rolled up and forgotten, just leave it there...

i went to see natalia zukerman last night at mo pitkins, and she was good. her voice is flat-out beautiful, and she sure can play the lap steel, but there were times when i wanted her to be a singer instead of a singer/songwriter/musician. while i like her lyrics, there were times when i felt as if she found herself in the middle of a mediocre rendition of a mediocre song, so she threw in some scat to jazz it up. that sounds harsh, and the moments when the scat-like phrasing seemed truly natural were amazing, but that's the sense i got.

haunted house, though, really shoots out the lights, and she played milk + honey at my request. milk + honey reminds me of everything good that's every happened to me, which i mean as a pretty high compliment. "take off your cotton" is up there with "tremble nice" (in nini camps's "slide") as one of the simplest, hottest lines since janis. she closed with a cover of my favorite things, which i didn't like at first but which sort of exploded after the first verse.

but there's something that bothers me about that song, and i'm only going to say this one time: if whiskers on kittens are one of your favorite things, you're missing some of the best parts of the kitten. ok, so the song doesn't explicitly say that, say, paws are not one of [your] favorite things, or innocent curiousity, or a love of string, but i think it's implied. so wake up.

and while i'm at it, "drop it like it's hot" should really be "drop it like it's hot and you're holding it." jeez. it's incoherent otherwise.