Tír Na HiFi

Rounding out the day's listening with Judee Sill's two albums tonight in what has become a regular late night ritual for me.  Close and repeated listening over time to this woman's work has only intensified my conviction that these songs are perfectly formed masterpieces of interior emotion in which not a single note is wasted.  It's also worth noting just how uncannily she can simultaneously convey a sense of self-absorption and emotional absence.  The more you listen to this music, the more you become keenly aware of the spontaneous little vocal inflexions that betray Sill's emotions.  Sometimes she sounds so disconcertingly absent from herself and her physical surroundings, and yet, locked in so tightly to her music, giving the distinct impression of somebody dwelling and lingering on her words and their very personal implications.  The most extreme example of this is The Donor, her most personal song, on which she sounds particularly agitated, an impression that is highlighted on the live version of this song on the Live in London CD.  There is a purity and fragility and tenderness about the emotions expressed in Sill's music which, to me, accounts for their haunting timelessness.  When you dig a little deeper and read about her life, you realise that the songs she wrote were a direct expression of her own hopes and dreams vividly and painfully rendered.   It is this emotional honesty that makes me listen to her music over and over again.  When she sings the lines "Sorrow's like an arrow shooting straight and narrow, aiming true, its sting goes reaching to the marrow - silence cried",  you feel instinctively that she is singing from experience about being wounded inwardly, permanently and reposing in a dark, enclosed place of shame.  The wholly absent and emotionless phrasing of these lines cuts me open each and every time.   Nothing is varnished or glossed over.  The pain comes through time and again.  Kyrie eleison. 

jadarin wrote:

Welcome back John! Looking forward to catching up :) I'll be sending you a pm later today. I'm really tied up.....big time :) Love the title by the.....have a look at The Fog posts :)

Cabretta on vinyl ...

and

on vinyl too.

If anybody's not familiar I would recommend this CD, usually goes cheap and it's a great selection ...

One of my favourite songs is Kath Bloom's The Breeze/My Baby Cries. Unquestionably, this stands in my mind as this great singer's finest vocal performance. A lifetime of rejection lies in these bruised and broken vocals. This is a woman lost in a daze of reminiscence - "the breeze has killed me" - whose heart and mind cannot move on nor come to terms with the deep, searing, irrevocable loss that lies at the heart of the song. Her heartfelt singing evokes an extraordinary sense of a helpless child groping in the dark, trying to feel her way through her life by clinging to a lost memory of happier times. Her voice is forever on the edge of breaking down as the memory of the past swells up inside her. Bloom's own vocal inflexions that respond intuitively to the lyrical content are echoed beautifully by Loren Mazzacane Connors' attentive and responsive guitar work. A true musical partner. The four albums of their work together that I've heard - Sing the children over, Sand in my shoe, Restless Faithful Desperate and Moonlight - are exceptional and are very highly recommended.

In many ways this song is uncoverable. It's impossible to separate the lyrical content from the primal anguish of Bloom's vocal. But, a few years back, Bill Calahan produced an astonishing cover version. Callahan's take on this song is calm, unhurried, meditative and deeply reflective. He doesn't try to mirror Bloom's anguished vocals but instead goes for coolness and restraint. The extremity of his emotional anguish is registered by the absence and nullification of all palpable emotion. A heart and mind fossilised in emotional stasis. The acceptance of one's cruel fate and how powerless one is to alter it. Simple, understated instrumentation that stills the heart and concentrates the mind. It's an extraordinary performance of a great song - vivid, powerful and wounding.

It's worth noting that Callahan brought exactly these same qualities to his hypnotic version of Judee Sill's For a Rainbow, an arguably more difficult proposition because Sill never lived to record this song and only left behind the lyrics and sheet music with her belongings after her passing. Once again, Callahan's vocals are simple, unadorned, unaffected. The song begins with minimal guitar accompaniment and then gradually builds and swells into a repetitious, swirling mix of crashing cymbals and piano chords over the space of eight minutes. The repetitiousness of the music emphasises the cyclical nature of the emotional trauma that is painfully explicit in the lyrical content and produces a trancelike quality in the listener's mind whichly is strongly suggestive of the hymnal qualities inherent in Sill's music. And, as the music builds, so too does the level of intensity and emotional involvement in Callahan's voice. His voice rises to a heartbreaking quiver on the pivotal line, "I'd give my life, my soul if you love me once before you go and let the storm break for the rainbow" and the way he subtly modulates this intensity to a forlorn sense of bewilderment and bemusement in the final line, "Where did the rainbow go?" is deeply, powerfully, unforgettably affecting.

[quote="Gerry D"][/quote]

hi Gerry
I always had a soft spot for the Willie DeVille his version of "Hey Joe" is brilliant

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH-0cFsoHc4

jadarin wrote:

I actually listened to excerpts from the above album a while ago and almost pulled the plug! The guitar work is brilliant and I love the slight Fairport vibe. Maybe they're just too good to be true? We'll see....

EE)




FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Tompkins Square has released the first-ever vinyl reissue of Dino Valente's self-titled 1968 solo LP, originally produced under the supervision of Bob Johnston (Dylan, Cohen, Cash). The album is commercially available in glorious Mono for the first time ever. A few mono copies were pressed as promos for DJ's upon release. The album has been remastered from the original tapes by Grammy-winning engineer Warren Russell-Smith, and includes original liner notes by Ralph Gleason.

Dino Valente's best known tune 'Get Together', popularized by the Youngbloods, served as a counter-culture anthem for millions. He was also lead singer for seminal San Francisco psychedelic band Quicksilver Messenger Service. But it's his lone solo LP which has often been held in the same vaunted company as Skip Spence's 'Oar' as a lost, forgotten classic. The album continues to inspire new generations of artists, such as James Toth of Wooden Wand, who says, "This long overdue reissue is a public service to loners, stoners and dreamers everywhere. Buy two copies; you will wear the first one out." Matt Valentine of MV&EE also effuses, "It's a masterpiece . . . the songs, the vibe, the verb, the cojones. A stoned out killer - an LP that I continue to listen to regularly to this day.  It was a huge influence on my first solo LP "space chanteys" and the production is awe-inspiring, in many ways ground zero for my spectrasound techniques."

Derek wrote:

Gerry D wrote:

hi Gerry
I always had a soft spot for the Willie DeVille his version of "Hey Joe" is brilliant

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH-0cFsoHc4

Hey Derek.
That's a great live version.
I have the studio version on a CD, Back Streets of Desire ...

Great album. TBH willy DeVille is one of those artists who, for me, could do no wrong.