The term “one-liner” evokes comedians and jokes. Lately the one-liners that stick with me are from songs. Here are two that keep bouncing around in my head long after the music has stopped, courtesy of the Avett Brothers’ newest CD: There’s a darkness upon me flooded in light, and I am a breathing time machine. The lyrics look and read naked without the music but resonate nevertheless.
Is the banjo’s sound a pleasure genetically shared? My grown son, Zachary, told me again today how much he loves Sufjan Stevens‘ rooftop rendition of “Lakes of Canada.” Part of the appeal is more than the banjo, however. It’s the way Stevens is filmed by La Blogotheque, coincidentally in my city of birth. Funny how much our tastes in music overlap — and unite, despite the age difference of thirty-five years. And the differences that divide fathers and sons.
I make no secret of my adoration for The Avett Brothers, a band I fell for even harder after seeing them live last summer. For that concert at the Oregon Zoo, I stood in a monsoon-like rain, oblivious to the drenching.
Now I’ve seen them again, this time indoors last Friday night at the Crystal Ballroom. I leaned against the stage with the most die-hard music fans I’ve ever met: people who had flown from South Dakota, a couple who had driven eighteen hours from Colorado, and a woman from Washington, D.C. who was taking in her eleventh show on the band’s present tour. Another guy was seeing his sixth performance in nine days. All planned to take in the Saturday night show too.
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Read the words. Listen to the words. Watch them sung. Then ask yourself what have — or did — we become? Ask why nearly every major news organization can’t bring itself to equate waterboarding with “torture” when, in fact, the United States executed World War II enemies for the same practice?
Maybe Jonathan Mann’s song, whose lyrics are drawn from one of the infamous torture memos, will finally awake the nation. And justice will be done.
When I say “album,” some young people look as if I’ve uttered a foreign word. Thus this headline touting the top 25 theme or concept albums caught my eye.
Cohesiveness in these works is lost in today’s random-shuffle world. My favorite (not that I’ve heard them all) is Sufjan Stevens‘ Illinoise. His “John Wayne Gacey, Jr.” makes me want to weep.
And surely someone has compiled another list of albums, albums forever linked to an experience, enshrining them in memory’s Hall of Fame.
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I won’t chide myself anymore for my swearing, which in my fifties has become more profane and repetitive when I’m alone and less frequent when around others.
That’s because an article in a scientific journal describes profanity as ubiquitous and a “natural part of speech development.” Guess I’m off the hook.
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