You Tube Videos

[jadarin]

One for a good laugh...

[mcq]

The wonderful Hedwig Mollestad Trio performing Laughing John at a show in Oslo in April this year.  Mollestad is on particularly inspired form here but, really, what impresses me is just how much of a cohesive group this is.  You really get the sense of them listening and responding to each other and here, the fun is in watching Mollestad and the drummer, Ivar Loe Bjornståd, bounce off against each other, whilst Ellen Brekken reinforces the rhythmic pulse with basslines of depth and precision.  Interestingly, I believe that Laughing John is a reference to one of Mollestad's influences, John McLaughlin, whose band she will be supporting at the London Jazz Festival in November.

[cybot]

Hope you're paying attention Shane :)

[tweber]

Hope you're paying attention Shane :)

Sure am Dermot, great rhythm section definitely!

[tweber]

Spent a few hours looking through this today, some great music on it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH7j8Zz ... 37ED6F55F0

[mcq]

This has mesmerised me for quite a while now.  Cat Power performing Bully last year on Later With Jools Holland.  Bully is a song that was recorded during the sessions for Chan Marshall's most recent album, Sun, but was excluded on the grounds that it appeared to her to be at odds with her new creative direction.  As good an album as Sun is  -  and it strikes me as her bravest yet  -  Bully would have been the standout track, and its omission from Sun reminds me of Dylan excluding Blind Willie McTell from his Infidels album.  Unquestionably, it's one of the very best songs that she has ever written, a heartbreaking elegy for a lost love, sung with a passionate intensity that is deeply moving.  Lyrically, what I find remarkable about this song is the sense that, despite the overwhelming sense of grief that infuses this song, at its heart it seems to say something very eloquently about the stoic nature of love, of guarding your loved one from pain.  This is expressed very succinctly in the closing lines, "Everything you have to go through with a smile on your face/Everything we now know with a smile on our face/I ... I can never forget".  Her vocal delivery throughout the song is beautifully measured with a sense of torment and anguished yearning for a love that is forever gone.    You get a sense of closeted intimacy, of someone talking to herself, in the hope that by articulating her pain, it may somehow be taken away from her.  The final line, "I ... I can never forget" is excruciating, delivered with a sense of raw, choked emotion that is  unforgettable.  The final impression is that of someone left speechless and inconsolable with grief.  And yet, there is also something here - expressed more in Marshall's vocal phrasings than in the actual lyrics - that says something vital about the need to preserve one's dignity in the midst of one's grieving both as a means of honouring the memory of the one that has passed as well as a means of self-preservation, of finding a way out of this darkness to persist and to endure in this life.  A wonderful, wonderful song that I just can't get out of my head.




It is instructive to listen to one of Marshall's most enduring songs, Metal Heart, after watching the above performance because it seems to occupy the same emotional hinterland as Bully.  "Losing the star without a sky/Losing the reasons why/You're losing the calling that you've been faking/And I'm not kidding."  This is a wonderful performance of the song that Marshall recorded for Letterman in 2008.  At one point she sings the line from Amazing Grace, "I once was lost but now I'm found, was blind but now I see", with her hand held out in front of her like a mirror.

[cybot]

Thanks for that Paul. You have no idea how much that has helped me. Thank you.....

[mcq]

You're very welcome, Dermot.  She really is a remarkable artist.  The sheer raw emotion that she can channel in a performance is quite extraordinary and singles her out as a unique and special talent.  Such a crying shame she can be her own worst enemy at times, though.

[mcq]

Two more wonderful Cat Power songs.  First up is Colors and the Kids, one of her most perfect achievements, from what must be her most enduring masterpiece, Moon Pix.  Like Bully, it appears to be narrated from the standpoint of someone who has lost a loved one.  And, like Bully, the musical accompaniment is simple, unadorned, and processional.  The effect on the listener is transporting and utterly hypnotic.  The opening lines set the emotional tone:  "It must be the colors and the kids that keep me alive/'Cause the music is boring me to death."  Marshall is interested here in clinging to primary colours and emotions  as a means of preserving her sanity. The music bores her to death because the songs that once inspired her now bear no meaning for her.  There is also an alternative meaning here in that the music that she once loved could be literally boring a hole in her - so suggestive it is of the times that she once spent with her lost love that she can no longer bear to hear it without breaking down.  The line, "Yellow hair you are a funny bear", initially made me think of a childhood toy that she may be clinging to, but, in the context of the song, I believe that it refers to the blurred drunken haze in which she spends her days.  She simply can't focus on details for fear they may summon up cherished memories in stone-cold clarity.  Living life in a drunken haze enables her to have a soft-focus perspective on her life without being exposed to cruel reality.  Memories come flooding in of her love, her best friend, "someone I could learn from, someone I could become".  There are no rough edges here in her vocal performance and acute emotions have been smoothed out by the alcoholic stupor.  She is simply lost in a dream of what might have been.  "I could stay here/Become someone different/I could stay here/Become someone better".  The ultimate slow-burn song, the fragile beauty of which takes time to fully absorb, it is an utterly haunting and transfixing experience which simmers and resonates within the listener.   Unforgettable.

No live version has ever eclipsed the studio original:



And then there is "I Don't Blame You", the meaning of which she refused to expand upon for many years before acknowledging recently that it had been inspired by Kurt Cobain's suicide.  What strikes me about this song is the sense of empathy and compassion and understanding with her subject.  What makes it such a heartrending experience is the knowledge that this empathy is informed by her own experiences of paralysing self-doubt and extreme stage fright and emotional breakdowns.  She feels Cobain's pain instinctively - feeling disconnected utterly from her audience, isolated and alone in her own mind, a sense of her life as a mere pantomine for others - and sympathising completely with his tragic predicament.  A deeply disturbing song in an immensely powerful performance.

"What a cruel price that you thought you had to pay for all that shit on stage/But it never made sense to them anyway ... What a sad trick you thought you had to play/But I don't blame you/They never owned it and you never owed it to them anyway".




Finally, what this woman can do with other people's songs is a thing of wonder. Here she is singing Who Knows Where The Time Goes. Utterly beautiful and right from the heart.

[tweber]

Came across this article on The Irish Times site today: http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music ... -1.1966101

Something for everyone there, e.g.