SOUNDTRACK: BUCK CURRAN-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #17 (May 1, 2020).
I’ve never heard of Buck Curran, an American guitarist living in Bergamo, Italy, “the epicenter of the pandemic in Europe.”
Years ago, Curran met Adele Pappalardo while on tour, fell in love and started a family. They have a son about to turn three years old and another child due in August. “We’re trying to survive,” Curran says. “And be positive,” Pappalardo adds. Soon residents in Italy will be allowed to use parks, visit relatives and attend funerals.
This Tiny Desk is blurbed by Lars Gottrich (which explains why I don’t know this guy–Lars travels in the obscure). He sums up the music of Curran perfectly:
There’s a burning darkness to these songs, as Curran’s rough-hewn voice and droning psych-folk melodies curl like smoke, but there’s also a desperate hope that cracks the surface.
His songs are slow and droney without a lot of change ups. Adele sings backing ooohs and aahs on the new “Deep in the Lovin’ Arms of My Babe” and “New Moontide” from 2016’s Immortal Light. I preferred this song because it opened with some lovely guitar harmonics. Although it’s about six minutes long and most of that six minutes sounds the same.
Adele leaves and he plays “Ghost on the Hill” which is getting its debut live performance. He ends with an instrumental, “Blue Raga.” It has some really interesting chord progressions and is my favorite song of the set.
[READ: January 2020] The Soul of an Octopus
S. bought me this book for Christmas because she knows how much I enjoy octopuses (it’s not octopi–you can’t put a Latin ending on a word derived from Greek).
This book was absolutely wonderful.
It opens with Sy explaining that she was heading from her home in New Hampshire to the New England Aquarium. She had a date with a giant Pacific octopus.
She summarizes some of the reasons why octopuses are so cool
Here is an animal with venom like a snake, a beak like a parrot, and ink like an old-fashioned pen. It can weigh as much as a man and stretch as long as a car, yet it can pour its baggy, boneless body through an opening the size of an orange. It can change color and shape. It can taste with its skin. Most fascinating of all, I had read that octopuses are smart.
This is all so fascinating to me because when I was a kid, I feel like octopus were boring, scary, purple blobs. Why didn’t we know they were so cool?
Probably because people didn’t know much about octopuses until fairly recently. In fact, we are still learning a lot about them. Like that one three-inch sucker can lift 30 pounds–and a giant Pacific octopus has 1,600 suckers. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 