so they’re out of his house.   So he thinks back to their days as young artists together.  He also thinks back to the days when he was suicidal, and how now he carries a gun but only for his art, not for suicide.

Back in the present, he has moved the trunk of the tree (and hurt his hands doing so).  But as he drives past, the edge of the road crumbles and he winds up sliding down the bank.  And I enjoyed the way the story matter of factly flashed back between his wife and her painting and his situation on the side of the road.  I imagined the audacity of him crashing down the side of the hill while he thinks about his past.  But no, there are other things planned for him.

Indeed, he can’t sit there for ever.  But as he tries to get out of the car, it slides further down the bank and lands fairly gently at the bottom of the ravine.  Since he knows no one will see him, he decides to drive.  And so he does, crossing over a creek and going through a run-off tunnel.  Until, eventually, he gets stuck on a large rock.

As he’s contemplating his situation, a young boy with a flashlight comes running down the hill asking if he’s the doctor (and telling him that he really shouldn’t drive in the creek).  The man says he’s not a doctor but the boy is so frantic that he just follows the boy up to the small shack at the side of the hill.  The shack is small and run down.  It creaks and squeaks as the man and the boy cross the floor.

When they arrive at the house, he learns that the woman has cancer.  She is in a lot of pain, and they really hope the he (the doctor) can do something.  Soon enough the husband realizes that he is not a doctor, but the rest of the story did not go in the direction I expected.

The end line of the story makes me wonder if he is supposed to have learned anything from the episode, but it seems more like this fascinating incident is just another thing that happened to him, while he’s getting ready for dinner.