In praise of... Miss America by Mary Margaret O'Hara

GLORIOUS

http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=vQbAr1DCjYw

It's just some jerk to it, j-jerk to it.

from an article where several current writers talk about their favourite songwriters in the wake of the Dylan Nobel prize
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/05/bob-dylan-nobel-favourite-songwriter

Mary Margaret O’Hara by Lavinia Greenlaw

An impression of distillation and deep thought … Mary Margaret O’Hara Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer

When I was 19 and newly in the grip of writing, I joined a band. Asked to produce lyrics, I intensified my poems. Perhaps I thought that they could be freeze-dried and then rehydrated with a tune. The results were ungainly. Good singer-songwriters must have an extra layer of judgment that enables them to see what most of us need to be shown. Mary Margaret O’Hara is best known for Miss America (1988), and has released just one album since.

O'Hara builds songs out of spare phrases that light each other as the parts of a poem should

She builds songs out of spare phrases that light each other as the parts of a poem should. She sings this way too, as if making a series of gestures which have taken their time to become clear. You get the impression of distillation and deep thought in the making of songs that resist their own weight: “You just want to push somebody / And a body won’t let you. Just want to move somebody / And a body won’t let you.” O’Hara resists stabilisation, something I understood when I saw her perform live. She has a decisive but off-kilter way of moving – a lurch, a flick of the hand, a foot stamp that are impossible to relate to what you’re hearing. It’s as if she has a sense of detail so latent that no one else can detect it. Her lyrics are published in brief lines full of quiet swerves: “So sorry if I can’t stop pretending / So sorry if I don’t let you go / Like this but not like this is ending / I think you know. / I think you know. / Help me lift you up.” They can be heartbreaking in their generosity.

• A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde by Lavinia Greenlaw is published by Faber.

had never heard this record before but laura snapes' sunday review of it was excellent https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mary-margaret-ohara-miss-america/

so now "body's in trouble" is really doing me in

oh Brad I'm surprised you never heard it, it's really a one of a kind record and seems like something you would really love

I'm similarly shocked! prob the best album Toronto ever produced

Other than The Trinity Session, that is.

She's on the new Fucked Up record!

Barely. She's in there somewhere. But it's good anyway.