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Gurdonarks Review

uploaded: Wed, Apr 23, 2008 @ 5:56 PM last modified: Wed, Apr 23, 2008 @ 7:35 PM (replace)

by	shimoda
Featuring	gurdonark
length	6:27
BPM	60
Recommends	Recommends (3)

Perhaps Fireproof Babies was joking, but it was April 2nd when he made the comment that Gurdonark’s review of http://ccmixter.org/reviews... should be sung. I had nothing better to do than put my voice on the hotseat for a pella that probably won’t be touched, but it sounded fun anyways. The recording has a few takes of certain small sections. I can’t vouch for the key cause I didn’t get off my lazy butt to figure it out, I just picked a comfortable tonality and feeling and went with it. It could be sung many ways, here’s one. Oh, the text of the review is (attributable to Gurdonark the Mellifluous and Eloquent:

“It’s a chill winter night, when the air is filled with the kind of mist that in warmer weather would be fog. We’re sitting in one of those spaces that exist in the midwest in ways that such spaces don’t really exist on either coast. It’s one of those places in which the booths are red, the carpet is a soothing color, and people wear button-down shirts, even if they are not at all button-down people. In the corner there’s a baby grand, not an expensive one, but one that still holds a tune wonderfully despite having seen better days.

A man in a huge sweater, woven from a Scots wool, sits at the piano. He’s had his Pete Hamill records out, and he would sing like one of the Roches if he had a soprano voice and a good harmonic sense, but instead he sings like an earnest fellow who did the right thing by beoming a physics teacher at the local high school.

All of life is a shimmering image—a ceramic doll, remembered jazz from a tinkling piano, an old high school sax recently bought for a song from a small-town pawnshop on the state line.

He closes his eyes, he remembers the poem, and he sings. He doesn’t worry that he’s not a Roche or a Chapin or a even a glee club. He just sings—and in his sincerity, and the mildest unheard imagined sound of the mist falling outside, we all find a moment of peace, and ask him to play another.

The singer knows, as do we all, that it’s not about the ideal compression in the most talented voice, but about making it real, and putting it out—raw, ready, and accompanied by a clarinet.”