I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: NICK HAKIM-Tiny Desk Concert #706 (February 14, 2018).

I thought the name Nick Hakim sounded familiar, but I had forgotten it was from an NPR SXSW Lullaby in which Hakim was draped in fairy lights.

In this Tiny Desk, his music seems much more jazzy.  He has an abundance of instruments, as well.  Two guitars (him and a lead guitarist) and a keyboardist who also has a piano at hand.  It lends itself to a lot of different sounds.

“Cuffed” has a slinky bass line and I like that the lead guitar makes a sound like rim shots almost.  I really enjoyed that the same guitar later plays a muted guitar solo.  Even the keyboard solo is a little trippy and wobbly.

As the blurb says, the music of Nick Hakim occupies a space and time that is faintly out of this world. The guitars and machinery that make up his music feel slightly askew, as though someone slowed down the tape machine every once in a while. His raspy voice feels drenched in a cavernous space.

Hakim’s songs seem very personal (“exploring the quietude of inner thoughts”), like this couplet:

she taught me to make love with patience not just thinking about myself/
to really feel the other person, oh my love, what would I do without you

“Needy Bees” slows things down to piano and a jazzy guitar with mellow lyrics like “let me live inside of your mind.”  And as the blurb notes, the music feels warm and spacious.  Again weird and wobbly guitar solo comes out of the middle of the song.

I find the way he sings “Roller Skates” to be comically restrained.  I imagine it could come across as really passionate but it seems odd the way he holds back some of his opening vocal sounds.   The sprinkling piano and cool bass breakdown in the middle of the song are terrific.

I didn’t like him at first but by the end I was getting into it.

[READ: November 15, 2017] “Bad Dog”

Not only does the dog die in this story, it is horrifically killed.

I gave away that ending, something I am loathe to do.  But you can probably  thank me for not having to read that particular piece of horror.

Having gotten that out of the way, I have to admit that this story was really compelling and craftily written.

At first I wasn’t so sure what was going on.  A lot of names are tossed out with little context.  But it soon becomes apparent that the narrator’s daughter Abby (now 31) and her husband Tim own a dog which they adopted from Tim’s friend who was moving.  They adopted it because they assumed they would not be having children.  But now they do.  A girl named Rose.

The narrator tells us all about the dog and the various problems and neuroses it has.  And then states:

“I’m telling you about this dog because I’m going to kill it.”

Why?  Because the dog has bitten Rose twice.  No one has seen it happen and they assume the dog is not vicious, just old and confused.  But the narrator is hearing none of it.

His daughter hires a Dog whisperer who basically says it’s all the humans faults (he hates to imagine what that charlatan cost).

And then the guy sets out on his plan to get rid of the dog–under cover of a flash rainstorm.

Why did I say the story was well done?  Because of the way the narrator stays perfectly focused and detached in everything. It’s clear that he loves his family and his grandchild.  But he’s also a pretty amoral person.  Allowing rationality to override any kind of emotion.

Such that when he gets to Walmart to buy the stuff to kill the dog with, he sees  a special on cases of Diet Coke

but I hesitate since I don’t remember whether it’s Zero or One or None that Stevie prefers these days and I don’t want to actively encourage a bad tendency and then I think, “He’s thirty-four, let him buy his own.”

That sums up the narrator pretty well.  Except for the fact that he can kill a dog.

I won’t spoil the very ending; some of you probably don’t care about the ending at this point either.

I’d certainly read something more by this guy for the writing, but it’s hard to get past the content.