Emotions and math. And swag.

I was going to structure this post about my new fantasy production of The Odd Couple, starring Margaret Glaspy as Felix Unger and Ashlee Juno as Oscar Madison, but it got too wordy.  Just let that idea sink in.  I was going to tell you all about who these women are, but I think I'll just let them tell you themselves.

First, here's Ashlee Juno.  Ten years ago Juno had never played guitar before.  Six years ago she was making music videos in her bedroom.  Today she's been on Empire, she's toured with Bruno Mars and Camila Cabello, and she's got the metrics so that she can tell you the exact number of fans she lost when she came out.

I don't play the guitar, and so I can't tell exactly how useful this guitar lesson is.  But it's a riot.




Margaret Glaspy's whole family (in Red Bluff, California) are musicians, and she grew up playing the fiddle and cut her teeth performing in fiddle festivals in Idaho.  Like Juno, she's only been playing guitar for about ten years.  For a moment, when you first hear her sing, you'll think, oh no, do we really need another Norah Jones?  That thought won't survive the first verse.

These songs are so strange and interesting.  The guitar playing in particular sounds like it's coming from its own world.  Every time she starts playing a riff, it seems to turn into something that wants to be something else.  Every musical idea seems to have another musical idea behind it.




The thing I love about both of these performances is that, to me at least, there doesn't seem to be very much daylight between who these women are when they're performing and who they are when they're not.  

I didn't even know either of these women existed last week, and now I'm writing fanfic about them.  Now I'm thinking Cyrano de Bergerac, only Ashlee's so tongue-tied about the girl she's mad for that Margaret has to feed her all of the lines.

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