Dig this terrific remix of the Jackson Five classic “The Love You Save” (that sage 1970 warning against booty calls?) from NYC’s Lower East Side duo The Knocks, who have also given their fresh treatment to The Killers, Peter Bjorn & John, and Passion Pit.
I always find the Jacksons eminently remixable (DJ Z-Trip did my favorite ever, but this is also close). Their songs were so laden with strong foundational elements that can be teased out to the front in myriad different ways. Enjoy this for your Hump Day. Holy heck.
This Saturday night in Denver will mark the final show of my favorite Colorado musical collective, the vibrant Everything Absent Or Distorted. Drawing together a minimum of eight members (but often more), this band has burst with explosive melodies and the potential to fill –literally and figuratively– every stage they’ve occupied, from the local to national level, and beyond. With their electric guitars, banjos, pianos, trombones, cellos, and pots & pans, they have given me an immense amount of joy and catharsis in the last two years — so much so that I put their album The Great Collapse into my top ten last year and still am not tired of listening to them, not at all. Not even a little bit.
If you live anywhere within a two-hour driving distance to Denver’s Bluebird Theater, I urge you to come out this Saturday night for their glorious, visceral, explosive last hurrah. Everyone is requested to wear their “best Sunday whites,” and I’ve cobbled together a fairly decent assemblage. There is something that feels a bit decadent, eccentric, even defiant, about wearing all white in late October. We’ll be a radiant crowd even though I will likely get misty. This is a band I’ve loved, and whom I’ll miss.
As I wrote this summer, “From the first time I saw EAOD live, I completely understood what they were trying to do with their music, because it’s the same way it hits me. To the guys in EAOD, music is something cathartic, something beautiful, and something more immense than could ever be captured on record. Every show was a tightly-wound, hot-blooded tour de force of musical intensity. It was never about perfection, it was about grabbing your instrument(s), climbing on your friend’s back, and singing marvelously literate lyrics about what this life can feel like.”
As their song “Closer Than You Think” opens, they muse: “Every time I close my eyes, I think about the ones that died, who had a book but never wrote it down, who had a song but never made a sound….”
I’m so thankful they made a sound, many of them.
The band is finishing things off with one last 4-song EP called The Lucky One – giving away 100 hard copies for free at the show (with that hand-printed cover art on the left, by Denver artist Jane Rabadi) and then giving it away digitally after Saturday.
As they write in the liner notes for the new EP, “It is not the last ditch effort of a dying band; it’s just the last thing we have to say right now.” I’ll miss what they have to say.
Mason Jennings’ Cave Recordings capture an artist very early in his career with stripped-down versions of some of his best songs. Recorded in 1998 at The Cave (a student-run pub at Carleton College in Minnesota), the blues emphases really shines through in this set, sounding timelessly rustic and eternally honest.
Mason’s rendition of “California (Part I)” here is one of my favorite versions – the earnest, unadorned way he sings the lines, “California, I’m gonna miss you … like I miss the ocean when I go to sleep / Man, it’s gonna break my heart….”
(That’s it — next time I come out to Cali I’m gonna stay in one of these, and listen to the ocean again as I fall asleep. Done.)
I’m coming up only to hold you under
I’m coming up only to show you wrong
and to know you is hard,
and we wonder…..
The original Band of Horses song “The Funeral” is a shimmering, gorgeous cascade that always reminded me of watching waves break, or a beam of sunlight shoot through the clouds – direct and powerful. Breathtaking when it explodes around that 1:20 mark.
But there’s something in those lyrics that catches in the back of my throat, that I must admit gives me pause with its undertones of… vengeance? Sadness? Regrets? It’s never been more prominent to me than the way Serena Ryder takes this song and makes it her own. Her voice is a powerful creation that feels muted here, but channels a hint of Janis Joplin, or more recently the marvelous Samantha Crain. This recording comes from a 4-song EP of covers a la Cat Power.
I am entranced by her throaty alto re-creation — smoky and restrained, and yet so terrifically mournful.
Serena is from Toronto and this year has brought tours with Ingrid Michaelson, Paolo Nutini, and Pete Yorn. Her album is it o.k. is out November 3rd, and she plays Denver’s Bluebird on October 27th.
If you haven’t spent any time around little people lately (kids, not midgets) perhaps you’ve forgotten how deeply calming it is to pick up a marker or a crayon and just spend some time coloring.
Your friends at the most excellent Yellow Bird Project have not forgotten this truth, and in the spirit of creating more awesomeness in this world, they’ve put together an Indie Rock Coloring Book that is suitable for kiddos or creative grown-ups.
Color in the whimsy of Andrew Bird’s whistling, or shade in Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s crazy carnival — we’ve got a couple to give away.
The YBP are the folks that have all our favorite musicans design original artwork for t-shirts (I have and love The National shirt — and you should check out the new Ra Ra Riot one!) with all the funds going to charity. This new coloring book is no different, with all the proceeds going to good causes. I met these fellas at Outside Lands in SF this year, and they are making some positive change in the world despite being younguns. Idealism works sometimes.
I tripped right into the gangly, urgent, danceable music of Ezra Furman & The Harpoons quite by accident last summer, and from the Jonathan Richmanesque spoken word lead-in of “I wrote this song in a paper bag…” my ears were happily perked. With a sound that channels some of the best awkward charm since the Violent Femmes, Furman has found an outlet for the restlessness of youth.
Their music unfurls into cacophony and melody, retro and squawk, The Kinks meet punk, with a dash of The Replacements’ sloppy joy. There are handclaps and awkward yells and lyrics about enjoying the music without worrying ’bout the words. That sounds like a plan tonight when they hit Denver’s Hi-Dive for the explosive opening of their big autumn tour.
That song makes me want to do some sort of modified twist dance move. It’s all in the hips. Ezra Furman & The Harpoons were signed by Minty Fresh Records while they were yet in college at Tufts, and are still evolving as a band through hundreds of live shows. I like where they are heading. Brian Deck (Modest Mouse) produced their album, and they played to an enthusiastic hometown crowd at Lollapalooza this summer.
After two albums on Minty Fresh, their latest is a self-released effort wherein (get ready) Ezra will record a personalized song for each person that buys it . The purchasing instructions advise you to “fill out the information of who ever will be receiving this special album, be it you or for someone else. Things such as receiver’s name, where he or she lives, anything, really . . . seriously. Ezra and the band will revolve their special message around the information you give.” Did we use the word charming already?
EZRA FURMAN & THE HARPOONS
(DAYTROTTER/”KITE IN A HURRICANE” TOUR)
Oct 15 – Denver, CO @ Hi-Dive
Oct 16 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court
Oct 18 – Seattle, WA @ High Dive Seattle
Oct 19 – Portland, OR @ Doug Fir Lounge
Oct 21 – San Francisco, CA (US) @ Rickshaw Stop
Oct 22 – Los Angeles, CA @ Spaceland
Oct 23 – La Jolla, CA @ The Loft
Oct 24 – Tucson, AZ @ Solar Culture
Oct 25 – Scottsdale, AZ @ Chyro Arts
Oct 27 – Norman, OK @ Opolis Coffee
Oct 28 – Houston, TX @ Walter’s on Washington
Oct 29 – Austin, TX @ The Mohawk
Oct 31 – Hot Springs, AR @ Maxine’s
Nov 1 – Little Rock, AR @ Juanita’s
Nov 3 – Memphis, TN @ Hi-Tone Cafe
Nov 5 – Nashville, TN @ 3rd & Lindsley
Nov 6 – Atlanta, GA @ The Drunken Unicorn
Nov 7 – Chapel Hill, NC @ Local 506
Nov 8 – Charlottesville, VA @ The Southern
Nov 11 – Madison, WI @ High Noon Saloon
Nov 12 – Stevens Point, WI @ The Encore – Univ of Wisconsin
Nov 13 – Minneapolis, MN @ 7th Street Entry
Nov 14 – Iowa City, IA @ The Mill
Nov 17 – Columbia, MO @ MOJO’s
Nov 18 – Lawrence, KS @ The Bottleneck
Nov 19 – St. Louis, MO @ The Firebird
Nov 20 – Indianapolis, IN @ Vollrath
Nov 27 – Chicago, IL @ Double Door
There are certain songs that I wouldn’t necessarily call guilty pleasures, because they are well-written pop songs, but rather — it never stops feeling somehow indulgent to enjoy their toe-tapping majesty this much.
The amp-kicking Superdrag hit “Sucked Out” (from 1996′s Regretfully Yours) remains a song I still like to hear, and when Brendan Benson covered it last week for his Daytrotter session, I was delighted. Benson and Superdrag share similar songwriting chops in consistently solid pop genius, oft-overlooked.
This is a song that Benson has been covering live in concert this summer, and it’s nice to have a clean recording (for free, at that!). The session also gives us three songs from his current album My Old, Familiar Friend (including the creepy melancholy of “Feel Like Taking You Home”).
The music made by Langhorne Slim is an anachronistic blend of rollicking, boot-stomping Americana, howling rock, and plaintive love songs that defy a single era. Hailing from the small town in Pennsylvania that he borrowed as his stage name from, Langhorne is indeed an artist who defines himself and his genre simply as a man who writes love songs. From soul-stirring gospel to old brokedown blues, his music is influenced by many different styles as there are kinds of love, and “it just makes sense.” He has released a superb album this year with his Be Set Free. I’ve been listening to it nonstop.
Over a bottle of wine in room #312 of the rad historic Boulderado Hotel, we spoke of everything from his musical roots listening to Hole when he was 14, to his kinship with the older generation and his comfort in growing older, and the ways he challenges himself in music to keep things exciting. In the same way that someone like M Ward is both delightfully unpredictable and richly soaked in the blues, Langhorne moves fluidly between a range of influences.
There’s a loosely-tied thread of jangly marvelousness cascading through so many of these songs, like it’s just barely being held together around the edges, while pulsing wild and free in the hot-blooded center. He can also turn a lyric in a way that pierces me, and is just as sharp and clever in person as he is on his records.
LANGHORNE SLIM INTERVIEW
BOULDERADO HOTEL, ROOM 312
September 9, 2009
FUEL/FRIENDS: You work really hard with your music, and you’ve been doing it for a long time – fifteen years?
Langhorne Slim: Well, I started writing music when I was pretty small, but I’ve been doing it professionally for six years or so. I’ve got high hopes with this new album, I want to make records that I hope will be meaningful to people for a long time.
F/F: Do you feel that you’ve approached all three of your records more or less in the same way, or are you trying completely new things here that you’ve never done in the past?
LS: Well, I tried to sing better, for one (laughs), because I do got it in me. No, I think the songs on this record represent growth. I’m proud of the other records that we did too but this one is a little bit closer to where I’d like to go. Maybe if you start thinking you’re getting it all right, that can be dangerous, but I am excited about the different chances we took, and maybe I felt more comfortable within myself to take those chances.
F/F: What makes this current one your best one, and how is it different from your last ones?
LS: You get a bit more used to being in the studio, it’s a lot different than performing in front of a live audience. For us a lot of times, people will comment on the different energy at our live show and on our records. I understand where that comes from but I also…resent it? Slightly. Because I think that it’s two different forms of creativity, or two forms of oneself. In front of 100 people or 5 people or a thousand people, you know, and experimenting with these songs that you’ve been playing, and trying to explore those in a studio atmosphere, they are two very different animals. I think this time with the people we had on board, it just came out right for what it was. And I am pleased with that.
To get up in front of an audience – you don’t have that energy in a recording studio. I think that you just challenge yourself in different ways when you’re in the studio. You try to bring different things out that you wouldn’t necessarily do in a live setting. You can’t have a horn section on the road, I can’t have backup singers, but you can do that in the studio. But it’s a fine line – you don’t want stuff to sound too crystal clear in a way that makes you sound not like you. To try to keep shit raw and real, while also treading that fine line, that very fun line to explore. One needs to keep challenging themselves in their music to keep it exciting.
F/F: One of your most striking lyrics on the new album is when you recount how your grandfather told you, “All pain hurts the same.” How do you get at that with your music?
LS: Well, I’m very close with my grandparents, I have a very close family and have been lucky to have them throughout my life. I relate a lot to my grandpop Sid, and we deal with a lot of the same….we’re wired the same way. For me, I’m very happy to get older because I feel like I’m more myself – I feel better as I get older. Anyway, one time I was talking to Sidney about feeling down and not even knowing why, and I said to him, you know people are going through some really bad shit, and maybe it isn’t that tough, but why do I feel so down? And he said that. All pain hurts the same. It always stuck with me, and made it into one of my songs.
F/F: Have your grandparents informed your music in other ways? Because I feel that there’s a weight of time in your music that is not often found in young people’s writing.
LS: Probably yes, but we’re all raised in the way that we’re raised. That line rang true for me so I put it in the song because I always remembered it. I think it’s just moreso their support and wisdom and love for music that they raised us in. My parents split when I was two and my grandparents decided that they were going to step up, on both sides of the family. There was just a lot of support and they loved music. With me it was never like ‘you should get another job or, you should try something else,’ it was not like that. And I am very appreciative of that support.
F/F: A lot of your songs are very personal. Are you comfortable in letting people interpret them in the way they want, just letting it go? Or do you want them to be understood in the way that you wrote them?
LS: Not at all — in fact, I would much prefer that if anybody connects to it, they do it in their own way, because it’s not about what my connection to it is, necessarily, once it goes out there. That’s what music has always been to me, I mean – shit moves me, in my own way. Well, here’s an example – Britney Spears has a song “Womanizer,” and okay, I’m not a womanizer, but I like that song (laughs). Whatever sort of hits you, that’s what hits you. I’m beyond alright with releasing my songs out there, that’s naturally what just happens. You sit with these things and then you put em on a record and then you gotta move on to the next thing and work towards that. It’s a map of what has been done. What’s more heavy than having somebody relate to something and make it their own? For me that’s a big part of what this is all about.
F/F: It’s an interesting dichotomy to put so much of yourself into something and then set it out there and in a way it becomes not yours any more, even though you’re the one performing it.
LS: Yeah….Sometimes you’re telling everyone out there a story about something that happened, and this is how it happened, but other times it may be about a feeling or an emotion, and a melody that you think is cool. Or a story that’s fiction but not totally fiction – you’re putting, maybe, four different relationships that you might have had into a simple song. So it’s not always as personal or simple as my story, going out there.
F/F: There was a quote I read once where you said, “I only write love songs.”
LS: People say, “what kind of music do you write?” and you’re supposed to have a genre for what you do, and I’m not trying to sound too cool for school, but I don’t feel that way toward music. I feel that the category stuff is more geared towards what section do we put this in at the record store. But yeah, love songs – if there was a section for that in the record stores maybe that’s where my shit would be. It’s not just about romantic love, there’s happy love songs, and sad love songs. We can do something like we played tonight for the radio, and I think it went over well, but in the past years playing with all sorts of headliners like metal bands or noise bands or hip-hop acts, you know, that all made sense because we all respected what each other were doing. That’s something I miss a little bit, even though I can still bring people out on the road with me, but – if tonight weren’t a radio show, people could have yelled at us, or spent the whole night back at the bar. But how cool would it be if you could have like a traveling roadshow of different stuff that just made sense because it was all good? And people would react to it? I think I’ve been lucky to get to play with a lot of eclectic bands (Violent Femmes, Avett Brothers, Lucero, Murder by Death) but I would like to also do shows with people who wouldn’t make any sense. That’s why a lot of the festivals are cool – Snoop Dogg is over there and we’re over here, and if it works right, people are music fans and they are open to hearing different shit.
F/F: You just celebrated your 29th birthday the day after my 30th, so I wonder, do you see 30 as a milestone at all, and are there things you’d like to accomplish before then? Or are you pretty content with what you’re doing in this last year of your twenties?
LS: Well, yeah – I’d love to be able to get a house – it’s amazing to be able to tour as much as we do, but I look forward to the time where I can have a place of my own that I could come home to. It would be amazing to have my own little spot someplace. Also, just to get better at what we’re doing …. and to keep on going.
[Interview originally published at gigbot.com [R.I.P.], and photos of course by the formidable Todd Roeth]
This morning my neighborhood is covered in a thin sheet of ice, each leaf coated and crackly frozen. After venturing outside to take this picture (and promptly slipping on the ice), I sit here with my coffee and warm up, cozy in my slippers and fuzzy clothes. As I read the newspaper it tells me that today is the anniversary of the death of Casimir Pulaski, a Polish gentleman I know nothing about other than that his day in March is the title of one of my favorite Sufjan Stevens songs. Something about this powdered-sugar dusting of snow seems eminently appropriate for listening to a lot of Sufjan all morning long, yeah? I’m in Sufjan mood lately.
The sadness in this song always gets me — painfully honest, and bitterly sweet. A girl he loves is diagnosed with bone cancer. The light from the window presses up against her shoulderblade and they pray over her at Bible study (but nothing ever happens). He wrestles, as many of us do.
Any bit of writing that is penned to promote a new album is always prone to a bit of hyperbole, but today I read this:
“…Running together for one dark blissout of a night, two of the finest indie-folk songwriters of the last decade come together under the Texas sky to quietly lay to tape 14 crushing, haunting tunes, leaving space enough in each to match their surroundings.”
I like each and every one of those things — Quiet blissful nights. Crushing, haunting music with lots of space to echo and ache. Texas (!). Will Johnson (of Centro-matic) and Jason Molina (of Magnolia Electric Co and Songs: Ohia).
So it was really a complete “sold” before I even clicked play on this new song from the two of them. Then I listened, and wanted to run away with them immediately. This is serious.
And if you didn’t listen the first time I posted it (looks like one year ago tomorrow, actually) or want to hear it again — please spend a few minutes with my all time best-loved, most-devastating song from Will Johnson:
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.
The band is finishing things off with one last 4-song EP called The Lucky One – giving away 100 hard copies for free at the show (with that hand-printed cover art on the left, by Denver artist Jane Rabadi) and then giving it away digitally after Saturday.
Name: Heather Browne
