As 2013 has come to an end, we are taking a look back at some of our favorite posts of the year by our guest editors.
The reaction to Tall Tall Shadow (Secret City), Basia Bulat’s third full-length, has been exceedingly positive, a happy circumstance for a performer who made her thus-far moderate fame on the folk singer/songwriter circuit and is now looking to switch things up. Bulat’s first two albums, adept enough affairs, traded mostly in the light arrangements and soft dynamics of contemporary folk music. If her talents extend beyond many of her peers (notably her staggering facility on a wide range of stringed instruments from the dulcimer to the charango), her aesthetic palette as presented on her first two albums was largely traditional. Tall Tall Shadow, by contrast, opens with the stomping, gradual crescendo of the title track, an immediate announcement of increasing speed and volume that sustains for the rest of the record. It’s a sonic gamble for Bulat, who for the first time finds herself pushing her aesthetics into more energetic territory. Still, the song structures and modes are of a piece with her previous releases, making Tall Tall Shadow a furtherance rather than a divergence from her previous work. Bulat will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new feature on her.
Bulat: And now for your recommended daily poetry intake! I have a very vivid memory of being in the choir in sixth grade, and being given a solo to sing in an arrangement of a song called “Tyger Tyger.” I knew the words were powerful, but I didn’t understand them at the time. All I wanted to know was, why were there so many questions in the song? And why was there no answer? And why was “tiger” spelled “tyger”?! Little did I know at the time I was singing the words of William Blake’s “The Tyger.” A friend gave me an illuminated copy Of Songs Of Innocence and Songs Of Experience years later, and while the poems felt instantly familiar I also felt like my world was changing as I read it. When I got to The Tyger, it was such an uncanny feeling realizing the words had already been etched in my memory years earlier, even though some of the melody I sung them to had faded from it.
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTMPJVDOoag
