SOUNDTRACK: MILCK-Tiny Desk Concert #752 (June 8, 2018).
I know of MILCK the same way anyone who has heard of her knows her: from her performing her song “Quiet” during the Women’s March On Washington last year.
MILCK is the music of Connie Lim:
Before the concert, we talked a lot with her and her production team about how to best share her deeply affecting, anthemic pop songs. Should we have a choir? Maybe a string quartet? Or should she bring out all her gear and perform as a one-woman band, live looping everything with backing tracks, to recreate the album experience? In the end she chose the simplest (and perhaps most fitting arrangement for an artist often billed as a one-woman riot): just MILCK, by herself, with a keyboard.
MILCK has a great powerful voice and she writes some very pretty melodies.
The beautiful soaring “Black Sheep” is restrained in this version. Her voice sounds lovely but this song needs to soar. Nevertheless, her positive message is undeniable. Indeed:
the ultimate message in “Black Sheep,” like pretty much all of MILCK’s music, is that you are not alone. It’s a celebration of universal, unconditional love, something the whole world could stand to hear and get behind. These songs also resonate so profoundly because they come from a genuine and heartfelt place – from MILCK’s own experiences and not a corporate office churning out scientifically proven pop formulas
Next came “Quiet” which she says she wrote as a healing song. It has become an anthem for women and men around the world. She laughs that this song pulled her out of her own emo isolation. It’s wonderful how clear and powerful her voice is on this version of the song.
She encourages everyone to take a deep breath which reminds herself how shallowly she breathes. She was comfortable being emo and then complains that “Oh My My” is “infuriatingly joyful,” it reminds us that even if we suffer there is still room for joy.
The verses are spoken/sung with this amusing start
Thought I’d be 50 still alone chain-smoking cigarettes at a bar
talking shit about my married friends to my single friends
Mid song she annotates a line that she was singing songs in hotel lobbies–covering songs by Adele and Jason Mraz and now she is opening for Mraz, so she gets to tell his audience that she used to be ignored singing his songs in hotel lobbies and now she opens for him.
It’s a lovely happy song, with some pop leanings although she keeps it on this side of good taste.
[READ: February 7, 2018] “My First Real Home”
This story was in Vicky Swanky is a Beauty which I read so long ago I don’t remember. Of course these stories are so short I don’t remember most of them anyway.
For a Diane Williams story, I felt like this one was actually pretty enjoyable and pretty understandable.
Of course, once again, it ended and I had to double-check to make sure I hadn’t lost the last page.
This is about a man who sharpens knives . He did a great job and the narrator discovered him because Tommy used to use him and Ernie’s have hit the chain saws. Or the man’s name was Ernie and he would do Tommy’s chainsaws. It’s not clear.
She brought her knives to him. And she explains in clear, plain simple English how the process worked–a box with a pen where you wrote down your order.
Then she went to get the knives back and for some reason he showed her his lawn.
And then the peculiar unsatisfying Williams ending:
I was sad because whenever I got there I was very happy.
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