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Archive for the ‘NPR/PRI/PBS’ Category

Gabe Hudson–“Dear Mr. President” (New Yorker, June 18 & 25, 2001)

Posted in Coronavirus, Death, Eric Clapton, Gabe Hudson, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Gulf War, Letters, New Yorker, Phoebe Bridgers, Quarantine, Racism, Saddam Hussein, Short Story, Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, Tiny Desk Concert, Violence, War, Yuck! on September 11, 2020| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: PHOEBE BRIDGERS-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #78 (September 10, 2020).

Phoebe Bridgers is in the White House!

Obviously anybody would be better in the White House than the current squatter, but Phoebe Bridgers would certainly be more fun than any other choices at the moment.

I love that Phoebe fully commits to being in the White House by having her band wear Secret Service-looking suits while she is wearing a very Presidential pantsuit (instead of that skeleton onesie she’s been in since the quarantine began).

For the first two songs she stands behind the oval office desk while Marshall Vore on drums and Harrison Whitford on guitar accompany her.

She opens with “Kyoto” one of my favorite songs of the year.  This more acoustic version loses a little bit of the magic from the recorded version, but that chorus is just so tasty and Phoebe’s voice (and the backing vocals) sound fantastic.

They open with “Kyoto,” a story song based on her first trip to Japan, followed with a sweet version of “Moon Song” and the sad details of loving someone who doesn’t love themself.

“Moon Song” is one of those beautiful songs that is lyrically very powerful but is just a hair too slow for me.  Of course after a few more listens (especially to the lyrics) it will sound perfect, I’m sure.  I had read an article recently about a line in this song

We hate Tears in Heaven
But it’s sad that his baby died

The article said that she originally wanted to say “We hate Eric Clapton,” but decided against it.  But that she really does hate Clapton:

I have such an Eric Clapton rant, because I think it’s just extremely mediocre music, but also he’s a famous racist.

I didn’t know this but apparently during an August 1976 gig in Birmingham, Eric Clapton made racist comments and praised Enoch Powell, inadvertently inspiring the Rock Against Racism campaign.

Wow.  Has he ever made amends?

The song picks up some power by the end, as Phoebe’s song tend to do.

And then comes the kicker, as Phoebe introduces herself with the words “I hope everybody’s enjoying their apocalypse,” the band kicks into her surreal doomsday tune “I Know the End.”

It starts like many other Phoebe songs–slow and thoughtful.  But this one builds and builds.  Midway through the song, they turn off the green screen projector and everyone walks (while the song is still playing) to another part of the room for the end.

And what an end it is: The trio expands to an ensemble

Whitford and Bridgers switch to electric guitar, Vore moves to a full drum kit, Emily Retsas joins on bass (looking bad ass in her blonde hair, dark suit and sunglasses), Nick White adds keyboards and Odessa Jorgensen plays violin.  The song feel so much louder (there’s been no bass so far).  You can feel the tension mounting

And then scattered throughout the screen are videos of Phoebe fans–recording from bedrooms, cars, backyards and trampolines–singing the chorus, air drumming and smiling big smiles.

And at the end everybody

lets out the kind of cathartic scream that has come to define 2020 for so many of us.

Followed by Phoebe’s winning smile.

[READ: September 10, 2020] “Dear Mr. President”

This story is written as a letter to The Honorable George Bush, President of the United States.

It is written by a Marine, Lance Corporal James Laverne.  [He is clearly a loser or a sucker, according to our current president].

He starts the letter with greetings and salutations and a fine memory of when Bush landed his helicopter at Laverne’s station in Iraq.  The men stood at attention for two hours while Bush was in a tent talking with someone.  Then when he came out he spoke to Laverne.  When Laverne said he was from Wisconsin, Bush said “Is cheddar better?” to which Laverne gave a hearty “yes sir!”

Then he tells a story of the time he was attacked.  He and Brecks went into a burned-out building where they’d heard there was sniper.  But when they got there it wasn’t a sniper, it was a dog.  Brecks went to rescue the dog, but when he bent over, someone on the ground threw a grenade onto the roof which blew Brecks to pieces. (more…)

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Erika Krouse–“The Husbands” (New Yorker, June 18 & 25, 2001)

Posted in Bill Callahan, Coronavirus, Cruise, Erika Krouse, Marriage Trouble, New Yorker, Quarantine, Sex, Short Story, Sisters, Smog, Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, Tiny Desk Concert on September 10, 2020| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: BILL CALLAHAN-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #77 (September 9, 2020).

Bill Callahan has been making music for thirty years (half of them as the band Smog).  He has a deep, calming voice.

His songs are slow and almost spoken word.  They might even start to put you to sleep until you start listening to his lyrics.

For his Tiny Desk (home) concert, Bill Callahan stands outside his home, near a desk adorned with a taller-than-usual globe, two books and a single banana. [They play] three songs from Gold Record, which came out just last week [as well as an older song, “Released”].

“Pigeons” starts with Callahan saying “Hi, I’m Johnny Cash,” and, with his deep voice you might be inclined to believe it.  The music comes in with a picked guitar intro and Callahan’s slow delivery of this engaging story:

Well, the pigeons ate the wedding rice
And exploded somewhere over San Antonio
I picked up the newlyweds and asked them
Where they wanted to go
They said “We don’t care, we don’t know, anywhere, just go”

Outside of Concan, the groom noticed the gold band on my left hand
And said “You got any advice for us, old man?”
Well, I thought for a mile, as I drove with a smile
Then I said when you are dating, you only see each other
And the rest of us can go to hell
But when you are married, you’re married to the whole wide world
The rich, the poor
The sick and the well
The straights, and the gays
And the people who say we don’t use these terms these days
The salt and the soil
After I’d said my piece
We drove on in silence for a spell
How my words had gone over, I couldn’t tell
Potent advice or preachy as hell
But when I see people about to marry
I become something of a plenipotentiary
I just think it’s good as you probably can tell

Midway through, the song turns into a bouncy waltz for a few bars.  Then it returns to that slow picking of the verses.  Derek Phelps adds trumpet accompaniment and Matt Kinsey plays a lot of guitar lines that act as mini solos as well as dramatic bass lines.

He says he wrote “Released” a few years ago but it seems more and more appropriate every day.  The dramatic guitar opening is great and Kinsey’s lead fills add a lot of depth to this simple opening.

The music gets really loud and dramatic as he sings the middle part (italicized below), before the song returns to that gentle, vaguely Mexican sounding (especially with the muted trumpet) melody.

The lyrics are a short poem

Like two wrestlers
I am mostly still
As the Four Horsemen
Come over the hill
Trying to pass themselves off as the Holy Trinity
When any fool can see
Any fool can see
Everything is corrupt
From the shoes on our feet
To the way we get fucked
Oh, I know that we are free
Don’t tell me again that we are free
Tell me, when will we be released?
Released

“Another Song” is a bit faster even if his vocals aren’t

I keep coming back to a lyric from “Another Song,” which he performs here: “Lonesome in a pleasant way.” We’re all a little bit more lonesome than usual right now, but we’re lonesome together. Maybe that feels OK, pleasant even.

It’s quite catchy.  It’s also fairly short except for the coda which is louder than anything else as it builds with the repetition of the title.

“The Mackenzies” is another story song.  It’s sweet and sad and comforting and painful.  And the tempo rises and falls accordingly.  Kinsey’s lead guitar lines throughout the verses are really something delightful as are Phelp’s trumpet additions.

The blurb ends with a nice sentiment from Bill.

Callahan, in the zone during this performance, shares so few words between songs that we decided to follow up and ask what he’s been feeling about his world today.

“There are a lot of voices these days. So many that, I think, even positive sentiments become detrimental in their deafening number,” Callahan explains. “Quiet reflection can be the clearest and most informative and soothing voice you’ll ever hear. There are many unknowns at this time in history. It’s more than a junction in our old world. It’s the possibility of a whole new world. A large part of me believes this. Listen to music, read books, talk to friends and family. Don’t listen to the voices, not even mine!”

[READ: September 8, 2020] “The Husbands”

This story is about Maggie, a woman who likes to sleep with other women’s husbands.  She knows it’s not healthy (mentally or physically) but she does it anyway.

She started with her sister’s husband.  She had dated Patrick in high school.  Then they broke up and her sister, Sarah, dated and then married him.  That’s not why she sleeps with Patrick now (probably).

She has slept with her best friend’s husband, her librarian’s husband, many other husbands.

Most of them are one of, but the thing with Patrick has been going on for quite a while.  She even flew with Patrick to Texas for a weekend. (more…)

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Alice Munro–“What is Remembered” (New Yorker, February 19 & 26, 2001)

Posted in Alice Munro, Canadian Content, Coronavirus, Death, Doctors, Hospitals, Memory, New Yorker, Protoje, Quarantine, Sex, Short Story, Shyness, Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, Tiny Desk Concert on September 9, 2020| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: PROTOJE-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #76 (September 7, 2020).

Protoje is another reggae singer (who I’d never heard of before this Tiny Desk) who seems to be breaking the mold of what reggae sounds like.

Protoje is a not-so-secret treasure who’s been a vital force in the reggae revival movement these last several years. Perched in the hills of Irish Town on the fringe of Kingston, Protoje welcomes us into his backyard (which doubles as The Habitat Studio) for a uniquely fresh spin on a Tiny Desk (home) Concert. With a custom-designed set flanked by lush greens and mountains in the distance, this creative backdrop complements the uplifting feeling of Protoje’s music.

He performs three songs from his fifth album In Search of Lost Time and ends his set with an older song.

“Deliverance” has a loud bassline from Donald Dennis and an electronic drum sound from Peter Samaru.  Protoje sings and raps with a really fast delivery.

He speaks to his spiritual philosophy and faith on “Deliverance” with a chorus stating, “I hold my order, give my praises / Oh Jah, deliver me through these days, Jah deliver me / Sometimes really hard to go and face it / Oh this life can truly be amazing, amazing.”

The song is catchy and uplifting.

I really like that Lamont Savory is playing an acoustic guitar.  It’s never obtrusive.  In fact it often fades into the background, but it’s always there keeping the rhythm and melody afloat.  As the song ends he walks over to Sean Roberts and starts messing around on Roberts’ looping box.

“Strange Happenings” opens with Savory’s quiet, pretty guitar melody.  I usually find reggae to be samey and kind of dull, but these songs have a lot of vitality.  And lyrically they are sweet and powerful.

to me life was easy, it was just fun and games
Until I saw that people were filled with so much pain
It’s harder to share sometimes, easier to pretend
The way we treat each other, I just don’t comprehend

And then it came as a surprise to me that Sean Roberts busted out a violin and began playing a kind of mournful solo.

“Same So” has the standard reggae rhythm but the bass line is a bit more interesting.  It feels warm and inviting–much like the place where he is playing (which seems so placid it almost looks like a photograph backdrop).

After joking that “this is awkward” he proposes one more song.

He wraps his performance with his most recognizable chart-topping hit, “Who Knows,” which featured Chronixx on the original recording.

This song also has a pretty guitar opening and Protoje singing in a high, soft register.

Who knows / I just go where the trade wind blows / sending love to my friends and foes.

A message of peace in a time of hostility,

[READ: September 5, 2020] “What is Remembered”

In this story Meriel and her husband Pierre are getting ready to go to a funeral.  They had to come travel to Vancouver from Vancouver Island and it was their first night in a hotel alone since their wedding night–they always traveled with their children.

This was their second funeral as a married couple.  The first was a fellow teacher of Pierre’s.  He was in his sixties and they felt that that was okay.  What difference did it make if you died at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five?

But this funeral was for Pierre’s best friend Jonas–aged twenty-nine.  When she told Pierre that Jonas had died, Pierre immediately guessed suicide.  But no, it was a motorcycle accident.  Why had he been so certain it was a suicide?

They went to Jonas’ parents house for the reception.  There’s an amusing sequence with Pierre’s mother treating Pierre like a child.  But then Pierre’s mother and Jonas’ mother were distracted by the doctor who had looked after Jonas. They both approved of the man. (more…)

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Haruki Murakami–“U.F.O. in Kushiro” (New Yorker, March 19, 2001)

Posted in Anat Cohen, Baden Powell de Aquino, Coronavirus, Death, Earthquakes, Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin, Marcello Gonçalves, Marriage Trouble, Natural Disasters, New Yorker, Quarantine, Sex, Short Story, Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, Tiny Desk Concert, Translation, U.F.O. on September 4, 2020| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: ANAT COHEN AND MARCELLO GONÇALVES-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #74 (September 2, 2020).

Anat Cohen plays the clarinet and Marcello Gonçalves plays the seven-string guitar.  Their

music comes from the heart of Brazil. The first two songs are choros, from the choro genre of music that originated in 19th century Rio de Janeiro. Think of choro music like New Orleans jazz, but in South America, both born of European and African influences. Cohen, on the other hand, is a clarinetist from Israel and the composer of these tunes. She developed a passion for Brazilian music while studying at Berklee College of Music and not long afterward found herself in a “roda” (choro jam session) in Rio de Janeiro with some of the most virtuosic players in Brazil’s choro scene. It was on that trip 20 years ago when Cohen met Gonçalves for the first time. All these years later, choro music has woven many of the threads in Cohen’s musical fabric.

Notice Gonçalves’s seven-string guitar, a common instrument in choro music; the additional string extends the lower register as if to combine an acoustic and bass guitar. Cohen explained in an email that playing with Gonçalves “makes me feel like I am playing with a full band.”

This duo was recently revered for their 2018 Grammy-nominated record, Outra Coisa, which celebrates the music of the iconic Brazilian woodwind player and composer Moacir Santos. Gonçalves is acclaimed for refining Santos’s orchestral arrangements down to just two musicians.

“Waiting for Amalia” opens with a bouncy guitar line and a sweet almost flirtatious clarinet.   This song feels quite jazzy.

“Valsa do Sul (Waltz of the South)” begins with a lovely, almost slinky clarinet melody. I love watching him play some of the fast riffs along with her, but it’s the bouncing, percussive moments that really make the song come alive.

This duo was recently revered for their 2018 Grammy-nominated record, Outra Coisa, which celebrates the music of the iconic Brazilian woodwind player and composer Moacir Santos.

Santos was the teacher of the guitarist and composer Baden Powell de Aquino.  I only recently heard of Baden Powell but here he is mentioned again–this time as an influencer before the existence of Instagram.  “In the Spirit of Baden” has some great low notes and a bouncy clarinet.  The middle has a strangely dissonant section where Gonçalves plays a few chords that are a little harsh.  Then Cohen joins in adding some wailing clarinet solos.  It’s a surprisingly dissonant moment in an otherwise very pretty song.

[READ: September 1, 2020] “U.F.O. in Kushiro”

I read this story almost ten years ago.  It was republished in a March 2011 issue of The New Yorker to memorialize the then recent earthquake in Japan.  This story was inspired by the incidents of the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan.

The story (translated by Jay Rubin) opens a few days after the Kobe Earthquake.  And even five days after the Kobe earthquake, Komura’s wife is still engrossed in the TV footage from Kobe.  She never leaves the set.  He doesn’t see her eat or even go to the bathroom.  When he returns from work on the sixth day, she is gone.  She has left a note to the effect that she’s not coming back and that she wants a divorce.  Komura’s wind is knocked out of him. (more…)

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Ann Beattie–“That Last Odd Day in L.A.” (New Yorker, April 16, 2001)

Posted in Ann Beattie, Aoife O'Donovan, Art, Bicycles, Chris Thile, Coronavirus, Deer, Edgar Meyer, Goat Rodeo, Guns, New Yorker, Possum, Quarantine, Short Story, Stuart Duncan, Thanksgiving, Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, Tiny Desk Concert, Violence, Yo-Yo Ma on September 3, 2020| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: GOAT RODEO-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #73 (September 1, 2020).

Classical music is for serious people.  Yo-Yo Ma, probably the best known cellist in the world, must surely be a very serious fellow.  False!

Yo-Yo Ma is a hoot.  How do we know?  The first song of this set is called “Your Coffee Is a Disaster.”  And the name of the group is Goat Rodeo, after all.

Yo-Yo man formed this assemblage known as Goat Rodeo nearly ten years ago.  It consists of Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile and many other folks.

You’ve probably heard Stuart Duncan playing fiddle on albums with Dolly Parton, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, and he was named the Academy of Country Music Fiddle Player of the Year numerous times. Edgar Meyer has played bass with Joshua Bell, Béla Fleck and Christian McBride, and the Nashville Symphony commissioned his first orchestral work in 2017. And you’d most likely recognize Chris Thile’s vocals and mandolin in the music of Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers.

I really enjoyed their wild (yes wild) Tiny Desk Concert back in 2011.

Fast forward a decade and this collaboration channels that same spectacular frenzy, separately captured in the gorgeous homes of the artists and mixed to perfection.

Thile introduces the song by saying the band is often in the midst of a a coffee war: Yo-Yo, Stuart and Edgar prefer beans that were roasted in a volcano for maybe millions of years, while Aoife and I prefer beans that taste as though the were fashioned by angels.  We like good coffee.”

Up next is one of many inappropriate (not scandalous or anything) titles.  When we are not arguing about coffee we are punning.  This: “Waltz Whitman.”  It is a slow piece that feels a lot like the kind of music Punch Brothers play–where it is a fiddle, not a violin.  Although the middle section which has some gorgeous slow cello from Yo-Yo Ma makes this song transcendent.

They’re accompanied by songwriter Aoife O’Donovan, who lends her pitch-perfect vocals to close out the set. Chris Thile … explains that “The Trappings” is about work/life balance, a timely sentiment.  How the things you are doing impact the ones with whom you do them.  How your partners aide and hinder your efforts (and the humorous variations he describes).

“The Trappings” is a faster song and it’s got vocals!  Thile sings lead and there is wonderful backing vocals from O’Donovan and Duncan.  There’s fantastic cello trills from Yo-Yo Ma throughout.

It’s good til the last drop.

[READ: September 1, 2020] “That Last Odd Day in L.A.”

This story was really interesting.

We meet a man who goes by his last name, Keller.  His girlfriend calls him that, his ex-wife called him that, even his teenaged daughter calls him that.

His wife left him after she had a bit of a nervous breakdown–the squirrels had dug up her bulbs and that was the last straw.

The woman Keller has been seeing, Sigrid, is a travel agent.  She has a son and an ex-husband who has gone deep into animal rescue.  Keller and Sigrid recently had a first date and it was a disaster.  Although they are planning another date after Thanksgiving. (more…)

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Marisa Silver–“Gunsmoke” (New Yorker, June 4, 2001)

Posted in Coronavirus, Film & TV, Guns, Marisa Silver, Quarantine, Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, Tiny Desk Concert, Tiwa Savage on September 1, 2020| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: TIWA SAVAGE-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #72 (August 31, 2020).

I don’t know who Tiwa Savage is.  Although apparently she is quite well- known.  Savage is

a veteran R&B and Afrobeat singer who began her career at age 11.  For her Tiny Desk (Home) Concert, Tiwa Savage returned, from London, to her birthplace of Lagos, Nigeria. She and The Alternative Sound band set up at the beautiful Jazzhole, a historic vinyl shop well-regarded among record collectors for the rarities within.

After Billie Eilish’s fake backdrop of the NPR office, this backdrop does have an NPR office feel, too.

With floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with books and albums as a backdrop, it certainly seems familiar to us, too — reminiscent of our performance cubicle at NPR HQ.

She plays four songs.  I really like Kenneth Ogueji’s bass sound throughout–very fluid and grooving.

On “Dangerous Love” she “speaks to matters of the heart.”  The song has a lot of high guitar notes from Phillip Akinkuande–fills and trills that flesh out the song nicely.  I also really like how a few times the song seems to smooth to a halt, just to pick up in unison again.

She says “I want you to vibe with us a little longer. I want to bring some Afrobeat to your screens.”

“Attention” has a nice, complex drum opening from Stanley Unogu and some very cool bass fills and runs.  There’s a lot of piano on this song, although I don’t know if it’s from Gospel Obi or Orowo Ubiene.

She sings the Reekado Banks single “Like” that she featured on.  This song is kind of odd as she keeps singing “Go go shorty it’s your birthday.”

She ends the set with “Koroba,” her newest single.  The song “blends her native Yoruba language with Nigerian Pidgin English, underpinned by a catchy, feel-good rhythm.”

This is the danceyest and most fun song of the set.

[READ: August 31, 2020] “Gunsmoke”

I really enjoyed this story.

It begins with the narrator, Alice, saying that her father has a gun and won’t come out of his house.

She received a call from a policeman telling her that her father has not made payments on his house recently and he is about to be evicted.  And yet there he sits with his gun, pointing it at the cops.

It turns out that this particular policeman, Bobby, is someone she slept with in high school. So they have a bit of a history.  She messes with him a bit (her dad has always been eccentric), but Bobby is serious.  He asks if she will get involved. She says she’ll call him.  But he has cut the phone lines.  Shit.

Alice’s father was a stunt man in the movies.  He worked mostly in Westerns in the fifties and sixties.  I love this insight into the world of the stunt man.  He could fall off of a horse, or a building or just about anything.  His only flaw was that he was quite short, but that didn’t stop him from getting work–make up and camera angles could make up the difference.

In one movie there was a battle between the Indians and the Army.  He dressed as a Comanche for one of the shots then changed into a lieutenant’s uniform for the other.  In the final product, “there was a scene of a heavily made up Indian pulling a soldier off a horse.  The Indian stabbed the soldier in the chest with a knife at close range.  The final two closeups of the victor and the vanquished revealed them both to be my father.

Alice also works in films, although when people ask her about it they are inevitably disappointed.  She does post-production voice over work.  She was in Titanic–she was the screams of some people drowning and the chewing in the eating room scenes.

She arrives at her father’s house.  The police are still there.  She knocks on the door and immediately has to tell her dad it’s her so he doesn’t shoot her.

She only visits her dad once a year and he looks a lot older each year–desert rats don’t age well.   She offers to help him pack up and move but he won’t put the gun down.  She’s not really afraid of him, just concerned.

Later she heads out to the store to get some decent food for dinner (he only has soup).  She sees Bobby in the store and they catch up.  He says he’s on his night off from his wife–she says they are in rut so they need to bring new experiences to the marriage. He is supposed to go to the movies and come home and talk about it with her.

So Alice and Bobby go to the movies together.  They watch a movie in which she is the laughter of a girl on screen and then later: “That’s my kissing sound…tongue and everything.”  When he shouts to the crowd that she is the kisser in the movie, she covers his mouth with her hand.  When he licks her skin, they of course end up making out in his car.

The next morning, Alice’s father has to make a decision.  When the police tell him to vacate, he cocks his gun.  Is this a stunt?

I really enjoyed that there were so many great details in this story–some of them didn’t really pertain to the plot but which fleshed out the story really nicely.

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Jeff Kinney–Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Wrecking Ball [#14] (2019)

Posted in Billie Eilish, Children's Books, Coronavirus, Diary, Family Frolic, Fears, Funny (ha ha), Humiliation, Jealousy, Jeff Kinney, Lies, Nostalgia, Parenting, Quarantine, Short Books, Technology, Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, Tiny Desk Concert, Toilets, Yuck! on August 31, 2020| Leave a Comment »


SOUNDTRACK: BILLIE EILISH-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #71 (August 26, 2020).

There’s so much to say about this Billie Eilish concert.

The biggest artist in the world has just done a Tiny Desk Concert!

Somehow it looks like she’s in the Tiny Desk studio!

Why does she only play two songs?

My daughter and I were supposed to see her back in March and she cancelled her tour about three nights before our show was supposed to happen.  What a bummer!  Especially because who knew if people would even want to see her again in a year (I’m pretty sure they will).  And would her stage show and song style change over that year?

The answer to that seems to be a dramatic yes.  Especially if these two songs are anything to go by.

For these two songs Billie embraces her torch song inner child.  She has a really lovely voice–delicate and emotional.

These songs are personal and lovely–there’s no “Duhs,” there’s no snark.  Compared to what I expected, they were kind of dull, actually.  Very pretty, but kind of dull.

These are the two new singles.  For “my future” Billie plays keyboards and her “real brother” Finneas plays guitar and sings some backing vocals.

On “everything i wanted” they switch places, with Finneas playing the pretty piano melody and providing a lot of nice backing vocals.

These two songs seem like they would go very nicely in the middle of a set of bangers for a few moments of cool down.  I hope when her show is rescheduled that she still brings all the excitement I;d heard her shows typically have.

As for the background…at first I thought it was just a cute idea.  But after six months, it was really comforting to have musicians look like they were playing the actual Tiny Desk.

[READ: August 28, 2020] Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Wrecking Ball

This is the book that started my resurgence into reading Wimpy Kid books. I bought this one for my daughter.  This story had me laughing out loud once again.

This book has a lot to do with the Heffley’s house.  I don’t know if middle school kids can appreciate jokes about household maintenance, but as an adult I sure can.

The book opens with Greg’s mom wanting to do some cleaning up.  That means going through the closet in Greg’s room.  He tells us that he basically just throws things into it, so it’s like an archaeological dig.

He starts sifting through things and finds old toys and things to feel sentimental about which is pretty funny.  But with all this junk, he decided that rather than throw it out, he should make some money off of it and have a garage sale.  Cue: Family Frolic magazine and their “great” ideas for a garage sale.  [I love when he makes fun of this magazine].

Greg has labelled his tables in creative ways: “Great gifts for your grandkids”(stuff from his grandparents that he doesn’t want).  “Pre-written birthday cards” (with his name white-outed). Mystery socks (which is just a pile of junk for 50 cents) and Rare Items (like an invisibility lotion and a freckle remover (an eraser or soap I guess)). (more…)

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Thomas Taylor–Malamander (The Legends of Eerie-on-Sea #1) (2019)

Posted in Children's Books, Coronavirus, Funny (ha ha), Hotels, Monsters, Ocean, Quarantine, Sea Monsters, Supernatural, Thomas Taylor, Threats, Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, Tiny Desk Concert, Tom Booth, Yola on August 27, 2020| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: YOLA-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #70 (August 25, 2020).

Yola is a Britiish singer with an amazing voice.  She is quarantining in Nashville and for this Home Concert, she is playig in a lovely backyard in Nashville with guitarist Jordan Tice.

Yola has one album out (and an EP) and her songs are full of soul and energy.  And that voice!

These four songs are stripped to just acoustic guitar (Tice plays lead on some of the tracks).  They are

 beautiful interpretations of songs from her 2019 album Walk Through Fire and her 2016 EP Orphan Offering that pull back the intensity I associate with Yola’s music, but are still passionate and fervent.

I’ve enjoyed hearing the recorded versions of these songs but hearing them stripped down to just melody and her voice, the sound even better.

“Faraway Look” is a gorgeous song with a terrific melody.  It sounds really quite different with the acoustic guitar but her voice is perfectly suited to it regardless of what kind of music backs it up.  And the way she can hold those notes is really stunning.

“Dead And Gone” feels more relevant now than when she wrote it for her 2016 EP.  This song is a little darker with some nice soloing notes from Tice.

“Love Is Light” is a beautiful ballad with a fantastic vocal melody.

I love the final song, “It Ain’t Easier.”  It’s got two great vocal lines back to back in the chorus.  I could listen to her sing it all night long.  And those little grace notes at the end are pretty awesome.

[READ: August 23, 2020] Malamander

I don’t often pick out children’s books to read.  Although I’m rarely disappointed when I find one that looks good.  My daughter and I were in Barnes & Noble and I saw this book.  The title, cover and description sounded really fun.  So I decided to buy it.  And I’m glad I did.  It was a fast, engaging read and the start of a promising series.

The book is set in Eerie-on-Sea.  Eerie-on-Sea is a wonderful place to vacation in the summer (when it is known as Cheerie-on-Sea).  But nobody wants to be there in the winter.  Sometimes not even the people who live there want to be there.  It’s bleak. It’s cold.  It’s windy.  And there is the legend of the fearsome Malamander.

When people visit they stay in The Grand Nautilus Hotel.  The Hotel’s Lost-and-Founder is 12 year old Herbie Lemon.  Perhaps you’ve never heard of a Lost-and-Founder, but you should have–who else is in charge of making sure everyone gets their lost items back?

Herbie is very good at his job.  But a big surprise happens when a girl climbs through the window of his office and asks him to hide her.  He does as she asks–who wouldn’t–just as two men come to Herbie’s door.  One is Mr. Mollusc, the manger of the Hotel who dislikes Herbie and dislikes the whole idea of the Lost-and Founder.  Fortunately for Herbie, Mr Mollusc is not the owner.  The owner, Lady Kraken, LOVES having a Lost -and Founder, she finds it essentially to running a good hotel.  The other man is large and scary with a hook for a hand.  Herbie and the girl, Violet, call him Boat Hook Man.

The girl is Violet Parma.  Her parents went missing from the hotel 12 years ago, when Violet was a baby  Violet was orphaned and raised by her Aunt.  She has now come all the way back to Eerie-on-Sea by herself to find out what she she can about her missing parents (she is sure they are not dead).  Coincidentally, Herb is also an orphan.  He was found by Lady Kraken and that’s how he got the job. (more…)

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Jeff Kinney–Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Meltdown [#13] (2017)

Posted in Children's Books, Coronavirus, Diary, Fears, Funny (ha ha), Humiliation, Jealousy, Jeff Kinney, Lies, Nostalgia, Parenting, Quarantine, Short Books, Snow, Snowman, Snowmobiling, Tame Impala, Technology, Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, Tiny Desk Concert, Toilets, Vacation, Yuck! on August 25, 2020| Leave a Comment »


download (98)SOUNDTRACK: TAME IMPALA-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #69 (August 24, 2020).

download (97)With so many artists that I’ve never heard of doing really long Home Tiny Desk Concerts, why on earth did Tame Impala, one of the biggest bands around, only play for 16 minutes?

The studio version of Tame Impala is pretty simple on paper: All songs are written, produced and performed by Kevin Parker. For the live version, Parker is still front and center but surrounded by a host of musicians who interpret his recorded work almost to a tee.

For his Tiny Desk (Home) Concert or his “Tame Impala Soundsystem” Parker brought Jay Watson and Dom Simper together to

do this kind of electronic jam with heaps of equipment around us and we’ll recreate the songs with samplers and sequencers. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a while and thought Tiny Desk would be the opportunity to do it.

So the three of them are in a room with banks of keyboards and all kinds of buttons to push and knobs to twist.  There’s even a guitar (most notably on “Is It True”).

They play two songs from this year’s The Slow Rush.  They open with “Breathe Deeper.”  The most interesting part of the song comes at the end when Parker starts messing around with the mixer in front of him and he starts generating drum beats and manipulating the sound of the entire song.

“Is It True” is similarly dancey and Parker’s soaring falsetto rides over the top of the song nicely.

They end the set with “Patience” a fantastic 2019 single that for some reason, didn’t make it to The Slow Rush.  This is my favorite song of the three.  The melody is great and with the pace slowed a bit it makes the song a bit more memorable.

When I saw then live, their show felt massive.  This show sounds massive too, yet it’s all confined to a tiny room.

[READ: August 20, 2020] Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Getaway

I was looking forward to reading this book after really enjoying Book 12.  But I felt like this one wasn’t quote as laugh out loud funny as some of the others.  I find Greg’s family dynamic to be the funniest part of these books and his family doesn’t feature all that much in this one.

This book is all about snow.  And snow means snow days from school, sledding and snowball fights.

The book begins with some environmental concern about global warming (it is unseasonably hot that winter).  Despite the genuine concern for global warming, Greg’s take is always a little warped–he’s concerned that if the ice caps melt there could be a giant monster hiding in there.  (more…)

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David Gilbert–“Cicadia” (New Yorker, August 24, 2020)

Posted in Coronavirus, David Gilbert, Dogs, Drugs, Funny (ha ha), Jamaica, Lila Iké, Lou Reed, New Yorker, Poo, Pornography, Pretty in Pink, Quarantine, Short Story, Stephen King, Swimming, Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, Tiny Desk Concert on August 24, 2020| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: LILA IKÉ-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #67 (August 19, 2020).

Lila Iké is a Jamacian singer.  Although her music has reggae foundations, her vocals transcend the basics of reggae.

The set starts with “Solitude.”

 On “Solitude,” she blends avant-garde R&B with contemporary reggae in a hauntingly elegant song complemented by violinist Sean “Ziah” Roberts.

The opening guitar from Stephen Welsh is four notes that sound like “Stairway to Heaven” and for a split second I had no idea what to expect.  It’s the reggae bass line from Dane Peart that grounds the song.  The biggest surprise to me was the addition of a violinist Sean “Ziah” Roberts–not something I associate with reggae.  Backing singers Tori-Ann Ivy and Ovasha Bartley add some gentle backing harmonies and some fun choreography.

“I Spy” starts with that standard reggae staccato guitar riff and some fun drum fills from Kristoff Morris and Stephen Forbes.

Most of the band is socially distanced, although not everyone is (it’s a fairly cramped space and there are people off camera as well).

“Forget Me” is a slower song with prominent keyboards from Wade Johnson and gorgeous backing vocals.  There’s a lovely violin solo at the end.

For the final song, “Thy Will” all of the singers stand up.

The song (which borrows from the iconic reggae rhythm section Sly & Robbie) ends the set with an uptempo banger.

There’s some groovy sliding bass and a series of solos from all of the musicians at the end.

[READ: August 20, 2020] “Cicadia”

The narrative style of this story loops around a timeline.  We project forward and flashback as the actual motion of the story is just three boys heading to a party.

It’s a Saturday night in 1986 in suburban Cincinnati.  Max, Rodney and Ben are heading into senior year. They have been best friends forever.  Rodney drives, Max sits in the backseat while Ben, shotgun, tries to roll a joint.

Earlier they sneaked into Rodney’s brother Oscar’s room to steal his weed.  Rodney is convinced that Oscar will kill him when he finds out, but in one of the fascinating timeline shifts the story provides,

Oscar is going to be their savior, as he always is.  Oscar the berserker bursting onto the scene with exquisite timing, creating mayhem and staring down Blaine’s cohort of pretty boys who are ready to thrash Rodney and Ben and especially Max.

They are heading to a party where Max will be winked at by a girl in a red beret. It was a definite wink.  In fact, the winks seemed to keep coming all night

Then the story flashes forward to the party where Max punches Blaine and Blaine falls into the pool.  To me, it’s unclear if this is a real party or if Max is remembering a movie.  [Pretty in Pink]  Someone falling in a pool?  [Every movie ever] Everyone cheered when Blaine fell into the pool except the girl with the red beret–for she had left already.

Back in the car, they tease Ben for not being able to roll a joint .  It is pudgy in the middle but it “has a joint-like presence.”  (A phrase that Max really liked).

While all of this is going on Max (the philosophical one) is thinking about their past together and how he is evolving from his friends.  He nearly got a perfect score on the SAT without even trying.  He now kicks himself for the few questions he got wrong–he will try again to get a perfect score.  He’s also planned to stop reading Stephen King and start reading the authors whom Lou Reed recommends.

As the get close to the party, they realize they are lost.  They ask directions from a man walking his dog.  But as the man talks to them, his dog, Cupcake, poops on a neighbor’s lawn and that neighbor yells, “Really Harold, again?”

Harold starts to tell them where to go but when the neighbor charges at Harold with an aluminum bat, Harold and Cupcake hop in the cars and they drive off.  Harold seems pretty fun until he starts asking about the smell in the car.  The boys aren’t sure if he’s going to narc on them or if he wants some.

Then the story has a little perspective shift and addresses… the reader?

maybe, like Max, you know where this is heading … and maybe you’re tapping the person next to you and telling him or her, I know what’s going to happen, because you;re the kind of person who can predict these things… and if you had wanted to, well, you could have been a writer yourself.

But the boys make it to the party, as the story said they would.  And they debate how they should go about selling Oscar’s pot.

There’s a really fun last line.

And yet, I genuinely can’t decide if this is a story or an excerpt from a novel.  There is so much detail that it feels novel-like. I feel like these three characters have a lot more life to show us.

There’s so much potential for time shifting and narrative address, that a lot more could go on here.  At the same time, too much might overwhelm a novel. And it does feel complete, if confusing as a story.

I enjoyed it either way.

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