After the tape of the marching band music, Tom Carper plays a folk album written about Anne Frank. “So over the course of the record,” he says, leaning into the backseat and talking with his hands, “Anne Frank dies and then she’s reincarnated. There’s a two-headed boy who lives in a glass jar and he's building a radio for a girl he loves. The music's this big psychedelic brass band with everything all whirling and trumpets blaring and organs and accordions rising up from the fuzz. In the lyrics there are, like, all sorts of things—allusions to incest, tarot card imagery, a circus wheel, a dysfunctional family of anthropomorphic carrots.”
Sounds like a mess,” Aaron says, staring out the window at Irvine passing by—the palm trees and cars, the blue sky and telephone lines. He slouches down in his seat and sips his bottle of Coors. “I don't think I get it. Maybe the speakers just suck.”
“No, but it's more than... I dunno... more than the sum of a bunch of old-timey carnival imagery. The singer—he's saying something. It isn't some love me, love me, saaaay that you love me bullshit.”
Tom Carper's voice drones in and out, disappearing beneath the music, coming in through the quiet spots, arching above the road noise. It's like the tape of the marching band music—there, but not there.
They pass by a car lot on the side of the road with rows of colorful plastic triangle flags flapping in the breeze and the singer sings, What a beautiful face I have found in this place that is circling all 'round the sun. And when we meet on a cloud I'll be laughing out loud; I'll be laughing with everyone I see... can't believe... how strange it is to be anything at all!
“Like that,” Tom Carper says, looking back at them, and straining against his seatbelt. “That sort of stuff. Just listen to the lyrics. Pay attention to everything.”
Dont forget to keep checking back through the day for live sessions, competitions, guest posts from Lazy Acre Artists and some special Record Store Day releases
No comments:
Post a Comment