I saw Gillian Welch for the first time after a Cardinals game at a club in St. Louis a couple of months back. My friend had gotten the tickets and was really juiced to go but, I wasn't really sure who she was. It wasn't until I saw her live in concert that I realized that I have enjoyed her voice many times before on the "O Brother Where Art Thou" soundtrack and her duets with Ryan Adams. Since the concert I have been in love with her voice and have purchased many of her Cds. I had never heard this new song, "Throw Me a Rope," until last night when I was watch her concert at St. Luke's in London and now I can't get it out of my head.

I guess I'll fall for your ruse--I'll swap you my Gillian Welch writing for your recording of a song which I have only heard through the grapevine is a must-have. Gladly. I'm in the library of my college at a tiny wooden carrel with the window open and freezing Maryland air blowing in on me but I can't bring myself to close the window and I
have a half hour or so to kill before I really need to get down to homework business.

HOW I FOUND GILLIAN WELCH [AND, SOMEWHAT, MYSELF] or TRYING TO PUT OFF HOMEWORK FOR THE SAKE OF ONE DARN MP3

I don't know when I first heard of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. For brevity's sake, I'll say it was about 4 years ago, when I was 14, though I think it was earlier. I started taking guitar lessons from a woman named Toy. Toy was from Louisiana and had a sweet singing voice with a twang I now covet and loved music with that same twang.

I was 14 and though I'd lived my whole life in the south, wanted nothing to do with it. I'd implore my parents to turn off anything that, to me, sounded "too country". My father listened alternately to dry, sarcastic indie rock and classic- and alt-country like George Jones, Whiskeytown and Lucinda Williams. I hated it. I hated southern accents, I hated hot summers, I hated sweet tea and I hated that I lived in North Carolina. Even the 'north' filled me with anger--why couldn't we be a stand alone state instead some god-forsaken redneck place that was really just a sad-sack half of Carolina?

In any case, Toy loved Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. I seem to remember her traveling a great distance to see them in concert and how wowed she was the next guitar lesson, which I did not understand at all. She made me a CD of her favorite songs which I listened to once and then discarded [how I wish I could find that CD now]. Too country was my refrain all the time. I associated it all with Tim McGraw and Faith Hill and had no idea of the finer shades of this sweet southern music--old time, bluegrass, creole music, whatever. It was all "too country". Toy tried to find some "not so country" songs to teach me but in the last few lessons she snuck a Gillian Welch song in there. I don't even remember what it was, now, but I can still half play it, unrecognizable to me.

I got older. I started to look at colleges, growing less and less certain that I wanted to leave the state. My friends and I slowly fell into an allegiance with our hometown, just before we were to leave it, which grew into love for our state and soon enough the southeastern US and everything it entailed. I learned to love sweet tea and all of a sudden, the only thing that was "too country" was Tim McGraw. I took up the banjo and we wasted countless hours trying to figure out Old Crow Medicine Show lyrics. I checked out the Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk music from the library and forced myself to listen to all 6 discs until I understood a little better where it all was coming from. Hearing it leak from my headphones, my roommates here at school dismissed it all as 'too country' for their tastes. I simply turned it up louder and and shook my head.

I kept reading about and hearing about Gillian Welch, kept putting her on my list of things to buy, eventually, when I wasn't such a poor high school student. I've never been that crazy about female vocalists, but I loved the snippets I had heard, and everything else I listened to seemed to lead back to Gillian and David--David produced an album I liked or Gillian Welch and David appeared on my favorite Ryan Adams records, whatever. I began my hunt in earnest [and oh, how this embarrasses me to say] when I heard in a radio interview a few weeks ago that Jill Andrews of The Everybodyfields, a band I love, say that she counted her as a big inspiration. I figured I should get will versed and downloaded a smattering of eight songs.

For three weeks now, I have listened to nothing else. I asked some friends which songs I should get next, with no car and no easy way to a record store. One said Throw Me a Rope, so here I am. As soon as I can, though, it will be my first purchase, even though I now already have many of her songs.

I could go on and on, about the Gillian Welch concert I missed to attend a horrific senior prom, or the way my friend and I puzzled over the hard G/soft G pronounciation of Gillian, or the time we watched Old Crow Medicine Show's Wagon Wheel video again and again just to see David Rawlings, but I think this is more than enough. Sorry.

I am in college in Maryland and have been here for only 2 months. I'm growing increasingly sure that it is not the right place for me and as the seasons grow colder, I only get more and more homesick for the home I once maligned. I don't have much of a drawl, not as much of one as I'd like, anyways, but get teased for the slight accent I have and southern phrases I have held fast to. In Gillian's sweet voice, despite her California Girl roots, I hear echoes of my home and a rich tradition of music I always rejected. I guess that's all there is to say... just that when I hear these songs I think to myself that "But I missed those hills with the windy pines/for their song seemed to suit me..."

So my story with Gillian goes like this:

I was familiar with her only by name and her work in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" That is, until I visited my sister in Lexington, KY last November. It was then that, as we walked by The Dame (a rockin' awesome venue in downtown Lexington) that my sister suddenly said, "Oh, Dave Rawlings is going to be here this week. It says 'with special guest'...I wonder if Gillian is playing, too?" Well, those might not be her exact words, but that's the gist. So we went to the concert, and much to my delight I was in awe of them during the whole show. But my favorite part of the show was a song that, not knowing the actual name of it, I coined "the pretty unison song." I tried as hard as I could to find out the name of it, but to no avail.

A few days later, I moved back to Birmingham, AL, where the Dave Rawlings Machine was scheduled to play in a couple of weeks. I bought two tickets but ended up going alone to the show. I'm glad I did, though, because I saw some old friends there, and it also kept me free to stay late after the show and talk to Gillian and Dave. Dave, being as humble as he is, was stoked that he had met someone who had come to TWO "Machine" shows on its first tour. After I had them sign the CD I had just purchased, I asked Dave and Gillian what the name of "that pretty unison song" was that they played in Lexington. They said it had two names, "Throw Me a Rope," and "The Way It Would Be." They said that it hadn't been released on any recording, but I might be able to find it on the net somewhere as a bootleg. So I tried, but once again got nothing.

Now it's a year later, and I joined a Facebook group that led me to your blog and offer. I can't tell you how excited I am to hear the song again!

Labels: Gillian Welch "Throw Me a Rope" Guest Entries

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Saturday, January 19, 2008 ... 7:32 PM

Self-congratulation!

I just learned that my short appreciation essay, "Link Wray," has been selected for publication in a Music of the Carolinas anthology to be released in the Spring by Novello Festival Press, a publishing imprint of the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.

I developed the essay from a short entry I posted here when Link Wray died, a couple of years ago (though I removed the post from here when I decided to work it up for submission). Usually associated with D.C., where his career found its legs, Link Wray was born in the I-95 truck stop town of Dunn, NC, where a circus performer named Hambone introduced an 8-yr-old Link to the blues.

If you wanna read more, buy the book! I'll post more details when I get 'em.

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Friday, January 04, 2008 ... 3:20 PM

Brendan's 2007 lists

My favorite new albums of 2007, some disappointing new albums of 2007, and a few favorite discoveries from years past. Cross-posted at HickoryWind.org.

Top 8 Albums of 2007

8. Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings: 100 Days, 100 Nights
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings continue to do that thing they do. I'm the last to catch on as usual, but happy I caught on at all. Now I have to catch up.

7. Mighty Ghosts of Heaven: Mighty Ghosts of Heaven
Mighty Ghosts of Heaven call up Bascom Lamar Lunsford and Moonshine Kate on the Ouija board of an open-back banjo, and take a roll in the hay with Old-Time string band music, and they do it with so much joy and verve it's impossible not to remember that some of our smilingest moon-faced moonshine music came out of a Great Depression.

6. The Sadies: New Seasons
The Sadies zero in on their heretofore neglected deftness with lyric and melody and come up with their first album that doesn't sag or lag between peaks in their instrumental acrobatics. Pure distilled Bigsby-bent energy.

5. PJ Harvey: White Chalk
Polly takes it down a notch and delivers her strongest album since To Bring You My Love.

4. Nina Nastasia & Jim White: You Follow Me
Nina overcomes partner Jim White's Throw-My-Drums-Down-the-Stairs technique to deliver the strongest PJ Harvey album since Rid of Me.

3. Josh Ritter: The Historical Conquests of ...
"The Temptation of Adam" threatens to crack beneath the weight of its cleverness. Each progressively cute couplet creaks the rafters. But that last line is so haunting, so chilling -- both beautiful and horrifying. With that tune and the rollicking first track, Josh reminds us that right up to apocalypse, be it Biblical or nukular (or both, as our case might be), boys and girls will continue to fall in love and sing songs to get each other into bed. That assertion of the essentially carnal human spirit, both gentle and animal, is comforting in this gloomy age of the decline of our empire.

2. Eilen Jewell: Letters From Sinners & Strangers
Eilen, with a voice made of liquor and wildflowers and a band of crack sidemen that would comfortably back either Patsy Cline or Rose Maddox, uncovers an astonishing treasure of melodies from the same three-chord creek in which American songsters have been panning for gold a century or longer.

1. Wilco: Sky Blue Sky
Yeah, it's sort of a boring pick. I didn't mean for it to be my favorite 2007 album. But I put it on the car stereo around Christmastime, for the first time since the early Summer, and I realized that I knew all the words to all the songs, and felt as though I always had. I think it's no coincidence that on the heels of their tour promoting this record, which itself plays like a career retrospective, Wilco have forted up at home in Chicago to play through their entire back catalogue, one album at a time. Sky Blue Sky feels like the end of a decade-long ride, and I'm curious as hell to see where they go next.

* * *

Disappointing Albums of 2007

Grant-Lee Phillips's half-baked Strangelet disappointed, too heavy on the rocknroll drums and curiously light on the loving lyrical tangles that made Virginia Creeper Grant-Lee's best album before or after the Buffalo. For its stray moments of melodic invention (listen to the second line of the first track's chorus), and for its bombast that suggests Buffalo nostalgia, I considered tacking Strangelet on for a number 9. I would still follow Phillips's luxurious and raggedy voice over the edge of a waterfall, but comparing Strangelet to similar artist Josh Ritter's pretty amazing Historical Conquests ... they just aren't in the same league. C'mon, G-L, you can do better.

Meanwhile, with At the End of Paths Taken, Cowboy Junkies made a third much-diminished return to their 2001 peak album Open. They do this every six or seven years: one great album and its several receding ripples. Maybe their next record will make the next big splash.

After their deeply affecting previous two albums, Okkervil River's The Stage Names felt flimsy and forced to me, unable to sustain the weight of its own whininess.

And if I may indulge a moment in contrarian blogger snark: The Everybodyfields? Somebody hand these kids a mop. Jesus Christ. I agree that life is full of suffering -- but damp, lacy Victorian bathos like Nothing Is Okay is partly why.

* * *

5 eMusic Explorations

Why top 8? Well I'm sure there'd have been two more new albums I'd have loved this year if I had heard them, but I spent so much time riffling around in eMusic's dusty shelves and drawers and shadowy eaves, I think I ought to spend some space reporting on a few of the nuggets I discovered there this year.

Band of Blacky Ranchette: "Getting It Made"
Howe Gelb's oddball country music side project wobbles in quality across a full album, but Neko Case's gusty melodic contribution to this country-pop tune made it one of my iPod favorites this year.

Alela Diane: "Dry Grass and Shadow"
A hay-flavored slice of New Weird American pie, Diane's honey-sunny apple orchard voice turns her words over and over to taste their consonants and connotations. Her album The Pirate's Gospel wears itself out early thanks to the sameness of its bare-guitar texture, but this fully fleshed single is an expert-cut little gem.

Corrina Repp: "Safe Place in the World"
Somewhere I read that she's a combination Neko Case and Portishead, so, you know -- I was right there. Turns out Repp is more Nico than Neko: cold and alien, though still dampened enough by rainy Northwestern hominess to soften her snooty Mod influences. She tends toward moody more than groovy, but this tune grooves in its spacey way, like Nancy Sinatra heard through Martian underwater radio.

Simon Joyner: "You Don't Know Me"
Soul-scarringly bleak, this Bright Eyes forebear sings like Lou Reed if Lou Reed were an Omaha hobo. The backing band sound like Patti Smith's band on Horses, hard-edged, strung-out and hungry, only with cowboy hats. Oh but there's so much jaw-dropping poetry and honest emotion brimming across the whole despair-dazed record, it's worth plumbing the unremitting grimness. Just don't listen to it if you're already feeling lousy, because it will stifle your last breath of hope. Oh and don't listen to it if you're in a good mood, because its pelt of freezing rain will break up your parade and follow you home and into your bed and beneath your covers and into your dreams. Powerful stuff.

Karen Dalton: "Same Old Man"
The late Middle Weird America matron too late catching a piece of long-owed recognition in 2007, thanks to eMusic's promotion and a spot on Oxford American's Southern Music CD, Dalton worked mainly on pedal steeled-up Memphis soul, to uneven results, ranging from exemplary to what my wife rightly characterized as Bad Karaoke ("When a Man Loves a Woman"). But it's Dalton's pair of banjo tunes on this cult classic album In My Own Time that rappel most deeply the steep misty face of Amerian folk music. The clawhammer "Katie Cruel" and up-picked "Same Old Man" seem to belong to no time period at all, but only to the ground beneath their feet, reminding me most of Washington Irving's supernatural Alleghenia, sowed with the blood of warring Europeans and enslaved Africans and thousands of years of Native Americans, and growing these strange mushrooms, hallucinogenic and bitter.

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Friday, November 16, 2007 ... 12:21 PM

"Throw Me a Rope" Guest Entries #5 & #6

Folks, it pains me to say this, but I'm fixing to get sick of reading about Gillian Welch. So before I cross that line, I'm cutting off the MP3 offer for now. It may come back some day. I wish I could think of a way to honor, in the same fashion, other artists we love, but no other music I write about here generates the volume of Google referrals that "Throw Me a Rope" does. Except possibly, mysteriously to me, Critter Fuqua of Old Crow Medicine show. That's something I still mean to look into -- what's with the global Critter obsession? (If you're reading this because you followed a "Critter Fuqua" Google search to this post, please for Chrissake drop me a line and help me understand.)

Anyway, I have enough "Throw Me a Rope" guest entries to take us into the new year. I don't want to post them all in one batch, because I think that's unjust to the folks who spent time writing them, and I don't want to post them one after another, with none of my own entries between, because I don't want new visitors to this site to think I only feature Gillian Welch content. (I don't. Really. Scroll down!) Also it's sort of lazy to let other folks write my blog for me.

All right, so here are a couple more guest entries. Emily Amey writes:

why i love gillian welch (you too david) in 100 words or less...

like most people responding to this post, i fancy myself somewhat of a music aficionado. but when it comes to gillian and dave, my appreciation becomes more fanatical.

i've seen them a hand full of times.. at the beacon in NYC.. at the
newport folk festival (emmylou's mom got sick, and gillian and dave sat in for her.. it was the highlight of the day!!).. and at a TINY little old opera house in bum-fuck ohio.. each experience has touched me in a different way.

seeing them live, and recognizing the unspoken synergy that takes
place, is mesmerizing. each time it's different, but they know where
the other is going, and constantly keep up and compliment. i own every album, every song i can get my hands on.. (ryan adam duos included)...and i never tire.

i'm going through a tough spot.. these two have seen me through many before.. i need a little something!! a little something until the next album hits the shelves.

It's like heroin, isn't it? And Lacy Garrison tells a great story about the night he met the dynamic duo:

I saw Gillian Welch play at Carnegie Mellon University a few years ago. My friend Rob and I drove from New York City to Pittsburgh to see the show. Needless to say, the show amazing. After the show, Rob asked if I wanted to meet Gillian and David. We stood outside and waited. I was extremely nervous. We waited for seemingly forever before they came out of the building carrying their guitars. Rob walked over to them and said hi. I was dumbstruck. I don't remember what Rob said but they agreed to take pictures with us once they put their guitars in their bus. I was beside myself. I could barely say my name when I introduced myself. Rob and I patiently waited. They emerged from the van. Gillian walked over to Rob and me. Without pausing, she stood between us and put her arms around our waists. David surprised me. I never thought of him as an extrovert until he took Rob's camera and started snapping pictures of the three of us. I have the pictures in a box. I love them. Especially the one that David took from arm's length. It has David's face, Rob's face, Gillian's face, and my beaming, smiling face pressed against each other check-to-check.

Thanks you two! More to come.

Labels: Gillian Welch "Throw Me a Rope" Guest Entries

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Tuesday, November 13, 2007 ... 7:36 AM

Eilen Jewell on Venice Beach busking

On Friday I interviewed Boston-based singer-songwriter Eilen Jewell, and wrote a feature on her for HickoryWind.org, which you can read here:

Eilen Jewell Has Arrived

Her record Letters From Sinners and Strangers is I think my most listened-to new album this year. Although in my story I sort of decry this exact facile comparison, fans of Gillian Welch (readers of this blog, in other words) will take much pleasure in Eilen's sepia-toned phrasing, either on the new record or last year's impressive, mournfully toned debut Boundary County, which with its sleepy tempos and whispered regrets and wide-open-spaciness compares, I think, to early Cowboy Junkies.

Betsy and I attended Eilen's show late Friday night. She opened for the Two Dollar Pistols, of Raleigh, whom we did not stick around to see because I'd been up since 5:30am and had a 100-degree fever. Still, I wish Eilen had headlined, and I was not the only one in the sizable crowd who did. The set flashed by, finished far too quickly. The tension between Eilen's energetic rockabilly band and her wry smoky vocals makes for a really compelling live sound. Her guitar-picker Jerry Miller lights up his orange Gretsch Round-Up like a lightning rod.

(Note: a few weeks ago I e-mailed Miller to ask whether he's the same Jerry Miller guitarist from 1960s psychadelic rock band Moby Grape. He isn't. When I met him on Friday I learned that not only am I not the first person to ask, but that at least one journalist has gone to print with an incorrect assumption.)

Anyway, it's probably not nice to say so, but I can't help suggesting that another up'n'coming young-woman-led alt-country act whom I reviewed here not too long ago could take a few or twenty lessons from Eilen Jewell and her ensemble.

I detained Jewell for longer than we'd planned, but she was focused and attentive, and very nice. Some of my favorite parts of the discussion -- specifically, an account of her summer spent busking at Venice Beach, CA -- just didn't work into the already long HickoryWind.org story, so I am going to post them here, informally:

Since doing that [Venice Beach], I haven't really been able to busk anyplace else. I got spoiled.

You do have to vie a bit [for a spot to busk]. It's a cool scene, because it's one of the few places in the country where there are just tons of street performers doing ... anything under the sun -- you name it: juggling chainsaws, playing their guitar ... but yet you don't have to get a permit and there's just no restrictions on it. I think that's just the coolest thing, that they still have that some place.

The trick is you'd have to get there bright and early, like almost ridiculously early on the weekends. Crack of dawn sometimes. To get a good spot. 'Cause it was all about the good spot. And then if you got that, you were pretty much set. Unless someone came and set up right next to you with a much louder amp or something.

The good spots were the ones where ... There were some people that were in the same places every day. Like certain people. I remember one guy was selling incense, and he was always at that corner, and another guy had an "atheist awareness" stand he had set up, or something along those lines. And you wanted to be next to the people who were friendly to musicians. That was key, 'cause some of them weren't into it, they didn't want to hear your music all day long. ... Generally the crossroads of the bike path and some other main street was a good way to go.

It was a lot of rolling with the punches, 'cause the first time you got there, you don't know what you're doing. Maybe you don't even have an amp 'cause you don't even know you're supposed to have one or that you're gonna need one, you know? It's just a learning process. You find out what makes you the most money, what doesn't work, who yells at you, who kicks you out of their spot 'cause you're just supposed to know it's their spot all the time. And it's full of characters too. Venice Beach is just ... it's just like ... I don't know if you've ever seen The Doors movie ... It's all like a big trip basically.

Well there's the chainsaw juggler. He always kind of kept things interesting. You know, when you say, "Oh yeah, there was a person just right down the street juggling chainsaws," you get kind of an idea about, "O.K., that's the kind of place it was."

I made friends with a lot of people who essentially just lived on the beach, and slept in the sand. And one of them was this great guy named Rollin [/Rowlin/Roland]. And I don't know if that was his real name, or if they called him that because he was always on a bicycle. Every day he would wake up, it must have been in the middle of the night practically, and he would go around the neighborhood and pick all the flowers he could, and he would cover his bike with flowers, and cover his head with flowers. He was just like a walking flower garden. And he would ride around on his bike, just the sweetest person ever.

One of my most vivid memories is standing there with my guitar in the middle of some song, and there's a small crowd kind of watching me, and Rollin rode by on his bicycle, and right as he rode by me he threw this huge basket of flower petals up in the air, and they all came raining down on me. It was one of the coolest things ever. I saved a lot of the flower petals, 'cause for some reason they dried really well. So for the longest time I had them in my guitar case as like a good luck thing.

Eilen plays Atlanta tonight, and then she's on to Florida, and finishes the year out west. Catch her when you can.

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Friday, November 02, 2007 ... 9:00 AM

Gillian Welch ... Speed Demon: "Throw Me a Rope" Guest Entries #3 & #4

I'm slow at thinking up stuff to post between them, and so I'm falling behind on the Gillian Welch guest entries. So today I'm going to double up.

Annie T. of Ape Kabuki writes:

last night there was an out of the blue, kind-of-secret-in-that-it-wasn't-really-advertised and only 40 people were there, Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings concert at Tangier in Los Feliz. they usually make it out to L.A every October, but they usually play at the Avalon, which is a much bigger venue. when they came out dave said, "welcome to the world's most informal gig."

the show was totally awesome. they did dylan covers and "tired eyes" and a beautiful robyn hitchcock cover "luminous rose," and they sang the same mysterious song they never put on a record plus i guess a new song of theirs called "knuckleball catcher," which was phenomenal. at one point dave was singing along with his playing under his breath just like glenn gould, and at another point he surprised himself with his genius and yelled, "jesus!"

i have decided that they are not alt-country or neo-country, they are modernist country. they take any song--even cindi lauper's "girls just wanna have fun"--and with their precision they distill it to its aching american essence, honing in on it like they're driving straight for it on a flat highway in texas. but shy and adorable at the same time. and so rangy.

but here's a spur of the moment poem for you;
red hair, cowboy boots
looking out past the screen door
into a field, a desert,
into stage lights,
quiet evening creeping
into our held breath
waiting, listening,
she bends her head
and his voice joins hers,
witchy from the darkened kitchen.

and an anecdote gillian told at the concert:
they were driving around l.a in their rented charger and some guys in their own classic car (i can't remember the make) pulled up next to them and kept on trying to get them to drag race. so over a couple of blocks out the window she learned they were scottish guys from aberdeen. and she said, "i woulda done it too, but if i get another speeding ticket, i lose my license."

Can't you just hear Gillian telling that story? Love it.

Carolyn Fryberger, who co-runs a Dave Rawlings Machine group over on the Facebook, shares with us a Cultural Event paper she wrote for one of her classes:

Why We Do What We Do:
Gillian Welch, David Rawlings and my Quarter Life Crisis

Tuesday April 24, 2007 marked a very important anniversary for me. Driving home from Nashville at 3 in the morning, as my mind drifted along the fuzzy edge of reality, watching east Tennessee farms fall away to the side of the road, I thought about how much has happened since the first time I saw Gillian Welch and David Rawlings in concert. Gillian and Dave’s music has become a medium through which I understand many of the experiences of my life; my choice to transfer from back home from what most would consider to be a prestigious school, the love that has come in and out of my life. She is able to take any experience, no matter how distant from my own, and make it understandable to me; in the process making the place of my own experiences more understandable in the world. She has changed the way I understand the feeling of home and the feeling of being myself.

Last year, going to Merlefest with my best friend Ginger marked the end of my first semester at UNCA, my first semester back in the area that I love. I was reeling with the weight of recent decisions, trying to figure out how to understand them as just a part of my life, rather than a definition of myself. It was at this festival that we both saw Gillian for the first time, a dream of ours since first being exposed to her music through friends and family. I had no idea at the time how much this show would change the feeling of the ensuing year, my understanding of myself, my motivations, and my friendship with Ginger. Since that first taste, I have traveled to seven Gillian Welch and David Rawlings shows, logging countless miles with my friend Ginger by my side. My understanding of Gillian and Dave’s music has deepened in ways I never knew possible, bringing with it a fuller understanding of myself and my goals. They bring me back to the deepest beauty of this world: the bittersweet experience of loving. Gillian and Dave have made me fall deeper in love with this world, and I have become wholly addicted to the experience of their shows.

The incredible emotional response they evoke from me makes the experience of their shows a kind of touchstone for other emotional experiences in my life. The meaning of most anything can be spun through their songs. This, I think, is the definitive purpose of artistic culture. At its best, art should be a medium through which we make sense of our experience in the world. We should allow ourselves to be changed both by the content, as well as the feeling of experiencing that content. There is no place in this world that I am as sure of myself as when I am riding home from a show in the middle of the night, overly caffeinated and preparing for a day of classroom delirium. This is the place where no questions need be asked, as I listen to the next tune on Ginger’s aptly named “why we do what we do” mix CD and revel in the overwhelming emotion drawn out of me by Gillian’s melancholy lyricism, and Dave’s euphoric guitar playing.

As I write this, it is 3 in the afternoon now, and I’ve yet to take a nap or eat a real meal. Running on fumes, these thoughts strike me as the most beautiful creations of my mind. I’m sure I will later read over them and think myself silly and overly dramatic. But I know that when Ginger reads this, she will understand.

Thanks Annie and Carolyn. More on the way!

Labels: Gillian Welch "Throw Me a Rope" Guest Entries

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Wednesday, October 31, 2007 ... 9:04 AM

TRICK OR TREATING DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS
by Richard Brautigan
from Revenge of the Lawn

As a child I used to play at Halloween as if I were a sailor and go trick or treating down to the sea in ships. My sack of candy and things were at the wheel and my Halloween mask was sails cutting through a beautiful autumn night with lights on front porches shining like ports of call.

Trickortreat was the captain of our ship, saying, "We are only going to be in this port for a short time. I want all of you to go ashore and have a good time. Just remember we sail on the morning tide." My God, he was right! We sailed on the morning tide.

* * *


All right so this isn't a music post exactly, but all arts aspire to music, yeah? And Richard Brautigan's drunken wee-hour memoirs summon, as well as any prose I think, the same tasty melancholy you hear in a familiar sad song. Lots of songwriters could take a lesson or three from Brautigan's prose.

I sort of worshiped Richard Brautigan when I was in college (R.B. the prose writer; R.B. the poet not as much). When I was about 20 I found his story "Corporal" in a Flash Fiction anthology, and its last sentence felt like a wrecking ball to the chest. In all my reading since that two-page-long story I've mainly hoped to feel again the same pure stunning pain. It's olympian, the emotional acrobatics R.B. pulls off with his bone-naked prose. On a dime he pivots from quirky bitter funny to universally fucking devastating. Devastation is Brautigan's gift, and he smuggles it in a birthday cake, the more unexpectedly to shatter your whole heart. But, you know, to shatter it beautifully.

This little bit of R.B. above is not devastating, but it is sad. When I was 20 I didn't know it was sad. Now I'm 30, an old man, an ancient artifact practically, and reading it for the first time in years I feel this sigh at the end, which I never felt before. It's small and bittersweet as October burning leaves. You can almost inhale it.

Here's more Brautigan stuff for Halloween. I like "Halloween in Denver." The mental somersault ending doesn't work perfectly, but it shouldn't work at all, and that it does as much as it does blows my mind. It sneaks up on your blind side and pinches you a little bit, and it hurts. It reminds me of the many similar disorienting turns in David Lynch's inscrutable but occasionally stunning Inland Empire.

Anyway, happy Halloween folks. More Gillian Welch entries posting soon.

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