SOUNDTRACK: HAMILTON LEITHAUSER-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #37 (June 21, 2020).
Hamilton Leithauser seems to always be on the periphery of my listening experience. I hear his name a lot and hear his songs a bunch, but I’ve never actually looked for him.
And yet, I like him and his music. And, indeed, as this blurb says,
This is the most adorable thing you may see all day.
Known best as the The Walkmen singer, Hamilton Leithauser is the singer of The Walkmen, although I know him better for his solo work.
Here he plays songs from his 2020 solo album, The Loves of Your Life.
Leithauser’s voice is a solid folk-singer voice and he hits a lot of high notes (with a deliberate straining style). “In a Black Out” features his father Mark Leithauser on harmonica. It’s a very touching Father’s Day moment.
But it’s made even more magical when for “The Garbage Men” he calls out his band: his daughters Georgiana and Frederika Leithauser and his nieces May and Lucy McIntosh. The kids sing backing ahhs (quite well) and they all enjoy singing “till the garbage men go by!” They also do the quiet “oohs” very nicely as well. And they dance on haystacks.
“Here They Come” is about a friend who would go to the movies and sneak into film after film to avoid going home. The kids sing the lyrics (pretty well) and dance even more adorably for this rocking song. It’s important not to forget his wife, Anna Stumpf on congas and percussion way in the back for the middle three songs.
His daughter makes fun of him introducing the tiny desk “Dad you sound so stupid” and Hamilton laughs at the mocking. They also show that they have a tinier tiny desk from the Calico Critters.
Then he introduces “The Stars of Tomorrow” by saying he and his girls met a Polish woman on the beach. The woman told them her life story (they’d hadn’t asked). It had a lot of drama and a lot of contradictions. Everything in the story is true from what he can remember she told him, “but I can’t vouch for her story.”
The final song “Isabella” is, to me, the most Leithauser of the five songs. A real folks song slow and passionate. The girls do a fantastic job singing the “they all go riding home” responses in the chorus. I’m very impressed with how well they sing.
There have been a lot of cute and sweet Tiny Desk’s but none have been as adorable.
[READ: June 23, 2020] “Lottery Poetry”
This month’s issue of The Walrus is the Summer Reading issue and features two pieces of fiction, one memoir and three poems.
The fifth piece is fiction and it is very timely.
Maisy Wu learned fortune-telling from her mah-mah who’d read faces and palms in a stall in Hong Kong. Maisy had been doing fortunes at college parties and eventually decided to quit her job at the Vancouver Public Library and go public with her talents.
She read palms and offered her own variation on Kau chim or lottery poetry.
Then the pandemic hit. At first people still came–they wanted her reassurances. But when she was declared nonessential, she was financially hit hard.
She decided to go mobile with her skills, inspired by take out drivers. She called it Curbside Divinations. She received some likes on social media but no calls. She imagined them saying, “If you’re so good at predicting the future, why did you book a trip to Mexico in March?”
Then she had a request from a man named Pete. He was a white man in sweats somewhere between forty-five and sixty-five.
She almost lefty when he asked “If you Chinese were so good at predicting the future, how’d you all get us into this in the first place?”
But as she turned to leave, he said he’d already paid. And she needed the money. (more…)
SOUNDTRACK: HAIM-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #34 (June 17, 2020).
When Haim first came on the scene they were marketed as a kind of hard rocking sister act. So when I heard them I was really disappointed because they are anything but hard rock. In fact this Tiny Desk (Home) Concert shows just how nicely their music works as kind of poppy folk songs.
SOUNDTRACK: LARA DOWNES-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #29 (May 30, 2020).
I don’t know Lara Downes, although from the picture you can see that she is a pianist, obviously. But she also works in communities with young people–something she has been unable to do since the coronavirus took over.
