Larkin Grimm at the Issue Project Room 10/16/09

Larkin Grimm dedicated her set at the Issue Project Room last Friday to the venue's late founder and artistic director Suzanne Fiol, who recently died of brain cancer; to die of a broken head!—we tried to wrap our minds around it but there was a wind whipping through the room, and our chests were great caverns.
In this here country performance is exhausted by art, rock and roll, and miracles and we fans bore witness as the lady hit rock and roll with a stick and drew from it a violent, bridge and tunnel Papagayo. It carried the spirit of Suzanne Fiol’s heart, not head, and conjured the ghost ships of those Spanish armadas it had once upon a time nudged along their merry discovering ways. Larkin Grimm doesn’t cradle her guitar in order to keep the song precious, but she wears it out like she does her lungs, and her ecstatically open address laments the lot of us as part of the still plodding procession of pioneers receding backward into the annals of American memory in search of the last wilderness. She sings to the weary searcher and colonist, pats down a bed of moss and asks America in its own voice to finally go to sleep. The high Nor’easter settles obediently and our blown minds can all rest easy into the earth’s downy matter with her plangent lullaby.