Hey Black Keys fans (yes, I’m talking to you): Those who find themselves enamored with the dirty, gritty, minimalistic blues-rock of this Akron, Ohio duo can let out a whoop of thanks for the live 4-track EP they just posted up for download at their MySpace. All the lovin of good new live tunes, for free. Don’t you wish every band would sate us this way?
You can get the tunes there or you can get it mirrored here:
No Trust (live) – The Black Keys Recorded at The Troubador in LA on 9/13/06 by Dan Auerbach – Mixed by Dan Auerbach
Girl Is On My Mind (live) – The Black Keys Recorded at The Troubador in LA on 9/13/06 by Dan Auerbach – Mixed by Dan Auerbach
10am Automatic (live) – The Black Keys Recorded at the Mercy Lounge in Nashville on 12/15/2006 by Wilton J. Wall, Jr. – Mixed by Patrick Carney
Elevator (live) – The Black Keys Recorded at the Mercy Lounge in Nashville on 12/15/2006 by Wilton J. Wall, Jr. – Mixed by Patrick Carney
THE BLACK KEYS WANT TO ROCK YOU Jun 13 Cain’s Ballroom – Tulsa, Oklahoma Jun 15 Bonnaroooooooo – Manchester, Tennessee Jun 16 La Zona Rosa – Austin, Texas Jun 17 Warehouse Live – Houston, Texas Jun 18 Lonestar Pavilion at Sunset – San Antonio, Texas Jun 19 The Ridglea Theater – Dallas, Texas Jun 21 Tabernacle – Atlanta, Georgia Jun 22 City Hall – Nashville, Tennessee Jun 24 The Vogue – Indianapolis, Indiana Jun 25 Agora Theatre – Cleveland, Ohio Jun 26 Majestic Theater – Detroit, Michigan Jun 28 First Avenue – Minneapolis, Minnesota Aug 3 Lollapalooza – Chicago, Illinois
“he likes the warm feeling but he’s tired of all the dehydration.
most nights were crystal clear but tonite its like it’s stuck between stations”
The Hold Steady were all I had expected and more. We walked into the hot, loud club just as the opening notes of Stuck Between Stations was starting, and I felt a crackle of electricity run through my nerves to my fingertips. I came with really high expectations and Craig Finn pretty much singlehandedly fulfilled each one. To be completely honest, words like “salvation” and “rock and roll redemption” kept flitting across my mind as I watched this band pour every ounce of themselves into each song they created for us with raging ferocity and heartfelt passion.
I didn’t take any pictures or video because I was too involved to be bothered. But the picture that kept echoing in my mind was what I had written about Josh Ritter, another amazing performer:
“Ritter is also a rare, rare performer in his obvious ebullience to be performing. As he weaves his intricate, literate songs on stage, he overflows with each lyric as if he were birthing every line afresh for the first time. There is no sense of a rote performance, and no indication that he’s sung some of these hundreds of times. Instead, he radiates a palpable joy and a sense of barely-contained anticipation with each word that comes out.”
Finn made me think of these things, except — his exuberance in performing is multiplied by a factor of 4,354. It’s as if all the molecules of his being are spinning in a fury of musical joy, barely and not-even-completely contained by his skin from flying out into a million directions. Instead of a gradual dawning of the birth of a lyric, it’s an atomic bomb. He gestures, he spits, he jumps as he shouts out the lyrics. He dances these slightly uncool jigs without caring that folks just don’t do that anymore. The rest are all too hip. He doesn’t care. This is music, their music, their lifeblood pouring out for the joy of the moment.
we had some massive nights
every song was right
all that wine was tight
we had some massive highs
we had some crushing lows
we had some lusty little crushes
we had those all ages hardcore matinee shows.
Go, ye, and be saved.
HOLD STEADY TOUR DATES
5.23.07 Salt Lake City UT Urban Lounge
5.24.07 Boise ID Neurolux
5.26.07 George WA Gorge Amphitheatre Sasquatch Fest
5.28.07 Portland OR Crystal Ballroom
5.30.07 San Francisco CA Slim’s
5.31.07 Los Angeles CA El Rey Theatre
6.1.07 San Diego CA Cane’s Ballroom
6.2.07 Phoenix AZ Brick House
6.3.07 Las Vegas NV Beauty Bar (FREE SHOW)
6.4.07 Tucson AZ Plush
6.7.07 Houston TX Walter’s on Washington
6.8.07 Austin TX Emo’s
6.9.07 Denton TX Hailey’s
6.10.07 Norman OK Opolis
6.11.07 Little Rock AR Sticky Fingerz Chicken Shack
6.12.07 Columbia MO Blue Note
6.14.07 Ashville NC Grey Eagle Music Hall
6.16.07 Manchester TN Bonnaroo Festival Grounds Bonnaroo Festival
Okay fellow Coloradoans, get yourselves ready for a brand new festival bringing some top notch talent to our scenic red rocks this September 14th and 15th. The Monolith Festival has announced a lineup with several bands I am jumping to see this fall. I am about this close to throwing my hat into the press ring and being there for all this action. Here’s who makes my top list:
Kings of Leon [here’s why] Cake [here’s why] Flaming Lips Spoon The Broken West [here’s why] The Decemberists Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Born In The Flood Gregory Alan Isakov [here’s why]
Full lineup here, with more acts to be announced. Tix onsale June 2. Wahoo!
I am thoroughly excited to be seeing The Hold Steady tomorrow (Tuesday) night at the Ogden Theatre in Denver, as everyone who sees their live show comes back fairly glowing. Last year’s Boys and Girls in America is a solid, lyrically dense, interesting rocker of an album, but I really started getting excited about buying a ticket for the Denver show when I saw the video of Craig Finn performing at Carnegie Hall for the Springsteen tribute:
Now that’s what rock and roll is supposed to both look and feel like.
I also read a very good snapshot interview with The Hold Steady in Paste Magazine on the airplane this afternoon. I recommend the whole article, but here’s a snippet that made me smile:
It’s awfully easy (and somewhat fun) to get tangled up in The Hold Steady’s Midwestern mythos— the band’s aesthetic is straightforward (brews, devil horns, guitars, good times) but not simplistic (Finn’s lyrics are near-prophetic), and they’ve cultivated, however inadvertently, a certain working-class appeal (see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, The Hold Steady’s most obvious predecessor). They’re the band you go see when you feel like getting drunk on PBR, dancing and then loitering outside the venue, eating crappy pizza on the curb; they embody the half-tragic, half-ecstatic American adolescence every 33-year-old with a desk job wants desperately to re-live.
In some ways, their appeal is as much about escapism—a return to teen-dom, to making out with a friend and hunting down parties in the woods—as anything else. I hold up a stack of press clippings and tell Finn I’m tempted to highlight every instance of the word “beer.” Finn grins, surveys the drained mugs littering our table, and raises his eyebrows. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he deadpans.
While I was reading the article somewhere over Arizona, I also listened to a handful of related b-sides and live tracks assembled by my friend Tom and scavenged in various locations.
THE BROKERDEALER And here’s an interesting collection: Craig Finn’s old band The Brokerdealer, which may be likened, at least on these tracks, to Finn’s own Postal Service project. All electronica and club-beats, but those same biting, poetic lyrics.
THERE’S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL And finally a soundtrack to the season: If you’re a baseball fan like I am, you should read this lovely piece from the Portland Mercury with Craig Finn ruminating on the connections between music & baseball, recording “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” for his beloved Twins, and how he saw Paul Westerberg at spring training.
I am still in San Diego today, so no Monday Music Roundup will be coming. I’ve gotten to speak Italian to a group of folks outside the San Diego Museum of Art, meet a British guy named Usher holding a tiny Pomeranian, bowl and drink beer with my dad, and maybe if I’m lucky I’ll get a patdown at the airport this afternoon. Oh, and also I got to see my little brother graduate college, which was awesome.
This video is all the music content I can swing this morning, it’s Jesse Malin‘s new song “Broken Radio,” off Glitter in the Gutter, which is really a beautiful tune. It stars Bruce Springsteen and the parts with both of them were just recorded a few weeks ago at Bruce’s house/farm/studio in Colt’s Neck, NJ:
Jesse has foxy eyemakeup. That’s better than mine most days.
Love Is A Mix Tape just absolutely knocked my socks off. I devoured this book in one long weekend in San Diego and enjoyed every single page, heartily. On the surface this is a true story about mix tapes, digging out the shoeboxes full of them and looking back at a life spent seeing the world in a series of 45-minute vignettes (then, of course, you flip the tape over). Rob Sheffield has penned an honest yet wildly entertaining book, one that also managed to affect me more deeply than any book I’ve read in recent memory, all woven throughout with a genuine and bleeding love for music. It’s electric.
The meta-theme of the book is simple, and has been told a thousand times in all our great epic tales and poems: great, rich love and deep, hard loss. But this one comes with a soundtrack all around and sewn into his relationship and marriage to Renee, a girl who he says was “in the middle of everything, living her big, messy, epic life, and none of us who loved her will ever catch up with her.” Rob loved Renee, and chronicles that here beautifully from their first meeting to her sudden death at 31.
Parts of the book are evisceratingly intimate. I felt almost too close to his darkest and most intense moments, and because I knew so much of the music that he ties in so effortlessly with all of his memories I almost felt like I had a personal stake that kept stabbing at me. I thought I was just getting into this because, duh, it’s about mix tapes, but I ended up thinking about what kind of areas of us need to be loved in order for us to be fully happy, fully whole.
Even if you don’t like reading about other people’s love stories, you should still 100% read this book. If you are a music nerd (I mean, you’re here) then theirs is the kind of relationship that maybe someday, somewhere, we all dream about finding. Renee was his muse, but his passion (and hers) is thoroughly and unabashedly music. He writes of their relationship, “We had nothing in common, except we both loved music. It was the first connection we had, and we depended on it to keep us together. We did a lot of work to meet in the middle. Music brought us together.” Can that work? They were both music writers and radio DJs, they fell in love hard and married young. They made lots and lots of fabulous mix tapes, and each chapter begins with a reprinted tracklist from one cassette from that era in their lives.
And please, tell me this. How could I do anything but love a man who starts chapter 14 with: “Every time I have a crush on a woman, I have the same fantasy: I imagine the two of us as a synth-pop duo.” He goes on to elaborate on how she is in the front (“tossing her hair, a saucy little firecracker”), stealing the show and he is hidden in the back behind his Roland JP8000 keyboard, “lavishing all my computer blue love on her.” He even lists all the best band names he’s come up with for their synth-pop duo: Metropolitan Floors, Indulgence, Angela Dust.
And you should hear him wax poetic about mix tapes: be still my heart. Rob writes, “There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one.” (Yes. There is.)
He gives his examples: The Party Tape I Want You We’re Doing It? Awesome! You Like Music, I Like Music, I Can Tell We’re Going To Be Friends You Broke My Heart And Made Me Cry and Here Are Twenty or Thirty Songs About It The Road Trip Good Songs From Bad Albums I Never Want To Play Again
. . . and many more. “There are millions of songs in the world,” he writes, “and millions of ways to connect them into mixes. Making the connections is part of the fun of being a fan.” The book starts with Sheffield pulling out a box of old tapes and all throughout the book –from his childhood school dance recollections, to the first mixes he can remember making for Renee, to the ones that accompanied him in the dark days and months following her death– the mix tapes and the songs are as much characters in this story as the actual people are.
I like that because that is how I see music, and exactly precisely how important it is to me. I’d never heard anyone articulate it as well as he does, with such gentle grace and razor-sharp humor. It made me feel a little less oddball and a little more deeply appreciative for the gift of the music that’s gotten me through it all.
Since each of us have our own completely sovereign and self-focused memories surrounding our favorite bands and favorite songs (the unique feelings, smells, companions, activities associated with them), there is something that I just find so ebullient about “seeing” all these bands and songs through the unique rubric of their lives.
Take this amazing passage about their first Pavement concert (summer 1991):
The night of the show, the floor was abuzz with anticipation. None of us in the crowd knew what Pavement looked like, or even who was in the band. They put out mysterious seven-inch singles without any band info or photos, just credits for instruments like “guitar slug,” “psued-piano gritt-gitt,” “keybored,” “chime scheme,” and “last crash simbiosis.” We assumed that they were manly and jaded, that they would stare at the floor and make abstract boy noise. That would be a good night out.
Royal Trux went on a few hours late, which I’m sure had nothing to do with buying drugs in Richmond. They were great, like a scuzz-rock Katrina and the Waves. The peroxide girl in the football jersey jumped around and screamed while the boy with the scary home-cut bangs played his guitar and tried to stay out of her way. She threw a cymbal at him. We wanted to take them home for a bath, a hot meal, and a blood change.
But Pavement was nothing at all like we pictured them. They were a bunch of foxy dudes, and they were into it. As soon as they hit the stage, you could hear all the girls in the crowd ovulate in unison. There were five or six of them up there, some banging on guitars, some just clapping their hands or singing along. They did not stare at the floor. They were there to make some noise and have some fun. They had fuzz and feedback and unironically beautiful sha-la-la melodies. The bassist looked just like Renee’s high school boyfriend. Stephen Malkmus leaned into the mike, furrowed his brows, and sang lyrics like, “I only really want you for your rock and roll” or “When I fuck you once it’s never enough / When I fuck you two times it’s always too much.” The songs were all either fast or sad, because all songs should either be fast or sad. Some of the fast ones were sad, too.
Afterward, we staggered to the parking lot in total silence. When we got to the car, Renee spoke up in a mournful voice: “I don’t think The Feelies are ever gonna be good enough again.”
Our friend Joe in New York sent us a tape, a third-generation dub of the Pavement album Slanted and Enchanted. Renee and I decided this was our favorite tape of all time. The guitars were all boyish ache and shiver. The vocals were funny bad poetry sung through a Burger World drive-through mike. The melodies were full of surfer-boy serenity, dreaming through a haze of tape hiss and mysterious amp noise. This was the greatest band ever, obviously. And they didn’t live twenty years ago, or ten years ago, or even five years ago. They were right now. They were ours.
I think about those days, and I think about a motto etched onto the sleeve of one of those Pavement singles: I AM MADE OF BLUE SKY AND HARD ROCK AND I WILL LIVE THIS WAY FOREVER.
————————————————————–
I know this is getting long (who cares) but that part made me seriously consider getting that tattooed down my side in tiny script, I am made of blue sky and hard rock. Then this next part, well, it made me believe. Again. In things I stopped believing in.
Renee and I spent a lot of time that fall driving in her Chrysler, the kind of mile wide ride southern daddies like their girls to drive around in. She would look out the window and say, “It’s sunny, let’s go driving” — and then we’d actually do it. She loved to hit the highway and would say things like, “Let’s open ‘er up.” Or we would just drive aimlessly in the Blue Ridge mountains. She loved to take sharp corners, something her grandpa had taught her back in West Virginia. He could steer with just one index finger on the wheel. I would start to feel a little dizzy as the roads started to twist at funny angles, but Renee would just accelerate and cackle, “We’re shittin’ in tall cotton now!”
We would always sing along to the radio. I was eager to be her full-time Pip, but I had a lot to learn about harmony. Whenever we tried “California Dreamin’,” I could never remember whether I was the Mamas or the Papas. I had never sung duets before. She did her best to whip me into shape.
“They could never be!”
“What she was!”
“Was!”
“Was!”
“To!”
“To!”
“To!”
“No, no, damn it! I’m Oates!”
“I thought I was Oates.”
“You started as Hall. You have to stay Hall.”
We never resolved that dispute. We both always wanted to be Oates. Believe me, you don’t want to hear the fights we had over England Dan and John Ford Coley.
Have you ever been in a car with a southern girl blasting through South Carolina when Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Call Me The Breeze” comes on the radio? Sunday afternoon, sun out, windows down, nowhere to hurry back to? I never had. I was twenty-three. Renee turned up the radio and began screaming along. Renee was driving. She always preferred driving, since she said I drove like an old Irish lady. I thought to myself, Well, I have wasted my whole life up to this moment. Any other car I’ve ever been in was just to get me here, any road I’ve ever been on was just to get me here. Any other passenger seat I’ve ever sat on, I was just riding here. I barely recognized this girl sitting next to me, screaming along to the piano solo.
I thought, There is nowhere else in the universe I would rather be at this moment. I could count the places I would not rather be. I’ve always wanted to see New Zealand, but I’d still rather be here. The majestic ruins of Machu Picchu? I’d rather be here. A hillside in Cuenca, Spain, sipping coffee and watching leaves fall? Not even close. There is nowhere else I could imagine wanting to be besides here in this car, with this girl, on this road, listening to this song. If she breaks my heart, no matter what hell she puts me through, I can say it was worth it, just because of right now. Out the window is a blur and all I can really hear is this girl’s hair flapping in the wind, and maybe if we drive fast enough the universe will lose track of us and forget to stick us somewhere else.
LOVE IS A MIX TAPE – MIX TAPE
I am heading home from San Diego this weekend so I’ll leave you guys with this, and I’ll be listening to it too. New stuff, some old friends — all these songs are assembled from the mixtape liner notes that pepper the book. Thanks to Rob for opening the vaults.
Ryan Adams‘ celebrity playlist hit the UK iTunes earlier this week. Whether he meant this list in seriousness or jest (?) I’ll say it again, I love this man — even if he listens to Linkin Park, I guess.
In related news, I think I will be seeing Ryan again at a new festival goin’ on at Red Rocks on August 3rd (with –check this lineup– Lucinda Williams, Old ’97s, Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter, and Denver superstars DeVotchKa). Tickets onsale Saturday. Not a bad way to be introduced to Red Rocks – it’ll be my first time at the hallowed grounds.
Who’s in with me?
***************** RYAN ADAMS: CELEBRITY PLAYLIST
Lost One – Jay Z This is my favorite song (yes, song) of the year, maybe of all time. I listen to this every day when I leave home and hit the streets of the Big A – Manhattan representing or something . . .
Do You Believe In Rapture? – Sonic Youth This is a band that will apparently never suck, and will have changed your life no matter what kind of music you listen to. This is some lovemaking music or go crazy music. Either way. Both.
“Hip Hop Is Dead” – Nas Although I strongly disagree with the message of this song – because it’s awesome – which would mean it – being hip hop – only suffered minor injuries. Mainly people not unlike myself having access to breakbeats. Ah, snap.
“Kingdom Come”- Jay Z Man, this song made me almost get my license. I’m not lying. I started talking about it and everything because I wanted to jam this song in a car. People hate it when you jam songs in THEIR car too loud. So if he continues, I need a car and you people need to build a freeway in the forest for me where I cannot cause harm to others. I would press all the knobs in the car and mess with the seat and never get to the jam. Jay-Z is probably, in my opinion, the first person who should be allowed to perform in outer space and that is saying a lot.
“How To Save A Life” – The Fray This is perfect songwriting and anybody that says otherwise is a jerk. Amazing hair-raising stuff. I would write songs like this if I had an attention span, but they would have more wizards, problems, and space references, etc . . .
“I Can’t Make You Love Me” – Bonnie Raitt Instant tears. Flawless. And a sick guitarist to boot who, I have to say, sorry, but is hotter than Martian asphalt.
“Don’t Stop Believin’” – Journey Don’t worry Journey. Nobody will stop. Although Sartre would stop. Because it’s all, you know, nothing.
“Numb” – Linkin Park Amazing band, nice folks, kick-ass music. Everyone steals from them and they don’t care. They still do it like it was yesterday and yesterday was tomorrow. Times five.
“Is It Any Wonder?” – Keane This song really shook me to the core when I first heard it. I felt like the words were so on time and that the melody and meaning reminded me of that pain a person can feel right before it all goes up in smoke. Very beautiful and scary.
“Over the Mountain” – Ozzy Osbourne I once listened to this album six times in a row in one evening. Alone. It was fucking great. The album, I mean.
I got an email earlier today from Merge Records and just now got to it – but this sounds cool:
M. Ward will be performing on Late Night with Conan O’Brien TONIGHT Thursday, May 17th.
M. Ward will be joined by an impressive band of friends including Neko Case, Kelly Hogan, Jim James, Mike Coykendall, Than Luu, & Adam Selzer to perform “Chinese Translation” from Post-War (note: my #1 last year!) Don’t miss this just-for-TV slice of musical magic positioned just a little later than what will no doubt be an action-packed season finale of The Office!
A surprise hit at the Cannes film festival last year, the film portrait of French footballer (aka soccer player) Zidane looks fascinating, and sounds even better. The instrumental score is by Mogwai (yep, originally named after the Gremlin) and impressed me in its lush sensuality and moody atmosphere.
Having not heard Glaswegian band Mogwai before (I’ll admit, maybe not being up to the challenge of getting into an all-instrumental band) when this arrived in the mail I expected the soundtrack to be triumphant and rousing. You know, maybe like that one song they always play during the seventh-inning stretch with the thumping drums and the kazoo (doo doo-doo-doo-doo-doo HEY! duh-doo-doo-doo).
What I got instead was this gorgeous, sweeping soundtrack that conjures up images of floating away, drifting, or even drowning. There’s a taut darkness strung through every song — reminding me a bit of Massive Attack or the brooding melancholy of Jesus & Mary Chain. The album also definitely has its sexy moments, like the downtempo tension-filled scorchers on the Out of Sight soundtrack (trunk scene anyone?). It’s richly layered, revealing new depth with each listen. I recommend it as one of the best soundtrack scores I’ve heard in a long time.
I also need to see this movie! One synopsis reads: “Follow one of the greatest soccer players of the modern era for a full 90-minute match between Real Madrid and Villareal. Scottish film director Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parenno exquisitely train 17 different 35mm cameras on one of this century’s most creative athletes, Zinedine Zidane. While cameras capture Zidane in ‘real time,’ Gordon and Parenno’s artfully crafted debut feature is anything but a typical sports movie.”
I’ll admit to villifying Zidane because of the way he acted in the World Cup (not that Materazzi was blameless) and because he was on “The Other Team” (I was wholeheartedly pazzo for Italia). However, I understand his talent and his legacy and should learn more about why he is so beloved. With a soundtrack like this, I think I would definitely enjoy the viewing.
I just finished four hours at a mandatory teambuilding workshop, complete with Power Point slides and graphics of pyramids and color blocked charts illustrating our goals. It’s four hours I can never get back. I don’t want to pull a dooce here blogging too much about work, but hooo-whee. At a certain point, buzzwords about team dysfunctions, a culture of trust, and joint achievements just kinda stop sounding like real words and all kind of run together into humming. But at least we got a loosely-related fresh air inspirational video about a guy that took three attempts to summit Mount Everest. And he ultimately achieved it BECAUSE OF HIS TEAM. He let the Sherpa guide summit first! We never climb alone!
I volunteered to be blindfolded for the trust walk (yes, there was a trust walk) because I thought it would be kind of fun to tie on the silk scarf over my eyes and wander gropingly around the office (in my cute new wedge sandals), trying to not trip on anything. And the redemption finally came in that we actually got to watch a clip from The Office (US version). Now that’s what I call a win-win-win situation.
[Demotivator poster courtesy of the wonderful Despair.com]
Name: Heather Browne Location: Colorado, originally by way of California Giving context to the torrent since 2005.
"I love the relationship that anyone has with music: because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. It's the best part of us, probably, the richest and strangest part..."
—Nick Hornby, Songbook
"Music has always been a matter of energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel." —Hunter S. Thompson
Mp3s are for sampling purposes, kinda like when they give you the cheese cube at Costco, knowing that you'll often go home with having bought the whole 7 lb. spiced Brie log. They are left up for a limited time. If you LIKE the music, go and support these artists, buy their schwag, go to their concerts, purchase their CDs/records and tell all your friends. Rock on.
Hey Black Keys fans (yes, I’m talking to you): Those who find themselves enamored with the dirty, gritty, minimalistic blues-rock of this Akron, Ohio duo can let out a whoop of thanks for the live 4-track EP they just posted up for download at their MySpace. All the lovin of good new live tunes, for free. Don’t you wish every band would sate us this way?
You can get the tunes there or you can get it mirrored here:
Kings of Leon [
Now that’s what rock and roll is supposed to both look and feel like.
[Demotivator poster courtesy of the wonderful 
Name: Heather Browne
