Musings #3: On Inspiration

2010 has been, at least in my account, an extraordinary year for new music. I am really in awe that I have found so much amazing music in the last three months or so. From being introduced to bands and artists that I had had a passing knowledge of already (The Magnetic Fields, The Dresden Dolls, Pink Martini, Gregory Douglass, Steve Reich, Morten Laurdisen) to discovering that I do, in fact, like opera, it's already been a good year. And that's without discussing any of the new/upcoming releases I've had the supreme pleasure of hearing. First up, we have The Magic Theatre.  A collaboration between Dan Popplewell and Sophia Churney (of the UK band Ooberman), it's an eleven-track concept album set in 1968 and 1888 featuring- among other things- a time-travel love story.  The vocals are all absolutely gorgeous, the orchestrations are breathtaking, and the storyline is just captivating.  Plus, the first single "Summer Sun" is exactly what its title suggests; sunny, upbeat pop of the kind we haven't heard in too long.  The last four songs will break your heart in the best possible way, and you'll finish listening to the album aching for those two lovers separated by eighty years. Next, there's Joanna Newsom's Have One On Me.  I've had an odd relationship with Ms. Newsom's music.  I remember when her first record, The Milk-Eyed Mender, came out.  I must have been fifteen or so at the time, and it was one of the most jarring, unhappy records I had heard up to that point.  I was not prepared for her voice- at once sounding like an infant and an eighty-year-old woman- and the lo-fi production left me cold.  A few years later, I bought Ys, mostly because I felt like I should like it.  I didn't, of course- one can't listen to music that way- but every so often, I would dust it off and play it again, appreciating more and more of it each time.  When I heard she was coming out with a three-disc third album, I was more than a little skeptical.  After all, that's an awful lot of music to expect a listener to sit through.  However, once I heard the track "Good Intentions Paving Co.", I was thoroughly hooked.  She brought a '70s folk sensibility to this record, and on songs like the aformentioned, you can almost believe that Joni Mitchell had a hand with the songs' creations.  To simplify Ms. Newsom's music down to possible influences is really to belittle her musical accomplishments, though.  Songs like "In California" and "Baby Birch" are gut-wrenching, and "Soft As Chalk" has a bite to it I didn't know Joanna had in her.  To be sure, her voice is definitely not for everyone; but if you can appreciate it, her music is really something not to be missed. And finally, we come to the album I've been entirely lost in.  Leave Your Sleep by Natalie Merchant is her first work in seven years, and that labor of love shows.  Twenty-six (twenty-seven if you buy it on iTunes, including the bonus track "Old Mother Hubbard") poems set to Merchant's music comprise two discs, and it is still not enough.  She apparently worked with over one hundred musicians on this album, and it is most evident on songs like "maggie and milly and molly and may" (words by e. e. cummings) and "The Land of Nod" (words by Robert Louis Stevenson)- songs that will actually break the listener's heart.  Merchant's sense of humor shines in her arrangements of "Bleezer's Ice-Cream Store" (words by Jack Prelutsky) and "The Adventures of Isabel"; but upbeat or ballad, there is truly not a dud.  I have only had this album for a day now, and I literally have not stopped listening to it.  It's going to be a hard album to beat for my personal Record of the Year, that's for sure. I feel so extraordinarily lucky to be able to listen to what can only be described as this glut of beautiful music.  It makes me very excited to hear what the rest of the year has in store, and it's also making me think of my music in new ways.  I've finally started working on a new piece, tentatively titled "Snakeskin Heart" (the first time I've been able to hang on to a new song-idea that I'm writing for myself for a good four months or so).  I feel more creative than I have in months, and it's in no small part due to the albums above.