Category Archives: music

jenn wasner of flock of dimes & wye oak (2016)

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The young, the old, the dead
And you and I presently
Traveling west
Chasing the sun
See where once it was
It will be again

And I have lived
A charmed life
The hand of fate rests
On my shoulder
Still I get the joke
Try to make you laugh
It speaks for itself

The child I’ll never have
The stranger on the sidewalk
All who’ve ever lived
Now are waking up
To wish us luck

When I made my plan
There were some things for which I did not account
I could not have seen myself here
In a place I’ve been before
Seeing everything all over
As if I could really know
As if I am sure
And you say it’s about time
But you know I’m not used to having enough

And there is nowhere I need to go
And there is nothing left to do
And I am sitting watching myself
Watching you
Watching the waiting

When I move to stand
My muscle memory is keeping me up
Real memory is also similarly cruel
To see his face in front of me
Out of the blue, for no reason at all
And I don’t suppose
I’ll be able to tell him how sorry I am
But like the guard settles in for another long night
I keep watch for a danger that I may not recognize
But I keep my eyes open

All I know is this
There are times when, to me
You seem to glow from within
And I wonder how this moment could possibly be
And how much was of my choosing
And what chose me
And I couldn’t care less
When it all adds up
And I feel I am closest to what I really am

And there is nowhere I need to go
And there is nothing left to do
And I am sitting watching myself
Watching you
Watching the waiting

the xx – npr music tiny desk concert (2013)

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Whoa.

“It’s easy to think of The xx as a fashionable band: Its members have a sleek all-in-black look, its typography and cover art is coolly and distinctively styled, and the group itself has been showered with validation, including Britain’s 2010 Mercury Prize. But beneath all that tightly controlled image-making lays music that’s raw and vulnerable; shy, worried tentativeness is wired into a sound that shimmers powerfully, but remains as fragile and delicate as a soap bubble.

“The xx’s second album, Coexist, came out last fall, and it plays like a series of tensely lovely interludes, each building to a climax that never arrives. Plopped in front of Bob Boilen’s desk and asked to play a few songs from the record, singer-guitarist Romy Madley Croft and singer-bassist Oliver Sim have reason to look slightly ill-at-ease: The setting and band configuration robs them of cover. No beats from member Jamie Smith, who opted to hang back at the hotel; no shroud of darkness or bright lights pointed outward to blunt the crowd’s stares. Throughout their characteristically compact seven-minute performance, Croft and Sim avoid eye contact, as they visibly try to ignore the huge throng and cameras positioned maybe 10 feet away from them.

“What comes out of their performance is not just beauty, but humanity — the sense that, in all of The xx’s songs, all the calm chilliness in the world can’t quite contain an exposed heart.”

Set List
• “Angels”
• “Sunset”

Credits
Producer: Bob Boilen; Editor: Denise DeBelius; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Becky Lettenberger, Claire O’Neill, Maggie Starbard

connie converse – talkin’ like you (c. 1950s)

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During the 1950s, Converse worked for the Academy Photo Offset printing house in New York’s Flatiron District. She initially lived in Greenwich Village, but would later take up residency in the Hell’s Kitchen and Harlem areas. She started calling herself Connie, a nickname she had acquired in New York. She began writing songs and performing them for friends, accompanying herself on guitar. During this time, she adopted smoking and drinking, which starkly went against her strict Baptist upbringing; her still-religious parents rejected her music career, and her father died without having heard a single one of Connie’s songs. Converse’s only known public performance was a brief television appearance in 1954 on The Morning Show on CBS with Walter Cronkite, which artist Gene Deitch helped to arrange. By 1961 (the same year that Bob Dylan moved to Greenwich Village and quickly met mainstream success), Converse had grown frustrated trying to sell her music in New York. That year, she moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her brother Philip Converse was a professor of political science at the University of Michigan. She worked in a secretarial job, and then as Managing Editor of the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1963 which she also wrote for. Following her move to the midwest, Converse appears to have mostly ceased writing new songs. She disappeared in 1974. [Read more here.]

molly drake – i remember (c. 1950s)

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Molly Drake (1915 – 1993) was Nick Drake‘s mother – clearly his talent was hereditary. This recording was made during the 1950s at the family home in Tanworth-in-Arden by her husband, Rodney Drake, on a home Ferrograph recorder. A collection of these recordings and poems was released by Bryter Music as a limited privately-pressed edition of 500 copies in 2011. It came out as a single CD with a booklet of poetry housed in a black card portfolio. The album was later released by Squirrel Thing Records in March 2013. The released versions of the recordings were engineered by John Wood and produced by Cally Callomon. John Wood was the sound engineer on her son, Nick Drake‘s albums.