The cheerful waiter and gloomy bartender at the Sunday café have yet to start calling me "British Airways", but they will. One or other of them sometimes drops in at my weekday corner to discuss bar business with the women who run the place, so they're bound to overhear the name eventually.
Since Glum and Chirpy charge double the price asked on Monday to Saturday for a "grande crème", I expect twice as much: instant service, a comfy seat, half the gossip and decent music television instead of sport with the sound turned down. Even peace.
I go there to fly.
"Sometimes I wonder
Why we're always coming down
And why we need to touch the ground
And why I didn't keep on heading
right on up to heaven".
 Once I'd described 'Redbird' as a super Nova achievement overall, the second song with its subtitle, 'Amelia Earhart's Last Days,' began to work.
Before entries went missing*, I announced plans to wing it for a while, with one certain compass point in the worst of winter: 'South'! Critics who tried to shoot down the Bermuda-born Heather Nova for releasing a "pop" album in 2001 wasted their ammunition.
Heather's always told stories, her own and other people's. Though she has fans who seem unsure she's of terrestrial origin, her planet is one where the ways of the human heart are remarkably well mapped.
Graham Lubin's ear for those he calls "hauntingly ethereal" hasn't charted Heather Nova, but went wild over Elizabeth Fraser and the other Cocteau Twins at Celestial Voices (in the blogroll). The disbanded Scots slip in since their ethereal heyday proved ideal listening to take sustenance from Glum and Chirpy and firm up the future of this log.
"One notorious review simply began, 'Surely this band is the voice of God.' While the embarrassed group sought to downplay such reactions ([guitarist Robin] Guthrie in particular was astonishingly self-disparaging, for years professing to hate the end results), the fact remains that this powerful climax of the band's early years consists of one high after another. Lesser acts would simply kill to have recorded such a varied, strong release, while innumerable others took, and still take the release as a touchstone for their own work," Graham said of 'Treasure' (1984; remastered in 2000).
The Cocteau Twins' sound gusts and swirls like the wind, ringing chimes; it pulses and plays like stratospheric light on ice crystals often so far aloft Frazer's words are hard to catch unless you really concentrate. This scarcely matters when you're meditating. Awed fans called it "dream pop" anyway, full of symphonic surprises like my other favourite, 'Heaven or Las Vegas'.
In short, I made decisions in the company of angels.
Brevity isn't one of my qualities, warn fleet-footed friends. They also assure me that so long as I maintain this log, it shall unfold one guy's love story of the lost and found. So be it; no rush, then. I'll tell it more slowly than I was before resuming the restoration. If women's songlines help me stay on track and in tune, what I write may sometimes help do the same for others.
Whether we're being chatty or hang-gliding across poetic peaks, things Heather Nova (home) does in equal measure on 'South', few people are always sure of their feet and then need a boost to the confidence this column was about in its original shape. I doubt Nova worried much about that flak she took for a change of style. One track fast became a hit song for the feelings expressed as well as the heavenly voice:
"(...)'When you let other people tell you what's right
When you leave your instinct and your own truth behind' he said
'That's a virus of the mind.' That's a virus of the mind
I guess it's kind of like losing your sight; for a
Second you think that they might be right, and it
Feeds the doubts you have inside, and it
Almost starts to feel like a crime
To follow your own rhythm and rhyme
Yeah I'm pretty happy living in my own sweet time I'm pretty happy
And I don't need your virus of the mind (...)."
In a prolific career like that of Elizabeth Frazer, now also working from a home of her own, Heather has sung of hard, sad times and alienation, but 'Virus of the Mind' has all the appeal of a confident person on an album glowing with superb musicianship and memorable tunes.
Both Frazer and Nova have a staggering vocal range and the emotional reach down into the troughs of our lives -- when love can hurt like hell -- without which we can't know the rolling crests of joy.
"People think that they can heal without the touch
Learn to live without the love they need so much
But everybody hurts, and everybody cries
And everybody needs a helping hand sometimes
And I'll be there
Like a bird, singing to you (...)"
That's put simply on 'Singing You Through' from 'Redbird', the latest peak in Nova's career, which musically reveals many facets of a performer in multiple genres but has lyrically grown out of the slow-burning anger and sudden stabs of 'Oyster'.
 There's nothing wrong with anger when it's justified and you know how to channel it, but to be "fuelled by anger" as a governing emotion, like somebody once told me she was, can hide not only resentment and hurt, but the lack of confidence people feel if they're given a perpetual pounding that induces a sense of helplessness. When someone else recently blew up at me, that drew reassurance once I realised a cross response was all wrong.
Self-confidence without complacency is a reassuring quality to foster and to appreciate from Heather Nova and the radiant Sharleen Spiteri of the highly popular Glasgow band Texas. They're so engaging I spent a whole afternoon with the music one surprisingly sunny day. The 'Red Book', their latest, got opened, after 'Careful What You Wish For' and 'White on Blonde'.
The friend who told me of Sharleen's confidence and style on stage called her a "rock star who's cut the crap, someone you should write up soon because she's so open about the themes your site has taken on lately." He meant the lost love story I'll now have to put back.
"Just be careful what you wish for
Just be careful what you hope for
Your wish, it may come true!"
That could be a cue for the rewrite of 'Body music (iii)', but isn't, despite Sharleen's statement to an online rag that rarely inclines some of us to take it at name value, 'Ask Men'. Frequently I do ask men, but ones less attached to slicing the species in half than that site often seems to be. What did Sharleen say, though?
"When you become confident you can be naturally sexy. Ooze sex."
It's a pithy platitude, perhaps, but only too true. I've plenty more time than some people do for singers of both sexes who search their melancholy souls and work the old magic of sharing our bad times and making them easier to bear with the transforming power of music to stretch out a hand to the solitary. It's reassuring to know you're not alone.
 However, Spiteri is able to ooze sex and say how not because she's as pretty as two pictures, but since she's been through the rough stuff. Hit singles on 'White on Blonde' (1997) made the soccer stadiums, titles like 'Insane' and 'Put Your Arms Around Me' ooze powerful emotions but aren't cheerful, 'Careful What You Wish For' 2003) an electronic edge some found experimental, others commercial, which is to say it's mixed up.
'Red Book', released in 2005, is a return to form, the most upbeat, lyrically confident on the whole and ... oozy. The mate who called Sharleen a rock star doesn't like his rock very hard; catchy and melodic are more like it, Texas can be bluesy and funky, but he meant that at her strongest, she comes raw.
Flying can be a bumpy experience; reading more about the singers here after initially posting this, I was startled to find several other people speaking of "sexy" and "angry" women almost in the same breath, then noticed they equated the two with early albums, not the new ones.
"I do so love it when you get mad!" Variations on that theme have made many a movie line and perhaps once I even felt the same way with women; today, I much prefer it when one soars instead of flying into a rage. For a big vocal range, Tracy Bonham lifted me up for a week.
She began her musical career at five, has a classical education, is at ease with several instruments, including the violin, does unexpected things with a quirky sense of humour.
 The photo is only half the picture from one at Tracy Bonham's home site. One way to make a great discovery is to ask what she likes. At Amazon US, they did. What Tracy's choice of "Music you should hear" includes string quartets by Debussy and Ravel, Stevie Wonder, the album with which the kid made me a fan of Sigur Rós, pronounced ( ), and Willie Nelson's 'Crazy' demo sessions:
"They inspire me to write better songs. How anyone can write a perfect little jewel of a song that is both sad and funny is beyond me."
It's not beyond Ms Modesty.
The pillar of her student community made her recording debut in 2000 with the 'The Burdens of Being Upright'. Her very first song on record, 'Mother, Mother,' is about a dutiful young woman's phone call home to the parents, the way it might have spilled out. Tracy Bonham made a funny miserable liar with a flair for good lyrics nearly six years ago.
She gave us power-chords then. Her enjoyable 'Burdens' could have cast her as a rocker chick, a role she'd like no more than the women above since there's no holding back somebody so eclectic. She pulled me up hard in my tracks, before I had any idea what some of her tastes are, on just a first hearing of an album with a green cover, a bird and maybe a firefly spark of light.
'blink the brightest' (2005) is a nice name for a brilliant release, rich instrumentally, including that violin, and strong on emotion, wit and and vocals, including the chorus.
Tracy Bonham soars happy-sad, love is powerful, love is fragile:
"i am a rock that's what i do for a living
please look away as i'm wilting like a flower" ('wilting flower').
So the lyrics aren't always confident, but Bonham's line in contradictions is that of a musician sure in her "stubborn skin ... wearing thin" and "naked pretty as a heartache waiting for my second skin to settle in" ('naked').
There's a French expression, "être bien dans sa peau," to be taken both figuratively and literally, "to feel great" or "to be comfortable in one's skin", used mainly of confident people with the feel-good factor. Celestial voices apart, when these women share that in common, it's contagious.
_______
*This column is such a substantial rewrite, it's based on chunks of the missing matter.
10:43:04 PM link 
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