I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: TASH SULTANA-Tiny Desk Concert #610 (April 7, 2017).

Tash Sultana is a force of nature.  I’d heard her song “Jungle” a bunch of times on the radio before seeing this.  I thought it was interesting and kind of catchy with some cool guitar work.  But it never occurred to me that Sultana was doing the whole thing BY HERSELF!

For this Tiny Desk, she recreates that song (and two others) entirely by herself with loops and loops and effects and all kinds of good stuff.

As “Jungle” opens, Tash plays the guitar chords and loops them.  And then she plays the opening riff.  And loops it.  And then more riffs on top and loops them.  She creates a huge sound for about a minute and a half.  Then when all that sounds good, she starts playing the drum machine.

It’s so much fum watching her dance around her little area (barefoot, mind you) tapping pedals and setting effects on and off.  And when she starts soloing, she’s got a perpetually big smile on her face just really enjoying all of the work she;s doing and the sounds she’s making.

She finally starts singing and she’s got two microphones–the chorus gets the second microphone which has a processor and echo to totally change her sounds.

And then towards the end of the song she starts messing around with a solo and has all kinds of effects at hand for whichever part of the solo she’s doing, including a wild, ass-kicking, classic-rock style solo that all mellows out into  sweetly echoed section and a gentle guitar ending.  The song itself isn’t that complicated, but holy cow she packs so much into its 7 minutes.

So who the hell is Tash Sultana?

This 21-year-old Maltese-Australian got a guitar from her grandfather when she was three, she says, and has played it every day since. It’s astonishing to watch Sultana’s fluidity on her instrument, like a natural extension of her body. (She also plays bass, saxophone, trumpet, flute and more, but kept it “simple” at the Tiny Desk.) I thought I had a lot of energy — watching her bounce from guitar to drum machine to two separate microphones — and then hopping barefoot from looping pedal to effect pedal as she builds her songs was exhilarating and exhausting.

She says she wrote “Notion” when she was having a difficult time with myself… and someone else.

It opens with that her singing “oohs” into that processed mic and it sounds otherworldly.  And then again she jumps around from guitar to drum machine looping more and more.  Although it’s interesting that most of the song stays kind of mellow.  Her melody is very pretty and her voice is great.  The only trouble is it’s kind of hard to understand what she;s singing.  But its fun that she’s singing some of the song without playing anything else (it’s all being looped) and how intensely she sings it.

After playing the song for some 9 minutes, she hits some pedals and the just takes off on a wailing guitar solo.

“Blackbird” is very different–it’s all played on acoustic guitar.  There’s no looping.  She says she wrote this while in New Zealand.  She was wandering and got lost in a cave.

But acoustic doesn’t mean simple folk song.  She plays some great riffs with her right hand while hammering-on with her left hand. The part around 19:15 is just fascinating to watch.  She must have an alternate tuning as well because when she plays opens strings it sounds great (and it’s 12 string as well, so it sounds even more full).

After singing a few verses she plays an incredibly fast section.

There’s just so much going on, and I have no idea if all of that is part of the songs or if she’s just going off into her own world.

I was so impressed by this set that I just got tickets to her when she comes to the area in a few weeks.

[READ: January 31, 2017] “Mo Willems’s Funny Failures”

I have never really written about Mo Willems, even though my family loves his books (I’ve even got an autographed copy of one of them).

The Piggy and Gerald books are wonderful first readers (and are fun for adults too) and Pigeon is the best bad-tempered character around.

Since I like Rivka Galchen and post about just about everything she writes, I wanted to include this here.  It is a biographical essay based on a few interviews she had with Willems.

He says that his inspiration for making books he was thinking about Go Dog Go, (a book I think of often), particularly the part where the one dog asks the other “Do you like my hat,” and the other one says “I do not.”  He says that even at 7 he knew that the first dog should be saying “well screw you.”

The Elephant and Piggie books launched in 2007 and just ended in 2016.

Galchen says that when she first met Willems, she had her three-year old daughter with her.  When Willems waved at her, she began to cry.  “I understand,” he said, it’s a big appointment.  The first of many.”

She talks about how Willems’ book are funny because of word choice, timing and getting reactions just right.  Leonard the Terrible doesn’t just scare a kid named Sam, he scares “the tuna salad out of him.”

Willems says that writing easy readers is hard–you have the constraint of using only forty to fifty words.  They also have to be short and engaging and not rely on punch lines, because they need to be read over and over again: “You don’t listen to ‘A By Named Sue’ for the ending.”

Willem’s upbringing was pretty interesting.  He was brought up in New Orleans, an only child.  His father was a ceramicist and his mother was a corporate attorney.  His parents weren’t against him being an artist, but they didn’t want him to fail. “If you end up on the street, we’ll just walk part you, we won’t help,” he says his parents told him.  His parents deny this although they are estranged.

As such he says he didn’t like his childhood and feels that childhood in general sucks. He had an art teacher who tore up his cartoons in class.

While I enjoyed reading about him, I also appreciated learning about things that  I didn’t know he had done, like the animated film The Man Who Yelled (not for kids).

He says “the only way to get to make an animated film was to have already made an animated film” so he did interstitials at Nickelodeon–called The Off-Beats. He got a 22 minute Valentines Day special  and then the series Sheep in the Big City.

He also did standup comedy, wrote for television and rode a motorcycle through the streets of New York City.

Willems always felt like a failure, which may be why his books seem preoccupied with it–like the Pigeon who never gets to ride the bus.  He says that at Sesame Street they would have workshops on the importance of failure.

When she asked him if it felt strange to no longer be writing the elephant and piggie books. He says that the “What are you working on next” question is the worst–I hate that question. I want to say “Isn’t this good enough for you?”

Evidently he first did the pigeon books as a fun sketchbook to had out to friends at the end of the year.  His wife, Cher said it was meant to be a children’s book.  He disagreed.  But his agent shopped it around as a children’s book and the editor at Hyperion agreed that it was good.

He earned a Caldecott (rarely awarded to an author’s first work). A year later his first Knuffle Bunny book also won a Caldecott.

He says he doesn’t think he could write another pigeon book now.  Why?  He’s a monster!  His wants are unbounded, he finds everything unjust, everything against him, he’s moody, he’s selfish.   Of course I identify with that, but I’m glad that I can’t imagine writing him now.  I’m happy to be less like him.  I’ve mellowed out… I’m merely pessimistic.

He talks about how the Piggie & Gerald series morphed over the years. The characters changed a little bit and the color palette became brighter: “I would never have used the colors I used in ‘Slop!’ earlier in the series.  I just wasn’t ready.”

Galchen went to his book signing and watched as eighty children came up with piles of books.  He looked at one who was clearly nervous and said I only bite every fifth customer and you’re lets see–one, two , three, four–you’re safe. ”  Also, Willems has developed the ability to ink a piggies or a pigeon or a dinosaur into a book while not looking down at the page, so that he can look at and speak with the child who is there to see him.

The essay ends with her describing the reading she attended.  He says “any librarians or teachers in the audience today? Raise your hand.  Higher.  Higher”  He pauses, looks out.  “Now back and forth a little bit, to try to get my attention.”  The first time I saw this I was waiting for him to suggest that we all clap.  But that’s not how jokes work.  Willems just says, “well, now you see how it feels.”

Willems is a pretty dark guy (as many children’s book writers tend to be) but I love all of his books and can’t wait for more.