It was a good music-filled night.
After work, per Krissy's recommendation, I headed over to the outer Sunset/West Portal to see Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley. I'm a fairly recent Jeff Buckley convert, but in the end, I don't know that it mattered—the movie was so incredible, so amazing, & so emotional that I can't imagine anyone walking away from it not a rabid Jeff Buckley fan.
What impressed me the most was how effectively the filmmakers used music in the film. It's somewhat obvious, of course—making a documentary about Jeff Buckley without heavily featuring his music would be, oh, sort of pointless—but it always amazes me how few films/television shows use music as effectively as it can be used: to enforce a point, to manipulate (in a good of bad way) emotions, etc. [2] And from start to finish, with AM:JB, the combination of music & the story made it one of the more emotional things I've seen in a while. Just, wow. [3]
Anyway: fantastic movie, and highly recommended.
So then, later tonight, I went to the Fiery Furnaces show at Cafe du Nord. This was my second FF show (we went to a show back in April 2005), and it was completely different—they didn't do their usual mashup of half of their songs into 45 minutes [4], and instead played a lot of their songs in full. They also played 5-6 songs from Rehearsing my Choir, including "Seven Silver Curses", which was great. [5]
They played an incredible version of "Chris Michaels" to end the show. They actually played the full song, in serial, rather than cut up into chunks throughout the show. And it was fucking amazing.
And then, when they came back on for an "encore" (does it actually count as an encore if they don't really leave the stage?), just Eleanor (singing) and Matthew (keyboard) played "Chief Inspector Blancheflower". And then the rest of the band came back for "Two Fat Feet," which closed it out. It was so, so great.
[1] A footnote in the title: a new low.
But seriously, I tried really hard to get a great closeup picture of Eleanor Friedberger, but just wasn't close enough. I think I'm in love with Eleanor. She's been my desktop wallpaper for about 4 months now, and I don't see that ending anytime soon.
BTW, I didn't actually scream "I LOVE YOU ELEANOR!!!" myself, at the show, though I did hear it a number of times from other people.
[2] "Freaks and Geeks" was one of the greatest examples (for me) of a television show that really used music well.
[3] This movie was pretty seriously sad.
But it was also really funny, and I'd be remiss if I didn't point out this (to me) really funny part that almost made me laugh at a completely inappropriate time. So, after Jeff has (presumably) gone missing, they showed a news clipping from (I think) a local newspaper with a headline that said something like, "Musician missing - liked 'mystery'" (I don't remember the exact headline). And I was like, WTF? "Liked 'mystery'"?
It seemed kind of flippant; but then, after thinking about it, it sort of made sense, because it seemed to capture what was (at least, based on the film) the hope at the time: that Jeff needed to get away, & had just disappeared, and had staged it all. Which, in some sense, makes it all the sadder and more macabre to read "Liked 'mystery'" in the newspaper clipping.
But so anyway, I thought that was funny in a really absurd way, and almost laughed, but am kind of glad that I didn't, because then I would've felt really bad.
[4] Which is what we saw when we saw them in April, and which is captured fantastically well in this recording of one of their shows in Toronto, which I listen to all the time.
[5] Though it struck me that their shows, in the end, are pretty terrifically insider: they really only seem to make a lot of sense if you actually know the songs that they're playing. As opposed to some bands, which try for mass appeal even if you only know one song, for example. This is even more true of their medley-esque shows, but even in a show like tonight's, where they played full versions of a lot of the Rehearsing my Choir tracks, the versions they play are still vastly different than the album versions.
Frankly, I love it, because there's always something new to hear & experience. But it's a really interesting approach, because with a lot of bands, the more times you hear them in concert, the more boring the concert is; whereas with the FF, hearing them multiple times only deepens your enjoyment, because you're hearing a new, different version of a song that you know well.
Which sort of presupposes that you know the songs really well to begin with, I guess, & which just illustrates the perversity of their approach, to me.
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