Following Geoffrey Wilson's remarkable set for Muse and Music on Thursday (Matthew Van Deventer is writing the review), I was speaking with the President of the General Society And Tradesmen, Victoria Dangle.
Ms. Dangle compared the singer-songwriter to Jackson Browne and thinking about it later, I tend to agree. Wilson, like Browne, has a very quietly distelled intensity. It seems so intent on fairness -because he writes songs about the civil war from so many viewpoints, it masks the question, of what Wilson says, "everybody, even the worst people, having some good".
This intensenity is very much a miasma, a mirage? I don't doubt Wilson's sincerity in paying tribute to Stonewall Jackson for teaching his slaves how to read and write, but I also don't doubt there is an edge ofawareness in his use of the n word done in such sharp contradistinction to hip hop.
For all the inherent mainstream beauty of both Browne's and Wilson's voice, neither of them are actually soft singers. The quietness isn't the quiet of, say, Bread or the Carpenters.
It isn't soft rock, it is quietly said. The temperate of temper through self control.
ps: i took the pix myself, I am certain there will be better upcoming.