Cynthia Dall - "Christmas (California)". This song has spent almost two years in my "to-post" folder, waiting for the right moment. It is a Christmas song, so I thought I would post it around Christmas; it is an unhappy song, so I thought I would post it when I was feeling unhappy, full of grey-black smoke. Today is a spring day that feels like summer, hot as hell, thunderstorms brewing. I am happy. I had coffee with my friend. But I have learned that Cynthia Dall died on April 5th. She was 41. This death feels incorrect, a story that ended at the wrong time. Cynthia should have lived to a ripe old age. She should have released another record, and have been rediscovered, and have staged a comeback, years later, covering "Someone Like You" in slow-motion electric guitar. But instead this - a terrible incongruity, a wrong thing, tragedy.

So let's listen to this wrong song on this wrong day, in a tribute to the wrong thing. Let's not hear the bruise in the singing but rather the gift of the work: this beautiful awful crystallization of a certain feeling. Dall makes a song in simple sounds - distorted guitar, schoolgirl voice, chiming piano, like an inverted "Good King Wenceslas". There are drums - tom, bass, tambourine. They are simple sounds but woven intricately: sounds pan from channel to channel, things disappear unnoticed. This is music mirroring meaning - when we have that blurry feeling, roiling, angry & sarcastic & hurt & wounded, sharp like the head of an axe, what seems simple is complex, a smear of many colours. It doesn't matter how this song was written - it matters how it was played.

Cynthia Dall could play.

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(photograph_ of Anna Schuleit's installation, Bloom)