I really love my job. I’m lucky; I work at multiple concert venues around my college campus. Usually, if a show is running smoothly and my staff is well-trained, I just get to stand around and look important while getting paid to see incredible live music.
Last Saturday night, we hosted Yo-Yo Ma, Chris Thile, Edgar Meyer, and Stuart Duncan on the Not Our First Goat Rodeo (2020) tour. I got deeply immersed in the Goat Rodeo album The Goat Rodeo Sessions (2011) after seeing their Tiny Desk Concert from 2011 last summer. They’ve since recorded another Tiny Desk (Home) Concert, which features more recent material. For this tour, they’ve brought along vocalist Aoife O’Donovan, who sings harmonies with Thile and Duncan. A “goat rodeo” refers to a situation with many moving parts, all of which must execute their exact functions without a hitch—a perfect storm, if you will. While this music is obviously tenaciously rehearsed, there are moments of careening, emotional wildness. These four musicians play with immense feeling, then stick the landing every time.
They started the show with a performance of “Attaboy,” my personal favorite of their catalog. I love the great sweeping motifs that return again and again in the refrain, often with new elements. It gets at my deep and long love of bluegrass music, a love whose origin I can’t quite place, and my interest in songs in 12/8. To be short, it goes incredibly hard.
Goat Rodeo is the quintessential super-group. Yo-Yo Ma is perhaps the most celebrated cellist of all time. Chris Thile is a mandolin prodigy whose first album was released when he was just thirteen. On five separate occasions, Stuart Duncan has been named the Academy of Country Music’s Fiddle Player of the Year. Edgar Meyer has won five of the seven Grammys for which he’s been nominated. These musicians are at the top of their game, and their combined prowess makes for one of the best shows I’ve seen at the Greek in my time working there.
Another song I was obsessed with summer of 2020: “Try Again” by Andy Shauf. I don’t quite remember how I found this album, The Neon Skyline (2020), but I was enamored with the clever writing, the lyrical patterns that appear altered but recognizable:
Somewhere between drunkenness and chivalry
I hold the door open and let her pass through
She says thanks to me in a British accent
And I try to answer her in the same voice
Somewhere between drunkenness and sincerity
I smile at her for just a little too long
Charlie's drinking wine, Judy's laughing at him
She says "I forget that you're such a fancy guy"
Somewhere between drunkenness and charity
She puts her hand on the sleeve of my coat
She says "I've missed this"
I say, "I know, I've missed you, too"
and finally:
Somewhere between drunkenness and jealousy
I watch her talking to some old friend
What a reunion, he recognized her across the room
How many years could there be to catch up on?
I think I like Andy Shauf because I often find myself trying to write in this manner, with linguistic dexterity and quick wit. He accomplishes not only fascinating and compact turns of phrase, but also layered and detailed story-telling. The album follows Shauf over the course of a single night: he hears that his ex is in town, he rehashes their whole relationship in his mind, eventually they run into each other, there is no catharsis. This song describes the moment when the two meet, and the album just gets more upsetting from there. It ends with the line:
Come on baby, try again
By this point, the refrain has taken on a sour tone; the couple is under no circumstances getting back together. Andy Shauf really drives it home with a cheerful interspersing of horns and guitars. His lilting, conversational voice lends itself perfectly to the resigned, quietly tortured character he portrays.
Laura Marling’s Song for Our Daughter (2020) was the first album whose release I remember being squarely in the pandemic. I listened to it late at night in a temporary bedroom in a temporary house when it first came out, and from that moment on I pretty much soundtracked every hour of my waking life in an attempt to distract myself from the fear and uncertainty that colored those first months. “Held Down” ended up being one of my most-listened-to songs last year.
I just bought tickets to a Laura Marling tour date in December. I think hearing this record live will be an important full-circle moment for me, a conclusion to some era of my life. So much has changed since it was released, and I surely do not listen as fanatically as I did then, but it’s grown with me. I hope you find something for yourself in it too.