SOUNDTRACK: JESCA HOOP-Tiny Desk Concert #965 (April 3, 2020).
I really liked the Tiny Desk Concert that features Sam Beam and Jesca Hoop. So much so that I bought the CD and it made me want to see both of them live.
Jesca Hoop last appeared at the Tiny Desk as a duet with Sam Beam (Iron & Wine) in the spring of 2016. They sang songs from their collaborative record Love Letters For Fire.
This time it is just Jesca and I have realized that I liked her more as an accompanist rather than a lead singer. Actually, that’s not exactly right. Her voice is lovely. I just find the songs a little meandering.
This time around, Jesca Hoop came to the Tiny Desk with just her guitars, her lovely voice, and brilliant poetic songs. She has a magical way with words, and she opened her set with “Pegasi,” a beautiful song about the wild ride that is love, from her 2017 album Memories Are Now.
“Pegasi” is nice to watch her play the fairly complex guitar melodies–she uses all of the neck. The utterly amazing thing about “Pegasi” though comes at the end of the song when she sings an amazing note (high and long) that represents a dying star.
She wanted to sing it today so it could live on Tiny Desk.
The two songs that follow are from her latest album, Stonechild, the album that captured my heart in 2019, and the reason I reached out to invite her to perform at my desk.
“All Time Low” is a song, she says, for the “existential underdog.” She switches guitars (to an electric) and once again, most of the melody takes place on the high notes of the guitar. Her melodies are fascinating. And the lyrics are interesting too:
“Michael on the outside, always looking in
A dog in the fight but his dog never wins
If he works that much harder, his ship might come in
He gives it the old heave-ho.”
After the song, she says, I’m going to tune my guitar, but I’m not going to talk so it doesn’t take as long. If you were at my show, I’d be talking the whole time and it would take a long time.
And for her final tune, she plays “Shoulder Charge.” It’s a song that features a word that Jesca stumbled upon online: “sonder,” which you won’t find in the dictionary. She tells the NPR crowd “sonder” is the realization “that every person that you come across is living a life as rich and complex as your own.” And that realization takes you out of the center of things, something that is at the heart of “Shoulder Charge” and quite a potent moment in this deeply reflective and personal Tiny Desk concert.
This word, sonder, came to my attention back in 2016 when Kishi Bashi first discovered it and named his album Sonderlust for it.
The song is like the others, slow and quite with a pretty melody that doesn’t really go anywhere.
I found that after three listens, I started to enjoy the songs more, so maybe she just writes songs that you need to hear a few times to really appreciate.
[READ: March 2020] Ducks, Newburyport
I heard about this book because the folks on the David Foster Wallace newsgroup were discussing it. I knew nothing about it but when I read someone describe the book like this:
1 Woman’s internal monologue. 8 Sentences. 1040 pages
I was instantly intrigued.
Then my friend Daryl said that he was really enjoying it, so I knew I had to check it out.
That one line is technically (almost) accurate but not really accurate.
The story (well, 95% of it) is told through one woman’s stream of consciousness interior monologue. She is a mother living in Ohio. She has four children and she is overwhelmed by them. Actually she is overwhelmed by a lot and she can’t stop thinking about these things.
She used to teach at a small college but felt that the job was terrible and that she was not cut out for it. So now she bakes at home and sells her goods locally. She specializes in tarte tatin. This is why she spends so much time with her thoughts–she works alone at home. Her husband travels for work. Whether she is actually making money for the family is a valid but moot question.
So for most of the book not much happens, exactly. We just see her mind as she thinks of all the things going on around her. I assume she’s reading the internet (news items come and go in a flash). She is quite funny in her assessment of the world (how much she hates trump). While I was reading this and more and more stupid things happened in the real world, I couldn’t help but imagine her reaction to them). She’s not a total liberal (she didn’t trust Hillary), but she is no conservative either (having lived in Massachusetts and New York). In fact, she feels she does not fit in locally at all. (more…)
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[READ: March 10, 2021] Things Are Against Us
