All posts by Zoe Krylova

About Zoe Krylova

Zoe Zoe Krylova is a poet, mother, doula, tarot reader and development assistant at the University of Virginia’s Women’s Center. If she could relive her childhood she definitely would have joined the school band and played the drums. She grew up listening to her mother’s 45’s of the Archies, Peter, Paul and Mary, and BJ Thomas and her brother’s LPs of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Moody Blues and Pink Floyd. Some of the concerts she witnessed while an adolescent include the Thompson Twins, Billy Joel, Cheap Trick, David Bowie, REO Speedwagon, the Romantics, Squeeze and Prince. Her musical world cracked open in college and beyond when she started listening to psychedelic rock, punk, electric folk, free jazz, world music, reggae and a few kick ass divas. Because the price of a babysitter is often prohibitive, she and her husband tend to take turns going to see shows at local venues in Charlottesville, Virginia. She blogs about what ever strikes her fancy at vale of evening fog.

This is the Soft Voice of the Evening

Cut-Out Bin

A Tribute to Devendra Banhart

And hey there mister happy squid, you move so psychedelically
You hypnotize with your magic dance all the animals in the sea
For Sure

[audio:http://stuckbetweenstations.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/littleyellowspider.mp3]
Devendra Banhart – Little Yellow Spider

Banhart At first spin of Devendra Banhart’s Little Yellow Spider, one might think it a children’s song. That is what came to mind when I first heard it on a mixed CD a friend sent as a New Year’s gift. Then I reached the line about the pig mating with a man. The appeal only grew.

Who was this poetic troubadour artfully warbling lyrics that were both playful and taboo, naturalistic and psychedelic, odd and profane? Suddenly a drawer had been opened and in it, amongst the lacy vintage shirts and bright paisley dresses, lay the sparkling spangles and baubles of wonder, magic and healing. Every time Little Yellow Spider came on my daughter would yipe, “I love this song,” and I would cough loudly over the pig verse.

I was driven to learn more about this man who could equally endear my child and myself, yet had a secret darkness, a seedy underbelly, a heart that had been broken by human folly.

And hey there Mrs. Lovely Moon, you’re lonely and you’re blue
It’s kind of strange the way you change
But then again we all do, too.

Over the course of a few months I purchased all of Devendra Banhart’s CD’s and found myself enraptured by song in a way I hadn’t been since my birth in the Summer of Love. Wordsmith of alchemical poetry, knitter of connections between microcosm and macrocosm, Banhart was projecting a wolf cry for our generation. In one album I could find pagan spell work, poignant love ballad and subversive declarations of liberation. Banhart was showman with a bowler hat and cane, skinny 60’s love child smoking peace pipe amongst oat straw and star thistle, edgy outrageous queen performing acts of desire behind closed doors, mother, yogi, long haired child. All this, and multilingual vocalist extraordinaire, who can, as my husband likes to say, “play his axe.”

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