As we were leaving the Chan Centre last night, my husband said to me, “Well, I know what you’re going to be blogging about tomorrow.”

“Nuh-uh!” I said (mature as ever). “I am not that predictable!”

But it turns out I am, especially if you’ve been married to me for like, a billion years.

So! We are huge fans of Iarla O’Lionaird, so went to see his new band, The Gloaming, last night. It is probably not quite accurate to call it his band; the other musicians, especially the fiddler Martin Hayes, are well-known and accomplished in their own right. It’s like a supergroup of Irish musicians, and they were just wonderful. They draw on the traditional repertoire of reels and the lesser-known (on this side of the pond, anyway) sean–nós tradition, but they also compose their own songs around old Irish poems. It was wonderfully old and startlingly new, all at once.

Here’s a (longish) bit to get you started: “The Opening Set,” with which they ended the concert, of course. It was my favourite, and it has everything, the oddball pianist (who was wonderful, and I am not a fan of piano generally), Iarla singing like an angel, and fiddling to set the roof on fire.

The second fiddler is playing an instrument called a Hardanger fiddle, which is like a combination violin, viola, and instrument of pure awesome. As a former string player myself, I was particularly enamoured of his bowing, how he wasn’t afraid to go all breathy and squeaky and light, or conversely to land hard and crunch the string.

We went early and attended an interview with Iarla O’Lionaird and Martin Hayes, which was fun. They teased each other like old friends, which gave some clue as to how they’d work together on stage. Something Hayes said really struck me: that when they were choosing their second fiddle player, it wasn’t technical brilliance they were looking for but ideas.

That’s what I look for, too, in music and in writing — the mind behind the art. I like to see the striving and trying; I like it a little bit messy, honestly. This insight gave me things to look for and think about during the concert — how the musicians responded to each other, what role each one was playing, what they were doing to the reels (unreeling them, sometimes).

They played one encore. I would have sat through ten more, but it’s probably just as well that they didn’t play that many. My son, in the absence of thrash guitar, had melted into a puddle of boredom by the end and was oozing off his chair onto the floor. So the concert was not universally beloved by our entire family. Still, if you like Irish music and have a chance to hear them, I urge you to take it. I believe I was grinning ridiculously the entire time.

We have so much new music this time around! I am really going to have to practice and work hard to keep up. Let me never complain about this kind of work, though: I enjoy it immensely.

Some highlights include “La Roza Enflorese” (a love song in Ladino) and “A Little Pretty Bonny Lass” (harder than it sounds).  Here’s the one I’m most excited about, though, and I can’t even tell you why except that the recording gives me shivers every five seconds or so:

It’s by Orlando di Lasso, that sly devil. There are no bar lines; this is the hard stuff. Just listen to those chord transitions, though. It’s like water, full of motion and sunlight and refraction. I wish it were longer, but maybe it’s hard to endure any more shivers than that.

The sky was up to all kinds of dramatic shenanigans as I was walking the dog this morning. It was overcast, as it so often is in this corner of the continent, but the sun was just rising and for a fleeting moment it found a window and shone underneath the cloud cover. It turned West Van golden, made the ships out on the water glow, and lit up the top of a single yellow tree like it was on fire.

Wow, I thought, this can’t get any lovelier, and then all of a sudden there was a rainbow right in front of me, full arc, crossing the entire sky.

Sometimes nature in Vancouver really doesn’t know when to quit. Get yer gilded lilies right here, folks!

I thought, Huh, it must be raining west of us for there to be a rainbow, and within seconds the sky opened up and it started raining on us. The rainbow and transcendent illumination vanished, and my dog – whose jacket I’d forgotten – started pulling urgently on the leash, trying to run home.

That was all par for the October morning course, though. The thing I don’t want to forget is that I was listening to “Crush” by DMB, and thinking that that’s the song my Journal of Crackpot Musicology ought to tackle next. I have anecdotes dating back to Amy Unbounded, and of course your usual delicious ration of half-baked analysis. Tune in soon*!

*”Soon” is always measured on a geologic time scale around here, of course.