Eliza Rickman

.....Where the hell is this place, I can see myself arriving late. I park. Its near Division by where the Puerto Rican flags are. I meander about until I find it. I find a door that leads to the second floor stairs. I can faintly hear a singing voice ascending the stairs with me. I gently open the door to the most intimate, quiet, attentive house crowd. Its Eliza, at long last. Right away its the best place to have her in concert as well as the most rare.

Let me read that back.....the best and most....alright....its not a regular venue you can just look up. Its a bloody house with the familiar feeling Chicago apartment where white people live. An old school latino owned house would have a cross some where as the first thing you see. The more graven images of Mary or the Saints give away Mexican catholics.....anyway.... The apartment felt old like it had history, and typical of Chicago. It felt familiar enough to me. It was easy to picture an immigrant family once living there. I saw lots of vinyl, a record player. The only thing that let me just open this door was this faint angelic voice. The place was awash with red, from the high ceiling to the walls. The living room was with its windows to the street shaded a gentle red.  Perhaps it was the light. Its not showing up like that in the few pictures I could take. It was the second floor. That apartment may actually look nothing as how I describe it. My bloody expressionist memory does fuck with me. It was the middle of her set. She was playing her auto harp....I do recall the toy piano played later. 

She ended her set with accordion. She covered Johnny Cash. No lie, it hits real hard, her cover. I'm so lucky she don't speak or sing in spanish. Them songs would make me cry. She's just a language barrier away from doing that. I say that because her songs cut deep......I mean, I mean....I imagine so. Its not just her writing and singing from the heart. Its reflecting one's own as well. Her arsenal of instruments seem just right to disarm you and make you ponder.
    I always seem to catch her in places that are a shift away and within the familiar.  If Borges had a labyrinth I know it has rooms in Pilsen, entire fucking blocks. What I'm saying is that you can never really know a place. Its always in a state of reveal. Something you missed. And so its revealed in layers. Its in this way I get to see an Eliza Rickman show. The Lab has rooms in Pilsen. We have stories there to hold on to. The first show I saw her in, they had this theater all set up for her and it seemed to even match her costume.....yeah this ambitious place, the entrance was in the back, by the alley, near 18th and Halsted. Forgot the name. I believe Eliza was touring for the EP Gild The Lily. It was an iconic performance for me. A deep listen to her lyrics are impacting. You catch yourself in a moment of self reflection even as....hmm you get into her music. Her official videos always take me back to that near forgotten theater venue.  I don't know what happened to it. I've never been back. Feels like it disappeared in all but in my own expressionist memory. It seemed like an old space, small and holding on to its relevance. The bloody labyrinth.
  The venues I've seen Eliza play hit like an urban Twin Peaks visual dream-like experience because I never seem to return to them, or nothing is left but what I remember.  Like the  house show near Division  where she toured for the LP O' You Sinners. Things happen that makes you glad you made it to that specific show. And the ones you miss, hurt long term. I don't always see her in regular venues. Almost every time where she plays they got that one chance to be that iconic place that Eliza played. And so it was with this second floor apartment. They pretty much play just like her videos for Start with Goodbye, Stop with Hello. Oh and that video is the best. The song, another horse drawn trot into the clouds with a careful descent down white stairs. Damn....all this said and I'm barely staring on the LP Sinners. Sorry for taking the long way. Its a compulsion to document these things. There are a number of them that I can recall since the EP, that I can finally play out.
   White Words is the coolest and a good break from the painful and the sweet. Its among those I've been waiting for since I first heard it.  She loops her voice. Its contemporary, yet not out of place with her sister tracks. Its brilliant how she rewrote Over Cold Shoulders. In the EP its minimal, haunting like an an old fashioned doll left on the porch of an abandoned house. Its just her voice and the toy piano. In the LP with more instruments it reminds me of Tish Hinajosa Tex-Mex or the folkloric Lila Downs. Yeah this may come of as a lazy way of describing her music, and name dropping. Its deeper than that. I want to put these artists in the context of a constellation. I tether them together so that all may rise, should only one be remembered.  Damn it I went off the intended trail again. Fucking hell....I was going on about Cold Shoulders....it reminds me of the old Mexican music I recall since I was a kid. The song just invokes for me that ideal rural background to stroll past el jardin. Gentle, horse-drawn music of the old frontier. This is my immediate impression of that track. Her music for me always reminds me of periods past.  Coming Up Roses she plays with accordion. This one for me has the open-veins, old world earnestness of Los Panchos.....sad and romantic.....huh? I know its a bloody stretch but fucking follow it anyway. Look them up. I've just noted four tracks but really....its all brilliant.And its not all sweetness and vulnerability. Even those songs have their shadows. Costumes. Its not for nothing that us fans think of her as a Disney princess. Only this is one that lives in the kingdom of this world of ours a struggling, traveling artist.
Zig