Remix: Music.
A Willie Nelson song and a car slipping into the approaching dusk like someone straightening their tie. Half-jokingly describing the surrounding mountains as being something like an Appalachian Jörmungandr. Just the way they sit there, you say, as you wait for either one of you in the conversation to begin to reverse engineer the logic — to show that that ol’ world snake was here all along, and here are the folk songs to prove it.
Lyrics and music as clean as cleanly cut woodwork, but — in spite of that — we still find ourselves writing short little bursts of deliberately circuitous marginalia like, “Mandolin starlight cascade” and “A piano player drunkenly pulling his suspenders back up around his shoulders” and “It’s Christmas, but not in the way you’d expect, and not in that way either.”
And we haven’t even touched on Melissa Paternoster’s guitar playing amongst all this, which — when I heard it last night, when people with long beards and tall trucker hats pushed past me to make their way to an emerging mosh-put — really reminded me of Prince. I never heard solos that were direct quotes of melody lines that had been sung. Instead, again, I heard a multi-referential fluidity that sometimes rendered the performance I saw onstage unexpectedly moving. That kind of fluidity wasn’t ‘supposed’ to emerge from that kind of style, but there it was, alive, again and again and again.
Underneath the Willie Nelson and Paternoster’s guitar work is also the simple fact that I’m still thinking of an interview Chris Gibson gave to ABC’s Conversations regarding his book The Guitar: Tracing the Grain Back To The Tree, which chronicles the attempt to link every guitar in the world with their tree of origin. I’m thinking of how tangible something like a guitar is — not only as an object, but as a sound — and how making a guitar out of something other than a tree feels as communities in the Global North move from a pandemic that required a whole-of-society response and what something like that means as we enter into the Climate Era. If a guitar partly sounds the way it sounds because the noise it makes resonates through the entirety of the wood of the object, what happens when the material components change?
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