Sarah Swire – Tight
Generally, audiences have understood how much they’re willing to see their favourite entertainers misbehave. They’ve communicated these decisions through ticket sales and nasty comments left on their social media profiles. How should the entertainers know just how much or little they can do? There’s no guide per se, but studying their antecedents helps.
Audiences, for the most part, want charming rebels who will cause the kind of chaos that won’t affect the world’s image of them. They want Keith Richard to look cool while stoned. They want people who’ll talk about the weather when they’d rather be talking about the war. What the general audience has always had trouble accepting are performers who make them uncomfortable.
You don’t realise just what you’ve gotten yourself into upon hearing the first notes of Sarah Swire’s highly theatrical “Tight.” The vocals, to start out with, are just a whisper and sung over an acoustic guitar that feels like someone’s attempt to half-quote, half-improvise on a vaudeville tune. But once you’ve relaxed enough, Swire delivers a monologue about pressure and anxiety. She does it with the kind of gravitas that could only have been provided by someone who has spent a long time interested in the theatre stage. If this does end up making you uncomfortable, even a little queasy, that’s great. Who only wants to hear music that you could play in a coffee shop anyway?
Sally Duhon – idk anything about anything
People ought to overreact. It’s healthy. It shows that they’re connected with the things going on around them. And, just as importantly, it tells you what they think is the value of “reacting normally.” There usually isn’t any other than self-preservation. People who don’t overreact spare others and themselves the immediate discomfort of having to consider terrible things. But they end up cheating themselves in the long run.
It’s young people, especially, who know how to grieve. They don’t just grieve for what they’ve lost but for others as well. They hear the suffering of the world and move up close to feel its heartbeat. Older people, those who have presumably already lived through many sorrows, think this is silly. They’ll talk about having to live life and enjoy it. But, for the most part, it’s just a case of their souls hardening up, becoming rigid, stuck and impossible to move.
Sally Duhon is a young artist who can’t look away from grief and can’t pretend not to be impressed by it. But, just like anyone in this position, the songwriter is also helpless in assisting others with their problems. “idk anything about anything” is a tender, lo-fi lullaby to someone who has passed away and to the people left having to carry the burden of it. Duhon’s singing and her words flow out naturally as if confessing to both the tragedy she’s witnessed and the confusion with which she’s been left. Still, it is better to feel it and to write a beautiful song about it than to shut yourself away from it.
