I have this relic from a quarter century ago, back when I was a young teacher dreaming of becoming a published novelist.
WXPN’s Live At The World Cafe Volume 12.
It’s a CD.
The cover is the color of honey. Under the title sits a painting of a tambourine. The square plastic case is an anachronism here in 2024. Holding it in my hand today makes me feel like an anachronism.
WXPN—or as we used to call it, just XPN—was Alicia’s and my favorite radio station once upon a time when we were young grownups living in the Philadelphia area. Our closest friends were big fans too. We all listened religiously. The Live At The World Cafe program introduced us to many singer-songwriters.
The Volume 12 CD was a gift from my best friend at the time. Alicia says he gave it to us as a wedding anniversary present. Listening to my ripped digital copy now makes me miss being in and around Philadelphia at the turn of the century—back when we were all still young enough to feel like the City of Brotherly Love belonged to us.
The compilation contains live recordings from sixteen different acts that had visited The World Cafe. Big names like Ian Anderson and Warren Zevon. As well as flavors of the day, such as Semisonic and the Crash Test Dummies. But I’ve kept the CD for a single performance: Amy Correia’s stripped down and hauntingly soulful version of her song The Bike. (A digital copy of this particular recording isn’t available on any music streaming service, as far as I know.)
I’m trying to remember the very first time I heard the XPN live version of The Bike. I know my wife was with me. Maybe we were in our first home’s 1950s-era basement bar, which we used to call The Hardwood. In my memory now, twenty-something Alicia and I are surrounded by wood paneling. We’re bellied up at the ten-foot-long bar top. As Amy Correia sings her heart out, Alicia and I look at each other with eyebrows raised, as if to say, Is your soul also glowing right now?
I fell head-over-heels in love with the song and imagined that the studio version would be even better. So I secured a copy of Amy Correia’s album Carnival Love, fast forwarded to The Bike, and prepared to have my heart squeezed in the best way possible.
At first, I was confused.
Then I was devastated.
The XPN live version is just guitar and cello. Correia’s voice is unprocessed, honest, and confessional. The performance feels raw and surprising. Like accidentally hearing undiscovered genius in a small, dimly lit rural bar, in the middle of nowhere.
Listening to the studio version—after having first heard the XPN live recording—felt like the audio equivalent of seeing beauty in a funhouse mirror.
The Bike is about a young woman inheriting her Uncle Pat’s broken-down and rusted bicycle. He drank himself to death during the holiday season. The narrator and her father fix up the bike and she rides it around town singing, while also contemplating death and the tragedy of her uncle’s loneliness. The song paints deceptively simple, vivid images. The narrator is forced to contemplate mortality, perhaps for the first time. At the funeral, she sees her aunt put a picture of a beloved poodle in the deceased’s hand and then cry. She listens to a government employee playing taps. She imagines her father finding the dead body. And, yet, the song’s refrain is joyous and life-affirming, as it describes the free feeling of riding around on the inherited bicycle, all while the narrator imagines a much younger version of her uncle, when his “world was alive with meaning” and the bike was still brand new.
The XPN live version conjures all of that with an unadorned authenticity that makes my soul quiver. It’s an in-the-moment performance that still—after thousands of listens over more than two decades—lights me up with its brave and fearless vulnerability.
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