After seeing Melody Gardot's record Worrisome Heart, I went home and checked it out via the good ol' internets and iTunes. Whabam! Some really good cool jazzy stuff that has way more substance than some of the other young ladies who are working in this genre. Her story packs its own punch. She survived a near-fatal accident between her bicycle and a jeep which leaves her with different health and medical issues still (the dark glasses deal with her sensitivity to light), and used the music she had learned as a young girl as a way to re-train her injured brain to work again. Her first EP, The Bedroom Sessions, came out of that therapy time.
These tunes, though, would be at the top of the stack no matter what Gardot's personal struggles might be. One minute smoky, the next plaintive, the next something else again; Gardot's voice has an uncanny ability to encircle your cortex and create not just an aural experience but an entire place and setting within the first few bars of a song.
The best news? Hastings had the CD for $6.29. I remember spending more on cassettes and getting a whole lot less for my money. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Bryan Adams, for smelling up some great classical stuff on the Three Musketeers soundtrack. But that's another story.
No comments:
Post a Comment