Last week, Said the Gramophone played host to its first ever concerts. If you were there, you know how splendid they were. If you weren't, imagine the most splendid thing you can, and then multiply by a dozen roses. Our thanks go out hard & hearty to all the bands; to Hil, Dan, Patricia and Lisa at Pop; to Andrew Rose; to Matthew and Frank; to other Matthew for graphics; to sound-guys Christian, Drew and especially Dan Lagacé; and to everyone who showed their face for short or long whiles.

Christine Fellows - "What Makes the Cherry Red". On Wednesday night some of us gathered at a room called Le Gymnase, a place of wood and concrete and gold banding, and amid lamps and lamplight listened. There was a performance by Julie Doiron + drummer, bashful stories interrupted by bouts of furious playing, gnashing at notes, the bitter & the sweet. There was a show by Ola Podrida, all the way from Brooklyn, who made their weariness insistent. (A reminder that some of our fiercest feelings happen at the end of long days, when hopes are worn threadbare.) And there was first, flush, an hour with Christine Fellows and her friends.

Her new album, Nevertheless, is front-parlour and porcelain duck. That is to say it's a record about an elderly protagonist, or of her, or for her; an old woman called Betty who's still deeply alive, eyes wide open. Christine sings the woman's songs with deference, affection, and even a certain glee - a lightness that is often absent from this subject-matter.

But "What Makes the Cherry Red", set in the centre of Nevertheless, is not a song lodged in narrative. Instead it is a caesura, an interruption, a little breath. It is a moment where Christine takes us aside to say something vital and generous. She makes a string of assertions I desperately wish to be true, and makes them from a fabric of sound that is so beautiful it verges on the sublime; the sort of bloom and rise that'll shake you as you sit there, that'll prick tears in your eyes, that'll make you uncertain of where pretty becomes beautiful; that'll make you wonder again if perhaps a sunset can redeem a day.

Someone said that lately my posts here have been diary-like. And there's some truth to this; I've been talking to myself, writing things out loud. I've been wondering about love - love fierce, fickle, falling, flying, failing. I've been inspired and disappointed by it. It's Friday and in Montreal this week I feel a little jaded, a little grey; a little less than I was. So what I want is to sew "What Makes the Cherry Red" onto my every sleeve, to find it written on every mirror, to see it in clouds and on the bellies of birds, in a girl's eyes, in the bottom of a cup of coffee. I want to see and feel this song in places other than a recording; I want to see it in places where its promises become incontrovertible truths. I want to know it to be true, what Christine sings. That one day what makes the cherry red will tie a knot in me, and forgive us our decay.

[Christine's MySpace / Nevertheless is released in early November on Six Shooter Records, and is available from her on tour.]

[This is too long, already. I will write about the other two concerts on Monday.]

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As previously stated, our own Dan Beirne appears in the play Legend of the Barbarian, presently mounted at the Theatre Ste-Catherine in Montreal. I saw the play on Thursday night and it's just about the most fun you can have in a room with a concubine, a goblin, a blind seer, and a bunch of people wearing furs. It's ridiculous but even more absurdly it's fraught - all these barbarians and mercenaries caught up in genuine internal struggle, melodrama painted on the insides of peoples' kohl-rimmed eyes. It runs until the 20th, and includes one decapitation, two eye-gougings, and a generous quantity of loincloths. Go on!

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[You can buy the cherries in the photograph above.]