SOUNDTRACK: JOHN LEGEND-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #58 (August 3, 2020).
I don’t know all that much about John legend. I know he’s released a lot of popular music and that he seems to be famous for being famous at this point.
But wow, this set is great. Legend has a terrific voice. I’m not really sure what genre his music is–it’s very soulful–becuase it’s just really great songwriting.
They kick off the set with “Ooh Laa,” a song John calls “doo-wop meets trap” it’s also the lead-off track to his summer album, Bigger Love.
I don’t know how the “trap” part fits into this song, but the combination is fantastic. The song opens with a sample of the “shoo bop shoo bop” from The Flamingos’s “I Only Have Eyes for You. It works as a great foundation for this song of love and romance. It’s got a great chorus of, yes, “Ooh Laa,” which is a perfect line for this song. It also has Kaveh Rastegar on upright bass, which adds a great slow jazzy feel.
“Wild” opens with a quiet guitar melody from Ben O’Neill that reminds me of a Beach House song (although it sounds very different with Legend singing). It’s fascinating how different this song sounds from “Ooh Laa” even though it is very clearly a John Legend song. It’s also got a fantastic wailing guitar solo, which was completely unexpected.
All of the songs filmed on this day are from Bigger Love, including “Conversations in the Dark,” which John says is “a good song for babies to dance to — you might want to get married to it, too, if you’re so inclined.” Meanwhile, behind the band on a big screen reads, “Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes.”
Legend sits at the piano and says you may know this song from This is Us or you may have seen my babies dancing to it.
It also opens with a quiet guitar melody and Legend’s gentle piano which fleshes out this lovely song. The backing vocalists Keri Lee, Emi Secrest and Alana Linsey really shine on this song. They sound great on all of them, but they really stand out here.
While introducing his final song, “Bigger Love,”he tells us that “I wrote all the songs before the pandemic, before we saw folks marching in the streets, mourning (the) life of George Floyd, expressing their outrage. But some of these songs feel even more appropriate now, feel like we need them more now then we did even when I wrote them. This song ‘Bigger Love’ is about the power of love to get us through tough times, the idea that when you have love, it makes you more resilient, it makes you more hopeful And we all need a little dance break, too, right?”
“Bigger Love” is catchy and bouncy with some great sounding drums from Jimmy “Rashid” Williams and simple keyboard splashes from Eugene “Man Man” Roberts.
[READ: August 1, 2020] “The Shawl”
This story is compact and written in a well-plotted style.
It begins with a story. A story that the Anishinaabeg people on her street speak of.
A woman had two children whom she loved: a boy and a girl. Then she had a baby girl with a different man. She loved the new man more than her first man and decided to leave her family for the new man. But she decided to bring her daughters with her.
On the way out of town, their carriage was attacked by wolves and the older girl fell out of the carriage and was killed. All that was left of her was a torn and bloodied shawl.
The narrator’s father adds the detail that he believes the mother threw the girl out of the carriage–to sacrifice her for the life of her new baby,
In the present, the narrator is a young boy. He has two siblings and a father who is a terrible drunk. His mother was no longer with them so it was only their abusive father to look after them.
The children learned quickly how to hide or protect themselves from the man. There are numerous details about the things they did to save themselves from his abuse. And then finally the detail of what the narrator did to protect his younger siblings.
The shadow of the first half of the story hangs over the second as the narrator confronts his father to save his siblings.
The way Erdrich weaves the story is really great.
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