Love Songs for When You Are 80

Hello loves

I have been absent these many weeks, ah....well...months, mostly b/c I was suffering a severe and awful case of writers block. Then school started and I lost my mind. (note to self: NEVER take two lab sciences ONLINE at the same time) I apologize and I hope to post more often.

Ahem, anyway, I had a dream last night that the man who was my Grandma Becom's closest neighbor, and one of my choldhood hereoes, Mr Scott, was alive and in Raleigh and somehow famous. (When I was little he told me he wrote a novel when he was younger and still had it and had never tried to get it published. This made me unbeleivably sad.) Andrew Wilson, brother to Luke and Owen, had visited him the night before and given him a '45 (a record single for those who don't know, the kind they used to have in jukeboxes) , by Marvin Gaye called "Love Songs for When You are Eighty" (no such song really exists as far as I know). He then gave it to me. I was thrilled. It was Christmas Eve. I took it to work, where I was having trouble getting the lights to come on, and as I stuggled with the strings of Christmas lights, another of the managers took the record from me and peeled it apart and revealed it was never a record at all but plastic utensils, like for picnics. I was vey dissappointed.

We saw Andrew Bird last night at the Carolina Theater in Durham and it was amazing. Getting there was a bit of a problem as the street signs in Durham are of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" variety. (There was even one that had nothing but a question mark and an arrow which made us laugh really hard.) There was an opening band called Auggie March that sounded like Ryan Adams witout any of the stuff that makes Ryan Adams good. They were an unusual choice for an opening band.

Regrettably, Jeff forgot to bring the camera so there are no pics but the stage setting was really unsusual, with victrolas with two horn thingys that spinned and a stuffed monkey, of the sock family, that Andrew Bird brought on the stage himself. He played in his socks, and for how cerebral his lyrics are it makes you realize how playful his music is. Very whimsical. Like an erudite Dr. Seuss with electric violin. He played alomst exclusively old material and admitted that previously he never played material from Eggs because it was really hard to play by humself so for this tour he solicited the help of this Norweigan dude from Minneapolis to play guitar. Outside of this he had no other accompanyment and it was amazing to watch him create the various layers of his songs right in front of you. He used effects pedals and looping and sampling pedals in order to create backgrounds and it was truly thrilling as his violin plucking/ bowing is so unusual and dynamic it makes you feel like he is playing another instrument.

Wow, that song from the Charlie Brown Christmas special, "Christmas Time is Here" just popped up on the iPod and it's kind of creepy considering my dream earlier. Oh well, I love this song. You know the part in the Christmas special where Linus reads the story of Mary and Joesph at the inn and Christ's birth? I was thinking not too long ago that his reading is the only reading that ever really made me believe in God, fall in love with the story. Leave it to Charlie Brown to make a believer out of me.