Black Boys on Mopeds

Over the weekend someone reached out to me over Messenger and asked who I had gone out with in college. "Hilary," I said. Which reminded me I hadn't snooped on Facebook in some time to see what she was up to, which is something that I do of course though I also try to have lunch with her every year or two to have a proper check in. Every two years seems to be about all she can take of me, which I can certainly understand and is entirely in keeping with people's general trend to care less and less about maintaining broad networks of connections as they age.

So I scrolled down Hilary's feed and saw that there was a Sinead O'Connor song she had posted around the time of O'Connor's passing earlier this year, with a note that her husband had brought it to her attention. I listened to it, and it was indeed lovely, but I thought that O'Connor's presence and delivery reminded me in many ways of the early Sharon Van Etten, a longtime fixation of mine. Perhaps not surprisingly, when I looked for other versions of the song on YouTube I discovered a cover of it by Van Etten herself. And I love hers in particular.

But it gets better. I kept scrolling YouTube -- and I didn't have to scroll far because there aren't that many versions of this song out there -- and found one by Phoebe Bridgers, who is one of Natalie's absolute faves. Which is just too lovely, to have that much commonality of taste across generations when there just aren't that many versions of the song out there. Through much of her childhood I thought Natalie would shoot us if we played another song by Jonny Cash or Mandolin Orange or Gillian Welch or something but it seems the apple hasn't fallen that far from the tree. Then again, I was younger than her when I reencountered and fell in love with John Prine, who had been my dad's favorite and is very much in the same tradition. Even the chord progressions are the same; but of course they are.

Codicil: turns out there a lot more covers of this song than I originally thought. I like this guy a lot. Reminds me of the guy from Neutral Milk Hotel.

Evening strum

Trying not to get sucked down into the endless maelstrom of post-election dread and fear, of late I have been playing the guitar more and more. After years of hands softened by playing my old classical guitar (which I wrote about now north of a decade ago here), I have taken up with the Gibson sunburst guitar that Mary's brother George left for me in the attic in Larchmont. The neck is narrower, the frets closer together, so it feels tight on my stubby hands, but I'm getting there.  They key thing has been to put the classical guitar in its case so that I am not tempted to pick it up.

Also, the strings are steel (or some kind of metal) rather than mostly nylon, so it's harder on my hands, so I am developing callouses on my fingertips, which is good but wierd after all these years of soft hands.

I've been learning more songs too. For a long time, my repertoire has been fairly limited. One thing that's been helpful is finding resources on the so-called interweb which have all the lyrics and chord progressions in the songs. Makes things damned easy. Another boon granted my by Al Gore's mighty creation is guitar dudes on YouTube showing licks and ways of holding one's hands in non-obvious (at least to me) ways to facilitate moving between chords. That has meant unlearning many decades of muscle memory, not a quick and easy thing to do, especially with the limited time I can/do make available for playing.

My repertoire has been expanding to include John Prine, Neutral Milk Hotel, Sharon Van Etten, etc. One important thing I've tried to do is write down songs that I've learned. I did that, but I forgot where I wrote it down. Sigh.  I know Google docs would be a good place, but keeping track of all one's Google docs is a chore in itself.

In general, the challenge of multiple file management constructs is a whole nuther kettle of worms, worthy of a blog post of its own.

Now to take Graham to martial arts and read Buffett's 1990 Letter to Shareholders.

Getting psyched

For the new Sharon Van Etten record.  In fact, I meant to buy it today when I was uptown with Niklaus, but got to running late and forgot to.  I had to drop the 3 kid bikes jammed into the back of the car off at Clean Machine so they could pass it to some guy who'll clean em up and give them to some lower income kids. So much easier than driving out on 15-501 to Goodwill or Re Store or whoever would've taken them.

Yes, I could order it from Amazon, I just like to patronize the local record store with appropriately haughty and surly bastards at the register.

And, yes, I could just have it delivered via the so-called "internet" to my phone.  But I have no way of plugging that into my stereo at home, so old and cheap is it, and I don't like the way the think skitters around in the car and skips.

Oh, I could listen to it on my phone using headphones, but I've never liked listening to music that way.  I can drift off into the nether regions of my own mind easily enough without any headphones, thank you very much.  And how then would I hear the world around me?  So many nice birds this time of year, or the gentle lulling of this fan off behind me.

Mostly, what good is music if you're not imposing it on your teenager?

Sharon van Etten at the Cradle

SVE came to Carrboro last night, the second time this year, this time at least I was up on it and was there. Good show.

About her. The striking thing was the contrast between her singing/voice and persona and her speaking/bandleading one. She sings with great range, great deep tones and tremendous resonance, laying it all out there. When she speaks, she's a somewhat gawkish young lady, almost a little girl voice. She's not used to commanding the stage, being a rock star, hasn't mastered the patter with the audience so she spends a fair amount of time saying how happy she is to be here, how she loves NC, etc. Not that I'm faulting her, I think building the persona that can fake rapport with a big room of people you don't know is hard. I had always liked the way she makes a lot of eye contact with Heather Broderick when she sings, thinking that it added depth. After watching the show, I think what it's really about is that she's shy and that Heather, and her other bandmates, are people she knows and is comfortable with. In fact, I think that's one reason why people in all bands look at each other. I kinda remember that from Unity Rockers days.

Overall, she sounded great, I'm very happy I went, but I would've loved to have heard more of the acoustic stuff. I think the bass was too far out front in the mix, sometimes drowning out her voice and her interplay with Heather which is, for me, the heart of the matter. The drummer was surprisingly good and entertaining, more front and center than I would have suspected, and it was cool that he's a North Carolinian and a Cradle alum. I think they didn't need to do a big distortion fest at the end of one song, but hey, I'm 46, that wasn't for me.

At the end she said she'd be at the merch table if people wanted to stop by.  Part of me wanted to go over there and meet her and Heather, but then I really didn't need to go and be basically flirting with younger women on whom I have slight crushes, given that I'm married. If she wants to know how I feel about her, she can read my blog.

More importantly, I was right at the end of my book and wanted to get home and finish it, and then get in bed at a reasonable hour.

It will be interesting to see where she goes from here. The one new song she played didn't mine new material. Her strength is not just her voice, but her willingness to plumb the depths of the psychic pain of what is absolutely normal young adult romantic stuff. She's doing the autobiographical art that everybody thinks about doing, it's just she's figured out how. If she roams the world doing the same material and going back to the same psychic place, she will probably get stale, which would be a shame. I suspect she'll need to move on to a new life phase to find new challenges. So if it takes some years for another record, that's probably good. But she's gotta ride the wave now to get paid, as she should.

A new low, a new chanteuse

What with having a first name that occurs most often as a last name, and a last name that occurs most often as a first name, I'm really quite used to name confusion. People call me by my last name all the time. Even my good friends often call me by my last name, though they do so advisedly and often rhyming with "your boy."

But yesterday, on Facebook, someone I went out with in college called me Troy. Admittedly it was a brief thing almost a quarter of a century ago, but by God it felt significant at the time. That was kind of a slap.

On the positive side, I caught wind of this young singer Sharon van Etten yesterday on Last Hotel or whatever the evening show on WUNC.  I like her, particularly when she harmonizes with this Charlotte Rampling looking person whose name I haven't yet figured out (3/2/2012 -- Turns out her name is Heather Broderick). They are each the kind of young ladies I would have courted when I was younger, and I would hope that, had I succeeded in wooing them, that they'd keep track of my fricking first name.