Category: Music
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(Are you making this up?)
Eh, some of it, yeah, why?
(Well, what are you doing that for?)
I just didn’t want to burden anyone with the truth
Xmas Past.
I listen to Jamendo so you don’t have to
Breathing calmed down so went for a short walk to the corner shop with Kid A where he bought a can of baked beans with his own cash.
Then we walked around the long block talking about how those beans are now his beans, what would happen to the beans if I reimbursed him with a bank transfer, what he could do with a bottomless backpack, the striking similarity between the Chinese lion adorning a neighbour’s drive wall and the Chinese lions outside the Chinese restaurant in Spilsby, and how Lime bikes are taking over the world.
Breathless!
A million housewives every day
Pick up a can of beans and say
“What an amazing example of
Synchronisation!”
Or in my case, “£1.59?! What a rip-off!”
Retreated to the relative safety of the bedroom where I’m finding solace with Radiohead and OK Computer on a loop.
An airbag saved my life
Dua Lipa's Tiny Desk concerts
Dua Lipa’s Tiny Desk concert at home in between covid lockdowns in 2020 is the most watched Tiny Desk concert ever.
Which doesn’t surprise me at all as we must have watched it literally hundreds, if not thousands, of times.
My little boy absolutely loved it, and even me and big kid secretly liked it, too.
Love Again is my favourite.
She’s just performed a new concert at Tiny Desk HQ, and it’s also very watchable and listenable, with These Walls the standout track.
Jon Batiste's Tiny Desk concert
Jon Batiste, like Alicia Keys, is a supremely talented musician and performer. This is another must watch Tiny Desk concert from 2019.
This is another video my little kid enjoyed watching, singing along to (before he could talk), and dancing to with his big brother (before falling asleep).
Don’t it make your soul shake?
Alicia Keys' Tiny Desk concert
If you haven’t seen and listened to Alicia Keys’ Tiny Desk concert (Feb 2020) then I highly recommend that you do, even if - or especially if - you think she’s not your thing.
This is a video my little kid loved to sing along to before falling asleep for a mid-day or afternoon nap.
We all just wanna be shown some love
Living and breathing
I have vague memories of seeing Florence + The Machine on the BBC at Glastonbury, possibly in 2009. She was the big new thing, breathlessly jumping around all over the place, climbing up the gantry, as she showcased her debut album Lungs.
Lungs album cover photoshoot stills - Tom Beard 2009
Or maybe it was 2015. Ship To Wreck sounds so familiar and like it would have caught my ear.
All very dramatic, elemental, and possibly not quite my thing more generally at those particular times. I didn’t pay much attention then or since.
By then, I’d fallen out of love with life, not just music. In recent years, I’ve rediscovered music, and life, and this week Florence + The Machine.
My little kid is 4 ½ years old. He’s obsessed with space at the moment. When he was younger, and still napping in the day, we found that he enjoyed falling asleep to a variety of music videos on YouTube. Mostly videos of music I liked. I don’t know how that happened!
At one time he really enjoyed some of the NPR Tiny Desk concerts - bands playing stripped down acoustic or semi-acoustic fifteen minute sets on a tiny office stage in front of a small audience.
Two he really liked were Alicia Keys and Jon Batiste - which weren’t my choices (well, they were my choices, but now I had permission to choose them), but I grew to love them, too. It’s hard not love such amazing musicianship, singing and songs, all performed with unconfined joy in the moment. My son got it. So did I.
One he wasn’t so keen on, but I enjoyed, was Florence + The Machine’s Tiny Desk performance. Usually so full of bombast, almost over-produced, and perfect for rocking out stadium tours, this was vulnerable and exposed. Two voices, a harp, acoustic guitar and keyboard. Three perfect songs.
I really tried to listen to more, the album versions, but I still couldn’t get into them.
This week, with my focus on my own personal breathlessness and lung history, and still thinking about another Machine entirely, I tried again. I still couldn’t do it, not fully. I now liked the album versions of the Tiny Desk songs, but the rest washed over me. I read more about the band, the albums, reviews, trying to understand why people like them so much.
Then last night, I finally got it. I cant explain why, exactly. Maybe it’s just familiarity. Probably it’s paying attention. As with many things in life, you sometimes have to make an effort to learn to appreciate things and develop a taste (or ear) for them.
Each breath screaming / ‘We are all too young to die,’” Welch sings in the chorus of “Between Two Lungs"
I do wonder also, though, if sometimes songs speak to me even when I’m not actively listening? I’ve always been useless at remembering lyrics. Not great for singing songs in a band. But the songs I love for the music, the energy, the tunes… When I do pay attention to the words, sometimes years later, they do carry meaning for me (even if that’s not necessarily what the song is actually about). They just needed to be heard. That’s the beauty of it.
No more gasping for a breath
The air has filled me head-to-toe
And I can see the ground far below
I have this breath and I hold it tight
And I keep it in my chest with all my might
I pray to god this breath will last
I recently read: How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy (of the band Wilco) 📚.
It’s full of practical if fairly obvious tips on how to write and get your creative muscles going.
Here’s a poem I wrote based on two books I regularly read to my little kid at bedtime.
Finally feel like I’m getting my breath back after four days of having trouble breathing in, wheezing and feeling like I’m emphyseming.