In softly and serenely covering “It’s Not Easy Being Green,” Jake Bellows reminded an Omaha crowd about his own specificity as a songwriter and performer, and, even more, what he makes of it.
As much as the song is about alienation, about being different, it’s also about not standing out — a preposterous sentiment from the former frontman of Neva Dinova and the author of one of 2013’s most conceptually layered albums.
Of course, the song was always a bit ironic: a face-in-crowd lament murmured by a bright green, singing frog.
The Bellows who stopped by Slowdown Wednesday night in the midst of a national solo tour (from his current home in California to his former home of Omaha) confirmed that which is both new and old about him. In a more-than-20-song set he laughed through old songs, he heckled, he flubbed, he stupefied, he challenged the very premise of musical consumerism and entertainment that brought him to the stage that night. His definition of the night as a communal experience, not an artistic showcase, undermines the premise of even writing this review. Or calling it a review, maybe. You wouldn’t evaluate a family reunion. How do you grade a man’s journey from the despaired writer of song’s like “I’ve Got A Feeling,” which Bellows refused to play on Wednesday because “it hurts me,” to someone who swims through a new kind of enlightenment?
So “review” could be the wrong approach, but you could still write about it.
Contrast Bellows’ self-deprecating long-windedness across a marathon headlining set with opener McCarthy Trenching. While singing, Dan McCarthy laughed at the slow tide of people filtering into Slowdown to wrap their arms around Jake Bellows right in front of the stage. It was that sort of night, with Bellows’ tourmate, a Weimaraner named Dragon, trotting around the Slowdown front room, weaving in and out of strangers’ legs.
There’s a decided tightness, a profound lack of haste to McCarthy Trenching performances, even if on Wednesday McCarthy drew attention to the expanding and sometimes fictionalized worlds he creates. Of the song “Oh Nancy,” from McCarthy’s 2011 album, Fresh Blood, which comes off as an apology to his mother about the lifestyle of a touring musician, McCarthy admitted he only ever went to one pool hall, while on tour in Texas. The depths of that imagination are understated in the one-liners of the song and a finger-picking style that’s perhaps more like the way McCarthy plays the piano than just running a few fingers over a static chord.
Sans piano on Wednesday, McCarthy embraced the intimacy of the night with a seldom-performed new song, “I Just Stay Home.”
“Part of songwriting is to attempt to understand other people,” McCarthy said, explaining “I Just Stay Home” as a try at comprehending the life of a “weird uncle,” a soft, living elegy for an overly domesticated man who stays home sweating through his underwear, since the state disallowed him from driving. And while the song stands out in McCarthy’s discography for its lack of playfulness and, more notably, its lack of symmetry and resolution — the man in the song literally just stays home — the lyrics brim with their own agency. There’s a certain way in which lyrics escape McCarthy’s mouth in which he is not a song-teller or, when they’re funny, a joke-teller. Even yarns of decay are alive.
The living energy in Bellows’ set came across in its unpredictability, a tone that was set from moment one.
In the midst of touring, Bellows disclosed that he lacks for sleep, setting the table, a la his theories from New Ocean, that all life, and therefore concert performances, will be a meeting of different tones and frequencies.
“People who don’t sleep give off a weird energy.”
As for the mistakes, and there were many — half a dozen forgotten lyrics, a few incorrect chords — return to Bellows’ own definition of the night for excuse and exoneration, a reason for their total irrelevance to any conversation about the set. Insofar as Bellows postulated music was not about filling the bar or a producer-consumer relationship between the artist and the people standing in front of him, what do errors mean in the context of a family gathering? The idea of perfection in performance is a foreign concept to a potluck or a poker game. That was the atmosphere, his scatteredness appearing utterly familiar to the room of people. Of Oscar, his silent — ”painfully shy” — miniature robot, who had his own microphone, the singer further lambasted himself: “some haggard old weirdo who brought a robot. Nice one.”
Bellows repeatedly poked fun at his age, diving through the Neva Dinova discography with songs like “Dragon,” “Supercomputer” and “Dances Fantastic.” Guitar solos are for young men, Bellows explained, after skipping a few. He joked of male impotency, while betraying the self-effacing, ageist remarks with a stirring vocal command. “Dances Fantastic” wiped the smile from the performer’s face as vocals skewed piercing and dark, demonstrating a tenacity for sapping each vocal phrase to its end, a feat only possible via nurtured lung capacity and deliberate breathing.
If there was a moment that most personified Jake Bellows on Wednesday, his singularity, his otherness, the simultaneous joy and complexity of his theories about projecting a better world through art, it was during a minute in which he said nothing.
He turned on a small, mono-melodic jingle that came through Oscar’s golden maw of a mouth. It was, at once, the most miniscule ditty, but the kind you felt could be the roots of any of the pop songs on New Ocean. Bellows stood before the crowd and beamed, as though he’d never heard the song before, like a confident father whose son was playing his first piano recital from back over his shoulder.
It lasted all of 45 seconds. Fittingly, no one knew how to react. From somewhere inside his chest, Oscar’s artificial heart glowed orange through a hole in his chin, the smallest exteriorization of a flaming spirit in the child, in his creator.
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s managing editor. Reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org