SOUNDTRACK: THE WEATHER STATION-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #237 (July 20, 2021).
For a band this soft, there are sure a lot of players. I can’t even figure out what Philippe Melanson the second drummer (!) is doing for most of set. It’s especially amusing since at least initially The Weather Station was just one person: (singer here) Tamara Lindeman.
However, it’s the setting of the Home Concert that is so magical.
There’s a desk and a band playing songs filled with nature’s imagery somewhere in the woods of Mulmur in Southern Ontario, Canada. …. The songs for this Tiny Desk (home) concert are filled with imagery of nature and our relationship with our planet.
I like that they are really spread far apart–that the camera has to pan far left and right to catch everyone (although, really for most of the set it’s guitarist Christine Bougie and saxophone/ clarinet player Karen Ng who are off screen.
If Melanson is relatively quiet, full on drummer Kieran Adams is one of the loudest players here. In songs like “Robber” there’s almost nothing but drums (the rest of the music lays a bed on which the drums seem to skitter around). In fairness, Melanson does get to wail a lot of “Robber” as well, which is easily the most fun track here.
“Tried to Tell You” has a real 70s soft-rock vibe. It’s amusing, for instance, to watch keyboardist Johnny Spence as his hands literally don’t move almost the whole time that the camera is on him. I like the way the quiet guitar and clarinet bounce back and forth off of each other in this song.
The keyboard melody is much more prominent for “Parking Lot.” As with most of the song, the pulsing bass from Ben Whiteley is what really grounds the song.
With images of a blood-red sunset in the song “Atlantic” and the lines “Thinking I should get all this dying off of my mind / I should really know better than to read the headlines / Does it matter if I see it? / No, really, can I not just cover my eyes?,” Tamara writes about her passion for the earth and its future, but the tunes are calming and thoughtful, not doctrines or lectures.
“Atlantic” has a nice pulsing feel with squiggly guitar lines. The spareness of these songs is really in evidence when you see that Bougie is often barely playing before jumping into a big flourish of notes
“Robber” is a six minute jazzy piece that slowly builds to some wild fun. The build up is spectacular and once again Bougie’s guitar work is terrific.
[READ: July 15, 2021] Oh, Boris!
My library gets all kinds of strange books–books that don’t really seem like they belong in a University library. But I believe they like to make sure they cover all of the bases–just in case.
Which explains why we have a book like this. A 6″x6″ square book that’s 64 pages and looks like it was conceived, written and published in a week.
I found this book while searching through old books to see if they could be cataloged (it actually fell out of the pile because it was so small). Perhaps the only really interesting thing about this is that it was written in 2016, a full three years before Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. He had just been named Secretary of State (really!) around the publication of this book.
For those of us in the States who wondered how the Brits created such a buffoon, it’s worth noting that he was born in the United States (guess they should also have a law that a PM must be born in the country).
The (very) brief bio suggests that he was a smart kid (won a scholarship to Eton) and then made a name for himself in journalism. But he’d always had political ambitions. He failed in the 90s, but won a seat in 2001. He was fired for having an affair but was reelected (I guess sex scandals are really no big deal anywhere).
In a fascinating piece of history, Johnson was a chief architect of Brexit. And then it says
Boris went from favorite to be the new Prime Minister to having his chances scuppered as he was politically outmaneuvered by his Brexit ally Michael Gove. Then … Theresa May appointed him Foreign Secretary much to the disbelief of statespeople both home and abroad.
I can’t believe he survived whatever that Gove business was and someone still made it to PM. What the hell is wrong with people?
The bulk of the book is a quiz with “post truth facts” in which mildly humorous and insulting questions are asked. If more of them were true, it would be more fun.
Johnson must have been in the news a lot if he was only a foreign secretary and had this book made about him.
He is also clearly a horrible individual, with no care for anyone but himself. A series of quotes about Johnson includes this from LBC radio host James O’Brien (and could apply to trump as well)
He’s not really in politics to make your life better. He’s certainly not in politics to make my my life better. Boris Johnson is in politics to make Boris Johnson’s life better. First, last and always.
Alan Rickman (who could also have been speaking about trump) said
If [he] gets elected it would be a case of the lunatic having no clue how to run the asylum.
Comedian Jeremy Hardy said (in what is half true (the lovable part is untrue) of trump as well)
He may seem like a lovable buffoon but you know he wouldn’t hesitate to line you all up against a wall and have you shot.
So Johnson is a terrible human being. But sometimes even terrible human beings can get a thing or two correct. I understand that he has a long list of offensive published quotations. But there are a few printed here that are good.
The only reason I wouldn’t visit some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump [I wonder how that went down later].
I enjoyed the self awareness of this
I will greatly miss [MP] Alan Johnson, not just because he is a nice guy but also for the satisfaction I used to get when I saw a headline saying “Johnson in new gaffe” and realized it wasn’t me.
And this fascinating comment [self deprecating or cunning insight?]
My realistic chances of becoming Prime Minister are only slightly better than my chances of being decapitated by a frisbee, blinded by a champagne cork, locked in a disused fridge or reincarnated as an olive [all of which can still come to pass].
Obviously there is much mocking about his hair. And it’s also obvious that he uses his hair as a way of diverting attention from his (horrible) policies. But this is supposed to be a mocking book, so the hair must be mocked.
The rest is silly fictions and silly games (a maze, a word search) to fill out the pages.
I wonder how many people actually bought this.
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