I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: KELSEY LU-“Pushin Against the Wind” (2019).

The Kelsey Lu album has a song produced by Skrillex, and I was really surpirsed at how gentle the first song on the album was.  I was listening on Spotify and the second song started.

I was astonished how much the song sounded like a 70’s (British) folk song.

“Pushin Against the Wind” opens with a quiet, simple guitar melody.  Kelsey sings softly over the top.  The thing that sets it apart happens about a minute in when the tone changes.  She sings slightly faster and this bridge is punctuated by chunky percussion accents.  But those modern sounds are sparingly used, and this song feels delightfully timeless.

The song never gets all that big, but the end pulls the sound back even further to a simple cello and xylophone melody as she sings over the top.

This song is quite enchanting.

[READ: May 1, 2019] “The Swim Team”

This is a very short story (two pages) about the narrator living in a small town called Belvedere when she was twenty-two. The town was so small it wasn’t even a town–just houses near a gas station.

The citizens of the town thought her name was Maria and she was overwhelmed by the task of correcting people.

She knew three people: Elizabeth, Kelda and Jack Jack. (“I am not completely sure about the name Kelda, but that’s what it sounded like and that’s the sound I made when I called her name”).  They were all in their eighties at least.

There are no bodies of water or pools in Belvedere, but “Maria” gave the three of them swimming lessons.  None of the three of them could swim, and when Maria said she used to swim on her high school team, they asked her to be their coach.

She filled bowls with water and had them lay on her kitchen floor.  She  put their faces in the water to learn how to breathe.  She told them that’s how Olympic swimmers trained when they had no water nearby.  (“Yes yes yes, this was a lie”).

She taught them all the strokes she knew and soon Jack Jack was actually moving across the floor.

This tale is book ended with this detail: “This is the story I wouldn’t tell you when I was your girlfriend.  You kept asking and asking, and your guesses were so lurid and specific.  Was I a kept woman?”

It ends with her saying that she had a very different identity in Belvedere, “that’s why I couldn’t tell you.”

This all comes up because she ran into you three hours ago and you seemed very happy.