A Delightful and Random Discovery: Peter Adams May 29, 2009

 

I just stumbled upon this DELIGHTFUL musician and his DELICIOUS music tonight!  His name is Peter Adams, and I can’t wait for you to hear him!

Here’s the totally random way it happened:  I was looking for a website for a lovely (but now-defunct) pop/folk duo, eastmountainsouth.  I couldn’t find one, so I started looking up the people in the duo to see if they had done any solo projects. The guy half is named Peter Adams, so I clicked on the first link google gave me, which is the above link.  

It turns out that the Peter Adams I was looking for is Peter Bradley Adams. But I like my new Peter Adams even more!

 

Here’s a blurb from his website:

Wandering through a floating jungle with a string band and stumbling onto a ruined city of waterlogged bass drums, mossy chord organs, and a tribe of harmoniums dancing in anarchic fervor to a primeval phonograph of the moon singing to the ocean.

Peter Adams is a critically-acclaimed musician from Cincinnati whose self-made albums have received worldwide attention. Mixing a variety of styles and influences, Peter creates a lush musical world that is entirely his own.

He writes, produces and plays everything on his albums, and the music is SO gorgeous!  He uses bells, violin, accordion, guitar and who knows what else to create lovely songs.  Rob said it reminded him of music that would accompany a magical children’s book story.

AND he has “pay what you want” pricing for his downloads.

Are you intrigued yet?  If so, go HERE and listen to him.  Right now!  (And while you’re there, you must see The Lunaphonic Omnibox.  Isn’t he so VERY creative?)

***Update – I sent him an email and he wrote back. See, he’s friendly also! He comes to Nashville for shows sometimes, so we’ll all have to go next time, ok?

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The Time Traveler’s Wife May 21, 2009

Every so often you have a book stop you in your tracks. So it was with ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ by Audrey Niffenegger. Julie and I (and yet-to-be-out Bella) were working in Baja, Hungary with Randy and Tami from the Sozo Festival. We were helping with a leadership program for some Eastern European teens, and the summer was wearing on. The novelty of living in Baja was wearing thin, and the daily chores of keeping everything clean and everyone fed had us looking for an escape.

‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ hit me like the first splash of cool pool water on a hot day. I think I read in within 40 hours, and its mix of mystery, sci-fi, adventure and love (and loss) really connected with me, plus it whisked me nicely away from our pedestrian tasks, unairconditioned apartment and unintelligible neighbors.

I don’t want to give much of anything away about the book, but for those of you who have read it, I’d like to give you the impetus of the song lyric. A few months after we got back to the states, I was sitting in the living room of our old condo in Hillsboro Village one Saturday morning, playing around with a chord progression from one of my favorite guitar studies (by Cuban composer Leo Brouwer), when the ideas from the book began to creep into my thoughts.

Henry’s ability to travel through time is really just a genetic freak. He has a ‘chrono-displacement’ gene that causes him to involuntarily pop in and out of time. That inspired the first lines of the song – ‘It’s just one of those things / You get used to it, like / seizures or color-blindness.’ His travels are random, but largely involve him visiting people and places that are important to him, primarily his wife at her childhood home, so he’s able to piece together a patchwork narrative of the events of their life together – ‘Just what the future brings / is still a mystery, but / some things begin to show more clear.’

There’s a scene toward the end of the book (if you can’t stand spoilers of any kind, skip to the next paragraph!) where Claire, the wife of time traveler Henry, waits at her home for him to show up. Claire’s an old woman now, and she knows that Henry will pay her one last visit before she’s gone, and the song idea came from this delicious moment of hope and expectation before she actually sees him. I thought about this bittersweet scene, how she’s known she will briefly see him this one last time (he told her many years before that he visits her when she’s much older), and has, for many years now, held on to this last goodbye. She has been waiting for him, waiting all these years.

The book switches narration each chapter between Henry (the time traveler) and Claire (his wife). We figured the song could mirror that “he said/she said” feel as a duet, and after a few changes with who would sing what, we came up with the final version of the song. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s recently read the book as to how well the song captures the mood and tone of the book (or not).

Thanks for tuning in.

Waiting For You

It’s just one of those things
you get used to it like
seizures or colorblindness

Just what the future brings
is still a mystery, though
some things begin to show more clear

I’ve been waiting for you
I will wait for you
I’ve been waiting for you
I will wait for you

You say that you picked me
but the more I think of it we
neither one really stood a chance

You think it’s destiny
well, I dunno, maybe that’s
just the way you feel when you’re in love

And you look at me with eyes that hold
the mysteries of life but you’re too kind
to tell me

I’ve been waiting for you
I will wait for you
I’ve been waiting for you
I will wait for you

and yes I learned to run to steal
to cheat to fight to lie to heal
to do what it takes to survive
and you have been my heart my home
my hiding place my tether to the rest
of the world
and I will wait for you

I’ve been waiting for you
I will wait for you
I’ve been waiting for you
I will wait for you

Singing Of Brightness And Beauty May 14, 2009

I love to read great books, don’t you?  

I started reading when I was four years old, and I have been captivated ever since.  I especially love fiction, with Russian, British and Southern Gothic literature being among my favorites.  

Rob loves poetry, especially William Blake, Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney and John Updike.  And we are both head over heels in love with the American poet Billy Collins.  (In fact, he is speaking at a writer’s seminar at a local university next month, and we are trying our best to figure out a way to go.)

So inspiration from books has been always present.  Here’s a quote from one of my favorite books, Cancer Ward, by one of my favorite authors, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.  

“Her smile was kind, not so much her smile as the lips themselves. They were vital separate lips, which seemed about to flutter from her face like a lark into the sky. They were made, as all lips are, for kissing, yet they had other more important work to do: to sing of brightness and beauty.” 

When I read that years ago in my bed late at night, I had to get up and write it down so I would not forget how important this work of singing really is.  

I think it might be possible to bring brightness and beauty to the world with a song, and if it is possible, I want to do it.