: You may have noticed I skipped "Hangin� Johnny." Here I have to shift back to my first hearing of the album, at dinner with Nancy and Tracey. About halfway into Hangin� Johnny, Nancy pauses and tells me that we have to stop talking and listen for awhile. So I dutifully stop, and we all cock our heads in that way you do when you�re trying to hear something wafting on the air. And a bit later I hear it, clear as a bell...VANESSA�S LAUGH!!! Oh, we were fairly rolling on the floor laughing in our own right the second it rang out. I know she�d announced in the chatroom that her laugh was on there, but I�d been dubious of anyone�s ability to pick it out other than its owner. That was before hearing the CD of course. The precise moment it came over the speaker I recognized it as surely as if she were in the room...telling us about getting socked by homeless women, or finding prostitutes carrying out their business on the back porch of her workplace, or spilling coffee on Melanie Doane, or any one of the hundred other things that ONLY happen to Ness, and only seem to reach their highest pitch of humor in hotel rooms at 2am with two and three chatters scrambled about on each bed and another half-dozen on the floor, recounting story after story after story in turn. I�ve heard so many of your laughs, you who are reading this, under similar circumstances, so many times. I hope in fifty years that I�ll still recognize them all just as clearly.
: What an incredible gift this album is to capture these recollections and distill them so well. But more than its ability to capture...to contain, to enclose, to preserve...it is its ability to evoke that makes this work special. It is a document and it�s not, for while it does hold these memories for the future, the idea of "documenting" suggests fixing memories in one tight form for years to come. This album brings a hundred weaving memories to light, fresh and new and intertwining with those of others. Yes, it preserves them, but it infuses them with life as well, and the fact of its live-ness makes them--the melodies, the memories--live with it. I think this has ever been one of Great Big Sea�s greatest assets...they take music that has the potential to be old and dusty and archival and make it live, kicking and shouting and stomping and present, here, now, surviving and singing in its roundest, loudest voice.
: Bravo.
Dr. T. |
