Silver Moons
The Pop & Jazz blog
Mary Fahl‘s new Love & Gravity is out! It’s the singer and songwriter’s first full-length release since From the Dark Side of the Moon, her recreation of the iconic Pink Floyd album (reviewed in issue 13 of Pop & Jazz).
I’ve only heard Love & Gravity once, but I’ll say up front that it was the first of many listens to come.
Listen, and watch, as Fahl makes Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” entirely her own.
Understated Fahl isn’t. Between the tone of her arrangement, with its delicious echoes of Pink Floyd’s “Goodbye Blue Sky,” and the pace and power of her delivery, Fahl’s reading may be, for me, the definitive recording of this song, which was so beautifully sung by both Judy Collins and Mitchell herself, each quite early in her career.
Fahl draws out the gravitas in Mitchell’s words, finding degrees of pain and acceptance that suit a singer in middle age, without losing the childlike wonder that powers the song. Mitchell’s own later interpretation, from Both Sides Now (2000), is also superb, but I’ll take Fahl’s intensity over Mitchell’s somberness, if it comes to that! (Which, thankfully, it doesn’t.)
Read more about Fahl and listen to her music at her website.
18 October 2013
Morality too often puts up with being a constraint, and even imagines such a disgrace to be its essence. Art, on the contrary, as often hugs unreason for fear of losing its inspiration, and forgets that it is itself a rational principle of creation and order. Morality is thus reduced to a necessary evil and art to a vain good, all for want of harmony among human impulses.
—George Santayana, Reason in Art (1905)
Currently burning down servers at YouTube is the dance-pop single “The Fox” from the Norwegian sibling duo Ylvis. It’s sort of gimmicky and ridiculous and it’s sort of beautiful, too. I relish its spirit of fun, which billows without so much as a waft of mean spiritedness. The song plays on the absence (in English and presumably in Norwegian as well) of established onomatopoeia for representing fox sounds. This absence, along with the animal’s penchant for stealth, has given us the inaccurate impression of foxes being—like 99 out of 100 dance-pop celebs—creatures with no distinctive voice of their own. As Ylvis’ unhinged attempts at representing fox sounds make clear, however, the lack of ready-made phrases to signify fox noises results from the unusual (and varied) nature of fox calls themselves.
The verse melody is quite pretty, and Ylvis’ gekkering (onomatopoetic jargon for foxes’ fighting sounds) is quite good. This is what gives “The Fox” legs. Sure, one face of the song is tongue in cheek. But there’s a childlike innocence that suits its subject—that feels earnest and can be enjoyed that way.
Big blue eyes, pointy nose
Chasing mice and digging holes
Tiny paws, up the hill
Suddenly you’re standing still
Your fur is red, so beautiful
Like an angel in disguise…
They take the image too far, of course, and dive back into sending up the trope of the over-wrought pop paean to young love—fully in keeping with the “other” part of the song. It’s easy to roll with the flip, especially when they come to the next lines: “If you meet a friendly horse / Will you communicate by Mo-o-o-o-orse?” The staggering of the word “Morse” evokes the named code while playing with dance-music cliché of the stuttering sample—all in a single vocal take unembellished by keyboards or samples.
Satire is well and good, but the genesis of this song is something worthy of serious inquiry: the beauty of foxes. That we can laugh and sing along the way just makes it all the richer.
5 October 2013
