SOUNDTRACK: ANE BRUN-Tiny Desk Concert #518 (April 1, 2016).
Ane Brun is a Norwegian singer who is currently based in Sweden. She plays piano and guitar and has a pretty voice which reaches high notes but maintains a kind of rough rasp. She says she had a terrible cold and this is her first day of singing. She doesn’t trust her voice yet and she thanks everyone for being so quiet.
The three songs she sings are slow (a little too slow for my tastes). The blurb says that these are the three slower songs on the album, so maybe I’d like them a bit more amid the other songs This is not to say the songs are bad, just a little too mellow.
Having said that, the melody and vocal lines of “Still Waters’ are beautiful. This is the one song she plays on the piano and it does sound rather different from the other two.
For “All We Want is Love” (which she describes as the ultimate love song, kind of), she plays a pretty, picked melody on the acoustic guitar. But its clear that her voice is the main instrument here–and she hits some lovely notes in the repeated refrain of “All we want is love.”
“Signing Off” is the last track on the album. It is a slow guitar song. The melody isn’t as immediate as the previous song, but her voice really does carry the tune nicely. I wonder if her voice normally sounds like this or if the cold impacted her singing.
[READ: March 14, 2016] “For the Best”
I wasn’t that inspired by the previous story of Beattie’s that I read. And I didn’t really love this one either. I found it very slow going.
The story is about a man named Gerald, an older divorced man, who gets invited to a party. His ex-wife, whom he has not seen in some thirty years will also be invited.
But the way this was revealed was kind of circuitous, I thought.
the Clavells weren’t the sort to play pranks, so the printed invitation to their annual Christmas party arrived after what Gerald and Charlotte’s son, Timothy, would call a “heads-up,” sent by e-mail, letting them know that both were invited to the event, at the Clavells’ apartment, on West Fifty-sixth Street. Gerald hadn’t seen Charlotte since their divorce, thirty-one years before, and this was the first time he’d seen her e-mail address. Whether she was on any social media he wouldn’t know, as he was not.
I enjoyed some of the oddly phrased ways the story was revealed (like that last sentence), but it took me a few tries to puzzle out if Gerald was the recipient or the sender oft he invite. It’s a long first sentence, I guess.
I also enjoyed this follow-up sentence: “It was a rather jaunty message from the Clavells, who were not jaunty people.” But I think that reading so much of the story like this is exhausting. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 