I don’t know why it took so long for me to closely examine her music the way I have with her poems, especially because I never stopped listening to her music from the day she gave me her CD early last year, listening to it over and over in my car during my long drive to the auxiliary office and back, and when the CD wore out, I listened on line – something my owner no doubt took note of when he perused by work computer.
Why I picked this song to examine first is also a mystery. It is not my favorite by far, regardless of how brilliantly performed, a jazz piece in which she does some serious scat singing.
Perhaps it is because the theme is so similar to her later poems about living in the moment and has vague echoes of her meeting the old woman on that cruise and how she later wore through appointment books – and not with lists of laundry.
There is an intense brutality exploited by the harsh piano and competing guitar, as if two knights were dealing for the affections of the seductive voice rising and falling in intervals and into passionate scats, a velvet glove seeking to soothe the brutality of the musical iron hand, two hands full of intensity and lust, her alluring vocal floating over the thrust and jab of the piano and guitar as the drum beats out a steady rhythm against everybody can compete, her voice weaving in and out, there and then, then not there, falling into an extended emotional moan so completely soothing at time as to lure away attention from the musical conflict waged underneath, a delightful distraction, full of passion and pain.
The voice is something so soothing you are tempted to wrap it around you like a cloak, but the interchange of instruments, the rising and falling, the slow steady mounting to a crescendo, makes it impossible to ignore the instrumental conflict, as if the guitar and piano take turns with her, and then, near the end engage with her at the same time.
The song is not my favorite because I’m not a fan of jazz, though some of my close friends are students of it, allowing me to recognize how well-crafted this song is. I’m not sure who is playing the piano, but her husband is definitely playing the guitar.
Her musical work seems to strongly resemble those poems of hers I’m familiar with (there is a whole batch of poems from that period I’ve heard about but never seen, so I assume her songs reflect those as well.)
This song like some of the poems I am familiar with is a commentary of people’s all too busy lives.
“Everybody runs around, places to go, people to see,” she sings, going on to suggest that life is about taking risks as a gateway to happiness.
She sings that she’s been where other people are, especially when alone, her busy brain forgetting all this.
“Sometimes I just ride the bliss,” she sings, and eases into an extended and seductive scat as the instruments ride in over here.
“I want to feel it. I want to be it now,” she sings when the instruments ease down. “Can you imagine how many lovers, how many lives without the golden kiss.”
Then, as if to echo a poem she wrote about that old lady on the cruise, she sings, “We need to stop planning so hard… not to handle things, manage things only endless….” Perhaps bliss.
Then, she comes back to the chorus of feeling it and being it, an intense sensuality again emphasized by the instrumental outro, of piano and guitar vying for the attention of her amazing voice.
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