SOUNDTRACK: THE INNOCENCE MISSION-Tiny Desk Concert #807 (November 28, 2018).
I bought the third Innocence Mission album, glow, back in 1995. The single “Bright as Yellow” was (and is) absolutely gorgeous. It was a lovely, dream pop album. But they took four years to make their next album and I guess I forgot all about them.
So what a delightful surprise to hear and see that they are still playing music together in their more or less original lineup. After glow, their drummer left and they continued as a trio without drums.
The three songs they play are different in style, but not intent from “Bright As Yellow.” “Bright” has a hazy/dreamy electric guitar sound. These three song are gentle folk songs all on acoustic guitars.
The Innocence Mission, ever the most careful cultivators of quiet, encouraged us to come closer, to discover the “thing beautiful enough” in the moment it’s delivered.
They do not play “Bright as Yellow” (I wonder if they ever do anymore). Instead they play two new songs and one old song.
The trio — now three decades into its existence — bookends this performance with two songs from 2018’s Sun on the Square. “Green Bus” and “Light of Winter” thread the long and winding needle of Karen Peris’ evocative words with her husband Don Peris’ decorative-but-nuanced guitar and Mike Bitts’ deft bass lines.
“Green Bus” sounds a lot like the recorded version, but warmer, somehow. The end of the blurb says that Peris is a little under the weather. It makes her voice seem even more fragile, which somehow makes the lyrics and the song even more intimate.
In some of my favorite lyrics of the year, Karen Peris tangles the tender and the tempestuous:
And what could I bring you,
now in the meantime?
Fruit from the sunlight,
quartz from the bay?
And where will I find this,
perfect and wondrous?
I look into shops,
I slip into rain.
Between those newer songs, The Innocence Mission plays “Tomorrow on the Runway,” the opening cut from 2003’s Befriended. This song has a lovely guitar melody and Peris; delicate voice sounds wonderful.
Nursing a small cold, Peris’ voice slightly breaks when she sings, “Did you still leave the darkness without me? You’re always miles ahead” — but the humbling effect, however unintended, lingers in your being.
“Light of Winter” has a stunning chorus–the way the music weaves with her voice is gorgeous. The verses are quiet and subtle but the way that chorus comes us–wow.
It was great to hear them again, and I think they may need to get added to a nightly bedtime rotation..
[READ: December 13, 2018] “Time for Their Eyes to Adjust”
This is a story of a woman’s relationship with her father. A relationship that is strained and tested by many factors.
The narrator says she is 48, the same age her father was when she was born. She is aware of her parents’ time together, but mostly through hearsay:
you can never know much about other people’s lives, least of all your parents’, especially if your parents have made a point of turning their lives into stories that they then go on to tell with God-given ability of not caring in the least about what’s true and what’s not.
Her recollection of her parents is that she was his child and her child, but never their child. She spent a lot of time with her mother and then 1 month every year with him at Hammars, or Djaupadal (Sweden), as it was known in the old days.
He came to Hammars in 1965 and built a house. He is a filmmaker and they were shooting on the beach there. The narrator’s mother appeared in ten of his films, but they fell in love during the filming of that first one. The narrator can see the way he loves her in the way he filmed her.
But they never married and the narrator was born out of wedlock–a scandal in 1966. Although no one in her world seemed to mind–her father had eight children already. With women he did marry.
She and her mother moved away from Hammars when the girl was three. When when she was 8, she was sent back to Hammars every July so the mother could have some quiet time and to grow close to her father. The house was bigger–and would grow bigger every year.
He was actually dreading the girl’s arrival because he lived by many rules and needed her to obey them. But he soon grew to love the girl very much and looked forward to her every year. And the girl liked to stay there because her father’s rules were a structure she longed for. She had a hard time going back to her mother who was not structured and often just wanted peace and quiet so she could write.
The one thing everyone could agree upon about her father–he was punctual and he expected the same from everyone. He always arrived on time–except for the movies, which one needed to arrive at least 10 minutes early for–your eyes needed time to adjust to the darkness.
And so the narrator flashes forward to 2006, the one time she knows of that he was not punctual. And it freaked her out. There were no signs, no storm, no birds falling from the sky. But it felt like there should be.
Eventually two of her half-siblings arrived at Hammars too. Then in 1978 her father invited all nine of his children to Hammars for a visit. There was talk of all of the various ex-wives coming as well. But the girls’ mother wanted nothing to do with that. She didn’t like being between wife No 4 and No 5–what did that make her, 4 and a half?
The girl waited all day for the siblings to arrive–when they did she was so excited she ran up to the car. One of them, a tall man (and an airline plot) lifted her up in the air higher than she had ever been and it was wonderful.
Every day with her father a was a day with a film. When she visited every night at eight sharp they would climb into his office. He would pull out a white screen, turn off the lights and begin a film.
That flash forward is actually a flash back and as the story ends, more detail is filled in about that 2006 incident. She learns it was not in fact the first time he’s been late. Not at all.
This somewhat confusing story was translated from the Norwegian by Thilo Reinhard.
I Just Read About That... 
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