It is Sunday, after all

The Sufjan-influenced Welcome Wagon create songs that sound more like a jubilant Easter sunrise service than Brooklyn in January. This song is burnished brass, banjo and handclaps, and everyone singing along at the end. “Skip about like calves, coming from their stalls at last…”

But For You Who Fear My Name – The Welcome Wagon

Their 2008 album is out on Asthmatic Kitty.


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The haunting melancholy of AA Bondy

Today dawned steely grey and covered in snow. While it was nice to get a slow start, I feel a touch of the seasonal blues, unexpectedly.

It’s the right kind of day for the sad, slow beauty of AA Bondy.

I fell in love with Bondy’s music last year and almost named his When The Devil’s Loose (2009, Fat Possum) one of my top albums of the year. Bondy wrote of it, evocatively, “To me [the album] sounds like a radio washed ashore after a shipwreck.” The songs are subtle on the album, but it is really something to hear what they become live.

HearYa Sessions recently had Bondy and his backing band into the studio, and I was amazed by the way “Slow Parade” becomes an electric beast at the end. It starts like morphine and ends like ten-foot waves crashing.

Slow Parade – AA Bondy

Drag your shadow down the street
is it you I was to meet?
with your saints there on a chain
Waiting on another rain

And I’m going down
where the waves will surround
to the roll and the pound of the wild, wild sea
singin sweet to me…

Also, be sure to listen to the HearYa version of “Mightiest of Guns.” That minute-long slowburn introduction here puts a lump in my throat.

CONTEST FOR THE DENVER KIDS:
Come see AA Bondy tonight at the Hi-Dive! I have four tickets to give away, so please email me ASAP if you’d like to attend! Willy Mason and A(aron) Tom Collins open.

AA BONDY TOUR DATES
28 Jan – Hi-Dive, Denver, CO
29 Jan – Jackpot, Lawrence, KS
30 Jan – Maintenance Shop, Ames, IA
1 Feb – High Noon Saloon, Madison, WI
2 Feb – Blind Pig, Ann Arbor, MI
3 Feb – Mohawk Place, Buffalo, NY
4 Feb – Valentine’s Downstairs, Albany, NY
5 Feb – T.T. The Bear’s, Boston, MA
6 Feb – Union Hall, Brooklyn, NY

That catchy song in the fake iPad commercial

Man, would Steve Jobs just go ahead and officially take over the universe already? I don’t even have an iPhone, my years-old iPod is so full it hasn’t been synced in months (sanc?), and mostly I just like to surreptitiously touch my friends’ i-devices that are cooler than mine.

With the announcement today of the iPad (which I find myself desperately wanting), a possibly fake YouTube advert also surfaced, with very real music provided by Los Angelenos Cola-Cola:

Catchy, right? But even better than the chimey gem used in the commercial is their song “Paper Bird,” which I keep restarting over and over on my player. This song offers an unadulterated slice of power-pop joy, like The Swimmers meeting Local Natives.

Paper Bird – Cola-Cola

Yum. I’m addicted.

Their Cola Cola EP is out now independently.

Angels will fall on me and take me to my home

This song is spare and haunting, a massive voice in an empty room, and I have been listening to it on endless repeat lately. Folks have been urging me for months now to listen to Lissie, the girl from Rock Island, Illinois with a voice much more soulful and evocative than belied by her slight presence. A good pal put her song “Little Lovin’” on his very best of 2009 compilation mix, and I knew she was in town to open for Ray LaMontagne but I missed her. So after peripheral glances of her might for months now, I’m glad I finally took some more time to listen.

This song reminds me of a combination of Mazzy Star and the echoey space in the Serena Ryder cover of “Funeral.” Listen for the three-minute mark to really get your socks knocked off.

Everywhere I Go – Lissie

Man, what a voice.

Lissie’s debut EP Why You Runnin is out now on Oxford, Mississippi’s Fat Possum Records. You should probably also check out her Daytrotter Session.

The Swell Season covers Bruce

A reader who was at Radio City Music Hall on Tuesday night to see The Swell Season sent me this stunning link. Amidst the sweet, sad saxophone, it once again becomes a singalong. Holy heck.

…Lying in the heat of the night like prisoners all our lives
I get shivers down my spine and all I wanna do is hold you tight

I am waiting, waiting…

I spent most of this afternoon streaming the full new album from Patty Griffin, one I’ve been waiting to hear since I sat in the very sanctuary where it all happened. Downtown Church was recorded in one of the oldest churches in Nashville that once housed wounded Civil War soldiers amidst its Egyptian-themed murals and columns. I accompanied my friend there for her regular Sunday service when I was visiting in December, and was thrilled when the kids’ Sunday school teacher mentioned to me that Patty had recorded a full album there at the beginning of last year. The presence of the room is amazing, and I could picture Patty belting from the pulpit.

This is a full-on gospel album, with songs written and influenced by folks as varied as Hank Williams, Big Mama Thornton, and Bob Dylan. It’s produced by Buddy Miller, and the formidable Emmylou Harris loans her vocals, as well as “gospel royalty” like Regina and Ann McCrary. There were tinges of this warming, soulful authenticity on songs like the incredible “Mary” (in ’98) or cuts like “Up To The Mountain (MLK song)” from 2007′s Children Running Through. But this one lays down the folded-paper fans and Sunday dress hats, and just lets it go.

This song knocked the breath out of me the first time I heard it today, and sent all kinds of tingles up and down my spine. I closed my office door immediately and turned it way up, mesmerized. It starts humble, but it’s hard not to be moved by the end — the ache and the grief and the longing in her voice speaks as clearly as any of the words she is singing.

I also first thought she was singing, “I am waiting, waiting, for my time to come,” and to some degree, maybe we all are waiting for something. Waiting for someone to return, waiting for a clear path, waiting for a soulmate or a child or some inspiration.

This is a song for that.

Waiting For My Child To Come – Patty Griffin

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Patty recorded a version of this song with Mavis Staples for the Oh Happy Daycompilation earlier this year, but this new version is even more solemn, more soulful, more absolutely convincing.

When Miller spoke of the genesis of this album concept, he stated that Patty “seemed to feel this would be good for her heart, too.” Yes.

“One of the first things she said was she wanted a room where she could kind of feel her voice coming back to her,” Miller says. “And my place doesn’t necessarily fall in that category. So I thought of this downtown Presbyterian church. I’d just done a couple songs as part of a benefit there. It’s the wildest looking thing, and it sounded beautiful. So I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask.”

And after you finish listening to this, try segueing seamlessly into Joshua James’ “Cold War” in all its boot-stomping gospel goodness, and be sated completely. Perfect.

Hello blackbird, hello starling

…Winter’s over, be my darling
been a long time coming but now
snow is gone.

Josh Ritter is one of the most important songwriters of our generation, consistently producing breathtaking songs that are rife with symbolism, rich with meaning, and brimming over with the kind of heart that I want to have.

While we wait for his new album this year (one of my most anticipated in 2010, based on things like this) yesterday brought the news that Ritter is re-releasing Hello Starling, his third album, with all kinds of fancy extras.

This album contains several of my all-time favorite songs from Ritter: Kathleen (for lines like, “all the other girls here are stars, you are the northern lights” and “every heart is a package tangled up in knots someone else tied”) and Bone of Song (a spine-tingly story about creative inspiration).

And also this one, which I have been listening the bejesus out of this last month. Even if a glance around me tells me that the snow is still here, the ice is caked in the shade, and the water is frozen over impenetrably, for a while when i listen to this song I can close my eyes and feel that real shoot of green hope, somewhere underneath. Hope in spite of this grey reality.

I’m underneath your window now
it’s long after the birds have gone to roost
and I can’t tell if I’m singing for the love of it
or for the love of you…

Snow Is Gone – Josh Ritter

This new 2-CD deluxe reissue of Hello Starling also includes a bonus CD of Josh performing the whole album solo acoustic, four live bonus cuts (Josh plus full band) as well as rewritten, spiffed up liner notes, photos, and essays. Buy it at Newbury Comics (limited booklets autographed by Josh) or at your independent record store (www.thinkindie.com). Oh and while you’re at it – Josh also has a new song “Great Big Mind” on the 1% for the Planet compilation.

Josh Ritter is playing tonight at the Radio City Music Hall with The Swell Season, then it’s off to a bunch of dates in Europe. I plan to see him this summer at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival with Mumford and Sons. Yes, please.

OK Go’s new video and smartly-written missive

For all the backyard dancing and treadmill acrobatics, OK Go could sometimes dismissed as a silly pop band, but my experiences with their music leave me pretty sure that they’re anything but. Yes, they might like to dress up as a marching band now and again but really, who doesn’t? Their music is sleek, catchy, and literate.

So, I copied that embed code for their new video above from an open letter that whipsmart frontman Damian Kulash penned in the OK Go forums last night, all about why you can’t embed their videos on YouTube. He writes in part:

“The catch: the software that pays out those tiny sums doesn’t pay if a video is embedded. This means our label doesn’t get their hard-won share of the pie if our video is played on your blog, so (surprise, surprise) they won’t let us be on your blog. And, voilá: four years after we posted our first homemade videos to YouTube and they spread across the globe faster than swine flu, making our bassist’s glasses recognizable to 70-year-olds in Wichita and 5-year-olds in Seoul and eventually turning a tidy little profit for EMI, we’re – unbelievably – stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared. It’s like the world has gone backwards.”

I always find it fascinating to read musicians’ viewpoints about the industry and how the liquid maelstrom of the internet can affect things for good or for bad. The whole letter is worth a read.

Their new album Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky is stylish, breathy and clever.

I fell in love with you, and out of love with you, and back in love with you (all in the same day)

When I was in Nashville last month, I stumbled upon Brendan Benson and Cory Chisel playing an afternoon set to a packed crowd at Grimey’s record store (surely one of the coolest music meccas on the planet). There was free beer (Magic Hat?) being handed out for the price of free, and it was as if I had slipped over to heaven for an hour there amidst the music.

Brendan Benson is noted these days for his role in The Raconteurs, and I had only ever seen him in that lineup, never solo. But his solo music tends towards the irresistibly solid power pop, never silly, always completely delicious and substantial. I took some videos for y’all that I’m just getting around to uploading on this sunny Saturday:

A Whole Lot Better – Brendan Benson
(rad opening track off his latest album, My Old, Familiar Friend)

And an older one that I’ve loved heartily…

And finally – covering Tom Petty’s “American Girl”! Brad Pemberton (of Ryan Adams’ Cardinals, Patty Griffin‘s band, and the Alternate Routes, among many others) rocking the drumkit, too.

I didn’t go to Benson’s show that night at the Exit/In, but ended up across the street. Standing on a rainy sidewalk outside the venue, I could see in past the packed crowd to watch him play “What I’m Looking For,” before we ran off into the night. It was a fine capper to a wonderful weekend.

A Danger(ous) radio appearance

Hot on the heels of my NPR chat, I recently stopped by Danger Radio studios in a top-secret location in Denver to record a show with Tyler “Danger” Jacobson and Jake Ryan. In between playing songs we’re digging, listen to me get feisty and flushed about defending bands I love from marauding curmudgeons with strong opinions.

Danger Radio Episode 47 with Heather Browne (playlist)

[Just kidding, we love each other. But we did disagree, which is kind of fun. Top photo by Todd Roeth, from this excellent piece.]