Tag: 260806

One more run

Senie Hunt plays through pain before surgery

Well-known for getting a lot from his guitar, by picking and strumming while also tapping out djembe-like rhythms on its surface, around a year and a half ago Senie Hunt learned his instrument was taking its own toll. As Hunt held a bag of groceries in his left hand, he reached for the doorknob with his right, and felt a sharp, wrist-to-elbow pain.

“I couldn’t even open my door,” he recalled. “I had to use my left hand.”

The source was an old injury, likely dating back to his college rugby and football days, aggravated for years by the demands of his playing. Tissue had been tearing and self-repairing, building up scar tissue that doctors now need to remove and seal back into place.

“It was either that or let it develop into chronic arthritis,” Hunt said. “I’d rather lose a little bit of motion and not have pain than not lose motion and have pain.”

The surgery will happen in Nashville, Hunt’s home for the past five years, right after he does a run of local shows. That means the guitarist is, for now, playing through it, shortening sets and adding breaks as needed. A recent gig finished with his hand wrapped in gauze.

“I just had to play a little differently through certain songs that were maybe a little less percussive,” he said. “The pain leveled down and helped me keep doing all the shows without having to cancel one because of it.”

There’s no paid time off for it, either. “I have insurance, but I can’t give myself that,” Hunt said. “So I recoup — I try to save as much as I can, especially during the tours, like any musician finds ways to.”

That makes this month’s homecoming swing, which ends Aug. 22 at Concord’s Barley House, something like a last stand before he heads South. His trio includes drummer Rory Walsh and bassist Tom Martin, who he’s built a tight chemistry with, and he’ll play several shows solo.

One big night is Aug. 14, when his trio is at the Concord basement bar where he often played before leaving New Hampshire to build a career in Music City.

“Penuche’s is one of those spots where anytime I come back, it’s like home for me,” he said. “It’s the family crowd, everyone we know.”

Hunt is plugged in for the trio shows, playing a Fender Stratocaster he repainted himself in the colors of the flag of Sierra Leone, the country he emigrated from as a young child before settling in New Hampshire.

“I wanted to pay homage to that in any way I could,” he said.

Surgery will align with another milestone for Hunt. He recently finished mixing and mastering his first full-length album, tentatively called The Journey. It’s been in the works since before the pandemic, and the plan is to release it during his recovery, to fill the gap in live shows.

Its title is a reflection of Hunt’s path in leaving his war-torn home country for the U.S., and his life in music.

“The songs try to tell a story of that,” he said. They include a reworked version of “Songbird,” one of the first songs he ever released, that now leans harder into the percussive, West African side of his playing. There’s also “Farewell, New Hampshire,” written when he first left for Nashville.

His new home has been good to him, Hunt said, primarily because he did his homework ahead of moving there.

“It could be a total train wreck if you’re trying to just jump in,” he said, adding he’s found a community beyond the country-leaning masses on the mile-long stretch of Broadway. “You’ve got hip-hop, hardcore metal, blues, jazz … I think the town is slowly starting to recognize all the other scenes.”

One thing missing from the current swing is the Concord Multicultural Festival. Hunt has played it multiple times, but surgery scheduling and September shows with his band back in Nashville mean he’ll bow out from this one. “I really had to focus on planning around my hand surgery this year,” he said.

He won’t have to miss out on seeing family. Nieces, nephews, his brother and sister-in-law, an older sister visiting from Massachusetts, and his twin sister are all in town during what’s also the family’s birthday month.

“Family first,” Hunt said. “Then, boom, all these friends from the years come out to the shows to hang out.”

Senie Hunt Trio at First Fridays: Dog Days of Summer
When: Friday, Aug. 7, at 6:15 p.m.
Where: Bicentennial Square, Concord
More: seniehunt.com
Solo in Concord at Rollins Park (33 Bow St.) on Saturday, Aug. 8, at 10 a.m. and at Sunfox Farm (Gully Hill Road) on Sunday, Aug. 9, at 5:45 p.m. Senie Hunt Trio at Penuche’s (Bicentennial Square) on Friday, Aug. 14, at 9 p.m. (21+)

Featured photo: Senie Hunt. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 26/08/06

• Tribute era: The backstory of tribute act Kanin Wren’s Taylor Swift Experience sounds a lot like that of the recently hitched über-star, albeit sans sold-out stadium shows. Wren first picked up a guitar at age 5 and has performed since her teens. The award-nominated concert stops at Swift’s every era, from country hits to pop songs that have been quoted in Congress — costumes and all. Thursday, Aug. 6, at 7 p.m., LaBelle Winery, 14 Route 111, Derry, $45, labellewinery.com.

• And company: The Allman Brothers Band’s longest-serving bassist and Dead & Company member, Oteil Burbridge is jam band royalty as a sideman, but an upcoming show has his center stage. Earlier this year Burbridge released an album with singer Lamar Williams Jr., who joins him along with Melvin Seals, Steve Kimock, Jason Crosby, Johnny Kimock and Tom Guarna. Friday, Aug. 7, at 7:30 p.m., Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua, $57 and up, etix.com.

• Local hero: Saturday Night Live veteran and Late Night host Seth Meyers returns to his hometown for an evening of standup comedy to benefit a pair of New Hampshire charities. He also did fundraisers for CASA of NH and Granite State Children’s Alliance in 2018 and 2023, and told WMUR recently that a return every few years also prods him into writing a bunch of new jokes to tell. Friday, Aug. 7, at 8 p.m., SNHU Arena, 555 Elm St., Manchester, $63 and up, ticketmaster.com.

• Nineties night: A pair of hard-edged tribute acts perform in Concord. Opiate brings Tool’s dense, prog-metal alchemy to the stage, from early Undertow cuts to sprawling later epics. Frontman Rick Kinsella channels Maynard James Keenan’s brooding low register, while the band eschews note-perfect mimicry for hypnotic time signatures and heavy atmospherics. Alice, a tribute to Alice In Chains, opens. Saturday, Aug. 8, at 8 p.m., BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord, $31, ccanh.com.

• Roots outdoors: From the early ’90s through an amicable split in 2003, Say ZuZu toured hard and constantly, crossing the country in a converted school bus. In 2019 the Seacoast band reunited to play a few shows and got a label deal that led to 2023’s No Time To Lose, their first studio LP in 21 years. They hit the stage only in bursts, like an al fresco show at one of their favorite old venues. Sunday, Aug. 9, at 7 p.m., Stone Church, 5 Granite St., Newmarket, stonechurchrocks.com.

The friendly neighborhood MCU

Spider-Man helps keep the Marvel universe grounded

Neighborhood Spider-Man is the best kind of Spider-Man.

Peter Parker (Tom Holland) returns in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, where he has over some four years established a life of solitude and dedication to crime fighting. Not the big intergalactic crime of Infinity War and Endgame but New York City street crime where the baddies he catches are arrested, often by police detective Jean DeWolf (Liza Colón-Zayas), who likes talking over criminal networks and crime patterns with Spider-Man. But only on the phone — since the Dr. Strange everybody-forgets-Peter-Parker spell, Peter has kept his Spidey strictly profesh, no one knows his identity or sees him with the mask off, even to drink coffee, which sometimes-colleague Frank “The Punisher” Castle (Jon Bernthal) thinks is so dorky.

In the four years since the spell, Peter has watched from afar (i.e. social media) as former best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and former girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) went to MIT and lived their lives without him. It makes him sad, he wants to tell them who he is but also wants to keep them safe. He’s shocked when Ned suddenly walks into a local shop where Peter is hanging out. Peter follows Ned to his new apartment, where Peter sees MJ hanging out with her boyfriend. Perhaps the stress of watching the girl he still loves kiss another dude is what causes the strange headaches he’s been having to go from annoyance to a full-on blackout, from which he awakes to find himself covered in webbing that, in a change of pace for this Peter, didn’t come out of a web shooter but came out of his own person. He also realizes that his Spidey sense is getting much stronger, stronger to the degree that the ambient noise of New York is too much to take.

These changes seem to also be getting in the way of chasing down an elusive baddie (Sadie Sink) who seems to jump from body to body and is targeting the Department of Damage Control, the shady organization that Spider-Man has primarily dealt with in their rehabilitating villains capacity. Spider-Man can, at first at least, track this person throughout their jumps from body to body. But as he finds his abilities going highwire, the shadowy-jumper seems to be a step ahead of him.

This particular baddie’s whole deal is pretty good and I’ll admit, as a person who doesn’t seek out Marvel movie spoilers, I was pleasantly surprised with the reveal. I also liked how the baddie’s designs are specific and limited in scope — this is, for the most part, not a skybeam world-in-peril situation. And even when we rub up against bigger parts of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — Peter asks professor Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) for some sciencey advice and asks Yelena (Florence Pugh) for information on the baddie’s Damage Control aims — it’s narrowly focused on these circumstances.

This movie manages to be about Peter growing and changing and dealing with life’s complexity without being too soggy about it and while still keeping it grounded in the emotions of the characters and a kind of streets-of-New-York sense of reality. And it’s funny in moments, not perhaps as gleeful as earlier Spider-Man outings but still managing lightness and ending with a note of extremely sweet joy.

Featured photo: Spider-Man: Brand New Day

In Wonderland, by Joyce Maynard

(Little A, 413 pages)

New Hampshire native Joyce Maynard has said that she likes to write about things people don’t talk about. That can be a plus or a minus, especially in a coming-of-age story that explores uncomfortable family dynamics through the eyes of a 14-year-old on the cusp of puberty.

Literary fiction laced with suspense, In Wonderland is as sophisticated a novel as one would expect from someone who has been writing books for a half-century. Maynard knows her craft and builds tension slowly, like a tea kettle placed on low heat.

As June 1986 begins, Frances — her last name is not given — is miserable in the way all 14-year-old girls are miserable pre-social-media, with the added stress of parents who barely speak to each other or to her. Her father drinks too much, they live in a sad, dark apartment in New Jersey, and their only fun family ritual is going to visit her father’s childhood friend at his lakefront home in Maine each Labor Day.

This year, however, she gets to spend the entire summer there. Her father’s friend and his wife need a mother’s helper for the summer, and they invite Frances to fill the position, which involves little more than lightly supervising the two children (one of whom is just two years younger than Frances) and getting them to tennis lessons. Frances is thrilled just to get out of the gloomy house for the summer.

But she also has fond memories of being at the estate, named Wonderland, and her father’s friend, Forrest, is the only person in her life who treats her with respect. Even better, he is the kind of person everyone wants to be friends with — active, engaging, generous, energetic, attentive to a fault, especially to his wife, Regina, whose family’s wealth enables their lifestyle.

For Frances, Regina was a wan figure in the background on her previous trips to Wonderland. She has an unspecified medical condition that requires her to take lots of pills and lots of naps. What energy she has seems to be used up in the evening when she types instructions for everything her family needs to know and do the next day. “The thing about dealing with Regina is recognizing she’s just not a normal person,” Frances’s father tells her.

But the presence of Forrest makes up for that, and as the summer begins, Frances fits seamlessly into the family’s routines, marveling that this will be her life for a little more than three months. “It was all so beautiful,” she observes. “Outside now, a pair of loons called out to each other. Lace curtains fluttered at the window, moonlight glittering. From the other side of the lake, someone was setting off fireworks for no particular reason except that at Lake Catherine every day felt like a special occasion.”

But Forrest’s affection for Frances becomes an obsession for her, fueled by the hormones of adolescence. When Regina gives her a gift — a leather-bound journal — telling her that every girl should keep a journal, Frances starts writing about her interactions with Forrest and eventually slips from the real to the imagined. The journal, which she hides under her mattress, is a ticking time bomb throughout the novel, with all the subtlety of golden retriever. We know somebody is going to find this journal eventually; we just don’t know who or when.

Meanwhile, as Frances’s relationship with Forrest develops and changes over time, so too does her relationship with Regina, who wants to both mother the girl and also treat her as some kind of unpaid therapist. Regina begins to confide in Frances about the strengths and deficiencies of her marriage, including the couple’s sex life, not knowing that Frances is always going to be on Team Forrest. But Regina says nothing to shed light on other secrets, including her physical and mental condition, and a mysterious locked room in the house. Every story is supposed to have a villain, they say, but it’s unclear whether there is a villain here at all or just a bunch of spoiled, entitled, clueless or heartbroken people trying to play the cards they’ve been dealt.

It’s not a spoiler to say there is a pivotal death in the story since Maynard opens In Wonderland with Frances’s memory of encountering the corpse. It might be a spoiler to say I have no idea why she did this. To anyone paying close attention, the scene foreshadows a future event and diminishes the eventual shock of it.

This is not to say that there aren’t other shocks throughout the book, going right down to the final pages. The biggest surprise of all, however, is what a page-turner a novel about a 14-year-old sex-curious girl can be, even if you can do without all the cringy inner dialogue about nonexistent breasts and a menstrual cycle that refuses to start. The characters in this world may not be wholly lovable, but they are interesting, and as such, we are invested in what happens to them. Lake Catherine may be fictional, but the emotional punch Maynard delivers is real. B+

Featured Photo: In Wonderland, by Joyce Maynard.

Album Reviews 26/08/06

Ian Sweet, Shiverstruck (Polyvinyl Records)

I get it, the Chappell Roan copycatting will continue until morale improves, or something to that effect, but stay tuned, because this Los Angeles-based indie singer hasn’t quite settled on a sound, it looks like. She (real name Jillian Medford) started out by making interesting records; her first album, Shapeshifter, was an amalgam of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Raveonettes and a few other good things, and Stereogum loved it, and then she went in a Mazzy Star direction in 2021 with Show Me How You Disappear, which I suppose is a relatively similar sound to the Roan worship we hear on focus single “Wild Heart,” but admittedly it isn’t without some of the Jay Som-with-a-pulse ideas she’s tried before. What does that word salad mean? Well, think Karen O meets Roan, and with regard to the latter, she’s put together some seriously angsty atmospherics that are so vibrant they’ll probably fool many people into thinking it is Roan. This all isn’t to say it’s not good stuff; there’s nothing wrong with being doubly derivative. Either way, she’ll be at The Press Room in Portsmouth on Oct. 15. B

Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, Ellington Masterworks (MCG Jazz Records)

Huge-sounding collection of Ellington obscurities tendered by this (depending on the day) 17-member Washington, D.C.-based outfit. That’s refreshing, given that usually such homages are larded with well-known chestnuts like “Prelude to a Kiss” and of course “Sophisticated Lady.” So this one’s a more or less chronologically arranged set of (verified) rarities (the band had around a thousand tunes to choose from that Ellington had written during his half century of work), beginning with 1940’s “The Flaming Sword,” a number derived from “Panama” (no, not the Van Halen song), a thumping, Latin-infused swing joint that recalls (obviously) Benny Goodman. Clocking in at over 12 minutes, 1948’s “Tattooed Bride” rises from a slow-burn to take the listener on what feels like a speedboat ride over busy waves, “built into a W-shape” with irregular phrasing. I noticed that some of the individual songs, though obscure, have inspired academics to give them the full wonk treatment; there are no poor choices here. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Aug. 7 is this Friday, which means new CD releases, which means we have stuff to talk about, as long as there are some new CDs coming out! It just so happens that there are, but first, you’ve seen me talk before about my favorite joke band, Mac Sabbath, the Los Angeles-based outfit the Village Voice called “Hieronymus Bosch meets My Little Pony,” which isn’t something I’d have written, but I haven’t contributed to the Voice family of newspapers for many years now, if there even is one anymore. No, in case you forgot (recommended), this band — comprising Ronald Osbourne, Slayer MacCheeze, Grimalice and Catburglar — plays Black Sabbath covers dressed up as Ronald McDonald, the Hamburglar and whatnot, but they futz with the lyrics, turning them into political screeds disguised as rants about fast food. I think it’s hysterical; Ronald McDonald has seen other dark parodists through the years, like YouTube’s RakkaRakka guys, who portray Ronald as a demented homicidal lunatic, I suppose you’d have to see it to appreciate it. Anyway, I was pleased to hear that this band is on tour and will be in Worcester, Mass., at The Palladium on Dec. 9, I might actually go to it myself. Now, turning to (only slightly) less comedic news, widely hailed California indie-folk band The Mountain Goats are back this week, with their count-em 24th LP, Days, which is said to be a not-very-serious look back at previous cultural tropes through the last few decades, for example the lead single “Charlie Sheen Reaches Out to the Feds,” an examination of Sheen’s “tiger blood” period. The tune is a thrumming, no-wave-ish tune that sounds like something Pavement might do if they were trying to be punky and weren’t one of the worst bands in history, I like it just fine.
• OK what’s this, I’ve never heard of The Anchoress, have you? Of course you haven’t, she’s popular with edgy people in England, so nobody in this country knows she even exists. Possessed of a Ph.D. in literature and queer theory, her real name is Catherine Davies; she wrote a book about epic poetry titled Whitman’s Queer Children, and when she’s not doing stuff like that, she’s producing her own indie-pop albums, like her new one, As We Once Were! You might like the single “Throw Over Your Man” if you like Kate Bush and/or Florence + The Machine; I like them myself and admire that this lady is trying to sound cool, but as with most New Music Express-approved bands from the U.K., the song really goes nowhere. And now you know why you’ve never heard of her.

• Oh yay, here we go again, another album from filmmaker John Carpenter, who directed such films as The Thing and Halloween. In case you missed it, this is a regular thing: Once every year, this film-directing man puts out an album mostly made of synth cheese that might have been relevant in 1981, and no one’s been able to stop him (if you want to know what I’ve had to endure from this guy for the last few albums, most of the amateurish three-chord music in his films was written by him). And so, like Charlie Brown running to kick the football Lucy’s going to yank away, I’ll go listen to something called “Lord of the Underground” from his new album, Cathedral! Yikes, it’s ’80s monster metal, like slow King Diamond, but no singing, just some evil choral stuff! Does anyone buy his records?

• And finally it’s Canadian indie band Kiwi Jr. with their fourth album, Blowin’ Up, whose title track sounds like They Might Be Giants covering a Cars song, it’s OK.

Featured Photo: Ian Sweet, Shiverstruck and Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, Ellington Masterworks.

Blueberry cookies with lemon and lavender glaze

  • 1 cup (198 g) sugar
  • 1/3 cup (2/3 cube) butter
  • 1 egg
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • ½ cup (114 g) milk
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • ¼ teaspoon baking soda
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • 3½ cups (420 g) all-purpose flour
  • 2 cups (285 g) frozen wild blueberries – Leave these in the freezer until you add them to the cookie dough; you want them to stay as hard and frozen as possible.
  • 1 cup (114 g) powdered sugar
  • juice and zest of 1 lemon
  • 1 teaspoon dried lavender buds

Mix the dry ingredients — the baking powder, baking soda, salt, and flour — together, and set them aside.

Cream the butter and sugar together with an electric mixer until they have come together and are lighter in color and slightly fluffy. Beat in the egg and vanilla.

Reduce the speed of your mixer to its lowest setting, then mix the milk in. (Just pouring it in with the mixer going all-out will get splashy.) Spoon most of the dry mixture in; reserve a couple of tablespoons of it. Take the blueberries from the freezer and toss them in the flour mixture until they are coated. In theory, this should help keep them from exploding when you add them to the cookie dough.

If you have strong arms and are super-patient, stir the frozen, floury blueberries into the dough gently with a wooden spoon or a silicone spatula. If, like me, you have the gentle subtlety of an overheated porcupine, use the mixer to bring everything together. Unfortunately, this will cause many of the berries to explode and will turn your cookie dough purple.

Shriek, “You’re turning violet, Violet!” (if you know, you know) and put the bowl of purple cookie dough in the refrigerator.

Preheat your oven to 350°F. Leave the dough to chill and the oven to heat up. (Which seems like a bit of an extravagance. At this point in our technological development, shouldn’t we be able to suck the heat out of the dough and pump it into the oven somehow, instead of making the refrigerator and the oven work at cross purposes?)

Start making the glaze. Whisk the lemon juice, lemon zest, powdered sugar and lavender buds together, then set them aside. Go write a handwritten postcard to a friend you haven’t talked to in too long.

Lavender is one of those strong-flavored ingredients that will overpower this whole enterprise if you find yourself chewing on a piece of it. By leaving it to soak in the acidic lemon juice, you’re extracting some of the flavor.

When the cookie dough is cold and the oven is hot, scoop golf-ball-sized balls of dough onto a baking sheet covered with parchment paper or a silicone mat. Bake the cookies for 11 to 13 minutes, until they have browned slightly. Let them cool on the baking sheet.

Strain the glaze and pour it over the cooled cookies.

The cookies themselves are not very sweet, but the glaze is. Together, with the zing of lemon juice and the floral lavender in the background, these are very nice, maybe with a glass of lemonade.

Featured photo: Blueberries cookies. Photo by John Fladd.

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