- Ana Benaroya
As I wrote in this week’s music section, tomorrow night at Fremont Abbey I’ll be hosting a concert called Songs About Books. Led to Sea, Bright Archer, Levi Fuller, Joshua Morrison and Ryan Barrett of the Pica Beats will all perform new songs based on books that I assigned to them. If you want to read about the whys and the hows, you should go check out the piece I wrote explaining the book-assigning process.
So here’s what’s happening tomorrow night: You’ll see five mini-sets from all five musicians. And basically, my “hosting” amounts to this: In between the sets, when one musician is breaking down and another one is setting up, I’ll just stand up and talk a little about the books I assigned and why I assigned them. It’s not going to be a lecture, or a reading, or anything like that. It’s just some interstitial scene-setting. The last thing I want to do is to get in the way of the music, because the music for this project is exceptional. In just a couple of months, everyone has produced a strange, beautiful, occasionally creepy array of songs that work together in surprising (and unintentional) ways to form a kind of concept album. You don’t have to have read the books to get the songs, although the songs will likely make you want to read the books.
You can buy tickets right here. They’re $12 in advance and $15 at the door, but that includes a CD featuring 15 songs from the project. These musicians have really put together something special here; I think the songs work as suites about the love affairs between human beings and books. The show should be a lot of fun. I hope to see you tomorrow.