Neko Case In The Crystal Ballroom

Seats for Neko Case's show at the Paramount in Seattle were already selling for $250 back in April. They were only $25 per in Portland so a kindly internet goddess, aka Lord Wife, swooped in to scoop up two for my birthday, booking us onto an Amtrak and into the Hotel DeLuxe. It's just a few blocks away from the Crystal Ballroom where she played two nights, an old hall with a fully functional "floating floor" once popular for swing dancing.

I was turned onto Neko Case by a friend's facebook aside in late February, never hearing anything of her before. The more she sinks in now, the clearer she stands as a poet who happened to develop into a singer. Poetry in turn brings back Mr. Marcinec, my high school AP English teacher, who once asked the class to debate whether verse can be assessed on technical merits alone, or if the artist's life must be taken into account. The answer, to me, was as sharp as a late hit. If you walk home past dark woods on bitter-cold nights near Robert Frost's haunts, as I did, musing on death whilst rejecting it is an option is easy to spot. You have to move, or you have to freeze.

Knowing that Coleridge woke up from his opium dreaming of Xanadu and Kubla Khan increases your odds at guessing what suppressed wish a stately Pleasure Dome signifies, and J. Alfred Prufrock's spiritual exhaustion starts to resonate when you plot it against T.S. Eliot's European travels as Edwardian life unraveled prior to World War One. Neko Case went to school in Tacoma, leaving home at 15 to live in a classmate's unfinished cellar while the nearby Green River Killer was ripping through more than 70 young women, half of them under-aged runaways. She's still scared to walk alone at night, and absent that context, you might awkwardly misinterpret one of her most popular songs, Deep Red Bells. She wrote it not as an ode to g-spots, but to victims:

where does this mean world cast its cold eye?
who's left to suffer long about you?
does your soul cast about like an old paper bag
past empty lots and early graves?
those like you who lost their way
murdered on the interstate
while the red bells rang like thunder
deep red bells, deep as I've been done

Putting Case's name in the same breath as Coleridge and Eliot is intentional. She belongs. At 18, she started playing drums for a succession of punk bands. A god-given ability to sing was noticed and invited to do covers, and from there she went on to share in the artistic processes of a number of bands. She credits collaboration with musicians such as The New Pornographers, The Corn Sisters, The Sadies, Cub, Maow, and Kelly Hogan for teaching her the craft. She began to write her own material, releasing her first solo album (The Virginian) in 1997.

Her pieces combine stark observation with gorgeous melodies and fervent passions. Anger stirs unmistakably below all the surfaces, and there's a wild, even creepy quality to her, like wind blowing dust over abandoned roadside attractions. Flash-floods of overstuffed vans and army bases, grabby brakes and shabby blokes, emotional voids and hangovers, waitress gigs and crippling angsts come gushing through like gray water in laundromats. While her songs aren't always equally intense or personal they're sent from the same address, and she writes only as a woman who has been helpless before men can. It must've been very tough for a control freak of such high order. Her body of solo work is nothing less than a resolution to turn and face the humiliations of love, and, with music as her protector, to learn. With Middle Cyclone, she sets out to explore, finally having taken her struggle by the smooth handle.

The album seems to rein in vocal strength in favor of sharper lyrical focus. Every note and part of each composition is arranged to let you apprehend the words, delivered atop exceptionally precise instrumentals which often meander from traditional verse/chorus structure to weave in micro-songs. Heard live, the band performed a studio-perfect version of every piece, so tightly that "Neko Case" might best be thought of as a collective. Middle Cyclone was accordingly recorded in her barn in Vermont with over a dozen musical guests, including Garth Hudson (formerly of The Band), M Ward and a nest of robins in the rafters.

The Crystal Ballroom was Sold Out and a waiting line had already formed outside the closed box office two hours before the show. We spotted it in perfect time, so I snagged the best standing-room spots in the house--we occupied the "Magic Corner" 20 feet away from the artistic breakthrough of the year's main mike. Even without industry backing (Case's US label is ANTI-), Middle Cyclone debuted at #3 on Billboard, occupies the #2 spot on US Rock and is easily the most successful indie release of 2009. After a long hike, she arrived at a secret narrow embarkation point where critical acclaim meets critical mass.

Case had long been pigeonholed as a banshee, a speed-baller for belting out other people's songs. While there's no overlooking her dominating voice, labeling her as a torch singer is downright obstructive, and fails to describe how she can sail across genres and vocal planes. Let me put it this way: she could sing like Patsy Cline, Tanya Tucker or Rosemary Clooney, but they could not have easily returned the favor. As a pure singer, she's capable of nerdy introspection, tobacco-row mourning, indie-pop smoothies, eco-folk, jagged punk, charcoal chanteuse, retro orchestra and I would bet Wagnerian opera. She can conjure an interstate truck stop at 4AM, high school sweethearts home for goosebumps, fuzzy heroin magic carpets, square dancers bouncing off '68 Cadillacs with big chrome bumpers, and spiky CBGB mosh pits. Her voice attracted big-label attentions, but its proprietor had other plans:

"I'm not out to become Faith Hill, I never want to play an arena, and I never want to be on the MTV Video Music Awards, much less make a video with me in it. I would like to reach a larger audience and see the state of music change in favor of musicians and music fans in my lifetime. I care very much about that."

Case claimed there would be no love songs on Middle Cyclone, that all the lyrics could be taken literally, that Nature would be the focus. Which may be technically true, but it's akin to Stephen King stating, "I'm through with horror. My next books will all be travel guides." Ruthless restraint and a naturalist's aperture are devices which set the album apart, brilliantly so, because her genies can't be bottled or chained. You feel them straining and threatening to break loose at a remove, and you can hear when they beat the screens down. The first song is about a libidinous tornado unable to find its lover, or make him understand, carving his name across three counties. "People Got A Lotta Nerve" is about a caged elephant and an aquarium killer whale taking revenge, but like Coleridge's subconscious, Case sidles up and becomes a defiant predator giving fair warning. Then, as with Frost's deep dark woods at night, it's a mite difficult to rule out indelicate possibilities when she tosses her throat back and wails, "I'm a man-man-man, man-man-man eater!"

At a concert you pick up things the albums and tubes can't convey. You realize Neko's an introvert, not very comfortable in the spotlight, self-conscious of her relatively flat butt. Her skin and hair have the translucence and texture of perogies in orange vodka sauce, and she honestly loves animals. She's really just there to cut diamonds, and to compensate she's hired a statuesque, lung-expanding brunette backup singer arc-welded like a water tower to her left who banters in the pauses like an extroverted emcee, announcing her love for good burgers, that she's 46, and "my beauty secret is low wattage."

Before singing "The Pharaohs" Case remarks, "This song is about my second boyfriend," and when she pours out the bourbons of "my body burned, my legs ached/but you never came to bed/you just left me there awake/you kept me wanting wanting wanting/like the wanting in the movies and the hymns," veins thick as her middle fingers stand out on her neck. She discloses that "Red Tide" is about 3 million assholes who moved apropos to Seattle during grunge's gestation and suddenly noticed they hate the rain. The mollusks, they have won. You notice she reads voraciously and make a mental note: if you ever run into her, don't ask her about what she's done. Ask what she thinks of The Confessions of St. Augustine.

After whistlings and stompings on the trampoline floor the backup singer came back up first for the encore and you caught her say "Oh, what the hell." They played for another forty-five minutes, so you knew they were done for good and pressed back through the bodies of screaming cognoscenti. You walked up to the DeLuxe and asked your wife how best to classify sui generis. She pauses and says, "Country gothic," and you think of how Boadicea might have fared if she'd properly armored herself for the Romans and their arenas. You think of her song about waking up to disorienting hotel fans spinning overhead, heads webbed with indiscretions watching maids who have nowhere else to be in Portland on a Sunday morning:

Prison girls are not impressed
They’re the ones that have to clean this mess
They’ve traded more for cigarettes
Than I’ve managed to express

People Got A Lotta Nerve, Music & Lyrics By Neko Case

Fair warning. If you click on that vid there will be returning. It'll take you back to your daddy's Ford to wild scallions growing up alongside gutted roads to the flat bench with your almost sixteen year old girl smushed up just as close as she can sit beside without you driving with her in your lap. There's a rifle in the gun rack enough gas to get there and back so you're driving off to find Paris in the dark.

She was right there with you too on the stainless steel cover of the cooling fan you sat on when you were nine watching people in the pavilion dancing and drinking their heads off to the Country Playboys singing promenade all the way swing your corner lady and promenade the hall. This girl is right where you're from doesn't even think about fighting fair she does not compromise and she told the whole music industry to go fuck itself and it did. So if you choose not to click on the vid I understand but here's what she had to say:

So the saying says an elephant never forgets. Standing in the concrete cave, sway inside and sing! They walked over the ocean and their dreams they dreamed awake until the lights grew dim. Until the cop cars came. Everybody tells me this is crazy yes I know but I'm a man man man man man man man eater! But still you're surprised prised prised, when I eat ya.

You know...they call them killer whales but you seemed suprised when it pinned you down to the bottom of the tank where you can't turn around it took half your leg and both your lungs and I craved, I ate hearts of sharks. I know you know it and I'm a man man man man man man man eater but still you're surprised prised prised when I eat ya. It will end again in moon-lit song, it will end again in moon-lit song.

As an added bonus, Neko Case has been banned for life from the Grand Ole Opry for taking off her top during a performance. Let's go see her when she comes our way.

Smokestack Lightning, Music & Lyrics By Howlin' Wolf

Chester Arthur Burnett was better known as Howlin' Wolf. He was an ass-kicker in the crafts of the blues and life, stood six foot six and traveled north and south across a border of 300 pounds. He was born in West Point, Mississippi, in a sharecropping triangle of the Delta as flat and hot as a pancake off the griddle. His were the people who invented deep blues and his mother never accepted any money from him because it came from the Devil's music.

Charley Patton taught Chester how to play guitar and Sonny Boy Williamson schooled his harmonica while living with his sister. Chester backed up Robert Johnson in juke joints as a teenager. First time I heard the Wolf too late I cursed my culture for hiding him from me and just like Sam Phillips did I said, "This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies." Chester fell in love at first sight with a girl named Lillie from a good family in an audience in West Chicago. They had kids he became a devoted dad drove a Pontiac station wagon while he succeeded and for Lillie he sloughed off illiteracy in his 40s and passed a middle-aged GED.

Near the end of his career he had painful terminal cancer but he'd still go play a set at a bar and sing stop your train darlin' let a poor boy ride. His manager Eddie Shaw would drive him back to the hospital in Chicago where his big body died in 1976. He wanted all of it not just some of it. He wanted all of it. This song is about chasing after women and experimenting with electricity and waiting for that card that's so high and wild you'll never have to deal another. Much of a muchness.

This song is about Chester Arthur Burnett and a little bitty boy inside seeing his future brown-eyed wife out in the audience. It's like those feelings you may remember when you were a little child when you woke up and the morning smiled so you tilted your head worked your mouth but the words didn't come out yet so you did what you could do and smiled back. Chester and Lillie did that. When lightning hits, it doesn't arc down from the sky. It is spit up from the ground, its undeniable frictional energy searches for some high and appropriate dense object, tenses around it and bolts up through the cradling clouds out into higher space. Smokestack Lightnin' is about thunderstorms its about how a cold front hits a warm front and how the earth we walk upon ejaculates. The lyrics:

Ah, oh, smokestack lightning
Shinin', just like gold!
Why don't ya hear me cryin'?
Ah, whoo hoo, ooo-ooh...
Whoo-ooo...

Whoa, oh, tell me, baby
What's the, matter with you?
Why don't ya hear me cryin'?
Whoo hoo, whoo hoo
Whoo-ooo...

Whoa, oh, tell me baby
Where did ya...stay last night?
A-why don't ya hear me cryin'?
Whoo hoo, whoo hoo
Whoo-ooo...

Whoa, oh--stop your train
Let a poor boy ride
Why don't ya hear me cryin'?
Whoo hoo, whoo hoo
Whoo-ooo...

Whoa, oh, fare ya well!
Never see, ah, you no more
Ah, why don't ya hear me cryin'?
Ooh, whoo hoo, whoo hoo
Whoo-ooo...

Whoa, oh, who been here baby since
I, I been gone, maybe a little, bitty boy?
Girl, be on!
Ah, whoo hoo, whoo hoo, whoo hoo

Blind Faith, 1969 Music & Lyrics: Come Down Off Your Throne, And Leave Your Body Alone

Come down off your throne
and leave your body alone
Somebody must change
You are the reason I've
been waiting so long
somebody holds the key

Well, I'm near the end
and I just ain't got the time
And I'm wasted, and
I can't find my way home

Come down on your own
and leave your body alone
somebody must change
You are the reason I've been
waiting all these years
somebody holds the key!

Well, I'm near the end--
and I just ain't got the time!
oh, oh, and I'm wasted, and I...can't find my way home.

You Say You Want A (Green) Revolution...

via the always thought-provoking Still Life Living:

You say you want a (green) revolution,
Well, you know,
We all want to keep our kids from frying under a magnifying glass like ants,
You tell me that we need a solution,
Well, you know,
We all want to live sustainably.
But when you talk about reducing my consumption,
Don't you know that you can count all those other people out.
Do you know it's going to be all right?
all right? all right?

With apologies to Sir James Paul McCartney, KBE (Knight Commander of the British Empire).

According to David Eisenberg of the Development Center for Appropriate Technology, if every man, woman and child alive today consumed at the average resource footprint level of Americans, we would need eight (8, VIII, 0001000) replicant planet earths to be sustainable. If, on the other hand, we take our current 7 or 8 billion brothers and sisters and try to establish sustainability goals for this blue-green ball called Earth, something’s gotta give. Population? Consumption? Equality? Biology? Rationality? While we may be Free to Choose, is it ethical to choose?

Quaker Ben told me once that he thought the world would evolve into either East Germany of the 1980s or the Rio de Janeiro of today.

Is that really our choice? Total information awareness, democratic fascism, or libertine laissiez-faire corporate colonialism where street urchins are hunted for sport?

Personally, I think it comes down to two choices: Arbeit Macht Frei versus The Truth Shall Set You Free.

You say you'll change a constitution
Well, you know
We'd all love to change your head.
You tell me it's the institution,
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead.

My advice is to start to "Practice Sustainable Sex".

Bruce Springsteen Gives Voter Registration Concert in Philadelphia

Seems the Boss called up the Obama campaign and asked to help out. Some young staffer probably said, "Thank you very much for your interest, Mr. Springsteen, we'll get back to you. Oh, wait--I know...you're like a famous musician, right? Maybe you could play some music!"

The legendary rocker interrupted a free seven-song acoustic set at avoter-registration rally in Philly on Saturday to threaten to break his guitar over the head of anyone who votes for John McCain. Well, not really. He did talk about equality, fairness, America, etc., and the need to register. Pretty cool thing for an American Icon to do on a Saturday afternoon.

'Jolene,' Ray Lamontagne, Song & Lyrics

There's a guy in front of the grocery store, looking down at the ground, rocking back and forth on a folding chair, abusing an acoustic guitar. As you get closer you can hear him start to sing, "Cocaine flame in my bloodstream. I sold my coat when I hit Spokane. Bought myself a hard pack of cigarettes. In the early morning rain." Right with his first line, he has earned your attention.

An interviewer in Australia pressed Ray LaMontagne on the inspirations for his songs, where they came from, his artistic process. After uncomfortably deflecting a couple of the questions LaMontagne paused for a long time and then said, "I was reckless with my self sometimes." He didn't betray any secrecies to which he'd sworn, feeling his songs already do it well enough. The accidents of linguistic structures force poetry into sidetracks, sometimes inaccuracies and sometimes embellishments, but while soaking in his constructive mastery, you can also tell it's for real:

Cocaine flame in my bloodstream
sold my coat when I hit Spokane
bought myself a hard pack of cigarettes
in the early morning rain

Lately my hands they don't feel like mine
my eyes been stung with dust and blind
held you in my arms one time
lost you just the same

Jolene,
I ain't about to go straight--
it's too late
I found myself face-down in a ditch
with booze in my hair, blood in my lips
a picture of you holding a picture of me
in the pocket of my blue jeans

Still don't know what love means
Still don't know what love means
Jolene!

Been so long since I seen your face
or felt a part of this human race
I've been living out of this here suitcase for way too long
A man needs something he can hold onto
a nine pound hammer or a woman like you
either one of them things will do

Jolene,
I ain't about to go straight--
it's too late
I found myself face-down in a ditch
with booze in my hair, blood on my lips
a picture of you holding a picture of me
in the pocket of my blue jeans

Still don't know what love means
Still don't know what love means
Jolene!

Coldplay's 'Viva la Vida' & Lyrics

Myth prefigures art, art prefigures physics, and physics prefigure the unthinking efficiencies of resulting orthodoxies. I've heard this song quite a few times this summer, not least because it has climbed to #1 on the charts. Like all their other work, Coldplay's trademark poppy-flows lull you into swaying trances, and as the overwhelmed words wash over you, the song becomes something like a holograph. Beautiful, rotating, floating just beyond your grasp, you never quite get at what they're about by just listening.

The band's music in general and this song in particular are vessels, it seems, for world music and for an entirely different commercial model, bearing other artists and styles away from nearly a century of American dominance, ostensibly from what has become a usurious, hyper-vigilant Industry, a rusting monolith thoroughly ill-suited to digital distribution. The album 'Viva la Vida, or Death and All His Friends' is themed around guerillas and insurgencies, around love in all its diversely and promiscuously international forms, around the global cycles of war and peace. Song and album were both produced by Brian Eno and released exclusively on iTunes on May 5th, with Europe having to wait quite a while for production of a physical CD. By the 30th of June, the album had sold more digital downloads than any in history.

The clearly audible first line, "I used to rule the world," is a tip-off to greater depths and possible endurance, as is its title from the Frida Kahlo painting of watermelons; the album's cover art is from the 1830 painting by Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People. I dawdled a while before searching out the lyrics, but sure enough, frontman Chris Martin, better known in the US as Gwyneth Paltrow's husband (for whom he wrote the intimately disclosing song 'Yellow'), penned a title-track meditation on imperial strivings and deceits: "Revolutionaries wait...for my head on a silver plate. Just a puppet on a lonely string...oh who would ever want to be king?"

Martin thinks Saint Peter will never call his name. Not sure about that, but funny enough, the song and album's release are an artist's crowning achievements, ones which surely demanded an intense devotion to craft, which surely plant new guidons for others to follow. The viddy is of them playing to an adoring, seemingly thrown-together crowd at the BBC Centre. Here are the lyrics:

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own

I used to roll the dice
Feel the fear in my enemies eyes
Listen as the crowd would sing:
"Now the old king is dead! Long live the king!"

One minute I held the key
Next the walls were closed on me
And I discovered that my castles stand
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand

I hear Jerusalem bells are ringing
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can not explain
Once you knew there was never, never an honest word
And that was when I ruled the world


It was the wicked and wild wind
Blew down the doors to let me in.
Shattered windows and the sound of drums
People could not believe what I'd become
Revolutionaries wait
For my head on a silver plate
Just a puppet on a lonely string
Oh who would ever want to be king?

I hear Jerusalem bells are ringing
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can not explain
I know Saint Peter won't call my name
Never an honest word
And that was when I ruled the world

Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Someday Never Comes" Lyrics & Music

If someone were to ask, "What's the most American music?," a whirlwind of sound and images would jam through my mind, Robert Johnson playing his guitar and poisoned with lye, Roseanne Cash singing her high lonesomes, Louis Armstrong dealing effortless masteries, Julia Ward Howe getting martial. Flat and Scruggs, Wynonie Harris, Bruce Springsteen, Buddy Holly, Blondie, and Led Zeppelin dwell co-equal in the pantheon. Even if those last guys were Brits they did it right, and they did it good.

If someone says, "No, you can only choose one artist," the first one I'd think of is Creedence Clearwater Revival, the roots-rock band formed in El Cerrito High School, California. Most of the rhythms and chords they use are 200 years old if they're a day, their music is simple as grass and non-Americans simply would never have put it together. Americans are always going to listen to Creedence, and would always have loved John Fogerty's songs at first listen. His songs contain our core, and come from the geographies which define us.

Strong statement, I suppose. Yet you can imagine Revolutionary war minutemen absent-mindedly singing "Suzie Q" together as they trudge along a dirt road; you can see chain gangs cutting sugar cane, singing "Long as I Can See the Light," families would have fun around log cabin firesides singing "Looking Out My Back Door,"and lonely muleskinners hauling their loads west would no doubt sing "Molina" to empty plains. "Proud Mary" might just as well have been sung on the steamboats going up rivers and around the bends. In a Simpsons cartoon episode, Homer Simpson hears a panicked Marge ask if anyone knows how to perform CPR, so he looks up into the distance and sings, "I see a Bad Moon a-risin'--I see troubles on the way." I rest my case.

CCR remains popular in the YouTube age, with most of the tunes mentioned above having been downloaded millions of times. In their hay day, the band was so popular and prolific they released four Top Ten albums in 18 months. "Someday Never Comes" was one of the last songs they wrote before breaking up. Here are the lyrics:

First thing I remember
Was askin Papa, "Why!? "
For there were many things I didn't know.

And Daddy always smiled,
He took me by the hand
Sayin, 'Someday...you'll understand."

Well, I'm here to tell you now
each and every mother's son
you better learn it fast
you better learn it young
'cause someday never comes.

Well, time and tears went by
and I collected dust,
there were many things I didn't know
and when daddy went away
he said, "Try to be a man,
and someday...you'll understand."

And then, one day in April
I wasn't even there
there were many things I didn't know:
a son was born to me,
and his mama held his hand
saying "Someday, you'll understand."

Well, I'm here to tell you now
each and every mother's son
you better learn it fast
you better learn it young
'cause someday never comes.

Think it was September, the year I went away
for there were many things I didn't know
and I still see him standing, trying to be a man;
I said, "Someday, you'll understand."

Introducing Ray Lamontagne, His Song "Hannah," And Lyrics

One eternal yawp is never equal to another. Even if it doesn't echo here, it can hit the Top 40 elsewhere. There are only 10,000 downloads on this YouTube so far, but there's a singer you should know. He's from here, but he's big in the UK. From Wikipedia:

Ray LaMontagne was born in Nashua, New Hampshire, in 1974 to a constantly travelling mother. When LaMontagne was a child, his mother left his musician father, while his father was on tour, and moved him and his siblings up north. His father had no contact with LaMontagne and had no knowledge of his whereabouts for years. Because of the stories told to LaMontagne about his father, LaMontagne refrained from most musical activity, instead spending much of his time reading fantasy novels in the forest.^[1] His mother moved her six children wherever she could find work, so it was difficult for LaMontagne to make friends. LaMontagne attended high school at Morgan High School in Morgan, Utah, but frequently ditched class, wrote stories, or got into fights with other students. As a result of these interactions, his grades were poor — LaMontagne barely graduated.^[2] After graduation, LaMontagne moved away from his family to Lewiston, Maine in order to find a full-time job.^[3]

LaMontagne found a job at a shoe factory in Lewiston where he worked 65 hours a week. One morning at 4 a.m., LaMontagne heard Stephen Stills' song "Treetop Flyer" on the radio as it awoke him for an early work shift.^[4] After purchasing the Stills Alone album, LaMontagne decided that he wanted to quit his job at the shoe factory and start a career as a singer-songwriter.^[5] LaMontagne began touring in 1999, although he maintained a side job as a carpenter.^[4] In the summer of 1999, LaMontagne amassed 10 songs for a demo that he sent to various local music venues. Mike Miclon the owner of Buckfield Maine's Oddfellow Theater heard the demo and invited LaMontagne to open for folk acts such as John Gorka and Jonathan Edwards. A friend and business executive, Ron Clayton, heard LaMontagne's recordings and introduced him to Jamie Ceretta of Chrysalis Music Publishing. CMP recorded his first album, and sold it to RCA Records in the US and Echo Records in the UK.

The lyrics to 'Hannah:'

I lost all of my vanity when I peered into the pool
I lost all of my innocence
When I fell in love with you

I never knew a man fall so far until I landed here
Where all of my wounds they turned into gold when I kissed your hair
Now come to me Hannah
Hannah won't you come home to me--
And I'll lay down this bottle of wine
If you'll just be kind to me!

Ask her why she cries so loud
She will not say a word
Eyes like ice and hands that shake
She takes what she deserves

To celebrate her emptiness
In a cold and lonely room
Sweep the floor with your long flowered dress
If you cannot find a broom

Now come to me Hannah
Hannah won't you come home to me
And I'll lay down this bottle of wine
If you'll just be kind to me!

She's got hair that flows right down
Right down to the backs of her knees
Her Papa he was a preaching man
And the Lord is hard to please

So she comes down from the ozark hills
to these very streets to roam
With a banjo and a bible
and a fine tooth comb

Now come to me Hannah
Hannah won't you come home to me
And I'll lay down this bottle of wine
if you just be kind to me!

I'd walk one mile on this broken glass
to fall down at your feet
Mmm-hmm-mmm Hannah: you're the Queen of the Street,
and I climb the tree with my Hannah-lee

My intentions they were pure
Oh the breeze did whip and I lost my grip
And I tumbled towards the earth
Where you never would guess
who it was that stood below

And His name I would never tell
But His eyes were clear
And His arms were strong
And He caught me as I fell

Now come to me Hannah
Hannah won't you come on to me--
well I'll lay down this bottle of wine
If you'd just be kind to me!

Now I'd walk one mile on just broken glass
To fall down at your feet
Mmm-hmm, Hannah: you're the Queen of the Street;
The Queen of the Street.

Dracula's Lament & Lyrics, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, By Jason Segel

Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a romantic comedy about a musician (Jason Segel, who also wrote the script) who has lived with a Crime Scene Investigator-style actress (Kristen Bell) for five years. Although it's about a painful break-up with lots of "uncomfortable" humor, much of the movie was set in Hawaii where we plan to go next month, and it was imbued with Moliere-level instincts for pop culture ironies. Not surprising, because the producer was Judd Apatow, of Freaks and Geeks, 40-Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, SuperBad, et al. It was great fun and we, all of us, laughed a lot.

The film's high water mark was the musician's quirky, crazy idea for a rock opera about a puppet Dracula hopelessly in love with a woman he can't have. In the movie, Segel plays "Dracula's Lament" in front of a bar full of incredulous locals for the girl who makes him soon forget Sarah Marshall, and he makes her forget a surfer-champion ex-boyfriend. It's completely perverse, not for everyone, and I loved it. Somehow, somebody already has the song up on YouTube, synched to the Sesame Street Dracula. The lyrics, in a Transylvanian accent:

It's getting kind of hard to believe
things are going to get better
I've been drowning too long to believe
that the tide's going to turn

And I've been living too hard to believe
that things are going to get easier now
I'm still trying to shake off the pain
from the lessons I've learned

And if I see van Helsing, I swear
to the Lord I will slay him!
A-ha-ha-haa! Take it from me
I swear I will let it be so! A-ha-ha-haa!!

Blood will run down his face
when he is decapitated...aah!
his head on my mantle is how
I will let this world know:

How much I love you--
die...die...die!
(Pause)
I can't.

Cat Power: Lived In Bars

She is a verbal temptress, using Dylanesque tricks of language to get us to do the heavy lifting of her evocations, teasing up all the pictures and emotions we come pre-wired with. When she once wrote about something specific and concrete, it took me four years to realize it was an achingly beautiful, tender and knowing tribute to Kurt Cobain ('I Don't Blame You'). I've had little comprehension of her writing, although 'Lived in Bars' provides hints enough--send in the trumpets, the marching wheelchairs, open the blankets and give them some air, swords and arches, bones and cement, the light and the dark of the innocent of men.

But I'm charmed, even if I know beyond any doubt her art is rooted in the torment of not being wanted, as charmed as if Emily Dickinson sang Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers. She's even more artist than that, infinitely more dangerous, and she honestly doesn't believe she's pretty but you'll see her when you click on that video. Her real name is Chan Marshall, and she's about to be as big as artists can get. If this woman sang a grocery list, you would say oh, what sagacity perishes there, the hulls all of our ships be damned, and she would leave scars on your heart. Then she'd ask you, "Could you get me some takeout? Are you mad at me?" The lyrics:

We've lived in bars
And danced on tables
Hotel trains and ships that sail
We swim with sharks
And fly with aeroplanes in the air

Send in the trumpets
The marching wheelchairs
Open the blankets and give them some air
Swords and arches bones and cement
The light and the dark of the innocent of men

We know your house so very well
And we will wake you once we've walked up
All your stairs

There's nothing like living in a bottle
And nothing like ending it all for the world
We're so glad you will come back
Every living lion will lay in your lap
The kid has a homecoming the champion the horse
Who's going to play drums, guitar or organ with chorus
As far as we've walked from both of ends of the sand
Never have we caught a glimpse of this man

We know your house so very well
And we will bust down your door if you're not there

We've lived in bars
And danced on tables
Hotel trains and ships that sail
We swim with sharks
And fly with aeroplanes out of here

Jim White: A Town Called Amen

On the recommendation of a friend, I went alone to see a show by an unfamiliar artist called Jim White, egged on by the knowledge that he made an atmospheric BBC docu-romp about the South, 'Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus.' Not that I saw that. But after the dynamite show, and his penetrating lyrics and quick witticisms between songs, I'm going to. Here's one of the songs that most pleased the standing-room only crowd at the Tractor Tavern, and me. And its lyrics:

The days of our innocence and grace blow by;
The smiles we wear upon our face blow by.
Oh, the sweet wine of youth
goes sour over time.
Seems like the more that you lose,
the more you ache to find...

A town called Amen.
Like a bright-eyed smile
from some long lost friend---
it’s a town called Amen.

Sit at the window sill,
see the children rushing by.
Come a flood of summer rain,
the strange increments of time.
How the wild engines run!
Burning shadows from our minds.
Lord, when the purging gets done,
I sure pray what’s left behind...

Is a town called Amen.
Like a bright-eyed smile
from some long lost friend---
it’s a town called Amen.
Come lay down on this bed.
Hey, close your weary eyes.
Like the clouds above our heads,
life slowly passes by.

Did you kiss the dog you love,
when you were a little child?
Will you lay in the arms of
some sweet reverie a while?

In a town called Amen.
Like a bright sunrise.
Hey, if you open up your eyes,
you’re in a town called Amen.

The Mac Air Song: Yael Naim, New Soul

Yael Naim is a Sephardic singer-songwriter whose Parisian parents moved when she was a child to Tel Aviv, and so it came to pass that she became a soloist in the Israeli Defense Forces Orchestra. Following that, she soon moved back to Paris, found a little place in an arrondissement and began working up a secret triple-distillery for beauty. Like her fellow new Parisienne Leslie Feist, she rocket-blossomed and is now powering an Apple commercial. Yael recorded an elemental ditty in her studio apartment, called it New Soul and published it in an anthology titled Yael Naim, an album with almost no backing when it was released in late 2007. Yet the collection was savored and devoured by the muses and the furies, and it didn't take Apple long to find the track, which has shot up to #9 on this week's US Billboard chart.

The song lyrics are below, but a note about Apple, which is playing a big part in making it a hit. People have asked me to describe the difference between Apple and Microsoft, since I've worked with and against both. "Apple is Hitler, Microsoft is Stalin," is one short way to explain, and sometimes against my bashful discretion I've gone with that. (What would seem to be the most facetious or sarcastic of descriptors can be metaphorically apt, spiritually spot-on.) We all come into this world as new users do into unknown operating systems, we're forced to make a choice; between the two, I'd have to go for a world designed by Apple.

It may at times seem peevish, small, paranoid, and subject to the snobbish whims of a martinet who has the airs of a French runway designer--because it is. That's why it hires people for their aesthetic passions, people who love beauty. That's why a Yael Naim song is backing its ads; an Apple product exec was in France chilling out on vacation before the launch last Fall, heard New Soul play at a friend's apartment (probably ganja-steeped) near the Champs d'Elysees, and said, "That totally captures what we're trying with the Air. We need it!" And so they went and got it, fast. (By comparison, Microsoft is ill-equipped to do lifestyle. Hearing the same thing, a Microsoft exec would've probably said, "Wow. Great song. I should go to the effort to send it to Steve Ballmer so he can send it on to marketing.") Apple fully understands how the currents of music connect through the deepest waters, and how the currents have to be just right.

The air of the artistic, that belief in the power of beauty is why, instead of my former component-by-component assembled PCs, we have 7 Apple devices of various size and shape in the house. They may be less than fully inter-operable, they may have made me give up games, and they may be the hardware equivalent of Italian suede shoes...but they do strive to be great. Not just good enough for everybody. They want to deliver all the dashingly effortless points of interface and style. And more often than not, they deliver, just like now. Here are the lyrics to New Soul (and you'll have to click on the vid to catch the full effect, the lyrics alone don't do it):

I'm a new soul, I came to this strange world
hoping I could learn a bit 'bout how to give and take.
But since I came here, felt the joy and the fear,
finding my self making every possible mistake!

La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

I'm a young soul, in this very strange world
hoping I could learn a bit 'bout what is true and fake.
But why all this hate, try to com-mune-iii-cate--
Finding trust and love is not always easy to make!

La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

This is a happy end, 'cause you don't understand
everything you have done, why's everything so wrong?
This is a happy end, come and give me your hand
I'll take you far away...!

I'm a new soul, I came to this strange world
hoping I could learn a bit 'bout how to give and take.
But since I came here, felt the joy and the fear
finding my self making every possible mistake!

La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

The Finest Kiss

I just learned this weekend that a real-world friend links here, and that he also happens to run the best Seattle music blog in the known universe, small as mine is on the subject. Toby's a lover of indie music to the extent he can accurately be called an expert, and his local reportage of bands is even better than the professional efforts around the Sound.

It wasn't the music that got me out here, but I grew to appreciate it fast. Since the late 80s the Pac Northwest has continued to grow into one of the most vibrant and nurturing emerging music scenes, the birthplace of the grungy "garage band" sound. It was a sarcastic revolt against the glammy, over-produced metal, pop, and alternative stuff that dominated the late 70s and 80s, so it was by definition anti-corporate. It was edgy and dangerous as a snakebite, dangerous as an OD, revelling in its alienation and managed to retain that feel even after bands like Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and a score of lesser-known bands like Gruntruck were hitting it big world-wide and it attracted the trust-fund babies, who could actually afford heroin.

The originators were gone or cooled down, bands such as Green River, Mudhoney, and the Melvins (Kurt Cobain was a devoted fan and helped them out as a stage hand) were starting to pass the torch, but Seattle was as music-mad as Liverpool in the 1960s. Even my button-down friends and I in MBA School went down to the Off-Ramp every Tuesday for open mike night. We saw the worst band in history (Zeke) there. The lead singer came out wearing nothing except a gold lame' G-string, and it got worse when they started to play. Funny enough, they're a local-venue band stalwart 16 years later.

The Northwest was a perfect incubator for garage bands, and still is. You sure as hell can't play much music outside, and most parents would've rather parked their cars out on the street than have proto-punk metal/Iggy Pop fusion playing in the house. So grunge happened. Lord Running Boy had his first experience with Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath last night, which he immediately went wild over: "No, no, turn it up, it's gotta be louder," he cried, grabbing the volume knob and turning it up to Eleven, whirly-gigging and turning his cousin's living room into a mosh pit for the balance of the album. (Yes. Yes, I am terrified.)

The Finest Kiss is named for a song by the Boo Radleys, a UK group Toby heard when he was living in Caen. They have a website up now, and you can listen to the song here. By going to Toby's site, I also learned that Australian legend Paul Kelly, the greatest singer-songwriter you've never heard of, will be playing at the Triple Door in March, right where I first ran into him. We're going. And I'll be enjoying the future of music via the Finest Kiss.

Tom Waits: Downtown Train

The above song was a #1 hit for Rod Stewart, and my grandmother worked overtime, supervising the night shift making cassettes along with the last vinyl cut records ever mass-produced. At Decca Records, just as she was about to retire. Somewhat surprisingly to me, she became a big fan of Rod Stewart. I was fondly bemused, and had hopes she was recovering from the death of my grandfather. But she never did, and Rod Stewart didn't write that song. We all thought he did at the time but he just sang it like so many others. Nobody saw the man behind the lyrical curtain, a misshapen unforgiven dwarf who whittled patterns many other voices would take into fashion.

The dwarf's voice is a rock crusher. It makes gravel out of washboards, asphalt, and car parts floating in on tides of bourbon. As a child, he taught himself to play on a neighbor's piano, where he took refuge while his schoolteacher parents were acrimoniously divorcing in Pomona, California when he was 8 and 9. His father was named Frank, his mother Alma, and it was 1958 or '57, depending on how you calculate prodigy. He later played in an R&B band in high school, but his heart wasn't in it. You can almost hear a music teacher saying, "Class...please pay attention, and excuse Tom."

While the 60s revolutions raged, he listened to Bing Crosby to figure out his timing. He studied Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Lord Buckley, Hoagy Carmichael, Marty Robbins, and Raymond Chandler. He started playing lounges and strip clubs in San Diego when he was 18, and he was so good that word got out--Martha and the Vandellas, Charlie Rich, and Frank Zappa asked him to tour with them. He strove to make art with words and eventually mused a magnum opus on his father's absence in an album called Frank's Wild Years. While he steadily closed in on genius as a pauper, the Eagles, Rod Stewart, and Bruce Springsteen made millions of dollars singing his songs as their own.

When I heard Rod Stewart singing Downtown Train, I heard a tom-cat reasonably asking for free sex. Later, when I first heard Tom Waits singing his own creation, I heard someone describing people traveling into Manhattan, girls who hung from the straps on the downtown lines, also the people who came in preserved from New Jersey, people I worked alongside with thick accents and frank assessments. So I knew how fully he shook their essence down like a perfumer who bottled souls. Once an old guard on the exchange laughed long at me one morning when I first wore a new blue Italian silk pinstripe suit my mentor had given me, and I asked what was the matter. He said--"You look like a million bucks," and I said right back to him, his name was Jesse, "I'm shinin' like a new dime!"

Once you hear Tom Waits sing his own creations, Rod Stewart and everybody else scatters like crows.

The lyrics to Downtown Train:

Outside another yellow moon
punched a hole in the nighttime, yes
I climb through the window and down the street
I'm shining like a new dime
the downtown trains are full--with all those Brooklyn girls
they try so hard to break out of their little worlds

You wave your hand, and they scatter like crows
they have nothing that will ever capture your heart
they're just thorns without the rose
be careful of them in the dark
oh if I was the one!
you chose to be your only one
oh baby, can't you hear me now

Will I see you tonight?
on a downtown train
every night, every night is just the same
you leave me lonely now

I know your window, and I know it's late
I know your stairs and your doorway
I walk down your street and past your gate
I stand by the light at the four way

You watch them as they fall
and baby they all have heart attacks
they stay at the carnival,
but they'll never win you back!

Chorus

Will I see you tonight?
On a downtown train...
where every night is just the same
(you leave me lonely)
will I see you tonight?
On a downtown train...
all of my dreams just fall like rain
ooh baby on a downtown train

Lou Reed And John Cale: Style It Takes

Taking the last SwissAir flight from Heathrow back to Basel, I was one of the few people going through the airport after landing. Things shut down early in Switzerland, even on a Friday night, so I drove back to my apartment through what might as well have been a combined curfew and blackout. Dead beat but unable to sleep, I turned on the TV to see John Cale singing this piece. It was catchy, and the setting was strange. It took a minute to sink in that the founding members of the Velvet Underground had gotten back together for the first time and were performing a requiem for Andy Warhol at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Warhol had played mentor and barb, promoter and stifler to the band. Like a surreal Colonel Tom Parker, Warhol introduced, showcased, pushed, and had "creative differences" with them. Eventually they had a falling out and never spoke to each other again. But after Warhol died in 1987, Cale and Reed, who also weren't speaking to each other, got together to go over their scrapbooks and start writing Songs for Drella. ("Drella" refers to a nickname coined by one of the actors in Warhol's interminable films, Ondine, who had pegged Warhol as a perfect cross between Dracula and Cinderella. The nickname stuck.) Though not always an unreserved fan of any of the artists involved, I was pleased to witness an artistic achievement. The song and album really capture Warhol's artistic energy, optimism, and determination, and he really did want to put the Empire State Building on all our walls, so we could watch the sun rise above it in our rooms. The lyrics:

You’ve got the money, I’ve got the time.
You want your freedom, make your freedom mine;
’cause I’ve got the style it takes--
and money is all that it takes!

You’ve got connections, and I’ve got the Art.
You like my attention, and I like your looks;
And I have the style it takes--
and you know the people it takes!

Why don’t you sit...right...over there?
We’ll do a movie portrait;
I’ll turn the camera on, and I won’t even be there--
A portrait that moves, you look great! (I think.)

I’ll put the Empire State Building on your wall.
For 24 hours glowing on your wall;
Watch the sun rise above it in your room--
wallpaper art! A great view!

I’ve got a brillo box and I say it’s art.
It’s the same one you can buy at any supermarket;
’cause I’ve got the style it takes--
And you’ve got the people it takes.

This is a rock group called the Velvet Underground.
I show movies on them, do you like their sound?
’cause they have a style that grates--
and I have art to make!

Let’s do a movie, here next week.
We don’t have sound,
but you’re so great,
You don’t have to speak!

You’ve got the style it takes (kiss)
You’ve got the style it takes (eat)
I’ve got the style it takes (couch)
We’ve got the style it takes (kiss)

Feist: I Feel It All

Leslie Feist strikes again, this time on Jimmy Kimmel Live, singing with her band on a commuter bus. She draws on the marimba, snapping fingers, an acoustic guitar, an unused sax horn, a guy blowing on a cross between a bagpipe a waterpipe and a keyboard, and lots of greek chorus vocals in the background. It's really on a bus, with the driver's head bobbing up and down to the groove. The suspension must've been pretty good, and transmitted a stream of an artist's past consciousness:

"No one likes to take a test, sometimes you know more is less, put your weight against the door, kick drums on a basement floor, stranded in a fog of words, loved him like a winter bird, on my head the water pours, Gulf Stream through the open door, oh fly away, just fly away, to what you want to make."

The full lyrics to 'I Feel it All:'

I feel it all, I feel it all
I feel it all, I feel it all
The wings are wide, the wings are wide
Wild card inside, wild card inside

Oh, I'll be the one who'll break my heart
I'll be the one to hold the gun!

I know more than I knew before
I don't know what I knew before
I didn't rest, I didn't stop:
Did we fight or did we talk?

Oh, I'll be the one who'll break my heart
I'll be the one to hold the gun!

I love you more, I love you more!
I don't know what I knew before,
but now I know, I wanna win the war

No one likes to take a test
Sometimes you know more is less
Put your weight against the door
Kick drum on a basement floor
Stranded in a fog of words
Loved him like a winter bird
On my head the water pours
Gulf stream through the open door
Oh, fly away, flay away,
To what you want to make.

I feel it all, I feel it all
I feel it all I feel it all
The wings are wide, the wings are wide
Wild card inside, wild card inside.

Oh I'll be the one to break my heart
I'll be the one who'll break my heart
I'll be the one who'll break my heart
I'll end it, though you started it.

The truth lied!
The truth, it lied,
Oh, and lies divide.
I'll guess we'll meet again,
but lies divide.

Joni Mitchell, Free Man In Paris: Karaoke Stars

On the laquered Thai chicken-cage in which we keep our stereo and music, we played Joni Mitchell's most popular all-time CD tonight. Lord Wife pointed out that Joni Mitchell's song 'Free Man in Paris' was specifically written about her extremely talented, music-loving record producer (David Geffen) and about the anonymity and freedom he once enjoyed in Europe. So I just searched on YouTube for it, and this excellent karaoke version of the song came up on the first hit. Listened to it, and didn't notice at first it wasn't Joni Mitchell. It's very close and very well done, from somewhere in Japan. You don't have to be closeted like David Geffen to dig it, too. But I'm starting to understand.

The lyrics:

The way I see it, he said
You just cant win it...
Everybody's in it for their own gain
You cant please 'em all
theres always somebody calling you down...
I do my best,
And I do good business!
Theres a lot of people asking for my time,
They're trying to get ahead,
They're trying to be a good friend of mine!

But I was a free man in Paris,
I felt unfettered and alive!
There was nobody calling me up for favors,
No ones future to decide.
You know Id go back there tomorrow
But for the work Ive taken on.
Stoking the star maker machinery
Behind the popular song...

I deal in dreamers
And telephone screamers
Lately I wonder what I do it for
If l had my way
Id just walk through those doors
And wander...
Down the Champs d'Elysees
Going from cafe to cabaret
Thinking of how I'll feel when I find
That very good friend of mine.

I was a free man in Paris,
I felt unfettered and alive!
Nobody was calling me up for favors
No ones' future to decide.
You know I'd go back there tomorrow
But for the work I've taken on
stoking the star maker machinery
behind the popular song.

Feist: Secret Heart

You know the drill. Listen. Lyrics. Read. This very secret that you're trying to conceal is the very same one that you're dying to reveal. Go tell him how you feel. This song was written by Ron Sexsmith, also a Canadian, and Feist covers it such that you can't tell it's not by her:

Secret heart
What are you made of
What are you so afraid of
Could it be
Three simple words
Or the fear of being overheard
What's wrong

Let em' in on your secret heart

Secret Heart
Why so mysterious
Why so sacred
Why so serious
Maybe you're
Just acting tough
Maybe you're just not man enough
What's wrong

Let em' in on your secret heart

This very secret
That you're trying to conceal
Is the very same one
That You're dying to reveal
Go tell him how you feel

Secret heart come out and share it
This loneliness, few can bear it
Could it have something to do with
Admitting that you just can't go through it alone?

Let em' in on your secret heart

This very secret
That you're trying to conceal
Is the very same one
That you're dying to reveal
Go tell him how you feel
This very secret heart

Go out and share it
This very secret heart