Archives : all posts by Jordan

Caitlin Cary and Thad Cockrell - "(Let Me Wrap You in My) Warm and Tender Love"

The best way to hear this song, in my – ‘humble’ is not the word… correct opinion, is as the end of an epic negotiation. It began simply enough: in a bar, with a whiskey on the rocks in hand, a man approached a woman. He asked if he might be able to wrap her in some wrapping paper he had left over from the previous Christmas. She refused. It might have been over then had she not made a bold counter-offer: why not, she proposed, allow her to wrap him head-to-toe in tensor bandages, as if every muscle in his body were sore. He liked this, and thought it over quite seriously, but declined in the end. Perhaps it would be better, he suggested, for him to wrap her in rice and seaweed, as if making sushi, and then dip her in soy sauce and wasabi. She initially accepted this offer, but then received a call from her lawyer who advised her to pass. She offered to knock on his front door while he freestyled on the other side of it, but they both knew this wouldn’t work – she without hands, he without rhythm and the ability to rhyme. The negotiation went on like this all night. The bar closed, but the man and the woman and the bar band remained. When the sun came up, the band – eager to get home to their families - started in on a tune. Raunchy blues organ, lightly distorted tremolo guitar, brushes on a snare – a dusty, alt country ballad. The man and the woman, now both unbecomingly drunk on whiskey, simultaneously recognized the song as Percy Sledge’s soul classic, “(Let Me Wrap You in My) Warm and Tender Love.” They knew just what to do.

[Buy]

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Blind Willie McTell - "Statesboro Blues"

Blind Willie McTell is goin’ to the country. This blues isn’t a lament; it’s a promise. Don’t believe him? Just listen to how he makes the notoriously phlegmatic Major blues progression move like Baryshnikov. No, I assure you that he’s goin’.

The City of Statesboro, GA: Well, we sure will miss Blind Willie.
Groucho Marx: McTell me about it!
Audience: (Laughter, applause)

fin

[Buy]

Jon-Rae and the River - "Roll"

Upon first listening:

0:00 - 0:25 - Bob Seger, dubiousness.

0:26 - 0:30 - Motor sounds, continued dubiousness.

0:31 - 1:25 - The Band's a good band. Did you guys ever notice that Rick Danko looked exactly like a jellyfish when he played bass? Can this music really hold my interest for the next four minutes?

1:26 - 1:27 - Someone tell the man in the back of the studio that, though we understand that this music excites him, it's impolite to yell while the recording's in progress.

1:28 - 1:52 - Hello, frenetic duelling guitar/keys solos. What a pleasant surprise. Oh, you can only stay for fifteen seconds? That's too bad. Do come back any time.

1:53 - 1:54 - Drum fill.

1:55 - 2:54 - Nothing against Levon Helm, but I never really understood the concept of profundity until I heard Rick Danko take that verse in "The Weight" ("Crazy Chester..."). Dubiousness has melted away, enthusiasm grown up in its place. How much of my dubiousness had to do with the fact that I was reading In Dubious Battle up until this verse, we'll never know. My enthusiasm, on the other hand, was almost certainly caught from Jon-Rae and the River - all of whom should be quarantined, so infectious is their own enthusiasm.

2:55 - 3:35 - Jon-Rae's lyrics betray an unhealthy fixation on rolling. But to where?

3:36 - end - To a party at Tina Turner's house. Bob Seger's there, The Band, a Stax horn section, a hippie with a bongo - everyone's dancing their brains out.

[Buy]

Heroes and Villains - "Gene Clark"

What have Heroes and Villains done?! Something, befitting their name, as heroic as it is villainous. They have released a song into the late Montreal fall that captures the greyness of that time and place. In their Montreal, as in mine, the curtains are always drawn since the sun is always set. The planes overhead are there to remind us of Gene Clark, who was afraid of flying and worried himself to a premature death; the bicycles are for Nico, who crashed hers, the cars for Camus, James Dean, Jackson Pollock, the ships sail for Hart Crane. Everything in the dark, a sad, pretty symbol.

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Kaki King - "Second Brain"

When a solo guitar virtuoso decides to sing, one should generally decide not to listen. John Fahey and Leo Kottke have both used their vocal chords to garrote perfectly good guitar compositions. Kaki King's double-tracked voice is like how Joel Taylor and I recently described Dabney Coleman's hands: "Two plumes of indescribably rarefied gossamer mist." Which is to say, thin. But unlike Fahey and Kottke, King doesn't allow her guitar to become mere accompaniment to her vocals. Quite the opposite - her voice acts as just another texture, another sound that she can weave into the few empty spaces within her intricate guitar patterns. King knows to barely use what she doesn't have and use in abundance what she has in spades.

[Buy]

The For Carnation - "Emp. Man's Blues"

One might say that my editor Max Maki’s greatest weakness of character is her tendency to find any excuse to bring up the fact that she is indeed my editor. It’s not uncommon for her to stop a stranger on the street, ask him what he does for a living, and without waiting for an answer, interject that she is an occasional contributing editor of an occasional contributing author of an occasionally read mp3 blog. The sad reality is that her work here barely pays the bills. In fact, in recent months, she’s been forced to supplement her income doing demeaning work as a journalist for CBC Radio 1. One result of such mercenary labour was aired yesterday evening and consisted of interviews of Quebec City residents regarding what most scares them. Yesterday, you see, was Halloween!!!!

The first interviewee said that he was most afraid of ghosts. His thin voice quivered as he gravely recounted being haunted by a neighbour-lady who had died in her home and remained there decomposing for several days afterwards. She had been a friend of the family. “She was a very nice woman,” he said, pale in voice as his apparition presumably had been in chimerical body. Max Maki, ever a model of sensitivity, cut immediately to the Ghostbusters theme.

The next interviewee said that he was most afraid that he wouldn’t be able to do everything he wanted to do before he died.

Objectively speaking, this song is several times more frightening than either of the above, or anything else, for that matter. The first few times I heard it, I jumped out of the nearest window. Though I compound fractured all of my bones each time, I would say that the feeling of relief at having escaped the sinister grip of the song overwhelmed any acute pain I may have felt. In writing this, I'm facing my most primal fears, and let me tell you, it doesn’t feel good at all. After all, only irrational fears should be faced; rational ones should be heeded.

It would be irrational not to fear the sheer slowness of “Emp. Man’s Blues.” Actually, never mind the slowness - you should be worrying about the strings that hiss like wind through gnarled tree branches, or the distant keyboard, like the sudden, jarring sound of chimes breaking a nighttime silence.

Don’t listen, I urge you.

[Buy]

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The Soirée - "Across the Sea"

You needn’t be afraid of ghosts or of the finitude of life, though. Both The For Carnation and The Soirée understand that time is dense: between any two moments there is always an intermediary moment. To travel from one moment to the next requires the impossible – that we navigate through an infinite set of intervening moments. Life, it would seem, must be infinite, and ghosts therefore must not exist. So, take it slow. We’re not getting anywhere, anyway.

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1. Mahmoud's Philosophy: Monism

This is what I think: that Mahmoud Ahmed and Bobby Patterson are brothers. It goes without saying, of course, that Mahmoud is older, that Bobby idolizes him, that Mahmoud is in his second year of college, that Bobby is in his junior year of high school, that Mahmoud studies philosophy, that Bobby plans to study philosophy (though he doesn't know what it is). It's probably the case that after Mahmoud's first semester, he returned home to Philly for the first time since he left to study in Addis Ababa. It's certainly the case that he tried to explain to Bobby the concept of monism.

"There is only one thing," Mahmoud instructed. "Everything that you view as distinct from something else, is in fact identical to that thing and everything else."

Bobby: Wait a minute... What about mom and dad?
Mahmoud: The same.
Bobby: The United Nations headquarters and the fattest cat in the world?
Mahmoud: (holding up three fingers) How many fingers am I holding up?
Bobby: Three!
Mahmoud: Not even close, man.
Bobby: But...

Once Bobby understood and everyone had opened their Christmas presents, Mahmoud returned to Ethiopia. Bobby went back to school and told all of his teachers and classmates about his brother and his wonderful idea. Almost all of them immediately recognized the obvious truth of monism, and only a few skeptical cohorts asked questions like:

"But what of lice and concepts? Surely these are separate?"

Or "Isn't a Michigan sandwich something other than the Brandenburg Concertos?"

To which Bobby would reply, "I'll ask my brother and get back to you tomorrow." And the next day: "Mahmoud assures me that lice, concepts, a Michigan sandwich, and the Brandenburg Concertos are all one thing."

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2. Mahmoud's Music: Soul

After his first year, Mahmoud came home for the summer. He brought his band with him. Every night after dinner, Mahmoud and the band would set up their gear in the Ahmed-Patterson backyard and serenade the family with a rendition of "Tezeta." No matter how many times Bobby heard the song, he never tired of it. In fact, it seemed to him that each night's performance was significantly hotter than the previous night's. The bass always bored deeper, the organ grew ever more lively, the guitar more romantic, the vocals more fluid, and the glorious flute more... Until the intertwining pentatonic runs became so seamless that it rendered the individual parts indistinguishable from one another. By the end of the summer, Bobby could hear the song only as a whole. The various instruments, the late summer's breeze, the moonlight: all were one.

Bobby decided then that he would form a band of his own. After all, even though it probably wouldn't be as good as Mahmoud's, it would in some sense be exactly the same.

Bobby Patterson - "If I Didn't Have You"

[Buy Mahmoud, Bobby]

Robert Pete Williams - "Prisoner's Talking Blues"

Game theorists, listen up! The prisoner's dilemma is not as you have it, but is, at least as described by Robert Pete Williams (a higher being than any of you), Hamlet's own. Williams wonders if he's better off alive or dead. Alive, he is sick, he is imprisoned, he is a burden to those of his family who still live, and is separated from those who are dead. Yet, being alive allows him to visit with his little kids, with his sister who is like a mother to him, and whom he loves. His parents are dead, and though he misses them, he feels they might be better off ignorant of his misdeeds and of his consequently unfortunate circumstances. If being human means, as some have suggested, that we are what we choose, then our personal potential is restricted by limitations on our physical freedom, and so Robert Pete Williams considers regaining his humanity by relinquishing it.

Williams talks and talks and talks. He talks so long, examines his predicament so thoroughly, that though he never states it explicitly, it becomes clear that his question is whether to be or not to be. He divides up his many words with serious, thoughtful breaths, meant to hold back the emotion from his consideration. He picks here and there at his guitar, playing something recognizable as blues, something lost underneath his words. He talks until you forget that he could communicate in any other way.

And then, more than three minutes into his song, he starts to sing. He sings of thoughts of suicide. It's barely different from his talking. And though he's merely making explicit what we already knew, his singing - so restrained, so gentle, so heavy that it sinks to the deep core of his trouble - reveals something new: his fear. He doesn't know what to do, he doesn't want to die, he wants to change, change while he's young, so that he may become old.

His guitar locks into an astonishing riff. As subtle as his singing, it has an equally devastating effect. Slow and circular, it anticipates the dry, eerie style of Malian blues guitarist Ali Farka Toure. Whereas Williams' singing communicates fear, the light drive of his guitar is a burgeoning resolve, an answer to his own cry for help. [Buy]

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Washington Phillips - "Paul and Silas in Jail"

It is not known what instrument Washington Phillips used to make the otherworldly carnival sound that serves as a backdrop for his lullaby sermons. That's between Washington Phillips and god. [Buy]

Dave Van Ronk - "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me"

1. There are more cello voices than trumpet voices in this world and many more trumpet voices than woodwind ones. Double reed voices are more rare than the raw steak I'm eating right now, so sell Dave Van Ronk's voice on eBay; it'll fetch a fortune.

2. Ronk tends toward the lightest vocal skronk - the air tightening up, escaping thick and congested from Ronk's bronchus. Ronk's name is very funny, but his song is very sad. I'm laughing through my tears as I write this, alternately seduced by the suicidal impetus of Ronk's sonk and saved by the very hilarity of Ronk's nomenronkture.

3. "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me" is a perfect driving song if the vehicle is a horse and the destination is your own execution. "Put the rope around my neck/hung me up so high/last words I heard him say/'won't be long now 'fore you die.'" Sensitive. [Buy]

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Cat Power - "Remember Me"

Normally a big fat genius of interpretation, Cat Power here plays Otis Redding's "Remember Me" too slowly, too loosely, too formlessly. Even still, her many vocal flourishes (including her appropriation of Redding's patented I-can't-keep-it-inside-anymore ascending slide) are gifts of which - I'm sorry to say it - we are undeserving. [Available for exclusive download at eMusic.]