Last year, John and I went with our friends Bird and Bama to a concert at a small local venue.  There’s a restaurant attached to the concert hall, so we had dinner first.  The concert was scheduled to start at 7:30, so we went to dinner at 7, thinking that would give us time to eat and roll in at about 8:15, when the concert figured to actually start.  Because, you know, concerts NEVER start on time.

You can see where this is going, yes? We ate dinner, walked into the venue and…the set was 2/3 over.  Turns out, there was a late-night show by a different band starting after the show we were seeing, so they’d started precisely on time.  What we did see was really great, but after about five songs, the show was over.

So I was really excited when I learned that that the artist, Jeffrey Foucault, was coming back into town this spring.  This is a great time of year for live music- bands and musicians are coming out of winter hibernation, gearing up for summer festivals and tours, playing small venues.  I’ve been to half a dozen shows in the past month and a half, and haven’t paid more than $15 for a ticket.  That’s about the same as a movie, folks.

This was one of the shows I was most excited about- I bought tickets for us well in advance, and like the enthusiastic old people that we are we arrived at the concert five minutes before the opening act started, plenty of time to get seats.

And oh, it was so worth it.

I wish there was a way I could write about music without sounding like a trite nitwit, but I haven’t found it.  I love music, but I don’t play well, and I certainly can’t write about it effectively.  Suffice it to say that I can think of few better ways to spend an evening than watching someone who is truly prodigiously talented as a musician doing what they do best.  For example, at the show last night, pretty much every song required a reset of a capo and a retuning of the instrument.  I found myself transfixed by the process, amazed at the years of accumulated practice and skill at playing and songwriting that it must take to be able to write beautiful songs in different keys and to shift back and forth between them effortlessly while making idle chat with the audience.

There’s nothing in the world that I can even come close to doing that well.  I like to consider myself a generalist- I do many things pretty well.  I can cook, for example, and sew.  I’m good at writing, and I’m pretty clever in conversation.  I’m good at pub trivia.  I make a solid cocktail.  But I don’t have deep, amazing skill at any one thing, the way our friend Newton does at low temperature physics, or my friend MEM has at theoretical math, or our friend Dyer has with computers.

I do not have the brain it takes to become a world-class expert in any particular academic field, nor the discipline it takes to become a world-class expert in any hobby or skill.  I am, for the most part, perfectly okay with this.  But sometimes, like Saturday, I watch someone playing absolutely lights-out on the guitar in this effortless, spare, heartbreakingly beautiful way and I wish, just for a moment, that I could do something that well.

The last song of Saturday’s show is one of my favorite songs of all time.  I’m glad we saw the whole set this time, and I’m doubly glad that I finally got to hear him play this song live.  I’ve heard this song dozens of times and it still catches my breath.  It makes me wish I could write poetry, or songs.  I’d highly suggest you check it out.