SOUNDTRACK: FRENCH, FRITH, KAISER, THOMPSON-“Bird in God’s Garden/Lost and Found” (1987).
The words are a poem by Rumi. It is a slow droney song that is primarily drums from John French. Thompson sings in his quieter style.
There are several different versions of this song. There’s an earlier unreleased version with Richard & Linda Thompson that is much quieter. I especially like this version because after every other verse they brighten things up with a dramatic five note string riff (or maybe it’s Kaiser on the sanshin) that seems to come out of nowhere.
They spice up the middle of the song with a rollicking traditional Irish sounding fiddle melody from Fred Frith’s “Lost and Found.” (Frith plays violin). It adds a bit of zing to an otherwise dirgey song.
After about three minutes of the slow thumping there’s a wonderfully rocking instrumental section complete with fiddles and bass playing some wild melodies.
It was recorded on the album Live, Love, Larf and Loaf and also appears on Thompson’s collection Watching the Dark (1993).
[READ: September 1, 2019] “Nell Zink’s Satire Raises the Stakes”
I have really enjoyed the Nell Zink books that I’ve read. I’ve even read an excerpt from Doxology, the book that’s reviewed in this essay.
What I like about this essay though is the summations of her writing and her earlier books.
Schwartz says that Zink looks at life from the fringes. She then summarizes her three impossible to summarize books in simple and amusing fashion: (more…)
