SOUNDTRACK: JOSH RITTER with AMANDA SHIRES and JASON ISBELL-Tiny Desk Concert #896 (September 27, 2019).
I enjoyed Josh Ritter’s previous Tiny Desk Concert. I liked his voice and found his lyrics to be quite thoughtful.
For this Tiny Desk he is accompanied by “musical soulmates,” Amanda Shires on fiddle and Jason Isbell on acoustic guitar who both play on Josh’s 2019 album Fever Breaks.
The three songs he plays in this concert are even more thoughtful, they are also pointed, powerful and painful. The songs are not enjoyable, exactly. They are accomplishing something other than joy.
As the blurb says
Honestly, it was a draining concert with challenges to who we are and who, as a country and a people, we wish to be.
The music is quiet and subdued and are there to lift up the lyrics, which are clearly the most important part of these songs.
“All Some Kind of Dream” is
filled with frustrations regarding the treatment of refugees, immigration, politics and our hearts…. He sings, “There was a time when we were them / Just as now they all are we / Was there an hour when we took them in? / Or was it all some kind of dream?”
Every word his sings is one that should change the way Americans view what is going on, and yet some will never be convinced by lyrics like
I saw the children in the holding pens
I saw the families ripped apart
And though I try I cannot begin
To know what it did inside their hearts
There was a time when we held them close
And weren’t so cruel, low, and mean
And we did good unto the least of those
Or was it all some kind of dream?
Ritter took a moment to encourage everyone to fight back
When the song ended, Josh stared into the NPR crowd. “I feel like the big thing that we all have to fight against is this notion that we’re not all human beings,” he said. “And they’re trying to break us in every number of ways, all different little groups, and that we have no power, but we have power!”
The next song “The Torch Committee,” is slightly more cryptic in construction but hardly cryptic in intent
Wait, suppose that we untie
Your hands to sign upon this line
To pledge that you have always been
A patriot and citizen
Please ignore the legalese
Lawyers are my right now see
Why we’re so happy that you came
Appendix three and list of names
It features a nice solo from Isbell and a raw violin solo from Shires.
They ended the set with a new song,”The Gospel of Mary.”
This is a long song (). Like the other two it is something of a story song which “imagines Joseph, Mary and their child as refugees.” The verses are interspersed with solos from Isbell and Shires.
As the applause faded Josh hugged his bandmates, thanked the crowd, smiled and said, “America, we love you, but you’ve gotta change!”
Ritter is an amazing songwriter and I hope that these songs hit the ears of those who need to hear them.
[READ: August 9, 2019] Labor Days Volume 2
Book 2 picks up a little over a month after Book 1.
Bags and Vanessa are still on a quest for the Face of History (which suspiciously keeps leading them to bars). But they know that the Face of History is a leader of a vast conspiracy. And of course Rick Stryker is hanging about being rather useless and hilarious as always.
Vanessa is annoyed with Bags for dawdling and wasting their time. Bags is annoyed at Vanessa because she keeps hurting people in extraordinarily violent ways. She seems to have no compunction about doing the violence she does.
A chance discovery sets them aboard a ship. The captain makes Bags do grunt work and makes Vanessa something of a captain’s aide (much to Bags’ dismay).
But Bags is also being visited by someone in a dream state. Or a blackout state–it’s not always clear which. She is a naked woman who looks a bit like Bags himself (same bulbous nose anyway). She tells him that she has sent him on this path. And on this quest he, Benton Bagswell, is to become the new Face of History.
Through some more violence and explosions and more traipsing through Europe (Paris, this time), they run into Bathory, one of the women form the previous book who was wronged by Rick Stryker and who has since become a warrior. She’s now going by Hippolyta.
She explains that she wanted a permanent revolution by creating a kingdom that would be based on a state of permanent turmoil, with no written laws: “a society that would hurtle man and woman alike heedlessly irretrievably hellishly into the future.”
“Never caught on though, eh?”
“Not even slightly.”
The four of them begin to work together until they encounter F.I.S.T.T.T. the group who wishes to smash “the hegemony of the now.”
After all of their bouncing around history, Bags and Victoria finally speak their feelings about each other:
I just hope you know that even though you’re batshit crazy and even though I’ve been an awful not-quite-boyfriend that I like you quite an awful lot.
Aww. I like you too even if you are a drunken lout.
So sweet.
So why then after such a nice confession, does he sneak out on her? Because he thinks he can handle everything on his own. Silly boy. He’s not even the hero of his own story.
As the story comes to an end (for there are only two books) Fate comes back one more time to tell Bags about his destiny. But Fate has forgotten two things about Benton Bagswell.
They are pretty funny things.
As is the final panel which is set in Bags’ subconscious “which is, as you know, all about freedom.” (There’s lots of nudity is what they;re getting at).
This story was twisted and hilarious with terrific art by Rick Lacy.
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