Summer in the City

[Friday, July 17, 2009]

Another month, another laptop, another blog post…

I was going to post on July 15th, which would've made it less than a month between postings(!) and is, apparently, National Tapioca Pudding Day (seriously, who comes up with this stuff?). It would've been something in honor of that creamy, lumpy “dessert” that Bee and the rest of the family insisted on making when we were kids. I couldn’t stand the stuff. I mean, maybe, maybe if they’d taken out the clear, chewy balls, it would’ve been edible. Still wouldn’t have been dessert, but edible.
Anyway, Tapioca Pudding Day has come and gone, a reminder of how fleeting--and random-- are the glorious days of summer. And in quintessential Seattle summertime fashion, I spent this evening listening to great live music and drinking cold microbrews under heavenly blue skies at a park just outside the city. Really, it doesn’t get any better than this.
I was pleasantly surprised by the opening band, Blind Pilot—a group of six Northwesterners who apparently had their musical debut on bicycles. How very Portland of them! They had a great folky/pop sound, with strong, unexpected harmonies. An appropriate opener for harmonic genius Andrew Bird. If you haven’t heard it yet, you must give a listen to Andrew Bird’s latest album, Noble Beast. The man only gets better and better, and best live, if you can believe it. He’s got stellar backup from 3 Minneapolis musicians, but he’s really a one-man band, constantly looping complicated violin riffs and whistle solos as he sings and plays guitar. And damn, this guy can whistle. It's like birdsong, pretty and smooth as a well-trained, vibrato-charged tenor.
Bird's lyrics are as unexpected and complicated as his melodies, which grow and expand and hardly follow the conventional formulas of songwriting. As a result, each song, live, unravels or builds or spirals like the best of short stories: by the time the last violin string stops its vibration, you’re in a different place than you were when the first chord struck.
Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the Decemberists, who had a big fan base, a charged set, and more instruments onstage than , with their predictable melodies and highly-stylized, big-sound-masking-mediocre-musicality, were a bit more like…tapioca pudding. I left before their set was over, feeling more than satisfied by everything--brews, blue skies, and Bird--that came before.