SOUNDTRACK: JASON ISBELL & AMANDA SHIRES-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #88 (September 30, 2020).
I can’t decide if I like Jason Isbell or not. I like his songs quite a lot and after watching this set I like him a whole lot. But I find his voice unpleasant–too twangy and country, which just rubs me the wrong way.
And yet the chorus of “Dreamsicle” is wonderful. The way he and Amanda Shires harmonize is just fantastic. I’ve heard the song on the radio, but it sounds amazing here.
The songs for this Tiny Desk (home) concert are from Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit’s Spring release, Reunions. “Dreamsicle” shares the story of a child seeing his family falling apart all around. Reflecting on those times, he finds fond memories, and the chorus of the song — “a Dreamsicle on a summer night in a folding lawn chair” — conjures up bright light even amidst the darkness.
Between songs, Jason is very chatty, making a lot of humorous observations, like that he’s been to the Tiny Desk and “The Tiny Desk Desk is not tiny, it is larger than average for a desk…. It’s a tiny concert at a desk. [Call it a] cluttered desk concert.”
The next song “Overseas” is a louder song (it think it even distorts their sound equipment some). Introducing the song he says, “Lets do ‘Overseas.’ Because we cant go overseas were gonna sing ‘Overseas.’ There’s a lovely lead violin and more terrific harmonies in the bridge. They have this back and forth at the end
JI: That’s Amanda Shires playing the fiddle. That’s really good.
AS: Thanks for having me.
JI: That was so good.
AS: I like to the play the fiddle, man. It’s a violin though.
JI: We should do this more often.
AS: Yeah we should.
This interchange is all the more funny because
Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires feel fortunate. They have their 4-year-old daughter, Mercy, a wonderful home, and each other.
Jason says that Mercy “tells me that she is an expert yodeler…. And it’s good, especially for a four year old who is not Scandinavian or Jimmie Rogers. But then she says can you send that video to Jewel? Jewel seems very nice but I’m afraid she’s going to come to our house and say “you can’t yodel for shit” and I want to be the barrier between my daughter and the cutthroat world of yodeling.
The final song, “It Gets Easier,” deals with Jason’s drinking demons, with a refrain filled with such stark truth: “It gets easier, but it never gets easy.” These words could be an anthem for all those in recovery. It’s the nature of Jason Isbell to sing the truth.I really enjoyed their banter and it made me like their songs even more.
[READ: September 24, 2020] “Birth of a Gardener”
During the COVID Quarantine, venerable publisher Hingston & Olsen created, under the editorship of Rebecca Romney, a gorgeous box of 12 stories. It has a die-cut opening to allow the top book’s central image to show through (each book’s center is different). You can get a copy here. This is a collection of science fiction stories written from 1836 to 1998. Each story imagines the future–some further into the future than others. As it says on the back of the box
Their future. Our present. From social reforms to climate change, video chat to the new face of fascism, Projections is a collection of 12 sci-fi stories that anticipated life in the present day.
About this story, Romney writes
the story works because the woman’s husband is a mansplainer. He loses her to another dimension simply because he assumed he understood the principles of physics better than she did. Not to worry: that isn’t a spoiler. … [Pitkin Buck shows that] even as we are simplified into the roles that prioritize our relationships — mother, wife, sister, daughter, partner — over our individuals identities, women in 2020 (as with women in 1961, and women in 1861, and…) have to fight to retain our own rich interior experiences.
In this story, Payne is a physicist–Fermi Research at the Droxden Foundation, famous for his work on anti-matter. His wife, Lee, is not. And he hates to see her “spraining her mind” over books about physics. Why did she waste her time with books like that when she has such a green thumb.
He is so frustrated with her that he finally says she should just give it up “If you would be happy for life, plant a garden.”
She replies “That wasn’t why I evoked you.”
He doesn’t understand what she means, even when she says, “I just thought very hard and–finally one day, there you were.”
He says “Stop playing around with a rigorous logic that isn’t your style.”
She retorts: “Rigorous logic! Rigor mortis!”
Finally, she says she wants him to teach her to see physics. It would help them both. She says she can already see neutrinos.
He gets angry and asks why she keeps talking fairy tale when he has serious work to do.
After more back and forth he ends the discussion with, “Darling, you bore me.”
The next morning Lee was dead. It was shocking to him, but he felt closer to her now than he ever had while she was alive.
Suddenly he started seeing her–as if she were down at the end of a tunnel looking at him. He sees that she is looking at book. It is called The Validity of Thought Patterns as Determined by Their Elegance. He sees that she is the author of the book.
Then she starts demonstrating a diagram on a black board. She made a beautiful arabesque–it was the work of a clear and intelligent mathematical. But he had to laugh because she had gotten one thing crucially wrong–of course she would be confused in the end.
Then he realized the mistake was his own. She was not drawing matte but anti-matter. His own field of study! He and Lee were even closer than he’d ever realized. He must try to communicate with her.
The end of the story is outstanding.
