Mia Doi Todd @ SF

Last night I found myself face to face with Mia Doi Todd. I didn't realize this until she took stage later, as I'd never actually seen her. She's much smaller than I imagined. Though she seemed to enlarge behind her guitar.

I had come to her show at Cafe DuNord after listening to her album (ordered a few months back from the small LA label that published it), which I did after watching a video clip online for her song My Room is White. As it happens, my room is white (something I've always found relaxing to wake to, and less distracting to sleep in) which I mentioned to the friend who recommended me the link. She didn't think it was nearly as interesting as I did. The song was enticing nonetheless.

Music, as I relate to it, is fully conceptual and in some sense unattainable. Our brains allow us to receive and store information by discerning patterns of greater and greater scope. This intelligence spawned language, first in the form of simple constructs encoded in tone and time, and then in more complex articulations involving sophisticated technique derived from our human language skills. Music is an example of such a pattern that we're able to process and then discern emotional messaging.

The goal of the musician, thus, is to imply the music in as clear and accurate a way as possible, and in essence become invisible. The goal of the listener is to discern the music from the sounds produced by the musician. The better each of them are, the more salient the music will be.

And so with attention piqued, I could not have predicted my emotion as I heard French a capella. I was enraptured. The implication of music occurs for me most easily when the least amount of sound gets in its way. It's for this reason that I've stayed attached to compositions with strong vocals with simple acoustic accompaniment. There is so much music that can be swept into the swells and folds of a rare vocal talent. And as this magic went down, it lit up my left frontal lobe with high bandwidth emotion. Miss Todd completed her show with various songs from the album Manzanita (which I own) and several I'd not heard. She was accompanied only by her Taylor.

I closed my eyes once in a while, and thought about my own unlikely musicianship. I'd been whining about not getting a violin when I was 9, well into my 20s. All the while I poured energy into self-destructive behaviors, feeling anger and envy around musicians of every kind. They were the chosen few, and I wasn't happy about it.

And then several years ago, my friend Jason Sugg scolded me on the phone: "Go get a guitar now." He had heard enough of my whining. I'd earned the nickname BIM years before for being a Bitter Indian Man. The bitter malaise seemed to have no end.

I did go get a guitar that day. But it sat dusty for nearly 4 years until someone I met named Farah Kidwai (an accomplished opera singer and now dear friend) suggested I take voice lessons. I didn't really like the guitar because it seemed too detached (at least at the time). Voice was always my most personal sense of expression. The years of looking down instead of forward left me with a suite of terrible habits including massive self doubt, shame, self sabotage, the works. So it was something more of a complete spiritual turnaround to find out the hopelessness was just a gimmick I'd learned from too much t.v., and that there were instructions available for how to use my diaphragm and my larynx. The realization opened new doors, got me to actually start using my guitar, and was inevitably the reason I was standing in...

And suddenly I was back at Cafe DuNord, and taking in an honest performance, I felt comfort. That despite the somber intervals and austere lyrics, Miss Todd had allowed me to see a clearer picture of my own love for things lost, and things hopeful, through musicianship so beautifully transparent.