The Magic of Two – Shawn Colvin and Mary Chapin Carpenter on Tour

Sometimes when two artists come together, magic happens. Last night Shawn Colvin and Mary Chapin Carpenter hit the small stage at the Norwalk Concert Hall (which is literally in the City Hall Building) in Connecticut for a beautiful blending of their talents. They are playing a number of shows together, continuing tonight at Infinity Hall, also in CT, and other venues in around the country. But last night was their first show together, and that’s always special.

Music is a highly collaborative art, and the mixings of a particular performance are always unique. The chemistry between these two old friends who have lent back-ups to each other’s recordings over the years was so strong that it felt like we were hanging out with them in on the porch while they pulled out the old songs they always wanted to play.

A lot of it was covers from Tom Waits, the Backstreet Boys, and short references to everyone from James Taylor to Bob Dylan to Katy Perry. Shawn Colvin tends to provide comedy relief in her reminiscences from the road—and hopefully she will share her Sting guitar-tuning story again. Mary Chapin (her first name) Carpenter is the warm friend who rolls with whatever comes along and cracks jokes as they come to her. And while their patter includes references to loser boyfriends and hot flashes, their lyrics are mostly about small moments in life and love—the good and the bad, and what lies between.

 

There was someone in his past that he hasn’t gotten over yet

Each day’s like the last, he just misses what he can’t forget

It’s just an empty space where something used to be

Now he guards the gate, but he’s lost the key

So no one enters, but no one leaves

There’s a keeper for every flame

                           Mary Chapin Carpenter, Keeper for Every Flame

 

Sweetness and light, you were right,

Summers are getting harder

Days echo by–blood red sky

Chop wood and carry water

We only do what we can and there’s a natural plan, you know

I know that you understand cause you’re just that kind of man, you know

Oh we try and try and we cry baby cry and

Everybody knows we get nowhere

Again and again forever til the end and anwhere you go I will go there

                                   Shawn Colvin, Anywhere You Go

 

And, it should be noted they are both phenomenal guitarists.  While I lean heavily toward Shawn Colvin’s syncopated, rolling riffs,

 

it would hard not to appreciate the fine fingerwork of MCC’s delicately-laced songs.

 

They gave acoustic versions of their hits, MCC’s, He Thinks He’ll Keep Her, and what they referred to as a good ol’ murder ballad, SC’s, Sunny Came Home, but the real treat was the harmony they brought to each other’s songs—MCC’s deeper base filling in Shawn Colvin’s high register. It would have been nice to hear more of their better-known songs (like the two above), but maybe that’s for another tour!

It was one of those great evenings where the audience felt like they could easily talk to them on stage, and everybody had a good time. There is something to be said for experience, particularly among musicians, who appear to ripen with age—they are at once both sharper and more mellow. The comfort and enjoyment they so obviously derive from playing familiar songs is something that fills the air around us and we get to take home with us.

These are singer-songwriters in the folk tradition blended with county, rock and even a little blues, they play an acoustic tour with just four guitars on stage between them in a very pure set. They share stories from the road and their lives, opening just for a while, the window into how music—and why music is made. Both have albums coming out in June, SC’s All Fall Down and MCC’s Ashes and Roses.

Great timing, since we’re all waiting for something other than Adele (who is wonderful, but will need years of seasoning to be as rich as these two!)

© Copyright 2012 – Arts Enclave

Why the Show Must Go On…Are Movie Makers Dreaming?

It’s mid-January, just a day before the opening of the Sundance Film Festival, and here in the Northeast, the indie movie business is revving up again. I have to smile at the unfailing drive of filmmakers to keep making movies regardless—or because—of the world around them. Movies live in a parallel universe, where things happen according to a set of rules that are created spontaneously and independently of any reality, but moviemakers have to live in this world. And, they are apparently finding funds, because (as a frequent indie crew member) I’m getting calls about new productions that are ready to start soon.

Filmmakers are the hopeful idiots of the world, ready to create what is essentially a digital dream for consumption…and nothing stops that creative leap. Not a housing crisis, or a crashed economy, not a war, and not even a hurricane.

Last summer I worked on the locations crew of a film production, Hello I Must Be Going, that was shooting on the East Coast when Hurricane Irene made her way to shore. (For those of you who don’t live here, that storm caused an estimated $7 billion in damage, killed 28 people, and wreaked havoc up and down 10 states).

The storm hit on Saturday, our biggest shooting day, and we were forced to shut down for the weekend, losing locations we had already secured. Throughout the next few days, most of the state was still on emergency status (meaning only emergency vehicles allowed on the roads), with downed trees blocking roads, flooding throughout the region, and whole towns closed for business.

And what were we doing? Furiously emailing and holding conference calls…Rearranging our shooting schedule to use the available talent we had staying in local hotels in the scenes we needed before they were scheduled to fly out. I was calling new locations as the writer was writing new scenes and the director was rethinking the look of the film and the producers were reconnoitering on how to keep the production floating along the streams of wreckage around a state that was still largely shut down.

We returned to a previous location we had used the week before, only now we had lost the whole basement to water, and the entire production space had to be holed up in one side of a garage while the caterer used the other. We sat in our cars with our laptops, we pulled trucks through mud puddles around giant tree branches, we parked cars in soggy fields, and we ate at tables crunched into tight, still-dry spaces. And nobody complained. Not the talent, and not the crew, who were putting in 16 hour days on what was turning into a somewhat miserable shooting experience due to weather.

And on Tuesday after the hurricane, we were back to shooting, rescheduling Wednesday on the fly. And on Wednesday, we worked on Thursday. It was our last week, and every day was a crapshoot—but we made it. It was truly a kind of Hell I would not want to cross through again, but we did make it. Me and 50 or 60 people who had been total strangers just one month before.

That is what amazes me about movie crews. They unite under a common notion that the “show must go on.” They don’t know each other personally, and there is little time to really share much about your life back home.  You don’t know who has kids or who’s getting married, or even where they come from. You come into someone’s life for 3 or 4 weeks, and the whole of every day is about the movie, the current shot, and making the day.

Movie people have a gift for staying on task. It’s how movies get made. You get up in the dark and show up in a parking lot before the sun is up for a breakfast burrito, and you stay on your feet for another 15 or so hours before you can drag yourself back home or to a local hotel for about 5 hours sleep before starting again tomorrow. You do it day after day, counting down the days, just like every other member of the crew. And each day, we show all up, until the movie’s done.

I know of no other field in the arts that comes close to the level of abuse a movie shoot lauds on its crew. Artists struggle for their art, but they don’t stand out in the rain for 6 hours in the middle of the night, directing traffic so it doesn’t cut through the shot. Like sane people, they would go home.

But here’s a lesson artists and writers can learn from movie crews: blind attention to getting the job done. It’s not your movie, or your idea, but you still give your full attention to your piece, and so does everyone else. There’s no time for second-guessing whether the project will turn out well, or whether you should have gone in a different direction. And it’s inconceivable to call in sick—you can pretty much only call in dead. There’s only the shot ahead, and the one ahead of that.

When you think of it, it’s a miracle there are films worth watching on the screen. It’s one of those weird things in life that often works, sometimes well, and on occasion, it works spectacularly. And maybe that’s why we do it.

In the fine arts, the artist focuses on executing their own vision, but in the performing arts you are but a tiny piece of the whole that must come together to form the director’s vision. On various mornings in those wee hours, we would stand around an ask ourselves why we were still there, showing up for one more very long day on a film that might never even make it to screens. But we don’t wait for the answer, because we all know what it is…the show must go on, and in a minute (tiny) way, each one of us knows we are making it happen.

There’s a legacy effect to working in the movies, where you are part of the experience behind the film, and no matter how miserable it gets, it’s still hard to walk away from. As the saying goes, “what, and give up show biz?”

I’m pleased to see that one of the films I had a small part in making is showing at Sundance this week. I have no idea how the film came together in post-production, but I trust–because of the work ethic we brought during the production–that it turned out well. I’d love to see it come to theatres. My congrats to the director, the writer, the actors, the producers, and of course, the crew!

© 2012 Arts Enclave.

2012 – Handle with care…

We don’t have to look back very far in 2011 to see the enormous and often bizarre challenges we were met with. By all accounts, it was a very difficult year. Here in the Northeast, it started with the endless winter that pushed straight through spring, followed the summer of the big hurricane, the fall of the blackouts, and the winter that tanked Halloween, so millions of tiny tots missed out on trick or treating as well as a white Christmas.

It’s a good year to have behind us, and one we can be proud we all survived.  The economy was as strange as the weather, with companies holding job fares and then closing their doors within weeks of each other. We lost big retailers like Borders Books, and Sears is imploding, closing an estimated 120 stores in early 2012. While scouting for film locations in Connecticut this year (one of my miscellaneous jobs in the arts), I saw hundreds of vacated properties—foreclosed and soon to be foreclosed homes willing to invite movie crews, and tons of businesses that had closed their doors. I had one assignment looking for old gas stations, but what I found were dozens of recently abandoned ones. One day they were open, and then next day nobody showed up to work.

I also visited a number of places in upstate New York that were so hard hit by the aftermath of Hurricane Irene. There were roads and bridges completely washed out, and towns dotted with FEMA trailers. For the first time in my lifetime, the evidence of the daily struggle for survival is all around us.

But we can hope we are through the worst of the worst of the storm, because the world platform also changed in big ways that will affect every day of our future. Osama bin Laden was caught and killed; the Iraq war formally ended without much fanfare and Kim Jong-Il, the mean little despot who ruled North Korea and menaced the free world passed away quietly, leaving a muddy pool of uncertainty behind.

And through it all, a new American Idol was crowned (although we care not who it was), Justin Beiber made many more millions touring, and Adele sold 5.28 million copies of her album “21” in 2011—more than anyone in the past 7 years (including GaGa and Katy Perry). The final Harry Potter film (Deathly Hallows Part II) broke all box office records, with both the highest grossing opening day and the highest opening weekend gross of all time, and a Picasso painting set an all-time record at auction at Christies, commanding $106.5 million, after a year of huge bidding for old masters such as Dali and Giocometti and other Picassos.

So at a time when the world seemed headed for darkness, people continued to find escape and inspiration where they have always found it—in the arts.

And if one thing survived the awful years we have come through, it is Hope. Let’s ignore the dark pundits planning for global disintegration in 2012—because if it happens, we’ll never really be ready anyway. Let’s live every moment that we have in the fullest expression of who we all are. Let’s paint and draw and sing and dance and write and make the world a better place one single moment at a time.

…So this is what I’m going to do—be me, only more so. I want to make sure I really become the person I planned on being. And now that I now know the universe is completely in charge of how that plays out, I can relax and stop trying to control it. I cannot plan for success or love or even how a painting or something I’m writing may turn out. All I can do is do it, and leave the rest to Providence, and believe that in the end, good things will come of it all.

What we need from artists in 2012 is truth. Don’t paint what you think we want to see, or sing to the beat that everybody else does. Paint what you see, sing what you hear, write what you believe. And somewhere in all of that, we will all find our way out again.

To quote a Kenny Loggins* song, “There’s a whole other life just waiting to be lived…one day we’re brave enough to talk with conviction of the heart.”

Welcome to 2012…and a delicate new world full of possibility!

Happy New Year from Arts Enclave!

© 2012 Arts Enclave.

  This video is from the Live at the Redwoods DVD, the song is from the Leap of Faith album – both available at KennyLoggins.com

…Because the World is Blue (Man)

It’s better to arrive late to the party than not at all. I finally went to see Blue Man Group live in Boston at the Charles Street Playhouse—I’m not exactly in front of the trend here, since they’ve been around since 1987—but like the Statue of Liberty (which I also haven’t been to) Blue Man Group is one of those things lots of people have heard of but don’t think to see for themselves.

The two roads conundrum…and the artist’s mindset

It’s pretty obvious I’ve been away from this blog for a while. In fact, I’ve been away for a while  in general.  My quest: to explore all of life’s possibilities, a large number of which seem to present during the summer.

This summer I’ve made trips to Lake George to teach a writing workshop, toSaranacLaketo cover a plein air festival—and again to step into the life of a full-time plein air painter. I came back to my freelance writing  job for a few weeks and then promptly took work as Locations Manager to a feature film shooting inConnecticut. None of these jobs have regular hours. They all bleed into each other, and into every corner of my personal life. In future posts I will explore/explain what I learn on these individual journeys, but for today I want to share a poem that keeps resonating in my head, because it completely nails my own personal life M.O.

It was more than a year ago I heard this poem read at a reading inNorth Easton,Massachusetts. The poet, Craig Fredericks, gave a wonderful reading that night, opening by saying, “there is an ancient Hebrew Law, rediscovered with the dead sea scrolls, that prohibits ‘saying anything stupid on the Sabbath.’ With that in mind…”

The Gathering of the Vibes Hits Bridgeport in 2 Days!

If you’ve never been to an outdoor festival and you can make it to CT this weekend, Gathering of the Vibes is where the music plays!  It’s a four-day festival in the old rock tradition, built on the memories of Grateful Dead concerts–but with plenty of new talent to keep all ages entertained. Last year I interviewed the VIBES Director and originator, Ken Hays about the festival, and where live music is headed.

Try to catch this great event if you can. Tickets are still available by the day for the performances – check out the schedule. Bands like Dark Star Orchestra and FURTHER, featuring Phil Lesh and Bob Weir are long-time favorites at the Vibes. This year the new headliners include Elvis Costello and Jane’s Addiction. Definitely one of my favorite CT events!

  © 2011 Arts Enclave. All Rights Reserved.

Ah, the Plein Air of the Adirondacks

Plein Air painting conjures images of lazy summer afternoons where Frenchman long now passed on once stood in a field or beside a stream, painting masterpieces that would last beyond their lifetimes.

Impressionism was literally born from the plein air experience, as the artist worked quickly to capture the impressions of an outdoor setting through a few hours of changing light. And change it does, moment by moment.

Last week I followed a large group of exceptionally talented painters (about 87 of them) from around the country (and one from Russia) who made the pilgrimage to upstate New York for a 5-day plein air festival, high  in Adirondack Mountains.