I should re-title this blog “Just Go to Daytrotter”.
I want to give the A.A. Bondy Ann Arbor show review the attention it deserves, which means not writing it up on this day when I’m functioning on a scant few hours of sleep. For now, know that it was an amazing show, and A.A. Bondy is a good, good man.
Fortuitously, Daytrotter posted a new session with Bondy today, so they’re going to help me tide you over.
What I should be doing is writing some brilliant, pontificating post full of content and revelation to make up for the shorter, paler posts I’ve been making. Instead, the fact that I’m journeying up to Ann Arbor tonight to see A.A. Bondy play at the Blind Pig has eaten my brain.
So instead, I’m going to cop out by pointing you to a Daytrotter session by the man opening for Bondy, Mr. Willy Mason. I have never intentionally gone to a show to see Mason (nothing against him – he’s a fine songwriter with a strong voice), and yet this will be the third time I’ve seen him play.
Show review forthcoming.
Simone Felice is a wonder. In 33 years, he seems to have experienced enough highs and lows to fill a few lifetimes, and he still manages to radiate the kind of sunny, loving air one would expect only from someone who has remained innocent of the depth and variety of pain the world has to offer. He came to prominence on the music scene as the drummer and rabble-rouser of the Felice Brothers (“prominence” being a term used loosely here as there are some still ignorant of the glory of the Brothers), given to off-kilter rhythms, whiskey-fueled antics and declarations such as “All ya’ll didn’t think there was any more churches left in New York City, did ya? This is the Felice Brothers Scumbag Church where you can fuck your cousin in the bathroom.” But even in the midst of the backwoods anarchy of the Brothers, the softer light in Simone still came shining through when he’d take the helm on songs like “Your Belly in My Arms” and “Mercy”.
When tragedy struck, not for the first time in Felice’s life, in the form of the still-birth of his daughter in the winter of 2008, instead of becoming hardened by the experience, Felice seemed only more determined to spread love. He bid bon voyage to the Brothers as they continued to tour, write and record and began to work on his own project, the Duke and the King, with longtime friend Robert “Chicken” Burke. What came out of holing up in a cabin with “Bobbie Bird” was an album, Nothing Gold Can Stay, that, true to its title, delivered musical poetry celebrating the beauty of the world – however painfully fleeting – and garnered Felice and Burke copious and effusive praise. Taking the show on the road, Felice and Burke continued to evolve their songs into ever more joyful noise.
Seemingly incapable of sitting still, Felice has now begun performing solo, has finished his fourth book and has just launched a website to keep the world apprised of his further creative endeavors. (One of the happy surprises of the new site is the affordable availability of The Big Empty, the eponomously-titled album of the band Felice started with younger brother Ian in the autumn of 2001, shortly after 9/11 and a few years before the formation of the Felice Brothers.)
Full disclosure: Simone Felice has become a sort of idol of mine. The dichotomy he personifies between dirtbag mountain boy and warm poet delights me, and the poetic prose of his books affects me in a way that writing hasn’t done since I was a susceptible teenager. But the clincher to his idolhood came when I messaged him via his MySpace page to ask if he could help direct me somewhere I could acquire a copy of his limited-edition novel Hail Mary Full of Holes and received a reply that not only affirmed that he could send me a copy from his own barn, but was also one of the kindest, warmest missives I’ve received from just about anyone, let alone an artist I had admired from afar.
This beautiful video was shot at the Olana State Historic Site near Felice’s home in upstate New York. The postmark on the envelope that carried my copy of Mary to me tells me that it was mailed the day this was filmed.
The Duke and the King official site
The Felice Brothers official site
Take This Bread: A Felice Brothers blog
Incidentally, it was my enthusiasm for the Felice Brothers that led me to the music of their former-brother-in-law-and-still-brother-in-other-ways, A.A. Bondy (and it was a little write-up in the excellent and sadly now-defunct No Depression magazine that led me to the Brothers), who shares with Simone and the Brothers not just a talent for stripped-down, honest music, but also the trait of being just a damn nice person.
Two of the great joys of seeing A.A. Bondy play are hearing new arrangements and variations of his songs and seeing what great covers he’ll pull out. To that end, here are two slightly different versions of his heartbreaking cover of the Rogers and Hart classic “My Funny Valentine” (a song which, interestingly, he’s been pulling out for encores since the Verbena days).
Hearing him sing this song mere feet away from me at his show last month in Akron was the first time I’ve been left speechless during a show. It seemed I wasn’t the only one having that reaction as it took a few moments for the applause to start once the song was finished. From the back of the room, someone called out, “Well done.”
I’ll be heading up to the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to see him play on December 2nd. I’m excited to see what he has in store for us this time.
As mentioned in the christening post, I love A.A. Bondy. My friends have had an earful of just how much these past few months, and I finally decided to put my proverbial money where my mouth is by putting together a collection for them of Bondy gems from around the internet, like his sessions with Daytrotter and HearYa.
I was listening to the collection on the way to work this morning, and even though I have heard all of these songs – and sometimes these very recordings – hundreds of times now, I find that they can still surprise me. On the surface of A.A. Bondy’s songs, they seem very simple. Sometimes just guitar, bass and drums. Many times, even less than that. But it’s, as I’ve often said, a deceptive simplicity. On one hand, literally, there’s his deft finger-picking on songs like “Mightiest of Gunsâ€. But beyond the technical aspects, the practical aspects, there is the emotional depth of the songs. Listening to the version of “World Without End†contained in this collection as I rolled down the snowy highway this morning, it struck me how the harmonica wail toward the end is so plaintive that it sounds like someone crying, like the sounds I have made when crumpling under the weight of heartbreak. The next song along was Bondy’s cover of Hank, Sr.’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cryâ€, a song which, given its longevity, I am even more familiar with than any of Bondy’s originals. I have always found it a lovely song, but I never felt the emotion where it surely originated until I was there, alone in my car, surrounded by Bondy’s voice as he asked if I had ever heard a Robin weep. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, this song that I knew so well was, for the first time, bringing tears to my eyes. Then, as if I had somehow unknowingly arranged these songs to allow each successive song to build on the emotion of the one before (I did not – I am not that clever in creating playlists), came the most recent rendition of “Mightiest of Guns†with the wonderful addition of Ben Lester’s pedal steel wrapping me in a melancholy that was, at the same time, as beautiful and warm as a hand-sewn quilt.
“This is why I’m starting a music blog,†I thought. This kind of music. This sort of musician who is less about any fortune-driven ideas of success (because Bondy has chased that golden ring, and it left him hollow) than he is about the art of music, about pulling himself inside out and playing his heart across his guitar strings, through his harmonica and, most tellingly, through his voice. “I just don’t know how to write for anybody but myself. The idea is that if it does something for me then hopefully it will do something for somebody else, you know?†he said in a recent interview. And it does, Mr. Bondy. It does.
The major impetus for the gathering of the collection was HearYa’s posting of a second session with A.A. Bondy and his accomplices, Macey Taylor and Ben Lester. Great to hear Bondy bringing a bit of his live-show noise and power into the studio. I hope this is a taste of things to come on his next album.
