South Bay Folks Open Mike, 2002-12-12
I didn't feel like singing a depressing song, so... I had to play the one non-depressing song I know, "Blue Sky" by Patty Griffin. (That's a lie: I also know "Sailor" by
Hem, but I just played that last week, and my song "No Time to Lose", but it sounds too much like "Blue Sky" to play them right next to each other.) To fill up the other half of my two-song set, I played a semi-improvised melodica piece I came up with in the parking lot.
The thing I forget about playing melodica, until I'm halfway into the first line of whatever I'm playing, is how to breathe. I don't inhale enough, and I blow too hard, and so by the end of the line I'm weak-winded and gasping for breath.
I also got to play piano, a rare treat, with Kristina on Nick Drake's "Northern Sky".
All the way down to San Jose I was singing myself hoarse along with
Nadine's album "Downtown, Saturday"--thinking maybe I could play "Whenever You Are Around" on the piano, but no, I need to work on that one first. The bright side of all the shouting was, I got a new entry for the "who does my voice sound like to other people?" list:
Richard Butler.
A couple of women from LA who called themselves "The LA Girls"--hmm--sang the national anthem, a capella and in harmony. I always cringe when people perform this--first of all, because of my fear of jingoism, a reaction I'm not proud of. But second, it seems impossible to perform it without slipping into cliche. Even when you try to reharmonize it, there are only so many ways you can go, and most of them have been gone before. So unless you can bring really stunning passion or technique to it, it seems like a losing game.
The second song, a guitar number featuring only half of the duo, was both interesting and good. Its chorus--something about "when are you coming home to stay"--both obscurely reminded me of another song I couldn't quite identify (one that repeats the phrase "are you coming home") and made me want to write my own. Which I didn't.
Current music (which won't fit in the "Current Music" box): An unreleased song by Hem which they played at their concert on Monday, fragments of which have been drifting through my head all week. The chorus, I believe, culminates in the words "I know you'll carry me home", but I could be wrong. I'm not sure about the lyrics, but the melody and arrangement are oh so powerful. You know what else is a good unreleased Hem song? "The Beautiful Sea".