Tag: 250424

Feeling the song

David Wilcox performs in Manchester

A lot of David Wilcox’s fans consider him a musical minister, his songs providing spiritual grounding as they rhyme and dance.

“If I feel hollow, that’s just proof there’s more for me to follow,” he offers simply in “That’s What the Lonely Is For,” a touchstone track from his mid-’90s gem, Big Horizon.

A fitting way to describe Wilcox’s approach to songwriting is “Language of the Heart,” also a song title from his major label debut, How Did You Find Me Here? In a recent phone interview, he likened his craft to bailing water from a boat. “Because the alternative is death,” he said. “It is purely self-preservation.”

Even if the world isn’t clamoring for another song, “What I need is to check in with my heart so that I stay current with my grieving and it doesn’t build up a backlog or break the dam,” he continued. “It’s a fun excuse; I pretend I’m being an artist, but really I’m just tending to my emotional buoyancy.”

In 2016, Wilcox began helping his fans process their emotions through his music via a bespoke song service. “I’ve kind of applied my songwriting talents to other people’s hearts and stories … that’s a fascinating thing for me,” he said. “I’ve done more than 70 of these custom songs now, and they’re all so specific and unique.”

The process begins with Wilcox spending an hour on the phone talking to a prospect, who is usually looking for a unique gift.

“To see if I can get to the heart of the song, I ask quirky questions, like, ‘What are some things on your shelf that have a story that would really take a while to tell?’ or, ‘What’s a thing you’d reach for if the house was on fire?’”

Testimonials to Wilcox’s Custom Built Songs fill the service’s web page.

“David has a keen ability to take a conversation and turn it into art,” said a customer named Bob, who surprised his wife on their 17th wedding anniversary with a Wilcox-penned ode to the rainforest. “He listened to our story and turned it into a beautiful song that we will enjoy for the rest of our lives.”

Writing in response to stories he’s heard is how, as a young introvert, Wilcox began his musical journey. “Someone would say something to me, and it would take me a day of sort of gathering my answer musically. Then I would come back, and I would sing them a song that showed I was listening. I did feel what you were saying.”

The spirituality in his music is the product of a wide open and still ongoing search for meaning, and words to express it.

“What I got growing up was a mystical sense that life is more interesting than it appears,” he said. “I was trying to find language for that because I was raised with no tradition at all. And that was a great way to come up, because I got my mystical sense first before I had any dogma or any stories.”

It’s not rooted in any specific dogma or belief system.

“I speak a lot of languages spiritually, and I am comfortable in a lot of settings. If people saw me coming out of some buildings, they’d say, ‘What the hell are you doing in there?’ I have prayed at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem,” he said, adding, “The fact that three religions landed in the same city on the same rock, I don’t consider that an accident. I consider that divine comedy.”

Wilcox has made 18 studio albums, starting with the independently released The Nightshift Watchman in 1987. His latest is 2023’s My Good Friends. His creative process is a blend of self-therapy and mysticism. “I call it metabolizing old pain. You take it apart and find that it’s made of discomfort, but mostly it’s … yearning, which has a sacredness. [It] comes from an assumption that life should be better, that you’re basing on … nothing but just faith.”

David Wilcox
When: Friday, April 25, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Dana Center, Saint Anselm College, Manchester
Tickets: $45 at anselm.edu

Featured photo. David Wilcox. Photo by Lynne Harty.

The Music Roundup 25/04/24

• Abba dabba: Time travel back to the ’70s with Abba tribute act Mamma Mania! The New York City based-band goes for the look and feel of Sweden’s beloved export and encourages audience members to do the same and arrive in their favorite dancing finery. With over a decade of experience, they bring plenty of energy to “Dancing Queen,” “Take A Chance On Me” and others. Thursday, April 24, 7 p.m., LaBelle Winery, 14 Route 111, Derry, $40 at labellewinery.com.

• Fur out: Though they cover the hallowed hippies nightly, Bearly Dead is an atypical tribute act. Formed in the wake of the Dead’s 50th anniversary reunion shows, the Boston band tends to rock a lot harder than its namesake. “We don’t try to recreate,” guitarist and singer Nick Swift said last year. “We’d rather play like ourselves; we are a rock band which just happens to play Grateful Dead tunes.” Friday, April 25, 8 p.m., BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord, $24 at ccanh.com.

• Mass laughs: Enjoy standup comedy in a cinema setting with Chris Tabb, who’s been on BET, NESN and The Food Network, along with hosting a late-night talk show a while back and volunteering for the American Stroke Association. Tabb was once House MC at Foxboro’s Comedy Scene and cites Bernie Mac as a key influence; he’s a favorite in New England clubs. Saturday, April 26, 8 p.m., Chunky’s Cinema Pub, 707 Huse Road, Manchester, $20 at chunkys.com.

• Other half: A bitter legal spat has dashed the prospect of John Oates performing again with Daryl Hall, but Oates has made some solid solo albums without his old mate. At an upcoming show, he’ll give area fans a chance to hear him play “beautiful and introspective country-folk songs,” according to one critic, “situated geographically and emotionally closer to Nashville than to Philadelphia.” Sunday, April 27, 8 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $35 at tupelohall.com.

• Multi man: Funkmeister and Moon Boot Lover leader Peter Prince plays solo at music-friendly eatery. Over the years, the ever-changing singer/guitarist’s band has included members of Soulive, John Brown’s Body, Assembly of Dust and Percy Hill. The first host of the Jammy Awards, Prince and his band are favorites throughout New England. Wednesday, April 30, 6 p.m., Riverworks Restaurant and Tavern, 164 Main St., Newmarket. Visit peterprincemusic.com.

Sinners (R)

Director Ryan Coogler crafts a very good supernatural thriller studded with a few top-shelf musical set pieces — including one all-timer of a chill-inducing music-on-film moment — in Sinners.

After years away in the military (World War I, it’s implied) and in Chicago, twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both Michael B. Jordan) return to their hometown in the Mississippi Delta during what Wikipedia says is 1932. I missed a date title card, if there was one, but the movie makes it clear that we’re in the pre-civil rights era when getting out — joining the Great Migration to the north or west — was the best chance of getting ahead for Black communities. But Smoke and Stack explain to their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) that the relative freedom of Chicago isn’t exactly as advertised so they have decided to return to the devil they know. They’ve come back with a stack of cash, a truck full of booze and a plan to open a juke joint, which will have its opening night the very same day they buy the old mill where it will be housed from some tobacco-spitting racist.

The day is spent gathering necessities for the big opening. Stack and Sammie buy catfish and a sign from general store operators Bo (Yao) and Grace Chow (Li Jun Li). They hire pianist Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) to perform along with guitarist Sammie, and Cornbread (Omar Miller) to serve as a bouncer. Smoke convinces Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a sort-of ex who perhaps has otherworldly abilities, to cook for the evening. The night promises possibility — Sammie flirts with Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a woman who might sing at the joint — as well as potential dangers. The way Smoke and Stack are told there’s no Klan in the area makes it clear that the Ku Klux Klan is a present danger. The juke joint’s menu of Italian wine and Irish beer suggests the Chicago gangs that may be the booze’s provenance. And then there’s Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a woman with a biracial grandfather who appears to be white and had a youthful romance with Stack. She still (angrily) carries a torch even though Stack tries to convince her that they can not be a couple.

But Sammie can almost make all of that seem like distant worry. His playing of the blues goes beyond simply music well performed into the realm of spiritual experience, something that can connect the people in the present to the people and music of the past and future. He conjures an experience that not only gives the people listening a kind of momentary release from themselves but also attracts a man (Jack O’Connell) we first see running, smoldering as the sun sets, to a house on a dirt farm, begging to be let in.

The creature feature elements of this story are well done but what makes them something more than just standard-issue monster movie fare is the way they’re nestled in a setting that feels like a dark fairy tale even though it’s drawn from actual history. When a trio of white musicians comes to the door of the juke joint, they’re dangerous for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the supernatural. What, then, does it mean for something to be a monster? The movie also spends a fair amount of time thinking about freedom — momentary freedom, a more lasting state of freedom. What does that mean? How is it achieved?

Anchoring these ideas to something human and real are the performances, which are solid across the board. Jordan of course is the standout. This movie isn’t, in the Fruitvale Station sense, a serious drama but, as Jordan did in Creed and Black Panther — two movies where the IP could do most of the work if you let it — he brings gravitas to less-than-grave subjects. He can convey pain, frustration, desire and anger with an economy of gestures and expressions. And he makes Smoke and Stack two different people who can work in concert without always being in agreement.

The real standout of Sinners is the music — how the movie uses it, how it puts it together. One musical scene in particular felt to me like the equivalent of a set-piece action scene in a different kind of movie. It’s Tom Cruise hanging from a plane or Keanu Reeves fighting in a traffic circle. It is the sort of thing that shocks the movie up to a different level and makes it easier to forgive any wobbly bits, not that this movie has many. It’s a kind of precision designed, choreographed sequence that serves as a showpiece and a bit of a demonstration of mission statement for what the movie wants to convey. A
In theaters.

Tilt, by Emma Pattee

Tilt, by Emma Pattee (Marysue Rucci Books, 227 pages)

If you’ve ever imagined yourself in the middle of a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, where were you when it happened? That’s what Annie, the protagonist of Tilt, is thinking as she frantically makes her way out of a big-box store in Portland, Oregon, moments after the long-predicted “Big One” hits.

“What I’m saying is, my imaginary earthquake did not include IKEA,” Annie says.

Annie is 35 years old and 37 weeks pregnant when the earthquake hits on the very morning that she has finally pushed past her inertia and gone shopping for a crib. Up until this point, the “nursery” in the two-bedroom apartment that she shares with her husband, Dom, consisted of an empty room and a car seat still in its box. To say that she is ambivalent about this pregnancy is an understatement. Also, Annie and Dom are barely solvent, a circumstance that she blames on Dom’s unwillingness to let go of his dream of being a famous actor, even though he is 38 and his latest “big break” is being an understudy for the lead in a local production of “King Lear.”

Annie herself is something of a theater kid, but she has largely abandoned the dream of her younger self to be a playwright, having taken a 9-to-5 job that pays the bills while suffocating her soul. She is on her first day of maternity leave when the earthquake hits the Pacific Northwest. It is the long-feared Cascadia earthquake, one that collapses buildings and bridges and destroys all communications and life as we know it. Annie survives with minor injuries but in her struggle to escape the building she leaves her purse, keys and phone behind. Unsure of what to do, not knowing if her apartment still exists or if her husband is alive, she sets off on foot, in a pair of Birkenstock sandals, planning to walk to the coffee shop where her husband works, some miles away.

It is a precarious journey for anyone, let alone a woman just weeks away from giving birth. Almost everything around her is broken or ablaze, people are dazed and injured or dying, and, as the hours go by, survivors are becoming predatory.

As Annie makes her way through the streets she reflects on a fight she and her husband had the previous night — and tells the story to her unborn child, which she affectionately calls Bean. It was a run-of-the-mill fight, but also one that summarizes the couple’s journey: “Because all fights are about nothing in the grand scheme of things but then also in the grand scheme of things when taken all together, they tell a larger story. Like each fight is a star in the sky and now that I’ve been with your father for a decade or so I can look up at the constellation of all of our arguments and see a shape there, clear as day,” Annie tells her child.

That constellation becomes clear to the reader in a series of flashbacks that alternate with Annie’s real-time journey and also give us snapshots of Annie’s hardscrabble upbringing and her relationship with her late mother. We learn of the bright promise that lit up Annie’s twenties, as she writes and produces a play that led to her meeting and marrying Dom. But as she settles into the monotony of her job as an office manager for a tech company, those dreams “sparkle at us from a distant mountaintop” amid a life consisting of “an infinite amount of time spent unloading the dishwasher and waiting in line at the grocery store.”

She wavers between trying to appreciate her life as it is, and wondering whether she and Bean would be better off on their own. She can’t shake the idea that Dom is failing her. But it is unclear whether he is failing Annie, or whether she is failing him. She grapples with these questions on the journey, in which she forms an unlikely bond with a young mother who is trying to reach the school where her daughter was when the earthquake hit, and as she encounters a variety of memorable characters: a bicyclist whose wife has been seriously injured, a malevolent gang of teenagers, the passing drivers who offer her a ride, a young woman who works with Dom.

Parents, Annie notices, are everywhere. “What is it about parents that you always know they are parents?” she muses. “That look that says I am serious but I also spend lots of time picking up LEGOs. Their hands tense and anxious from constantly cutting apple slices. A kind of hanging flesh around their mouth. A hurried way of walking.”

Ultimately, while this is a novel about the end of the world as we know it, a species of the so-called “apocalypse genre,” it’s also about coming to grips with your life when your life has not turned out as you planned, when you are so dissatisfied with your lot that even an earthquake doesn’t mess up your plans. “Nobody wants to be where they are,” Annie thinks at one point. “So would it really matter so much if the earth swallowed us all?”

But Pattee answers her character with this book, which thrums with tension and is gorgeously written, with scenes and phrases that will long remain with the reader. She describes the blaring of car horns as “honks [that] rise around us like the mating calls of a long extinct species” and Annie’s monotonous existence as “looking for some way to spend a Saturday, all those Saturdays collecting in dusty piles around the house.”

A narrative built around an interior conversation with an unborn child takes a bit of getting used to, but after a while, it works, and gives Annie license to deliver asides like this one, spoken to the child after a remembrance of an exchange the parents had the night before the earthquake:

“Did you hear me say that? Were you listening to all that? Seeing the dusty baseboard, cracked linoleum, and light fixtures from the eighties. Did you look at us in our baggy pajamas, in our untoned bodies, and think, Them? Them?”

Tilt is a remarkable literary debut. Every end of the world as we know it should be this good. A —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 25/04/24

Stella Cole, Stella Cole (Iron Lung Records)

Don’t be fooled by the disposable-template look of the album cover. The world is waiting pretty breathlessly for the follow-up to this Knoxville, Tenn., native’s next album, whenever it comes; for now we’ll have to make do with this, her self-titled debut, an exercise in Great American Songbook standards, oh, and a cover of Billie Eilish’s “My Future.” Would that more of this kind of thing showed up on my desk — I mean, it does, but usually from singers who don’t seem to get that singing songs made famous by people like Judy Garland and such requires more than a little flair, or at least a desire to tell a story, which Cole states was the next-level step at which she’d approached this album after spending too many years sweating over what her voice sounded like (all the necessary trill-drenched panache is present when she covers the Garland-originated “Meet Me in St. Louis”). At 26, Cole’s knack for online self-promotion gained her worldwide recognition; her devotees include Michael Buble, James Taylor and Meghan Trainor, which should definitely tell you something. The Eilish tune, since you’re curious, isn’t steeped in the same torchiness as the original, more like a story, as we discussed. A world-class debut. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

The Crystal Teardrop, The Crystal Teardrop Is Forming (Popclaw/Rise Above Records)

What’s old is new again, again, with this U.K.-based Jefferson Airplane-configured five-piece. You may (or may not, I don’t care which) remember the Paisley Underground of the 1990s, which tried to resurrect the groovy sounds of the late 1960s while retaining some semblance of current relevance, but in case you’d never heard of it (a few of the bands on the soundtrack to The Silence of the Lambs came from that scene, for reference), these guys were at least cool enough to name one of their bangly-jangly flower-power songs after one of the bands that thrived during that short-lived cultural blip (“The Rain Parade”). That really wasn’t necessary, given that this group aims for the rafters as far as authenticity: The totally analog recordings feature a guy on sitar, one on Mellotron and the singer Alexandra Rose’s vocals were captured through an old Leslie speaker, which lends it a nostalgically claustrophobic Byrds/Mamas And Papas sound. Catchy though the music occasionally is, we have here an obvious flash-in-the-pan that I’m sure the Nylon reviewer will find to be a nice, dishwasher-safe distraction from the turmoil of current events; maybe your great-grandfather will dig it, or something. B —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

• Well here we are, gang, as I write this we are in the grip of a typical Third Winter, in New England, and guess what, spoiler, it’s freezing again! I had a heat-saving idea so we didn’t have to call the oil delivery guy again, what I did was take all our tax return stuff and put it in the ol’ pot-bellied stove and burn it, which was better than paying my taxes; after all, there’s no one at the IRS anymore to take my check and staple it neatly to their pile of Eric’s Tax Stuff and drop it in someone’s inbox and then go back to their desk and eat the ham sandwich they have every single day, while looking out the window, dreaming of freedom and birdies and super-polite sexytime with someone they work with who actually talked to them once a few years ago! I tore up the check and ordered Captain America #100 from eBay, for my comics collection, and stocked up on cans of beans, for the fast-approaching apocalypse! Anyway, while I shuffle the myriad pages of my giant doomsday prepper grocery list, we should probably talk about the Friday, April 11, batch of new music CDs, in this music CD column, everyone shut up and let me look at the list, oh! Oh! Look guys, it’s sludge-metal heroes Melvins with a new album, Thunderball, wait, why did the Melvins think they could name their new album after a copyrighted James Bond movie (actually I’m kidding, legally they can, they’d only maybe have lawyer problems if they renamed their band “Thunderball,” and besides, anyone who even remembers that there was once a James Bond movie called Thunderball is in a retirement home right now, where all they watch is reruns of Match Game ’77, so I think no one will complain either way), why did they do this? Oh who cares, it’s a Melvins album, let me do the rock journo thingie and listen to something from it. Here it is, a new tune called “Victory Of The Pyramids,” and wait, what are they even doing here, the video starts with crazily flashing images, aren’t the YouTube moderator-goblins supposed to warn people first? Like, suppose I’d just accidentally heard a Van Morrison tune and my stomach was already totally touch and go, I’d probably toss my cookies right now! And waitwhat, the song is awesome of course, but it’s punk-speed, someone tell me what’s going on here with all this crazy nonsense, between “fast Melvins” and “no IRS anymore” and ridiculously high prices for Captain America #100 in “Fine” grade condition, I’m lost, on this silly planet, with all you crazy people! But wait, breaking news, it slows down to normal Melvins speed after a few minutes; it’s doomy and Black Sabbath-y but not crazily insane like Korn. Right, OK, it’s mostly slow, please disperse, nothing to see here, let’s move on.

• But wait, there’s more doom metal, with Insatiable, the new album from Aussie band Divide and Dissolve! Composed of two women, the band doesn’t have a singer, but you’ll probably like them if you like Bell Witch or getting in car accidents.

• Pennsylvania “shoegaze/post-hardcore” band Superheaven releases its self-titled LP on Friday! “Cruel Times” is really cool, kind of like Stone Temple Pilots, a band that was never shoegaze, why are they saying they’re shoegaze? They’re not!

• Lastly this week I’d like to say that experimental indie/world music band Beirut’s new album is called Study Of Losses, and it includes the single “Guericke’s Unicorn,” a woozy and weird but very tolerable modern art-pop thing that sounds like Luke Temple trying to make circus music for cute dogs that like to swim. Just go listen to it, trust me. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Image: Iron Lung, Adapting // Crawling (Iron Lung Records) & Mac Sabbath “Pair-a-Buns” (self-released)

Updating Mary Pickford

She doesn’t come up in conversation very much — not today, anyway; 100 years ago it was a different story — but Mary Pickford was a deceptively powerful woman. She was by far the most popular actress of the silent movie era. She could adopt an innocent look that let her play boys and street urchins as easily as princesses or flappers. Adoring fans would freak out at the sight of her in a way Americans wouldn’t see until The Beatles. At a time when you could buy a very nice house for less than $500, she negotiated a salary of $10,000 a week. When studio heads tried to play tricks with her salary on the assumption that hey, she was just a girl, Pickford — along with her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, the biggest action star of the silent era, and Charlie Chaplin, the biggest star, period — started her own studio, United Artists.

Yes, Mary Pickford hit her peak during Prohibition, but it is still not much of a surprise that there is a classic cocktail called the Mary Pickford.

What is surprising is that it’s not a great cocktail.

A classic Mary Pickford consists of ½ ounce white rum, 1½ ounces pineapple juice, 1 teaspoon grenadine and 6 drops Luxardo maraschino liqueur.

There are any number of good cocktails that use white rum, but it is probably the least flavorful type of rum, and using half an ounce of it raises a number of questions: (a) Why bother? (b) Was this some sort of nod to her delicate beauty, or the fact that she often played children in the movies? (c) Was it some sort of sexist “girls-can’t-drink” attitude on the part of someone who had never met a flapper?

There are some exceptions, but generally I build a cocktail around a base of 2 ounces of spirits. Half an ounce is a little insulting to Ms. Pickford.

Moving on: Many — perhaps most — cocktails served in a stemmed glass, like a Mary Pickford, feature about half as much volume of fruit juice as they do spirits. There is three times as much pineapple juice in this drink as there is rum.

I’ll give you the teaspoon of grenadine. It adds a tiny bit of sweetness and a gentle pink color.

Luxardo? I don’t care for it. But I do agree that this combination could do with some added complexity.

So let’s reconfigure a Mary Pickford — not Mary Pickford herself; she was close to perfect as she was — but let’s build a drink that is more worthy of the name.

First, let’s bump the rum up to a more robust ounce and a half, and let’s make it a rum with some actual flavor — a golden, or possibly a spiced rum.

Then, let’s bring the pineapple-juice-to-rum ratio more into line. Because pineapple juice has a gentle flavor and isn’t as acidic as a citrus fruit, we can still use a bit more of it than the rum, but we’ll bring it closer to parity. Then, because it’s not acidic enough, let’s add some lime juice to give it a little bit of a backbone.

We’ll keep the grenadine. It’s been doing a good job and should be allowed to keep its job.

Finally, let’s add complexity in the form of rosewater. Normally, you have to be extremely careful to limit rosewater to a drop or two, but for some reason — perhaps known only to Mary Pickford herself — this cocktail will support a much larger amount of it than usual.

Let’s go with:

  • 1 and 1/2 ounces golden rum
  • 2 ounces pineapple juice
  • Juice of 1/4 lime
  • 1/3 teaspoon rosewater

Combine all ingredients over ice in a cocktail shaker, then shake until very cold. Ask your digital assistant to play “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” by Duke Ellington.

Strain it into a stemmed cocktail glass.

Now this is a cocktail that Mary Pickford might get behind. The rum provides enough authority to make you take this seriously. The rosewater is feminine but not overwhelming, and the grenadine gives the whole enterprise a slightly pink color. Appropriately enough, two or three of these will give your face that same pink color.

Featured photo: A Mary Pickford. Photo by John Fladd.

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