"You can't build cathedrals out of finger steeples"

Thao Nguyen's song Tallymarks off her solo album "Like the Linen" has some of my favorite lyrics ever. I'm normally not into meta songwriting, but the song is so adorable that I can forgive her and embrace the embarrassed, sweet little chorus.

"But I think I might miss you enough to say so,
and I think I already did.
Well, I think I might miss you enough to say so.
There you go, I just said it again."

Tallymarks - Thao Nguyen

Although I generally prefer her work with the band on "We Brave Bee Stings and All", this track is well worth a listen (or twelve, in my case).

Title of the post

As you may have noticed, music is one of the greatest loves of my life. For those of you that don’t already know, I also have a profound relationship with comedy. And there’s one other thing: I’m having a serious love affair with musical comedy. Here are four of my recent trysts.


I saw Tim Minchin for the first time a month ago in New York, where he had a six-week run at New World Stages. The man is a genius, if a bit mad. He is a talented pianist and witty as all hell, and I was hurting from laughing by the end of the show. His style is often dark and vulgar, but he performs with such eagerness that it’s difficult to be offended.

You Grew On Me - Tim Minchin
Inflatable You - Tim Minchin


After the show, we walked down to the UCBT (Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre) and saw Olde English’s variety show, Very Fresh, where they debuted a brilliantly made video, “Akon Calls T-Pain”. If you’ve ever heard a song by either of them and thought, “I can appreciate this very original music and the artist’s clever use of vocoder,” this is not the video for you.



(The three songs parodied are “Buy U a Drank” by T-Pain, “I Wanna Fuck You” by Akon, and “Sexual Eruption” by Snoop Dogg.)


Improv Everywhere is a project headed by Charlie Todd (or Agent Todd, in IE terms) that he started with fellow comedy students of the UCBT improv school. (Todd now performs and teaches there.) Their goal is to “cause scenes of chaos and joy in public places”, which they have been doing since August 2001 with over 70 missions. One of their recent missions, executed in Los Angeles, struck me as particularly great.

I’ve been known to have a slight problem with suspension of disbelief. I walked out of “Superman Returns” because I found it so implausible that Lois Lane did not die in the opening scene that I physically couldn’t sit through the rest of the film without shouting obscenities at the screen. So I definitely understand the problem many play- and movie-goers have with musicals. Strangers shouldn’t be able to effortlessly harmonize after breaking into song about something that, let’s face it, doesn’t deserve to be sung about. Like, say, spilled lemonade:




A bit closer to home, I managed to get a taste of musical comedy on campus at the latest Mixed Company a cappella concert. They invited the Johns Hopkins Mental Notes, and both featured a comedy song; Mixed Company sang “Title of the Song” by Da Vinci’s Notebook, and the Mental Notes sang “Your Love Is (Love Song with Metaphor)” by former Da Vinci’s Notebook members Paul and Storm.

Title of the Song - Da Vinci’s Notebook
Your Love Is (Love Song with Metaphor) - Paul and Storm

I wish I had a recording of the performance to share-- the soloists, Nemo Swift ’11 of Swarthmore and Tom Murphy ’09 of JHU, did a wonderful job. But the real beauty of these songs is in the lyrics. I’ll leave you with verse two of “Your Love Is”:

My love is a sailing ship
Seeking out a friendly shore
To cast out my anchor, happily never to sail no more.
And your love is the ocean that drowns me
Leaving my bones to be picked at by crabs
And bringing settlers to the New World with smallpox and influenza
And wiping out the indigenous population.
Smallpox
Your love is smallpox.

"I'm losing my marbles, it's marvelous"

Review of tonight's Mika concert coming soon. But first, the music video for "Buttons", the hidden track on Sia's album "Some People Have REAL Problems".

"My war paint is sharpie ink and I'll show you how much my shit stinks"

Everyone's been going crazy over Juno and its soundtrack, and rightfully so- it's an adorable and touching movie with a score to match. My favorite track is "Loose Lips" by Kimya Dawson of the on-hiatus Moldy Peaches. She has five songs on the album, not including a Moldy Peaches track (the 'theme' of the film, "Anyone Else But You") and another two by Antsy Pants. Antsy Pants is another of Kimya's projects, featuring the young Leo, a 13-year old French ukelele player, among others.

Leo & Kimya:













Tree Hugger - Antsy Pants
Vampire - Antsy Pants

Back to "Loose Lips". Enhanced, as it were, by the lack of enhancement in the low-fi production, Kimya's voice is vulnerable and innocent. The lyrics are thrown at you in handfuls, honest and unrefined fragments happily, if a bit urgently, patched together. The song makes me feel like an 18 year old kindergartener. The lyrics certainly don't have the naivete of a grade schooler, yet somehow Kimya is your 3'9" best friend, holding your hand and rambling aimlessly and reassuringly.

Loose Lips - Kimya Dawson

"...and if you wanna kill yourself, remember that I love you. Call me up before you're dead, we can make some plans instead. Send me an IM, I'll be your friend."

I've started to post reviews regularly! Just kidding, it's more Andrew Bird.

Lucky for you, I never get sick of Andrew Bird. Here's two tracks off his 2005 album, "Andrew Bird & The Mysterious Production of Eggs".

Measuring Cups - Andrew Bird
Skin Is, My - Andrew Bird

Both of them have a line in them that just hits me the right way-- I don't know if it's the meaning, or the rhyme, or the melody, but I get the urge to play those few seconds over and over.

In "Measuring Cups": so put your backpack on your shoulder / be the good little soldier
In "Skin Is, My": let it be printed on every t-shirt in this land / on the finest of cottons and the hippest of brands

It's bizarre how catchy these songs can be, when they sound so atypical of a hook-y pop song. Oh, Andrew. It's true love.

Song so Sufjan

Driving home tonight, I was playing The Avalanche by Sufjan Stevens- a full CD of "outtakes and extras" from Come On Feel The Illinoise. After listening to "Chicago: Multiple Personality Disorder", I heard a song start that I had never heard before. Now, I'm sure I must have heard this song at least once when playing the album, but I had never actually listened, if I did make it that far.

This song is so Sufjan that I've never even heard it before. It starts off quietly and clearly, like many of the songs in which he sings alone with his banjo. Then, extra voice parts are added in, slowly obscuring the lyrics (They Are Night Zombies, anyone?). Finally, what kind of a Sufjan Stevens song would this be without a final wild crescendo into irrelevant brass and cymbals? And that grating, annoying, wish-it-weren't-in-the-song-but-after-a-while-you'll-get-attached-to-it feedback is so, so Sufjan. The solo piano bit at the end is a song-saver, bringing the piece back down to earth after its typical overdone finale.

An excerpt of the oh-so-Sufjan lyrics:
here in this house in Pittsfield
the ghost of our grandmother works at the sewing machine post
hiding the bills in the kitchen on the floor
and my sister lost her best friend in the Persian Gulf War
there was a flood in the bathroom last May
and you kicked at the pipes when it rattled
oh the river it made

Pittsfield - Sufjan Stevens



Coming soon on Broken Loveseats!
Lily Allen: How are all her covers so damn adorable?
Sufjan's Chicago Revisits: If notes were fists, which version would win in a fight, and could the acoustic version put up more than a girly slap?