I’ve recently been somewhat obsessed with the Ben Lee song “Catch My Disease” (on my Stomp/Clap mix) — I listen to it every time I need a potent jolt of handclappy goodness in my day these last two weeks. I’ve been familiar with this quirky Australian musician over the years, both in his solo work (“Running with Scissors” from my That’s Dangerous! Mix is still a wholehearted favorite – a massive tune that completely could have been a radio hit) and the awesomeness of The Bens collaboration (with Kweller and Folds in 2003).
Recently my iPod shuffled forth this gift, and I had to smile. I love the unvarnished acoustic delight here, even when he flubs the bridge timing and has to start over. It sounds like the stars coming out, and you and me watching on our backs in the summer grass.
Formerly the frontman of ’90s rock band Archers of Loaf, Eric Bachmann has been crafting music with his band Crooked Fingers for over a decade. He writes incisive, pitch-perfect songs (remember “Sleep All Summer” that The National and St. Vincent covered last year? It was one of my favorite finds of those warm months, and Nick Hornby’s as well). Sleep All Summer – Crooked Fingers
The first Reservoir Songs EP in 2002 had an old-time baptism depicted on the cover, and the gentle, warm arrangements of songs therein knocked me flat. I loved his version of Springsteen’s “The River” — somehow he makes the original even more heartbreaking, the disillusionment of forgotten dreams gentle but thorough [listen here].
Bachmann is currently harnessing the power of the internets to kickstart funding support behind his next Reservoir Songs Vol. 2 EP (due out on July 6). There will be six new covers on the second incarnation, with a vinyl-only pressing on the tiny indie label Foreign Leisure. His songwriting fodder this time around is Merle Haggard, Moby Grape, Thin Lizzy, Billie Jo Shaver, The Kinks, and this late ’60s easy rambler from John Hartford:
To pledge to this project through Kickstarter just means you commit ahead, buying ahead to show the financial backing for the endeavor. I think it might be the future of music for indie musicians. Bachmann’s already raised more than the $5000 needed to initiate, but look – for just $15 now, you get a limited, numbered edition of the EP on vinyl with screenprinted cover art, and a download. What is raised now, in excess of the set goal, goes towards a new Crooked Fingers full-length album, after 2008′s Forfeit/Fortune, which is just fine by me.
I don’t know much about the principles of electricity, but I do know that there is something ephemeral and hard to contain about the blue-white volts. As I watched Kristian Matsson, aka The Tallest Man on Earth, last night at the Bluebird Theatre, I thought of lightning and static, and how I could almost hear the electricity humming in the air around his tightly wound, wiry, small frame.
Matsson writes some of the most intricately plucked, passionately thought-out songs in my ears these days. His voice is insistent and pressing, enunciated and piercing. You can’t detect any accent from his native Sweden; in fact his rough voice actually does sound akin to the troubadour he’s often compared with (Dylan — not hard to see why). Watching him captivate the crowd, I wondered how anyone could think all folk music on an acoustic guitar was sleepy and rosy. Matsson powerfully channels the urgency of the best folk music of a generation past, comfortable in the soundtrack of today.
For as jovial and talkative as Mattson was, during the songs he was unable to stand still. Each one seemed to be working its way out through his very skin, as he rocked back and forth and locked eyes with folks in the crowd, sitting down for a second only to stand right back up again. It was a kinetic experience. Josh Ritter has a similar undiluted enthusiasm for the crafting of his songs in a live setting, but where Ritter seems to joyfully birth each lyric with a palpable joy, Kristian’s songs feel hard-fought and sharp edged. There is an urgency behind each story he needs to get out. He roils and paces, struggling to let the muse and the melody pass through him authentically to the audience. Standing sometimes like a bird, his skinny legs would tuck and fold one on the other, perching.
The songs were nothing short of gorgeous, even as their words ran me through. Matsson is a master guitar player, inflecting subtle musical variations into the finger-picking patterns of the songs. The bluesy notes seemed to often hang golden and round in the air, practically visible in their radiance. There was a camaraderie there down in front by the stage, like we all knew a secret (while many at the back bar of the sold-out club talked loudly over him, the opener). He played several requests and acknowledged the requesters, hugged two fans pressed up against the stage, and leaned in amongst us every chance he got – dripping sweat.
His music flows beautifully organic, rife with imagery of levees of stars, rivers and snow, and sparrows and bluebirds. But – there’s a dark and sometimes sinister undercurrent to the way Kristian sees the natural world. He’s not writing about the jasmine because it smells good, he’s writing about how it thrives based on the body buried beneath it. The secrets that we keep. The jealousies we foster.
It hit me as I watched him play just how damn much I have fallen in love with his music. As each song started (The Gardener, Where Do My Bluebird Fly, Love Is All, Pistol Dreams, Drying Of The Lawns, an exquisite King of Spain…) I kept feeling frissons of joy inside, thinking, “ooh! I love this song!” After the seventh time, I realized what I meant to say to myself is that I really just deeply love him , and appreciate his music. When I met him after the show, he gave me one of the tightest hugs I’ve yet gotten, and I swallowed hard and thanked him for making my life richer and my heart fuller. I know – cheeseball. But I’ve never claimed to be otherwise, and his music does do that for me, every time.
Now you must listen. He closed his set with a fairly unknown new song, a bonus track from his new album The Wild Hunt (one of the best albums of 2010 so far, out now on Dead Oceans). And yes — holy heck, it stripped me bare and held me fixed.
…In the forest someone is whispering to a tree now
this is all I am so please don’t follow me
And it’s your brother in the shaft that I’m a-swinging
please let the kindness of forgetting set me free
And he said oh my Lord…
why am I not strong?
like the wheel that keeps travelers traveling on
like the wheel that will take you home
And on this Sunday someone’s sitting down to wonder,
‘Where the hell among these mountains will I be?’
There’s a cloud behind the cloud to which I’m yelling
I could hear you sneak around so easily
And I said oh my Lord…
why am I not strong?
like the branch that keeps hangman hanging on
like the branch that will take me home …
I am loving the album version above, but last night’s closing rendition was acoustic and simple with a guitar instead of the piano, and it possesses a separate kind of beauty:
Other highlights? How about him bringing out his marvelous, wrenching cover of Paul Simon’s Graceland? (which I just learned Simon once said was the best song he’d ever written).
Brian Fallon of The Gaslight Anthem stopped by KEXP studios last week to record acoustic versions of three songs from the band’s newest album American Slang (out June 15th on SideOneDummy Records). The new songs keep speaking to the same themes from 2008′s The ’59 Sound – the grit and callousness of everyday life, the redemption through the songs (the ones we heard as our guard came down).
That second song is a cover of something originally by Canadian band Lightning Dust, a cousin band to Black Mountain. Originally woven in Amber Webber’s delicate croon on 2009′s Infinite Light (Jagjaguwar), Fallon reinvents it here as his own sad dirge of Americana. When I met him last year, Fallon told me he was thinking of recording a solo album. Since I love these acoustic sets, I’d be very interested in hearing that effort. Antonia Jane – Lightning Dust
Did you ever come close to home?
riding the tide of the silver line
maybe dress them up in ribbon and bows
never fall back into the one you love
Jamie Lidell possesses that confident, funky swagger and musical ingenuity that straddles genres and backgrounds. I find this white kid from Cambridgeshire, England so proficient in unleashing new blends of sounds that every new effort from him is a pleasure to dive into. Even in the back of a black cab, riding around somewhere in London, armed only with a few sampling tools and his totally un-self-conscious musical presence, he creates something marvelous.
Antiquiet perfectly captured it when they wrote: “It made us think of some of Michael Jackson’s early demos. There’s this great version of Beat It, where he lays down the beat, the guitar, the harmonies, the backups, every single layer of the song just by overdubbing his humming into a 4-track recorder. We’ll always be in awe of artists who can so completely envision and effortlessly express a song.” The Ring – Jamie Lidell
Compass(out today on Warp Records) brings back Lidell’s unique soul that struts and oozes like Prince or James Brown, with guest songwriting assists from both Beck and Feist and help from Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor and Wilco’s Pat Sansone. First listens are eclectic and powerfully fantastic.
And for good measure, this is arguably my favorite Jamie Lidell song from 2005′s Multiply(you should see me prepare for and then execute that drum fill that starts at 0:45; it’s breathtaking) -
JAMIE LIDELL TOUR DATES
06.09: Philadelphia, PA – World Cafe
06.10: Brooklyn, NY – Music Hall of Williamsburg
06.12: Toronto, ON – The Mod Club
06.14: Vancouver, BC – Venue
06.16: Portland, OR – Doug Fir Lounge
06.18: San Francisco, CA – The Independent
06.19: Los Angeles, CA – El Rey Theatre
Breathlessly unrelenting from the first seconds, this song makes me feel like I was walking down a street in some post-apocalyptic foreign city and suddenly got caught in a really awesome game of guerilla laser tag. With a girl band from the Sixties.
I am off to Mesa Verde this weekend to see the remains of rad ancient civilizations. I did a report on it once when I was a nine-year-old living in California, and I’ve been fascinated ever since by the cliff dwellings the Anasazi left behind. Now it’s driving distance away, so I found a friend and we’re off. Since it’s May and supposed to be warm and gorgeous, I borrowed my dad’s little convertible car for our long drive, but instead, we’re flirting with snow. Ah well. It’s an adventure.
My favorite songs are the ones you feel in your bones, the ones that bubble up effervescently with that passion which has to explode out your extremities in the form of claps, stomps, and other forms of bodily percussion.
A few months ago, fellow blogger Adrian and I started knocking around the idea of a Stomp/Clap mix with all the best samples of these songs. This has been an absolute joy to assemble (with suggestions from you guys) and is the perfect late-Spring soundtrack. While everything outside is coming back to life, these songs are the essence of vibrancy and propulsive joy.
They range all over the map, from the old Delta blues of Son House, to Frightened Rabbit from Scotland (my favorite song on their new album), to the fantastic version from Brooklyn’s Elizabeth & The Catapult covering Leonard Cohen. There’s the song from Good Old War that kept me going all winter with its hopeful lyrics about birds up in the sky (and I thought of those words when a flock of seagulls soared silently over my head on the beach Saturday evening), and the Joshua James tune still frequently finds itself on repeat in my car for a dozen times or more.
The handclap + stomp combination was the earliest way that we humans punctuated our songs and kept our beats, and the preponderance of newer artists on this mix heartens me. Music is joyful again.
THE FUEL/FRIENDS STOMP-CLAP MIX
(This one’s so massive, I’m calling it a Double-CD/Gatefold LP supermix)
I recently made a different mix for a drummer friend of mine, all based around songs with percussion I love — and I think this mix just eclipsed it. This might be my favorite new mix ever.
This song feels completely perfect this morning – such a wistful, humble, earnest little song. I don’t often find myself in an Oasis mood, but the news of a Liam Gallagher Beatles movie (no one saw that coming) led me to delve and talk a bit about their songs and the ones that stick with me.
This one is the flawless complement to this silvery-grey swirl of conflicting feelings I always have after a visceral few days back in my hometown. Solo Noel Gallagher renditions are often my favorites of the Oasis catalog, and the addition of the strings makes it even more right. When I listen to this song, it vibrates with youth and a sort of naive longing.
This is from The Dreams We Have As Children, released by Noel last year as a fundraiser for the Teenage Cancer Trust. The full album includes guest spots by Paul Weller and a host of b-sides and rarities from the Oasis catalog. You can stream the whole thing on Lala (for the next 21 days).
[photo: my cell phone snap. Saturday night, Seabright beach]
Last weekend as it snowed on the first weekend of May (and really, Colorado, why not?!) I cozied into Denver’s Esquire Theatre to watch Ben Stiller quirkily emote as Greenberg. I rather liked the film, and kept noticing the quality of the songs throughout. I hadn’t known until afterwards that James Murphy from LCD Soundsystem wrote most of the original songs for the film, and when this song queued up over the closing credits, it instantaneously became my new favorite 1-minute-long song.
As director Noah Baumbach said in a recent interview, “I hired the guy from LCD Soundsystem, and I made him sound like solo Paul McCartney” (or this). If You Need A Friend – James Murphy
Holy heck, this is going on the “Stomp Clap Mix” that Adrian and I are slowly building.
On most days, my favorite Wilco album is Summerteeth (maybe on most warm days like today, or perhaps it would always be my favorite if I lived in California full time).
TO WIN: Let’s talk about your favorite Wilco _______ (seemingly nonsensical but somehow profound song lyric, live concert moment, etc). You pick what to write about, and the responses will be enjoyable for me to read in these coming days of travel and services. I’ll pick a winner when I get home on Sunday night.
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.
That second song is a cover of something originally by Canadian band 
TO WIN: Let’s talk about your favorite Wilco _______ (seemingly nonsensical but somehow profound song lyric, live concert moment, etc). You pick what to write about, and the responses will be enjoyable for me to read in these coming days of travel and services. I’ll pick a winner when I get home on Sunday night.
Name: Heather Browne
