I'm not sure how to talk, really talk, about how much this concert meant to me.
Back in high school, my ears were opened to a whole new level of music. I've written about it a lot in the past, but it changed my life. I already liked alternative music a lot, but my life-long friend Ben had discovered some amazing sound, thanks as always, to the British.
Cocteau Twins, Kate Bush, Bauhaus, This Mortal Coil and Dead Can Dance.
I thought they'd broken up back in 1999. They've both put out solo albums, etc. Dead Can Dance was done, right?
Imagine knowing a band/musician that had moved you in amazing ways. Imagine that band/musician was never going to produce any more of that soul satisfying sound again. Terrible.
All the credit for knowing about the return and world tour of Dead Can Dance goes to my husband. He found out about it and said we could go together. What an offer! But...
But this music belongs to me and someone else I am eternally entwined with...my sister-in-law Alesha. I told Cameron that his offer was wonderful, more than generous, but I really had to go with Alesha.
And I did. We had to go together to experience something long hoped for and never to be realized, except now it could be realized.
The venue was the Red Butte Garden amphitheater and the concert was last Saturday. I thought a lot of my friend Ben, now passed away these eight years, and how he was the catalyst for my love for all this music that I still love so much (going on nineteen years).
It was a beautiful, dream-like concert, so much more about sound than noise, an amplification of the senses rather than the volume of an electric guitar (though that's awfully fun, too). Dead Can Dance are classified as "world music." Fair enough. They are Gothic cathedrals, rural Turkish villages, Greek churches and Irish fields.
Brendan Perry's voice is a rich, elevated baritone and Lisa Gerrard reminded me of a graceful marble statue that could sing like an angel.
I wished Ben could have see this concert. I wanted him to be there. Dead Can Dance have never made it to Salt Lake City before. At the third encore, an unfamiliar song introduction began and I puzzled it out in my brain and then came the utterly unexpected "Song to the Siren." Originally written by Tim Buckley, recorded by Pat Boone, then Tim Buckley, then This Mortal Coil (sung by Elizabeth Fraser from The Cocteau Twins). This Mortal Coil's version is the one I know best and when I was in high school with Ben, he expressed that he'd like me to sing it at his funeral.
When Ben's mom called to tell me that he had passed away, she said wanted me to sing but that she wasn't sure what yet. I related what Ben had told me ten years earlier and she said that's what she wanted me to do.
So here I am. Standing at this concert, with my sister-in-law and friend, who accompanied my singing at Ben's funeral, listening to the very song I sang that day, all the while thinking of him, wishing he could be there. Of course, I cried, but it was so awesome. Alesha and I clung to each other.
These musicians move me. I am so grateful for the effort they put into beauty and ethereal elevation.
I'm quite pathetic without my computer, I've learned, but sometimes I feel like there's no turning back. Computers are the future. Computers are the here and now.
