mythology | 11.38 km
i’m trying to get a grip on reality and to come up with a reasonable frame of reference. met a friend the other night who is seriously ill; in fact she’s so ill that there’s a chance that she might be dying. and suddenly all that has scared and frightened me the past weeks deflated and shrunk to some absurd rubber shred at my feet.
and yet i can’t get the fat head to stop worrying and brooding, resulting in the predictable ramblings. i don’t really feel comfortable posting them here. maybe i will after wednesday.
however there *is* something i want to share, because this song has been haunting me the past couple of days.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/iuzb42
obviously this is not an official release, but i have been to enough of suzanne’s shows to say that she is someone who likes to be in control of the performance and the ways a song will take. but it seems to me that she isn’t in this track. there are some parts of the melody that just seem to be out of reach for her voice. she played this song with a capo, so she could easily have tuned it down, but she didn’t.
the result is that there are moments in the song where her voice suddenly turns from being firm and in control to being fragile, thin and literally out of tune. as you might know, suzanne’s asthmatic, therefore her vocal range is limited and she cannot really sing long notes - and it seems as if she’s composing along this line of limitation.
in this particular performance of this song she, too, is exploring this line, pushing her voice into regions where it is without control and is way past what one would consider “beautiful singing” or a “good voice” - but there is a grain in her voice, an intensity grounded in this very frailty and insecurity (that these equal the frailty and insecurity of the character in the song just as an aside).
all this turns the performance into a very intimate one. she sang this as a second encore, as if she first had to be sure that the audience is ‘familiar’ and sympathetic enough for her to make herself vulnerable and voice this weakness and weaken the voice.
