On the Truly Excellent Miranda Lambert

This past Sunday Miranda Lambert was robbed.  She did take home a Grammy Award for “Best Female Country Vocal Performance” for “The House that Built Me”—an award she surely deserved.  But the award for country album of the year went to multiple-winners Lady Antebellum for Need You Now.  I like that album and its eponymous single a good deal.  But I don’t love it.  I understood why when I read Jody Rosen’s recent take on Lady A in Slate.  The subheadline of the article christened them “the dullest band on earth” and Rosen suggested that “the group's defining quality is a kind of nebulous in-betweeness.”  This kind of banality was the perfect tonic, says Rosen, for the very immoderate age in which we live.

I certainly don’t begrudge Lady A their success.  They are certainly capable songwriters (if a bit unoriginal).  They even co-wrote a very sweet song with Lambert on her album (“Love Song”).  But Rosen is right: this is a band that you lavish with only a moderate amount of affection.  I do not feel the same way about Miranda Lambert’s Revolution.

Released on September 29, 2009, this is an album that rewards you with repeated listenings.  Its not that its a staggering work of genius—or even that every song is of unimpeachable craftsmanship.  But on the whole, this album is one of the most touching and quietly profound country albums I’ve listened to.

First, we have to discount a couple of songs which are fun diversions but not integral to the main action of this album.  “White Liar” is a too-brassy specimen of Lambert’s revenge fantasy oeuvre; “That’s the Way that the World Goes Round” is her obligatory novelty song cover (though, like Gillian Welch’s “Dry Town” from her previous album, Lambert choose a grade-A songwriter to cover in John Prine).

The rest of the album is absolutely enthralling.  I’ve discussed “Makin’ Plans” and “The House that Built Me” on this blog before.  Both deal with the dangers of straying too far from home.  “Makin’ Plans” is about being content with what’s familiar and “House” is an attempt to recapture some sense of place.  Another song on the album takes the complete opposite approach.  “Airstream Song” is about always being on the move.

Sometimes I wish I lived in an Airstream
Homemade curtains, lived just like a gypsy
Break a heart, roll out of town
‘Cause gypsies never get tied down

The music for it is also quite spectacular.  It features a slightly odd amorphous introduction that sounds like the instruments are just tuning up before launching into a loose-limbed take on alt-country Americana.  That a VERY commercial country artist makes room on an album for these kind of Brooklyn-based hipster-chic musical textures is fascinating.  What’s more, however, is that Lambert doesn’t at all adapt any kind of ironic pose.  She’s quite serious, and not in a falsely pious country way.  She’s managed to find a middle way between sentimental commercial country schlock and the kind of fake-folksy shenanigans of urban redneck poseurs.

Even songs which could take the album into truly awful Red-state jingoism, like “Time to Get a Gun,” have such a winking kindness that you just smile even if you disagree with her politics (she grew up the daughter of private eyes, so she’s earnestly an NRA supporter).  What helps is Lambert’s acknowledgement of her politics in relation to the liberal Northeast.  But rather than adopting Country’s usual befuddlement at city-folk ways, Lambert suggests a rapprochement.

So let’s shake hands and reach across those party lines
You’ve got your friends just like I’ve got mine
We might think a little differently
But we got a lot in common you will see
We’re just like you
Only prettier

Her last chorus states that “I’ll keep drinkin’
And you’ll keep gettin’ skinnier.”  How can you not love this?  Clever, fun, culturally aware—appropriating American musical idioms and subverting them with contemporary cultural messages—graduate students will be lining up to document this.

Typically, however, they’ll likely focus on how she embodies some kind of post-feminist ideology and not discuss what I think is her true aim: to capture the sense of living in a post-place world.  A sense of dislocation is present in each song—dislocation from the ideal relationship, from one’s home, from one’s culture.  She confronts a burning question: unbound from any strictures and with limitless choice what makes you happy?  Revolution touches on how this impacts every aspect of our lives.  How we relate to the land, how we look after our neighbours, how we find love, how we find peace with ourselves.  No album in my recent memory more deeply touches the cultural moment in which we live. 

County is often blamed for being culturally regressive.  I’ve rather loved its ability to bring some poetic dignity to our everyday struggles, but I’ll concede that sometimes artists can affect a nostalgia that I don’t share.  But here Lambert has harnessed the most beautiful aspects of the country idiom to our cultural moment.  Listen to this album and it will cut you to the quick. 

But best of all, Lambert brings you great solace as well.  “Heart Like Mine” is about a Christian girl who doesn’t quite live up to certain strict interpretations of good Christian living.  She’s in a place like a lot of us: struggling to square what we are with we and others would like us to be.  But this girl has hit on quite a good idea regarding her slightly immoderate alcohol consumption.

Cause I heard Jesus, He drank wine
And I bet we’d get along just fine
He could calm a storm and heal the blind
And I bet He’d understand a heart like mine

No more Christ-like words have ever been set to music in country.  I love this woman. 

U Smile, Sorrido Anch’io

Quick confession: I don’t actually mind Justin Bieber’s music.  Ok, actual truth?  I kind of enjoy it.  Its slick production and lyrical innocence remind me of pop music of the 90s.  Remember them?  The bull market, third way centrism, the tech boom—optimism.  The only tough choice you had was between The Backstreet Boys and Nsync.  I actually preferred 98 degrees, which is, I know, ridiculous.  But don’t tell me that “The Hardest Thing” wasn’t a kick-ass song.  Trust me.  I just watched the video.  I still love it but now miss my fleet of turtleneck sweaters.

But the Bieb’s music also shares an aesthetic heritage with a slightly older genre: the eighteenth-century sentimental opera aria.  Before you declare my argument utter fancy, just compare the lyrics of Bieber’s hit “U Smile” with Don Ottavio’s aria “Dalla sua pace” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni.  Both describe an innamorato’s dependence upon his loved one for his every happiness.  In the eighteenth century, this declaration of one’s entimental nature—of one’s empathy—was a sign of refinement and nobility.  They weren’t called  gentleman for nothing.  Since the mid-century the sensitive man was all the rage.  Teenage girls, it seems, might have liked Don Ottavio just fine.

Bieber: “U Smile” (Bieber/Duplessis/Altino/Rigo)

I'd wait on you forever and a day
Hand and foot
Your world is my world
Ain't no way you're ever gon' get
Any less than you should
Cause baby
You smile I smile
Cause whenever
You smile I smile

Don Ottavio: “Dalla sua pace” (Da Ponte/Mozart)

Dalla sua pace la mia dipende;
Quel che a lei piace vita mi rende,
Quel che le incresce morte mi dà.
S'ella sospira, sospiro anch'io;
È mia quell'ira, quel pianto è mio;
E non ho bene, s'ella non l'ha.	

[My peace of mind depends on her / what pleases her gives life to me / what grieves her brings me death / If she sighs, I sigh, too / her wrath and her sorrow are mine / and I cannot be well if she is not]

Don Ottavio is by no means a beloved character of opera.  Despite his highly empathic declarations, critics have often criticized his inaction and even implied his impotency.  His fiancée, Donna Anna, doesn’t seem to have a lot of respect for him.  Poor guy.

His situation is made slightly worse because most opera productions demand that Ottavio sing both his arias (“Dalla sua pace” was added for the Vienna production of 1788, a year after it debuted in Prague).  This means that he spends most of his time onstage singing about how sensitive he is.  What a bore.  Musicologist Joseph Kerman, though, cut him some slack: “Ottavio’s reputation for blandness does not take into account this capacity of his for sympathetic chromatic resonance.  One does not begrudge him his bonus aria.”  In other words, Mozart’s music makes it all worthwhile.

I’m not sure that the Bieb’s music will stand up as well as Mozart’s.  But for the time being, his particular brand of bubble-gum pop makes me smile.  One should not begrudge him his success. 

When His Thoughts Was as Free

Many apologies for not updating this blog in several months.  I’m going to try to do better in future.

It has currently reached that point in the day when I require a pep-talk to forge on with work.  The eye of heaven has cast its gaze on parts west and so I feel like I can put my labours to rest.  But humans invented artificial light for a reason, and so I should really continue on.  I will, however, sneak in a short post.  You won’t tell, will you?

Sometimes during long days at the office my mind starts to wonder.  Especially on gray, soggy winter days like today it settles on good memories of careless summer days.  Few poets better captured the simple joys of maidenhood youth better than James Whitcomb Riley (sorry for briefly recalling Camelot).

Riley was a poet who spent most of his life in Indianapolis.  Many of his early poems were published in a Hoosier dialect (like the one below).  His collection “The Old Swimmin’ Hole” (1883) is every bit as folksy as the title suggests.  One of his most famous poems, “When the frost is on the pumpkin,” is published in the volume.  One of my favourites is “The Mulberry Tree.”  It could have been a very grating elegy for a misremembered past.  But there’s a tinge of melancholy in the poem that I think gives it a bit of emotional heft.  Sentimental, of course.  But totally effective.  Here’s the last stanza: 

Then its who fergit the old mulberry

   tree

That he knowed in the days when his

   thoughts was as free

As the flutterin’ wings of the birds that

   flew out

Of the tall wavin’ tops as the boys come

   about?

O, a crowd of my memories, laughin’ and

   gay,

Is a-climbin’ the fence of that pastur’ to-

   day,

And a-pantin’ with joy, as us boys ust to be,

They go racin’ acrost fer the mulberry tree.

Soffro anche spesso

“Being a part of something special makes you special, right?”

Those words, uttered by Rachel Berry in the first episode of Glee, are remarkable.  I remember watching the trailer for the series on YouTube last spring and instantly falling in love, mostly because of how moving I thought that line was.  The show, with its cast of mildly misfit highschoolers, is all about that kind of desperate enthusiasm that teenagers ooze.  But as we age, we somehow never completely get over that need to feel special.

It’s maybe just that the things that make us special change a bit.  I had that thought in the shower before bed last night, while I was humming Radiohead’s biggest hit, “Creep.”  Now, lest you think I have some affinity with the angsty grunge-rock lyrics (how 90s!), you should know that I think of that song in Italian (which is maybe worse).  But a cover of “Creep” was a huge hit while I was there last fall.  You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing it playing on the radio, sung in appropriately grungy style by Vasco Rossi—a sort of Italian cross between John Mellencamp and Leonard Cohen in both vocal stylings and political activism.

Now you know that I hate my “when I was in Italy” stories, but this little episode actually gave me some insight into why people love to travel and why I still tell these damned stories all the time.  The song, in English, is of course about a guy who doesn’t feel he deserves to be with a girl who’s “so f***ing special.”  The Italian is a cleaner version about a guy who doesn’t want to leave a girl; he’s going to stay “ad ogni costo” (at any cost—the title of the song).  The Italian girl in question isn’t quite as perfect as Radiohead’s “angel.”  She has “eyes that are never honest,” but she’s apparently still special enough that you wouldn’t want to leave here.  Rossi makes that very clear in a kind of brilliant reworking of the Radiohead version.  The last line of the verse in English (with the infamous epithet) is

I wish I was special
You're so fuckin' special

The Italian version goes for a rhyme instead

Tanto è lo stesso
Soffro anche spesso

[Much is the same / I also often suffer]

The second line rolls around in the mouth (and sounds) almost the same as the English version.  The s-f-n-sp chain of consonant sounds is identical.  It’s hard not to imagine that Rossi started with this line and built the rest of the song around that.

Now this is much to say that a song I heard in Italy was about wanting to be a part of something special.  But that makes me think that one of the reasons that people love to travel so much is to capture some of that feeling that Rachel Berry gets from being in Glee club.  It’s also maybe one of the reasons we (I) reminisce so much about our travels.  We loved that sense of being special.  Of being a stranger in a far land.  Of being a part of something bigger than ourselves.

So maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on people who have the bug for travelling.  My last post was perhaps too critical.  After all, we all want to have those radically transformative experiences.  They are the stuff of dreams, and of course, poetry.

Dante was a guy who met a pretty special girl at the age of nine.  It was that experience that inspired him to write La vita nuova, one of the most important works in literature.  It has a lot of wonderful poetry, but its most iconic passage is perhaps the first sentence, which is in prose. 

In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova.

[In that part of the book of my memory before which there is little that can be read, there is a heading which reads: here begins a new life.]

Just down the street from my apartment in Naples was the Piazza Dante, a lively and unsurprisingly run-down eighteenth-century square with a beckoning statue of Dante in the middle (above).  I’d sometimes perch myself at his feet in the afternoon and wonder when I could mark a new heading in the book of my memory.  Naples wasn’t that for me.  But I did feel pretty special to be there. 

“I Don’t Care for Roving”

In life you occasionally come across someone who suggests travel is a necessary component of your education.  This person is usually someone who backpacked through Europe on a summer holiday, or more recently braved South America, in order to “find themselves.”  They’ll regale you with stories of a restaurant found on a narrow street, a kiss stolen from an exotic stranger, and the myriad of ways in which life is so different from the way it is here in Canada.

I used to hate coming across these people.  That was until I inadvertently became one.  Last year I had the opportunity to “live abroad” (I’m vomiting as I right that).  I now find myself peppering my conversations with useless facts about life in Italy as though my few months there impressed upon me a certain knowledge of the place, its people, and its character.  But no sooner do the words “when I was in Italy” leave my lips and I feel something in my soul turn sideways.  Am I that douchebag?

Despite my newfound “cultural capital” I feel really no different then when I left.  I may be marginally more engaging at poncy academic events, but I found no insight about the ways of the world or who I was. 

I was perhaps predisposed to feeling this way because I could never understand how seeing more of the world could make one any wiser than one who stayed put.  I would always cite Emily Dickinson as my example.  The woman barely left Amherst, and never left her house for the last twenty years of her life.  And yet her poetry displays the most brilliant insight about life.  Joy, sorrow, the natural world—no better travelled writer has written anything superior about these topics.

So while writers have been arguing for decades about the reason of her seclusion (Did she nurse a broken heart? Was she the victim of family cruelty?) I preferred to think of Dickinson as a brilliant recluse, who had all that one needed to know about life there in her home and in her orchard.

But last month Lyndall Gordon, Professor at Oxford and noted literary biographer, has suggested a new reason for Dickinson’s hermetic life: epilepsy.  Lives Like Loaded Guns details the relationship between Dickinson, her sister-in-law, Susan, and her editor, Mabel Loomis Todd (who was also the mistress of her brother).  Susan attempted to get Dickinson’s poems published.  But the Amherst homebody couldn’t convince New York publishers to do so.  Todd—worldly, and well-travelled—took to editing the poems herself and made Dickinson the household name she is today.  Score one for the peripatetic set?

Maybe not.  Emily may not have got around very much, but it is because of her poetry that she’s famous.  Perhaps the fact that she never travelled and wrote about the life around her made her poems that much more universal.  Todd just gave her some good PR.  It’s just too bad that Dickinson may not have been able to travel, even if she wanted to.

For those of us who have the option, however, travel doesn’t necessarily bring the delights that it promises.  I was thinking a lot about that while I was away and listening to Miranda Lambert’s album Revolution which came out just as I was leaving last September.  A recurring theme on the album is a sense of home.  The first verse of “Makin’ Plans,” for example, makes the case that travelling can change a person.

If I ever left this town
I’d never settle down
I’d just be wandering around
If I ever left this town

If I wasn’t by your side
I’d never be satisfied
Nothin’ would feel just right
If I wasn’t by your side

It’s a bit desperate, maybe.  Should one not travel out of fear?

One of the most emotional tracks on the album, “The House That Built Me,” presents the flip side of the coin.  While the house/life metaphor can be a bit shopworn, this song is so touching it works beautifully.  The singer returns to her childhood home because

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me

No wonder that it’s become the surprise hit of the album.  Who can’t relate to wanting to go back home?  Maybe Emily Dickinson.  But if she did venture out her front door, she might be disappointed by what she found.  “I don’t care for roving” she wrote her mentor Thomas Higginson in 1870.  Thank goodness.  Neither do I.   

Some Quick Yeats from the Office

Things to Think (At Work)