The Dirty Three - "Hope". It's like with faces, see? You look at a face and it's the saddest face in the world. And then the light changes and you look at your friend and you see that it's love, not sorrow, in their eyes.

So here's a sad song, a sad song till the light changes. Then it's dawn, hope, warmth, contentment. It's when you unlock the door to your home after a long trip away, setting the bags down on the floor, seeing your chair as it was left, by you, by your human hands. The sun's only just rising and the room is white, or blue, or- I don't know; the light keeps changing. Maybe there's a body in the bed, waiting for you. Maybe you lie down alone, hands above your head, and you stare at the ceiling. Maybe you listen as the city comes to life, maybe you sleep. Maybe it's sad, maybe it's really really not.

The Dirty Three play music with guitar, violin and drums. Maybe you've heard of them. (They have the best drummer in the world.) This is a song from Horse Stories, from 1995. (And it reminds me of Loren MazzaCane Connors.)

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The Dirty Three ft. Cat Power - "Great Waves". This isn't from Horse Stories. It's from Cinder, due out October 11th, one month after Arvo Pärt's birthday. It's perhaps the best Dirty Three song ever, which is kinda too bad because it's basically a Cat Power song. But I don't know if I've ever heard Cat Power this mystical, so urgent without being desperate, so in control of her talents. It's startling to hear Jim White play behind her, the rattle and blur that leaps against my heart. Even more startling is that she sings of hurricane and flood, yes you got it, and there are so many images fresh in our mind. "The world is gone." A violin sounds like a ukelele or else it's a plain old mandolin and I imagine the smallest stories, the individual bodies that are exploding when Chan sings "the bodies are exploding", the individual humans running for cover when Chan sings "humans running for cover", the cars "intersect[ing] in the middle of the sky".

If there's going to be a song that makes me think of Katrina, me who was in Slovenia when the storm hit, me who doesn't have a TV, me who feels a million miles away and hasn't really been able to care, well then let it be a song that's a swamp, a morass, a thick soup of sound - and also a reservoir, a pool, a gift: every twig, leaf and raindrop, every brush of snare and thump of tom, everything unrehearsed and yet perfectly placed.

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Elsewhere:

You really ought to grab the Page France track at Fluxblog.