I couldn’t escape the feeling, growing up in northern New England, that life was happening elsewhere. Somewhere, surely, people drank espresso, had brilliant ideas, made art, circulated in galleries and concert halls, strolled boulevards crowded with boutiques and creatively-dressed bohemians, invented cocktails with clever names, and discussed the Meaning Of Life—but not in my tiny village of two thousand souls, without so much as a gas pump or a stoplight. Our sleepy corner of the nation had peaked decades before with Robert Frost, or maybe even a century before that. The world had moved on.

Granted, my sense of “life” was unduly colored by fantasies of expatriates in Paris (see: espresso, boulevards, Meaning Of Life), conjured up, no doubt, by too many winter afternoons spent reading my grandmother’s Time-Life art books. The closest my dreams came to home was the 1913 Armory Show. Still, that isolated youth gave me something valuable: the ability to immerse myself, really and truly, in art. I took any scrap of culture and parsed it obsessively for meaning. With music, it started with my mom’s Beatles LPs. I read the record sleeves reverently and puzzled over the lyrics. (How many holes did it take to fill the Albert Hall?) I saved up money for tapes, stacking them gingerly next to my tiny Aiwa boom box and listening until the spools started to creak. One of the best birthday presents I ever received was a subscription to an English rock magazine when I was thirteen (thanks, Mom!). Every record and article was a cultural missive, a Rosetta Stone for understanding the rest of “life,” coming from so far away that it might have been outer space.

All this preamble is to say that I’m still obsessed with music, and especially the thrill of seeing musicians live. It amazes me that the songs I swoon over at home are made by real human beings who travel around and perform. In some ways, as a theater scholar, I guess I’ve built my whole intellectual world around the miracle of live performance. And the past several weeks have been a musical bonanza.

The run of terrific concerts started in February, with an in-store performance by Kristin Hersh to promote her new album, Learn To Sing Like A Star:



Now, Hersh is my Dylan, my Lennon, my Johnny Cash. As far as I’m concerned, she is the undisputed Queen Of Rock. And unlike those guys, she’s also fairly unsung. So only about fifteen people came to the in-store, and I found myself this close to greatness. She perched on a stool with an acoustic guitar and played for about an hour while her husband and young kids milled around browsing the CD racks. Even though I’ve seen her a half-dozen times before, I was still pinned against the wall by the intensity of her thousand-yard stare. It was a lot like this:

Talking with her briefly afterwards, I was awkward and shy. Why? She was just a tiny little woman in cargo pants and work boots, herding up her kids to go to dinner. But. She was also a force of nature and the most essential voice in my musical universe for the past fifteen years, first with Throwing Muses, then solo and with her band 50 Foot Wave:

She is brilliant and fierce and speaks the truth with sibylline fury. As hard as I try, I simply can’t reconcile the art with the artist. But I’m happy to keep going to her gigs in an effort to figure out the miracle.

The next show was a quick jaunt to Milwaukee to catch The Shins, touring with their album Wincing The Night Away.



Listening to a leaked copy late last year, I was especially smitten with the single “Phantom Limb,” which is achingly pretty and sad:

Singer-composer James Mercer has said it’s about a teenage lesbian couple. Without a lyric sheet, I misheard the opening lines and sang them wrong for weeks as “Frozen intercourse / White girls from the north.” Oh, well. That’s still how I sung them, at the top of my lungs, during the show. Say what you want about The Shins and the way they blew up in the mainstream—wouldn’t you rather hear this than Pussycat Dolls in the supermarket?

Next up was Apples In Stereo at the High Noon Saloon, one of the finest live music venues in my fair city, and just around the corner from home. You can catch an ass-kicking show and still be home in time for Aqua Teen Hunger Force!

The Apples’ latest album, New Magnetic Wonder, is sonic crack a really intense sugar high, like scarfing down a dozen handfuls of jellybeans and chasing them with a quart of Mountain Dew. Not that I would know.



Math-obsessed mastermind Robert Schneider, of the Elephant 6 collective, is the musical love child of Brian Wilson and Isaac Newton. He is also unlikeliest rock star ever, small and furry, like a really tuneful Ewok. It’s hard not to love him:

March brought TV On The Radio at the Orpheum, a grand old lady of a theater and probably my favorite venue around:

TVOTR’s album Return To Cookie Mountain topped most critics’ end-of-year lists, edged to #2 in the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop poll by Bob Dylan. It’s a dense, difficult work (stomping single “Wolf Like Me” notwithstanding), and I’m happy to say that the Orpheum show was a revelation. Here’s a clip that some enterprising local posted online:

Listening to the album is like staring at the dark, forbidding expanse of an ocean. Watching the band perform, being in their kinetic whirl, is like diving into that ocean with a scuba pack and seeing all the life beneath the surface. Just remember to breathe. Singer Tunde Adebimpe stalks across the stage, his throaty yell twining with Kyp Malone’s otherworldly falsetto. David Sitek hangs wind chimes from the neck of his guitar; the only time they stop jangling is when he smashes it against Jaleel Bunton’s cymbal. Magnificent.

The final stop on this musical journey, appropriately enough, is Dean & Britta, whose new album Back Numbers is like the comfy pants you slip into when you come home from work:

After more than a decade leading indie-rock mainstay Luna, Dean Wareham now plays with bassist and wife Britta Phillips as a duo. The world needs more sexy baritones like Wareham’s; Jarvis Cocker’s and Stephen Merritt’s are good, but they don’t even come close.
D&B’s music is a bit more subdued than Luna’s, which is to say practically soporific. It’s a good feeling, though–kind of like when you’re in bed deciding whether to have sex or go to sleep. Both sound pretty good after a few years with someone. Every few songs, though, Wareham lets rip an effortless, minimalist solo that reminds everyone who’s boss.

A kind fellow taping at the High Noon saw fit to post part of last week’s gig, a lovely Troggs cover:

Coming up next month: Neko Case and Yo La Tengo at the Barrymore! I can’t wait. What good shows have you seen lately?