Carousels Of Time: Sunday Night Folk Music And The Evolution Of My Soul

The following is a music review written as an exploratory essay. It depicts my fluctuating emotions as I experience, in a modern interpretation, the type of music that has always struck me most.

Alternative and independent music lovers have created and thus given unto themselves the most win-win of situations in the history of music fandom.  They groan over ticket prices exceeding $25.00 and are shaken and altogether aghast when thrown into a venue of greater heights and volume than a 2-car garage.  All hell breaks lose when your favorite baroque pop groups finds its ballooning international fan base so vast that the venue is now a dreamy little village in and of itself and the tickets are upwards of $60.00.  But, an unfortunate and pricey rarity aside, the predisposition of independent music junkies is overall positive.  Pay little for a night of lush instrumentation and your heart tugged and weakened vulnerably straight down to your knees by a chorus of tipsy guitars and resonant French horns.  But really, it’s four times as much as much cash to see Beyoncé, and here, in this room that is approximately the size of a queen bed, we have one female, wailing in perfect syncopation while haphazardly rattling a tambourine, three males donning varying styles of facial hair, all while assuming far angles of the stage: a bopping bassist, a drummer, wildly yet charmingly aloof to the happenings that lie ahead, and a lead singer singing like a broken angel, like a James Taylor-Paul McCartney lovechild.  This is bliss�"the way in which  $30.00 binds all those who’ve become broken records in the name of communicating a love for a sort of melancholic musicality that rarely, if not ever, stands in the limelight of the world’s most beloved tunes.

            DC9 is located between two Ethiopian restaurants in Northwest DC.  It is, unbelievably so, a fairly popular music venue for a sliver of DC residents I’ve never had the pleasure of really encountering any other time besides now, as a person residing and working in the Capitol Hill area.  These things are nice, though, because we are able to see those who share our air and space, yet only run rabid when the lights go out and the acoustic guitars surge valiant over feedback.  What I’d known of Damien Jurado before my arrival at the venue was mostly from his NPR Tiny Desk concert, three songs and the general look of him.  And, without former knowledge, I could also take a few stabs at the sort of fans I’d be encountering in close quarters.  I must admit, for as much as I often feel bogged down by irony as a little barnacle in a post-post ironic society, I love the sea of flannel just as much as the next girl who’s a secret sucker for idyllic sepia-coated bird’s eye views of bobbing heads. 

            I wanted to hate this place: the traceably prototypical bartenders with beards and the plaid and the women with hair perfectly natural and floral prints like necessary oxygen, making the sways and twirling hair all the more packaged and elegantly expected.  But I didn’t hate it.  I didn’t even hate the obnoxious calls and yells for songs that, in my cynic’s mind, were the only known of the artist’s repertoire to have hooked and pulled these ragged folks from their bumper-stickered Mac books to this show.  So, after I’d imbibed the initial scene, came the affirmation of my win-win situation.  In my anticipation of a fantastically mellowing headliner, I wasn’t nearly prepared for the poignancy and arousal that was to come with a chirpy blunt-banged folk princess. 

Now, I could listen to Belle and Sebastian serenade me through imaginary seas of organ-reliant pop or Colin Meloy softly convey some of the wisest war-relationship analogies I’ll ever hear adapted to music, but my heart lowers itself to my knees by a very specific type of voice, of a very specific genre.  I will be opened by today’s cooing songbirds, but I will sink at Joni, Carole, Joan: women whose upper mids open like lifeless oceans only to wash aboard the shores of creatures great and small, filling ears with musical waters and overwhelming with the whirr of elemental reality�"one hitting the other.  This is what I love.  It’s safe to say that having expected nothing and arriving amidst Courtney Marie Andrews’ awkward yet celestial serenade, I lost my mind.

There’s something about a voice that quivers with accuracy and floats almost angularly.  In Woman of Many Colors, her guitar plays like movie credits drifting over leaves of varying browns, while she pronounces words in a way I’ve continually longed for, in a way that allows for hearing and drinking.  She sings, like like liquid:

“I’ve called many places my home, little darling, but I only come from one.”

This is an element of music I long for time and again: the ability to hear and feel words like stories that are better sung than told.  I am taken back to when I first loved women in folk.  It was my fifth grade graduation from my Quaker school�"my last year there, in fact.  We were to perform Joni Mitchell’s The Circle Game, which is my favorite musical story ever told.  I am taken into the song, by whirlwind-like motions as each opening clause beckons me to ride along on painted ponies:

“Yesterday, a child came out to wander | Caught a dragonfly inside a jar.”

I remember that feeling of knowing someone had written about a journey in which I found myself trapped, but now, almost freed, in a sense.  And now, here I was a girl with three men watching guitar pricks like musical economists, counting the precisions�"well intentioned, but just different.  And I, the once wandering child now felt the power of a voice born and conjured only a few months before my own, singing songs I knew from my own journey�"the only in which I’m now trapped�"or freed…

            Courtney Marie Andrews has, in a sense, answered questions that Big Yellow Taxi, has left with me.  In Irene, she starts in just like Joni in Taxi, like a swooping bird, backing her sound with insurmountable power, then floating up to a register wrought with desire and yearning.  To Irene, she simply dictates “Gain Some Confidence.”  As if the woman has no choice but to be a strong one.  This message, to me, was a firm reminder of how I’d been raised.  Strength was no choice, but necessity.  I couldn’t control my eyes want to close.  Music, at least the right kind, makes me think that maybe if I allow my eyes to close, I won’t just be me and music won’t just be music anymore, but we will be the same.  And as for Andrews’ answer to Ms. Mitchell�"well, I think it’s that she was right.  Time turns and so do we, but we won’t have fully grasped what’s been there until it’s been pulled out from beneath us while the wool has been tightly wrapped ‘round our peace-enchanted eyes.  The answer, then, lies in the message that we gain some confidence and move from town to town, break rules, break hearts, experience, question, and look past bloody and sparkly façades, alike.  We’ve moved forty years now from a suggestion to an action. 

I think about the women I discovered when I came to age, much after they’d come to age, of course.  I think about Joan Baez lyrically filling the space of a campfire and several longhaired souls exacting stereotypes, yet actually feeling fulfilled by a promise, an urging:

“How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?  How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand?”

Baez asks, and now, thanks to the question, Andrews can now exist as a singer whose songs answer and move forward.  And really, if you listen, her guitar moves, just like she moves from home to home. I feel comfortable here, not simply due to my reluctant yet confident affiliation with the crowd; I am brought to solace by the tiptoeing of the guitar.  I am home even though I’ve doubted my place in almost all of my residences, especially when neither answers nor clear directions accompany each place.  I think it is a woman’s music and proclamation of both her flagrant and muted colors that bring me home to personal truths: when I move I’m best, when I move, the music beckons “Gain Some Confidence.”  I have no choice but to be everything I am always. 

            Courtney Marie Andrews broke all former affiliations I’d had with “opener.”  She broke the bonds of genre, forged the ultra-identifying seas of hipsterdom and alt-rock, and indie.  She just was, and yes, I even loved her persona betwixt song-to-song chirpy conversation topics and self-told allegations that she’d been a lying imp in her youth�"her spoken voice almost purposefully timid.  I didn’t care what she said, really.  It was as adorable as she’d hoped, I think.  But the music was still the story I’d been searching for, and so she was a well-carved storyteller, a flawless messenger: an arbiter and communicator of healthy rebellion.

“You dream of the North, Irene, so that’s where you ought to be.”

The words, so simple, yet like a graduated, less sexual sort of carpe diem literature.  My dreams, like reality, I thought.  My win-win situation.  Everything out of nothing.  A night in the 2-car garage, eyes closed, I’d won the ultimate prize: my own story told to me, a return to the same sort of folk that freed me when my vision was yet narrower, my hands smaller, and my heart less full.