i'm going down a long road / maybe it's the wrong road
[this is a post from the archives - originally sent february 27th, 2018]
About a week and a half ago now, I dragged an old friend* to see Shovels & Rope play in a ballroom of the student union of our alma mater. I almost didn't go because sometimes I'm a big idiot and I'd forgotten I'd bought tickets and I was tired and hungry and getting sick and all of these are dumb excuses but sometimes they're the kind of dumb excuses that I let keep me in bed. There were moments where I wondered if the poor floor boards were going to hold under the stomping and moments where I wondered just how pissed the people trying to study in the rooms below were. Mostly, though, I wondered how I ever thought the show would have been worth skipping to stay at home and stare at the ceiling.
Billed as an "Evening with..." show, there was no opening act and the stage was set as a sort of haphazard living room - pallets for walls and an inexplicable number of lamps. The duo came out a vision in coordinated outfits of peach crushed velvet - a Meg-and-Jack White-Go-To-Prom for the Appalachian set.
The set was bookended with covers - a kick-in-the-stomach, so-raw-you-have-to-hold-your-breath-or-choke-because-it-makes-your-throat-hurt rendition of (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding** that let you know from the jump that it was going to be one of those all-the-cards-on-the-table kind of nights and a joyous Chuck Berry closer that finally had the gray-hairs out of their chairs and rushing the stage.
I'd seen Shovels & Rope play once before and I was struck then and now by two things:
Their live show is exponentially better than their recordings (which don't, by the way, suck)
Their live show isn't for the audience at all
When Michael Trent or Cary Ann Hearst are addressing the audience with between song banter, you get the sense that they're genuinely glad everyone is there. Once they start playing, though, you get the sense that the audience fades and the show they're putting on isn't for anyone but the other. Half the time - no, more than - they don't look out into the crowd at all. The stage is set so they can face each other and they have to move the mic stands around whenever they want to address the audience directly. We could be there, or not, take us or leave us, the audience is just gravy.
The first time I saw Shovels & Rope play, I found this approach odd. This time- life-affirming. You can't win over everyone and you shouldn't want to. I read somewhere once that anything ever written is really just written for one person. There's something special about watching a pair who knows that deeply.
There's something remarkable about the gut-wrenching glory of love stomped loudly, whether anyone else is watching or not.
*The kind of friend you grew up seeing everyday and then don't see for months and months but who is immediately game to go to a show for a band they've never heard of on no notice AND pays for your Shiner is a very special kind of friend, indeed.
**A Nick Lowe song, originally, apparently but forever an Elvis Costello one in my heart.
I blinked and now it's actually been two weeks instead of just one since the last of these dispatches went out. I've listened to a lot of things, here are a few:
One day, I listened to all of Andy Shauf's discography in a row, from start to finish because a friend asked me for recommendations for music to work to while being sad and I decided to work backwards from there. (Shauf's The Party was one recommendation. Also, Peter Oren's Anthropocene and Nina Simone's Little Girl Blue). I used to be an obsessive completist about listening to everything an artist I liked had ever done - see my high school ipod for more than 500 Ryan Adams tracks if you doubt me on this - but it's been years since I've regularly dug beyond the first album I find and cling to by a new-to-me artist. Anyway - I listened to all of Andy Shauf's albums in order and sent myself this in an email:
moving through discography, songs get less bombastic more nuanced, less focused on the other as an object and the other as a person with flaws and features and history and stories and even though some of the beats are the same, there's a progress. it feels like aging - the themes get darker (hitting particularly dark moments on wendell walker) but also more forgiving and i guess that's the point of getting older. the themes are often the same, a thread that you can follow, but it gets tugged at harder as you move through like shauf's learned you can tug at the thread without everything completely unraveling and that maybe there's some beauty in the way things fray anyway.
Take from that what you will, but you should go listen to The Party, or, pick an artist you only started loving recently and start at their very beginning. Tell me who you pick. Tell me what you learn.
There have been an absurd number of really good albums released in the last couple weeks. Songs from a lot of these hit the February playlist you'll be getting soon but here's a quick list of recent releases I recommend putting in your ears sooner rather than later:
Caroline Rose - LONER
Marlon Williams - Make Way For Love
Loma - Loma
Brandi Carlile - By the way, I forgive you
U.S. Girls - In a Poem Unlimited
snooooooooze jaaaaazz - my new playlist of things I listen to when I should be sleeping but can't (like now). If anyone has any recommendations for snooooooozier jazz so that I might actually sleep, I will make you the themed playlist of your choice (and will attempt to have it not be the same song over and over again unless you really want it that way).