SOUNDTRACK: THE LUMINEERS-Tiny Desk Concert #966 (April 6, 2020).
When The Lumineers first came on the scene they were the band that sounded like Mumford and Sons. It now seems likely that The Lumineers are more popular than Mumford.
I’ve known them since “Hey Ho” but I’ve never seen them I guess because sinegr Wesley Schultz doesn’t look anything like I thought he would (I’m not sure what I thought, but that’s not it).
Much of The Lumineers’ Tiny Desk comes from the band’s third LP, III, which tells a story of addiction in three acts. They began with gut-wrenching renditions of “Gloria” and “Leader Of The Landslide.”
I’ve heard “Gloria” a million times, but it was nice to see it live. I especially enjoyed when violinist Lauren Jacobson joined in on the high notes of the piano while Stelth Ulvang played the low parts. Byron Isaacs plays some interesting bass lines (That I’ve never noticed before) and adds nice backing vocals.
“Leader of the Landslide” has a very sad introductory tale. Stelth Ulvang switches to accordion. It is “accompanied by a cassette recording of crickets made on iPhones and dubbed to play on a boombox.” It’s a quiet song, unlike what I think of them as playing.
The third track is also from III, but was an assignment from director M. Night Shyamalan. He tasked Schultz and his suspender-clad writing partner, Jeremiah Fraites, with composing a song for the end credits of a film. “Jer and I worked really hard on that, and then he didn’t need it,” Schultz confessed. The results are the stark and haunting “April” and “Salt And The Sea,”which strikes a different chord than any other song they’ve written.
“April (instrumental)” is a one-minute instrumental that segues into “Salt And The Sea” Drummer Jeremiah Fraites plays piano while percussionist Brandon Miller switches to drums. but he’s mostly playing cool atmospheric percussion (my new favorite thing of scraping drumsticks on cymbals).
It wouldn’t be a Lumineers show without a foot-stompin’ sing-along to end the set, which came with their crowd-pleasing hit “Stubborn Love”. Stelth Ulvang demonstrated a level of barefoot acrobatics unrivaled at the desk thus far, not an easy feat (or should I say, feet).
I never knew the name of “Stubborn Love” but I’ve certainly wanted to “Hey oh, oh oh oh) along with it. And yes, Ulvang jumps on Bob’s desk to get everyone to sing along–I hope he didn’t step on anything (and that his feet were clean).
I’ve never thought about seeing them live, but I’ll bet their show would be a lot of fun. However, since they are now playing to 20,000 people, I can probably give that a miss.
[READ: April 25, 2020] “The Bird Angle”
Nell Zink and Jonathan Franzen are intricately linked. As she writes in this essay
All I wanted when I first wrote to Jonathan Franzen–a birder who moonlights as a journalist–in 2011 was some attention for a bird-obsessed NGO. With his help I debuted as a novelist five years ago at age fifty.
Her fifth book comes out this year. She now has some money and wondered what to do with it. Franzen recommended birding in Peru.
So this is the first non-fiction piece of hers that I have read. It’s also the first piece about birds (aside from her novel the The Wallcreeper which has a bird prominently in it).
She was going to Cuzco, Peru for thee days. First she toured churches (seventeenth century Jesuits made Christ look especially gruesome). The next morning she hiked to Sacsayhuamán, an Incan ruin made of exceptionally large rocks.
She imagined Peru would feel like a hot night in New York when the A/C broke. But she only got two mosquito bites the whole time she was there (both on her ass from peeing outside).
High-end birding relies on word of moth recommendations so she paid a lot for a man named Ramiro and listened carefully and kept her eyes open.
First stop was the Huacarpay wetlands. She has this amusing comment: alert birds seem smarter but they’re just paranoid from being attacked.
She says she was constantly searching the rivers for ducks and once saw a bundle of drugs wrapped in black plastic (she wisely didn’t say anything at the time).
They moved from elfin stunted forest to the cloud forest. Cloud forests were once rare, but they have become more prevalent because of ecotourism.
That night she was surrounded by giant coffee grinders, hoarse dogs barking, seals huffing at their breathing holes and muted sirens. In fact, when she got up in the morning
The seals, I learned the next day, were hoatzins, [Hoatzins are loud freaky looking birds best known for having chicks with claws on their wings like arcareopteryx. They’re not shy of humans because they taste terrible], the dogs were rats, the coffee grinders were cicadas, not sure about the sirens.
The most useful thing to know about birding–don’t wear white For most species its an alarm color displayed only on wings and tails when fleeing at top speed.
Next she climbed 155 steps to a platform mounted on a kapok tree. The trunk was nine feet in diameter branching only when it reached the canopy. Most Amazonian trees work that way: their aim in life is to reach the light and they don’t waste time on lower branches. Kapoks can grow thirteen feet in a year.
There are hardly any dead trees in the Amazon–things rot too quickly.
She mentions a number of birds, but my two favorite descriptions are of a curl-crested araçari.
The glossy black toupee of an aspiring Sicilian shepherd boy sat awkwardly on his reddish mullet. His yellow shirt was set off by crimson chaps. His eyes were those of a chameleon. His bill bore tattooed teeth. His white face had five-o’clock shadow. His feet were greenish … He perched there for half an hour, occasionally swiveling to make sure I got an adequate impression of his mind-fucking lacquered hairstyle.
and manakins
stubby little birds…. The club-winged variety uses its wings mostly to make ridiculous sounds. My favorite is the fiery-capped, a weak and puny character with a barely audible tweet, a purple striped belly and a downy flame-orange helmet. Sexual selection by females made him what he is today. He can’t fly very fast but why should he? It wont stop snakes from eating his children.
Ramiro asked her if she had ever seen a wallcreeper (he’d gotten curious enough to Google her). She said yes in a zoo and left it at that. Before she met the araçari it was her spirit animal–an opportunist wiling to settle anywhere inaccessible rock is warmed by sunshine.
She sums up a trip to the tropical forest by saying you’re supposed to notice the diversity, but its hard to keep track of things that keep changing. What you remember are the constants like the “walking palm,” its trunk begins five feet off the ground sprouting from a tepee of roots.
She also wondered why she hadn’t seen any slugs. Ramiro first thought she said sloths, but when she described slugs (a snail without a shell), he dismissed the idea as absurd.
Of course there are accounts of environmental devastation. Everything from gold mining to logging, but she speaks of them matter-of-factly, not sensationalist. It’s just the sad state of the word–that may be more upsetting than an alarmist reaction.
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