THE LEGACY OF BILL GRAHAM
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Wardell

Sample this concert
  1. 1Welcome to Daytrotter00:03
  2. 2Call It What You Want03:19
  3. 3Uptown Era03:49
  4. 4Opossum03:07
  5. 5After Laughter03:29
Wardell May 20, 2013
Liner Notes

The sunshine can't help but be in the air with a Wardell song. It's blinding. It's cooking the meat and skin in your arms and neck as you listen. It's a bounty of the yellow stuff, spread out everywhere, bleaching your vision. It gives you that odd feeling you get after a long winter of being cooped up and suddenly finding yourself out of doors with the temperature matching exactly what it feels like inside - an almost unfathomable situation that takes some getting used to.

With no wind, it's a little something that spooks you right into a strange giddiness that borders on dreaminess. It's something of a fantasy that you think you're living and it has to do almost exclusively with deprivation and acclimation. You keep muttering to everyone how nice it is - just how damned nice it is - when it should have been a given for the month of May.

Wardell -- the creation of brother and sister, Theo and Sasha Spielberg - don't rely only on sunshine, however. It's far from it. There's so much of that sinking feeling in there as well, in trace amounts. It's a bunch of longing and a dash of pain. It's all that stewing and thinking about what more there could have been between the lines, between strangers or between the ones who had intended to stick around for a while, but decided against it. It's this that we hear in these songs, when they sing, "I could smoke and dance/You could be happy for me." There are no assurances to that happiness, but the smoking and dancing could happen, easily enough. Some days, that's all you're going to get - that and a little warm weather.