The man does it all

Gentle readers, you may remember that in April of 2013 I said my days of buying music were over (read the post here). After five plus decades of buying 45s, LPs, Cassettes, CDs and MP3s I decided I had enough. Any new music I was going to hear I would rent, via Spotify, not buy and own. That’s turned out pretty well for me. I pay $10 a month for the upgraded version of Spotify, which eliminates all adverts. I have access to over 30 million tunes; only once has Spotify not had what I wanted to hear. I have in fact purchased a couple of things, but nothing like in the old days.

Back in the 80s and 90s I spent quite a bit of money replacing vinyl LPs with CD versions. I also paid attention to what was popular and though I didn’t dig deep, I did buy some things I had only read about, not heard.

One of those albums was In My Tribe by 10,000 Maniacs. It was released in 1987 and featured wonderful vocals by Natalie Merchant. I remember liking it a lot when I bought it but, alas, it joined the shelves of bought-and-played-once discs, not because it wasn’t good but because other things landed in the player more often.

(An aside: the main reason I pay for Spotify rather than Pandora is because I’m someone who almost always knows what I want to hear; others like being surprised by the radio, or by Pandora, the internet version of radio. Not I. I have so much music that I mostly play what I’m in the mood for).

So Natalie Merchant came and went in my life.

She returned on Friday. She played a concert at SUNY Purchase with her band (piano, guitar, bass) backed by the Purchase Symphony Orchestra conducted by my husband, Ransom Wilson. It was fascinating. She still has a beautiful voice and she's always been a wonderful songwriter. She’s also become quite an arranger; she scored her songs for her combo and orchestra. The sound was lush, the lyricism intoxicating and the total package magnificent.

Oddly though, it didn't totally win me over. I think because often I could not understand all the words and almost never could I follow the tale of the tune. It was delightful to hear but I would have to listen repeatedly to “get it.”

And I may well do that. I have long known that I am much more a “music” person than a “words” person. It is always the sound of a song that wins me over; I may come to love the words later, but only if I’m first moved sonically. And her arrangements moved me.

The point of this post though is to send props to my man. He did a brilliant job, with scant rehearsal time, pulling together these talented students to play music they had never seen. One orchestra rehearsal and one with Ms. Merchant — that’s all they got.

But when someone as talented as Ransom is on the podium, it's enough.