Honestly, I haven't turned into a shill for Amazon. I just haven't had time to do much blog-wise beyond passing on noteworthy links and Gillian Welch's Revival album for $1.99 at Amazon is EXTREMELY noteworthy. (You see what I did there. It works on two levels. One, it is awesome. Two, it is music and music is composed of notes. Do you see that? Do you see what I did?). This recommendation comes even more strongly than the Andrew Bird recommendation of a few days ago (Manuel, back me up on that one.).
This is an album that every person with ears should own - it's one of my all time favorites. Again, if you don't know Gillian Welch, do your requisite googling and You Tubing but for goodness sake if you like puppies, pies or oxygen you're gonna like this album.
Pomeroy just posted a trailer to the movie The Strangers. This is the type of movie that scares my wife to death and makes me think about what everyday implements around the house I could turn into weapons to fend off an axe wielding maniac with a scary white face. I would wager that this is a fairly common line of thought for married men-how do you defend the castle if need be. There are of course your kitchen knives, we have a particularly nice Wusthoff chef's knife (great balance!) that could do some damage, but I don't really want to have to engage in any close hand-to-hand combat - not much margin of error there. You've got your blunt instruments - your Mac Light, your lamps, your chair/table legs, but my go to crazy guy with an axe home defense choice is, oddly enough, an old axe handle I keep under the bed and have dragged around with me ever since I got married. Because, frankly, my wife scares me.
Anywho, on to the music. In the aforementioned clip, at about the 1:30 mark the record player skips down to a song and gets stuck playing the same 3-4 second sample over and over in the background (by the way if you stop it at about the 1:27 mark that is a pretty scary face on in its own right). The song is My First Lover by Gillian Welch, off her Time (The Revelator) album, and the line that keeps repeating occurs twice in the song - once in the middle and then the ending lines, where she sings, "quicksilver girl." Which is a reference to the Steve Miller song by the same name, which in Gillian's song is playing in the background of her first lover's tryst. So this is a post about a song playing in the background that is itself partially about a song playing in the background.
Here's a video of a live performance with pretty poor audio:
Here is a better live audio version you can download, from the show mentioned before.
I've always felt that I should like Radiohead more than I do given my age and social circles (point me out to me in a crowd and I would assume that I was a "Radiohead guy"), but truth is . . . .mmmah, its not really me. I am however a pretty doting Gillian Welch fan and if Radiohead sounded like Gillian covering Radiohead then I would be an enormous Radiohead fan. If you've ever been to one of Gillian's shows you know that she and partner David Rawlings are leading virtuosos in the fine art of covers and they are almost always guaranteed to pull out one or two gems in the midst of a set of their own stellar material. Their cover of Radiohead's "Blackstar" is one of my favorites and this is a version I recently acquired which they did in New York while touring last year with Bright Eyes. The trumpet accompaniment on the track is by Bright Eyes' Nick Walcott and it makes a lovely song even lovelier. Enjoy.
* Photo from their performance the night before, you know, just in case you've got continuity issues.
