The Prayers and Tears

Since I’m, by title, the Curator of Hopscotch, people often ask me what band I’m most excited about seeing when the festival finally arrives. For two reasons, it’s a bit of a faulty question: For one, I really like or love most of these acts, as that’s why I’ve picked them; I can, without hesitation, say some of my favorite bands in the world have comprised the first two Hopscotch lineups. More important, though, is the fact that the festival itself presents such a workload that neither me nor Hopscotch Director Greg Lowenhagen actually get to see many bands. Why worry about picking a temporary favorite if, you know, I actually don’t get to hear them while they’re here?

That said, one of the bookings that excites me the most at Hopscotch 2011 is The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers, more recently truncated to The Prayers and Tears. In 2005, the band—led by Perry Owen Wright, part of Chapel Hill’s temporarily very-productive collective and label Bu Hanan—released maybe my favorite local record of the last decade, The Mother of Love Emulates the Shapes of Cynthia. Rich with Biblical, social and personal details, The Mother of Love examined the failures of a new marriage with devastating clarity. As Wright sang during “Concerning Lessons Learned from the Aliens,” he “consider[ed] all the small things from every smallest angle.” Alex Lazara’s production was similarly attentive, reflecting Radiohead’s post-millennial interests in restraint, texture and patient movements that couldn’t be predicted.

Not long after that album was released, though, Wright went cold, hitting a wall of writer’s block that, try as he might by reading stacks of old documents or conceiving new concepts for LPs, he couldn’t break. The Mother of Love remains, so far, the second and final Prayers and Tears album, a sad state exacerbated by three years of relatively infrequent onstage appearances by Wright. So maybe this Hopscotch appearance, which I likely won’t see, is the start of some reemergence; if so, I could barely be more excited. —Grayson Currin