Alison Sudol. Photo by Brian Tibbets
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to
heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
– William Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Act 5, Scene 1.
Alison Sudol, singer/songwriter (b. December 23, 1984), takes her stage name from within Shakespeare’s play. A Fine Frenzy captures something of the nuance in her voice and music. And the magic and mystery inherent in the myths and sources for that play ring inside her music, her voice. She is medieval, modern, impish, sweet and sad. Her red hair makes her different, and she stands out from the pack for other reasons. She is indie, alternative, fresh. Vulnerable. I hear a woman on the verge, beautiful, but not tired, not jaded, still hopeful. Newly excited by her own power, she understates it, still willing to gamble, to chance the journey and the landing.
Her debut album, One Cell In The Sea (2007), brings us the gifts of a young woman touched by art, literature, by Nature and evolving sensibilities …
Come On, Come Out
Alison bears watching. Her future on the shore, her musical future in the wake of Tori Amos, Sarah MacLachlan, Natalie Imbruglia and Keane among others … and her stories in the wake of C.S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll and Dickens. She has said in interviews that she is writing children stories, in the tradition of Narnia.
I have also been listening to “Almost Lover”. The live studio performance is best as far as I can tell, but the “Brothers Née” video is superbly lovely. What is great about this song is the chain in parallel rhythmic quantities of almost lover — hopeless dream — luckless romance. Then continue the lyrics which I misheard the first time as follows: “shouda known you’d bring me heartache, lovers almost always do,” where if that is the way it went, the modulation would take “almost” into the adverb category and give it the strenght of a universal law about love. However, when double-checking the lyrics, I see it goes “almost lovers always do,” which is a law about love but not as strong as “lovers almost always do” would have been. Regardless, the song is beautiful, and best heard in the studio recording video.
I have the album now. Excellent overall. “Almost Lover” is one of my favorite songs from the album.
I discovered her on pandora.com. That service has really expanded my knowledge of contemporary music.
Your Aunt Barbara wrote a poem on Pandora and Eve, something about beautiful/evil, maybe from “Moscow Mansions.” A meaningless coincidence, but I couldn’t help myself.
I’ll look into that. Have her collected poems now. Thanks, Robert.
The poem is “Beautiful/Evil” and it comes right after the title poem of the book Defensive Rapture. In that poem the word “uneveness” occurs as misspelled, suggesting (if I am correct and the context supports it) that this is a good non-Eve sort of rapture and so in the “Beautiful/Evil” you would have the idea of a good Pandora as opposed to the bringer of bad gifts. Similarly, the site pandora.com brings only good things, only the kinds of songs you like.
Well done, Robert. Nice link to a link. Linking Greek with Geek.
I asked a guy I know who is a musician to listen to “Almost Lover” (I think the “unplugged” instance on YouTube). He said he liked it and would keep it in his New and Interstering Musicians folder. He said Allison has a sweet lyric voice, tending toward a pure sound, and, at my posing the question, he like the lyrics. He did suggest, however, that he might construct the song differently, with different chord changes, that what he called the “bottom” may not be best for her voice.
Interesting. She is not a perfect singer, from a technical point of view. From looking at her bio, she’s a little bit later to the game and mostly self-taught. Many of the singers I’ve written about before have had a great deal of training. She hasn’t. But I love her voice and public personality. I think she has a lot of talent and much potential for even better work. Thanks again for your comments.
I love her too, and the gentleman who listened to her is very serious about music and if his reaction is favorable, you can rely on it.
– but also take into account the difference in people’s responses and the different moments in an artist’s life and in the experience of the audience — the production of musical forms, music as entertainment, music as meaning and emotional weight and nurture, the flow and foam and texture of our lives, and musical experience as direct and immediate engaging those feelings and their exchangability — music, in short, as having a changeable and fluid and, one could almost say, transformational quality, so that, finally, one individual’s response feeds into and shapes another’s response and then is forgotten, but then we return to the music and our hearts leap out to it renewed and informed and re-attaching to the eternal and quicksilver movement and encouragement that is our musical culture and our changing and lifting emotional experience.