Ida

Interestingly, between the time I last saw Ida over 2 years ago, and catching up with them on their recent tour, they had been both signed and dropped by Capitol Records. Somewhere therein, there is something ironic - kind of like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife, which incidentally isn't irony at all - it's just poor silverware management, as my friend Matthew aptly points out. I don't think that anyone would have quite the same reaction to Ida that I do, so please bear with me. For me, Ida is quite evocative of a time gone past, of being up late, thoroughly amped on all things good and caffinated, cranking away on some horrendous monstrosity of a physics problem which clearly Einstein himself would have subcontracted. All the while, though most other lonely creatures had long since shut their trembling eyes, my radio kept me company, quietly piping in the sounds of 103.3, WPRB, Princeton's student-run radio station.

It was here that I was introduced to the wonders of independent music - sounds which can be dewdrop sweet and simple or as sour as month-old coffee. Just because you're not U2 or R.E.M. doesn't mean that you can't come up with some pretty neat ideas for a tune - it just means that you don't have quite the resources (a couple of Ida's songs are recorded on a 4-track recorder and one was even recorded on a walkman) and you're not going to sign an $80 mm contract anytime soon. Of course it also means that there's great potential for the creation of absolute drivel, and I'm not going to lie to you - there's a lot out there. It just makes finding the real gems like Ida all that much more pleasurable. So that's what Ida's songs make me think of. And you know what? It's nice to get all nostalgic.

Links of note:

Ida's booking agent: http://www.aerobooking.com/.

Ida's homepage: http://www.idamusic.com/.

My review, 9/29/97, Cafe du Nord, SF.

If you'd like, you can email me here: richard@hearingmusic.com.

Oh, and all content on these pages is copyright Richard Lewis.