Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Fiona Apple at Wolf Trap

Milady gave me a wonderful early birthday present of tickets to see Fiona Apple last night. I am aware of at least two friends who would snort loudly upon reading that sentence, so I'm just going to remind them that despite my appreciation of certain musical genres I still go to sleep at night with a beautiful woman beside me, on top of a pile of money, which is on top of a bed made of the bones of my enemies (encrusted in gold and jewels) and pulled around Arlington by a team of armor-covered timberwolves. I'm manly. That's all I'm saying.

The show was pretty interesting; we got there late because we were too hungry to take our Pollo Rico dinner out of the restaurant as planned. Where do they find those handsome, handsome chickens? They're delicious. We missed the opening act, who was apparently David Garza. My better half inquired as to whether we were out of the hipster loop if we didn't know who that was, but I figured since we were at Wolf Trap anyways we were probably pretty far out of the loop. Getting there late meant sitting on the back, back lawn and not really being able to see the stage, but this isn't really a problem if you've ever seen Fiona Apple perform live before. Having seen her on TV, I knew that I wouldn't be able to pay attention to the music if I had to keep staring at her "dancing." This is similar to seeing Radiohead's Thom Yorke do his spastic weasel dance. Sure, it's iconic... and yet. Fiona, more precisely, reminds me of the way that staring at a sparrow hopping around can start to freak you out because they begin to resemble little velociraptors that would gleefully eat you if they could. Fiona's movements on stage are inhuman; they exist as some other creature and the creature is at times angry and at times very, very sad.

So, most of the show was spent lying in the grass listening to the music. This was fantastic. I think a lot of her raspiness gets studioed out on the CDs, so it's wonderful to hear songs I'd imagined as a hormonal teenager sounding raw already turned even more real. Of course, this meant she ran out of breath on a couple of notes and ducked out of a couple of bars during my favorite song. Hell, she even closed with Criminal, which I have sung with my shirt tied into a bra at karaoke so many times it's not even funny anymore, and taught me how to really sing it. I'm working it into my act as we speak, you lucky snots.

After this I only have one other act to see before either I or they die: PJ Harvey. Plus, I don't think she has any songs explicitly or implicitly about castration so my fiancee won't have to worry about me wandering off by myself and getting torn apart by some Dianic/Amazon cult.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

*SNORT*

5:58 PM  

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