SOUNDTRACK: SARA WATKINS-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #209 (May 13, 2021).
You never really know what you’ll get with Sara Watkins. Well, that’s not true, you know you’ll get wonderful music in some variant of folk. Whether she’s playing with Nickel Creek or her brother in Watkins Family Hour, there’s going to be harmonies and wonderful violin. The big surprise for me for this concert was that she opened with “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.” Yes, “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” by Sons of the Pioneers. The trio of Sara Watkins, Alan Hampton and Davíd Garza’s voices sound fantastic together.
This is so enchanting. The painted scrim, the scenery trees are not only a setting for Sara Watkins and her bandmates, but we also discover a “magic desk.” And as Sara lifts the desk’s top, we hear a guitar playing an alluring melody; in fact, it’s Harry Nilsson’s dreamy song “Blanket For a Sail.”
Davíd Garza, [what’s he been up to?] plays the melody and then the rest join in, with Sara playing the violin like a guitar. Then when Sara puts bow to violin she and Garza share some fun soloing. Hampton’s upright bass is a perfect low end for these songs.
These songs are surprising to me, but I guess they shouldn’t.
The songs are from her new album, Under the Pepper Tree. “It’s a children’s record, largely inspired by thinking back on the music that meant so much to me as a kid,” she says. “I’ve got a daughter now, and so much of the music that I heard as a kid has stayed with me and served me well.”
One of music’s magical properties for Sara is the way it can ease transitions. Maybe it’s from childhood to adolescence, or falling in and out of love, or simply getting your child to sleep. For this Tiny Desk, we hear old cowboy tunes via the Sons of the Pioneers or Rogers and Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”
The album is called “Under the Pepper Tree” because she has had a pepper tree in every house she’s lived in in Southern California {I’ve never heard of pepper trees]. They have a lacey canopy like a willow tree like a fort. The song is a delightful instrumental.
“You’ll Never Walk Alone” is an old standard and Sara sounds really impressive hitting those high notes at the end.
“Night Singing” is a song she wrote to her daughter, but she realized it was a song she needed to hear as well. It’s for anyone who needs to feel that they are cared for. It’s a beautiful lullaby.
A lot of musicians make children’s records after they become parents, and that’s no bad thing.
[READ: June 5, 2021] Have You Seen the Dublin Vampire?
I don’t post about children’s books very often. But since this came across my desk at work (an even more rare occurrence!), I thought it would be fun to read it.
I’m not familiar with Úna Woods. This is a rhyming picture book with really fun illustrations–I’m assuming assembled on Photoshop. The lines are very smooth and consistent and the leaves are all the same with just different colors.
I don’t know if the Dublin Vampire is a thing. Although Ireland is famous for its vampire creators.
Bram Stoker creator of the world’s most important male vampire in the world (Dracula) was born in Clontarf. Sheridan Le Fanu, creator of the pre-eminent female vampire (Carmilla), was born on Dominick Street. [Thanks to Supernatural Dublin].
I don’t know Dublin well enough to know if there is a “moon-shaped park with a creepy old tree,” but that’s where the Dublin Vampire lives.
He rides a ghost bus (I’m ALMOST positive there isn’t such a bus in Dublin). (more…)
