Women's voices: Waiting for the walking green

Life comes at you from all directions. It’s like doing the laundry: it just never stops. Even as you’re filling the washer with the last load of the week, you’re (probably) wearing clothes that are going to have to be washed. Unless you’re a frat boy.

So it’s just never done.

And the Voices find ways of coping with it.

I believe I first heard Kathy Mattea while I was in the UK. My sister used to send me home-made mix tapes of all kinds of different singers. Some were pretty good, some not so much. But the adventure was she never labeled them or included a play list. So I’d have to try to figure out what the song title might be and see if I could find out something about it on Google (pre-YouTube, you’ll note), or else write her via snailmail to ask.

“The 8^th song on the B side; maybe called “Close Your Eyes”? Who’s the guy singing it? And what’s it really called?”

I wasn’t going to know the artists, because she’s more country than I am. Reba? Martina? Who?

(But it turns out I am educable.)

Mattea’s “Come from the Heart” arrived that way. I loved her voice—there’s a warmth to it that permeates even the coldest day.

Since then I’ve seen the first three lines of the refrain passing around the Internet in the guise of some old saying. They were actually written by Richard Leigh and Susanna Clark. But they certainly resonate.

It’s hard to remember it when you realize that you’re smack in the midst of doing something remarkably stupid…in front of an audience. But it’s good advice anyhow, and Mattea obviously knows of what she sings.

My other slice of life for today comes from Joni Mitchell.

Dunno about you, but sometimes I have to plumb haul my drifting ass into cold, unwilling consciousness with the karmic equivalent of a Glock to my head. I just get so wrapped up in where I have to be and when and what I’m going to say when I get there and blah and blah and more unending unremitting blah.

But when you get that wrapped up in crap like that, you miss the treasures all around you.

That’s what Mitchell was pointing out in “For Free”—the guy playing clarinet beautifully, with no one on the street paying a lick of attention.

Thing is—I know for certain that where I’m going and when I have to be there and what I’m going to say when I get there don’t hold a candle to what’s going on right this moment right in front of me, or beside me, or just behind me. When you start walking down that brain-dead path, you miss the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra at the arts and wine festival.

Or Joshua Bell playing in a D.C. Metro station.

You don’t want to do that. At least, I don’t.