Musical Input

Sweet dreams in Cancun

'Titans of Americana,' Allison Russell, Janel Monae and Annie Lennox

I spent much of January living very simply, recovering, thinking, writing, applying for grants, painting bathroom walls and moving desks. But nearly three weeks into the New Year, we flew to Mexico to attend a Brandi Carlile-curated music festival at a beach-side resort. Like the bevvy of yoga retreats to be found in Tulum, there's a whole artist-curated-music-festival-at-a-resort machine that's risen up in Cancun of late. Wilco does its Sky Blue Sky festival there, Bob Weir has Dead Ahead and of course Phish has a festival. Carlile, inspired by the Lilith Fairs of yore, as well as the Book More Women movement, which documents how few women are actually playing major music festivals, took things in her own hands five years ago to create Girls Just Wanna Weekend.

Over the past few years, I’ve come to greatly admire not only Carlile’s formidable voice but what she does with her platform, rallying behind Joni Mitchell’s comeback and championing artists like Allison Russell, who I adore. When I had FOMO about a Carlile-led Highwomen/Mitchell show last year, Kwame said “let's just go next time” and we made a plan to go to Cancun. 

All-inclusive resort vacations are out of character in our history of vacations, but I can’t knock it, especially for just a short-trip. After a long day of connecting flights and shuttles, we arrived in time to unpack, walk along a garden pathway and out onto a well-manicured field, where we were handed drinks before settling in for the first night of music featuring sets by the aforementioned Russell and Carlile’s band.

I can’t say enough about Russell, whose powerful voice and two most recent records Outside Child and The Returner moved me to go to see her twice when she toured through the Bay Area last year. She and her Rainbow Coalition band were in fine form at Cancun, as was Carlile, who played her own full-throttle set in what would only be a warm-up for her full-throttle weekend of hosting and sitting in on nearly everyone’s set.

I wasn’t sure what to expect the second night, which featured sets by KT Tunstall, Celisse and Janelle Monae, all who proved to be their own forces of nature. Tunstall was the big surprise for me, funny and exceedingly vital, accompanied only by her guitar and loop pedal, she played a slew of new songs as well as her big hits from the early aughts. “woo-hoo, woo-hoo….” (Tunstall also gave a great talk on songwriting during a daytime presentation a few days later.) Monae put on a show with capital S, calling to mind Prince, Michale Jackson and The Wizard of Oz, with a funky, saucy, unabashed performance featuring backup dancers and multiple costume changes.

A subtext of the third night was what a wealth of musical talent and wisdom is still percolating out in the world even if the spotlight has gone elsewhere. We would have been happy if the first set — a songwriter’s circle with Carlile, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Kim Riche and Brandy Clark — lasted all night. Deep, resonant, seamless songs about self-acceptance, regret, the challenges of growing older, the mystery of it all, all of them adding harmonies to each other’s songs and moving one another, and many in the audience, to tears.

Standing on the porch tonight
All I hear is a distant car
Watching the fading light
Between the dirt and the stars
Between the rough and smooth and
The easy and the hard
The lonely sound of loneliness that's
Shaped just like my heart

— ‘Between the Dirt and the Stars,’ Mary Chapin Carpenter

You know it's really not that bad
No matter how bad it might feel
Cause there ain't nothing time won't fix
And this ain't nothing that some time won't heal

— ‘I’m Alright,’ Kim Richey

That was worth the price of admission right there, but the night was young. Sarah Mclachlan and her piano owned the next hour and half. Her set felt a little princess-like after the sage-realism of the preceding hour, and had me flashing back on an old chapter of my life that I didn’t feel like thinking about on a warm night on the Yucatan Peninsula, but that’s the power of music, isn’t it? It can send you all sorts of places, even if you haven’t boarded a plane to get there.

The next artist, the festival’s special guest, Annie Lennox, really sent me back to a formative time of music discovery. How exotic her voice was to my teenage ears when The Eurythmics took over the airwaves with ‘Sweet Dreams’ and ‘Here Comes the Rain Again’ in the mid-1980s. How bold she was with her unabashed androgynous look which ran counter to every image of traditional, oversexualized femininity I was socialized to emulate. Music and voice showing the way to a world of alternatives….

And here she was in Mexico, dressed head-to-toe in pink and sounding as deep and otherworldly as she did decades ago. It was kind of shocking to hear that voice in real time. Lennox hasn’t been performing for some years, and the fact that she was on a stage in Cancun now owed to the seemingly limitless energy of Carlile, who is clearly on a mission to give back and properly acknowledge the many pioneering women artists who came before her. And I have to applaud her for it. It was incredibly affirming to witness such a stellar night of music performed by women who were all over 40 years of age. Carlile’s band, augmented by Russell, Lucius, and Wendy and Lisa, provided backing for Lennox’s brief but hit-packed set.

Which brings me to the real surprise of this superlative night of music: Wendy Melvoin. Wow! What a guitar player, what a show person! She and Lisa were famously a part of Prince’s Revolution and they led the band through a note-perfect mini-set of Prince tunes before Lennox took the stage.

A full night amid a very full weekend that’s taken some time to digest. Fortunately, one could avail themselves of the beach between all those servings of music. Fortuitously, Cancun has great birds as well, and I could sit on the balcony and acquaint themelves with Great Kiskadee, Melodious Blackbirds, Tropical Kingbirds and a variety of Orioles if I didn’t want to venture further.

Sunday, Lucius, a new-to-me band, played a tight, rhythmic set before Lennox took the stage again to sing ‘Sweet Dreams’ to kick off an all-star 80’s music revue that was more spectacle than inspiration for this viewer. On Monday, we boarded another shuttle to the airport and came home. Blink. FOMO banished, hope and inspiration restored.