Harper Phillips Cartography on ITunes!

Artists You Need To Be Paying Attention To Right Now: Harper Phillips

This week’s installment of Artists You Need To Be Paying Attention To Right Now stars Harper Phillips, the singer/ukulele playing songwriter behind the new album, Cartography, which is available on ITunes (or if you dig purchasing things that you can hold in your hand, you can get an old fashioned hard copy by going to www.harperphillips.com).

A bit of advice, if you go to ITunes, don’t just pick two or three tunes that you think you’ll like the best, hit the tiny ‘purchase’ button, and then leave the rest of the songs on the shelves to electronically rot. We’ve been trained to behave this way and it’s not our fault. We live in an age of Recession! and Terrorism! and War! and also Musicians who think it’s ok to put out collected recordings that consist of three or four good songs surrounded by six to eight additional tracks of garbage humping filler-like trash!.  

Cartography does not fall into that garbage humping category. Harper Phillips has produced a great album. When you find yourself on ITunes, you’re going to want to buy the whole thing.

When I listen to Cartography I rarely do so in bits and pieces. I listen to it from beginning to end, as if watching a movie or reading a really great novel. Its themes of love and heartbreak are so perfectly woven together by the combination of good looking vocals (the powerfully hypnotic tone of her voice literally makes me want to date sound. it’s incredible. the way she sings makes me want to ask sound out on a date), brilliantly poetic lyrics, and catchy ukulele chord changes throughout the album’s 11 tracks, that you’ll find it literally impossible to hit the stop button once it gets going: making this work the audio equivalent of a page turning thriller.

The songs on this album are thoroughly unique and yet also manage to share the same bathwater with works like Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar. The way in which Harper Phillips manages to express the blind ecstasies and brutal horrors of love is honestly inspiring. It’s like the Marquis De Sade meets Winnie the Pooh. Or, and forgive me here if you’re not a Buffy The Vampire Slayer fan, but that moment during the last episode of Season 2, when Angel’s spent the entire year without a soul, torturing Buffy and all her friends, and then he decides to end the entire world with help from the demon Acathla, and just before our entire world gets sucked into an evil dimension inside which the entire human race will suffer an eternity of torture and suffering and pain, Willow does a spell that makes Angel get his soul back, and Buffy realizes he’s got his soul back, but at this point it’s too late, and even though she loves him as much as anyone has ever loved another human being in the entire history of people loving human beings, she has to stab a sword threw his chest and send him to hell in order to save the world.

That moment, when Angel has his soul back and is looking at Buffy because he loves her but also just realizes that she’s just stabbed him and sent him to hell, and Buffy’s looking at Angel because she loves him but still has to stab him because, you know, life’s not fair—that moment has always perfectly summed up for me the trembling complexities that make up things like getting your heart broken and falling in love. Cartography has the same effect on me.

And for that, I am grateful.

So if I refer to Harper Phillips as the Joss Whedon of ukulele playing songwriters, know that it is to be taken as a compliment of the most highest order.

Harper singing the lines ‘knit your heart to mine’ or ‘Please don’t talk about San Francisco/Please stop bring up San Francisco/I can’t sleep about San Francisco/Please don’t talk about San Francisco/Anymore’, and Buffy running a sword through the heart of the guy she loves because she has to save the world: these things effect me equally. A perfect expression, perfectly executed.

They are, in many ways, the same thing.              

Like Buffy’s sacrificial sword thrust, Cartography will also save your world.

until next time,

iloveyou,

rob