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bardofsomerset · 5 months ago

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Allison Russel at Omeara, Part Three: A Tale of Two Concerts

In part one, I discovered Allison Russell and made an effort to listen to everything she’d ever recorded. In part two, I took you on a tour through every other concert I’d ever seen, culminating with my journey to the Bath Forum and Imelda May. Now, both of those ladies finally get the concert reviews I meant to write years ago.

Would I have walked into Omeara if I hadn’t stepped into The Forum first? Maybe not. I’d kind of forgotten what live music could be when I first looked up Imelda May’s tour. If it hadn’t been in a place as familiar as Bath, if a friend I knew so well hadn’t been so enthused about coming too, if it wasn’t the artist who created a piece as important to me as Life Love Flesh Blood, I might not have gone as far as buying tickets.

The memory of that night in Bath was part of what drove me to search for Allison Russell’s UK dates. London wasn’t so close to home, this friend wasn’t one I knew as well, but I remembered how I’d felt when I heard Outside Child, and the idea that it could be elevated like that, that I could mix it with that kind of atmosphere, was irresistible.

It wasn’t until we were in The Forum, in the foyer, right next to the displayed merchandise, that the actuality of our chance to see Imelda May finally took hold. There was nothing stuffy or crowded in that space, they’d improved ventilation and air filtration to deal with the pandemic, so it was easy to taste the simmering anticipation. We waited, and we waited, with the conversation between me and him still continuing as it had for so many years, and then the woman in charge came to make sure we were ready not just for a concert, but for an experience. There were things to be distributed, things that couldn’t be found on that long spread of the merchandise table: our golden lanyards proclaiming us VIPs, and our mystery gifts hidden inside cardboard boxes. The bounce of excitement was becoming unbearable.

From the foyer into the hall and the choice of any seat we wanted. My friend, a drummer to his soul, picked the side where we’d have the best view of the drumkit, and our conversation flowed on as we waited some more. We sat, and a concert auditorium is a very different place when it’s all normal lighting rather than puddled shadows, and when instead of a crowd there isn’t enough of an audience to fill the first four rows. The instruments are on stage, but not the band, there are technical people going about doing technical things, and it’s all very much a place unfinished, like you’ve been allowed entry into somewhere you’re not supposed to see. A concert is magic, but here you could see it being built on the bones of the real.

Then the instrumentalists took their positions, and can you imagine what was happening to that simmer of anticipation now? And then there she was, except it took a minute, because she walked on like a normal human being and she dressed like a normal human being and if you hadn’t know why you were here and if she hadn’t been right at the centre of the stage, if she’d been back on those regular streets, then you probably could have gone right past Imelda May without even noticing.

Of course, she wasn’t on a regular street, she was at the heart of an auditorium, with everyone else revolving around her, and if that didn’t give you enough of a clue, well, she started to sing.

Three tracks for the soundcheck, just enough to ensure every instrument had the chance to jam, just long enough to confirm that yes, this was definitely Imelda May, because there was no power on earth that could hide that voice or make it small, just time enough to remember how much I loved this music before it stopped again, because it was only the soundcheck, not the gig. Talk about a whetted appetite. All it took was the enticement of “Sixth Sense” and the brief bounce of Johnny’s bass line.

The first words she actually spoke to us, talking like an ordinary human, weren’t about the music but about being a tourist in Bath. It seemed she’d been wandering the city too, and she’d noticed how all that Roman history was built on the memory of something Pagan. It was so delightfully unexpected. I’m always down for belittling the Romans.

I knew before the Q&A started that I wouldn’t personally be asking anything, but I was eager to hear what she had to say to everyone else. Some questions would probably be the same that you could hear in any interview, and I’d watched and read more than a few of those, but there was always a chance I’d learn something new.

For instance, the questions about influences and collaborators, which led to the fun story of how Ronnie Wood (he of Rolling Stones fame) likes to claim he discovered Imelda May when he saw her singing as a teenager:

“But Ronnie,” she told him, “You didn’t tell anyone! I still had to spend years working my way up.”

One highlight was the woman who asked how to encourage her own daughter, who was very early in her guitar playing career, to keep going in the face of inevitable challenges. The general gist of the answer was that if she was meant to be a musician, it’d happen regardless of encouragement, because:

“Music’s a bit like that romantic partner who you know is bad for you, but you just can’t let them go.”

That got some laughs, especially from my friend and not least from Imelda May’s own guitarist.

It was a good-humoured session as well as an interesting one, but it was still only a tiny part of the evening to come. Eventually, the questions ran to the natural close and we had some time to kill before the show proper, so the two of us made our way past the merchandise table, this time stopping long enough to make a choice between the many t-shirt options (I went for the A Lick and a Promise curling serpent) and, on a bit of an impulse, acquiring the tea towel inscribed with the verses of “Home”, probably because the moment I reread it I wanted to own it again, in as many forms as possible:

“It’s choosing kindness over being right.”

That line hits me every time.

Then we headed to the café and, guess what? We talked some more. And some more. We didn’t go too far, because it wasn’t that long until the music started officially, but our conversation spans every corner of the multiverse.

This time, when we stepped back into the auditorium, it was less half-finished and more on edge. You could feel it. A little keyboard had settled itself in the middle of the stage ready for the supporting act. I’d never heard of Rachel Sage before Imelda May announced she’d be accompanying her on tour, but I’d taken a peek at YouTube to give me a little idea what to expect. It was a colourful and fun setup, the kind that’s full of flowers, and the music was just as bright. I don’t understand the people who don’t show up until the main event when they’ve paid for the whole thing, because getting to see someone new (especially someone so clearly recommended by the artist you already like) is always exciting.

We only spent half an hour with her, then it was time for another breather. Another moment for even more anticipation to build. Back to the auditorium as the aisles filled with more and more people and the atmosphere thickened. When the lights changed, the half-empty, half-finished space that we’d seen before vanished completely. We were somewhere new. That building, nearly 90 years old, was reborn yet again, into something ancient and immediate all at once.

This time she didn’t just walk onto stage like an ordinary human. She emerged like a goddess summoned, like some divine figure of Irish mythology: the Morrigan in her crow form with black wings outstretched, Bridget the goddess of poets in full voice. She spoke before she sang, before she even appeared, the opening of a story, the drawing in of the crowd:

“It’s eleven past the hour.”

This wasn’t just a concert, it was a work of art. The lighting, the smoke, the visualisations on the screen at the back, the poetry interspersing the songs. Her voice was like music even when she spoke, when it poured over verses like “Home”, when curled it into melody as a whisper that you hang onto with every breath and when it punched into rhythm like a dance in a thunderstorm.

Before the concert had begun, probably months earlier, Imelda May had talked on Twitter and Facebook about planning the setlist for this particular tour. She’d told us which of the old songs she’d play: “Mayhem” and Johnny and “Big Bad Handsome Man”, setting realistic expectations for those of us who might have been wishing for more of the classics, but my big question was how much of Life Love Flesh Blood would be made manifest?

More than any of the older albums, probably, as it was part of the new era, but not as much as 11 Past the Hour. The most recent songs were clearly going to the focus. My friend was particularly hopeful that he’d get to hear “Breathe”. He talked about the arrangement in all its interesting details and debated how she’d transform it to fit the confines of the tour stage, highlighting the things I’d never have thought to notice. My ears have always been much less attuned to the technicalities of music than him.

I didn’t want to anticipate too much. I didn’t want to get excited about songs that then didn’t appear, and I was pretty sure that she could just sing her way through a shopping list and I’d be happy to hear it. How much of Life Love Flesh Blood could fit into one gig anyway?

The likely suspects seemed to be “Black Tears”, “Call Me” and “Human”. They were the bigger hits, the most recognisable tunes. I’d already decided most people probably didn’t love “When It’s My Time” as much as me and therefore it might not be a priority. With absolutely no expectations about which songs were going to appear, every time one I particularly liked showed up, it meant extra excitement. I successfully avoided disappointing myself.

And so Imelda May wove her spell in so many different songs, and we the enchanted masses followed, through love and loss and laughter in a dozen shapes, recolouring the world every time. All those words that already meant so much to me, like the chorus of “Human”, had an intensity like never before. The sounds that had already poured through my blood in “Black Tears”, in both voice and melody, reverberated anew. As for that new album, for 11 Past the Hour which didn’t yet have the same sentimental value, it crystalised into life, even as its mysteries opened ever deeper.

Then came the moment my friend had been waiting for:

“A lot of my songs are about personal experiences. This one is about pretending I’m a tree.”

My friend grinned and I grinned for him. What I was saying earlier, about how some songs click more naturally than others? For 11 Past the Hour, for me, that had been the title song, and “Made to Love” (I’d seen that one on the telly, which always helps), and “Diamonds”. “Breathe” had taken me a little longer, and it was hearing it in that auditorium that made it grow on me (pardon the pun). For my friend, with his musical ears, it was the other way round, and the live version was part of the point.

There was this one woman in the audience, she had a different purpose. Dancing was the reason she was there. She was just looking for the excuse, and the moment the tempo crept up by a few beats, she was down the row and out into the aisle, moving like this evening was everything her body had been waiting for and like freedom was the sound of a band.

She was the first but no, of course she wasn’t the only. There must be very few people alive who can hold in stillness when “Mayhem” plays. In the latter half of the evening, when the older songs and the more rhythmic of the new were all stacked together, it was like someone had called us all to rise, like one of those old fairy tales where a whole town is enchanted in their souls and in their feet, like the red shoes had been gifted to every one of us so we could stand on the fire.

I didn’t step into the open, I wasn’t one of the many who filled the space in front of the stage with their movement and their energy and their celebration, but even from my seat I had to rise and release some of what I felt surging through me. As I said to my friend, if nothing else, my view of the musicians was hindered by all the people now standing above me, but this was about much more than practical considerations. Imelda May might have changed her hair since the rockabilly days, but that look in her eye was inescapable. It wasn’t one you could ignore. You weren’t allowed to be still when that music roared.

There was one moment, not long after the standing, when I let myself anticipate a specific song, because I’d been waiting all evening for the bodhrán to reappear. I’d seen it in the soundcheck, so I knew it was coming. Its arrival could only mean one thing. This time, “Johnny’s Got a Boom Boom” didn’t just bounce off my bones, it thumped inside them, vibrating in my toes and atop the crown of my head and through every inch of flesh and sinew in between.

It also went to show that the old and the new could partner each other; that energy could happily zip and zap between the two without stuttering. “Should Have Been You” and “Made to Love” also came in that latter half of the show with all their triumph and defiance, and they were just as good for sparking feet and snapping hands as any of those rockabilly tracks. When they hit the air the whole room burst.

You can’t leave a concert on that sort of note, with everyone still crackling. Sheer emotion just explodes out of your skin. Like when you’re exercising, so hard and intense, but you need to gradually reign it in before you can go home. Things started to slow again, not losing energy but redirecting it, narrowing the feeling back into the line of a melody.

She’d told us she didn’t often do covers. Now, I’d heard her smashing “Tainted Love”, originally by Gloria Jones but perhaps more familiar by Soft Cell, so I knew that not often didn’t mean impossible. I knew that that she could fill an old song just as well as anyone who’d previously given it voice. I was also aware that the “Tainted Love” energy was just the sort of thing that could thunder through you like her rockabilly tunes, perfect for the rhythm and the dance.

But this was just a couple of months after Meat Loaf died, that master of the Gothic novel poured into music, singer of romance and horror in equal measure. She remembered him in her words, how they’d worked together and how he’d been everything she could have expected or hoped, the affection clear, and then her tribute to him soared into a song that came straight from his voice:

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(This isn’t Bath, but it’s from the same tour so a similar staging.)

This was an evening about poetry, as much as it was any one thing, but not every artist would be willing to stop completely to read you a verse when you were there for a song. Nevertheless, there was one more chance to share in the beauty of “Home”. As much as I loved reading it on the page (or the tea towel), nothing could quite compare to when she delivered it in her own rhythms, the lyricism pouring through her voice.

There was also, by my reckoning, at least one song from 11 Past the Hour that I couldn’t imagine her leaving out of the setlist, but we all had yet to hear. The perfect, gleaming, grounded form of “Diamonds” would soon swell through the room and stay flowing with us as we embarked on the journey home, back to the train and the conversation, still carrying the touch of that night.

One major concert in a year should have been enough, right? Probably, but here I am, stepping into Omeara.

It’s like descending into a cave, into a vault, into the belly of a church and isn’t that appropriate? A sacred space, a place of communion? Isn’t that what we’re coming to experience? There must be a reason so many concert halls are houses of prayer.

The coolness, the murmur of voices, the anticipation. The stage, full of instruments but not a musician in sight. Walking in the spaces between the audience because there are no seats here. People wait, and they talk, and we circle them. Maybe it will be too crowded later, but for now it’s perfectly balanced. It’s simple to claim a spot, near the front but not too close, edging to the side so the wall is there for leaning. Now there’s finally time to talk properly, about books and music and all the other things we enjoy. It’s not a thirty-year conversation like with my other friend, I’m only approaching the mark of my first decade knowing her, but sometimes it seems so easy it could have been just as long.

There’s still a certain amount of pressure, because I’m very aware she’s only here because of me. It seems very important that she has a good time. And that isn’t the only expectation. So, you know how when you find a new favourite song, you listen and listen until the memory of it is a constant twist in your ear, until you’re sure you’ve shaken free all of its surprises and it becomes just as routine as your own name? I didn’t do that with “Nightflyer.”

No, what I did was I rationed it. After originally gobbling it all up, I carefully limited myself to one play at a time, no back-to-back relistens, and I spread those single plays out days, even weeks apart. Yes, I wanted to know the song, but even more I wanted to preserve that feeling from when it caught me the first time, that breathless, captivating astonishment. I didn’t want to risk it becoming tired, dull in its familiarity. After I’d purchased the concert tickets, I expanded that principle to the whole Outside Child album (not Our Native Daughters, or Birds of Chicago, or Po’ Girl. That was making life far too difficult). I haven’t listened to a note for months.

Has it been worth it?

When the moment comes for the lights to curl away and the first note to fall, it’s not Allison Russell. It’s time to be introduced to another voice, one with a colourful dress and a melodic guitar, the supporting artist: Lady Nade (as in lemonade, as she helpfully tells us in that Bristol accent that sounds like home). I had looked her up when I’d seen her name on the Omeara website, so I already know to expect a delightful sound. I’m also a little predisposed to like her because of Bristol. She talks about herself a little between songs, the kind of entertaining stories that make everything more human. They’re also helpful if you want to appreciate the lyrics even more (don’t betray your girlfriend or your best friend if she’s a songwriter. You’ll find yourself immortalised in all the wrong ways).

Of course, she’s the supporting artist, so her section of the evening is sweet but short. I could listen to more, but I’m also absolutely desperate for what comes next. The room settles back to murmuring voices, more people shuffling into the gaps of what until then was a reasonably spread-out audience. More fool them for missing Lady Nade. That enclosed chamber never reaches the point where I feel too crowded, even when the watchers fill it wall-to-wall, and that’s another of my worries brushed away.

“Have you seen Allison Russell before?” asks a woman on the other side of me, who isn’t my friend. It’s a bit of a startling moment, to say the least. I wouldn’t normally pursue a conversation with a stranger, but we do obviously have at least one interest in common.

“No,” I tell her. “I didn’t even realise she existed until earlier this year. Though I am a bit ahead of my friend. She’s only here because I needed somewhere to stay tonight, and she lives in London.”

We all laugh. It turns out this other woman had been meant to come and see this gig before the pandemic, then, well…yeah. Lockdown. In some ways, it’s a bit of a relief that earlier show hadn’t happened, because a couple of years, or even a few months earlier, I wouldn’t even have known that Allison Russell existed. Yet another way in which the universe seems to be aligning in an unusually friendly manner.

It turns out the woman’s story is similar to mine. She’d heard Allison Russell sing once on the radio and that was that. She had to immediately stop, then go away and listen to everything else she could find. It seems all three of us are on a voyage of discovery.

And now it’s finally time for the main event. The lights darken their warning. The conversations cease. On walks the woman we’re waiting to see, wrapped in silver and sparkles that brighten every reflection, and the stillness of the stage is alive.

“Our circle is unbroken. Our circle is whole. None above, none below, all of us equal under the listening sky.”

We all wait, breathless, until the slow, simple plucking of “Little Rebirth” begins with such simplicity. Until it stops, and her voice pours in with so much richness and depth. Until the whole sound rolls around that cavern, reverberating off those walls and plunging through our skin. We’re hypnotised, mesmerised, and that’s the place we stay, long past the end of the evening.

The first notes are strange to me. I said before, on a new album your ears always embrace some unexpected melodies before others, for reasons you might never fully understand. “Little Rebirth” had never been one of the tracks that just clicked. Not until that moment. “Little Rebirth”. “Poison Arrow”. “Joyful Motherfuckers” (I admit, that one, I was probably being a bit prudish about the title); I didn’t understand any of them properly in my own room. Now, in this space, I can feel the scope of them, and I revel in every chord.

“Little Rebirth” makes sense as an opener because it is about an awakening. For a world that hasn’t long come out of lockdown, for a people who have been denied live music and its touch for too long, that perhaps represents more than at any other time. And it means we can all change and rebuild together as we listen, just as the song invites. Remember, the lyrics say, “We’re all transforming”, not just the singer. It’s the “bonds of our works”, when “our” is every person in this world, and the Earth herself.

We reach “The Runner”, where Allison Russell says, far more succinctly than me (everyone’s more succinct than me), exactly what I’ve been trying to explain for all these thousands of words: the effect music can have when it hits you at exactly the right time, in exactly the right place. It’s the moment you’re not alone anymore, and the world is somewhere new, and everything that used to trouble you turns into freedom. It’s the feeling of being in Omeara on this night.

Allison Russell also explains “Poison Arrow” as she introduces it, perhaps realising that its tone of welcoming celebration may seem counterintuitive next to that title. It makes sense once she gives it voice. It becomes clearer still in the soothing repetition of that chorus. You taste the poison, and take its strength, and move beyond it, to the place where all the loneliness and the fear and the pain flow away. You heal.

Then “Joyful Motherfuckers”, with the most jarring of titles, a rather vehement statement compared to some of the more poetic metaphors and indirect allusions elsewhere on the album. It comes towards the end of the show, which also makes sense as a placement, because after Allison Russell spends an hour showing us the love in her heart, asking us to do the same seems a logical next step. She calls out and we respond, now part of her circle. She brings sunlight to our evening, and the vibrancy of a garden to the city’s narrowest streets. It’s a statement of how radical love can be.

There are some moments here that remind me of Imelda May. Those lines of poetry before the songs begin, the lyrics of love in the dark times, the lesson that happiness isn’t something that just happens but a choice that we make. Both artists make a comment about not really doing covers just before doing exceptional covers.

“We don’t really do covers,” says Allison Russell

By Your Side or Landslide? I barely have time to wonder.

“But when we do, we tend to do Sade.”

Every time I think I can’t be more excited, that I can’t enjoy the evening more, something else happens. “By Your Side” is one of the songs I hadn’t dared to hope would be on the setlist, because it wasn’t part of Outside Child. Spine-tingling on YouTube, here it penetrates even deeper under my skin.

On top of “By Your Side”, with its intensity so much greater in person, we have the luxury of hearing the two Native Daughters tracks that are mostly clearly Allison Russell’s: “Quasheba, Quasheba” and “You’re Not Alone”. They’re the bookends to Outside Child’s narrative, from turning back to the ancestors to gazing forwards at the next generation. Of them all, the performance of “Quasheba, Quasheba” is even more than I could have imagined.

What every single song has in common that night? A captive audience, singing and bobbing along when appropriate, transfixed at other times. And Allison Russell, there at the centre of is all, the linchpin for everyone: the band, the audience, quite possibly people walking past in the street outside who don’t realise what’s in the air around that building but can feel it anyway, Allison Russell, the guide from whom every single one of us takes our cue.

If you read any review of Allison Russell, whether of her recorded music or her live performances, the one word that you are almost guaranteed to hear is joy. Allison Russell is the human embodiment of joy, and when that smile and that voice are all around you, you can’t help but rise with it. One day, she’s probably going to outright levitate off the stage and when that happens, we won’t even blink. We’ll probably all just follow her up to wherever she takes us next.

Even those of you who are frequent listeners to the banjo in all its forms probably don’t think of it as a rock instrument, but the way she moves when she’s holding it is like she’s the lead guitarist in some raucous band. When she’s face to face with Mandy Fer, the actual guitarist, you can see the two of them pulling energy from each other, magnifying each other, until the explosion of sound rushes around them and hits every other person in the room.

The woman next to me, my new friend, makes a soft-voiced comment that she doesn’t think she could do those deep knee bends as part of her regular day, let alone whilst trying to play the banjo. We agree. I ask the friend I’ve brought with me, a clarinet player herself in another life, whether she’d ever tried to play the clarinet whilst still having a banjo hanging around her neck. The answer, you may be unsurprised to hear, is no. A clarinet on its own is more than trouble enough. There’s something very special going on here.

Special not just because of the music. With the exception of Tony Bennett and Willard White, every concert I’ve seen has involved a little bit of talk between the tracks, those moments where you and the artist connect in a very different way. Allison Russell speaks about the backstory, of course, because Outside Child is very much a narrative, and the horror and the hope are a huge part of what makes it distinct. She also expresses her delight to see us:

“You sold out! On a Wednesday! In a pandemic!”

Like it’s the most delightful surprise. Like her getting to be here with us is even more of a privilege than us being there with her.

She introduces the band, Mandy Fer who I recognise from some of the videos I’ve watched, Elena Canlas and (I think, based on my desperate internet search for viola players associated with Allison Russell) Nikki Shorts, who I do not.

Every time I’ve seen a clip of Allison Russell live, the line of musicians with her changes, twisting out new turns in every arrangement. I don’t realise at first that this particular iteration involves a viola player who’d only been called in a few days before. You’d never guess from the sound she makes. I have to laugh a bit when Allison tells us that she wouldn’t dream of telling the band what to play, that each of them is great enough in their own right that she has complete trust in their harmonies. I suppose you can do that when you have a “circle of goddesses”, as she likes to describe them, in unlimited supply.

Not only does she spend as much time telling us to go and look up her band’s other projects as she does promoting her own work, also spends a significant number of minutes pushing us to go and listen to Leyla McCalla’s latest album, Breaking the Thermometer. She’s right, of course, as I find out when I go home and do as I was told, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen any singer so enthusiastic about telling you to go and listen to other people.

I’m still keeping track of the songs as best as I can, trying to estimate what’s still to come without getting my hopes up. We haven’t heard “Montreal” or “The Hunters” and that’s fine, but we also haven’t heard “Nightflyer”, and I’m pretty certain she won’t miss that one from the set list.

Every time I listen to “Nightflyer”, the song I know meets one I’ve never heard before. Every reconstitution of the band means an arrangement remade, a slight shift in emphasis. Every tweak of a phrase from Allison Russell finds another corner of the song, and a new shade of her voice with it.

I can’t emphasise this enough to you, you need to play the whole album through, again and again, not just “Nightflyer”, and you need to watch live performances, as many of them as you can, on YouTube if you can’t make it to a venue, because you need to hear every nook and cranny her melody, and absorb what that does to the shaping of her story. There are more sides to it than you can imagine, especially not with only one listen.

Now though, it’s not about the rest of the album. All I’m waiting for is “Nightflyer”, just one time. It’s going to be the encore, isn’t it? We’re going to finish on the highest of highs.

“This record has taken us everywhere,” she says, “It’s taken us to the Junos, and the Grammys…Sing along if you know it. If you don’t know it, sing along anyway!”

We all laugh. We all know what’s coming and yes, we all sing along. Every member of the band, Lady Nade stepping back to the stage, Allison Russell herself, plus every member of the audience, together. Like that first time hearing “Willow”, really hearing it for the first time, all the way back in 2005, when the echoes of other people’s voices turned it into something it had never been before, when a room full of strangers became a single feeling that expanded to fill the world, when there was nothing more than those living minutes, nothing before or after, and when nothing else could matter; that’s what it is to hear “Nightflyer” in the belly of Omeara.

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I look at my friend and she’s singing as enthusiastically as if she’s known the song forever, as though this isn’t something I’d pulled her into just weeks ago. I look at the woman I met just a few hours before and see the smile in every note she voices. I look around, turning my head to that entire congregation, and every single one of them is here, right here, and we’re all as one. Time disappears. It’s hard to believe that the music ever finally stills, that the stage empties as the musicians leave and we we’re left in the cool and the quiet again. The song is still in our throats.

I listened to this radio program, once. I was out in Oman with my parents as we drove the long, dusty road from Thumrait to Salalah. It was an English-language program by an Arab woman and she was explaining, for the benefit of her other Arab listeners, the concept of the “English understatement.” You know what she means: when “not great” translates to “kind of awful”, when you say something’s “not bad” to express that you find it brilliant, when “pretty good, actually,” means it’s the best thing you’ve ever heard. I’d never really thought of it as a thing, let alone something that would need clarifying for people who weren’t English, but it’s stuck with me for years.

Anyway, I say all this to explain the rationale for my first comment at the end of the show, as the musicians finally depart but the sound they played still echoes, when every member of that audience still has that energy radiating from their skin. I look back to my friend, anxious to know if dragging her here was worth it, and I know the answer as soon as I see her face. Still, I think I’d better check:

“She’s pretty good, isn’t she?”

“She’s incredible!”

My friend had apparently missed the lesson on English understatement.

Some advice, for the non-musicians among you who like to listen to live music. Take someone who knows what they’re doing as your guest whenever you go to a concert. They’ll pick out the things that you don’t notice, explain why certain arrangements are particularly interesting (my other friend dissecting “Breathe” in the audience of Imelda May), point out that there’s not actually a drummer – ok, I probably should have been able to notice that a standard instrument was outright missing – as this friend does on the way out of Omeara, expressing her admiration for that unusual construction, observing all the little percussive moments that came from the keys instead.

We manage to shuffle our way as far as the lobby, where the tables are out and the merch calls incessantly. It must know that the concert has left us vulnerable. I don’t actually have a physical copy of Outside Child yet, so that’s an easy enough decision to make. It’s the second question that needs a little more thought.

“Do I want a t-shirt?” I ask my friend.

It turns out my friend knows the answer better than me:

“You do want a t-shirt, it’s whether you’re going to buy it,” she says as she picks up her own copy of Outside Child.

Fair enough, I agree. I buy one. Then I turn to Lady Nade’s side of the table, where I have to choose between multiple CDs. That’s a bit much. I eventually decide on the most recent one. She’s handling the sales herself, and signing as she goes, so that’s an added bonus. It’s one of those moments again when I find myself explaining my name, something I can do by now almost by rote.

It seems that might be the end of everything, as we finally follow the pathway out into the crackle of a London night.

Well, apart from the fact that right next to the main doors is a stage door, and Allison Russell is standing right there. Just standing there, in her silver and sparkles like she’s still on the stage, but talking to everyone who goes by and letting them take pictures with her, like there’s no barrier between performer and audience. We end up in the queue without even thinking about it.

The trouble with this particular scenario is that if I’m a little bit awkward talking to people I know, I’m pretty much incapable of speech when meeting someone new. My friend takes a picture of me standing next to Allison Russell, but she also has to cover most of the conversation. She tells how she likes to use a cuddly toy to hide her face in family photos, and the story of the imaginary pet spider she had as a kid. That’s a fun listen while my tongue’s still all twisted and I make absolutely no contribution whatsoever.

Then the evening really does come to an end. Back to the tube, back to her flat, but the night still alive and my brain doing what it always does when it’s feeling a lot of things all at once. Balancing on the edge of a new set of words and turning those words into sentences and the sentences into this. Spending far too long writing it down until what’s on the page sounds approximately like what I felt in my head, and then leaving it here for you.

The end of an evening, maybe, but not the end of the story.

#Bardic Writings #Youtube

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bardofsomerset · 1 year ago

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Allison Russell at Omeara, Part Two: Live and Singing

Previously, in Part One, I was introduced to the music of Allison Russell and made the big decision to go to London and see her in concert. This caused me to reminisce on all the other concerts I've seen, hence, Part Two, with even less Allison Russell in concert than the first part.

Maybe it’s because my taste in music leans so heavily to before I was born, but going to watch live gigs has always seemed a rare and special thing. I’m never going to get to see Nina Simone or Dusty Springfield or Ella Fitzgerald in the flesh. When I saw Cleo Laine for the first time, she was in her eighties (having lost absolutely nothing of that voice) and I was the youngest person in the audience by a few decades.

That’s been a bit of a recuring theme since my first ever concert (not including musicals, which play a bit differently), seventeen years before I ventured out to see Allison Russell. When I took my seat in front of Joan Armatrading’s stage, I was very aware that I was possibly the only child in a room full of adults.

(Well, technically Joan Armatrading was the second concert, but as the first one started an hour and a half late and we had really bad seats, I don’t count it as a full experience.)

Joan Armatrading…there was no first listen to Joan Armatrading. Those melodies crawled into my ears while I was still in the womb, and they’ve been floating through my body ever since. She’s my mother’s favourite, has been ever since the 1970s heyday of Back to the Night and, of course, the eponymous album that introduced the world to “Love and Affection”, the song you probably know best:

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I hear that opening and I’m a child again, home and safe and certain of the shape of the world. Funny, really, when uncertainty is part of the fabric of the song. It’s not music I “discovered”, there was no moment when it found me, but that makes it important in a whole different way. It’s how I grew with it, when the lyrics stayed the same but something changed in the way I listened; how every subsequent replay remade what I thought I knew.

It’s probably fair to say Mum was more excited than me as she directed the car through the growing evening darkness of 13th October 2005 and took us into Bristol. Yeah, there was some budding anticipation, but after that failed first gig I didn’t really understand. I could be sitting comfortably at home and still hear my favourite songs. I liked Joan Armatrading, but not in the way Mum did. How could I, without all those decades of following her, without those songs echoing through all the days of my life? You can trace the history of a person in their album collection, but I was barely a teenager. I hadn’t had time to build musical connections like that.

Plus, there was the fact that my literary analysis wasn’t quite at the level it is today. Joan Armatrading is a poet, and not one who explains her every thought and feeling to you. She wraps mysteries around her lyrics, leads you in and leaves you to draw from them what you will. Back then, I still didn’t have a clue what it all meant (I mean, I’m not going to say I understand it perfectly now, but I can see silhouettes and build something meaningful around them). It can be hard to fully appreciate something that you don’t understand.

Did preschool me hearing “Drop the Pilot” for the first time have any comprehension of a bogey outside of something that came out of your nose? Nope. Did I have the faintest conception that the titular “Rosie” might be a man in lipstick and heels? Not at all. I just knew I liked the songs with a faster rhythm, the ones where I could sing along with enthusiasm. “Drop the Pilot” is still one of my favourites, and that’s partly because I remember how it felt as a child, and partly because I can hear it now in a way that was impossible back then.

There was no sitting up in the gods this time like that failed first concert, we were right there in the front row, knees to the stage and almost in the centre (a feat that wouldn’t be repeated until 2014, when my parents finally bought me tickets to see Elaine Paige, after previously missing her twice. That evening took me through every show she’d ever played, every character I’d never had the chance to see, where every slight hunch or stretch of her shoulders was all that was needed to turn the actress who sings into someone completely new).

Any worries about disappointment vanished the moment Joan Armatrading took her place.

I may have preferred the more up-tempo tunes when I was little, but on that night, sat in what was still known as the Colston Hall, before renovations and renaming rebirthed it as the Bristol Beacon, it wasn’t “Drop the Pilot” that hit me most. It got me, don’t get me wrong, I think pretty much every song landed twice as heavy as I’d ever heard before; in that way that only happens when you and the singer are barely a breath apart, but the moment of the night was one I hadn’t remotely expected.

By the time we reached that point, I’d already seen tunes that I thought I recognised shimmering with a new kind of life. I’d journeyed through songs that were completely unfamiliar, but that settled as old friends by their final note. My ears had opened to the jokes and backstory woven between the music, the phrases delivered in that Birmingham accent, until it was suddenly clear to me that the disembodied voice coming through my speakers for so many years was actually a real human being. Just like the rest of us, except there was that melody, that talent, so far beyond my imagination.

It couldn’t have been better. That’s what I thought, but it turned out there was another space I didn’t even know needed to be filled. When the end was rolling close, but the audience wasn’t ready for her to leave, that’s when Joan Armatrading decided to sing “Willow”:

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“Willow” wasn’t one of my quick and bouncy tunes where I already liked to sing along. I wasn’t yet at the point in my life where I could dig into its deeper meaning. When it started to play, I didn’t even know the words. It was immediately clear that everyone else did, so all I could do was listen to them, and to her.

I knew by this point that Joan Armatrading was a poet, but somehow that was the moment where it became real to me, when her voice and theirs drew out those shapes from the lyrics. I could hear it in the thunder, see it illuminated in the edge of the lighting, wrap myself in the softening storm. “Willow” was shelter from everything else in the world, leaving nothing but us. Everyone was singing along, even me, and I still didn’t know the words exactly. It just felt right.

It was the first time I realised that a concert isn’t you watching them. It’s them sharing with you. It’s you giving back. For so many of the people in that audience, it wasn’t just that moment but all the memories that accompanied it, reliving every replay since the original 1977 release. I found myself joining them in a place they created before I was born. It was learning not just the lyrics, repeated in every chorus, not just the melody, poured nectar-like over the congregation, but also how to experience the song as a living thing.

I’ve seen Joan Armatrading twice more since then, first at Warwick Arts Centre (one of the great advantages of attending the University of Warwick was having that right there on campus) with two brilliant supporting acts – part of her mission to bring attention to the local talent who it’s sometimes easy to miss, in this case Jamie Sheerman and Chris Wood – and once again she fed her distinctive lines of humour between some of the most beautiful love songs ever written. Now I was finally in a place to hear “Dry Land” (one of that small cluster of early songs that weren’t hers alone, but with lyrics by Pam Nestor) and “The Weakness in Me”. I was ready to wonder how I ever missed their depth before.

Second was at my old friend the Playhouse, right at home in Weston-super-Mare. That was when she was scaling down her touring and it was just her on the stage, an entire band within one woman’s fingers. There was nothing between her and us. She made the switching between instruments look so easy, and she crafted those songs into whole new shapes yet again.

In between, I heard the way other musicians, famous and important and influential ones, talked about her, the way they all honoured her with such boundless respect. I watched the documentary, the one about how in the 1970's no one had seen or heard anything like her before, and that’s still true today, about all those poor, confused white, male record execs who saw a black woman who wasn’t singing blues or jazz or soul and didn’t have a clue how to respond, whilst she just kept on doing her own thing and the listeners kept finding her, because you might not be able to describe Joan Armatrading’s music in relation to anything else, but you know it’s something special. By the time I was in my twenties my appreciation was on a whole new level. Small me couldn’t have conceived of it.

When I was at uni, Joan Armatrading became one of the artists I played as an antidote to homesickness. She just reminded me of listening with my mum. She was top of a list of singers that also included Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Elkie Brooks. Other than Tom Waits, I’ve had the immense privilege of seeing all of them live.

Leonard Cohen I saw twice (July 2009 in Liverpool, September 2013 in Cardiff), and both times he seemed so bemused that we’d all made the effort just to go and listen to him. He took off his hat and pressed it to his heart, ever the gentle romantic, a poet who sang whilst his backup, including the Sublime Webb Sisters (his description) turned the occasional surprise cartwheel and band members, including the man he called “maestro of the wind”, played along. He rendered the full version of “Hallelujah”, the proper one, no verses cut and no meaning lost, enough to silence the drone of all those inescapable covers (I once had to watch a performance of “Hallelujah” by a choir of teenagers in a Christmas concert. It didn’t have quite the same weight), and he sang all the melodies I try to press on people when they complain Leonard Cohen’s music is depressing. Who hears “Anthem” or “If It Be Your Will” and feels anything less than hope? As for all when he asked that audience to see you naked, and made his vows of devotion, I’m pretty sure there was some actual swooning amongst his long-adoring fans. Even in two big arenas, not remotely intimate spaces, there was still a closeness that’s hard to describe.

Then there was Elkie Brooks, with that voice worn in over decades, with every new texture just elevating the whole. She’s going on her Long Farewell Tour in 2024 and beyond, so if you want to see her, now’s the time. I’ll definitely be there.

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We saw her in Yeovil, at the Octagon (I think this was May 2010), a present to make up for missing her most recent appearance in Weston. She has this gift, Elkie Brooks, across all the genres, whether on her own or back with the woefully unappreciated Vinegar Joe. One moment you’re in a pub or bar, rowdy and rousing, dancing, probably on the table, with a glass in your hand. Then you stop, dead still, ears clinging to each lingering melody as she takes you to a club 1940-something where it’s long after dark and the music curls around you like smoke.

(Also, as I discovered when searching for the best videos to illustrate this section, she was once a cavewoman.)

When we saw her, she was half apologetic about the fact she had a new album out. It was just after the release of Powerless and, perfectly understandably, she wanted us to buy the CD. That meant she needed us to hear stuff like the title track and “Why”, which for someone still relatively new to all this were two absolutely beautiful songs, but for everyone else clearly didn’t have the weight of the classics. I can’t find it on YouTube, but her version of “I Can’t Make You Love Me” was the first I heard, and remains pretty close to Bonnie Raitt’s for me.

Elkie Brooks knew the new album was not the main reason her audience was here. She was very aware that most of them (this was another one of those concerts where I was a different generation to everyone else) had been loving “Lilac Wine” and “Pearl’s a Singer” for many, many years. They were going to need to be satisfied.

How do you keep a song alive on the hundredth time through? The thousandth? What’s left other than reciting it like a child with their times tables? Can you really find a new emotion every night, whilst still keeping the core that made people love it back then?

The answer was in her own personality, in the spaces where she found room for character and conversation. The knowing pause and raised eyebrow on “I drink much more than I ought to drink” in “Lilac Wine”, a moment that made us all chortle. Introducing “Pearl’s a Singer” and playing up her exasperation at just how many times she’d had to perform it. After all, its success took even her by surprise back in 1977. We couldn’t help but laugh again, just before she emphasised how she was going to need our help to work up her enthusiasm:

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(Obviously not a concert version, but the closest I could find to how it was when I heard it.)

We obliged, hanging on that moment of stillness in the middle of the song before rushing into the acceleration. You could tell, through every moment of that gig, that Elkie Brooks was someone who’d lived her whole life on the stage, that she knew and understood every inch of it, so utterly comfortable with every shift in tone, with how she reached us and how we responded. There wasn’t a single moment when that connection wasn’t there, us and her and the music all together.

Which brings us back to Cleo Laine, who, as I mentioned, was in her eighties when I saw her. July 2009, I’d just finished the first year of my A-Levels and she was more than fifty years into her career as Britain’s greatest jazz singer. I swear if Cleo Laine was American, she’d regularly be mentioned in the same breath as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. That quite frankly ridiculous vocal range (four octaves? Five octaves? I’ve heard it debated, but either way, seriously?). That glorious scat singing (the whole video is worth watching, but go to 6.35 for when it starts getting really fun). The fact she decided to do an album of Shakespeare set to jazz. I mean, really, is it possible to design something more specifically to my taste?

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If we’re talking concerts that were particularly special to me, not just my mother, then we have to talk about Cleo Laine. My mother still has a role to play (we share a lot more music than I do with my dad, though he’s probably the reason I like country, and he was also the one who stood next to me through the non-stop, three hours and no interval experience at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium as Bruce Springsteen piled the energy higher and higher, until he sent off all his band and perched there at the end of the stage, just him and his guitar, playing “Thunder Road”). No, my mother was the one who bought me a Cleo Laine CD one day, having seen it at random in a shop, and told me she thought I’d like it. Being a teenager, I ignored her. That was very silly, as I discovered when I finally hit play.

Jazz doesn’t have to work as hard as other music to make me fall in love with it (don’t ask me to explain the technicalities of why that’s true. It’s not a conscious thing), but that CD wasn’t actually a particularly jazzy one. At Her Finest took the songs of some of the great songwriters: Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, Stephen Sondheim, each of them so capable of creating an image, a story, an insight into our own nature, and it strummed them to that unmistakable, unsurpassed voice. Into this potent mix, Cleo Laine had added her own pen, painting lyrics over the rippling melody of “Cavatina” to create “He Was Beautiful”. What all those tracks had in common was a humanity, poured into words and music and feelings, that found its way deep inside you.

That first time I saw Cleo Laine live was in St George’s Hall, Bristol, where we’d also later see Curtis Stigers jazzing things up. It literally used to be a church, one small enough to hold everyone close. It was a most appropriate sort of venue for a divine experience. We were only a couple of rows back, right at the heart of it all, and it almost seemed she was staring directly at me as she sang. At other moments she didn’t forget to look up and to the sides, to the people tucked in at the edges who weren’t necessarily in the line of view. She was there for her audience. I had no doubt she saw every one of us.

The thing about someone having that much experience on the stage; they have so many stories. There’s nothing they haven’t seen, no escapade they haven’t enjoyed. Dame Cleo Laine and Sir John Dankworth were side by side, and their banter flitted between every song, the embodiment of a 50-year marriage and shared life between two people who understood each other’s music better as much or more than they did their own. They would be mocking each other one minute, then harmonising perfectly the next. She’d make fun of him, he’d menace her with his clarinet while she wasn’t looking. Behind them, shoulders curling around the deep, heavy voice of the double bass, their son Alec carried the family tradition in fine form.

They dusted every moment with fun and good humour, like they’d just invited us into their everyday lives. One time, as Cleo was introducing a song, she told us she’d first heard it sung by a lady (I can’t remember who and it’s really annoying me) who’d been 91 at the time. Still a decade away from that, despite being well past what most people would consider retirement age, with absolutely impeccable delivery, she explained, “It gave me great hope.”

On the other hand, when she sang “Sonnet 18”, or as you may know it, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day”, the world stopped.

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Melody by John, lyrics by that Shakespeare guy. I mean, as Cleo herself said, if someone wrote you a poem like that, would you have any option but to fall in love?

The second time we saw her, a few years later, John was gone but the whole rest of the family was there, children and grandchildren: Jacqui, Alec and Emily, singing and playing along, and we were in their back garden at The Stables near Milton Keynes. A shared communion indeed.

We saw Jacqui Dankworth on her own once, back in Weston, just a few days before I left for uni. Cleo Laine had sung the classics, but this night was about something new, songs I’d never heard before. I could hear the similarities to her mother’s voice, and the differences too. She’d inherited something special, but despite the almost irresistible urge to compare, there was no denying she could stand alone. That was also my introduction to Charlie Wood, his piano dancing around her voice as they both fed off the other. They weren’t married yet, but the connection between them came alive in every note.

At uni, I saw Alec Dankworth with his Spanish Accents in the Warwick Arts Centre. Someone said to me once, and I think it might be true, that it’s impossible for a double bass to sound bad. No screeching, no wailing, none of those completely inexplicable noises that my saxophone sometimes decides to randomly make when I blow it. There’s just something about that deep, earthy rhythm that gets right into your blood.

Getting the CD of Back to You signed after Jacqui’s gig, she asked if I was a musician (I think it was because I was again on the young side of the audience and that was the most obvious reason for me to be there), always a slightly awkward question. Technically, I suppose, but not really how she meant. She also commented on my unusual name.

That’s another recurring theme at these events. Lesley Garrett (possibly the most exuberant singer in the world, and equally enthusiastic about encouraging my own singing), and Clare Teal (Yorkshire again, a voice so familiar from the radio, who’d introduced me to so much jazz, but who I’d only recently realised was a singer in her own right) would both say similar things. “That’s an unusual name.” “Are you a musician?” like there was anything comparable between me and them.

Of all the concerts that have been and could have been, of all the old favourites given new breath and surprise discoveries brought to life in the chamber of an auditorium, only one still seems like a dream, like something like that could never have happened. Aretha Franklin had given up on international tours long before I became a fan. There was no chance she’d be coming to the UK any time soon.

No, she wouldn’t come to me, but I did go to America in 2011, one year on a university exchange, from Warwick to Vanderbilt, from Coventry to Nashville. Flicking through the internet and seeing that Aretha Franklin was on a US tour and suddenly realising, “yes, I’m in the US.” Opening the list of dates and seeing “Ryman Auditorium, Nashville” and barely taking time to consider. I walked to the Ryman (I wanted to make sure it was an easy journey so I’d know I could do it on concert night) and I bought my ticket there and then, taking the opportunity to do a little tour of the building too. I didn’t realise quite how much history was in the Mother Church. Yet another religious experience hallowing the halls where music plays.

It was raining on the night, the weather was absolutely foul and I was not looking forward to trudging down Broadway, but it turned out one of my professors was going with her family and she offered to give me a lift. I had a very good seat, down and near the front, but frankly I could have been sat on the roof outside, right in the heart of the weather, and it still would have qualified as the experience of a lifetime.

I’ve been trying to construct a narrative for that evening, one that sums up every moment and emotion, the crowd of that stage with its band and more band and singers and dancers filling in every corner, the second piano they rolled on halfway through so she could play for us on the most beautiful (and longest) version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” that’d I’d ever heard, the audience overflowing with love and her love in return, the fact that not a single word or note mattered in the face of that feeling, but I don’t think it exists. Could any description do it justice?

It’s a good place for music, Nashville. I realise you already know that, but I also saw Sonny Rollins while I was there (a very good reminder of what the saxophone is meant to sound like when I’m struggling myself), and I took in Memphis the Musical just weeks before I actually visited Memphis for the first time. A lot of fond memories accompanied that long year, despite the lonely moments and the homesickness.

There have been other concerts as well: the ancient energy of Clannad twisted into something cool and modern under the roof of Warwick Arts Centre, Natalie Williams at Ronnie Scott’s (as much about the venue as the music, fabulous as that was), Tony Bennett at the Royal Albert Hall and Sir Willard White at The Forum in Bath, barely a word spoken between those classic songs perfect phrased, Gladys Knight at the Royal Albert Hall with love and celebration, several slightly overwhelming Big Gig performances with the Guides where we sat next to the aeroplanes and watched the dots on the stage who were presumably the artists we were there to see. But live performance had fallen by the wayside a bit, and not just because of the pandemic, when I made the decision that this time, on this tour, I was going to stop putting things off until the next opportunity and make an active effort to put myself in the same room as Imelda May.

My first encounter with Imelda May came when “Johnny’s Got a Boom Boom” was playing on the radio with somewhat unavoidable frequency, and I didn’t mind because every time I’d nod my head and tap my foot, thinking to myself as I heard that unmistakable, bouncing off your bones bass line, “I like that beat. It’s pretty cool” Then I went on my way, working on my A-Levels. At some point, I did see an interview in person, saw her with that hair and those lips and that look in her eye, and my vague thoughts added, “She looks pretty cool too.”

Then, a few years later, I saw this performance on the Graham Norton Show:

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Not only did I again think “I like that beat”, this time I also had to smile at the lyrics:

"I love your nails, even your entrails I love your soul, even your little mole Yeah I love you inside out

I love your arms and your laugh out loud charms I love your wits, and all your wobbly bits I love your lungs, and your talking tongue Yeah I love you inside out"

I might not have a competent musical ear, but I know what good words look like. These were clever, and funny, and not long after, when I happened to be a in a music shop with money to burn, I bought Mayhem in its entirety as an album. It wasn’t planned. I spotted the CD in the ranks, I remembered that performance, and there was a spontaneous decision that I’m still glad about more than a decade later.

Those first two albums I bought, in fairly quick succession: Mayhem, then Love Tattoo, became the albums I played when I was tired and I needed a burst of energy, whether to my hands or to the thinking parts of my head. They were (and still are) what I turned up loud when housework needed doing, even if they made basic tasks take longer because of the constant need to dance, and even if I could only play them when I was on my own because yes, I still felt compelled to sing along very loudly. They made life a little bit easier and a lot more fun. They could blast me into a writing mood, but sometimes I’d have to wait until the CD finished because I couldn’t concentrate on my words when my ears were still hanging on hers.

Tribal was the first album I ever preordered before it had even been released, claiming the bonus EP despite the fact I didn’t at the time own equipment capable of playing vinyl. It was also the first time I watched an official Imelda May music video, and I still go back to It’s Good to be Alive” whenever I need an immediate pick me up that’ll make me grin so loud you can hear it. Or you could, if I wasn’t alone in the house with the speakers on full blast, crushing every other sound under the vibration of that rhythm.

Then came Life Love Flesh Blood. Before Outside Child, no album had ever come into my life with such a definite force. There were the interviews with Imelda May first, some that I heard and some that I read, promising that it would be something different. Was that a good thing or not? I was reasonably certain that the quality of the singing would make any shape of melody worth a listen, but would these new tracks have that same energy, that mix of humour and humanity, that made the previous records so precious? I was excited, yes, because the odds seemed good, but there was a little trepidation too.

I’m not sure what I was worried about, really. I love those rockabilly rhythms but my favourite songs on Love Tattoo and Mayhem are the slower ones: “Knock 123” and “Kentish Town Waltz” respectively. You can linger in the lyrics, and in all the power and control thrumming through that limitless voice, and you can feel every inch of meaning bleeding into you. The first time “Call Me” poured through the radio, it stopped me like those two had, and all my doubts were scoured away in the echo of that first perfect note.

Caught in the pain and the pleading of Life Love Flesh Blood’s first song, feeling its ache in my ears and my chest, I knew there was something special coming. Then I saw the guest list for Jools’ Annual Hootenanny, saw her name, and I was very ready to hear what came next. It turned out it was the kind of sound that claws itself into your spine. My music, written especially for me.

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Yes, she had new hair and a new style, but she still had that look in her eye. That command to pay attention. It was coupled with something else. Without that beat, there was a new kind of vulnerability, one that would tremble throughout the album. Behind the evocative notes of that title, “Black Tears”, behind that striking, captivating image, was a darkness and a pain that spilled out until it swallowed the world.

Somehow, I ended up buying Life Love Flesh Blood twice. Two CD versions, both preorders with bonus tracks. They had a different image on the front, and one had a signed insert whilst the other had extra, extra bonus tracks (the ukulele versions), so they were technically different. No regrets.

No, it wasn’t like the previous albums, but sometimes music finds you at exactly the right time. It wasn’t a happy period, and I was wallowing, to put it mildly. A series of songs with “the world’s not perfect but we can still make it better, I’m not perfect but I’ll still try my best” as a central message? A battered hope depicted through all those admitted mistakes, through humanity in all its shallow, selfish, prideful moments? The declaration that love is something we can actively choose, and that we have to keep choosing? I can’t overstate how important it was for me to hear that.

It's a highly personal album, like you’re being allowed a glimpse into someone else’s soul, but somehow it also manages to distil humanity as a species:

"I've chased away my demons But I'm human at my best

So come adore me But know I'm going to fall Off of this pedestal That I hope you put me on"

I’m going to try and explain why this works for me, but I’m not sure there’s a better way to say it. How does someone write something that brilliant? Place so much depth in such simplicity? The tension there, that conflict between who you want to be and your actuality, the intense desire for someone else to see you and the fear of what will happen when they do, the hope that they’ll love the idea of you and that creeping voice reminding you that the idea is unsustainable? All you can do is your best, but is your best really worth that much? Romance and reality in the same hand; all the difficulty and beauty of being human.

If those few lines of “Human” gave me feelings, then the entirety of “When It’s My Time” ran through me like a blade. It’s not often I see depictions of religion that match the people of faith that I know, not borderline saints, not judgemental bigots, but everyday humans who are so aware of how impossible it is for them to have all the answers, and yet who are so willing to keep trying to understand better, to try and be better. It’s the faith that tests itself every day and comes through on the other side, that admits its own doubts and frailty and is all the stronger for it.

It’s also that conflict again, that precarious balance of hope and helplessness. How do you accept your own imperfections? Is it possible to do better when you’re so intimately aware of your own flaws? Can you find the value in trying, even when you know you won’t succeed? Where do you put your faith? How can you be so small and so human in such a big, complicated world?

I know some people complained about the new sound in Life Love Flesh Blood, but listen to “Proud and Humble” and “When It’s My Time” back-to-back. One leans more into the triumph, the other’s more pleading, but both are pretty explicit about their faith and failure. “I’ve done wrong but that’s not the sum total of me. Look at what I tried to do. Lord, love me like I love you.”

That same wry humour that I loved in “Inside Out” is still there as well, especially in “Bad Habit”, otherwise known as the catchiest song on the album, the one I’m most likely to keep humming for weeks every time I hear it.

"Spending money like I have it A bad habit, spending money like I have it

…

The doctor said 'Girl to my surmount There's nothing wrong with you But you bank account!'"

In other places, it flips the script the other way round. Songs like “Big Bad Handsome Man”, where he tempts you and it’s enticing and celebratory become songs like “Sixth Sense” and “How Bad Can a Good Girl Be”, where the temptation calls directly into your own darkness. Rather than looking out at him and his devilish charm, they take a more introspective route and dare to explore the less palatable side of that desire.

The album is also about love. Like with Allison Russell, I love how Imelda May writes about love. This the woman who admired “all your wobbly bits” for “Inside Out” and then on the same album included “Kentish Town Waltz”, one of the best bits of storytelling in song I’ve heard, absolutely devoid of anything that resembles the ideal of romance whilst still being one of the most romantic things you can possibly imagine.

I love how this love is never flashy, never about grand gestures. It’s about everyday drudgery that you choose to share, about a whole range of choices that you need to make for a love to work. It’s the stews lasting three days into four, it’s knowing you’re going to fall off of the pedestal you hope they put you on, it’s not fear, it’s home, and all that’s good and bad about that. On 11 Past the Hour, it’s “Diamonds” that carries that theme best:

"Don't need to wish on stars We don't have to reach that far Everything's right where we are"

I thought no love song could stop “Kentish Town Waltz”, but “Diamonds” is pretty close. They’re different in tone, but they’re both about the grounded side of love, about a reality that isn’t full of sparkling glamour but is all the stronger because of it. Imelda May writes about love in a way I don’t think I’ve seen from anyone else. It’s never flamboyant, sometimes it’s annoying, but it’s also a way of living.

It doesn’t even have to be set to music. When 11 Past the Hour was announced, I did as I’d done for the last two albums: listened to every single as it was released, poured over every interview to try and eke out the details, and as soon as it was possible, put myself down for a preorder. This time, rather than a bonus EP that I couldn’t play, the extra was a disc of poetry, yes, set to melodies, but spoken, not sung.

Now, 11 Past the Hour is a pretty evocative title in its own right. That’s not a bit of casual speech, it’s an image with some depth to it, the kind that that’s at once instantly understood and enduringly enigmatic. This album was following on from Life Love Flesh, Blood, which had already been pushing the poetic pretty hard, that had managed some points when I thought the lyrics turned almost Leonard Cohen-esque:

"You got my mind In the gutter of love"

Now, however, for Slip of the Tongue, the melody drew back a little so you could see every syllable of each word, though when read in Imelda May’s voice there was music anyway.

Lay those lines out in isolation and they carry their own weight. Here’s love again, in “Home”, perhaps the best of them all. “It’s choosing kindness over being right”. It’s not all harmony though, there’s the punch and the dance of “GBH”, then the shock awakening of “Elephant’s” first line, there are moments of delicacy and violence colliding together, there’s questioning and uncertainty and humanity, the things I love so much in her music. Then every time you think you have a grasp on the images and the feelings of Slip of the Tongue, there’s moment of transformation into something more.

Since then, I’ve bought the A Lick and a Promise poetry book. It now on the desk next to my laptop, where I can pick it up and dip in at leisure whenever I have a craving to see words painted like art.

Of course, you can’t ignore the songs of 11 Past the Hour. It’s a fairy tale from that opening “'Twas”, it’s a romance where sweetness and sorrow sit side by side, it’s intimacy danced under an open sky. We travel a long way over the course of this album, from Ireland to London to Mexico to the most war-torn corners of the world and all the roads in between. There are temptations and doubts and darkness, as we’d expect. “I’m no psychopath” says the woman who once celebrated how, “I go with a psycho” There’s triumph that bursts forth in “Made to Love” in a similar way to how it roared in “Should Have Been You”. There’s storytelling. It rewards every listen, and every relisten, as you try to unravel all its questions and their uncertain answers.

Seeing Imelda May in concert shouldn’t really have been that difficult, as she has several great advantages over most of my other favourite singers. For instance, she is still alive, in good health and actually touring in the UK on a regular basis. The only real reason it hadn’t happened was that I hadn’t got round to it. I was sure I would one day.

A new album meant a new tour, so in the aftermath of 11 Past the Hour I poked around her website to find dates and destinations. Bath. Bath was on the list. It was the perfect place for it to happen. Bath is one of my favourite cities and I’ll take any excuse to wander there. There’s so much history in every street, but not the heavy kind. It’s beautiful in the pale stone of the buildings and almost mystical in the shimmering waters.

Of course, I’m not actually anywhere near Bath at the moment. I’m stranded a long way from home and don’t know when I’ll be able to get back on a more permanent basis. That meant that when I took a casual look at those tour dates, as I’d done nearly every year since I became an Imelda May fan, Bath didn’t represent the city of closeness and convenience, but instead an excuse. I could combine it with a trip home, not the long-term settlement that I really wanted but still an improvement on my current status.

As always, my mum jumped on the opportunity to encourage me to socialise, this time by suggesting I go with one of the members of that three-person social network of mine. Asking him to come wasn’t actually that difficult. It’s hard to believe when you see me craning my neck to look at him, but we met when he was shorter than me. We’re friends in the way that’s only possible with someone you’ve known since before you had a memory. We’re close in the way that no matter how many paths you both travel, whether in philosophy or physical space, you know you’ll always come back, and that when you do you’ll be able to just pick it up again. We started a conversation nearly 30 years ago and whilst it’s curled many ways in between, it hasn’t stopped since.

That meant that something as simple as sending him a message didn’t have to be debated and worried over, that I knew before I started that I wasn’t overstepping. Of course, that wasn’t the same as knowing he’d say yes, or even if he’d like Imelda May’s music. Not that I was too worried about that second one. He’s a musician, a proper one who can hear the things I miss, and that means that his musical genres can basically be divided into “good” and “not for me.”

I didn’t send him links at first because I was still trying to decide which tracks would make the most representative sample, but I did offer to make recommendations if he wanted to listen. He was enthusiastic about coming even without hearing a single note. “I’m sure I’ll love her music. I’ve not heard of her but feel free to send anything over.”

After some debate one my part, I decided on “Johnny’s Got a Boom Boom”, as that was the one I was pretty sure he’d have heard on radio if he’d ever encountered her without realising, the Graham Norton performance of “Inside Out” that had pushed me over the line into a fan, and the “Black Tears” video from Jools Holland that had made me realise just how special Life Love Flesh Blood would be. There needed to be some old and some new if he was to fully appreciate her.

Then he started wondering if going to see her without having a clue what to expect would actually be more of an experience. It was a month later when he messaged me that he’d finally decided to listen to the links “I love the three that you sent and while I like the 50s Rock n Roll stuff, her latest album is blowing me away! Her voice is incredible no matter what genre she's singing but I like this latest stuff the best.”

I may have bounced up and down slightly with excitement.

(In case you’re wondering, yes, I did later turn him towards Allison Russell – “I love Hy-Brasil, the atmosphere and harmonies are amazing” – followed by a deep plunge into the Silk Road Ensemble as he fell into the many layered wonders of Rhiannon Giddens.)

When I went to buy the tickets, there were two options. Yes, I could have just gone with the regular ones, which would have got us to a decent position in the stalls, but the very front few rows were only available as part of a VIP package. A VIP package that also came with the right to watch the soundcheck, and attend a Q&A afterwards, plus a special gift. That was ridiculously enticing and if I’d been on my own, I wouldn’t have been able to resist.

Was it fair to ask someone else to buy a VIP ticket to see a singer that they hadn’t heard of a month ago just to indulge me?

Yes, I decided, it was worth it, and if he wanted I’d cover the difference between this and a regular ticket so he wasn’t too put out.

It was just after I’d bought the tickets that he messaged and told me he was having trouble rearranging his shift at work.

“Don’t do anything yet,” he said as I rechecked my confirmation e-mail.

There were a very nervous few days before that one was resolved, and all that was left was to wait for Tuesday 12th April.

When the day rolled round, I was already in a good mood. I was home, in Somerset, and that’s always been the best thing to help me breathe. I wasn’t worried about finding the venue, because I’d been to The Forum before. There was no stress about getting back to Bath Spa station before the last train, because as you’ll know if you’ve ever been to Bath, getting to The Forum basically involves leaving the station and turning left, and getting back is just as simple. Everything was in such a clear line.

His dad gave us a lift, him from his house and me from my B&B, and from the car to the station to the train we picked up that conversation we’ve been dipping in and out of for so long. We’d left at lunch to allow plenty of time to get something to eat and be at The Forum before the soundcheck began, which meant we also had time to wander around one of my favourite cities in the world.

You can’t walk through Bath without feeling its age, the echo of all those Victorian voices, the shape of all those Roman constructs, the song of that older time before stories had words, when the Pagans first touched the magic in its waters. We talked, and we talked, and the sun was bright but still cool enough, as you’d expect in early April, and the streets were lively, but not crowded, and there was really nothing that could be changed to improve that day.

We walked past a bookshop and I felt that irresistible pull, and unlike the vast majority of people who know me, who wouldn’t have trusted me to leave again, he said “We can go in if you want.” Yes, even though we were still on a schedule. Drifting between the shelves, running fingers over all the intrigue and excitement promised in every different colour papering the spines, until yes, if we wanted to have something to eat before the soundcheck started, we needed to move a little quicker.

A little vegan café full of garlic mushrooms and katsu curry. Conversation about music of course, but also comics and politics and personal lives and all the topics in between. His music degree had led him into a career as a postman, clearly such a natural choice, but now he was making a change. He had decided to become a music therapist, was just starting his early reading before the course started, and that meant he could talk through the deconstruction of a melody in a whole different way, to how it could bypass and jumpstart parts of the brain that were otherwise losing their connections.

We came to a halt in the sun and sounds outside of The Forum, that curve at the point of the road, the art deco cinema turned dance school turned bingo hall turned church, a model of architectural beauty like all of its city. Forum is an ancient word, it takes you back to those Romans again, and it sounds like a conversation, like something for people to share. It’s a name that carries a lot of ideas. And of course, this was yet another concert venue on sanctified ground, a site dedicated to both God and music over the course of a life.

No one else was there when we first arrived, but others soon followed, coming up in their ones and twos, presumably for the same purpose as us. I watched them with curiosity, all those different looks and different voices but united intent. If we hadn’t all been stood outside of that same door, could we even have known the music we shared?

Eventually, those doors opened. It was finally time to step inside.

#Bardic Writings #Youtube

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bardofsomerset · 1 year ago

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Remember that time Esme Weatherwax got bitten by vampires and everyone was like "Oh no, they're going to turn her into one of their brainless puppets!", and then Esme was just like "This is not a one way road!" and just straight up mind-controlled them right back? Like, she mentally just kicked down the door and said "You let my blood in, I am going to take that as an invitation!" and then started wreaking havoc in their brains.

'You wanted to know where I’d put my self,’ said Granny. ‘I didn’t go anywhere. I just put it in something alive, and you took it. You invited me in. I’m in every muscle in your body and I’m in your head, oh yes. I was in the blood, Count. In the blood. I ain’t been vampired. You’ve been Weatherwaxed.'

I want to be her so bad when I'm old!

#And that's why she's my favourite #Discworld

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bardofsomerset · 1 year ago

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my most shameful confession is that i have not read the shepherd's crown and i am never going to. i took one look at the cover and i saw the bees and i saw You and i was like "oh, granny weatherwax dies in this one" and i decided i was never going to touch it. if i never read it i never have to acknowledge that death is real. i never have to accept that this is the end. as long as i never read it then there will always, always be more discworld left to read. i can live forever in a world where the story isn't over yet.

it's been almost a decade and i'm still not ready to say goodbye. you can't make me.

#I had exactly the same reaction #I will never read the book where Granny Weatherwax dies

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bardofsomerset · 1 year ago

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Allison Russell at Omeara, Part One: Song to Stage

There are three options and I don’t know which is mine. I look from staircase to staircase at all the people certain in where they’re going. It’s London, everyone’s marching in their own determined line. My choice is something of a random one, but I head upward.

Narrow and grey shifts into open daylight. There’s space around me, a breath of relief from those close-pressed crowds. The delight of the fresh air is tempered slightly. Most of the country has started cooling from those ridiculous heights of just a week ago, but heat still congeals in thick ropes around those towering city buildings. Out in the space between them, I’m caught on the sharp edge of the sun, brilliant on my cheek.

This is the moment. It’s where it starts becoming real. Me being me, I have planned for a dozen ways in which this could go wrong. I’ve already navigated what I thought were the biggest hazards: the long road of buying tickets and finding a place to stay and making travel plans, and I’m almost ready to breathe, but not quite yet.

From the moment our evening was agreed, I’d been watching more potential hurdles springing up ahead of me. A rail strike. A heatwave. A pandemic. Any one of those things could have stopped me making it to the city, or could have closed the venue before the performance began. Now I'm in London, the chances of it dramatically falling apart are drastically reduced. Not gone, I admit, but reduced.

What I haven’t planned for? My friend – the person I’d expected to be right here waiting for me – being nowhere in sight.

It's not a worry at first. I'm a few minutes earlier than planned. I’ll just message her and let her know I'm here.

Can’t send.

My phone tells me. Now that's rude. I try again. Nope. I have a signal. What's wrong? Maybe I’ve run out of credit? No, that can’t be it. I’d have received a text warning me in advance.

No, wait, I used to get texts. I’ve changed provider since then. Perhaps I don’t get text warnings anymore?

Perhaps the universe doesn’t like me.

So I shuffle around in the increasingly uncomfortable sun outside of Vauxhall station, the Tube behind me, the entrance to National Rail ahead, a thriving mass of people and shops and daily life all around. I don’t need to worry yet, I’m early.

I don’t need to worry yet. It’s only just five.

Maybe I need to worry a little, but she’s only ten minutes late. That’s within the margin of error.

I look around, measuring each person against my memory of her. The build is wrong, or the hair’s off, or they’re not wearing glasses. Of course, it’s been a few years, so maybe I’m the one in error. I watch the passers-by, I watch the clock, and I wonder if I was right to think this day was doomed. It had seemed so implausible from the start.

This story begins in a lot of different places, but perhaps the most immediately relevant is in January of 2022. That’s when I randomly bumped into this article during a general wander through the internet:

It’s a rather interesting read, and well worth the time. If you want the abbreviated version:

Jason Isbell is a pretty cool guy but there are also many, many awesome Black women making country (and country adjacent) music and they are nowhere near celebrated enough.

I’m a pretty casual follower of country; it’s something I’ll have playing the background but it’s not something that I actively seek out like I do jazz. Still, I took that list of awesome Black ladies in the spirit it was intended and started listening my way through. It was late at night at the time, everyone else asleep, the dark wrapping round close and the air hovering in silent stillness. I had to turn the volume right down.

Now, I should emphasise that I did like pretty much every person on this list, several of whom have since become regular plays, but I also carried on browsing the internet at the same time in a general “well, this is nice” sort of way. There was no reason to think “Nightflyer”, a track picked at random after a YouTube search like every other song I’d found from the article, would be different, but then Allison Russell’s voice did that thing it does.

If you’ve heard her before, you know what I mean. If not…well, listen. Start where I did:

youtube

I acknowledged the first chorus as a pleasant sort of intro, then returned to the internet. I was concentrating on something else and remember, I’d set the volume to quiet, when she reached “I’m the smoke up above the trees, Good Lord.” Something about the way that sound vibrated over those words skipped my lazy ears and drove itself right into my spine. I stopped. Everything else stopped. There was nothing else in the world.

For a few moments I savoured those notes, that ever-changing tone that travelled right through my body. And then I tried to go back to my random internet browsing, but I couldn’t, because she was still singing and there was no room for anything else next to that voice. It swallowed everything. I hung there, motionless, and every other thought just disappeared.

And it wasn’t just the voice. The density of those lyrics, that imagery. This was poetry. Moving into the second verse to taste the contrast of “sick” and “light” at the back of your throat, then hitting the jarring, captivating idea of the “violent lullaby”, one of those lines that I really wish I could have written myself, followed by the way her voice slows and stretches on “suffocating” until you can feel that heat clinging to your skin.

“I’m each of his steps on the stairway / I’m his shadow in the door frame.” No metaphors there. Suddenly all those beautiful layers of imagery were gone, and dread slammed in their place. That was the first moment when reality snapped in, too much and too heavy. That was when I began to wonder if this song was more than just some pretty pictures and a mellifluous tone.

We touch that simple, stark fear for just two lines, just long enough to understand, and then we’re jerked away, our eyes following the narrator’s gaze up to the lunar moth and focusing so, so hard on its tapping. Anything to try and avoid what we know. The fact you can look elsewhere, but the smell still lingers, the beer-stained breath that ensures there’s no doubt exactly what’s underneath. It’s a masterpiece of writing, both in what’s directly said and what isn’t. The melody and the space between, indeed.

Of course, as I would later learn, this song isn’t about abuse. This album is not about abuse. It’s about what happens after, about claiming joy, about healing. In line with that, the coldest moment of “Nightflyer” oh so swiftly slides us into a place of relief. We can’t stay in that room for long. The next verse crawls back out and emerges into something new. Rebirth, one of the images Outside Child really delights in.

We enter utter triumph. His soul’s trapped, I left him behind so I could fly free. The gold and the green, so much richness and life just in those two colours. If you can reach “What the hell could they bring to stop me Lord?” and not raise your hands in celebration like a little old lady in church on Sunday, I’m not sure you’re listening to the same song as me.

I started to prepare for it to wind down, because we’d reached what felt like a climax and it was roughly the length you expect from an average track, but even better, it was one of those tunes that’s longer than you expect, when you’re bracing yourself for disappointment because you know it has to end but somehow there’s another verse to surprise you. This time the violence is defiance and transformation, from wounded bird to screaming hawk to a battle dove, each striking with impossible vividness.

Now we’re soaring again, breaking the bounds of earth for the moon and the solar flare. Expanding so far that that little room and its trapped moth are almost forgotten. Almost. Child and mother and love on all sides. A communion with every face of the universe.

“Nightflyer” did end, eventually, but after that breathless, transformative experience, sitting in the dark, clinging to my wakefulness when everyone else curled among their pillows, I knew I needed more. The list of artists from the original article was put on hold so I could fill myself on every song of Outside Child.

Whenever you listen to a new album for the first time, some tracks pierce your ears with particular vehemence. It doesn’t mean the others are bad, just that there’s a primal element to hearing music that you can’t always control. “Nightflyer” was obviously one for me, but on my first run through Outside Child proper, the hooks started with “Montreal” and “Hy-Brasil”, to be followed by “All of the Women” and “4th Day Prayer”, then “Persephone” and “The Hunters” when I went round yet again. As for the others? “The Runner”, “Poison Arrow”, “Little Rebirth” and “Joyful Motherfuckers”? Those came later.

“Montreal” being one that sticks with you makes sense because it’s the opening track, the very first thing you hear, but it’s more than that. The city breathes through this song, it’s a living thing. You can feel it, feel how small you are amidst its spires, feel how secure you are in its cradling arms. It builds structure and safety amid the darkness, literally thanks to the towering of those buildings and the shadows they cast, then you see the light creeping awake through the unity of old and young. And of course, seeing that child who’s been lost outside is where you establish the premise and title of the album, and a peek at the wider story to be told.

You also need “Montreal” to be early on, so when “4th Day Prayer” takes us to Westmount Park, when “Persephone” runs us up la rue St. Paul, when “The Runner” travels from “Mont Royale / Aux Portes des Lions” and stops us right out the South Hill Candy Store, we know what that means and we’re anchored in the certainty of that place. Montreal continues to breathe, and live, and cradle, throughout the album, and it helps shape its reality.

As for “Hy-Brasil”, that manages a feat that few songs manage, to be written in the present but to sound ancient, like it was first sung a thousand years ago, like it’s a spell or an enchantment first breathed by the fair folk, like it’s from a realm that’s not quite earth. I went on a deep dive afterwards trying to research the myths that I was sure must have inspired it. “Montreal” creates atmosphere, but “Hy-Brasil” reverberates in it.

“All of the Women” reminds us that this single story is part of a larger whole, that for every voice that’s found so many more are lost. It’s those little moments and small beauties that survive in the rawest and most painful of times, it’s a refusal to apologise and a demand to be seen. Every repeated phrase magnifies the defiance, the indomitable, indestructible nature of the cast-aside people, the people outside.

If “All of the Women” spans the present, “4th Day Prayer” is the song that most anchors Outside Child in the length of its history, in all the women who came before, in every generation that saw that same violence given a new face. As with the rest of the album, it’s not a cry of despair. It’s a refusal to accept that fate, a determination to deconstruct it and rewrite it so that no one in the future will have to survive that again. In many ways, it’s the sequel to “Quasheba, Quasheba”, though that was a song I hadn’t discovered yet.

“Persephone” wasn’t quite what I expected the first time through, not based on its title, but on relistens I managed to appreciate it. The immediacy of the blood and violence in the first verse, that moment of hopeless isolation when she doesn’t even bother to ask the cop for help, because she’s already learnt that the people who are supposed to protect aren’t there for her, the enigma that is Persephone, goddess of spring and bringer of new life, given human form, the desperation involved when all you can do is keep moving “nowhere to go but I had to get away from him”, how even though we never leave the blood and the bruises and the fear behind, love still grows precious and intimate among it all. To borrow from another Persephone and her companions in Hadestown:

“Some flowers bloom Where the green grass grows Our praise is not for them But the ones who bloom in the bitter snow We raise our cups to them”

Parts of “The Hunters” could be a lullaby in a child’s ear, if you don’t pay too much attention to the words. If you do, then that jarring, violent image from “Nightflyer” is given solid form against the gentlest melody. When the lyrics finally registered, my main thought was mostly: “ouch.” This is another fairy tale, not quite the same myth as “Hy-Brasil” but still one that travels back centuries to those primal days when monsters howled in the forest and stories were inked in blood.

Now, I’d discovered Allison Russell in an article about country music but none of these tracks were country as I imagined it. I saw the album described as Americana and/or roots, and tried to find a more specific definition of what those terms meant, but…well that wasn’t helpful.

What Outside Child is is expansive and intimate all at once, bringing you into a place so private then singing out until daylight rings. It’s one person’s story turned into the history of humanity and all its experiences. I said this isn’t an album about abuse. What it is about, in many ways, is love. Not just romance, but a dozen different ways that one human can connect to another, and to the world, to know that it’s worth living:

It's trembling first love:

"Don’t make a sound, don’t cry out love Your parents are sleeping just above I kiss you once, I kiss you twice Fall asleep looking in each other’s eyes"

and the love passed through the generations, from your ancestors:

"My great grandmother was a magic weaver ...

Down in the cradle oh I would hear hеr as I breathed my soul beliеved"

to your children:

“I am The Mother of the Evening Star / I am the Love that Conquers All��.

It’s love of a place:

"Oh my Montreal Can I dream of you tonight?"

and of music:

"Then I heard that Rock and Roll ...

I was up above me, I was standing right beside me - oh And I saw my deliverance"

It’s the love that grows in unlikely places and small moments:

"she likes the way that I smile and sing as I walk I like her fabulous outfits, the proud way she moves, she says "I used to be a dancer...some grace you don't lose ...

When she's not there I worry about her"

and the love that comes when you’re connected to the whole world:

"Can you feel the Mother moving Through the bonds of our works?"

The love that’s pulled from darkness and horror:

"Poison arrow be kind to me and I’ll be kind to you ...

All you sad and broken travelers, come on”

and love for all the other people who’ve been through the same thing:

"Three for the children breaking through Four for the day we're standing in the sun"

And it ends with a call for you to express that love too:

"If you’vе got love in your heart, but it’s way down in the dark You bеtter let it see the sun, this world is almost done ...

Hey you hey you Who you think I’m talking to? Show 'em what you got in your heart"

Though of course, you can’t forget the love that should be, but isn’t:

"Oh Papa, oh Mama It is of you I am afraid ...

Curse you child, curse you child We should have killed you as a babe"

And through every love and every lyric is that voice. That voice, that holds a thousand tones. The sweet and the soaring, the rough and the raw, that simmering, controlled intensity that vibrates through every atom followed by joyous freedom that sends you flying. The whole world and every emotion in it can be found in Allison Russell’s voice.

I needed more, and turned back to YouTube to find the next Allison Russell album, but all I could see were a couple of random, though excellent songs. I didn’t know “By Your Side” but I could feel each word and note crawling inside me, settling just under my skin to stay long after the video ended. “Landslide” was an old friend, and already much loved, but just spinning those lyrics into French created something new, forcing me to pay attention when I could have dismissed its familiarity.

Then YouTube started to recommend unfamiliar bands by the names of Our Native Daughters and Birds of Chicago, which wasn’t what I was looking for at all. Where were all of Allison Russell’s other albums?

I don’t think it even occurred to me that one CD could be the sum total, or that Allison Russell could maybe have made music under other names. That’s until I paid a little more attention to the thumbnails. There was a very definite resemblance between one of the Native Daughters, and one half of Birds of Chicago, and the woman I’d watched sing “Nightflyer”. I decided to investigate.

I went and listened to Songs of Our Native Daughters, and yes, there was that unmistakable voice amid all those other tones that I still had to learn to distinguish, those other brilliant women who I’ve since added to my regular playlist for their own solo work. That was my introduction to Rhiannon Giddens and Leyla McCalla, and it redirected me back to Amythyst Kiah, also one of Jason Isbell’s recommendations. Definitely a good decision on my part.

There was fun and celebration on Songs of Our Native Daughters, but there was a lot that was serious and thought-provoking too, the sort of thing that makes a lover of history at once happy and horrified. And then there was “Mama’s Cryin’ Long”.

“Mama’s Cryin’ Long” is the kind of song which rips all the words out of your mouth and leaves you transfixed in shock, barely able to breathe, let alone move. Don’t believe me? Watch the documentary video, and the faces of everyone else when they first hear it. They’re like “yeah, we’re gonna help you record this, but first we need to recover for a minute”.

When I later went and listened to Rhiannon Giddens on her own, when I worked my way through a back catalogue that included “At the Purchaser’s Option” and “Come Love Come” and “Julie”, I looked back at “Mama’s Cryin’ Long” and realised exactly who had to be responsible for that particular retelling of history. Discovering Allison Russell was a gateway to a whole new world and an endless list of singers and songwriters and musicians who deserved my attention.

*Glances at the Valerie June and Adia Victoria and Rissi Palmer and Queen Esther and Kyshona that have also filled my listening since I began following Allison Russell on Twitter.*

After recovering from Our Native Daughters, I immersed myself in Birds of Chicago, whose music is so excellent to have feelings by. They’re songs to stick together the pieces of broken things, a dozen ways to write about love in the face of doubt, loneliness and violence. It’s the aching beauty of “Super Lover” and “Till It’s Gone”, the defiance and even triumph of “Cannonball” and “All the City Girls”, the unfettered joy of “Alright, Alright” and “San Souci”, the magic of those “tiny electric sea horses” in “Mountains, Forests”, the whole lifetime painted in “Hold Steady, Rock Slow”, that old spiritual somehow written just a few years ago known as “Barley” the intimacy and intensity of “I Have Heard Words” and then “American Flowers”, which might just be a perfect song.

Further back there was Po’ Girl, and the seeds that would eventually bloom in Outside Child, the laying down of themes and ideas that still had to grow. Imagine my surprise when I heard the opening of “Corner Talk”, and it was basically “All of the Women”. I tell people that they have to listen to the entirety of that Outside Child to fully understand it, to trace the concepts underpinning every song, but really, if you want to see it completely, you need to look right back to Po’ Girl and linger in the words of “No Shame” and “Kathy”.

It seemed a good time to go back to Outside Child and listen again, listen closer. Now I knew it was autobiographical, and I was prepared for my own emotional reactions, I was able to realise a little better the weight of that story, put context to that moment in “Fourth Day Prayer” when she claims the cemetery as the safest place to sleep, when she chooses it over what’s supposed to be home. Deeper layers upon deeper layers as I tried to climb all the way inside.

This isn’t just an album, it’s an autobiography. It’s not just an autobiography, it’s a family history. That’s another reason you can’t just stop at the songs on Outside Child. You need to at least include “Quasheba, Quasheba” and “You’re Not Alone”, chronologically the first and last parts of the saga even if they both appeared before it. Between them you slide in “Hy-Brasil”(great-grandmother was a magic weaver) as a more recent ancestor before first adding in a Po’ Girl (and Birds of Chicago) number, “Kathy”, as one step closer to the present. If you’re listening to “Kathy” then you have to play “No Shame” next, so you can hear that echo from “Why’d you let him steal your joy?” to “I will not let him steal my joy.” That’s an idea we’ll hear again, even more definitively, in “The Runner” with “Can’t steal my joy”. Eventually you reach “You’re Not alone”, where joy is made manifest in “Every little shiny thing”. “You’re Not Alone” ends with the bequeathing of that inheritance, that ancestral strength, on to the next generation:

“In the cradle of the circle All the ones who came before ya Their strength is yours now You're not alone”

Another way to do it is to start with “Quasheba, Quasheba”, then move to “Fourth Day Prayer”. That path follows the history through its geography:

"From the Golden Coast of Ghana To the bondage of Grenada"

Then one step further:

"From the coast of Africa To the hills of Grenada To the cold of Montreal That whip, that whip still falls"

It doesn’t get much more explicit than that, this ongoing cycle, this long line of Black women still hearing that same violence, the kind magnified over generations.

Except it’s not just an immutable, unbreaking cycle. “Nightflyer” is a song of here and now, with in one person’s lifespan, but it’s also the centre point of the narrative, looking both back and forward from the narrator’s experience as a child, and as a descendant of others, to where she becomes “Mother of the Evening Star” herself.

No, that Evening Star label is not explicitly explained in this often enigmatic song, but it does become clear when its echoes recur at the final chronological point (so-far) in this story, “You’re Not Alone”:

“Hey my little Evening Star”, becomes a direct address, not about the narrator of “Nightflyer” but about the Evening Star herself, the next generation. The story continues, only this time with a promise that pain doesn’t last forever, that you don’t have to be alone in your suffering, that this inheritance can turn into love.

(Brief pause to admire that rhyme on “compass” and “wonderous”.)

Just stop and think how powerful that is for a moment, to look back at hundreds of years of violence being passed from generation to generation among your ancestors and say “That’s enough. This stops with me. My daughter will never have to go through what I did. What we did.”

I followed that narrative from end to end and through all its branches. Within a few months, I was reasonably certain I’d actually listened to most of Allison Russell’s work, both solo and in various groups, most of it multiple times. That might have been enough, but I was going to have a few strokes of luck all in a row.

I could have stopped there, with the listening. When I first discovered Outside Child, the thought of getting to hear it live didn’t really occur to me. Pretty much every artist that I’ve seen was someone I’d been a fan of (or at least known of) for years. I suppose it felt like progressing from an album to a concert was a kind of long-term development that couldn’t be rushed. Well, in the cases where they were still around to tour in the first place. There are disadvantages to being born in the wrong era, musically speaking.

On top of that, I’d already been to one big concert in 2022, a long-term ambition realised, and I still couldn’t quite believe that it had happened, and gone well. Asking for more seemed tempting fate. When I walked out of The Forum, Bath in April with the last notes of Imelda May’s “Diamonds” lingering in my ears and my throat and my chest, with more than a decade as a fan given tangible form, I thought that moment of satisfaction would feed me for years until the stars next aligned for someone else’s concert.

That’s why the decision I made in May to check out the tour page on Allison Russell’s website was a bit of a whim, perhaps a reaction to having listened so intently to all her music in such a short space of time, perhaps because I was still carrying some of the feeling from Imelda May. If you had asked me, I’d have said that the chances of a Canadian musician based in Nashville who I’d never even heard played on the radio over here appearing somewhere that I could practically manage to attend was so small as to have been invisible. Looking for dates felt like inviting disappointment.

Except there were two dates. Two. Two performances in the UK. One of them was at a festival and I knew I didn’t want to bother about all of that, but there was also one London gig at a little place called Omeara.

London, now London I could do. London’s just over an hour away by rail. Except, of course, for an evening performance, there’s no guarantee you’ll make it back to the station before the last train leaves. It even said, on the Omeara website, that concerts could finish late. I’d need somewhere to stay, which was more money and more logistics and frankly my first instinct when something looks like it might be complicated is to just label it impossible. I put the idea aside.

Well, mostly. I did really, really want to go though. I couldn’t remember the last time discovering a new artist had hit me quite so hard, and there was only one album in recent years that had given me a comparable number of emotions. Funnily enough, it was the album I’d been lucky enough to see, at least in part, live at The Forum earlier in the year. Life Love Flesh Blood by Imelda May.

I say in part because it was the tour for 11 Past the Hour, so obviously those were the tracks that got the most airtime. As for the even older stuff, the rockabilly stuff, she’d warned us before the show started that it’d only make two or three appearances, making sure we wouldn’t be too disappointed. I wasn’t because I do adore the newer sound, but I couldn’t help but wish that’d I managed to see her earlier, when the back catalogue was smaller and it was easier to guarantee which songs would make it to the setlist.

My brain began to persistently nag me that going to see someone performing from their first album was the best way to make sure you heard every song. Leave it until later in their career and there would be picking and choosing, like with Imelda May. I didn’t know when Allison Russell would be back in the UK or if it’d be a convenient time and place for me.

Plus, Imelda May had been my first concert in years and it had been incredible beyond words. Of course I wanted to find a way to do it again, to try and recapture that feeling that only exists when you and the singer are in the same room and their performance saturates the air. Yes, it also made me more sceptical that I’d be able to make it work, as two dream concerts in one year seemed a bit much, but I knew I’d regret not trying.

I am not, as a general rule, a social person. My mother believes that interacting with lots of other people is healthy. I personally try to avoid it. On this particular occasion, however, her suggestion that I find someone else to go with me to make the logistics easier was a good idea. In theory. It’d have probably been better if I had a friend network of more than three people, none of whom lived anywhere near me, or London.

However, I am still a Revver at heart, even if Revelation Rock-Gospel Choirs is no more, and being a Revver means having at least one acquaintance in every city. A little memory snuck into my head, whispering that I did have one person who lived in London. Or she had done, last time I saw her. Someone with excellent taste in music and who was generally a delight to spend time with.

Me being me, I focused on the potential problems:

I hadn’t spoken to her for three years. Not because we’d fallen out or anything like that, just life (and lockdowns) had been happening, but messaging someone who you only known middlingly well after all that time just to ask a favour seemed a little rude. I wasn’t sure if we were close enough friends for such an out-of-nowhere request. Would it be weird?

I didn’t know if she still lived in London. A quick glance at her Facebook said she was in Manchester. Now, you might think this brought my planning to an end, but I happened to know that she had lived in Manchester before London, and she was also notoriously bad at social media. It wasn’t entirely inconceivable that she just hadn’t got round to changing it. For over three years.

In line with her general uselessness on social media (possibly her only character flaw, which for a woman who rebuilds villages destroyed by earthquakes seems pretty minor), she was also notoriously bad a replying to messages. I could Facebook, e-mail and text her and it wouldn’t be a surprise if I received only silence on all three.

The chances of her being available on that night were slim. We’re talking someone who travels, and volunteers, and helps construct schools in remote corners of the world (see, being bad at responding to messages does seem a small annoyance, doesn’t it?). Her calendar tends to be pretty packed.

I cannot emphasise enough, with so many things that could go wrong and so little chance of success, just what a big deal it was for me to ask her anyway. The music had enough of an impact on me for me to consider it worth it.

I sent a message in the most casual tone I could possibly manage, and put a lot of energy into preparing for a negative response, or even more likely, no response at all:

“Are you still living in London?”

Not only did I get a reply, it arrived within two hours:

“Hi Devon! Yes, still here!”

Now a series of questions, each asked in the assumption she’d say no:

(This is the abbreviated version. I tend towards wordy, as you may have guessed by the fact that I’m over 5000 words into this and we haven’t reached the venue yet)

“There’s a concert in London that I’d like to go to but I’m not sure I’ll make the last train. Do you have any floor/sofa space available?”

She needed to check her calendar, as she was away from home, but it was a conditional yes.

That could have been enough. It was enough, really, I didn’t want to push it. I had the most important thing. But then I dared the final hurdle, grasping for the star:

“Is the concert itself something you'd be interested in, on the off chance?” I sent her the link to “Nightflyer”, to the exact same video that had stopped me in my tracks. A concert is meant to be a communal experience. Imelda May had been shared with one of that network of three friends. And it was too long since I’d seen this particular acquaintance.

I knew she had good taste in music, after all, we’d met in the choir. The first concert we sang in together, she wore her steel-toed work boots because they were the only black shoes she had to hand. That meant I could stand on her feet as much as I wanted but she had to be extra careful not to tread on mine. From such moments are friendships made. Every concert after that point, I tried to stand next to her because I knew if I got lost, she’d help me find the right note. The fact she had impeccable taste in books was just a bonus.

This time there wasn’t an instant response. Days went past as my jitters grew. I wanted to buy my ticket; I wanted solid confirmation that this could work. Perhaps she’d changed her mind. When five days had passed, I finally poked her, in the most unobnoxious way I could manage. It turned out she was just being bad at Facebook again, and still didn’t have access to the calendar. I did get a proper answer to one question:

“Did you like the video?”

“Yes, she's got an amazing voice!”

That was what I needed to hear. I gave a big sigh of relief, because at least it meant she really did want to come and wasn’t just trying to gently put me off. A few days later, without me needing to harass her again, she finally returned to her calendar and within minutes of her confirmation, I’d booked two tickets. There was still some finagling to do about trains and times and where we were going to eat, but we were on track.

Which brings me here. The sun and the glare outside Vauxhall station. The crowds full of brunettes with glasses who aren’t her. I’m trying to connect to the Wi-Fi in the nearby Starbucks. Perhaps I can message her that way. If not, my brain is busy trying to calculate how long I can stay here or if I’ll need to make my own way to London Bridge and hope she joins me.

Yes, I overthink things.

I’m leaning on a lamppost, fingers and head focusing on my phone, wondering if she cut her hair short and dyed it purple since our last meeting and that’s why I’ve been unable to spot her. It seems unlikely, but you never know. Then a familiar figure pushes past, in too much of a rush to notice me. It takes me a moment to notice my own recognition, especially after the false alarms.

No, this is definitely her. It’s the back of her head, no face or glasses, but I’m so certain that I wonder how I could have doubted my memory. She’s missed me in passing just as easily as I missed her, hurrying a bit too urgently to make up for the delay. That’s what a dentist appointment will do to you. The one thing I hadn’t accounted for in my long, long list of reasons for things to potentially go wrong? The length of time needed to polish up your teeth.

Still, my original plan is now half an hour out and I really, really need to make sure we reached Omeara in time. There’s a rush to her flat, just enough time to drop my bag (not even long enough to properly inspect her bookshelves) and then back to the Tube and the baking furnace of the Jubilee Line.

I’d told my companion she was in charge of directing us, her being the one with local knowledge, but once we step out at London Bridge, I take the lead again. I’d carefully traced the route on the map before I’d left the house this morning, reciting the turns over and over again, peering at the Streetview option but not quite spotting the Omeara sign. I’m just heading in the general direction and hoping it’ll be there. I’m still not certain it’s all going to happen.

In an astonishing twist, it turns out that if you follow the directions exactly, Omeara is exactly where it’s said to be on the map. For avoidance of doubt, as we walk past the clearly labelled door, a strain of music floats out from behind the nearest wall:

“Yeah I’m a midnight rider

Stone bonafide night flyer.”

Soundcheck time. Yep, definitely in the right place.

In Part Two, we take a slight detour as I reminisce on some of the other big concerts I’ve seen, from Joan Armatrading to Imelda May.

#Bardic Writings #if music be the food of love #Youtube

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bardofsomerset · 1 year ago

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Pitching is a funny thing. I first discovered the existence of this book in a newsletter from the YA author Malinda Lo. She described Great Circle as:

“An epic novel in two strands: one a historical novel about a woman pilot in the first half of the twentieth century; the second a contemporary story about a Hollywood actress cast to play the pilot in a film. There is some gorgeous writing here about flying. Bonus: the book starts out feeling pretty straight, but surprise! The pilot is queer.”

Now, I was very intrigued by the concept of telling the actual story of the historical figure alongside a present day recreation, but with the description of a woman pilot, part of my brain went to Amelia Earhart and – perhaps because of the amount of time spent reading Doc’s Overwatch fic – part to Tracer. I wouldn’t recommend a book to Doc based just on gay content, especially if (as it sounds here) it’s a secondary thing, but a historical epic about a female pilot that plays with the line between story and reality? That sounded like it could be in her wheelhouse.

What I wasn’t sure about was if it was for me, so I went and read some other blurbs and reviews to give me some more general impressions. It continued to sound intriguing, but one of those reviews mentioned the heroine growing up in Missoula. Which, had it been a month earlier, would have meant nothing to me, but it was a place I had recently seen mentioned in the news.

“Isn’t Missoula in Montana?”

Because if this was a book about a female pilot from Montana going on epic historical adventures, then I was pretty sure I was morally obligated to tell Doc about it.

(Also, the two main complaints I saw when reading reviews were that the book was too long, and that too many depressing things happened in it, and as we see from this review, those are not things Doc will ever complain about.)

So, my eventual pitch looked a little like this (I didn’t keep a copy, so this isn’t word for word, but the general gist is the same):

Two POV characters, each with very different voices. The first, a girl growing up in Montana in the early part of the 20th Century who (with the help of a bootlegger) becomes a daring aviatrix of the Amelia Earhart generation. Her epic adventures take her through Prohibition, the Depression and the Second World War. The second, the modern day actress due to play her in a movie, trying to make sense of the present by looking at the past.

Which shifted the focus a bit more to the things I know interest Doc.

Then, at some point in my own reading, I realised that it was possible that Marian lived, which despite being a pleasant surprise to me, also filled me with a feeling of dread. Would Doc think that was a cop out? Would it undermine all the good stuff beforehand?

Instead, I get to read this beautiful review, which is pretty full of depth and gorgeous prose itself:

“Single-minded drive is the furnace that drives the train forward, but things must be sacrificed to its firebox. Can a runaway train ever be stopped? Do we, the holders of history, actually want it to be? What relationship to the person does the legend have?”

“I loved Marian, she angered me, I felt a kinship with her and that kinship made me all the angrier. “

“tethered to her the way a ship is to its anchor, bobbing and floating with the tides, in touch even out of sight, a flexible line barely seen inthe water between them,”

“The person Marian Graves has become has hardened herself so much she is almost a statue, because she has the unhappy reality of having become a legend even before she’s died. She’s a runaway train, now, and there’s no going back, and she must become this beautiful symbol of struggle and womahood and courage. Where would there be room to be simply Marian, stubborn and frustrating and lonely and sad?”

“I understood all the narrative reasons that she had to die, the beauty and the tragedy of it, that once one has committed to becoming a story, one can no longer be a person. That to become Noted Aviator Marian Graves, Marian Graves, orphan, of Missoula, Montana, had to die.”

“Peace is possible, yes, if you let go of the glory. And letting go of the glory may be as difficult as letting go of the runaway train, and falling to the river below.”

“He is a pawn of god who thinks himself God,”

“He wants to be so much, but he is just one of a line of people who wanted to love Marian into stillness, but cannot; not him with force; not Ruth with her brightness, not Jamie with his softness, not even Caleb, though he manages the closest by recognizing her for the feral cat she is.”

“How the truth can be bent through humanity and somehow the arc, the great circle if you will, can be made whole again through reinterpreting the beauty but also the fear and pain through art.”

“Not in a vague foreshadowing kind of sense that she’ll die, but we are told over and over again that she had that tragic death, that she was the that beautiful and brilliant and brief firework, always doomed to this, and that it is part of the beauty of her story. People who live, and grow old, can become disappointing, they can have bad opinions, and their fire can dim to an ember. But those who die young? Who die brave? They get to be at the peak, and conversations about them are enrobed with their gloss and glitter. Hadley is the frame that allows us to see the whole picture.”

(It’s weird with Hadley because she’s so necessary, from a structural and thematic viewpoint, and the whole fact she exists as a lens to view Marian is part of what attracted me to the book in the first place, but at the same time it’s hard not to skim through her sections to get back to the deeper and more interesting stuff.)

“a vague sense that this movie might be her great trek across the world, the thing that makes it matter, but the stakes will never be high enough for her to become anything from it, and she cannot disappear into the sea and rise fresh, and maybe that’s Hadley’s tragedy. That she can’t choose to die like Noted Aviator Marian Graves.”

(And there you are finding depth in Hadley’s shallowness anyway.)

“the language of it is so glorious that it feels like eating a bit too much fine chocolate: sweet and thick and rich, and even if its a bit much, it can be forgiven for all the pleasure you derive from it.”

“laden with idiosyncrasies and hypocrises and all the little things that make us human, delivered in such a loving fashion that as quick as you are to be angry with them, to yell at them, you see the truth of them. You feel the wholeness of them, and you are forced to, if not forgive them, square with the fullness of who they are.”

This was a delight to read, and had me nodding along in agreement all the way through.

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

Thank you to @skylineofspace for sponsoring this!

“Marian was real, obviously, but people’s lives don’t get preserved like fossils. The best you can hope for is that time will have hardened around someone’s memory, preserving a void in their shape.” --Great Circle, pg 291

I loved this book. I loved this book so much that a review of it never got written because I felt like anything I had to say about it had to be more involved than anything I had time to offer, and even now I sit here so afraid that I can’t convey what this book gave to me. I think this might be the best book I read this year. I want everyone to read this (and am, in fact, sending this to @rosepetalrevolution as soon as I finish this review)

In a non-spoilery way, I would say that this book is about what it takes to make a legend, a hero, a symbol, and the conseqeunces therein. Single-minded drive is the furnace that drives the train forward, but things must be sacrificed to its firebox. Can a runaway train ever be stopped? Do we, the holders of history, actually want it to be? What relationship to the person does the legend have? There are other things that it can be about, but I would say that is the one overarching idea.

SPOILERS BELOW

Again, I fucking loved this book. I was in love with this book from the first 50 pages. I was so afraid that throughout the whole thing, is was going to drop the ball massively, and I don’t ever feel that it did. I loved Marian, she angered me, I felt a kinship with her and that kinship made me all the angrier.

This line: “It wasn’t that Marian didn’t miss Ruth. Rather, she took her missing and sealed it away. Her natural inclination was to carry on, to think of other things.” This is such a Montana way of thinking about things--my grandmother started selling my grandfather’s things before his funeral, even, not because she DIDN’T love him, but because she DID--and I felt it so keenly and deeply, and it is her strength, and her weakness. One of the things I love about the book is that Marian goes through a great deal of trial but it doesn’t break her. If anything, it makes her spine more iron. BUT the stiffer she gets, the harder it is for her to bend for the love of anyone. “The uninhabited ring of space she’d cultivated around herself begins to feel less like a protective barrier than scorched earth.”

Even Caleb, who knows her heart and manages to keep himself tethered to her the way a ship is to its anchor, bobbing and floating with the tides, in touch even out of sight, a flexible line barely seen inthe water between them, knows that Marian can no longer be anywhere. In response to her saying she envies is ability to stay put and be content, he says: “No, you don’t. If you did, you’d find that place, too. You don’t even let the possibility in.” And he’s right. The person Marian Graves has become has hardened herself so much she is almost a statue, because she has the unhappy reality of having become a legend even before she’s died. She’s a runaway train, now, and there’s no going back, and she must become this beautiful symbol of struggle and womahood and courage. Where would there be room to be simply Marian, stubborn and frustrating and lonely and sad? She has die. There is no other choice she can make, but to die in the attempt. I think even to have completed it would have broken her, in the end, because there would be no more worlds to conquer. Nowhere to go but down, plummeting like a gannet into the sea.

Which is why when i first read this, I did not like that she lived. I understood all the narrative reasons that she had to die, the beauty and the tragedy of it, that once one has committed to becoming a story, one can no longer be a person. That to become Noted Aviator Marian Graves, Marian Graves, orphan, of Missoula, Montana, had to die. It actually only took a few days of distance for me to change my position on that front. Rereading it, i absolutely think the survival is the correct ending, especially the way it’s done, because Noted Aviator Marian Graves DOES die. The book even says she dies twice, she dies and she is reborn to live again as a sheepherder, in peace and in ease. Even when she has money, she simply becomes Alice Root, because she finally does have roots, because she has gone down the rabbit hole. I came to respect it as the perfect end. Peace is possible, yes, if you let go of the glory. And letting go of the glory may be as difficult as letting go of the runaway train, and falling to the river below.

I realize only now that I’ve said nothing about Barclay, in all the things I’ve had to say about Marian. Barclay is a man who is a means to an end and can’t realize it. He is a pawn of god who thinks himself God, and he is pathetic for it. You hate him, and he is made to be hated, but you can almost feel how much he longs to be powerful and how Marian is this wild horse he tinks can be broken and tamed, but if she could be, he wouldn’t want her anymore. I think it says something about the power of Marian as a character that Barclay can only be asked to fade. But for him, she never would have flown, and but for flying, he might have had her, and so the trap he set for her caught his own leg instead. He wants to be so much, but he is just one of a line of people who wanted to love Marian into stillness, but cannot; not him with force; not Ruth with her brightness, not Jamie with his softness, not even Caleb, though he manages the closest by recognizing her for the feral cat she is. Barclay is only one of a line.

I love so much Jamie’s struggle with Sarah, with Marian, with the idea of authenticity, and what can be seen through art. How the truth can be bent through humanity and somehow the arc, the great circle if you will, can be made whole again through reinterpreting the beauty but also the fear and pain through art. The way he loves women who do not see their lives as natural progressions of the choices they’ve made. The way he cannot bear women who not see their lives as natural progressions of the choices they’ve made. I think all the time about that last confrontation with Sarah:

“He saw how she was warmed by her sense of her own goodness. Was he, in the same way, seduced by an idea of his own virtue? How could anyone see clearly through the innate haze of self-righteousness?”

How indeed! I think this is the struggle for all of us, that we, naturally, struggle not to see ourselves as heroes, struggle to see the places where we make excuses, but instead of shrugging that off, Jamie recognizes where he has been made a victim of people who think the way they want to do things is the right way to do them by virtue of them wanting it. And in the moment he worries he might become that, he leaves. He is given the resolution he desires, and I would argue that the resolution isn’t the disappointment of Sarah, but the revealing of his own seduction to becoming her. That is the fear, that he might lose that discernment, that discernment that allows him to be the artist he is. It would be a more comfortable life but a less fulfilling one. Jamie IS his convictions, and I find that extremely compelling as a character idea.

The Hadley portions of the book. What do I think this has to say about the whole story, and why does it exist? It’s tough to say for sure, I think. It is most definitely not the strongest part of this story. The obvious answer is that of course she is the framing device that allows us to reveal Marian’s survival as a surprise to us. Not in a vague foreshadowing kind of sense that she’ll die, but we are told over and over again that she had that tragic death, that she was the that beautiful and brilliant and brief firework, always doomed to this, and that it is part of the beauty of her story. People who live, and grow old, can become disappointing, they can have bad opinions, and their fire can dim to an ember. But those who die young? Who die brave? They get to be at the peak, and conversations about them are enrobed with their gloss and glitter. Hadley is the frame that allows us to see the whole picture.

I do think the Hadley stuff is, on balance, pretty weak. It lacks the vitality and struggle of Marian’s chapters--every time I came across them, I mostly waited for them to be over. And maybe some of this was the point of them. Hadley’s problems are pretty vapid and shallow compared to Marian’s despite having some modern-day semblance of an echo to Marian’s. But she can’t be Marian. There are no Marians here, in 2014, there are only fading movie posters from Not!Twilight or Not!Hunger Games (I don’t remember which and please trust me when i say it’s unimportant) and a vague sense that this movie might be her great trek across the world, the thing that makes it matter, but the stakes will never be high enough for her to become anything from it, and she cannot disappear into the sea and rise fresh, and maybe that’s Hadley’s tragedy. That she can’t choose to die like Noted Aviator Marian Graves.

The descriptions and prose in this book are lush and delicious. There will be plenty of people who comment that this book is far too long, and I know the current thinking is anything over 300 pages needs to be edited down, but I refuse to accept that as being true while people are reading trilogies that are actually the whole story, inflated from 500 pages to 900 to justify their existence. Why, to inflate people’s book count and give them a feeling of accomplishment? Nah, we don’t live that way here. Great Circle has its moments of indulgence to be sure, but the language of it is so glorious that it feels like eating a bit too much fine chocolate: sweet and thick and rich, and even if its a bit much, it can be forgiven for all the pleasure you derive from it. I think of little bits like “felt like swallowing a sparkler” or

The character work sets this book apart from others. The main characters, of course, are laden with idiosyncrasies and hypocrises and all the little things that make us human, delivered in such a loving fashion that as quick as you are to be angry with them, to yell at them, you see the truth of them. You feel the wholeness of them, and you are forced to, if not forgive them, square with the fullness of who they are. But more than that, i think of the very much side character Jackie Cochran, and how we get a backstory of her in ten pages that tells more of her nature than any number of lesser written three hundred page novels. Not only do you get the sense of what Jackie does, but what it says about her, and what it means. It’s in moments like this that I really appreciated the intense craft that Shipstead brings to the table.

There is still so much to say about this novel, and if I were with all the time in the world, it would be interesting to do little thousand word jots every fifty pages, a la the way I’m doing Fata Morgana. But, as the book says, ‘Endlessness is torture, too” and so this will have to suffice, this and the absolute recommendation to read this book. It has such a sense of longing throughout, and of the weight of that stone that builds a legend. There is only one book I’ve read this year that would come into any serious contention for the best book I’ve read this year, and this would beat it soundly if the tiebreaker were which one I enjoyed reading more. Please read it.

#Reblog

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bardofsomerset · 2 years ago

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I thought you’d like the way it uses its fantasy elements. It was seeing you talk about the circumstances where you do like fantasy that made me think this might be a good book for you, but I couldn’t quite figure out how to pitch it (it’s been a few years since I read it and I don’t have a copy, so my memory is less than perfect). I wouldn’t have described it as fantasy if I did though. Maybe fantastical, but not quite fantasy. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Angela Carter, but it very much reminds me of how she creates these sort of magical, sort of mythological, sort of real settings and you can’t ever really tell where the edges lie.

What I wasn’t sure about was if you’d like both narrators, or if you’d get so engaged with Mary that you’d resent going back to Morgan, especially early on when Morgan by circumstance is so disconnected from most of what’s happening on the island. I’m glad you enjoyed both of them. Especially when you point out her bravery, because you’re right it’s easy to dismiss that when it’s so common in fiction, even when it isn’t in the real world.

Thinking about Barney, maybe it’s meant to be remarkable how much Mary loves him? Considering the circumstances of his conception (her parents obviously still struggled with that), the lengths that were gone to to try and separate her from her relationship with him and the less than stellar quality of the other parenting we see, love, especially the kind where she still wanted to be so close to him, was by no means a given. I do agree he didn’t need to be her son for it to work, and obviously if it doesn’t connect it doesn’t connect.

I like how you go through that whole paragraph about Mary refusing to name what happened whilst also not explicitly naming what happened. Much as I appreciate the moment in the book, and Mary’s attitude to life more generally, I don’t have that personal connection to the rural grit aspects. I always like reading reviews where people pull out the things I might not have given a great deal of attention.

I’ll agree that working on yourself so you match the person you want to see is valuable work, in part because it’s not a skill I’ve done very well at developing myself.

The stuff about memory not being real fits pretty well with the blurry treatment of reality more generally, and the lack of clearly defined beginning and end. It leaves lots of spaces and questions that are really interesting to mull over but you don’t really need to answer. Things like the exact nature of the snake ropes come under that heading as well. I know I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the Thrashing House, even years after I last read it.

This review has given me some things to muse about, reminded me just how gorgeous some of the writing in this book is and has made me want to reread, so thank you.

Snake Ropes by Jess Richards

Thank you to @bardofsomerset for commissioning this!

Non-spoiler: This book exists in a strange kind of half-fantasy world that really works for me personally. I don’t know that I love the way it all comes down on the subjects of love and memory, but I think it has some absolute banger passages, and some really interesting things to say about the nature of human beings, and who we are at core.

spoilers below

I went into this book completely cold. Not only did I not know what the book was about, the copy I ordered turned out to be an advance copy, so there was nothing on it but the title, and the first three lines of the book. I could have told you not a single thing about this book when I went into it. And honestly, I think that was for the best! If someone had tried to sell me on the book calling it a fantasy I would have come into the novel with a completely different set of assumptions, and I would have been on guard, so to speak, for totally different things. I loved not realizing that we were in a world where there is an aspect of magic, and some myths are real, and the line is VERY blurry between story and fact.

I was very taken with this world where selkies are real, and a tree grew itself into a home of punishment, and you can hear things in the metal, and also, it might be related to our world--the island sells things to men from the mainland who talk about mobile pouches, and there’s some discussion of fast fashion--but none of these things are elaborated on too deeply, or ever threaten to dominate the story. I believe Richards knows all the answers to these things! But she is aware that just because she knows them, doesn’t mean the reader needs to. That level of restraint is not as common as we might hope in the modern day. Actually, I suppose not historically either.

I really preferred Mary to Morgan, and I think knowing me as a person that’s not all that shocking. They are both constructions, they have made themselves into what they are, from different ends of the spectrum: Too much experience and not enough. I don’t dislike Morgan at all, and I think she’s a fantastic example of how a person can be sheltered but brave. She doesn’t know anything about the world except through books and general vibes, hasn’t been outside properly in a long time, but no matter how dark and how dangerous, she knows that even suffering out there will be better than the misery of in here.

Actually, coming hot off the heels of me saying i didn’t like Morgan as well, let’s talk about how I fucking love Morgan. What she does is promiment in stories because it is realistically so rare. We, as human beings, are extremely prone to ‘the devil we know’ and I think most of us would simply stay where we were miserable yet safe. But something being common doesn’t make it laudable, just because most people are cowards makes it no less cowardly. But not Morgan! Morgan takes the leap and seizes her moment, and I love that. I love that she prefers danger to suffocation. She even says so, when she’s talking about how she wishes she had a wicked stepmother, that she wants anger and rage and fury instead of this prison. “I know from all the storybooks that wicked stepmothers are to be avoided if you wish to remain good or pure or ignorant. I really want one.”

All that being said, I still preferred Mary on balance. I loved how competent she was, you absolutely never get the sense of her being adrift or in peril, even when Langward is fucking actively cutting into her flesh, because she is so rural-style nails tough, and she cuts off the Shadow that carries that crime. Obsessed with her. I actually think I might be at odds with the story on this, i’d have to reread it to be sure, but I am not entirely certain that they cast this as such a good thing, as I do. I mean, I don’t think it’s calling her to the carpet over it, either, but I think the story takes a stance of “This sure is a thing that Mary’s deciding to do, huh? And there are definitely consequences to that, too” at the very least. But I loved it, and I thought she was great.

It was frustrating for me, not that Mary gave birth to Barney, in the end, but that it feels like the author wants it to be so IMPORTANT, and so CRUCIAL to understanding why Mary loved him so. “He were only ever mine,” and “It was always my arms hims wanted.” This is a personal thing, of course, as all things that annoy us are deeply personal, but as a lesbian who pretty much openly rejects the idea that family trees and blood are of value to anyone save maybe a doctor, it not only doesn’t connect but I found that particular aspect annoying. I loved that she was so close to her brother, that she loved him despite being a child she easily could have seen as competition or replacement, I found her protectiveness of him very touching. I should have known better--this isn’t QUITE as bad as Dishonored, where if I had played through the INSANE difficult (for me) of the game just to get to, “Corvo loved Emily because she was his secret daughter :)” I would have burned down the game studio--but it was more of an ‘ah, man.” every time she would go over how Barney was really, truly hers and I just could not connect.

What I did feel a huge connection with, a kinship with, was the way Mary rejects the kind of victimhood they want to put on her, and the way she realizes that to make everything about what happened to her is to make that the story of her.

“Other people want to name it so them can choose a punishment for some damage them can’t see. But without a name for it, I’m myself. I refuse it. I’ll not let this word attach itself to me. If it does, people will only see damage when them look at me; them will meet this word, for it is a terrible word to meet.

Unspeak it for me.”

Holy shit, I am not sure I have ever, in all my reading, seen this sort of approach to tragedy or trauma, or whatever name we want to give it, and it took me aback so much that I had to stop reading for a moment. I’ve never read anything that so well reflected my own personal feelings about what I’m going to put as, “Bad shit happening to you.” I do not want it to define so much of my story, and the only way to make that true is to remove its power from you, either in glancing over it only in passing or straight up never mentioning it at all. I get this from my grandmother and great-grandmother, and to some extent my mother, though my great-grandmother was a fairly serious example of this and the observation in my family is that I am made in her image most among all of us. But yes, I never see it reflected in art or media, this idea that there are downsides to naming the sins that have been committed against you, that you can come to be wrapped in those ropes yourself, and they can take you over, and it can be the entirety of you. And not just her, but also if she lets it be the story of her, it can also be the story of Barney. No one will ever look at Barney and see anything but this horrific act. He will be the living monument to Langward’s violence. That’s it. That’s all.

So much did I love this detail, that frankly it washes the whole Barney being her son nonsense out for me, and we go back to a neutral starting position.

Actually, speaking of ideas I’m obsessed with, the way that the book recalls over and voer that memory is a malleable thing, that we can choose to reinforce and color and even unstitch ourselves. I know I posted this when I stumbled across it, because I loved it, but it bears repeating:

“Memories don’t have to be real, them’re just pictures, like broideries. Just got to make the memory strong enough, the picture real. Stitch it so fine the colors gleam. Think of it over and over, pass my thoughts through the eye of the needle, make the threads hold firm, like a herringbone ladder stitch, get the split stitches with the needle right through the middle of the thread, till it looks just the way I want it to.

Or if it dun come easy, cut it all away and stitch something different.”

That our lives are embroideries, and it is up to us in many ways to determine the pattern. “We are the thing that we decide to be” is something that I hold very close to my heart, and feels very correct to me. And it takes work and time, to make the life you want, to make your truth line up with the personyou see yourself as, but I think that’s valuable work. I don’t know, i’d be so curious to hear other people’s thoughts on this because I am so different from many people I encounter that I don’t know if it’s common to see all this as a good skill ahaha. Mary spoke to me a LOT in these deeply rural, very true grit sort of ways that I don’t see reflected ESPECIALLY in female characters, and if anything individually won me over to this book, I think it would be the way that I saw aspects of my own life in Mary that i often don’t get to see held up.

I can’t quite get to what I think about the snake rope themselves. Not in a “do I like them or do I not” way, in a “what are they REALLY about?” sort of way. There’s something in the idea of weaving something as a protection, and that protection is as dangerous to you as it is to anything outside, and that the thing made to protect you can kill you if you are careless. But I can’t quite put my finger on exactly how all those pieces go together.

In general, I would say I liked the book! Particularly loved this approach to fantasy that colors the world more than dominates it. There is magic, but it never feels like the story is a vehicle for the magic, more that the magic serves the story. It isn’t so obsessed with its own world building that it forgets what matters about the story. I would think a fair amount of you would like this book, if you could come to grisp with the fact that a lot of it is almost…how do I want to put this? A half-story? It’s about one event and the things around that event, and the end does not feel pat. That sounds like a criticism but it’s isn’t, that’s one of the things I really liked about the book.

Actually, and, sure, why not make this essay even more disorganized, please know I am also not impressed with me here: I think what the book is trying to be is reflected in a passage about Mary’s mother’s diaries: “This book isn’t a story. It doesn’t have a beginning or an ending. It’s not teaching me anything or making me feel I could become someone else.” And I loved that, not only as a history person who often wishes people would remember that even historical figures are people, and not narrative devices, but also i think it is at least a little about the unfinished edge of this novel. That more came before we begin, and plenty more will come after, and in life there is not neat the end. Definitely not for this essay either ahahha.

One last thing I can’t do anything with but HAVE to share:

“All losses open doors into older grief” I have nothing to add except I will think about that line for a long, long time

#Reblog #Docholligay #Bardic Readings

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