{"id":573895854,"date":"2023-06-06T20:21:17","date_gmt":"2023-06-07T00:21:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/?p=573895854"},"modified":"2023-06-06T17:15:54","modified_gmt":"2023-06-06T21:15:54","slug":"raise-your-hands-high","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/blog\/2023\/06\/06\/raise-your-hands-high\/","title":{"rendered":"Raise your hands high"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Guess who we&#8217;ll be spontaneously seeing soon? I&#8217;ll give you a hint.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"900\" height=\"506\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/jbIAckvUnxc\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s from the last Indigo Girls show I saw, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/blog\/2017\/05\/10\/\">in Indianapolis in 2017<\/a>. This will be my seventh show. Reportedly, they&#8217;re on the road with a full band right now. I&#8217;ve never seen them play with a full band. This is quite exciting. And it moves us, quite neatly, into &#8230; <\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/blog\/banners\/bannermusic.jpg\"><\/center><\/p>\n<p>The latest installment of the Re-Listening project, the thing where I&#8217;m listening to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which they acquired. And this installment is the Indigo Girls&#8217; &#8220;Come On Now Social,&#8221; their seventh studio album, released in 1999. I guess this was my third Indigo Girls album, after &#8220;1200 Curfews&#8221; and &#8220;Shaming of the Sun.&#8221; I caught up on the rest of the back catalog later, and this album&#8217;s consistency was what made me commit. You wear out a double live album and then find two studio albums in a row that you lean into, hard? Caught the live act two or three times by then, too? You found yourself a band.<\/p>\n<p>This is one of those things I wish I could go back in time and put this on again, turn up the sound and hear it for the first time. I&#8217;d love to have this first impression again. <\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"900\" height=\"506\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/D9e8BiPIJQk\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I won&#8217;t do this through the whole post, but since we&#8217;ll see them in concert again soon, here&#8217;s a live version. <\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"900\" height=\"506\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/nKp0zl0qVR8\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe> <\/p>\n<p>I want to hear that again for the first time, almost every time, because even now, decades later, I&#8217;m still finding new things to be awed by in that track.<\/p>\n<p>Also, I suppose that&#8217;s the second protest song (of my generation) I ever picked up on as being a protest song (non-Buffy Sainte-Marie division.) Anyway, I&#8217;m trying, right now to read the <a href=\"http:\/\/xroads.virginia.edu\/~MA01\/White\/anthology\/meridel.html\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Meridel Le Sueur<\/a> essay that&#8217;s spoken into that song. But Amy Ray just <em>buries<\/em> herself and she&#8217;s beautifully, wonderfully distracting.<\/p>\n<p>Always with the Re-Listening project I am trying to find some memory that matches a track, a mood that meets the album. Sometimes these things stand out. But, always, when Emily Saliers is painting a picture, it&#8217;s just an attitude. It&#8217;s a credit to her storytelling ability. Her imagery crowds out my memories. But to think of whatever this inspires in you isn&#8217;t such a bad thing, even if it is an imagination rather than a memory. <\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"900\" height=\"506\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/3P-gX8wNFb0\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe> <\/p>\n<p>The difficulty here will be in not playing the entire album. But it&#8217;s my site, and I&#8217;ll play a half dozen tracks from it if I want to. Anyway, if you&#8217;ll overlook the VHS and NTSC analog quality that YouTube compressed here, this is a gem. For fun, I always sing the chorus as &#8220;There ain&#8217;t no way I&#8217;m gonna let this heart win,&#8221; and it changes the song substantially. That&#8217;s neither here nor there. <\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"900\" height=\"506\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/8lee-zZm8B4\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>When the banjo and the mandolin come out &#8230; God bless the Indigo Girls.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of imagery. The other day, when this next track came on, I was at a red light. It was a bright morning. Lots of sun. But the mood here is anything but. I was initially drawn into the band for the harmonies, but then found the &#8230; let&#8217;s call it the visceral, emotional core of truth &#8230; but the thing that&#8217;s not at all subtle, not at all to be disregarded, is the quality of storytelling Ray and Saliers can put around all of that.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"900\" height=\"506\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/uq-obbj_58c\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>But then they have to pep it up a little. Here&#8217;s a little drum fill, a few horns, and an under-appreciated song from Saliers. This is the one song that charted off the album, small HAC hit that marked the end of the Indigo Girls&#8217; crossover success. (Because the music industry is powered by corporations and so often has no real relation to what we hear, what we like or what artists play. But I repeat myself.)<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"900\" height=\"506\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/u_BSZpIlaWo\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Feels like a cookout song to me. Who needs a cookout?<\/p>\n<p>This song references a real person, it was quite high profile in the late 1990s. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Karla_Faye_Tucker\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Do you remember<\/a>? <\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"900\" height=\"506\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/JULNO4WTI-A\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The hidden tracks are in that YouTube video, if you are interested. Just scrub to about the seven minute mark. <\/p>\n<p>And, when we see the Indigo Girls next weekend, we&#8217;ll be having a blast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Guess who we&#8217;ll be spontaneously seeing soon? I&#8217;ll give you a hint. That&#8217;s from the last Indigo Girls show I saw, in Indianapolis in 2017. This will be my seventh show. Reportedly, they&#8217;re on the road with a full band right now. I&#8217;ve never seen them play with a full band. This is quite exciting. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,6,39,94,8,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-573895854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventures","category-memories","category-music","category-re-listening","category-tuesday","category-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573895854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573895854"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573895854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573895855,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573895854\/revisions\/573895855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573895854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573895854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573895854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}