David Dye of NPR’s World Cafe interviews Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis on her newest solo album, Acid Tongue, in Jenny Lewis: Drawn Back To Country.
While her band Rilo Kiley is known for its downbeat indie-rock sound, Jenny Lewis finds her foundation in country coming to the fore on her sophomore solo effort, Acid Tongue. Though she recorded the album in just three weeks, Lewis infuses her voice with a hint of jazzy soul without losing her grip on her country-rock roots.
With a healthy dose of guest appearances — by Elvis Costello, Chris Robinson of The Black Crowes and M. Ward — during the recording sessions, Acid Tongue crackles with the vitality of an old-fashioned jam session. In a session with host David Dye, Lewis performs material from the new album.
After Elizabeth Alexander’s epically forgettable Praise Song for the Day, I was happy to see Derek Walcott, easily my favorite living poet, read Forty Acres.
Forty Acres
Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving —
a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,
an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd
dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,
parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked
cotton
forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens
that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten
cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is
a tense
court of bespectacled owls and, on the field’s
receding rim —
a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.
The small plough continues on this lined page
beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado’s
black vengeance,
and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,
heart, muscles, tendons,
till the land lies open like a flag as dawn’s sure
light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.
In an office where I am gently mocked for having two screens and a laptop to the side, this is a valhalla – pixels upon pixels of glorious resolution….
“The paintings have been photographed in very high resolution and contain as many as 14,000 million pixels (14 gigapixels). With this high level resolution you are able to see fine details such as the tiny bee on a flower in The Three Graces (Las Tres Gracias), delicate tears on the faces of the figures in The Descent from the Cross (El Descendimiento ) and complex figures in The Garden of Earthly Delights (El Jardin de las Delicias).”
President-Elect Barack Obama will be sworn in as President tomorrow. Here’s a breakdown of where to watch the inaugural festivities and address and past inaugural addresses.
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