SOUNDTRACK: BABY ROSE-Tiny Desk Concert #944 (February 10, 2020).
I had not heard of Baby Rose, which I suppose makes sense since she put out her debut album last year.
The blurb makes it sound like she has been through a lot more than her 25 years might suggest.
But when the voice behind those words is as seasoned and vintage as Baby Rose’s, everything it utters reverberates like the gospel truth. The D.C. native — who came of age in Fayetteville, N.C. before coming into her own as an artist in Atlanta — returned to her birthplace.
She even speaks like a much older person:
“I would not be able to write with such emotion about these things without my fair share of regrets.”
It sounds like a sincere statement until you realize it’s a bit, an introduction to the song strangely spelled “Ragrets.”
But that is my favorite song here. It’s got a great opening guitar riff from John Scherer that is duplicated on the bass (with some great high notes) by Craig Shephard. Backing vocalist Erika JaNaé is there with her throughout–matching her with lovely backing ooohs.
Baby Rose has a voice that sounds a bit like Antony from Antony & the Johnsons–wavery and operatic. Especially as the Concert opens with “Sold Out” which features strings from Jasminfire on viola, Yuli on violin and Noah Johnson on cello.
It’s also evident in the third song “Over.” In the middle of the song she sings low and it sounds very Antony, although I suppose another comparison would be “the bluesy melisma of Nina Simone and the deep register of Sarah Vaughan–two of her idols.” This song is, surprisingly, less than two minutes long. It has a simple piano melody from Timothy Maxey. In addition to Erika JaNaé, Jasminfire and Yuli sing backing vocals. I like the bass slide at the end, which seems like it’s a transition to another part of the song, not the end.
The next song is “Mortal” which opens with a loud drum hit from Tauseef Anam and quiet shimmering guitars. There’s a lot of backing singing on this song and they all sing very nicely.
As this song is ending she introduces the band and says
“This is what real love sounds like. This is what it feels like.”
The blurb says
From any other new artist, a Tiny Desk declaration like that might sound a tad bit presumptuous if not altogether premature.
I actually thought pretentious was the word.
She asks if she can do one more (because of course an artist I’ve never heard of gets an 18 minute set). And in introducing “All To Myself,” she says she is
Dedicating the song to herself — and “to anyone here that’s ever wanted to call or text somebody that you know you should not call or text” — congratulating those of us who’ve refrained from squandering our emotions on the undeserved.
Her voice is really impressive on this song and I like that the blurb acknowledges that she’s not using autotune
In an era when the over-reliance on Autotune has nearly everybody in radio R&B land sounding like automatons, her unadulterated voice is almost otherworldly. It’s confounding how a vocal tone so weathered and wise emerges from her so effortlessly.
[READ: July 10, 2019] Who is Rich?
Rich Fischer is a cartoonist. As the book opens, Rich is beginning his annual week-long teaching assignment at a New England beachside Arts Conference. Rich was once sort of famous for his first (and only) published book and that’s why he was initially invited to instruct. In the intervening six years, he has not really produced anything except drawings for magazines, but the head of the council still likes him, so Rich has that annual work to look forward to.
Although he doesn’t really look forward to it. People come from all over to study all kinds of arts with esteemed faculty. It’s a place where writers, artists and historians show off that they are really drunkards and perverts and are willing to do anything to dance naked on a beach in a drum circle. At this point, he knows what he is and how he fits along with the rest of the teaching staff:
unknown nobodies and one-hit has-beens, midlist somebodies and legitimate stars.
His was a four day intensive workshop that cost $1500. He details his students–a former high school art teacher (who tried to take over the class), a med student who didn’t want to start med school, a trans kid, a Vietnam War veteran, a grandmother and a teenager skulking in the back.
But he was also sick of it. The same faces year after year. Nadia Klein “was widely mocked an imitated.” Larry Burris skipped his meds one year and wore a jester’s cap to class and lit his own notes on fire. And yet when he was asked to name another cartoonist he could vouch for to teach a second comics workshop, he didn’t answer the director, “because of the way my career had gone, I worried that I’d be hiring my replacement.”
He talks about his precocious success–at first it seems like a mistake, but you get used to it quickly. You assume it will always be there. Until it isn’t.
The difference this year is that Angel Solito is also teaching there. Angel is, essentially, the updated version of Rich–a new wunderkind with a new bestselling book. And young enough to be Rich’s son. Angel is excited to talk to Rich, he says
“You’ve been living the life for, like m ten years,…you gotta tell me what it;’s like. That’s why we gotta hang out!”
“Absolutely!” Fuck you.
Perhaps the funniest sections of the book deal with Rich’s association with the other faculty members. Vicky, a painter; Tom, an old guy who’d written a memoir; “and this idiot biographer named Dennis Fleigel.” Dennis is wonderfully loathsome. He asked Rich what the Amazon number for his book was. Rich replied that his book was out of print.
Dennis continued, “my book was selling, Amazon number below ten thousand for two straight years…but then that movie came out.”
“What movie?”
“Ring-a-Ding Ding. It’s about Sinatra, and when it came out my Amazon number went from ten thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand and it never went lower ever again.”
Rich says, I could imagine back in caveman days someone like him being cut from the tribe, dragged away and thrown off a cliff. There’s an accompanying hilarious illustration by John Cuneo. In fact there are many throughout the book and they add a lot of fun to the story.
Despite his reservations, he looked forward to this little working vacation. No humidity, no garbage trucks, no marital rancor, nobody yelling Daddy! Rich loves his family. He fondly remembers how he met his wife twelve years ago. He even had a stomachache wondering how they’d survive without him–and yet his wife felt he’d already checked out. Maybe he had, he felt his sex life had been mauled not by depression or conflict but by distraction, diffusion.
Rich is not reprehensible–he is unhappy in his marriage, but he’s not necessarily a bad guy–Klam has constructed him to be sympathetic but also a bit of a cad–a real person. He exhibits moral self-defense through preemptive confession. He is at fault, but so is his wife–it’s a mutual abandonment.
Although Robin is sort of one-dimensional–she doesn’t really figure into the story except to test his moral compass–she does have a fascinating back story: she was a former war reporter. She couldn’t handle seeing any more colleagues stabbed, kidnapped or disappeared so she has started working sporadic freelance shifts for The Nature Channel. The documentaries were well lit and ergonomic. The channel bought finished products that veered into sensationalism. She didn’t “make” anything anymore. Rich felt for her, but also didn’t care that much. Obviously her freelance work isn’t paying the bills either.
And that’s where Amy comes in. Amy was unhappily married as well. Amy’s husband is a wealthy business man. He is a globetrotter and on the news often. His riches were off the chart. She resented it and didn’t want to give it up.
He is rich. So Amy is rich–basically her husband paid for her.
Rich and Amy met last summer at this retreat. She was a student–not his student–and they hit it off. They went back to her dorm room and “goofed around.” That was supposed to be the end of it, but they had opened up to each other so much that they felt compelled to email regularly. He thought she might leave her husband, and if she left him, Rich might leave Robin and his family. Maybe. But then things got heavy and she ended their conversation.
Rich wasn’t sure if Amy would be coming this year. Then while he was sitting by himself thinking, there she was. They had “fake chit chat.” She showed him pictures of her new niece. He didn’t care. Then they got to the crux of the matter.
Amy: And things are good at home?
Rich: Is that a joke?
But how is it for you?
I already to you… I gave her everything I had.
You’re a good person.
No I’m not.
I’m glad I met you, whoever you are.
You look beautiful. I’m glad your daughter’s healthy.
She’s at sleepaway camp, hating every minute of it.
You got through it, I knew you were scared.
Yeah well, I started to wonder.
What.
You know.
Huh?
If there was a connection [to what happened to her daughter].
To what?
To us. The emails and everything
You mean like punishment?
I’m not blaming you.
She was referring to an incident where her daughter was playing soccer and in the middle of the game, she walked off the field, threw up and almost died–her brain had swollen. Just before her daughter’s brain hemorrhage, her husband had been away and Rich had gone to visit her. The girl recovered in a couple of months and Amy celebrated on Facebook, but she wouldn’t resume talking to Rich.
Much of the book deals with the mundane events of the conference–social meals, conference-goers in bikinis, and a dreary softball game. But it’s at this game that things really escalate for Rich. Amy is somehow injured in the game–a broken arm. She is taken to the medical clinic.
He grabbed a bike and rode into town to see how she was.
Meanwhile he was getting calls from home–calls about how exhausted his wife was “while Kaya was bleeding all over the bathroom floor, Beanie sucked the propeller out of that clown whistle and almost choked to death.”
On one level I understood that somehow Robin had orchestrated these events, possibly in their entirety, out of frustration or temporary insanity from lack of sleep, spun them into something shocking and only loosely based on fact, to punish me, that maybe none of it had happened and my real son and daughter were lying on a carper having Elmo juice, watching Fairytopia. But on another level I wasn’t so sure.
Rich tries to turn things his way, but then feels guilty.
He had that emergency at home and this emergency with Amy to deal with. Under the drugs she admitted that she came to the conference this year just for him. She hated her husband and couldn’t stand being with him anymore. Soon enough they were both in bed together–both of them taking her painkillers and making insane promises to each other.
Rich also does the unthinkable and spends a good chunk of his savings on a gift–an expensive bracelet. He purchases it on his debit card–so Robin is sure to see it. The money was supposed to go to their daughter’s pre-school. He knows that Robin will be apoplectic, that she would be
stunned into something beyond hatred, more like fear. She’d think I lost my mind. This was the kind of thing borderlines did before they burned down the house.
But instead of saving it for Robin, he impulsively gives it to Amy.
But Amy has so much money she doesn’t even notice the gift–she thanks him and immediately forgets about it. This wealth also figures into Rich’s desire for her. Not so he can have her wealth, but because he hates the way she got it. He can’t fathom when she complains about fundraisers, private jets and parties at which Coldplay have helicoptered in to play a private gig. [That wouldn’t happen anymore now that Coldplay have stopped touring for ecological reasons]. Rich is a Democrat wholly in debt. But Amy’s husband is a Republican. He supported Mitt Romney, and is committed to outlawing taxation and abortion. He deserves what he gets.
And that’s the halfway point of the book. The rest of the book shows Rich (and Amy) bouncing back and forth between lust and guilt. A lot of near-slapstick situations arise from it. Like when he nearly dies from falling off a ladder and imagines his obituary.
Of course, while Rich is going through all of this in his head, he still has to teach his class and has to deal with Angel Solito as his students realize they should be trailing around after Angel, not Rich.
A nice thing about the choice of setting is that there are all types of creative people here and they are all doing whatever they can to make their lives more interesting so they can mine them for stories. Rich observes, “Calamity is so much more dramatic than dissatisfaction – which is so, well, unsatisfying.” Especially when you find out that Rich’s fame came not from his own life’s story but from someone else’s.
I really enjoyed this book a lot. It was fun and funny with some great ideas and situations. The ending is a bit disappointing, but many endings are. Nevertheless, I really like Klam’s writing style and will certainly read more from him.
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