Slowburn

As is the case in general with much good music, sometimes the most resonating and gut-wrenching pieces are the ones you didn't quite love or even notice too much the first few (or many!) listens. While Lisa Hannigan's Passenger has been on constant rotation on my playlist, almost every track has been immediately enthralling, tracing the spaces of the heart and filling the in-betweens with the disparate paradoxes of delight, grief, and wry bemusement.

While this song doesn't necessarily fall into the true "slowburn" pile as the album really just came out, "Little Bird" is a treasure that might need to be seen live to be grasped fully. It wasn't until the night of her show at The Tractor this song made itself so terribly known; I found it almost unbearable, yet overwhelmingly riveting, to witness her performing it, especially at such a close proximity; Golden GigGirl and I had managed to squeeze up about three people away from the stage while everyone else in our party was scattered about the venue.

Her eyes glittered with the brilliance of barely-contained tears, lips curled with determination over her struggling assertions, presence and crippling hurt felt in every phrase. Before I could stop myself, tears were dripping off my chin and I had to remember to breathe in the rapt quietness of the stage audience, the awful, chatty people by the bar be damned. Her delivery didn't contain the same kind of pretty softness as on the album; it was more frail, entirely raw, and at the end of it, after I managed to tear my gaze away, I found Golden GigGirl gazing at me with widened eyes and we smiled at each other tremulously, wetly. Amidst awestruck proclamations around us, our hands found each other and squeezed tightly in mutual accord.

It's not hard to see now why she considers this song her favourite, and most personal, on the album.









No more than two days after the show, the official video for the song was released, which must have been filmed just before she went on tour. As with all her recent mini-documentaries and videos, this was directed by award-winning genius Myles O'Reilly of Arbutus Yarns, who continues to capture magic on film with seeming effortlessness; so perfectly, so delicately, and so right. Everything he does is low- to no- budget, yet the simplicity of his work is fitting and mesmerizing beyond compare.









With an evening that began with the introduction of dear old friends to wonderful new ones, to a stunning concert which won the hearts of every single one, it ended with this, the final coup of the night, brought to me by British Booty who spotted it in the garbage behind the bar. Now it's keeping the setlists for The Doves and The Posies' "last" show quite wonderfully warm... and what fine company indeed.









(photo credit: the videos are ~ probably quite obviously ~ not mine, though the pictures ~ probably quite obviously ~ are.)