My Brightest Diamond November 18, 2007

My Brightest Diamond is Shara Worden, granddaughter of an Epiphone-playing traveling evangelist, fathered by a National Accordion Champion, and mothered by a church organist. Shara's songs distil stories to their most distressing points of contact: a phone call, an injured horse, a dragonfly caught in a spider's web. She doesn't share all the information -- just the stuff that matters. The effect is a sensational compression of time, in which an entire event is summarized in a single note. This, of course, is the essence of opera. But My Brightest Diamond is much more than that. There is also the humor one might find in an old TV episode of 'Wonder Woman' or Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland.' Shara's songs reconcile all the complex emotions found in each of us: she can grieve as comfortably as she can laugh, sometimes in the same breath. Tim Fite, a "lo-fi lone wolf from Brooklyn...somewhere between folk and hip-hop," to quote the New York Times. The newspaper describes his recent album, 'Over The Counter Culture,' as "a harsh indictment of consumerism and the American dream of selling out" with which "he has made himself into a cultural gadfly."