Favorite musical rediscovery of 2006
Some of you may have seen my gushing comment, which I won't repeat here, about how much hearing The Roches moved my daughter and me at the Kate Wolf Memorial Music Festival this summer (photos).
I hadn't listened to them much in years; somehow the albums I only have on cassette became invisible to me in the dark corner where they were stored in my old house. What a delight in preparing for the move to discover that I still had great collections of a bunch of my old favorites! (I'm working on getting set up to transfer cassettes to mp3s.)
So when I heard they were coming to town on my birthday, I invited friends to go see them with me. It was a holiday show, and they twice invited anyone in the audience who wanted to come up and sing carols with them. I went up both times, which was a glorious delight and one of the best birthday treats I've ever had.
Here's a song they sang which floored me: A Prayer from Suzzy and Maggie's Zero Church. This is from a project they worked on in 2001 at Harvard University's Institute for the Arts and Civic Dialogue. They collected favorite prayers from lots of people. These lyrics are by Bill Barbeau, a Vietnam vet and firefighter.