As I squeezed myself in between people at the music room at Schubas on Saturday night, I wished I had gotten to the last Tomorrow Never Knows show just a little earlier. Despite being only 10 minutes late, I had managed to miss part of the first band's set, and they were pretty fucking good. My friend remarked that they were like Beirut (with maybe a little bit of bump and grind), and I couldn't figure out why the vocalist sounded so familiar (I finally figured out that he reminded me of the guy from Chin Up Chin Up.). Anyway, I was enjoying them immensely, but they weren't selling music at the show, and so upon my return home on Monday night (I stayed in the city so I could watch both halves of "Che" in Lincoln Park monday afternoon) I googled Vacations Band. And then Vacations tomorrow never knows. I did find out that, not only is the vocalist from Chin Up Chin Up, so is the entire band. Still, I could not track down a web presence. Now, I'm a pretty patient fellow, but I really have no longer to make my way to the third google page looking for your band's website. For all I know, Vacations are too new to have a website (which seems like a bad business desicion now that the web is everything), but even so, in a search-engine driven world a band's name needs to be search-enginable. Vacations and Church (a Portland band that I spent hours tracking down and finally found here.) are actually pretty great names for bands; I just have trouble locating them among the thousands of listings for church and vacations that pop up on google.
The morale of the story? When you name your band, do a google search.
You know, it didn't really hit me until just now. I mean, I knew what had happened. I was there. Campus exploded. I watched the returns all night, I celebrated by not doing my homework, I've been following the nomination process and the last breaths of a lame duck presidency which effectively ended at 5 p.m. on Friday. It wasn't until just now, when I was watching the Boss perform "The Rising" on the national mall with a full choir behind him (interestingly, dressed all in red) and the camera took an angle with Bruce in the foreground on the left and Obama in the background, that I realized that least popular (and maybe the worst) administration in America's history is out. That we can begin to recover our standing in the world, our civil liberties, our economy, and our Constitution. That we can tell the generations after us that we were there when America installed its first minority president. All of it hit me, and I was watching Bruce.
That's significant, that it was Bruce, who is, perhaps, the most American of any recent recording artist. Bruce, who has managed to alienate a significant portion of his fan base by campaigning for Kerry and than for Obama, whose most famous song (a song about the plight of veterans returned from Vietnam) was co-opted by the Reaganites, who has been writing songs about what it's like to live, work and love in America, who made my realise all of this. There's an idea I've been kicking around for a paper that would trace the history of liberalism in this country through the lens of Springsteen's albums, and that image, of The Boss singing a song of healing to a nation that needs healing, has cemented the idea inside my head.
I've always thought that this was our country and the we were going to take it back. I think we've done it. That's the beauty of the Obama campaign. The populist spirit of the Obama campaign fits perfectly with the populist bent of the the Boss's music. We did this together. And that's something for us to be proud of.
In case you didn't know, I live in the middle of nowhere.
A beatiful, wonderful, intellectually engaging middle of nowhere, but a middle of nowhere nonetheless.
The upshot of all of this is that good concerts here at Bard are rather rare, kind of like Sasquatch or a rookie Sandy Koufax baseball card and, when we get good ones, its usually a band no one has ever heard of. In that vein, I saw two musicians over the last couple weeks that I feel the need to share with you out there in internetland. The first, who I saw open for Clues and Elfin Saddle, is a pretty wonderful guy from somewhere around here named Ramona Cordova.
Ramona played at SMOG (which is where bands usually play on campus. It also has this horrible habit of making good bands sound shitty and shitty bands sound worse), but he played on the porch rather than in the building itself and so not only could we hear him clearly but the autumn night in Annandale provided a perfect background for his falsetto folk. He told us that he hadn't played in awhile, but he played a brilliant set anyway, at one point mimicking a tuba with his voice because the song, as he put it, just needed a tuba.
He was right.
On Friday, I saw an even more unexpectedly brilliant show in the form of singer/songwriter Gabriel Kahane with his sideman Rob Moose. Playing without horns or percussion (the small music room in the main academic building, where they played, probably couldn't have fit anyone else) Gabriel and Rob led the small crowd through a set of enrapturing and surprisingly danceable folk. The lyrics and melodies were, like Ramona's, autumnal and they trasnported me to Brooklyn when the leaves of the city are changing color and the fall wind turns cheeks pink and blows copies of the Times down the street. When it was almost over he had the audience take a vote, and he ended up playing the entirety of suite he had written called Craigslistlieder (the lyrics of which were taken entirely from ads he found on craigslist), an unexpected he gave to an audience he seemed to appreciate.
You can find Ramona's music here and Gabriel's here
FRENCH HOUSE FRIDAYS: Stardust "Music Sounds Better With You"
0 comments Posted by Anonymous at 9:59 AM
IF YOU'RE READING THIS AND YOU HAVEN'T VOTED YET, GO VOTE!
IF YOU'RE READING THIS AND YOU HAVE ALREADY DONE YOUR DUTY AS AN AMERICAN CITIZEN, THEN ENJOY THESE VAGUELY PRESIDENTIAL-THEMED MP3s!
WOOHOO!
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