SOUNDTRACK: CHLOE X HALLE-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #123 (December 8, 2020).
Chloe x Halle’s album, with its arresting album cover, has been on all the top album lists this year. I hadn’t heard anything off of it, so this is my introduction to this “powerful sister duo.”
Flanked by personal memorabilia supplied by their mother, the Bailey sisters did their best to make this studio performance really feel like a home concert.
I don’t know what he album sounds like, but this recording (complete with a full band, horns and strings) sounds pretty amazing. Almost as amazing as Chloe and Halle’s voices.
As they volley off each other, swapping lead and harmonies, it’s amazing to watch how years of practice and innate genetic chemistry have them synced tight.
After introducing themselves, the sister play “Don’t Make It Harder on Me.” There’s a clean bass opening from Elin Sandberg and quiet guitar chords (it’s fun to watch Lexii Lynn Frazier play as she is smiling a lot and really into it). The addition of the trumpets (Arnetta Johnson and Crystal Torres) adding soft and then loud accents is a really nice touch. But nothing can distract from the voices.
Halle takes the higher notes and wow does her voice soar. But the two of them together, whether singer counterpoint or their gorgeous wordless harmonies are really amazing.
“Baby Girl,” the second song here, starts with notes reminiscent of Crystal Waters’ “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless),” and is preceded with Chloe sharing “I know this year 2020 has been absolutely bonkers for all of us. For those moments where you kinda feel less than and you’re not good enough … that’s why we wrote this song. … Whatever happens, we’ll be OK. And this is our world.”
The song is softer with keyboard splashes from Elise Solberg and soaring strings from Stephanie Yu (violin), Chelsea Stevens (cello) and Marta Honer (viola).
Halle sings the first verse with Chloe adding punctuation on this cool refrain
step up to the patio
listen to the radio
try to play it on my Casio
more great punctuation from the horns nicely flesh out this song. The song ends with a short drum breakdown from Brandi Singleton with some ripping bass work as it segues into “Do It.” “Do It” is a great moment to see the sisters play of of each other. It’s fun watching them smile at each other as they bounce and bop and back and forth with the “do it”s and the “woo”s.
“Ungodly Hour” is upbeat but “Wonder What She Thinks of Me” is a very different song. Chloe says it’s a song telling the perspective of the other woman and what does that feel like? What would we do in that situation. Chloe sings the first verses accompanied by gorgeous strings. It’s a beautiful torch song and their voices are simply fantastic. Their harmonies in the third chorus are, frankly, jaw dropping.
I don’t tend to like R&B albums, (and it’s possible the album doesn’t sound like this), but this set was really impressive.
[READ: January 3, 2021] “Preparing to Spin the Wheel of Fortune”
I like when an author I enjoy has a Personal History in the New Yorker.
This one was especially fun because David Gilbert relates his experience appearing on Wheel of Fortune.
The studio is cold. There are contestant handlers who are mystically upbeat. They tell them to clap without clapping (so they dont mess up the sound recording).
He rather enjoyed the make up because she makes him look very good (he’s very critical of himself). Before talking about the whole process though, he gives some background on the show.
Merv Griffin created the show (after creating Jeopardy (with his wife in 1963). “He even wrote the thirty-second ditty for Final Jeopardy. It’s called “Think!” and it earned him additional millions in music royalties”). Gilbert gives some fascinating details about Merv (some of which I know from David Foster Wallace’s short story “Little Expressionless Animals”), including that his tombstone says “I will not be right back after this message.”
Then he has this wonderful passage that was almost like my own childhood (Gilbert is roughly my age).
Merv Griffin, star of the syndicated “Merv Griffin Show,” which aired on WNEW Channel 5 New York. This was the Merv I knew. Merv and Mike Douglas and Dinah Shore and sometimes Joe Franklin and always “The Brady Bunch” and “The Partridge Family” and “I Dream of Jeannie” and “The Odd Couple” and “The Munsters” and “Sanford and Son” and “Get Smart” and “Green Acres” and “My Three Sons” and “The Honeymooners” and “All in the Family” and “The Hollywood Squares” and “The Gong Show” and “The Price Is Right” and “The $20,000 Pyramid” and “Match Game”—man oh man, “Match Game”—and whatever else was available for a kid freed from school and eating cinnamon toast in his parents’ bedroom. Sitting four feet from that nineteen-inch Zenith color television. Manipulating the Jerrold remote with its twelve hard-click buttons and toggle switch that travelled between three planes of existence: standard (2-13), extra (14-25), and extra weird (26-37). I might’ve been talentless at the piano but I was Rick Wakeman on that motherfucking Jerrold, alternating between “Hogan’s Heroes” and “The Flintstones” without missing a canned beat. Those were happy days, made happier only on Saturday mornings, when I parked myself in the living room, with its twenty-five-inch Zenith—oh, the glory of those additional six inches—and participated in a network ménage à trois of children’s programming: ABC with “The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour” and “The Krofft Supershow” and “Super Friends” and CBS with “The Sylvester and Tweety Show” and “The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour” and “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids” and NBC with “The Pink Panther Show” and “Speed Buggy” and “Land of the Lost.” Click, click, click-click-click. Television was the essential part of my upbringing, and my generation might have been the last to share this cathode-ray DNA with our parents and grandparents. We could all talk Lucy.
He talks a bit about his father in this essay as well. He never really got along with his father–they were very different. His one great memory is when his father took him to see Kiss when gilbert was 12. This was Kiss heyday! He still laughs thinking about his stiffly dressed father trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
Gilbert says his youngest daughter is the reason he is in the studio. he and his daughter watch the Jeopardy!/Wheel hour most nights He was good at guessing the answers and she said he should apply to be on the show. Being a teenager, she pulled up the application and filled it out within minutes.
He soon got an email to go to the audition. His contestant handler is Jackie who “looks like Suzi Quatro playing Leather Tuscadero.”
The audition consists mostly of watching other people try out. The guy next to him is able to get puzzles with just one letter.
On Gilbert’s turn he guesses a letter and is immediately buzzed out. He gets a No.2 pencil that says he tried out for Wheel of Fortune and assumes that’s the end.
Two weeks later there’s an envelope from Wheel telling him he was selected to be on TV: “It’s like being accepted to cartoon Stanford.” He must cover all of his expenses though.
His kids are all away–at camp or elsewhere–so he has no one to tell.
The letters says that being a contestant on Wheel of Fortune is a wonderful opportunity, but it shouldn’t take precedence over other important areas of your life. Don’t do anything stupid like quit your day job.
Wardrobe is a big section of the letter. Men: dress business casual–no jeans, no tennis shoes.
Women get multiple paragraphs about two piece outfits solid colors and padded bras
He goes to LA in January (before the pandemic). But he gets cold feet in the waiting area. What if he guesses Jamaican Coffee Bears instead of Jamaican Coffee Beans?
While they are waiting, Vanna comes into say hi. No autographs, but she radiates pure goodness.
The location is surreal–being inside a set that you know–it’s the same but different. It’s like being Mike Teevee from Willy Wonka.
He doesn’t win it big, but he does get a prize.
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