Concert
I went with Praveen and others to the concert at the Fillmore given by They Might Be Giants. (Other people, including Leonard and Zack Weinberg, went to see the same show the night before.)
Noe Venable opened, which I found odd, because I also heard her open for Dar Williams last week. Dar and TMBG are rather different, but they chose to have the same person open for them. (Noe's music is much closer to Dar's, I think, than to TMBG's. They are both female singer-songwriters who have songs which tell stories, and the similarities don't end there.)
Noe Venable has a beautiful singing voice, and she can hit amazingly pure notes. Her web site has several downloadable tracks, including Juniper, which she performed at the Dar Williams concert (though not at TMBG).
Here's my attempt at her lyrics:
Mama, oh, Mama,
I don't wanna come down,
not if it's all like it was on the ground,
hiding my feet cause I'm too shy to dance,
hiding my face behind both of my hands.
Mama, o Mama, don't make me come down,
'cause I don't know what will come out of my mouth.
People will hear, they won't know who I am,
People will hear, and they won't understand.
Mama, I've seen them, the others like me,
once I could see it was all I could see,
the silent procession that crosses the snow:
with skeleton ladies like skeletons go.
Mama, o Mama, I can't let you know
how my trouble began, but I can't let it go.
Plummeting into the nightmare below
I'm better awake and I'm better alone
Mama, oooooo
Mama, oooooo
Mama, o Mama, up here where I'm free,
I have seen beauty you wouldn't believe:
Juniper's ledges and Juniper's birds
where Juniper's edges and mine become blurred.
Mama, o, Mama, if you only heard
the reasons for living, the freedom of words,
the blooming balloon of a thought being born
safe in the branches of Juniper's arms.
Mama, oooooo
Mama, oooooo
Mama, o, Mama, I'm not like you think,
a harrowing walk down a narrowing street.
If I had my way I would bring the whole world,
every sleepwalker and each hungry girl.
Mama, o, Mama, and old Uncle Tom,
my father the preacher, my daughter the song,
tell every bell to just wake up and ring
tell this old choir to just shut up and sing!
Oooooo
oooooo
oooooo
oooooo
oooooo
Mama, o, Mama, I'm holding your hand,
in these glorious dreams in which you understand.
Mama, o, Mama, we're spinning around,
Mama, o, Mama, don't make me come down.
Oooooo
oooooo
oooooo
oooooo
oooooo
Dar and Noe both, I think, have singing voices which differ dramatically from their speaking voices. In Noe's case, it's even more extreme, because she speaks with a high-pitched, sing-song voice with certain cadences which make her sound like she might be ten or twelve years old. When she sings, though, she seems to have perfect control, like an opera singer, and, as I said, a tremendous purity. (One of my companions at last week's concert suggested that Noe might cause glasses to shatter with her voice.)
I disliked two things about the TMBG concert. First, I didn't like the volume level. This was an actual "rock concert", and so it was very distinct from (for example) the Dar Williams concert last week. I covered my ears with a sweatshirt practically the whole time, and it was still very loud. It was much louder than necessary for the whole audience to hear clearly.
At other events I've been to with amplified sound, the main point of the amplification was to be sure that everybody could hear. At this event, there was also whatever motive drives rock concerts to be almost painfully loud, so that some people who attend them actually suffer physical injury.
Second, I didn't know a lot of the songs! As I wrote a few days ago, I know Dar Williams songs so well that I can detect a change at the consonant level. But I only own one TMBG album (Flood) and know a few other songs of theirs from radio play. But TMBG played many newer songs and, I'm told, some things which were not yet released on any album. It's really a lot more fun for me to know the songs in detail than to hear them for the first time.
One song I did know, which isn't on Flood, is "Older". It's available for legal free download in Ogg Vorbis format. (Do me a favor -- if you don't have an Ogg player, go get one, and download "Older" to try it out. It will be a good thing in the future that you have an Ogg player.) The band interrupted "Older" in the middle with another song and then picked up exactly where they'd left off. They liked doing things like that. They love jokes and puns and, in a lot of senses, they're extremely geeky.
Old favorites on Flood which did get played were "Birdhouse in Your Soul" and "Istanbul" (hooray!). The nachos at the Fillmore were pretty tasty (although they cost $10 for small portions). Maybe it's a better tactic to eat dinner in some nearby Japantown restaurants.
I had a great time dancing to "Istanbul", which is an upbeat song with a tremendous inner geekiness to it. Maybe historical consciousness is so rare that if you show historical consciousness you are automatically geeky.
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