THE LEGACY OF BILL GRAHAM
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Emily Lacy

Sample this concert
  1. 1Welcome to Daytrotter00:26
  2. 2Sugar In The Gourd02:33
  3. 3Where Can I Get?02:40
  4. 4There You Were06:54
  5. 5Oh Freedom06:43
Emily Lacy Jul 3, 2011
Liner Notes

The days must be so rough on Emily Lacy. We feel their coarseness through her, the way she looks at them. The way she is swallowed up by them, feeling them so fully - all of their deceptive qualities and all of their leering and their crude gestures. She's a singer perfectly suited and still not long for the dramatic tones that accompany every given day. She gets stung and she refuses to suck the venom out. She refuses to seek any sort of medical treatment to make it hurt less, to numb what it was that she just went through. She refuses to believe that anything could really diminish the suffering. It's there and it will work on her however it will work on her. There is no getting around it. Lacy, who's currently living and working on Los Angeles, comes across as a struggling artist, struggling with a bunch of other things, but dealing with the vapidity of the world with a continuous scroll of thoughts, the unraveled philosophical dilemmas and inner dialogues that are certainly shared by many.

She worries about the bill collectors, on the song from her album, "Makeshift Medallions," singing, "When I picture myself lately, it's all in numbers/When I picture myself lately, it's all in tears." Those are rotten numbers and those tears seem to be dry tears, the ones that she keeps to herself, for she sounds too tough for crying jags. She seems equipped to deal with these sour flings. She sounds, in a way that's part Bjork and part Kimya Dawson, as if she'll always be able to deal with her hunger pangs and her modest station, even if they never, ever go away. She doesn't care if anyone thinks she's going about things the wrong way, reading the wrong books, etc.

Her monotone and quickly delivered, spoken word mantra of "I Have No Interest," says a lot.  She describes herself thusly, "I have no cleverness to share with the local university. I have no ideas to sell on Wall Street. I've begun the abolishment of funds anyway, given it all up to love and folk music, a certain someone here and there, flowers among people, laughter, story-telling, whatever I can get….Seeing certain things in this world can kill you, either by being too close to it or seeing too much to it or capturing something that you were never supposed to capture….Wrong never looked so good as it does today, through these eyes, which are wet with a certain concentration camp of cells. A station inside all looking up as I look up and outstretch my hand to meet you…hello." It seems like that's everything, but for Lacy, the words and the crunched feelings keep coming, unabated.