cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This Entry is Kind of All Over the Place The concert was good. Not life-changing but still good. As it turned out, our seats sucked. The opening act, Neko Case, was rather hum-drum. Maybe she would have been good in a small club but she had absolutely zero stage presence of the kind that is really necessary to play a venue the size of the amphitheater. Rufus Wainwright was excellent. I was surprised at how into it that Trish was given that she'd only heard 3 or 4 songs of his. I think it was his song about wanting to turn the lead singer of the Killers gay that sealed the deal for her. I would say that Rufus Wainwright is one of the top 5 best male vocalists (non-opera) around. In terms of actual singing ability without the tricks of a studio. In no particular order: Peter Murphy Corn Mo has the best range of any male singer I have ever heard without going into falsetto. I have tried to sing along with 'Lollipop Time' in the car and hitting those high notes is harder than getting 'The Star-Spangled Banner' right. Yet he can also pull off a very full tenor sound. Richard Hawley makes the list based on pure style. He is, at heart, a modern day crooner. His range is nothing spectacular. What he has is naturally excellent tone, extremely good material to work with and a good sense of what his limitations are. Peter Murphy has incredible sustain and pitch. He's got bigger pipes for the lower end of his range than Corn Mo does but cannot make high notes like Corn Mo. Then again, who the hell can? Except for maybe Meatloaf. As for Al Green, c'mon. It's Al Green. Enough said. I also have huge respect for singers who have absolutely no real talent for singing but figure out how to pull it off anyhow. Ok, here's my list of the best male singers who have no real talent as singers: Momus None of these guys can really sing for shit. But they just kept doing it for so long that they managed to craft a style around their own limitations that makes it all ok. It's sort of like writing in haiku vs., say, sonnet form. You can obviously do a lot more with a sonnet. There's more range, more room to tell a story. The haiku is, by definition, a very limited medium. But if a poet is really good at writing haiku then reading the haiku can be just as good as reading the sonnet. That's kind of how I feel about each of these guys' voices. David Byrne will never have the range and control and the stellar tone of Corn Mo or Peter Murphy. But he knows his limitations (ok, except for that weird recording he did of Ave Maria) and writes music that keeps him well within those limitations but with enough interest such that nobody listening really notices how limited it really is. Yesterday morning I woke up sick. I tried to go to work anyway. Got out of bed, showered, shaved. Started getting dressed and then I had to run into the bathroom and puke. Again and again and again. I drank some water just to have something else in there to puke up because that is at least better than dry heaves. So I stayed home. I think this might have been my first sick day off of work all year. I went back to bed and slept until 11:30 am. Later I watched the 'Reno, 911: Miami' movie. Read some more of 'The Year of Magna Carta' and I started on Alan Moore's novel, 'Voice of the Fire.' I finished Audie Murphy's 'To Hell and Back' last weekend. 'Voice of the Fire' is dense reading starting out. The book spans something like 6,000 years of history centered around Northampton, England. The whole first part of the book is written in this weird, confusing grammar from the perspective of a stone age nomad boy. Making one's way through it is sort of like diving into one of Mark Twain's books that is full of 19th century slave vernacular. Except that the whole damn thing is written in the first person. By the end of the 2nd page I was seriously questioning whether it was even worth trying to continue but within another 6 pages or so I'd managed to fully wrap my brain around it so that I could read almost as easily as I could in normal english. Alan Moore is a geographical historian. Everything he writes only appears to be about human characters. Really, he's writing histories of places and the people are like a landscape that the real main character (the setting) moves through. Some day he will manage to write a short story or a comic book or a monologue that manages to be a complete and riveting story without involving a single conventional character. A pair of tectonic plates fall in love with each other, spend half a billion years struggling to join together only to find that the resulting earthquake has changed both of them so much that they no longer recognize one another and they fall out of love. They throw up a mountain range along their border to avoid seeing each other and dwelling on what was lost. To this day the Himalayas still stand as jagged, cold reminders of dead love and isolation. 10:27 a.m. - 2007-08-17 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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