Listen and Learn

Maria Solheim’s “Train Underwater” slinks through the ear buds, introducing itself with a series of muddled swishes and string scrapes that barely step over into tonal territory; just before the simple, clean vocals and compressed low-end jabs.

“At tiny ray of light sneaks up…”

The Franktuary (formerly Hot Dogma) is on Oliver and 3rd. Reflecting the infrequency of my patronage of this place – usually only when David was here, or in town – the album and artist is a low-key aberration in my entire iPod, which was filled with mostly turgid abrasiveness. The quasi-hipster meeting place is situated in the basement of the Trinity Episcopal Cathedral: a squat slice of stony history bookended by the utilitarianism of modern office buildings. The interior of the single-room eatery is bordered on one wall with raised windows, giving those of us at the bar a look at the scissoring lower halves of people passing us up for a different story. The ambulatory bustle sweeps through the urban lunchtime rush. Train underwater, indeed.

“Meanwhile there are seagulls swimming through the atmosphere…”

I’m at the observed end of the song’s narrative discourse. A small Norwegian girl (I admire her music and her husband’s talent) glimpses patches of red and white illuminations under the sea and fancies the presence of human life via locomotive transit and proceeds to extend the fantasy to explores just what might be going on under the flowing, translucent gray-blue carpet of water. The mirabile visu of the entire event spurns her artistic inquiry. The tableau of the majestic American downtown city, crowned with concrete and bejeweled with the end product of engineering in the collective rebellion against gravity, slyly contradicts the descriptors of that enigmatic body of shifting waters and lucidly unobstructed horizons.

“Train underwater. Can someone see the light?”