SOUNDTRACK: THE FLAMING LIPS AND HEADY FWENDS-“The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” (2012).
2012 saw the release of this very strange collaborative album. Whether The Flaming Lips had entered the mainstream or if people who’d always liked them were now big stars or maybe they all just liked doing acid. Whatever the case, The Lips worked with a vast array of famous (and less famous) people for this bizarre album. Here it is 8 years later. Time to check in.
This is, indeed a cover of Roberta Flack’s song.
It’s not often that a cover is so willfully defiant of the original without actually trying to mess with it.
This is a ponderous, ten-minute version of the song, punctuated by loud, echoing drumbeats keeping a slow pace. The music is essentially distorted electronic chord changes on the beats and occasional twinkling keyboard notes throughout.
The song is sung in the audio equivalent of soft-focus by Erykah Badu.
It is a hard song to parse. Badu’s voice sounds great. The contrast to the original music is stark and yet it is sonically more interesting than the treacly original. On the other hand, it is long and, if the mood is wrong, slow and boring.
It’s a song I thought I would likely skip were I listening to the whole disc, and yet listening to it right now, the 10 minutes went by like nothing. So maybe it is pretty great after all.
[READ: June 15, 2019] “Interesting Women”
Interesting women–are we ever going to be free of them?
So starts this story of an interesting woman.
She is concerned because all new acquaintances
seem to be gorgeous lesbians or bisexuals whose intoxicating charm fed straight into hot wet tumbles between rented sheets.
The narrator is on holiday with her daughter, Basia, in Thailand. Their hotel is swimming with interesting women.
The narrator and Basia are kayaking when an interesting woman approaches them. She is in her fifties, looking good without pushing it. The woman asks how hard it is and then says that kayaking is on her list of things to do that scare her, The woman’s name is Silver, well, its one of her real names. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 