I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: BJ THE CHICAGO KID-Tiny Desk Concert #907 (November 6, 2019).

At first I thought I might enjoy this Tiny Desk Concert because the first song “East Side High 2012 & Forever” was kind of soulful.  There’s some great guitar work from Jairus “Jmo” Mozee and some grooving bass from Joe Cleveland.   The song ends after a bout a minute and a half.

And I really liked the bass line that started the next song, “Good Luv’n.”  Although I didn’t like BJ’s singing style as much on this one.

I also didn’t realize that he was playing a huge medley of songs:

BJ the Chicago Kid took the roughly 15 minutes we generally allot for a Tiny Desk performance as a challenge. The 34-year old R&B mainstay used his moment at the desk to fit in as many of his most cherished songs as possible — Nine songs in 17 minutes to be exact.

I also had no idea that he was famous or had had a lengthy career.

To get the job done, BJ jumped around his 10-year discography, weaving deep cuts and covers from his early Pineapple Now-Laters days with contemporary cuts like “Church” off his major label debut, In My Mind, to heartfelt odes from his latest project, 1123. 

Both most of these songs fell into that sexy R&B singing style with vaguely (or explicitly vulgar lyrics).  “Aiight” has some nice twinkling keys from Delvin Brumfield.

“Church” has these fascinating lyrics: “she want to drink, do drugs, and have sex tonight, but I got church in the morning.”  I really like the addition of the violin from Peter Lee John on these songs–it definitely adds a new sound to R&B.

During “Love Inside” he tells Tony “Rico” Nichols on the drums:  “Rico take me away.”

“Turnin’ Me Up” is musically the most interesting song, and I like the way the chords swell as it takes him to his happy place.

“Get Away” features some sampled backing vocals and this is more of a rapping style song.  This song is especially vulgar (when we fucking, when I’m freakin you) which I find weird in this style of seduction song, but which apparently no one else does.

“Can’t Wait” is a slow broody number about how much he hates waiting for love.  Then comes “Too Good”

I liked about half of this set, although I feel like most of these songs blended into each other as one long 17 minute song.

[READ: February 15, 2020] “The Red Dot”

I really enjoyed the conversational nature of this story.  The telling and retelling of it adds an extra layer of puzzlement to it.  Plus phrases like this are fun:

Now do you want to hear the weird part? she said.  Yes, give me the weird part, I said.

The narrator talks about listening to Anna talking about a man named Karl–a casual acquaintance for both of them.

Karl owned a restaurant called Gist Mill, “where you go to get the gist of good food”.  Karl was skinny and used to run along the river.  Anna assumed running as his way of dealing with his divorce–his wife left him for a guy who designed toothpaste tubes.

When Karl finished his run, he would sit by the river, close his eyes and meditate.  When he opened his eyes, everything was clear.  But on this one instance that he told Anna about, he saw a red dot on the river.  The dot was getting closer.

Anna interrupts the story to add that Karl interrupted his own story to say that his wife was cripplingly afraid of the water–refused to go on boats, couldn’t swim, etc.

More interesting turns of phrase:

For a few months after Ethan was born she refused to bathe, or shower, and her fear of water seemed to be–and he admitted that it was just a theory she got from a therapist–amplified as part of her postpartum depression, a desire to dry herself up after all that womb moistness (he used that exact, weird phrase, Anna said).

So you can probably guess what’s coming, she said, and I said, No I can’t guess., I have no idea and and at that point Anna moved a little closer sipped her drink, smiled and said

the red dot got closer and was paddled by someone who looked a lot like Debbie, his ex wife.  And when he got closer he realized it was her, his ex wife, who was afraid of water, paddling a kayak.

Karl finally approached her and they had  huge screaming fight–although he wouldn’t say what the fight was about.

The narrator agrees that this was a weird story.  But then Anna says she hasn’t told him the twist yet.  The twist is that when Anna’s kids were little, she would go to the Y and swim.  There was always a woman there swimming who was amazing–much better than she was.   One day in the sauna they talked and the woman said that she was married to the owner of the Gist Mill.  She and Debbie became close–in the way you do with someone in the sauna after working out–and Debbie said that she used to sneak out in the morning to kayak while their kid was asleep.

So why didn’t Anna say something to Karl about that? She didn’t know–was he making it up or did he rally think that she was afraid of water.  Or maybe she faked a fear of water to get out of the tedium of taking care of the kids.

They finally agreed that she must have used this fear of water as a way to manipulate Karl–a manifestation of a deeper problem in their marriage.  But why did they think that made more sense than Karl making up a story to deal with the pain of the divorce.

Whatever the case, he thinks that both he and Anna had a vision–prophetic maybe–of Karl swimming across the river and getting exhausted or hypothermia and getting swept away.

Amazingly that’s only half way through the story because now the narrator thinks about the way Anna told the story–saving the twist for last.  He wishes he’d told her to stop the story or that his wife had come to interrupt the story.  Or what if Karl had been at that party… maybe they could have become friends and that might have changed Karl’s fate.

The story jumps to Karl’s funeral where people were sad but not surprised at the way he died–he often spoke of swimming the river.

The funeral got them talking about the death of the town’s most famous figure–a film director who had won two Academy Awards.  And then the town’s second most famous resident–he owned a house on the river and drummed for the world’s most famous band (or the band that claimed to be the biggest).

The narrator met this drummer on Broadway with his kid while walking the dog.  The narrator told him he liked his work on the side project he did with the country singer (to not be too obvious about the famous band), but the drummer grunted (with an Irish lilt) and walked away.

The narrator thought it was sad that a man who claimed to not like the world of fame (not like the blowhard singer) couldn’t be cool about his fame like Karl was.

The end of the story grows more nebulous–a dream about Karl, a trip with his wife where he imagines telling her the story. I feel the story lost some of what initially attracted me to the story.  But the first half was terrific.