SOUNDTRACK: NILÜFER YANYA-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #54 (July 22, 2020).
Nilüfer Yanya is a pretty mesmerizing singer. I feel lucky to have seen her live and would like to see her again.
In the meantime, this Tiny Desk (Home) Concert will have to do.
There’s something unique about the way Yanya constructs songs. And her singing voice is really unlike anyone else’s that I’ve heard.
For this Tiny Desk (Home) Concert, she plays four songs. Three from her 2019 album and one new one. All four are different from when she played Tiny Desk last year.
In her previous Tiny Desk Concert and when I saw her live, she had a full band. But for this one, it’s just her guitar and her voice.
For “Heat Rises,” she plays spare guitar lines and quiet chords as she sings in her unique style. As the song moves along she adds high notes to the chords–fleshing things out in a subtle but effective way.
After performing “Heat Rises,” Nilüfer Yanya pauses to say a few things about herself, something we’ve been asking artists to do for these Tiny Desk (home) concerts.
“One of the things that’s been on my mind a lot is the racism and violence and injustice going on towards Black people and people of color, not only in America but here in the U.K. and all over the world. As a person of mixed heritage” — Nilüfer’s father is Turkish and her mother is of Irish and Barbadian descent — “this issue is something close to my heart.” Nilüfer urges us all to see the hurt being done. It’s the only way forward.
She then plays “Paralyzed,” a song that she says relates to the issue. She’s never played it live before. The song has a cool four note chord progression followed by a sinister feeling five note riff.
Bob Boilen writes: “I hear these words so differently now:”
I hear strained screams from Heaven singin’
“save me”
This can’t be okay
Shadow’s lyin’ here
And it’s blocking out the light
(I am paralyzed)
The above part of the song turns musically bright as she sings those dark lyrics.
“Day 7” is the new song. She sings in a similar style to the one she uses on “Baby Luv” where she sings with an accent or inflection that is impossible to place but is very compelling. This song also features a simple but unusual riff as she builds the song using all of the neck of her guitar (the chords she plays during the “go go” section are so interesting).
She ends the set with the final track from her album, “Heavyweight Champion of the Year.” This is the only song from this set that she played when I saw her. I was blown away by the song when I saw her live because the song mixed quiet and range perfectly. It’s more subtle here and demands that you listen closely to the words.
[READ: July 20, 2020] “Nobody’s Business”
I’ve wanted to read more from Jhumpa Lahiri for years–she’s yet another writer who I feel like I need more stories from. And I really liked this story a lot.
The story is written in the third person. It’s about a woman named Sang. She is living in Boston, having just dropped out of a graduate program from Harvard. Sang has two roommates, Paul and Heather.
What was so interesting about the way that it was written is that it seems to be Sang’s story. She is, after all, the person with all the action. But by the end of the story it becomes more about Paul. I thought that shift of perspective was quite engaging.
Sang is Bengali and every so often she would receive a call from a Bengali man who was courting her. These men had heard that she was pretty and smart and unmarried at thirty, so they were trying to arrange something with her. Sang was never rude to these men. She even met some of them. But Sang was very serious about her boyfriend, Farouk, who was presently in Cairo. That’s not a ruse, she is really dating him. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 