SOUNDTRACK: PHOEBE BRIDGERS-Live at Newport Folk Festival (July 28, 2018).
I saw Phoebe Bridgers three days after this set at Newport Folk Festival (I had no idea). She plays five more songs at my show than here (yay, me).
The size of the crowd does’t seem to intimate her in any way and she sounds just as great (and intimate) as she did in the small club where I saw her.
A few songs into her sun-drenched Saturday Newport Folk set, Phoebe Bridgers paused and proclaimed, “I am a puddle of sweat.” It was a one-liner that primed those huddled at the Harbor Stage for the 2018 Slingshot artist’s catalog: details delivered with specificity and a subtle sense of humor.
I will say the one thing about this recording is that I don;t think you can hear all of the percussion as clearly as I could at Asbury Lanes.
The show started much the same as mine did with a beautiful languid version of “Smoke Signals” and a try-to-hold-back-the-tears reading of “Funeral.”
For the next song, “Georgia,” she brought out songwriter Christian Lee Hutson who is “going to help me sing harmonies.” Whether it was the song itself of Hutson’s addition, but Bridgers’ voice really soars on this song.
Even Bridgers’ stage banter reflected her striking style, mixing straightforward address and astute observation. “This song is about how every time I smoke weed, I remember why I don’t smoke weed,” she said of the plainspoken plea “Demi Moore.”
She continued: “I face plant and my brain is erased for many hours and I think I’m thinking too loud.”
There’s some gorgeous harmonies on the darkly sweet song, “Killer.” Then she played “Steamroller” solo on the acoustic guitar.
Later, she called “Steamroller,” a devastatingly candid cut from her 2015 EP, Killer, “another dark love song, thanks.”
Introducing Gillian Welch’s song “Everything Is Free” she said. “This is my friend Marshall. We’re going to sing my favorite song about music streaming ever written.” I loved hearing this live and it sounds just as solid here.
Up next was a song she did not play at my show. She welcomed Christian Lee Hutson (playing guitar with Jenny Lewis) and Sharon Silva (from The Wild Reeds) played bass with me for exactly one week and I waited for a really bassist…Emily. Chris wrote this song for me.” The chorus goes “”lets get the old band back together again, and there’s even a line, “with Emily on bass, it doesn’t feel the same.”
The crowd reacts strongly, as they should to her awesome song “Motion Sickness.”
Despite its venom, it’s a song that unspools with a sonic ease that feel refreshing, even for an overheated festival audience.
The songs sounds great live and she holds a 17-second note just for kicks. The sets ends (as did ours) with “Scott Street.” She says “This is about L.A. where we live; where it’s hot all the time.” It’s a quiet song, sounds and represents her music pretty perfectly–quiet, sad, with clever lyrics.
At our show, we got two encores after this, so again, yay for us. But this is a great example of her live show.
[READ: April 22, 2016] “Playing with Dynamite”
Back in February of 2017, I posted about an essay by George Saunders from 2009 in which he remembers John Updike “Remembering Updike“. He says that back in 1992:
It was going to be in Tina Brown’s first issue and they marked this occasion by running two stories contrasting the new writers (Saunders) with the established. Of course the establishment writer was going to be Updike. Saunders said he was chagrined because he knew the contrast would go something like this:
Wonderful, established, powerful representative of the Old Guard kicks the butt of the flaky, superficial, crass poseurish New Guy. Saunders’ story was “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz.”
I can see why they paired the George Saunders story with this particular Updike story. Both stories deal with grief and memory loss, although Updike’s does so in a very different way. On the other hand, their writing styles are so very different that it’s nearly impossible to compare the two stories.
The story begins with an interesting image from childhood: “one aspect of childhood Fanshawe had not expected to return in old age was the mutability of things–the willingness of a chair, say, to become a leggy animal in the corner of his vision.” But living now “in death’s immediate neighborhood” he allowed that things like that might happen and it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
There is then an episode in Fanshawe’s day when his wife, who was younger and more spry than he, passed him going down the stairs. She caught her heel on her dress and fell down the stairs. It was only after all the guests had left that she said to him, “Wasn’t I good, not to tell everybody how you pushed me me?” (more…)
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