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Review by ?
- The Flyer
- From A Distance
[talked a lot about Harlan Howard, who has "the biggest heart of any
songwriter born in America"]
- Say It Isn't So
- Always Will
["You all probably know this next song much better than I do. It was written
by someone [Kate Wolf] whose career rested in the twenty years where folk
music was considered the f word by the recording industry. She's holding a
seat at the bar upstairs. She does keep score, and if you sing along, you'll
get your drink a lot faster when you get there." ]
- Across the Great Divide
[Long story about her great uncle. "This is the only song I've ever
written by request. He died when he was 92, out there mowin' the lawn in his
khakis with a Chesterfield. People asked, what did he die of? Whaddya
think?. His favorite version of this song was by an Irish singer named Maura
O'Connor. He loved it, even had it on his answering machine. People'd call
up and hear her, not his niece singing the song. West Texas humor doesn't
really translate, but I keep telling it. At his funeral, my great aunt stood
up and said he had died just the way he wanted to, as someone outstanding in
his field. And then she laughed!"]
- Trouble In the Fields
["Two artists kept me from turning into the dust of West Texas and blowing
away: Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits. For LNGH we recorded 5 Tom Waits
songs, although only one made it to the album. The critics HATED that album.
They said it was overproduced. Of COURSE it was overproduced: I had an
orchestra with 60 strings playing behind me!"]
- San Diego Serenade
["I co-wrote this next song with my best friend, James Hooker."]
- Don't Forget About Me
- Time of Inconvenience
["I want to thank the woman who saved that song: Sara Hickman. It was
written for a benefit in Oregon against #9"]
["This next song was written by a gentleman I've been chumming around the
country with for years. We've done concerts together, although never in
Seattle. In all his life, only one blessing hadn't come true for him:
having a fat little baby to call his own. Actually, he just wanted someone
who would listen to him. Trouble was, he could never find a woman who would
hang around with him long enough to do that kind of thing. But he finally
did, a beautiful woman from Ireland, and just recently, at the ripe old age
of 49, they had a little baby, named Jack. Came out with a full head of hair
and a little mustache, just like him. So this is dedicated to John
Prine--may he never know the Speed of the Sound of Loneliness again"]
- Speed of the Sound of Loneliness
[The middle of this song featured a great improvisational piano bridge
played by James Hooker. On the first night, his playing was so "out there"
that Nanci actually said something jokingly to him in the middle of it,
something like "James, what ARE you thinking?". After it was over, she
talked about how he does something different every night with that bridge
section, that in Chicago he even broke into "Chicago, Chicago". She said it
was James' chance every night to play whatever he wanted, and if John Prine
only knew that James Hooker was walking around in the middle of his song
every night. I watched and listened carefully for this the second night, but
nothing unusual happened.]
- Listen To the Radio
[some added talk by Nanci in the middle of the song that I couldn't
completely make out: it was basically a pitch for "The Mountain"--KMTN, a
local radio station. "Richard Thompson's on right now!"]
[intro of band--when she intro'd James Hooker and talked about his work with
the Amazing Rhythm Aces, she said, "What was it you did? Punk folk?" "Oh,
we were just a lot of idiots," he answered, leaning back languidly. Hooker
is one cool dude. I wanna BE James Hooker.
Then she turned the stage over to Lee Satterfield for a song.]
- Lee Satterfield solo: How Could You (?)
[Nanci gave her thanks to everyone who came in and worked on _Flyer_,
including two women who are unique; "there was no one who sounded like them
till they came along, but now there are a whole lot who kind of do"--The
Indigo Girls]
- These Days In An Open Book
["It's fortunate that those dreams have come true. This next song has been
recorded by a lot of people. Every time I'm in the grocery store, picking
out that perfect tomato, and this song comes on the Muzak overhead, I think
to myself that THAT'S where this tomato came from. Nobody likes their own
voice, usually, but my favorite version of this has never been recorded, and
that's the version by the two people who wrote it (James Hooker and Nanci
Griffith), with our rough and tumble vocals." ]
- Gulf Coast Highway
- Outbound Plane
[Talked about Athens, Georgia, where REM, B52s, Indigo Girls, Widespread
Panic come from. Next song co-written by someone from one of her favorite
new groups, Counting Crows (Adam Durwitz)]
- Going Back to Georgia
["The scariest thing on earth happened to me last summer" (she turned 40).
Her father threw her a birthday party --her father has fun at EVERYTHING,
does cannonballs in the pool at age 70, etc. He came over to her and said
she NEVER has fun. In all the time he has known her, she's never had fun.
"He said I always have to go off and think about it. So I went off and
thought about that a lot." (Laughter from audience). And she made a New
Years Resolution: "if it isn't fun, don't do it. So when I wrote this next
song, I really had fun. I had so much fun it lifted me straight up off the
couch."]
- Anything You Need But Me
[Red Hot and Country (AIDS benefit album) story--"my friend Kathy Mattea
dedicated a year of her life to this project." Said that Kathy had told
everyone to find some song they'd always wanted to do, maybe from one of
their heroes. Nanci chose Jimmy Webb. "It was a great chance to call him up
and ask him to do this song with me." Interestingly, the two nights were a
bit different on her stunning performance of this song--it seemed to me that
she made a concerted effort NOT to use her hands so much on the second night
(see the RH&C video for what I mean)--she anchored them behind her back for
much of the song, or cradled the microphone.]
- If These Walls Could Speak
["This next one is from that overproduced album."]
- Fields of Summer
[Reference to three sold-out shows in Albert Hall ("Now we know how many
holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall", she said.) This is her favorite
Beatle song, and she mentioned the EP that just came out, and encouraged us
to call the radio station and ask them to play it.]
- Things We Said Today
[Lots of talk about how the next song was written in honor of Buddy Holly,
and how she got Sonny Curtis to play the Fender Stratocaster on the Flyer
album, even though he hadn't picked it up in 15 years. She said Sonny wrote
a lot of famous songs: "I Fought the Law," "Walk Right Back," and the "Mary
Tyler Moore Show Song" (which she belted out the last line of: "You're gonna
make it after all," to the delight of the audience. She said she then
worried that on tour, no one in the band could play the Stratocaster like
Sonny ("no one in the band plays that out of tune"). Sonny told her, "Nanci,
you're lower'n West Texas trailer trash yourself, why don't YOU play it?"
- This Heart
Encore #1
["This is the most "f word" folk song I've ever written."]
- It's A Hard Life
Encore #2
[long, stunning monologue, told while she quietly fingerpicked her guitar,
about being the child of beatniks. I had hoped to capture more of the
specifics of this monologue in my notes the second night, but then I became
so totally mesmerized by it that I just couldn't. I sure hope someone gets
this monologue on video while she's still doing it. She started off with
"I'm sure everyone in this room thinks that their parents are the most
peculiar people on the face of the earth." As reported before on this list,
she talked about how this generation of women is the first to be told that
they can have it all, and that they can do it all by themselves. (Cheers
from the audience, which misunderstood what she was saying, I think,
particularly in light of the song she was about to sing, about how she'd
trade it all away just for love.). She said wryly, "We're an unfinished
experiment. My mother loves unfinished experiments." And then she looked up
with a pixieish grin. She went on to tell a picturesque story about Bill
Murray and her mother stealing her limo after her concert in NY City, and
when they came back at 4:33 am, Murray walked away, down the white line of
the road, yelling "Goodnight, Mom! Goodnight, Mom! Goodnight, Mom!". ]
- Goodnight To A Mother's Dream
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