Re: jane in philly

wow, jeremy. what a description. thank you so much for that. for those of us working stiffs in the midwest who JUST CAN'T GET AWAY ON A WEEK NIGHT 10 HOURS AWAY... it's almost like i was really there. thank you ever so very much. 
   
  love,
  tracy
  
[email protected] wrote:
  I was about to call it an unusual concert but for Jane at this point I think 
unusual is common. We need another word. She played about an hour and 20 
minutes. No opening act. I don't think the concept of a "set list" works any 
more in trying to sum things up-- there are too many recitations between songs 
(often with their own background music), too many songs that abruptly stop for 
a story before leading into something else, and certainly too many songs 
that are simply unidentifiable as they have yet to be put in recorded form, with 
title. As far as I can remember she performed only three songs from her 
"regular" albums, two of which were from "Maria" and one of which ("Begat Begat") 
has been so transformed over the years in performance as to be pretty much a 
different song entirely. (The other was "Goodbye Sweet Pumpkinhead"--also 
somewhat transformed over the years but not unrecognizably so.) Mostly she 
played electric guitar, although she sat for a few at the keyboard. The acoustic 
guitar came out only in her encore, I think. Her sense of humor was at once 
sharp and three-quarters hidden, emerging in delightful little side remarks, 
word choice, light in her eyes. She told an anecdote in pieces, stretched out 
so far between installments that when she picked it up after the first time, 
you didn't realize she was necessarily continuing; she quickly made it seem 
like, well, of course, of course she's simply picking up the story she had 
dropped without warning 35 minutes earlier. She wore a long, dark, patterned 
skirt and a sleeveless, midriff-peaking-through light top over which she had a 
sparkly, kitschy sort of jacket, removed part of the way through and hung up 
on the mic stand near the keyboard. Her hair is dark now, worn in a Jane-do of 
some not easily described sort. The only other older song she sang was "You 
Don't Need," which has become I think the only song I think I've pretty much 
heard her do in every concert I've seen of hers (maybe five or six at this 
point). It sounds to me that she's turned the meaning of the song inside out by 
now: originally striking me as a song from a puzzled, frustrated would-be 
lover, wondering at her object-of-affection's inability to connect deeply with 
another person, she sings it now and I hear almost a self pep talk--she's 
assuring herself that maybe it's okay to be alone after all, or maybe chiding 
herself that she feels that way, or maybe (probably) something else entirely 
that has nothing to do with my random mis-projections. Still, it sounds like 
it's coming from a different place than from which she wrote it, and I can't 
help wondering why that song of all her mighty works remains just about the 
lone representative of her previous life as a recording artist. Maybe what she 
doesn't need are all her other songs? She sings a new song about letting go; 
she seems to have worked hard to let go of her catalog. Perhaps a necessary bit 
of therapy to put herself in the position of (potentially) giving it all 
away. She seemed solid and good-naturedly unflappable-- a little distant but not 
unapproachably so. At one point she asked rather out of the blue if someone 
(in the audience, she meant) was feeling really really sad. The energy seemed 
to hit her; later, as she was saying goodnight, she noted that when she felt 
that it shifted something for her, something in what she was doing. She is 
as ever amazingly present with what she does up there in a way that I don't 
think is all that penetrable to the common observer. Her voice is ever truly 
spirit-enhancing. A lot of times I found I just wanted to close my eyes and 
feel it, although at one point, I abruptly noticed that I was hearing some other 
sort of voice-- opening my eyes, I found that she had moved away from the 
microphone but was still singing, which was its own sort of miraculous sound. 
We don't hear the musicians we admire sing in unamplified voices, basically 
ever. She had copies of her three-song "Tootie" EP on the table for people to 
pay for or not, their choice. I wish her all the best best things, but for 
once felt quite unable to speak with her afterwards, even as she was more 
present and available, in a very low-key setting, than I've seen in the past. There 
was nothing really to say at that point because there was far too much. This 
is all striking me more fully and deeply now as I write about it than I felt 
yesterday. (No, she did not sing "Calling All Angels" or "Love is 
Everything.") It was an unusual concert.

Jeremy