I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: NATALIE MERCHANT-Tiny Desk Concert #500 (January 12, 2016).

Natalie Merchant was supposed to appear on a Tiny Desk show in 2014, but she was ill on that day (she even tells the story of going to the hospital).  She had to cancel the entire tour.  Turns out we saw her on that tour a couple of days before she got sick!

When Sarah and I saw her we both remarked on how great her voice still sounded.  And it sounds great here too.  The same instantly recognizable voice from her albums with all of the power and inflection that she’s always had.

Although I still don’t understand where her speaking voice accent comes from (she’s from upstate New York after all).

“Motherland” (a 2001 song) she dedicates to the staff of NPR.  Her accompaniment is an acoustic guitar, upright bass and accordion and it works very well for this slow, rather sad song.

“Texas” is another pretty, slow song from her 2014 album which she was supposed to pay at the Tiny Desk show.  She says he most regretted missing the Tiny Desk show when she had to cancel her tour.  She had no idea the desk was not so tiny and that it could fit 1000 people standing around watching.

Then she plugs her new album, Paradise Is There: The New Tigerlily Recordings.  It is a reworking of her songs from Tigerlily (and there was a documentary that accompanied it (which they were filming when we saw her).  She plays “Cowboy Romance” from that album.  I don’t know the original (or I don’t recognize the song) but it sounds fine in this stripped down format.

Even though her songs are rather serious, she’s quite silly with the band and crew.  She emphasis “CONfiguRAtion of muSICians” before introducing “Cowboy Romance.”

Everyone assumes she will play only three songs (the standard), but she has a special treat planned.  She says that she heard a story on NPR about how office workplaces would benefit from singing together.  And they are all trapped with her.  So she says they are going to sing a Protestant hymn that she recently found in a songbook in the library.

She says that she and the guitarist are Catholic, the accordionist is Jewish (from Israel) and the bassist has no religion.  he says he’s from the West Coast (she jokes that he’s from a cult in Oregon).  Then when she asks the guitarist what key it’s in and he says, “What song? ” to which everyone laughs because she never mentioned the title.

It’s a lovely old song which she teaches to the whole room.  After the first verse, she says she approves of the group sing-along and says it should be a weekly thing.  I love the way they split the screen to show the whole staff singing along. It’s quite lovely and the staff’s accompaniment is really pretty.

This is a delightful show and a very intimate performance by Natalie Merchant.

[READ: January 12, 2016] “Learning to Fly Part 2”

I really enjoyed Part 1 of this essay, but as often happens to me with broken up pieces, I forgot about the next part until long after.  So here it is over six months since I read Part 1 finally getting around to Part 2 (but at least I have Parts 3 and 4 with me so I’ll be finishing them up soon).

After several lessons, Ferris is still having trouble with his landing–he seems to always be coming up short (which would mean a fiery crash if he were actually flying).  In fact, his instructor notices that he does the same bad habits most of the time.  Even Ferris notices, which leads the instructor to state, “What interests me is why you would say that [what he is doing wrong] and not do anything about it.”

So his instruction has him practice on a flight simulator to get the hang of landing–which Ferris says is almost as nerve-wracking as the real thing.

He says there is feud between his will and his intellect.  His intellect wants to learn to fly but his will knows that planes crash and he will die if it does.

His instructor says that the closest anyone comes to dying during a flight lesson is on the drive to the airport (and Ferris is driving on Rte 80, so yes indeed).  Although intellectually he also knows that he doesn’t know enough about flying to actually fly a plane so he knows he is crazy for trying.   (He lists a paragraph of things he has to keep in mind just to keep flying straight).

Then the teacher asks if they should do stalls.

“You can stall the airplane?”
“Of course you can.”
“And then what?”
“Then you recover,” he says.
“You can recover from a stall?”
“I certainly hope so.”
“And you stall the plane while inside it?”…
“Where else would you be?”

And then Ferris learns how to fly up into the sky at a steep angle to stall out the plane.  This is done at a similar angle to take off so that pilots can learn what to do if you stall during take off–but you are practicing it from much higher so you don’t crash.

All this time, Ferris has been sitting absolutely still in is seat fearing that anything he does might cause it to stall accidentally.  But now he is supposed to do it on purpose.  Which he does, and then resumes after a silent glide.

Ferris concludes this part by saying that he eventually learned how to do a touch and go, where you bring the plane in, touch the runway with the tires and then take off again (something that our jet had to do twice on our way home from our last vacation which was terrifying, but somehow reassuring to know they practice this).  Ferris masters this and then his instructors tells him that he (the instructor) didn’t touch anything (steering, knobs–nothing) for the whole flight out there.

What will happen in parts three and four?