I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SAMPHA-Tiny Desk Concert #606 (March 21, 2017).

The name Sampha sounded sorta familiar.  I see that he is a producer to the stars (Kayne, Drake).  He’s also a musician in his own right.  The blurb says “Sampha’s music is more feel everything than feel good, which is why his fans hold him so close to their hearts.”

Sampha plays three songs:

The vulnerability on his debut, Process, isn’t hard to dissect, but can be downright agonizing to digest; his immediate family has been riddled with disease and ailments, with both his parents succumbing to cancer. Process finds Sampha interpreting this complicated emotional prism — and confronting his own mortality through it.

Sampha stopped by the NPR offices to perform 3 tracks from Process. The result is a Tiny Desk Concert as intimate as it gets (and that’s saying something). It’s just him, a piano and these heart-wrenching songs that we reckon double as coping mechanisms.

“Plastic 100°C” is played on the keyboard with all kinds of trippy sounds introducing the main song.  I like the main riff, which is full of interesting minor key notes.  I’m not really sold on his voice though, which is kind of nebulous here.  I’m not sure what his recording sounds like, but the starkness of this song makes me surprised that it is popular.  It’s quite long as well–almost 7 minutes.

The final two songs are on piano

“(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano” is an ode to the piano and his reflecting on how important his mother was in his life.  “Blood On Me” is an intense song with some intense singing.  Neither one strikes me as being particularly poppy or marketable, but he clearly has found his audience.

[READ: January 20, 2017] “Quarantine”

The story was so interesting, both in content and pacing.  I really enjoyed it a lot…until the end.

The story follows Bridget.  As it opens, we learn that she lived in Barcelona fora year.  She stayed with college friends, then she sublet from a guy named Marco.  She slept with Bernadette and her roommate Laurie–but not at the same time–although the thing with Laurie upset Bernadette happy.  Then she did something stupid in Marco’s apartment and got kicked out of there as well.  She moved to a cheap hotel until her co-worker Angela rescued her.

Angela was from Vancouver, “and some dewy freshness that Bridget associated with the West Coast seemed to cling to her always, even when she was sleep-deprived or drunk.”  Bridget is also from Canada.

Angela was dating a German man named Hans, or maybe Anders.  They invited her to crash with them–they seemed to enjoy taking care of people.  But then one morning, Hans/Anders told Bridget that he and Angela were getting married and moving back to Canada.  She was so mad she refused to go to their going away party.

Six months later Bridget herself was back in Canada because her father was doing very poorly.  He lived for about a year–but in very poor health. He was so bad that Bridget wished he would die–for his own sake.  When he finally died, her mother asked what she would be doing now–Bridget felt like she was being kicked out again.

She reached out to Angela and found out that she hadn’t gotten married after all.  She’d moved to Edmonton to become a masseuse.  So she invited Bridget to visit, but Bridget didn’t.

Instead, Bridget stayed, went to law school and made new friends.  She got engaged and was pretty happy.

Then she got invited to Angela’s wedding.

She wasn’t going to go until Angela called and insisted that she come, so she agreed.  Bridget told her fiancee that they probably wouldn’t have a good time at this old old friend’s wedding.  But they had a great time.  Angela’s husband, Charles, was a Nigerian cardiac surgeon and his family was raucous and witty.

I love that in the next paragraph we have jumped almost 5 years without comment.  Bridget and Sam moved to Ottawa and had two children.  Bridget was by now exhausted from work and children and decided to look up Angela on Facebook.  Angela was living in Vancouver with Charles and their beautiful son.   They caught up and then Angela said she was coming to Ottawa for a conference.

They met up at the conference and Bridget asked what it was for.   Bridget explained that it was a conference for people with her illness, which Bridget had never heard of.  It was a set of diffuse symptoms–fatigue, muscle aches, cognitive impairment.  Doctors were perplexed.  And so was Bridget because Angela seemed fine.

They promised to keep in better touch, but didn’t.  And the next time Bridget checked, Angela was compeletely off of social media–there was no trace. She wrote a letter to her and Angela wrote back.  She had gotten divorced and had decided that her symptoms were caused by an allergy to electricity.  So she moved to a cabin with a wood stove and candles.

But her ex-husband called Bridget soon after to tell her that Angela was doing very poorly.  He still cared for her but hoped that Angela’s “best friend” could help her.

I loved how this story started out as a tale of young woman who wanted no attachments–living free and easy in a foreign country, and turned into a story of a woman caring for someone who seemed so helpless.

But the ending was less than satisfying.  I didn’t want Bridget to “cure” Angela or anything–that would be too magical.  But the ending focused on Bridget as she was dealing with her empty nest.  And while it was nice to kind of come full circle to her having no committeemen again, it just felt like it gave up too easily on the other person.