SOUNDTRACK: BRIGHT EYES-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #86 (September 28, 2020)
I was never a fan of Bright Eyes. Something about them just never quite appealed to me. And since Conor Oberst was so prolific, I got tired of him too.
But then he made better Oblivion Community Center with phoebe Bridgers and I really liked the album and the live show. So I’ve rethunk Bright Eyes.
They were supposed to play a show in Bethlehem this summer with Lucy Dacus. I was more interested in seeing Lucy, but I would have certainly gone.
So here’s Bright Eyes with their first new album in almost ten years.
They recorded this Tiny Desk (home) concert with Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis at ARC Studios in Omaha, Neb., while Nate sits 1,500 miles away at Lucy’s Meat Market, a well-equipped studio in Los Angeles filled with sweet-sounding vintage keyboards. Singing and seated behind him is Becky Stark, better known as Lavender Diamond, along with their daughter.
The three songs they perform from Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was, are intense, with stripped back rawness and lyrics that are not always decipherable, filled with struggle and hope.
They open with “Mariana Trench” in which Mogis is on pedal steel, Walcott is on piano and Becky and daughter sing backing vocals. Oberst’s voice sounds as strong and confident as ever.
Up next is “Pan and Broom.” Nate starts the drum machine and then plays the organ. Meanwhile Mike is playing the Marxophone which is a kind of tiny echoing sounding zither machine.
“Persona Non Grata” is about being insane enough that people don’t want you around. Conor sits at the Moog, while Nate stays on the organ and Mike goes back to the pedal steel. Oberst plays a cool-sounding solo while Mike plays a pedal steel solo along with him. It sounds really good.
“Shell Games” is an older song. Mike switches to the guitar and Nate jumps over to the Casio. The guitar is quiet but adds a cool fuzziness underneath the synth sounds. This song also seems to be a bit more intense than the others.
This feels like a stripped down sound, but I don’t actually know what the recorded versions sound like.
[READ: September 26, 2020] “A Logic Named Joe”
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
Murray Leinster was one of the most prolific writers in the heyday of science-fiction pulps. … It reads like a creative exercise in conditional statements, with just a touch of black humor thrown in. … My favorite aspect is the implication that AI is evil because we, humans, make it evil, not because some robot has gone rogue.
The other stories in this collection so far have been more of a detailed explanation of a utopian future. This story is an actual story–and an exciting one.
It’s a shame that the central motivator of the narrator is a sexist trope, but otherwise the story is really cool and amazingly prescient when it comes to technology.
The story jumps right in and doesn’t fully explain what’s going on just yet.
The narrator works at Logic Company as maintenance worker. On August 3rd, a Logic called Joe came off the assembly line. Two days later Laurine came into town, and that’s when the narrator saved the world.
The narrator is married and Laurine is the woman he dated before he met his wife Laurine “is a blonde that I was crazy about once–and crazy is the word.” She dumped her exes and even killed one of them.
So, yes, a sexist underpinning to this story. (more…)
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Indigo De Souza is a new (to me) musician who I heard about on NPR music. Her song “Kill Me” is outstanding. A great dynamic of sounds, very funny lyrics and memorable hooks. I loved it immediately. She announced a tour soon after I’d heard it and I grabbed a ticket to see her headline tour (!).
I Just Read About That... 