SOUNDTRACK: LUCY DACUS-“Historians” NPR’S SOUTH X LULLABY (March 21, 2018).
I’m looking forward to seeing Lucy Dacus live in a few weeks. Her music is often spare but grows very intense. For this particular song it is just her and her guitarist who is creating textures and sounds as Lucy sings clearly and starkly. She plays the (almost) title track from her new album Historian.
The idea behind our South X Lullaby series was to offer intimate moments with musicians as an antidote to the commotion and deluge that is the SXSW music festival. When we met Lucy Dacus for her Lullaby and found out she’d perform “Historians,” a most somber song from her deeply personal and triumphant album Historian, it felt just right. It’s a song of reflection, the story of two intertwined partners and the way they document one another’s lives and preserve each other’s memories.
With simple but compelling swirls of sound, Dacus begins singing clearly with a bit of softness on the edges of her words. It’s fascinating to watch her face illuminated by the video around her (the same video that Stella Donnelly performed in front of).
The song is warm despite the sadness inherent in it.
The setting for this performance, by Lucy Dacus and guitarist Jacob Blizard, is an interactive art installation by the multidisciplinary Israeli artist Ronen Sharabani that’s part of the SXSW Art Program. This work, titled “Conductors and Resistance,” explores human-machine interaction in our ever-evolving technological world. The images projected behind Lucy and Jacob are two coffee cups, one empty and one that’s been almost drained, both tangled in and tugged at by a complex series of wires, representing what I think is human communication and miscommunication. This is just one of three walls onto which images are projected in this installation — you can see another wall behind Stella Donnelly in her South X Lullaby video.
[READ: April 13, 2016] “The Magic Mountain”
Back in June of 2009, The New Yorker had their annual summer fiction issue. Included in that issue were three short essays under the heading of “Summer Reading.” I knew all three authors, so I decided to include them here.
This essay was about Aleksander Hemon’s childhood in Sarajevo.
He says that (not unlike Angell) his family had a cabin on the mountain called Jahorina. His family would spend winter breaks there skiing and partying. His parents thought it was heaven up there. But he and his sister hated to go there in the summer. (more…)