Diana Darby
Fantasia Ball
© 2003 Diana Darby (795528001928)
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A childlike/dreamlike journey captured on 4-track cassette, bringing to mind the intimacy of the third Velvet Underground lp
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albums you will love
- DIANA DARBY: Naked Time
- JENIFER JACKSON: Birds
- PATRICK PARK: Under the Unminding Skies
- ADRIAN CROWLEY: When You Are Here You Are Family
genres you will love
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"Her music favorably recalls Kendra Smith's Opal. Or, if that's too obscure a reference by this time, just imagine her songs would sound right in a David Lynch film."
- Al Ritchie/Isthmus
When Arthur Lee was released from prison, the first guitar he touched was Diana Darby's; it and she haven't been the same since. Her second album, Fantasia Ball is unabashedly naked, and deliciously twisted.
Naked Time, Diana's debut CD, was hailed by critics "conjuring visions of a wounded mind running amok in a flowing field of flowers"- CMJ weekly. Featured on NPR Weekend Edition, as well as other prominent radio broadcasts, Diana has since toured the US, had one near-death experience, and contributed to acclaimed compilation discs. Of special note, is Acaurela Songs, on the Spanish label of the same name (acuareladiscos.com), which also features M.Ward, Tara Jane O'Neil, and Mark Eitzel; and Nothing Left To Lose - a tribute to Kris Kristoferson, (Calexico, Richard Buckner, Grandaddy), on Incidental Music. On the latter, Diana's version of Jesus was a Capricorn, singled out as "a revelation," in the SF Weekly, inadvertently provided the first steps toward the recording process of Fantasia Ball.
"The Kristoferson song was recorded live in the studio, and we kept the 'scratch' vocal. I liked the feel of a complete vocal take, so I resisted the temptation to re-do anything". The logical progression was to record herself. "I didn't care how perfect it sounded, I just wanted it to be all me. I even played lead guitar."
From the first line of Fly Away "If I could be anything at all, I would step out of myself and I'd never call" to the conclusion of Blue Turns To Grey (a Rolling Stones song that Diana makes her own), the voice sounds like it's being whispered to you personally. The performances captured are what Diana calls "suspended. " They are either first takes being sung as they were written, or radical re-workings that happened only once. "When I get 'suspended', it's like something takes over me. I am in an altered state where everything else around me disappears."
While Fly Away feels like a Gershwin song set to a Grimm's Fairy Tale, Summer and Falling Down were influenced by the poetry of Mary Oliver. "It was May and the dogwood tree outside my window was already losing its petals. I
started thinking about all of the things in this world I feel powerless over. And then I wrote Summer - 'Better get yourself a flower before it's too late.' I was referring to spring ending, but now I think it applies to the impending war and our loss of innocence."
Diana's music often sounds of another time. As for influences, she is known to have worn out CD copies of Forever Changes and The Magical World of the Strands. Caroline is a daydream-like song about a girl who leaves a trail of roses everywhere she walked. The Only One Who's Listening combines fatalism with a White Album-esque beauty. Happy has crushed velvet (underground) intensity, and Summer is a music box mind trip with instruments appearing that aren't even there.
Mother is Diana, hiss and the sound of a siren in the distance. The lethal combination of mother-anger, desperation, and Diana on drums combine to make My Own a departure (and possible launching pad for the next CD). The song builds from a low simmer to a boil and back again, summed up by the first line, "I feel your blood run through my veins. I pray to God we're not the same." " My 'lead guitar' is more about me screaming than it is about some
musician hitting the right notes."
To complete Fantasia Ball, Diana packed up her cassettes and flew them and herself to Nest Recording in Brooklyn, where J.Z. Barrell provided additional elements of color. Among J.Z.'s contributions are the guitar on If It Feels Good, the solo on Happy, and the guero on Summer. J.Z. also handled all the bass (except for Falling Down), mixing, re-mixing, and mastering. In between trips to Brooklyn Diana visited True Tone Studios in Nashville, where David Henry added cello to Fly Away and Ferry, along with bass and organ to Falling Down.
Listen for the sound of Trouble (Diana's black lab) barking and refrigerator
hums....
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Diana Darby's second album redefines intimacy /
author: murray jasonHouston-born, Nashville-based Diana Darby whispers the truthful, existential songs on her second album Fantasia Ball as though reading to herself from her diary, very late at night, in her dimly lit bedroom. It’s just unadorned and fragile voice and guitar captured to cassette tape, along with the most sparing embellishment from other instruments, that paint these gripping, gorgeous emotiscapes. Lo fi? Uh huh. You’ll find refrigerator hum, odd buzzes, an ambulance siren, her dog barking, and plenty of tape hiss on this disc. This is good. Wrapping such music in a pretty, tidy sonic package would have been like putting crunchy, bright candy coating around salmon sushi. Darby’s lyrics, like the poetry on her website, are a study in intimate minimalism. Take her song Summer: Summer, Summer’s comin’ And I feel the rain There’s nothing I can do To change a thing Or the even softer and slower Happy: You say you want me to be happy You say you want me to be happy all the time I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know How to do that Darby and her musical partners Mark Linn, JZ Barrell, and David Henry have done the right thing by putting nothing between you and her voice but a cassette recorder—as Darby put nothing between her internal world and her expression of these songs. Now, songs so simple and delicate work only if they express a universal truth. And this woman’s damn well tapped into that, no mistake. There’s a lot of emptiness and darkness in Fantasia Ball’s quiet, beautiful tracks—reflecting the Buddhist notion that you cannot connect with life without embracing its absence. For every artist there’s a line between what a song means to them and the version they offer to the world. Intimate singer/songwriters let you closer. Darby, in an act of courage or perhaps because she just never learned about that boundary, invites you to come over and sit down right beside her, shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh, on her side of that line.