{"id":398,"date":"2010-04-01T00:01:32","date_gmt":"2010-04-01T05:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"\/nashvillereview\/?p=398"},"modified":"2015-03-24T13:28:09","modified_gmt":"2015-03-24T19:28:09","slug":"flood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/398","title":{"rendered":"Jeff Harms"},"content":{"rendered":"<h6>Flood<\/h6>\n<div class=\"embed-vimeo\" style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/13115333\" width=\"740\" height=\"416\" frameborder=\"0\" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<h6>Egypt<\/h6>\n<div class=\"embed-vimeo\" style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/13128975\" width=\"740\" height=\"416\" frameborder=\"0\" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<h6><a title=\"Spring 2010 Contributors\" href=\"\/nashvillereview\/archives\/693\">Jeff Harms<\/a><\/h6>\n<p> is a Chicago musician.\u00a0 He has two albums\u2014<em>The Myth of Heroics<\/em> (2008 DRP records, with Emmett Kelly and Azita) and <em>Big Amazing Songs<\/em> (2005 Naivete Records, with Dominic Johnson and Spencer Matern)\u2014and his third,\u00a0produced by Leroy Bach,\u00a0will be released this winter.<\/p>\n<p>Here Harms performs his\u00a0original songs \u201cFlood\u201d and \u201cEgypt\u201d\u00a0as part of The Strobe Sessions performance series at Strobe Recording in Chicago, featuring Leroy Bach (formerly of Wilco) on piano and double bass. &#8211;<em> Zachary Greenberg<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Greenberg:\u00a0 Can you speak to the biblical undertones in &#8220;Flood&#8221; and &#8220;Egypt&#8221;?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Harms:\u00a0 Gosh.\u00a0 The Bible.\u00a0 I taught art history for a while and liked to do it as a comparative religion class.\u00a0 It is fascinating how flood myths, among others, are almost universal.\u00a0 I just love floods.\u00a0 It is so strange to see rooftops or steeples sticking out of this glassy surface, and so beautiful to imagine the world we know becoming like an aquarium.\u00a0 Of course people also die and lose their homes, which is not good.\u00a0 I actually went down to New Orleans after Katrina to work and film a movie.\u00a0 I definitely enjoy a good scale-shift, where an epic personal battle gets swept away by the flick of an avalanche, or in the case of Egypt, the idea that while the pyramids were getting built most people were just trying to get through their day.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Greenberg:\u00a0 Your second album is titled <em>The Myth of Heroics<\/em>, and in &#8220;Flood&#8221; you begin one verse with the line, &#8220;If the first story was a myth&#8230;&#8221;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Harms: People have always used music and verse to bring myths to life.\u00a0 I come from a tradition of troubadours singing of heroic emotion, so the idea that heroism itself is a myth broke my heart completely.\u00a0 I hope this next album, where &#8220;Flood&#8221; belongs, will be more optimistic.\u00a0 My favorite part in &#8220;Flood&#8221; is about moving on in spite of a sense that the universe is messing with you.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Greenberg:\u00a0A wonderful narrative thread runs through your songs.\u00a0 Who have been your literary influences?\u00a0 Who musical?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Harms: I have a BFA in painting and an MFA in sculpture and lived in Rome for a while, so I think I am more influenced by the images and art I have seen over the years.\u00a0 I also watch a lot of movies and think like a video editor.\u00a0 So if a stanza or line conjures a visual image, I like to play at moving them around until a story is implied.\u00a0 I like the demands it makes on your imagination\u2014that at one moment you can be in Detroit and the next on the moon.\u00a0 Like in the song &#8220;Tangled Up in Blue&#8221; Dylan sings, &#8220;Then he started into dealing with slaves and something inside of him died,&#8221;\u00a0 and suddenly you&#8217;re thinking, &#8220;Whoa! What <em>year<\/em> has this been all along?&#8221;\u00a0\u00a0 Another good example of images placed next to each other is the song &#8220;Idiot Wind&#8221;.\u00a0 I could probably write songs forever just thinking about <em>Blood on the Tracks.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Flood Egypt Jeff Harms is a Chicago musician.\u00a0 He has two albums\u2014The Myth of Heroics (2008 DRP records, with Emmett Kelly and Azita) and Big Amazing Songs (2005 Naivete Records, with Dominic Johnson and Spencer Matern)\u2014and his third,\u00a0produced by Leroy Bach,\u00a0will be released this winter. Here Harms performs his\u00a0original songs \u201cFlood\u201d and \u201cEgypt\u201d\u00a0as part of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[32],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6Jypy-flood","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11516,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions\/11516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}