Back in business

matt connolly
Monday, October 25th, 2010

It’s been a crazy week, but Sharp Notes is back and running. We’ll be giving you double the coverage, just as a little reward for your patience. To start out: Lizz Wright. She’s definitely not a Christian Artist, and she’s not exactly gospel, yet there is something deeply spiritual and moving in her music. She’s an interpretative artist, which means that she can take just about any song and make it fit nicely into her own sonic palette, from Ike and Tina’s “I Idolize You” to Led Zeppelin’s “Thank You.” Who does she idolize? Who is she thanking? Well I would be hesitant to say it was a boyfriend, girlfriend or lover of some sort. Perhaps it’s not God, perhaps it’s not even a god, but there is a sense that she’s paying tribute to something overwhelming and, to use the word in an earlier meaning, awesome. Like the character in Jonathan Littel’s The Kindly Ones who can ultimately only sit back and marvel at the sadness and wonder of life, at our own pitiful inability to make any kind of sense out of it. Maybe Wright is working on a different kind of ethics, where we don’t have to turn it all into a narrative, a chain, a cause and an effect, maybe it’s the ethics of awe of having an appreciation of the world and the people and creatures in it.