the perfect set.

last night, as i was belting out my best renditions of a gritty, world-weary, southern whiskey-drinkin', pall mall smokin' throaty voice, trying to keep up with lucinda williams, i discovered a new dream. maybe someday, given a little time to work on my voice to get it to the point where perfect pitch doesn't matter, adding in a little inflection, i have dreams of being among the elite east asian country singer-songwriters. i figure it can't be too hard since i don't really know that there are any right now, and maybe somewhere, there are some more east asian lucinda williams-philes, but still. i think i have a good shot. my birthday's coming up, so if you must get me something, my wishlist is a a carton of pall malls, unfiltered, and a bottle of scotch. just so you know. i'll start slowly with the alcohol - perhaps beginning with a nightcap. and i think i have enough practice with cigarettes to make a real go of it. at that point, i might have enough songs about *beautiful losers*, as she so eloquently put it last night, to make a full length cd. she was so wonderful that a man screamed out a marriage proposal to her in the middle of her set. a gay man. that's how good she was. i was trying to think of something similar that i could yell out to her, but i couldn't come up with anything shorter than "lucinda, i love you. if i believed in marriage, i'd propose, but you can best believe that this offer is as close as i'll ever get to a marriage proposal!". for some reason, i thought that that would be a bit hard to fully comprehend. it's amazing to me that someone is able to write for themselves, and yet still be able to make everyone in the room feel as if she were having an intimate conversation with her.

hence the marriage proposal. and hence the consideration of the non-marriage proposal.

and her songs were all about brokenness and loves she had and lives she's lived and all of that stuff that you know if you just thought about all of that hurt and nostalgia and melancholy, you'd be kicking your own ass or your friend would or whatever, for being so deeply self-involved and self-indulgent, but somehow, she makes it seem as though that's the only reasonable thing to do. and she wasn't missing the idea of anything - she was just missing that which she once had or thought she knew.

me, too, lucinda. me, too.

but she sang it all in a way where you just knew that she was alright. that maybe she was tapping into a lot of anger and bitterness and resentment about what various people wanted her to be to them, about people asking her for things she was unwilling to give, about people unwilling to accept her on her own terms as she stood in front of them, about not being enough for the various people she's loved, about fucking up and not being forgiven, about not getting somewhere quite fast enough to make it work, about desiring herself to be somebody she knows she isn't, about desiring someone else to be someone she knows they aren't, about all of that that we all carry around with us all the time, but her wryness and honesty were enough to make me believe that she knows she has more living to do and more songs to write. that she saved the hardest things for last - that writing love songs is harder than writing any other songs.

i'm getting there, lucinda. i'm getting there.