Whatever happened to mary margaret o'hara ?

She's also popped up on a Gary Lucas album, and 'Sweet Gravity II', that charity Vic Chestnutt tribute album (also notable for a contribution by Hootie & The Blowfish..)

'miss america' is an odd record. The production is almost punishingly bland mid-80's adult contemporary rock/country. But then she begins singing and I just can't believe it. The album really grew on me, especially the quiet opening & closing.

no direct mention if O'Hara's in the SF production. amazing to think of being disappointed by seeing a Wilson/Waits/Burroughs collaboration, but I certainly will be if she's pulled out before I get to see her.

No i didn't but i would REALLY have loved to.

get tickets now, they're going fast.

I'm a big Burroughs fan; it's a great cast; the final Wedding scene is pure Wilson lucid dreamstate. But the reason I'm thinking of going again is Ms O'Hara. Every second she's on the stage is just unbelievable, especially the first duet with her suitor, which was the one bafflingly emotional moment of the whole night purely on the basis of the tone of her voice, and getting to watch her as sang it.

The way she veers from perfect songbird to absolute raving madwoman; I can think of other singers who have the technical range, but it's always a bit of an exercise. When she does it I believe her.

A few tickets left for San Francisco. Some without Marianne Faithful, but she is the least of the reasons to see this actually; she's barely in it. The production is going to Australia next.

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/features/live/b/black-rider-06/

I'm definitely thinking of seeing it again. And if anyone, anyone, hears of any surreptitiously announced solo shows of hers while she's in town... please wake up this thread, or at least let me know.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIhu2CcH7tw

'bodies in trouble' video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z14wPTz6PdY

MMoH on the left

SCTV's The Last Polka - The Lemon Twins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JreEPKE7FMA

I'm sad no one else has posted this yet. And I'm sad I'm finding out about this about a week before it's going down.

http://www.villagevoice.com/nycguide/ev121095,6.html

Mary Margaret O’Hara and Guests
The Stone
E 2nd St & Avenue C, New York, NY
Sat, Jan 05, 08:00 pm

$10, baargain.

bargain for all 50 people who can fit into that room

I know she's modest, but that is going to be madness

very surprised that alex ross liked this album. i am a sucker for good drumming too but no drummer in the world can save these shitty ballads (even reckoner which may be the best song is totally annihilated after one and a half minutes by the string section).

sorry, wrong thread!

I love that bodies in trouble song but know nothing else. Is it all as off kilter and beautiful?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQbAr1DCjYw&feature=related

if you like this, find a copy of miss america

I actually just rapidshared one. I'll have to get sick of listening to Body's in Trouble before I listen to anything else.

You want to feel somebody, *oh* who do you talk to?

Did anybody make it to the show?

I love this album, especially Anew Day and Not Be Alright

She's playing Saturday in a festival with AR Hacke and Tony Conrad at the Funny Farm in Ontario. http://www.electric-eclectics.com/
Here's her piece in the Hal Willner/Kurt Weill movie. This is when I fell for her: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgQBdxA47lE

ok that Kurt Weill clip

there's no one like her

oh WOW WOW. i need an mp3 of that. pretty amazing playing on the track even without MMO'H but she's incredible. utterly unique.

Damn you I can't find my headphones!

still, just watchin' her twitch there

http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/cms/images/20070811ohara/ohara4-t.jpg

[Removed Illegal Link] has streaming audio from a performance at the 2007 Edmonton Folk Music Festival.

try this :: http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/cod/concerts/20070811ohara

that 'don't be afraid'... the kind of arrangement I wish she sang over more often.

http://www.amazon.com/September-Songs-Music-Kurt-Weill/dp/B0000029WM

there's close to a dozen new youtube clips up. including the live version of 'year in song', the john candy memorial, with the Razorbacks singing 'blue christmas' wearing angel wings, & a total improv freakout from Ontario a few months ago.

i had no idea she was Catherine O'Hara's sister!

Me neither, 'til buying A Mighty Wind a coupla months back

the edmunton show is great...thanks for posting : )

MMOH in London! Sounds a bit rubbish but:

Twisted Christmas
11 Dec at 7.30pm

Featuring Jarvis Cocker, Sandy Dillon, Daniel Knox, Bonfire Madigan, Mary Margaret O’Hara, The Inn-Ringers, The Smoke Fairies, Foy Vance, Kathryn Williams and Neill MacColl, Patrick Wolf & more
A deliciously dark evening of twisted Christmas songs.
http://event.barbican.org.uk/t/853767/386952/7247/0/

well there are
tears
'round your heart

http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=KOere1NrLXU&feature=related

great new song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZWjKCM9Ad8

She lists her email address (scroll down) and says you can write to her to buy Miss America. Makes me want to get a second copy.

xpost

She's in the recent music issue of The Believer, including her e-mail address, for people who want to buy Miss America.

She's one of my all-time favorites.

had never seen these clips before, this one is a treat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wazB8ZRuPN0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zUu4ccvQ_I

this is fucking glorious

lovely

when she starts crying in the video (2 minutes in) i get a lump in my throat. every single time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqctCwhunjE

alba has seen this! has anyone else?

that looks amazing!!

and so beautiful to look at even in the trailer. wow, i must see that.

it does! i didn't know about it. it was the trailer before the movie i went to see this week and i had a moment of confusion.

yeah i saw it last week. it's very good. the director does sort of non-narrative travelogues with some meditative musings over the top -- i was surprised by how well it was worked into a fiction film. it helps that the male lead actor is so sonorous and watchable. i was bored a couple of times -- where the camera lingers on urban scenes where i don't see the point of lingering -- but for the most part it's v warm and rewarding, and has moments of real beauty.

i love that she looks so much like her sis. cuz i love them both so much.

i could look at this picture all day.

http://www2.pictures.gi.zimbio.com/Catherine+O+Hara+Mary+Margaret+O+Hara+CineVegas+XgGyDCtnyolx.jpg

i don't think i've been so excited to see something for years.

Cohen also had a hand in arranging the collaboration that recently brought O’Hara to Montreal’s Hotel2Tango studio to work with Constellation Records’ Thierry Amar, Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto (members of Vic Chesnutt’s band) and Australian drummer Jim White of Dirty Three.

http://www.nowtoronto.com/music/story.cfm?content=188372

there are some sisterly themed alice munro stories where i totally picture the sisters as the O'Hara sisters.

interesting, i don't really know his story. i noticed in the credits patti smith exec produced museum hours. xp

that movie looks like something I would enjoy.

I read her Wikipedia entry thanks to this revive and found this very amusing:

In 1983, O'Hara left Go Deo and was signed by Virgin Records. Andy Partridge of XTC was scheduled as her producer but was fired after his first day [3] due to his reported difficulties with O'Hara's musical approach.

ha!

Andy Partridge of XTC was scheduled as her producer but was fired after his first day [3] due to his reported difficulties with O'Hara's musical approach.

Partridge has also intimated that devout Catholic O'Hara wasn't thrilled to find out her producer was an atheist and engineer John Leckie was under the spell of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. So suddenly they had a few weeks vacation on their hands, and Partridge mentions this idea he had to record a psychedelic album.

So we can thank Mary Margaret O'Hara for the Dukes of Stratosphear.

Scott, you have to see this. it's wonderful. really beautiful.

i was bored a couple of times -- where the camera lingers on urban scenes where i don't see the point of lingering

zvook, i'm kinda surprised at this since the film was completely about looking and seeing everything with equal weight and importance but choosing your own centre within the seeing and it's set up fairly early on. where the narrator describes the egg shells, bones, cigarette butts, old newspapers, spent beer cans and cuts from the Breugel to the scenes in Vienna. It's about slowness and lingering as well so i can understand the boredom but it's part of it and it pays off very gently at the end.

Then the Lecture on Breugel where the tour guide talks about finding the centre (for you) within the painting which analogues to as much time being spent looking at the people looking at the paintings as the paintings themselves in wide or in detail and the same techniques being used in the shots of the city referencing back to earlier in the film where Johann talks about seeing Anne and somehow "finding" her within the plethora of museum visitors and being interested in her, wanting to know her and not knowing why. it's not sexual - he's gay - it's really about making connections or finding a connection.

i was bowled over by this. i've not seen anything like it. really wonderful.

yes that's true but it's still boring a couple of times (i didn't mean every time, btw, far from it). it's true of his short work too, which i'd seen before i saw this, and is made up of just this sort of looking. there are always a few scenes which strike me as almost without value as if pulled at random from a day's cheap digital shooting.

what did u think of mmo'h in it?

I saw Museum Hours. I liked it quite a bit. It's true what zvookster says, about Jem Cohen's work being very much about this "looking." I don't know that he pulls his images at random, he's just someone who shoots a lot on his own, constantly, and creates a kind of personal archive of footage from which to pull shots from. I do think that stuff stands out in films like this or Chain, where he also uses actors, but it's his style and I like that he finds ways to expand what is obviously a very limited way of working. FWIW I think all the exterior/street stuff was shot on film, so maybe "cheap digital shooting" isn't really fair...

movie is fine, many of Jem Cohen's past films also worthwhile (Benjamin Smoke, Chain; never saw the Fugazi doc) xp

MMO'H never seems to be acting, A-

zvook, i didn't mean to describe the film to you. i knew you got it perfectly well, i was just thinking it through for myself. there were 5-10 minutes or so when i thought it was too much and, yes, a little boring but he pulled it back since, of course, that's a major point of the film. I'm interested to see his other stuff.

i though MMO'H was astounding.

It hasn't aged too well, but "Lost Book Found" is on Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/63141083

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9rZyMRdwwg

Wonder if anyone's heard anything other than this from that Go Deo Chorus demo tape that got them/her signed...

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/apr/19/cult-heroes-mary-margaret-ohara-miss-america

I don't consider those tributes to Weill and Cohen, nor The Black Rider productions, to be "relative trifles." And if she thinks she said it all on one album, so be it, right or wrong. Wonder how many people keep cranking it out when they secretly feel that way, or should?

WOW I had no idea the album was recorded in 83 and 84!

Author should have mentioned her track on Gary Lucas Gods and Monsters, v memorable

For some reason I heard this for the first time tonight - loved it. Lots of bits hanging at the edges throughout - whether that's a guitar, violin and the voice but there is so much to her voice I wouldn't reduce to that.

My t-TAAAALE is TALLLLLL

i never contributed to this thread. why? mmoh is one of my favourite singers, miss america one of my favourite albums. i wrote something about it some time ago in my old blog.

how i love those simple, to the point lyrics:

"But if our love is all for not
I'm still happy with what I've got
Not having you,
But keeping you in mind"

For some reason I heard this for the first time tonight

― xyzzzz__, Monday, June 13, 2016 9:23 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm gobsmacked at this!

https://vimeo.com/147145241

i just found a copy of Miss America on LP for a couple bucks stashed in the celtic music section at amoeba. incredible album.

I was just thinking about MMOH last night because we finished watching The OA and I got some of the same feelings from it that I get from this album.

my TAAAAALE is TAAAAAALLLLLL

I'd forgotten about this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPtuYmYg8OU

I didn't know this happened!

wow...this first improv is something else

Very very stoked. Just bought two tix to see her in June!

ohhhh!!!!

It's the "Beautiful Tool" combo who performed a handful of shows three years ago and I don't think anything since.

??Where is this happening??

Canada. At the Vancouver Jazz Festival. Tix were $28. A bargain imo.

Here's a baffled review from (I think) the last show in 2015.

Haha I just noticed she did "The Snake" - that thing that Trump performs from time to time.

Man so jealous

Show was good. A few reservations but I enjoyed it a lot. It didn't blow minds or anything. It was unrehearsed and the band could've used more direction. The starts and ends of the songs were all ramshackle, much of it was improvised and they overplayed on most songs imo. There was one bit near the end when they did a great key change and I thought "fucksake-an arrangement!"

She herself forgot the words on dozens of occasions and barely two lines in a row were ever sung straight. It was like Liza Minnelli slipping back and forth between Ella-style focused scatting and Yoko Ono making whatever noises she's feeling in the moment. Followed by some whistling or whatever. Pretty amazing.

If I'd wandered in not knowing what it was I might have been racking my brains for what Shimmy Disc act might have reformed - the only previous time I saw a balloon used as a musical instrument was at a Eugene Chadbourne gig.

She's on Bandcamp:

https://peggylee1.bandcamp.com/album/beautiful-tool

Oh wow thanks!

New one-minute ditty

This inimitable bit of O'Haratude popped up unexpectedly in my Release Radar today

https://rising.melbourne/wormhole/singles-club-jim-white-and-mary-margaret-ohara

Joining Jim White and Emmett Kelly in their band, The Double:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DH9ijW6yi8h/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==