This is a post that would probably benefit from an outline and several drafts, which it’s not gonna get. Oh well.
I’ve come to realize over the last few years that I’m repressed enough that it’s easier for me to access the deep emotions through art. I can’t just feel something (deeply), I have to watch a particular movie or listen to a particular piece or song to tap into what’s down there. Just as a for-instance, I loved Dear Evan Hansen far more than I was expecting, and found myself listening to “Waving Through a Window” fairly frequently – until I realized that every time I did that, I got tremendously tense and angry. Because it was causing resonance about my own teenage-hood and how miserable it was and how hurt and furious I still was, and something about listening to that song just opened up that cage. (am I claiming that having a miserable teenage-hood was somehow unique to me? Of course not.)
And, as some may remember, the day that Charles died – that was late afternoon, but it wasn’t until late evening when I was finally alone to start processing it. And the first thing I did, after pouring a glass of wine, was to put on Vaughan Williams’s “Variations on a Theme of Thomas Tallis”, knowing that it would be the perfect, um, vehicle? medium? to lead me to feel what I needed to feel. (It worked.)
Over the last few weeks, and reinforced by current events, I’ve been reminded that often it’s a perfect song that can encapsulate a human experience in such a way where you immediately go, not only “how true”, but “wow, I never really thought about that in that way… why not?” And that there’s a whole raft of songs – folk songs, musical theater songs, cabaret songs – that are forever treasured because how they help me become more human.
I’d spent my college years in a practice room with a French horn, and hadn’t really being paying attention to anything but classical music and the occasional show tune. But my last year in grad school, a co-worker at my side job gave me a tape of Christine Lavin, a funny, but also frequently poignant, American folk singer-songwriter. I wore that tape out - it was nothing like what I normally listened to, it was wonderful, and also… well, having recently come out of the closet and expanded my horizons, songs about lost loves and the sort of things that pop songs tend to be about were suddenly relevant in a way they’d never been before.
Embracing that particular album gave me two gifts – first, it sort of gave me permission to ‘like other stuff’ (not that anyone had ever told me I couldn’t), so could just embrace pop music in general, and then specifically to explore the contemporary folk singer/songwriter scene. All my favorite ‘best’ playlists include many many songs from the late 80’s/early 90’s singer/songwriter folks – the ones that Christine Lavin supported and pushed through her compilation albums such as On a Winter’s Night, and the ones I found on my own – like Michael Tomlinson, who I adore and who I discovered by picking up one of his LPs in a discount rack. Side note – I’m shallow enough to have bought both his album and my first David Mallett album because of how hot they looked on the cover.
But those days in my 20’s when I would just sit in my apartment and listen to an entire LP faded away when I moved to NYC, met a man and then of course song media itself changed so you didn’t have to listen to whole albums any more. And I sort of gave up the discovery process – and now realize there are like 30 more years of singer/songwriter stuff that I have not paid attention to.
I was so delighted that the Grammys last weekend put forth not only the goddess Joni Mitchell (whose album, Court & Spark, one of the most amazing creations in the universe, just celebrated its 50th anniversary), but that remarkable performance of “Fast Car” by not only the white straight male country artist whose cover was top of the charts this past year, but the black queer woman who wrote it in the first place. So many layers there – I think a lot of people reflexively snarled that a white guy ‘appropriated’ the song, like those marshmallow white singers in Dreamgirls singing “Cadillac Car”, but anyone who took two seconds to investigate realized that Luke Combs (a) was singing it because he grew up with the song and loved it, not for any other reason, and (b) does a beautiful job with it, being so respectful that he leaves the line about ‘working as a checkout girl’ alone. And then watching the two of them perform together, with her radiant as the sun and seemingly unaged, and him beaming at her, clearly bowled over by how lucky he was to get to perform this song with her.
Side note about Tracy Chapman – I’ve always liked her, but she mumbles and that drives me bananas. It took me a zillion watches of the TC/LC video to realized I’d never quite gotten the meaning of the last verse. As someone who spends a lot of time smacking singers over the head for diction, I listen to a lot of pop performances getting angry at them – it’s your job to communicate! And that’s not only the words, but it’s eye contact with the audiences. Speaking of On a Winter’s Night, they’ve been doing a reunion tour for years now – including tonight at City Winery, which I vaguely thought of going to . I saw the tour in 2019 in Tarrytown and Patty Larkin performed her songs whispering into the microphone and closed up, as if she were singing in a closet – no communication with the audience at all. I felt cheated and couldn’t understand half the lyrics (diction again).
Anyway, it’s now becoming a goal of mine to re-investigate the world of the ‘song of the human experience’, so that means buying all the Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs albums, going back and looking at my favorite singer/songwriters and their friends and what they’ve been doing in this century, and also – as part of my “I live in NYC and should take advantage of it” going to cabarets. Everyone who is anywhere near that kind of repertoire does cabarets, and you can go to them any night of the week with your two-drink minimum. And that would be less about appreciating the performance (although of course I would) than gathering repertoire – learning the songs themselves.
Last night I went to a performance of Jason Robert Brown’s Songs for a New World, featuring friends of mine. That was not only fun, but it was interesting evaluating the songs themselves for that ‘does this encapsulate something I want to revisit over and over again’. I realized as we progressed that I was already at least vaguely familiar with some of the songs, because the better ones do get excerpted for cabarets and so on. I’d fallen in love with “Christmas Lullaby” at a Christmas cabaret years ago (given by St. Bart’s Players, the same group that did SFANW last night), and realized I’d certainly heard “Stars and the Moon” before.
So yeah, I think that’s a new interesting path to go on – to find and hear and appreciate songs that are new to me. Maybe someday to perform them, but really just to make me more human.
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