Superwolf

I think the crowd was hungry for experiences last night. We were young, scruffy, and white-- very white. We were lined up in the sterile corridors of the MFA and not as out of place as we should have been. Each of us might have been there a few hours earlier. Damien Hirst is having a retrospective and as the line snaked past the entrance to his galleries, those of us who knew his work peered through the glass doors looking for something shocking. Or something that might have been shocking if we hadn’t already seen his work. The sheep suspended in a glass vitrine was just part of the spectacle of the evening.

The night opened with Mika…. (I’ll find the name somewhere, I promise) who had a strong classic finger plucking guitar style and a voice that sounded as if it were filtered through a microphone—and through history. I felt as if I was hearing something that hadn’t been heard in a long while. He had an insistent an plaintive voice. But the singer also had a strange lisp to his words. Behind the grit I heard an indoor intellectual. Or at least I heard the performance and discovered the character he assumed for the concert. He may well carry that character through life with him, but his halting lyrics seemed to stumble on earthy phrases like “Pretty mama” and his condemnations of nineteenth century robber barons. I had a suspicion that he might have known these men, or at least their great grandchildren. The roots of his songs weren’t his roots. They weren’t our roots either, but we all had a hunger for traditional mountain songs by musicians who were comfortable playing in Brooklyn. And we got that in a flat egg shell of a hall that kept the sound of his steel guitar inches from our ears.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy took the stage after a long opening set and gave me one of the best concert experiences of my life. Because I love his music, yes, but more because I love what he brought to the stage as a performer. He was there with Matt Sweeney and musicians on bass, keyboards, and drums. He played most of his newest release, Superwolf, and the album in concert is better than the one they recorded. Because the music needs to be live. Guitars and a keyboards created layers of sound that floated inches above my head. I kept looking up at the ceiling, almost expecting to be able to grab hold of some of it and pull the sound even closer. And across this background Will Oldham and Matt Sweeney added their voices. I used the word plaintive to describe Mika’s voice. But the textures of their calls to the audience against the pulsing background of sound was even more magnetic. They were calling to the audience about love, sex, death, and God. Will Oldham is a perverse kind of preacher, which is the only kind I can sympathize with at the moment. He sings of the grave, and the weight of his simple words are incredible. But his lyrics shift as easily to the delicate and childish without a loss of meaning. He sings through sex and doesn’t cleanse or cheapen it but celebrates it exactly as it is. His hands are in his lover or hers are in his and expressing the extent to which people can melt together or connect physically begins by just saying what’s happening. It’s enough. His voice and the music fill in the emotion and desire. In his words and music, sex is part of a profound recognition that we aren’t as complicated as we spend so much time attempting to be. We’re vulnerable animals. We’re scared. And we feel most human when we’re in touch with this.

So I watched this man with a beard and large eyes sing into the microphone while balancing on one leg, or kicking it out like a swishing tail. His motions are both awkward and assured. He was a few years older than most in the audience and we seemed hungry for his experience. I imagine that he understands that laying himself bare on the stage while engaging the audience is redemptive for him and probably for us too. He becomes more the animal; he gets to be the Superwolf.