Head Changers and Greens show in Parkersburg next weekend 5th St. Pub

Remember when we brought Anais Mitchell to town? Here is an essay about her Hadestown

anaïs mitchell: a history of hadestown
on her family

My parents were hippie back-to-the-landers; I was raised on a farm in Vermont. We didn’t have a television and we barely had neighbors, but my dad had a library full of books—especially all the classics of a certain era, like Proust and D. H. Lawrence and Durrell, etc.—and records, lots of old folk and psychedelic rock records. And they all lived in the same library, the books and the records, and my dad, as a novelist and an English prof, was a real lyrics man, which I am sure all led to me thinking of songwriting as one wing of the literary tradition, a noble poetic enterprise.

I can remember my dad sitting me down making me listen to Santana’s “Europa”—it’s an instrumental piece—and my dad going, “Can you see it? Zeus has changed himself into a bull and kidnapped the beautiful Europa and now he’s running, running, running down to the sea…” He was also real into “Home at Last,” Steely Dan’s song about Odysseus: “Still I remain tied to the mast…” I don’t mean to give him all the credit, but he passed along some major stuff to me about life, art, music, Greek myths, whatever, that I’m still playing out.

My brother and I spent a lot of time running around in the woods making up games and stories—and that’s kind of still what I’m doing with the opera, in a way. My brother once decided he was going to build an opera house on top of a cliff that overlooked our farm. He was a teenager then and he enlisted all his friends to come help out. They cleared a piece of the woods but they never really got any construction going. That kind of crazy ambitious idea, if not encouraged by my parents, certainly didn’t really faze them: “Oh, yeah, Ethan’s building an opera house on the back cliff…”

on vermont, living there, and the origins of hadestown

I always thought I would move to a big urban center like New York, but I now live in a 200-year-old farm house in another rural part of Vermont, not far from the Northeast Kingdom, where Bread & Puppet Circus is. It’s a very radical part of the state: tons of anarchists and puppeteers and stuff. There are a lot of fiercely independent creative people in the area, including Ben Matchstick and Michael Chorney, my collaborators on Hadestown.

Vermont is a very special place, totally beautiful, but it’s easy to feel cut off from the rest of the country up there, especially during the long cold winter. A lot of us are trying to homestead in one way or another, and it takes a certain kind of crazy mindset. We have a dozen chickens and two cats. Almost everyone on our road has a big vegetable garden. We’re learning how to grow our own food and put it by for the winter. We have to rely on friends and neighbors a lot—we help each other out stacking wood, digging a garden, or whatever needs to be done. Being so far out we also kinda have to make our own fun. We still don’t have a television. We have a wood stove—that’s the television of rural Vermont. We don’t live in New York, there aren’t a majillion things to do on any given night, so we have to come up with stuff ourselves. I don’t know if a thing like Hadestown could have gotten off the ground someplace else. I don’t know if people elsewhere would have been as game, but in Vermont it was pretty natural; it was like friends and neighbors coming together to help each other out and make some fun: “Oh, there’s a pile of wood in your driveway? I’ll help you stack it” leads to “Oh, you want to write an opera? Sure, I’ll be Hades!”

on the first run

When I first started writing the songs for Hadestown I had a few friends in mind to sing the parts, mostly singers from different bands around Vermont, and they ended up being the original cast. We rehearsed in a frenzy in the evenings during what I think was a two-week period. Our rehearsal space, and the first place we mounted the show, was the old labor hall in Barre, Vt., a beautiful old historical building where a lot of union organizing went on in the thirties. There was so much about those first shows that was flawed (at least writing-wise, on my end, in my own opinion) but they were some of the most magical moments of my creative life so far. Ben Matchstick created a whole world, a whole visual vocabulary for the show, in just a couple weeks. He’s a real magician, an eleventh-hour genius; he has the ability to make something out of nothing—no budget, no time, a rabbit from a hat. Then, of course, the collaboration with Michael Chorney, who wrote some of the most haunting and beautiful arrangements I’ve ever heard on any songs. One crazy thing about Michael is he doesn’t use any composing software, and he doesn’t play the arrangements on a keyboard as he writes them; he really just hears them in his head and writes them down with a pencil on staff paper—so a lot of the music he hadn’t actually heard out loud until the band got together a few days before the show! The band was Michael’s project at the time, Magic City; they had started out as a Sun Ra tribute band but were quickly evolving into something bigger. There was really a sense from the beginning of the collaboration that the Hadestown show had three voices in it: my songwriting voice, Ben’s visual/theatrical voice, and Michael’s orchestral voice. It was a sum-greater-than-the-parts kind of thing.

on the second run

The feedback we got from those shows was pretty overwhelming. It felt like we had struck some kind of nerve. Still, there was so much missing from the story; people were saying things like, “Hey, I was so moved by that … What was going on?” So when we decided to mount a second draft of the show Ben and I really made an effort to flesh out the story with the lyrics and staging—not just the metaphoric emotional stuff, but the characters, the plot, the arc. I’d say writing-wise the show took many steps forward, but a couple steps back, during that second edition. I spent months writing very expositional lyrics that eventually got cut. There was constant tension in my mind between getting the story across and preserving the poetry of the songs: not just the purdy language, but the metaphors. It really dawned on me during this process that Hadestown was never gonna be a Broadway-style show. I was watching all kinds of Broadway stuff on video, classic musicals, trying to get a feel for story arc and so on. Everything is so clear and crude in those shows. The protagonist comes out onstage and the first number is him going “This is who I am, and this is what I want, and this is what is standing in my way, la la la…” But as much as I love a clear-cut story, this show just didn’t want to go there, at least not all the way.

To me, from a writing standpoint, the second draft of the show was kind of stuck in a netherworld; it was surely more focused than the first draft, but there was also a bit of expositional overstretch … which did not in fact make the story more understandable. For example, we really went deep into the post-apocalyptic stuff in the second draft. The idea was that Hades had broken his contract with Persephone—instead of letting her go above ground for half the year, he traps her in Hadestown, so the seasons are out of whack, and the above-ground world is nearly uninhabitable. There was this one song—“Epic,” it was called—which took forever to write, and attempted to tell that backstory. It was very dense and poetic and it was the battleground where I played out the exposition-vs.-poetry conflict for months as I edited it and re-edited it. It’s where I learned firsthand this lesson I heard in an address Sondheim gave where he said, “You have to understand that an audience hears a song in real time. It doesn’t matter how clever or beautiful your lyrics are, if they pass by too quickly for the audience to comprehend, it’s not working.” After the second run I’d ask people, “So didja get the thing about Persephone being trapped in the underworld, blah blah?” and they’d be like “Nope, didn’t catch that. So anyway…” It really blew my mind. I’d gotten into a place where I was concerned with trees and not forests. I was changing lyrics right up till opening night—which I see now was unnecessary, not to mention stressful.

As for the staging, the second time round we had more money and more time (though not by much!). The cast was expanded; Ben had pulled together some crazy awesome stuff with lights and this “utility chorus” that moved sets around on stage and populated the world he’d created. He really wrote some crazy beautiful staging sequences for that second draft of the show. As for Michael’s arrangements, he added an instrument (viola) to the band during that second year, and made all kinds of changes and improvements and additions to the score. There were a handful of new songs, intros, bridges. His was a hard position to be in vis-a-vis the collaboration because as the story was changing and Ben and I were rethinking plot points, lyrics, etc., there was plenty of perfectly gorgeous score that had to be modified or even scrapped to accommodate the changes. It’s hard to edit lyrics and staging, but probably even harder to edit a score for six instruments!

That year we had a more ambitious tour schedule put together in conjunction with Alex Crothers of Higher Ground Music: kind of a Vermont legend, he runs the one rock room in Vermont where nationally touring bands play. We actually did “tour” around Vermont and then down to Boston. We were driving this old schoolbus painted silver that used to belong to a local circus company. We were loading the entire set, the sound and light equipment, onto this bus and setting it up on different stages. We were crazy to try and tour a theater show like that. It was full-on winter and there were white-out blizzards a couple of nights. I lost a bunch of money on that tour, because of a few very dead towns, but a lot of the shows were really fantastic.

on the guest singers

After the second run, there were again a lot of changes I wanted to make. I wanted to go a step further toward fully-realized characters, and a step backward toward the simplicity of the story in the very first show we did. I wanted to let go of some stuff that had never really sat right with me as a lyricist. We talked briefly about trying to mount another run the following year but the consensus seemed to be that to finish the songs, the song-cycle, should be the priority before staging again, and what better motivation to do that than booking studio time to commit the stuff to tape forever and ever? I worked real hard in advance of the recording but it was not as easy as I’d thought it might be to get things to a finished place. It felt a little like doing a crossword puzzle where there’s just a few squares missing, and it can only be one very specific thing. That is, we’d created a world, and now I had to be consistent within it, lyric-wise, music-wise. “Wedding Song,” “Flowers (Eurydice’s Song),” “Nothing Changes,” and “I Raise my Cup” were all new additions. “Wait,” “If It’s True,” and the two “Epics” also underwent major changes. I cut a song that had had a gorgeous score, and one that people were sorry to see let go. It was pretty tough!

But there was a crazy motivating factor, and that was, one by one these guest singers were getting on board. Ani DiFranco was the first, and I owe much of the momentum of the recording to her faith and belief in the project. I don’t think she’d even heard the Persephone songs when she said she’d sing them. That’s brave! Then there was Greg Brown: I’d imagined him singing the Hades part for a long time but still whenever I hear his voice coming in on “Hey, Little Songbird” I laugh for joy. His voice is subterranean, it has strange overtones, I feel it in my belly almost before my ears. He and Ani were both early songwriting heroes of mine. … Then there’s Justin Vernon: That was kind of a cosmic casting situation. Justin and his manager reached out of the blue and asked if I wanted to open the Bon Iver tour of Europe. They’d never met me; they had just heard my record once and liked it, and they thought, Let’s have her open the tour! It’s unthinkable, really. The very first night of the tour, when I heard Justin sing “Stacks” in Newcastle in the UK, my heart exploded; I thought, “He HAS to be Orpheus.” I wrote my manager Slim [Moon] and Todd [Sickafoose] the producer: “He is the Orpheus of the century!” I loved the idea that Orpheus, as a supernatural figure, could sing with many voices at the same time. But I had to have a stern little talk with myself that night; I was like, “This guy doesn’t even know you, and he’s already doing you a huge favor having you on the tour; you can’t ask him right away, you might weird him out, wait till the end of the tour and then see if it’s the right thing to ask him…” But the second night of the tour we were on a ferryboat from Scotland to Norway and I’d had a couple glasses of wine and I couldn’t bear it any longer—I just blurted it all out in a rush: the opera, the record, will you please please please be Orpheus? and Justin just said, “yes.”


on the record

The first thing we recorded was Michael’s orchestral arrangements, and it was a powerful thing to hear them in the clarity of the studio rather than the rush of the stage. They positively soared. We recorded them with some incredible musicians mostly from Todd’s Brooklyn scene: Jim Black on drums, Michael of course on guitar and Todd on bass, Josh Roseman on trombone, Marika Hughes on cello, Tanya Kolmanovitch on viola, and at some point Rob Burger popped in and laid down some mind-boggling accordion and piano. We were in a beautiful and expensive studio so we had to act fast to record all twenty tracks or whatever it was. Todd is a great producer, able to hear everything at once, able to know if a take was “there” or not, able to encourage everyone to feel the same things, breathe together, breathe magic into things, even in studio world. He was marvelous in that stressful situation. Then he laid down all sorts of other instruments, sometimes following the notes of Michael’s score but in another “voice” or register, sometimes supporting the score from beneath with a lushness and weirdness. He recorded some very weird stuff: a glass orchestra, a trumpet player who mostly played percussively, and at one point he said something about how he was hunting for “vintage futurism” sounds. “Vintage futurism” is how I had once described the Hadestown story. Together we sorted through the vocals—from New Orleans, Iowa City, Eau Claire, Los Angeles, Vermont—at Todd’s home studio in Carroll Gardens. Todd is patient, totally discerning, and totally open at the same time.

themes of hadestown

I think it’s safe to say all three of us—Ben, Michael, and I—are pretty influenced by the work of Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill. Brecht seems to approach the same tough theme in Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage: morality ceasing to exist in desperate conditions. “First you must feed us, then we’ll all behave…” “ When the Chips are Down” is really kind of an homage to that idea. “You can have your principles / when you’ve got a bellyful.” To me this is also the whole theme of the Joker in The Dark Knight and maybe the other Batman movies I haven’t seen. The Joker sets up horrific little test scenarios with human subjects to try and prove that people who are scared and desperate will turn on their fellow man. It’s a tough theme because we all recognize that capacity in ourselves—but that’s not all we have a capacity for, as the Joker finds out.

To me the essence of “Why We Build the Wall” is, it’s meant to provoke the question. Take global warming to its terrifying logical conclusion and imagine part of the world becomes uninhabitable and there are masses of hungry poor people looking for higher ground. then imagine you are lucky enough to live in relative wealth and security, though maybe you’ve sacrificed some freedoms to live that way. When the hordes are at the door, who among us would not be behind a big fence? These conditions exist already, but most of us don’t have to acknowledge them in a real way. I really and truly had no specific place in mind when I wrote “Why We Build the Wall.” People often say, “Oh, that’s just like Israel/Palestine, or that’s just like the US/Mexico border,’” and maybe it is, but the song was written more archetypally.

One funny thing is, the first song ideas came as long ago as 2004-5. I didn’t get deep into it till ’06 when we started working on the production, but in any case, the Depression-era stuff was part of the show long before the US economy tanked. I remember Ben and I watching Matewan together to get ideas about poverty, company towns, mining, etc. The whole show became uncannily relevant in the past year or so, which I didn’t expect. When I play Hadestown songs in my own shows, I usually introduce the show as quick as I can saying, “It’s based on the Orpheus myth, and set in a post-apocalyptic American Depression era …” At some point in the past year I noticed people were laughing pretty loud when I said that—it was so close to home!

The real moral of Hadestown to me is, yes, we’re fucked, but we still have to try with all our might. We have to love hard and make beauty in the face of futility. That’s the essence of what Persephone sings at the end of the show: “Some birds sing when the sun shines bright / my praise is not for them, but the one who sings in the dead of night / I raise my cup to him.”

article about Greg Brown: an Americana superstar!

Heartland Hero
Greg Brown may be the original Americana superstar

By Paul M. Davis



ONE OF the highlights of the new film Crazy Heart is the washed-up country singer Bad Blake's performance of Greg Brown's "Brand New Angel." In a recent interview with Under the Radar magazine, actor Jeff Bridges fingered Brown as an inspiration for the character of Blake. Considering the disheveled state of Bridges' character in the movie, this might appear to be a backhanded insult, but the inspiration Bridges speaks of has nothing to do with Brown's lifestyle choices; rather it points to his musicologist's grasp of American music, from country to folk to jazz.

Unlike Bridges' country singer on the skids, Greg Brown's career is going stronger than ever, but it's been a long road. Brown's career seems to have been defined by his penchant for confounding folk music cliches: a preacher's son who escaped the Midwest for the fertile '60s coffeehouse folk scene, Brown quit music and returned to his native Iowa just as he was gaining attention in the early '70s. After lying low for a number of years, Brown returned to the music business, but on his own idiosyncratic terms, building a following through appearances on Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion and on the strength of unexpected endeavors such as 1986's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, a song cycle based on William Blake's poetry.

In the two decades since, Brown has proven to be an American treasure. The Boston Globe hailed Brown as America's "most essential modern troubadour," an apt description of a songwriter whose dry wit and capacious warmth is self-evident. Through his grizzled baritone, Brown portrays affecting miniatures of American life with a literary bent that at times recalls Raymond Carver. There's not a whole lot of glit or flash to a Greg Brown composition, nor does there need to be: this is music that is as intrinsically down-home as Iowa cornfields and rusted-out carburetors. Which isn't to tar Brown with some reactionary association that doesn't fit him. Brown's politics are avowedly progressive, but he has no place for a simple Red State-Blue State divide in his work, even when he is explicitly critical of contemporary politics and culture. Instead, Brown seems intent on rendering a picture of American life that opts for honesty and empathy over polarization.

These days, Brown's music is a family affair: in 2002 he married Iris DeMent, an accomplished songwriter in her own right, and his daughter Pieta Brown's own musical career is a growing concern. On recordings, Brown is often joined by the family. While onstage, he continues to be supported by players such as intrepid sidekick Bo Ramsey, who has played beside Brown for so long that he could nearly be considered family.

Advertiser Links
San Francisco.com Real Estate
Moving to the Bay Area just became easy. Let San Francisco.com show you all the homes currently for sale.

San Jose.com Real Estate
Relocating to San Jose or Silicon Valley? Let San Jose.com introduce you to some expert area real estate agents.

Brown's latest release, Dream City: Essential Recordings Vol. 2, is a two-disc compilation of his work from 1997–2006 that collects fan favorites from previous albums, as well as a handful of unreleased tracks and live recordings. For Brown's legion of die-hard fans, such a compilation might be redundant, as his albums are so consistently solid that it's difficult to hand-pick a few highlights from each. To Brown neophytes, however, the compilation provides a serviceable introduction to the recent work of a man with 27 albums under his belt. And at this point, Brown has more than earned a valedictory lap.

If history is any indication, however, the artistically restless Brown won't rest on his laurels for long.

Chris Smither CD- Time Stands Still

Hoping to get a listen to Chris Smither CD "Time Stands Still." I am looking so far ahead, that I lament I will have a conflict for when Chris is at Fur Peace Ranch on October 9th, as that is the date of our annual John Prine Tribute show here in Parkersburg.

Link to Facebook; Americana Music Tribute Series fan site

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mid-Ohio-Valley-Americana-Music-Tribute-Series/252518842760

Stuart's Opera House puts on (yet another) great innovative show

Stuart's Opera House held a "Ohio Winter Folk Festival" yesterday in Nelsonville, and it was a great show, great start to hopefully, a new regular event. First, in the afternoon, there was a vinyl record sale, and some other musical sales, as well as a homemade craft show. A very good atmosphere is created by these events in the lobby of the Opera House; lots of good conversations and musical-sharing. Then in the late afternoon, and on into the evening they had 6 musical acts put on a good solid, diverse show. Adam Torres, an Athens singer-songwriter (the only solo performance), The Black Swans, Moon High, and Super Desserts (all three from Columbus) then led up to the headliner, Vetiver, from California. Lots of good songwriting, singing, instrumental virtuosity, harmonies, unique touches among these musical acts. We liked Super Desserts the best; they are a 12 piece ensemble- with violins, sax, tuba, xylophone, cello, uekelele, all sorts of stuff, and great vocal harmonies, and a good spirit and sense of humor. Once again, Stuart's has pulled off a great, innovative event, and kept folks admiring their great vision and musical commitment to the area.

John Prine Dream

I had a dream last night that John Prine was in. First it was in a "big city"- downtown, crossing streets in traffic, etc. I was sort of in a group walking with John Prine and some other people- just sort of spread out in little clusters. John was in a group ahead of me, and he was sort of being goofy, pretending he was in awe of the big tall skyscrapers in this city, like he was a country bumpkin in the big city for the first time gawking up at the tall buildings!!! Just being funny; nothing too dramatic. And then the dream sort of morphed into a smaller neighborhood; still a big city, but more of a neighborhood than the downtown- and we were still walking as a group, sort of cutting across streets/ jaywalking etc. and John was sort of singing, trying to remember lyrics to one of his songs- it struck me how hard it would be to recall all the songs/ all the lyrics when you had written so many songs over so many years- I don't think it was a REAL song, it was just sort of a snippet of a song, and he was struggling with recalling the lyrics. Whoever was with him was just sort of gently teasing him about not being able to remember his own song lyrics, and he was taking it good naturedly, sort of making fun of himself, too.

Woody Hawley Series show last night: Hank Williams Tribute

There was a packed (full) house last night at the Walker auditorium of the Clay Center for the third run of the Hank Williams Tribute by John Lilly and Robb McNurlin (and company). John and Robb have been doing this tribute since the 2003 50th anniversary of Hank's death on Dec. 31st near Oak Hill. The first years they did the show down in Princeton. The first year, the two of them took "the death ride" - with John knowing exact details of the incident in Oak Hill. They are great story tellers, weaving many stories into the excellent renditions of a wide range of Hank songs throughout the evening. They each also played two of their own songs "in the style of" Hank, and switched off the lead vocals and stories. The backing musicians were solid and contributed to the great appreciation of the impact of Hank's songs on much of music since. Ron Sowell of the Mountain Stage band joined them for two ending songs with some wailing harmonica. I saw the Light; and mind your own business. They wove through the most famous of Hank songs, and gave quite a variety of ones deeper into his song list. A very enjoyable evening.

Will Kimbrough - Gallery

Will Kimbrough - Gallery

acticle about Rosanne Cash's new CD The List

Rosanne Cash is no longer a competitor on Billboard's country charts, as she was between 1979 and 1990 when she had 21 Top 40 country singles, including 11 No. 1s. But she is still making great country music. This year's Country Music Critics Poll named her the third best female vocalist in country music and voted her new release, The List, the third best album of the year. And she has advice for her younger colleagues still on the country charts.

"The death of experimentation is the death of art," she says over the phone from her home in New York. "Even when I was having country hits, I always felt encouraged to experiment. First and foremost that encouragement came from myself. I wanted to keep expanding, becoming a better writer, a better artist. I wasn't interested in finding a formula and sticking to it. That would have felt like a factory job."

Of course, she had a terrific role model for experimenting. Her father Johnny was always trying something new, whether it was a live album in a prison, a concept album about American Indians, recording songs by a young folk singer named Bob Dylan or adding mariachi horns to "Ring of Fire." Johnny brought Rosanne an autographed photo of The Beatles, and the daughter was abashed to realize that her father had broader musical tastes than she did. When she joined his tour in 1973, the summer after she graduated from high school, he gave her a list of 100 essential country songs to expand her horizons.

"When he gave me the list," she admits, "I was shut down. I was only listening to rock—he was more open-minded than I was at that time. He said, 'Listen to these songs—these are your DNA.' The Byrds and the Burritos were my reintroduction to country music, and my dad's list came soon after that. By the time I made my first record, I was totally there. 'No Memories Hangin' Around' is a straight-up country record. I remember Emmylou [Harris] saying, 'That's the best record I've heard in a long time.' "

That first American album, 1979's Right or Wrong, included that duet with Bobby Bare, but it also included feisty feminist declarations backed by insistent electric guitars and drums at a time when those weren't the norms in Nashville. People forget that the loud guitars didn't matter as much as a spirit of experimentation, built soundly on tradition. An artist, Cash claims, needs both to escape the industry formula.

"Part of the problem," she adds, "is a lot of artists borrow from a tradition they haven't bothered to study. It always shocks me to hear artists say, 'I don't listen to anyone else,' or 'I don't listen to anything outside my genre.' How can you know yourself if you don't know your own culture? How can you sing a ballad if you haven't listened to Elizabethan and Appalachian ballads?

"The fact that my father gave me this list meant everything. It gave me a template for excellence. You want to know what a great song sounds like? Listen to 'Long Black Veil' or 'Girl From the North Country.' Those songs are cinematic. They paint a landscape and tell a story. They were an education—they gave me a background. You have to know what you're changing before you change it."

Greens shows coming up at the 6 Pence Pub

I need to get in to 6 Pence and finalize some of the tribute show dates for 2010, and this brings me to note that the Greens have posted 4 shows (one a month) that they will be playing at 6 Pence Pub here in Parkersburg. The dates as listed on the Greens my space site are: Feb. 20, March 27, April 17, and May 15th. These eerily occur a week before or after some of the Tribute shows I am trying to line up there: Johnny Cash Feb. 27th; Hank Williams (and the Cajun cookoff) April 24, and Bob Dylan birthday tribute May 22nd. Hmmmmm.

Not very productive posting in this desolate winter weather

I am in some unproductive funk with this desolate winter weather we are having here in Parkersburg West Virginia. Though tonight we will venture down I-77 to Charleston to the Clay Center and the Woody Hawley Series to see John Lilly's Hank Williams Tribute show. They had held this show close to the anniversary of Hank's famous WV death (Dec. 31) and now it is pushed out a little into January. It is sold out, according to an e-mail I just received. This (based on last year's show) is a classy delight of a music evening- not only are the musicians top notch, but they weave in some stories about Hank and the context of his musical impact. With the winter weather we have been having, its bound to be a congenial group of music lovers getting out to appreciate some live music.

Greens at 6 Pence from the December 26, 2009 show

Review of Prine concert in Flagstaff Ariz by Mary Tolan

By Mary Tolan
Long and Winding Road | Posted: Saturday, November 21, 2009 11:00 pm | (0) Comments

Font Size: Default font size Larger font size I woke up this morning humming …

That's the way the world goes round

You're up one day and the next you're down

… and by the time I hit my running trail I was singing this gem full tilt.

John Prine came to our little town last week and gifted Flagstaff with a two-and-a-half hour concert. The man is an amazing storyteller — in his songs, of course, but also as a stage presence, often sharing tales of how his songs came about. Like the time, after he thought he was all done recording a new album, when his "stubborn producer" told him he needed to write one more song. The way Prine tells it, he argued to no avail with the man and then stomped back to his hotel, determined to write "the worst thing he'd ever heard." So, he grabbed his guitar, started strumming and came out with his classic "Fish and Whistle." Boy, did he show him. Hearing that story and listening to the song's lyrics made me laugh. Because it does start out as something that could aim to displease:

I been thinking lately about the people I meet

The carwash on the corner and the hole in the street

The way my ankles hurt with shoes on my feet

But then moves deftly into classic Prine:

And I'm wondering if I'm gonna see tomorrow

Father forgive us for what we must do

You forgive us we'll forgive you

We'll forgive each other till we both turn blue…

We all have stories to tell, and part of mine is Flagstaff becoming home. The friendships built. I went to the concert with a couple I've treasured for 20-plus years, and I knew half the audience. Sure, the crowd could have been a photograph from an AARP conference — with a few under-40 babes sprinkled into the Ardrey mix. After all, Prine turned 63 last month.

Those of us growing up Beatles-crazed followed them from pop to rock, and onto psychedelic songs. So stuck on the English lads and their ilk that it wasn't until I hit my 30s that I discovered John Prine, immediately enchanted by the mix of serious and fun.

Today, a tad past 30, I appreciate his life observations. I mean, who else sings the truth of loving someone from 10 miles away?

When I'm feeling down, I think of the guy whose bowl of oatmeal stared him down — and won. And I laugh.

His insights about people are at once touching, deep and absurdly true.

Sally used to play with her hula hoops

Now she tells her problems to therapy groups

Grampa's on the front lawn staring at a rake

Wondering if his marriage was a terrible mistake.

Ouch. I've been both those folks — sans the rake.

And yet, as my life moves along this long and winding road, I like to think there's a rainbow ahead (without that dead end).

Someday, I may again hear someone singing to me, and it won't be from my living room speakers:

She is my everything

When she wakes up in the morning

That's when the birdies start to sing.

Meanwhile, when I'm feeling crazy as a loon and in need of spirituality, I hear Prine's appeal to the Angel of Montgomery:

Just give me one thing that I can hold on to

And she does.

Posted in Entertainment on Saturday, November 21, 2009 11:00 pm

Year in Review (off the cuff)

I know I maintain incredibly lazy habits of posting, so am not really sitting down to write a year in review with any preparation, and this is pathetic; maybe that can follow. 2009 saw (most likely) not as much music as some previous years (live music shows) and a little steady as she goes sort of exposure to new music (perhaps). But music continues to be perhaps the biggest thing that keeps me going through all the hecticness of life (besides family and work!) So highlights of 2009 would be the John PRine show in Asheville NC; shows at Stuart's OPera House, Mountain Stages, Will Kimbrough's set at the Pomeroy OH summer river festival, some Woody Hawley series shows in Charlston, a few shows at OU in Athens, Greens shows throughout the year, mostly in Parkersburg and Marietta, but a few elsewhere (!) and the Americana Music Tribute series shows we put on here in Parkersburg! (as benefits for Children's Home Society of WV-Parkersburg) Mark Stuart and Stacey Earle stopping through twice; the two Texas songwriters at john Radcliff's house concert, and YOU remind me of something glaring that I missed!
My musical listening remained pretty steady, and I rely heavily on No Depression-type news outlets to keep me up on the things I like.
I don't suppose 2010 will be a whole lot different in most of these ways. I do hope to attend the Americana Music Festival in Nashville in September this year. I guess the International Folk Alliance in Memphis in February is creeping up on me too fast. Already looking forward to the Nelsonville Folk Festival in May, with Todd Snider returning and Loretta Lynn on the agenda. Undoubtedly they will have more exciting shows to look forward to at Stuart's as the year progresses. I don't know where our annual John Prine trek might be to, this year, we'll see what his touring schedule looks like. I hope some of the other national touring acts will want to make their way through the Mid Ohio Valley.......