Beauty is a point of view.
Describe one or more moments of beauty in your life.
assignment 15
During college, I spent three years in a touring drama group. We did several shows throughout the Northwest, mostly hitting smaller towns where we had contacts who could find us places to perform and stay.
One night we went to Baker, a small city in eastern Oregon along the Oregon Trail. That night, three of us guys bunked together at the home of a married couple. They had a spare bedroom on the second floor. When the group split up for the night, we'd forgotten to take along our bedding — you learn the value of a sleeping bag and pillow, just in case. Instead, we each had a blanket and a place on the floor.
It must have been late October or early November. It was cold at night. Huddling beneath a thin blanket, lying directly on the carpet, using a folded pair of jeans for a pillow, I heard a train whistle. Then I heard another.
Suddenly they merged to become the most beautiful sound I could imagine at the moment: two trains going in different directions with their whistles at different pitches merging and echoing high clear notes in the crisp night fall air. They passed and the pitches changed.
Then the moment passed. The sound lingers.
In my first year of college, my musical partner and I would always listen the little-known Sixpence None the Richer's debut CD. The next year, their second CD came out. I bought it unheard, took it home, and started to listen as I worked on a paper.
The first song starts out slowly, with a simple guitar and Leigh's innocently ethereal voice. It was pleasant and soothing. Then the chorus struck.
A wall of guitar leapt out of the speakers. My jaw dropped. Somehow the simple but promising band from Texas had refined their talent and sound and learned how to weave a musical texture that spoke of pain, fear, and ultimately hope.
A lot of people find that CD depressing but it is beautiful. Every time I hear Tess and Leigh harmonize a minor second (a difficult interval to hear and even more difficult to sing), I shiver. Every time I hear the hollow echoes of the drums I see a dark room with a door starting to open.
The final song has Leigh singing "I can't explain" over and over and faster and faster as the music spins out of control. Then it stops beneath her and she trails off, revealing the backwards guitar chords from the start of the first song playing silently until they swoop downwards once, resume, and then stop.
I always pause then to let the ultimate silence sink in.
In 2000, I went to a midnight concert under a huge tent in a cornfield. I'd never seen Over the Rhine before. (Sixpence credits Over the Rhine as a major influence. That recommendation is more than enough for me.) My friends Clark and Amanda, who would marry the next year, Dave and Katie, and I had seats toward the back of the tent.
It was a beautiful night, with countless stars visible. The tent filled, then people started standing outside of the tent, rows and rows deep. Then the band took the stage.
Over the Rhine likes to start slowly to disarm people. The lead song from Good Dog Bad Dog is a subtle piano and vocal ballad. Linford is the pianist and principal songwriter. He has a knack for words almost unmatched. Karin plays guitar and sings, oh how she sings! Karin chews the words carefully, letting them fly away as if she were half-asleep or tipsy. It's amazing. She makes perfection seem so easy.
On any given night, one band somewhere is the best rock and roll band in history. On that night, under a huge tent somewhere in a cornfield in Illinois, as Karin and Terri closed down the chorus of "All I Need Is Everything" I realized that, at least on this night, I was watching the best rock and roll band in the world.
It's difficult for a music afficionado to imagine a live concert that sounds more perfect than a CD. The energy of the audience helps as does the anticipation and excitement — but there are wrong notes, different parts, missing overdubs, odd mixes, and dozens of other factors that change a song you loved on the album when you hear it live.
I loved that song even more in person. It was perfecter. At the end, Dave and I looked at each other and could only say "Wow".
It's beautiful to lose your words.