virtual album released 1999 @ mp3.com
(also released thru peoplesound lacking
Gun At My Head )
"My eyes say too much I'll hide, hide, hide them from you"
Anna+ guitar+stool= The Internet prize winning classic. Brittle and beautiful like a snowflake on the cusp of melting from its own internal warmth. Blazing hearth, dog, cocoa. One of those songs you'll tell your grandkids about like Werther's 'never heard of em' Originals, only sweeter.
LOVE ME TOO
"One day we won't be who we are"
There really should be a 'handle with care- fragile' sticker on this. The world drifts away in the background, distorted into a slow drone, it's away- out there and we are in here and in hear. A perfect mood piece. There's a tingle up my spine and I'm hugging my pillow like there's no tomorrow...
I GET NERVOUS
"Saw someone kissing someone I'd love to kiss"
As noted elsewhere, this track is the third musical revelation in my life. If this track was the Blessed Virgin Mary there's be a shrine in my living room, miracle healings daily at noon and three p.m. And you'd be able to buy cheesy glow in the dark statuettes. This is the track that broke Silverman to me. Stumbling around peoplesound.com at a very nervous time of my life (actually the shittiest year ever). Everything was going to hell and I found this gem and I played it to death. For me it sums up all the fear and emptiness that followed me around. All the self over-analysis and abandonment. Anna, if you've been there too, then singing this must be unbelievably difficult, and in a perverse way, it is an attractive quality. As someone on the discussion board said a long time ago, 'I too get nervous'. Well, whoever you are, I hope things are working out better for you, honestly. Now, my French being somewhere in the English Channel, I was glad the translation was on the mp3.com DAM CD. As for the relavance is.... well, YOU decide.
ALL MY LIFE
"We buy dreams, sugar coated to make them taste so sweet"
An apocalypse of personal proportions. A sudden flash of waking, life-changing, consciousness. There are traces here of the pop-culture critique that raises it's head on 'Magnificent'. Also the track that contains the 'sounds like a band' phrase 'mutilated angel'- name for the first tribute band;-) A whispery wake up call- there's a whole world out there. Do you care?
HOW CRUEL
"If you're not fcuking up, you're fcuking down"
Gave me a jolt at first to hear the f-word in such a lush setting, but hey, that's the idea and such language is best saved for such surprise uses rather than taking the Nine Inch Nails route of using it every other fcuking word. Ooops! This is the 'never again' and slightly bitchy-but- with- reasons theme which runs through a lot of Silverman's work. Lurks around the shadows with a bloody big knife. The long playout on the end leaves the story open ended enough that you have to finish it off yourself, but by the sounds at the very end, there's a bit of fight...
THE BLUE TREE
"Niagara Falls needs a lot of rainy days"
Apart from the drug referneces I don't have a clue what this is about but at the same time, it wraps me in a warm blanket and I can hear exactly what Anna's saying. Which, now I come to mention it, is exactly what it's about- chemical comforts vs. reality and the perceptions of that reality through the use of mind altering drugs and the consequences of same. That's why it's bouncy, but not, and why there's a sample of peyote smoking Native Americans or whoever they are in the background. No offence to any Native Americans, I'm getting to pretentious for my own good ;-)
GUN AT MY HEAD
"I know I'm wrong but I'm not feeling sorry, I don't mind, I'm not the feeling sorry kind"
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Tough call, but some people are better at it than others (and you know who you are). Hang the consequences, eh? Listen to the twisting and straining and grating of that mind. The conflict of doing the right thing or the wrong thing, or, indeed, telling the two apart.
BLACK RAINBOW
"I know you really want me, but you can't have me"
A sequel of sorts to 'Gun At My Head', a companion in pain if either of them were companion- having types. Choices made, deal with it. An interior monologue of steadfast bitterness and the polar opposite to the album opener.