I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: DAUGHTER OF SWORDS-Tiny Desk Concert #971 (April 29, 2020).

Alexandra Sauser-Monnig is part of Mountain Man (who did a Tiny Desk Concert some time ago).  Daughter of Swords is her solo project.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is just as quiet and delicate as Mountain Man but with a little more instrumentation.

Though she’s joined by a full band here, Daughter of Swords was originally envisioned as a solo project for Alexandra Sauser-Monnig. … With a few hushed folk songs, the music was so eerily still, you could have heard a phone vibrate.

This has to be one of the quietest four-piece bands ever on Tiny Desk.

As “Long Leaf Pine” begins, all you hear is a low rumble–the floor tom from Joe Westerlund.  Then Alexandra Sauser-Monnig begins singing quietly.  Maia Friedman supplies soft backing vocals from time to time.  Sauser-Monnig sings high and quiet and amazingly hits and even higher note before the end.

I like the sound of “Shining Woman” more. I think Alex Bingham’s bass stands out a bit more.  Or maybe it’s because Friedman plays an electric guitar accompaniment.  This song starts with a smattering of interesting percussion from Westerlund and while it is in no way loud, it moves faster than the previous song.

When Mountain Man was here, they talked about breakfast food.  Alexandra reprises that by asking what people had for breakfast.  Answers: a banana, a soft-boiled egg.  Alexandra had a green smoothie and goes on about the large piece of toast she had.  She doesn’t normally eat bread and this felt crazy to her [that should tell you all you need to know about Sauser-Monnig].  Bassist Alex Bingham says, “wild day so far.”

For the final song, “Prairie Winter Wasteland” Friedman plays the guitar to start this song–quietly ringing electric guitar.  There’s an interesting bass line from Bingham on this song and Westerlnd is using a small whisk brush on the cymbals.

[READ: April 20, 2020] “Ride or Die”

This is an excerpt from the novel The Last Taxi Driver.

Set in Mississippi, this excerpt follows a cab driver with one fare, a man just released from prison.

He says they never tell him what they were in for, only that they just got out.

This man–white dude, mid-thirties, a few missing teeth, a few prison tats–is in a fantastic mood.  He’s carrying a twelve-pack of Bud Light and asks to go to the Bethune Woods Project.

The driver says he didn’t even know these projects existed before he started driving a cab.  Most of the other cab companies shun the projects.  He knows that Uber is coming to town “I’ve never used an Uber and don’t understand how that works”), and he assumed they will shun the projects too.

They get to the address–someone has stolen the garage door.  The man leaves his beers in the cab, asks the driver to wait and rings the bell.  No one answers, so the man goes in through the open garage.

At what moment do you stop being a taxi driver and start being a getaway driver?

But he’s not leaving, mostly because he hasn’t been paid yet.

The man comes back with a six-pack of Miller Lite.  The driver tells the man that he looks like his friend Earl.  They get to talking and then arrive at the man’s second destination.

He knocks, but this time removes a key from under the mat and goes inside.  She wasn’t home either, but the man has a bottle of wine and an orange.  He drinks the wine, but the driver asks him not to peel the orange in his car.

The man gives one more address but they see a blue Chevy convertible pass and the man says that that’s the woman’s car.  They follow until they see that the woman has a man in the car with her–with the largest bald head I’ve ever seen.

They drive back to the first house and the man grabs a chair out of the open garage and sits on it with his bottle of wine looking happy, waiting for his ex-girlfriend to return.

Instinctively I wouldn’t like this story–it’s not my scene.  But I loved the light and breezy tone of this excerpt and it does make me want to read a bit more.