SOUNDTRACK: STEADY HOLIDAY-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert Meets SXSW: #187 (April 5, 2021).
Every year, NPR Music participates in the SXSW music festival, whether it’s curating a stage or simply attending hundreds of shows at the annual event in Austin, Texas. Last year, the festival was canceled due to the pandemic, but it returned this March as an online festival. We programmed a ‘stage’ of Tiny Desk (home) concerts and presented them on the final day of the festival. Now, we present to you Tiny Desk Meets SXSW: four videos filmed in various locations, all of them full of surprises.
Steady Holiday is the music of Dre Babinski. This video, filmed for our virtual SXSW showcase, finds her by the fireplace, a dog at her feet, an acoustic guitar in her arms. Steady Holiday is singing “Living Life,” a tune about a favorite topic of mine: the everyday, the mundane, and living in the moment. All the songs in this Tiny Desk (home) concert are from Steady Holiday’s 2021 album Take The Corners Gently, a top record of mine this year.
As “Living Life” opens, Dre Babinski sings the first verse solo, then you can hear other musicians join in and she reveals their secret location (with some very loud shutters). Derek Howa plays a pretty solo on the keys and by the end of the song drummer Brijesh Pandya is “da da daing” along to really flesh out the song.
Surprise guests aren’t the only surprise. After the first song, her printer (with googly eyes and an arm) prints out the next song on the setlist.
“Tangerine” is a bouncy song with some heavier ends and an interesting chord progression. Howa’s keys sound almost like a toy piano (but louder) and add a chiming quality. It’s wonderfully catchy. I’m curious how much bigger the proper version of this song sounds. Howa adds some creepy spacey effects in the middle, so I imagine the recorded songs have more going on.
The printer spits out a piece of paper: Your band is overdressed. Then she tells us why the guys are outside (it’s pretty funny).
Laughing while her dog grabs a chew toy, she performs the album’s opening track, “White Walls,” a song about self-reflection and how doing the same thing over and over (“painting white walls white”) won’t make life better.
This is a slow bouncy song with a really catchy chorus: “painting white walls white just to kill the time.”
Then she shutters out her band and
As her printer cues the last song, (oops, small spoiler), Steady Holiday takes us out on a lovely tune, “Love Me When I Go To Sleep”:
It’s just Bea and her guitar as she delicately sings
“Fragile aren’t we, who would guess / Here today, tomorrow’s taking bets.” Her refrain amplifies that fragility with a reminder to appreciate the gift of life. “Love me when I go to sleep / Love me with no certainty / Love me when I go to sleep.”
Her voice is clear and lovely and the final song feels like a lullaby.
[READ: April 20, 2021] Joan & The Man
This book came in at work and something about it made me want to read it (the shortness helped).
So this is a self-published book (I think–it could use some editing) that we received as a gift (from the author?). It is Rykaczewski’s fourth novel and it is a wonderfully weird mix of reality and nonsense.
Chapter One focuses on Joan as she tried on some clothes in a mall–she is buying bralettes–imposed propaganda to younger hip girls. Then it pushes back as she and The Man head to their place–the World Revolt Art Gallery. But more on that place after a brief excursion to the Riverbend Arts Market.
Joan & The Man are artists living in Florida. She works in paint and he works in words. They spend time at the RAM hoping to sell some works, but really it’s a sucker’s market. They often head down with their dog Duke, Duke is a nasty dog to everyone but The Man. Then there’s a weird moment where Duke winds up trading places with a movie star dog (to the terminal end of the movie star dog). But losing Duke frees them.
Joan met the Man at the World Revolt Art Gallery. The Man had owned the space for just a few months.
The Man’s backstory is simple but amusing. He had been living in a trailer named Queen Anne’s Harbor. It was a dilapidated trailer in a field and it was slowly listing. But worse was that he was not writing. He was often distracted by the white noise of the electronics around him. So he turned off everything.
The story flashes back further to the people who sold him the trailer. It was Arthur and Terri and they way they met is cute as well. Arthur saw Terri riding her bike and he pulled over to offer her a ride. But his car died on train tracks. They walked home together and after the third mile, they decided to run away together. She went her home, grabbed some things, said good bye to her parents and never saw them again.
They bought a truck and drove until it died–in a field with this trailer home. They lived there for decades until Arthur made money selling his book and then they went on a global adventure.
They gave the keys to The Man after he paid them a small sum.
And that’s where he would write his four books:
Without giving away the future the titles are the only part of those scribbles that are fair to share:
Word Revolt
The Folklore Behind Shade
Masters of Revels
Joan & The Man
[Here’s where the meta- comes in, because Rykaczewski has published four books, with these very titles].
He doesn’t reveal much about the other stories except that the first one was inspired by a school assignment in which he was criticized for his poetic interpretation of Abraham Lincoln. He response was Word Revolt, which changed his life. [I am very curious what the real book is like].
The Man started World Revolt Art Gallery –it was 100% free to all artists. You supplied the materials and WR took no money.
All of this part of the story (about half of the book) was kind of interesting if a little over written. There were some big words thrown around, sometimes in ways that seemed incorrect–I couldn’t decide if Rykaczewski was intentionally messing around with language or if he simply used the wrong word. I was giving him the benefit of the doubt but then I noticed a few “it’s” instead of “its” and a line like “the adds from the TV” and I wondered how well edited this was.
I was also a little annoyed by the book at this point because it seems like the writing was intentionally pretentious even though not much was happening. So I took a break and then read on a few days later when suddenly the story became really delightfully surreal.
There’s some interesting new characters brought in. The Man meets the original owner of the Queen Anne’s Harbor which turns into a hilarious story of blind man in a bar.
Then Masters of Revels unexpectedly sells 3,000 copies, Joan & The Man’s lives are turned upside down.
They decide to go on a long delayed honeymoon. When they get to the airport, the bartender overhears them talking about The Old Man and he had heard of him too. The Old Man was a drunk pilot who took The Man on a death defying flight to Canada in a plane called Danger. The scene where The Old Man passes out and they plunge to certain doom was pretty intense.
That story foreshadows their honeymoon flight in which their plane goes down and they are the only survivors, landing safely in a field near Austria where an empty artist’s school is waiting for them to take over. It’s over the top idyllic ending that can only be undermined by reality.
The book also reveals that The Man and Joan are going to have a baby named Winter.
The final pages, though, change everything. And what could they mean?
Again, reality and fiction overlap in interesting ways. Rykaczewski’s dedication is to “Theresa and our future daughter Winter.”
So what’s true in this book? Anything?
The ending made me go back and re-read the beginning and I enjoyed it more the second time through.
I’m strangely hooked on the whole thing and want to read Rykaczewski’s other books to see what else is going on.
I Just Read About That... 
Leave a comment