SOUNDTRACK: THE INNOCENCE MISSION-Tiny Desk Concert #807 (November 28, 2018).
I bought the third Innocence Mission album, glow, back in 1995. The single “Bright as Yellow” was (and is) absolutely gorgeous. It was a lovely, dream pop album. But they took four years to make their next album and I guess I forgot all about them.
So what a delightful surprise to hear and see that they are still playing music together in their more or less original lineup. After glow, their drummer left and they continued as a trio without drums.
The three songs they play are different in style, but not intent from “Bright As Yellow.” “Bright” has a hazy/dreamy electric guitar sound. These three song are gentle folk songs all on acoustic guitars.
The Innocence Mission, ever the most careful cultivators of quiet, encouraged us to come closer, to discover the “thing beautiful enough” in the moment it’s delivered.
They do not play “Bright as Yellow” (I wonder if they ever do anymore). Instead they play two new songs and one old song.
The trio — now three decades into its existence — bookends this performance with two songs from 2018’s Sun on the Square. “Green Bus” and “Light of Winter” thread the long and winding needle of Karen Peris’ evocative words with her husband Don Peris’ decorative-but-nuanced guitar and Mike Bitts’ deft bass lines.
“Green Bus” sounds a lot like the recorded version, but warmer, somehow. The end of the blurb says that Peris is a little under the weather. It makes her voice seem even more fragile, which somehow makes the lyrics and the song even more intimate.
In some of my favorite lyrics of the year, Karen Peris tangles the tender and the tempestuous:
And what could I bring you,
now in the meantime?
Fruit from the sunlight,
quartz from the bay?
And where will I find this,
perfect and wondrous?
I look into shops,
I slip into rain.
Between those newer songs, The Innocence Mission plays “Tomorrow on the Runway,” the opening cut from 2003’s Befriended. This song has a lovely guitar melody and Peris; delicate voice sounds wonderful.
Nursing a small cold, Peris’ voice slightly breaks when she sings, “Did you still leave the darkness without me? You’re always miles ahead” — but the humbling effect, however unintended, lingers in your being.
“Light of Winter” has a stunning chorus–the way the music weaves with her voice is gorgeous. The verses are quiet and subtle but the way that chorus comes us–wow.
It was great to hear them again, and I think they may need to get added to a nightly bedtime rotation..
[READ: December 13, 2018] “Time for Their Eyes to Adjust”
This is a story of a woman’s relationship with her father. A relationship that is strained and tested by many factors.
The narrator says she is 48, the same age her father was when she was born. She is aware of her parents’ time together, but mostly through hearsay:
you can never know much about other people’s lives, least of all your parents’, especially if your parents have made a point of turning their lives into stories that they then go on to tell with God-given ability of not caring in the least about what’s true and what’s not.
Her recollection of her parents is that she was his child and her child, but never their child. She spent a lot of time with her mother and then 1 month every year with him at Hammars, or Djaupadal (Sweden), as it was known in the old days. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 