Songs I Love in 88 Words or Less: “Over the River”

“Over the River,” The High Llamas

Number 2 in a new series, this instrumental is like mainlining emotion, sad and sweet, tho some jerk on Amazon called it “kitschy.”

Is that a bird I heard? Yes, yes, a little brown one dressed in houndstooth decoupage, wandering forlornly through a crackly film strip on the wintry day his best friend moved away… On the path he finds a stray piece of yarn, rusty orange like a secret patch on a magical calico cat, leading him home.

True fact: This song is played by a quintet of chickadees who talked incessantly during the recording, their blip-chirps and tweet-beats perching like arpeggios on the sheet music they pretended to follow.




Oh yes, I’ve used this song here before.

Feelings...Nothing More Than Feelings

I was on the M16 bus last Friday—always a challenging scenario for me, especially since there’s a champion nose picker who sometimes gets on at 7th Avenue—when I looked up and saw something that immediately set my mind at ease. It was the back of a giant forest green dump truck-type vehicle, emblazoned with the word “PINE” in white stencil-y letters. It was snowing, flakes all swirly-twirly and filling up the little frame of outside that I could see from inside.

Why the heck should that make me so happy? Those scary marketers who determine that fast food restaurants should be orange because it makes you not only not notice what you eat but eat it faster probably would have a hypothesis. Was I reassured by the “lo-fi”-ness of the stencil font? It’s true that green is my favorite color as of, like, forever. I don’t know, but I think it’s a mistake for me to think about it too much, ‘cause when it happens again I don’t want to stop it by overanalyzing. I guess it’s like a visual pacifier, and everyone has their own personal Pine.

Some Pines are more universal, and can have a calming effect on a wide variety of people. Unless you’re a cat hater, how could this not make you feel like you have fuzzy socks on:



And other times, a Pine can be more, well, complicated. Just before I woke up this morning, I was dreaming about a giant pomegranate. Each individual seed contained a kitten, just about to be born. The idea of a purring, stirring, mythic pomegranate made me very, very happy—especially since I picked it up and looked closely inside one of the seeds, which contained a little black kitten with a Mohawk. Storybook, right? But just then somebody’s mother came along and, with a wicked look in her eye, popped 2 of the seed-kittens in her mouth. And no, it wasn’t Persephone. I’m pretty sure it was the mother of a childhood friend who once told everyone I ate like an elephant.

This one's a complicated Pine--despite the title, it may as well be called "Bad Feeling."



An aural pacifier, courtesy of High Llamas:

A Post for Loma P. on St. Catrick's Day

Disclaimers: Holiday mix-up alert! Yes, this is an old Christmas card and yes, this is St. Patrick’s Day. And oh yeah, if any of my coworkers are reading this, they know I totally swiped the "St. Catrick's Day" part of the title.

So..I’m writing this post in honor of my favorite Irish-born musician, Sean O’Hagan, and his band High Llamas. His/their music reminds me of my sweet cat friend Paloma, a pastel calico named for her patchwork fur and cubist face, a la Pablo Picasso. Almost, not quite, one side was gray and the other white. (S O’H has a song called “Half-Face Cat.” You can’t really tell what’s going on in the lyrics, but the Half-Face Cat is all magical, mysterious and beneficent.)

Come to think of it, Loma P’s totally a High Llamas kind of girl. It’s not like all cats are. Puff, for example, was “Walk This Way,” the Run DMC/Aerosmith collaboration. Derrick, I’m not sure yet—I’m thinking possibly show tunes and/or Jimi Hendrix. But Paloma is totally High Llamas—sweet, comfortable, nest-building music. (Yes, I know cats don’t make nests, but she was a Cancer, so a nester by astrological definition.)

Music to remember Loma P. by:
Over the River, High Llamas

Oh, it’s achingly sweet, music you can imagine small and elegant twittering birds, like chipping sparrows, listening to. Simple, meandering, storytelling…cozy rather than showy.

The name, too… Over the River. Paloma died 2 days before the September 11 attacks, and on that day I went to the Bendix Diner (no longer there) on First Avenue, where they would feature original artwork in the booths. The piece in our booth was entitled “Small animals and heavy furniture pass easily through the space-time continuum…” I think of Paloma traveling back and forth from one side to the other, a calico angel who can run and meow at the same time. And who likes Doritos.