I was thinking about whimsy in art, and generally conclude that though in my Life there is little I Love MORE than whimsy, in music there’s little I Love less.
Visual art? I adore it. I appreciate the flights of fancy that the Frouds or the Pussywillow II I adored as a kid or the strange sense of found object PLAY in Andy Goldsworthy’s works – but in music I find that it just evokes Volkswagon commercials and women playing ukulele singing in voices that evoke a ‘fuck me or father me’ confusion that’s not healthy for ANYone. Whimsy in music seems so very commercial, whereas, though whimsy in visual art is certainly still a big seller, it seems like the really commercial aspects of it are anonymized in such a way that you never mistake it for self-expression, but rather, bland filler and knickknacks… in visual art we clarify that the commercial side of it is “craft” and the ART side of it seems to remain unsullied, whereas in music it feels as if whimsy has been elevated to a cut and paste EQ filter to be placed evocatively over top of sun-burnished families with perfect teeth…
Friday night we played in a venue that really doesn’t evoke whimsy at all. Though the black walls of the Backroom at the Burren may echo with Irish trad reels at times, and there IS a sparkly owl hidden above the bar, I do NOT walk into the Burren thinking “ah HA, the fae have been at play in betwixt these strange walls!” I GENERALLY think… “Damn… let’s have a second whisky and tear the roof off”. There’s no sense of play here. The playing is deadly serious. The playing is rocking.
And we rock. I Love to do so. There’s no question that we’ve always been inspired to THUNDER in the narrow confines of this shallow stage. Inspired by the bass of Tom Bianchi (ok, there’s a fair amount of whimsy there, actually), or the passion of the sorely-missed Hugh McGowan, the raucous madness of the bands we’ve seen here, the other singer/songwriters – we like shaking the damn chandaliers here. But this weekend we ran ourselves full-tilt into a wonderful sense of … well… murder whimsy?
I really liked Phil and the Flying Leap. There are few artists that I really enjoy the journey of, and so I was deliciously surprised as we delved into his music, his short but clever intros, and the swing, lilt, turn and strangeness of a jazzy, show-tune-inspired voice that curved all around his material, hid the ugly bits right up until he stuck the dagger in with a smirk and a sparkle, implying that you too could be having this much fun if you’d just help him hide the bodies.
But you should get to the last verse. At that point you shalt realize – you associate yourself with his whimsical deviltry completely at your own folly.
I met some wonderful people, re-met others. I encountered one of my regular VOMlings in person and found that she was much, much shorter than I was expecting. We had a good night, went home with our illustrious friend Greg Klyma and in a bout of well-deserved turn about, slept at HIS house for a change!
We jammed long into the night, ate loud celery, talked about control systems for bio-mass reactors at length, and went the Hell to bed… not at ALL knowing the horror of the road a’fore us, waiting to strike down all remaining semblance of whimsy…
