strike that

it says here

It helps, after a day of moody unemployment, to sit in the sixth row of a tiny late 20’s vaudeville house and listen to Billy Bragg sing I have faith in you. Billy Bragg who, when not kicking your ass, simply mesmerizes you with the way he sings an-ti-ci-pa-tion, each vowel different than you’d expect, the sounds all British and twangy and wrong, the word hanging parsed in the air for seconds. Billy Bragg whom I’d never heard of until a bus in Turkey in 1999, when Frenchie suggested I scrawl his name on a To Check Out list along with The Beach (a surprising choice for him in its semiliterate mediocrity) and some movie about Ireland. Billy Bragg who sings here and library in one sentence, and they get two syllables each. Hay-ire. Lie-bree.

and I lied to myself bout the chances I’d wie-steeeeeeeeeehd

The encore was a whole album, not montaged but quick-succession one song after another start to finish, a bonus concert to drive home the banishment of cynicism he’d been preaching, and I don’t know how some performers manage to make every person in every audience every night feel that they have just witnessed an unreplicable moment of passion and creation, but there it is.

And then Joshua and I played guitar on my porch till the wee hours, rattling strings and scaring away all the cats.

posted by tortaluga @ 2:48 AM