Warm Beer & Bizarre Love: Blackfoot Daisy's Exhaled Triangle

Love is like drinking beer when it becomes warm, like listening to static through an old radio late at night, like a hot concrete sidewalk that is sweating when illuminated by streetlights. Blackfoot Daisy gets the feel of it. On Valentine's Day, they take that feel and use it.

While New Order approaches your senses with their cover of "Bizarre Love Triangle" through bright neon lights, Blackfoot Daisy gives off an exhale. The Ukulele takes the place of the synth shimmer, while the violin part takes the place of the drum machine snaps. When a washboard softly rattles, it sounds like ash falling onto concrete. You will feel as if you have a private moment with someone at a kitchen table on a cold winter's night, while beers are getting warm, and scraps of lyrics are scattered on the table.

As creators of the songs, Wendy DuMond and Don Sechelski have always looked at how the arrangement tells a story; in this case, they create a new emotional shape to the arrangement that follows the lyrics of longing, confusion, and surrender; they create their new shape gently. Although Frente! used a similar opinion in their stripped-down version of the song during the late '90s, Blackfoot Daisy's version does not focus on nostalgia; it creates its own structure with wood, string instruments and breath.

The trio's use of foot-driven percussion makes this an active performance, grounding the song in something tactile; its materials are representative of human life. The audience is given a chance to hear the floorboards respond.

To those who wish to find reinterpretations of music that have a past but not be mummified, Blackfoot Daisy provides a rarity in that they offer warmth without being sentimental, craftsmanship without the ego of craftsmanship — and an indication that every love story which is in a convoluted body of love can flourish again, in a different manner.