Jukebox the Ghost is made up of three guys from Philadelphia who met in 2003 at George Washington University, and they’ve been touring since their first album Let Live & Let Ghosts was released in 2008. Their name combines lyrics from 70s musician Captain Beefheart with a line from the 50s Russian novel Pnin, and even though I’ve never heard of either of those things until just now, I think the words “Jukebox the Ghost” capture everything about them – their music belongs in a bouncing 50s jukebox but their lyrics have a lot to do with all sorts of heavy subjects.
Last night was their second concert at Brighton Music Hall within a week, coming back two Thursdays in a row at the exact same time but with two different openers. Ben plays the keyboard and sings on the stage’s right side, Tommy sings and plays guitar across from him, and Jesse’s on drums in the back in a short-sleeved collared shirt decorated with bright red flowers.
Since the first time I saw them in 2010, Ben’s sprouted a faux-hawk that makes for great horizontal optics as his head bounces in front of the mic, Jesse added a blonde streak to his hair, and Tommy must have been happy with his hairstyle because he looks exactly the same. All these guys can play the shit out of their instruments, and having two very different voices at either side of the stage helps mix things up a bit, although last night’s show at Brighton Music Hall was different from most.
Since they were here just a week before, Jukebox played more of their very first album instead of covering everything on their two latest: Everything Under The Sun released in 2010 and Safe Travels in 2012. Their first album is darker than all the others, with songs about the end of the world and one they played last night called “Lighting Myself on Fire.” Their titles are intense and their lyrics follow suit but in a there’s-nothing-to-do-but-laugh kind of way. In Let Live & Let Ghosts those lyrics were closer to the melodies that sometimes went minor and dark and dramatic. But even “Lighting Myself on Fire” is more of a love song than anything else, and most of those first album songs do have the Jukebox gene: bubbly dynamic music given so much meaning with words.
So last night Jukebox alternated between new and old songs, performing the “Good Day,” “Hold It In,” and “Under My Skin” hits from Let Live & Let Ghosts,but also covering “My Heart’s the Same,” “Static to the Heart” (with an extra guitar solo to boot), and “Beady Eyes on the Horzon.” From Everything Under the Sun they performed “Schizophrenia (video above!),” “Half-Crazy,” “Mistletoe,” and “The Popular Thing.” But they started out with their most recent, super catchy/mostly happy songs from Safe Travels: “Somebody,” “Say When,” “Adulthood,” “Ghosts in Empty Houses,” and “Everybody Knows.”
In the middle of the set the band took to performing covers they had learned to play for a friend’s wedding over New Years. “So if you’re wondering why those guys don’t know the words, we don’t know the words,” Ben said before they kicked it off with the 80s song “She Drives Me Crazy.” It was so catchy it made it physically necessary for me to dance, which is why the video above is kind of shaky and doesn’t include the whole song.
Tommy and Ben both have pretty distinct voices so it’s fun to hear a song you know and a voice you know combine for the first time, especially when they’re classics like “Don’t Stop Believing” and “I Believe in a Thing Called Love.” You can really tell how much they love playing those instruments during covers because it’s not really about the words or the message, it’s all just for fun and because the crowd loves it and wants to sing along – which is helpful when someone on stage actually doesn’t know the words.
Overall, it was 90 solid minutes of music that included a three song encore and lots of dedicated fans. Jukebox more than deserves it. This is their first big headlining tour after opening for Ben Folds, Free Energy, and The Barenaked Ladies among others over the past five years.
Even though they’ve been popular for a while, this tour makes it feel more official – they’ve officially/definitely “made it” and it’s so exciting to see how many other people love music that’s happy and meaningful instead of just noisy and mad.
“We all met here in DC, when the three of us were going to school at GW and started out by playing crappy charity events and open mike nights. We were one of the first bands to play at the Mitchell Hall theater when they built that stage in the basement. First we played a lot of shows to nobody, then all of a sudden there were tons of people there and we started selling out ticketed shows. As the guinea pigs for that venue, we got really lucky.”
See more from Jukebox including upcoming tour dates on their website.
The band also has a free iPhone app to get fans even more involved, plus they post Tommy’s Jukebox-style cartoons of the places they tour on the band’s Facebook page, which is kind of a whole other type of art.
From within a plain framed canvas sticks a nail, and atop it stands a matching silver bug, holding some kind of weight across its shoulders. Existing somewhere between reality and a Pixar movie, the little silver fellow is given character, a purpose, and the ability to walk on two legs. The nail he balances upon isn’t in the center of the canvas either, it’s just off to the side, and the little bug walks towards the wide ocean of white as if he were unaware of the inability to travel through physical matter.
But that doesn’t matter anyways, because in this artwork he’s frozen in time, and as if there were three different suns, three of his shadows stretch out from where the nail meets the canvas – two drawn on with pencil and a third that is an actual shadow, created by the lights above booth 2.11 at VOLTA NY.
A work by Colombian artist Sebastian Mejia, the strong little bug was echoed throughout the artist’s booth at the fair, sometimes framed on portable canvas like this one and other times just nailed right into the wall with shadows drawn temporarily. And even though the bug would have squashed if it were alive and real, the image of something so inconsequential trying so hard at something was adorable and disheartening at the same time, since the task seems so menial and even if the bug did succeed at whatever it was he was working towards, no one would care regardless.
But it’s probably not so much about what he’s trying to do, but about how we perceive what he’s trying to do. He’s immortalized by two carefully drawn shadows, meaning that there are at least four different representations of him in one place – a factor multiplied every time someone takes a photo. He’s strong the way we imagine hardworking insects to be, but he’s silver, and a shinier silver than the nail he balances upon and the q-tip shaped weight he carries across his shoulders. He’s smaller than the disposable pieces of cotton we use to clean our ears, but he’ll survive much longer and be remembered for much more.
It’s hard to fully appreciate this one in two-dimensions, although it is very much a two-dimensional work. Works of art framed in shiny gold appear to stretch back into the distance, but everything is actually made of something shiny and plastic, even the fading black shadows scrawled beneath each work. The trains within the paintings that look farthest away are just as close to you as anything else, they’re just smaller.
Shadowed wall drawings come from a cracked pedestal on which an ancient statue should stand – the floor and walls both filled in with gray to become the silhouettes of something nonexistent but expected. Sebastian’s whole booth, titled “Sombras Nada Mas” or “Shades Nothing More,” created a game between your brain and your eyes, as each piece forced a recognition of what was represented and what was really there.
Sebastian Mejia was represented at VOLTA by balzerARTprojects in Basel, Switzerland. According to his artist statement at the fair, his work “focuses upon the dissemination of visual information in different cultures.” He uses his work to examine the differences in symbolism between European and Latin American cultures, but all with a heavy-handed sense of comic relief to lighten the mood.
“Mejia’s work is an epistemological enquiry into the nature of knowledge, how it is acquired, presented, and how it can be retained, communicated, and implemented… Based on the ‘Allegory of the Cave,’ Mejia argues that language is a mere shadow of reality. Translated into the ‘visual,’ shadows of objects cannot represent reality of forms – truth must be experienced rather than told as language fails to convey belief. As ephemeral as his work seems at first sight, they are also about monumental historical and intellectual concepts, such as cultural interactivity, lightness, and adaptation.”
For more of Sebastian’s work, see his website – on the homepage there’s a pretty interesting video of the artist reading a book about Vasari in a library.
Little Bee tells the story of two women whose lives are accidentally intertwined. The first is a small 16-year-old African refugee who finally escapes two years in the UK’s Immigration Detention Center at the beginning of the book. The second is a British wife and young mother who began a successful women’s magazine before her new family undergoes an overwhelming tragedy (no spoilers here!).
“We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret”
The chapters bounce back and forth between each protagonist, Little Bee and Sarah, with each taking turns narrating their own side of the story. At first its confusing – why are we following these two separate characters? – but Cleave is sure to show the link between the two even from the first chapter. One of Little Bee’s few possessions is a business card belonging to Sarah’s husband, and she uses the printed number to call him as soon as she’s given the chance to use a phone. It takes half the book to discover exactly what terrible tragedy these women experienced together two years prior, but its the deep scarring kind that forges an unbreakable bond between them.
Little Bee came from a small village in Nigeria, escaping when it was overrun by violent men thirsty for oil and money. Her experiences give her a strange combination of innocence and maturity – she understands death more than most but remains fearful of her own sexuality because she’s only witnessed that taken advantage of. She seems younger than 16 because she only just learned English, taking the Queen’s language as her only defense in the dank cells that hold the fugitive immigrants just looking for a better life.
But Little Bee somehow still sees the glass half full – a miracle just on its own. She paints her toes bright red every night in captivity, hiding them under her steel-toed boots so that she can still feel pretty under all that protection. She’s released from the Detention Center with a few other girls, and each are given a clear plastic bag to hold all their worldly belongings. When Little Bee sees a beautiful girl in a yellow sari with nothing in her bag,
“At first I thought it was empty but then I thought, Why do you carry that bag, girl, if there is nothing in it? I could see her sari through it, so I decided she was holding a bag full of lemon yellow. That is everything she owned when they let us girls out.”
She has such a simple outlook on life, whereas Sarah’s couldn’t get any more complicated, and when the two women finally do meet in the book, Sarah does everything she can to help the little girl. She recognizes how smart she is, how kind and how loyal – not to mention how much she could learn from this 16-year-old who has seen more terrible things than she could even imagine.
“Truly there is no flag for us floating people. We are millions, but we are not a nation. We cannot stay together. Maybe we get together in ones and twos, for a day or a month or even a year, but then the wind changes and carries the hope away. Death came and I left in fear. Now all I have is my shame and the memory of bright colors and the echo of Yevette’s laugh. Sometimes I feel as lonely as the Queen of England.”
You can read a Q&A with Chris Cleave about the origins of the book on his website, and the whole incredible book is only $10 on Amazon. Read it to find out what happens for yourself.
