SOUNDTRACK: COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #68 (August 20, 2020).
Courtney Marie Andrews annoys me because she is not Courtney Barnett. So whenever a DJ says Courtney, I hope it’s Barnett. Sometimes it is and sometimes it’s this country singer.
Courtney Marie Andrews seems like a nice enough person but her music is on the wrong side of country for me.
She opens this set with “Burlap String.” Paul Defiglia plays upright bass and Mat Davidson (aka Twain) adds pedal steel. In this song
Andrews sings about the fear of love. “I’ve grown cautious, I’ve grown up / I’m a skeptic of love / Don’t wanna lose what I might find.” Yet, “Burlap String” is also a song about how love’s memory lingers, and how the mind rekindles its beauty.
Defiglia leaves after the song.
The blurb says that Andrews is only 29 and she’s been playing for ten years. She has a new album and WXPN has been playing “It Must Be Someone Else’s Fault” a bunch. It’s a bouncy song that seems to be full of sadness.
For “If I Told,” which she calls a modern day love song, Davidson switches to the Wurlizer. Andrews sings a bit of yodel in the chorus. It’s a catchy moment.
The set ends with Courtney alone at the Wurlitzer, singing “Ships in the Night” the final song on her seventh album, Old Flowers. It is about lost love and hoping for closure with fondness.
Courtney Marie’s voice is powerful but it’s not my thing.
[READ: August 1, 2020] Kill the Farm Boy
I saw a review for the second book in this series (which has just come out) and it sounded pretty great. So I looked up the first one only to find out that Dawson and Hearne are both authors with other series to their names. Dawson has written The Shadow Series (as Lila Bowen), The Hit Series and The Blud Series. Meanwhile, Hearne has written The Iron Druid Series and Oberon’s Meaty Mysteries. They’ve also written single volumes of things too. So they are well known in the fantasy realm.
The acknowledgments say that they met up in the Dallas Fort Worth airport at the barbecue joint (I have eaten there and it was tremendous). They waited for their flight and discussed killing the farm boy, or in other words, making fun of white male power fantasies that usually involve a kid in a rural area rising to power in the empire after he loses his parents. They found that skewering topics was fun and decided to write the book together.
So in the land of Pell we meet a farm boy named Worstley. He cleaned up the goats. And one goat, Gus, was especially ornery. One night while Worstley was mucking out the area, a fairy entered the room. She was haggard and dressed crazily with one sock on and her pants falling off. But the fairly quickly corrected any thoughts about her being a proper fairy by saying she was a pixie and her name was Staph. She was there to anoint the chosen One.
To prove her magic she pointed at Gus and magicked him into talking. The first thing Gus said was that his name was Gustave and he called Worstley “Pooboy.” (more…)
I Just Read About That... 