SOUNDTRACK: IRIS-Verftet Online Music Festival 2020 (April 1, 2020).
In April 2020, Norway’s Verftet Music Festival streamed an online concert:
Get ready for Verftet Online Music Festival, Bergen’s largest virtual concert festival, where we can enjoy great music together. We want to turn despair and frustration into innovation and positivity, and invite everyone to a digital festival experience out of the ordinary – right home in your own living room.
I was completely unfamiliar with Iris, but she was the only other singer whose set was still streaming. Because Aurora is a Norwegian singer in the same range, I feel like Iris’ voice sounds similar to hers. But that’s a lazy comparison.
I suspect that she is a bit more poppy than this set lets on. Like the Silja Sol set, it feels like a more “unplugged” kind of show.
It opens with “crawl for me” with she her singing to a guitar. It’s quiet and powerful. The rest of the band comes out for “mercy” which is “how i would like to to not show me any.” There are washes of guitar s and keys, including a very cool, almost sinister keyboard sound in the end.
A cellist arrives for “kroppsspråk” which is a cover of a Lars Vaular song. It’s kind of rapped–but in Iris’s more singing way. It seems like the original is very dancey and she has dialed it back.
After a gentle piano solo version of “giving in” (her voice is lovely in the spare setting), she played “from inside a car,” my favorite song of the set which has a breathy quality that I really like.
Then she throws in a Beatles cover. “Here, There and Everywhere” is a beautiful gentle cover with just her voice and an acoustic guitar.
“hidden springs” stays with the acoustic sound, but she moved to a more techie processed vocal for “your mind, the universe.” She has a few technical glitches for this song but when they are resolved her voice sounds very cool as it starts and then turns into a much bigger song.
As they prepare the next song she jokes that you shouldn’t eat crackers in bed, which proves to be the opening line of “hanging around you/crackers,” a sweet sounding breakup song.
Before the final song she mentions that all of her band is wearing band T-shirts: Iron Maiden, Metallica, Kiss and um, Reservoir Dogs(?). It’s an amusing look for such a gentle show.
Before starting “romance is dead” she encourages everyone to visit my You Tube channel for recipes. This set ending song is soft and lovely, just piano and strings and her beautiful voice.
[READ: July 15, 2021] “Road Trips”
When David was a kid, his father rallied the families on their street in Raleigh to plant maple trees. For years they were tiny, pathetic things. Now, decades later they are tall and majestic creating a canopy down the street where his father still lives.
He was home visiting his father who brought him to a block party. At the party a teenager saw David’s father and groaned “Lou Sedaris, who invited her?”
“My son is gay,” the boy’s mother announced as if none of us had figured this out yet. David was blown away that someone could casually announce this on the street where he grew up. As a young homosexual David played all the games that the other closeted kids did. Dated girls and claimed that sex before marriage was what dogs did–a true union of soles could take eight to ten years!
He kept his secret until he was twenty. But he would have kept it longer had a couple not picked him up when he was hitchhiking. It was 1 AM and he was picked up by a Cadillac with people his parents’ age in it. (more…)
