the world has turned and left me here

blonde redhead

When we finally return to Abbey Pub BR has been playing for a good 20 minutes (damn! damn! damn!). But they are amazing & I soon forget all the frantic rushing about we've just done, and am just glad to be there.

I will resist my urge to write excessive amounts about the concert. Or at least try to. The stage was small, barely enough for them to fit their instruments on I thought, and the venue very small too. Yun & I squeeze our way up to the front without difficulty. Between songs BR just messes around so that there's hardly any silence, one song just flows into the next. Unlike most every other concert I've been to where you get your songs shrink-wrapped, straight off the cd, these are real people making real music on the fly right in front of me. Holy crap.

On "I Get Rocks Off" Kazu and Amedeo go face-to-face & start singing off each other, there's this sudden dynamic between them & it's super exciting. Amedeo also goes nuts on his guitar a few times & that too is super exciting... basically I love seeing a band that enjoys their own music & each other thoroughly.

They play "Melody" and it's beautiful. For their encore they play three songs. Here's Kazu sitting at the keyboard during "Magic Mountain," which they follow up with "Water," a really rocking but hard-edge song, and I am afraid Amedeo is going to collapse the way he's staggering around in a guitar bliss.

Afterwards, partly at Yun's urging (hilarious to see how excited she actually got when he appeared on stage to clean things up), I went up and talked to Amedeo for a while, tried to persuade him to bring BR to the Sokol.

I also get to talk to Kazu & ask her all kinds of questions. Her jaw is still bothering her 8 months after the horse-riding accident in which it was broken--she says it may never be the same, and that it still hurts esp. after singing, which I guess explains their relatively short set. I confirm some suspicions about songs on their latest, "Misery is a Butterfly," and we talk about Mann's Magic Mountain for a while.

All this as if in a dream. This is the first time I've ever talked to anyone in a band after a concert & for some reason I expected to encounter unapproachable rock star egos. Especially with Kazu, I always envisioned her as this willowy far out Japanese goddess of inscrutable rock songs, but instead she was just a normal-size person without any pretensions, and actually seemed quite shy when I was talking to her.

The fact that I met them & they turned out to be so humble & real blew me away for the next few days, I couldn't stop thinking about it. This is a band. That was a concert. BR just gave me a new standard by which to judge things.