Jolie Holland at Bimbo's

I’ve been down this month because I’m selling my house and saying goodbye, forever, to my oldest friend. Funny, then, that I found this Jolie Holland CD, Escondida, amongst the CDs at Phoenix Books. It’s full of these old-timey songs that sound as though they were discovered in the bat-infested attic of an abandoned house in Appalachia. During my drive through the Santa Cruz Mountains to retrieve a few last things from my own empty home — my grandmother’s china, the wedding dress I decided not to wear, a jade plant that would never give up no matter how much I neglected it — I listened to that CD over and over again, and I found it increasingly hard not to cry because certain songs stirred up memories of old feelings while pretty accurately describing my present. I was being thoroughly haunted by the ghosts of my former feelings.

So when I discovered that Jolie Holland was playing at Bimbo’s 365 Club I purchased tickets right away, because her songs move me. Which was one thing when I was alone in my car, but another thing entirely in a club full of people. I was lucky enough to get a table next to the stage, which I shared with a very young and very sweet hippie couple. Actually, they saw me sitting on the floor and offered me a chair. I consider myself a friendly person, but compared to these kids I felt positively guarded. That is, I was guarding myself from feeling too much that evening, and as a result I was more skeptical than friendly, myself.

We ordered beers and the hippie couple said a lot of admiring things about Jolie Holland’s talents. In the meantime I found myself distracted by a point of criticism. It’s the strange way she draws out her vowels — sometimes they’re so distended that listeners have trouble deciphering her lyrics. But I didn’t bring it up. Would it kill me to let this happy couple go on being happy?

Then Jolie Holland came on and she started whistling a tune while the band played softly behind her. And my skepticism fell flat on its face because something occurred to me. While Jolie Holland’s lyrics are undeniably lovely (as in, check out these lines from “Black Stars”),:
The moon is wizened and it is old
As a toad in a Chinese story

She’s really a tunesmith at heart. Here’s why I say this — Jolie Holland is the best whistler I’ve ever heard; she’s so good, in fact, that when she did it on the CD I assumed it wasn’t her at all, but some stand-in. But no. Jolie Holland’s voice is an instrument and while her lyrics add a little something, we are meant to comprehend her songs by understanding what is articulate about the notes she sings and the way she delivers them. Listening to a Jolie Holland melody is the aural equivalent of looking at an old album of childhood photographs; the people and places captured inside are familiar and strange and they speak to you in a language beneath words.

That night at the concert, I dearly missed something I’d traded in for new memories. I wanted my home back, my old friend, everything. But I was in San Francisco, at Bimbo’s, enjoying this chance to revisit the past from a much safer distance. Distance was exactly what I needed.

As I drained my beer, I watched a couple slow-dancing near the edge of the stage. When they finished I discovered that the hippie couple I was sitting with had bought me another beer. We toasted and it was a great place, that moment, and now it’s become one of those lovely, achey scenes from the past.

That night at the concert my heart said its final goodbye to the house I once lived in. Any time I want to visit it again, I guess I’ll let my ears guide me to Escondida and to Jolie Holland’s lonesome-sounding whistle, because now, my house is gone. But it’s a true consolation to know that we, all of us, are here in this city full of friendly faces, and here is pretty neat, too.