Goldfrapp “Rocket”
Goldfrapp can do no wrong in my book. Their 80s-inspired forthcoming release, Head First (out March 23 in the U.S.), will be the London duo’s fifth album. I’ve heard the first single “Rocket,” (Van Halen, anyone?) but now comes the video, directed by Kim Gehrig. In it, the lovely Alison Goldfrapp plays a truck driver sending an ex into space. Watch it at MSN.
Celine: Through the Eyes of the World
Be prepared. As Blake reads this post, an audible gasp will be heard around the world… or at least throughout Colorado.
Celine: Through the Eyes of the World, the documentary–concert film chronicling the life of Canadian singer, Celine Dion hits theatres this weekend. The film—in French and English—was culled from nearly 13 months of filming during her 2008-09 Taking Chances Tour. Dion’s first tour in 9 years, Taking Chances sold over 3 million tickets in 5 continents, 25 countries, and 93 cities.
Here’s the offical trailer:
As for the Vancouver Winter Olympics, many of us wondered why Celine was absent from the opening ceremonies. According to reports, the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) invited her but Dion made the choice not to perform. Dion who is once again trying to have a child, was in New York undergoing in vitro fertilization treatment.
Kate McGarrigle, 1946-2010
Kate McGarrigle (photo by Dane Lanken)
I grew up listening to Kate & Anna McGarrigle, the Canadian folk-singing duo from Montréal, particularly the album, “Love Over and Over” (1982), whose title track is an exuberant and funny musing about the meaning of love (with special reference to the Brontës):
You ask me how I feel
I said my heart was like a wheel
Why don’t you listen to it sometime
I’ve walked upon the moors
On many misguided tours
Where Emily, Anne and Charlotte
Poured their hearts out
And what did they know
What could they know about love
Or anyone know about love
When I got to college I bought more of their albums, including their eponymously titled debut (1976) that Rolling Stone named one of the best of the year and that was lauded by almost all critics. Their songs are variously serious and whimsical and sad, filled with the music of so many instruments: fiddles and mandolins, pianos and accordions, guitars and violins. And always there are their voices, haunting and somber and beautiful. They released ten albums in total.
Kate McGarrigle died last month at age 63 of clear-cell sarcoma at her home in Montréal and I’ve been listening to their albums a lot in the weeks since her death. They’re just as wonderful as ever. The McGarrigle sisters sing in both French and English (their father was Anglophone, their mother Francophone) and every album has a bit of both, with the exception of “French Record” (1980). They sing traditional French Canadian folk songs (“Blanche Comme La Neige”); plaintive songs about love lost (“I Cried For Us,” above without video); explorations about childhood (“Sun, Son (Shining on the Water)”); and funny ditties that cast the making of salt as a love story between sodium and chloride – “think of the love that you eat when you salt your meat.” (“NaCl”)
Many of their albums feature a whole cast of McGarrigle relatives singing and playing piano and fiddles and guitars and accordions, including their organist sister, Jane; Anna’s husband, Dane Lanken; Kate’s ex-husband, the folk singer Loudon Wainwright III; and Kate’s two kids with him, Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright, accomplished singers in their own right whose albums I also love (including Martha’s brilliantly titled “I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too”). They are also joined by friends like Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, who have taken some of their songs to even greater fame. A 1981 version of their “Complainte Pour Sainte Catherine” is below (Kate is standing with accordion and Anna is on piano and lead vocals):
Empire State of Mind
I’m headed to New York for a very long weekend and thought I would share this little number by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys.
Animal Chin
This past Wednesday, Joshua Trinidad kicked off KUVO’s Jazz Odyssey with Jaga Jazzist’s “Kitty Wu.” I was instantly reminded of just how much I enjoy listening to the ten-piece, jazz-meets-electronics band’s risky, sprawling, and somehow serene sounds. Then I recalled the 2002 video for “Animal Chin” from the group’s absolutely intoxicating album A Livingroom Hush. The video, produced by Oslo based AKFF!, is a fast paced and frenetic animation constructed out of cut photos and magazine clippings. I can only imagine the number of man hours that went into its making… all of them worth it.
If you have an opportunity, check out Jazz Odyssey on 89.3 FM KUVO, Mondays through Thursdays from 10:00 p.m. to midnight. It’s a great program and proof that all does not suck in Denver. If you are on the outside, you can tune in online.
Charlotte Gainsbourg
I heart Charlotte Gainsbourg and even though she is better known as an award-winning actress, her career as a musician has also been significant. For her third venture into record making, titled IRM (French for MRI), Gainsbourg enlisted the aid of American musician, singer-songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Beck who wrote the album’s music and co-wrote the lyrics. The first single, a Gainsbourg/Beck duet “Heaven Can Wait,” is available on iTunes. The surreal Keith Schofield-directed video features a series of visual non sequiturs set in slow motion. IRM is expected January 26, 2010. In the meantime, you can listen to clips from the entire album, including my favorite track, “Greenwich Mean Time,” here.
Charlotte Gainsbourg | IRM
Downtown. Denver?
Click on the lovely Petula Clark and then read on. No, scratch that: click and watch the lovely Petula, and then read. The video is too priceless to miss.
First of all, I love this song. I love Clark’s version – the original, obviously – but I pretty much like any version. (The song was written by British songwriter Tony Hatch in 1964.) The always brilliant Dolly Parton covered it; Emma Bunton (Baby Spice) gives it a decent turn; and the Canadian Holly Cole Trio does a pared-down rendition that is pretty great, too. It’s catchy and the music is great; I love the backup singers and the horns. And then just look at Petula; look how happy she is, how joyful.
Second, is this song not secretly – or perhaps not so secretly? – a song for the gays? Downtowns have historically been places where people of a homosexualist inclination could find one another for companionship and cocktails and yes, of course, for sex. Urban spaces, historians have shown, have often been the first for the development of gay subcultures. But more than that, read the lyrics from one of the final verses:
And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you
Someone who is just like you and needs a gentle hand to
Guide them along.
How gay is that? Who more than a confused gay needs someone kind to “help and understand you,” someone conveniently “just like you,” who could be “guide[d] … along”? Indeed. Further, the song is just so profoundly hopeful (“you’re going to be all right now”), the kind of song that a young gay could take much comfort in. I’m doing so right now.
Third, the song captures much of what I love about urban spaces. Real urban spaces. While it perhaps exaggerates things a wee bit – not everything is great downtown – it also captures the spirit of a big, loud, noisy place – “the music of the traffic in the city” – and how joyful that can be to those who love them as I do. The first verse begins like this:
When you’re alone
And life is making you lonely,
You can always go downtown
When you’ve got worries,
All the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, I know, downtown
When I lived in the big city from whence I moved I would sometimes just take long, aimless walks around town, up and down avenues, through parks, across bridges and back again. All the noise and the crowdedness and the complete anonymity made such a difference. For a while my own little problems just didn’t matter compared to all of those millions of people and their equally complicated lives.
This is part of what I feel is missing in Denver. There is no downtown like Petula Clark sings about, nowhere that is loud and crowded and busy, nowhere I can walk and lose myself (in part because no one actually walks anywhere in Denver anyway). There is no real downtown, where “everything’s waiting for you.”
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