sanssouci

Rufus came to town this past week to play a show at the State Theatre so I hit the Hennepin theatre district with a few friends and had a blast. He is one of my favorite musicians writing in any genre right now and, as he played the show solo with only a piano or guitar, it was really interesting to see the songs I know so well (some of which are heavily arranged and orchestrated) stripped down to their skeletal structures.








One of my favorite songs is "Nobody's Off the Hook" from his Release The Stars album and, thankfully, he performed it. On the album he is accompanied by a string quartet and a piano part that's been stripped down quite a bit from what he plays solo. The reason for this is that all the string parts (which get incredibly harmonically complex at times) have been lifted almost verbatim from the original song as he wrote it on the piano. Rufus isn't a "four chords" kind of guy (although he writes songs like this occasionally) and this is why I love his music so much. He actually wrote a really catchy song about Frederick the Great's summer palace in Potsdam which my dad informed me he heard playing in a grocery store in southern Minnesota recently.

It's so easy to get distracted by the beauty of the melody and words that, unfortunately, you miss the fact that his piano parts are far from simple arpeggiations of chords. Case in point: here's a YouTube rendition of that song from a live performance. Stick with it to the end and you'll hear some of the complexity I'm talking about.

And just to prove my point even further I'll include the fact that his very first opera, Prima Donna, will be premiering in England next summer. I'm so glad I finally got the opportunity to see him live. Hopefully he'll be back around sometime soon.