Eric Anderson + a rotating cast of friends make up the Seattle band Cataldo. I don’t think the little kids are in the band (but would likely relate to the unjaded spirit of the songs it if they were). If you’ve sampled and enjoyed my summer mix, you might recognize Cataldo from the handclappy communal campfire goodness of “Black and Milds,” one of my favorite songs on that collection.
If it were possible to wear a groove into a digital stream, I would have surely etched one into their 2008 album Signal Flare by now, as it streams in full on Anderson’s website as my constant soundtrack of these hot midsummer weeks.
You should buy the album. This final song from it gets my highest recommendation if you love to sing and dance along to folks like Ben Kweller and Ben Lee. Which, really, should be all of you:
Eric writes in his charming biography, “I want to make beautiful things using people and tools around me. I believe in circuitous, round-about methods, trying as hard as you can, and fucking up as much as is necessary before you get things right. I believe in counter-melodies, gang vocals, and the banjo. Most of all I believe in singing things that are important to me and might be important to you.” I could not agree more. This is catchy, appealing, intelligently literate pop laced with sunshine and beat.
My friend Katie recommended that song on the summer mix, and has turned me on to their whole, wonderful catalog. I had a chance to see them with Laura Viers and Old Believers in March, and I do believe I failed dramatically by enjoying that second beer across the street instead of getting to the venue earlier. Hindsight!
Another favorite song on the album is the fantastic “Five Years Coming.” Over a banjo and piano melody, Anderson sings the truth:
“It’s been five years coming and one thing I can attest: that the simple songs of hope I wrote have always been my best.”
In a few weeks, the new theatre production of The Last Goodbye will make its highly anticipated world debut at the Williamstown Theatre Festival (August 5th – 20th). As I wrote back in April, this new creation takes Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet” and weaves fifteen songs from my beloved Jeff Buckley throughout it.
Under the summer stars, young actors and a rock band will put their hearts into letting Jeff’s music speak into the story of the ill-fated lovers we know so well. It’s also down the road from that Wilco-curated Solid Sound Festival. So yeah, why aren’t you going?
Even though I babble incoherently from lack of experience when talking about theatre, I was fortunate to talk to both the director Michael Kimmel, who first conceived of this pairing and worked with Jeff’s mom Mary Guibert to make it happen, and Kris Kukul, who is the musical director and actually wove the songs into the completed creation. It was fascinating to talk to them both, and I even got tears in my eyes at one point as Michael talked about why this play makes sense with this musician, this man. I think they get it. I’m excited to see where this production goes.
THE LAST GOODBYE: DIRECTOR – MICHAEL KIMMEL
Fuel/Friends: I understand that the genesis for this whole melding of Shakespeare and Jeff Buckley occurred in your mind. Tell me about that.
Michael Kimmel: A little over three years ago I had this idea. I’ve always been a fan of Jeff’s music, I’ve had Grace for years and years. I was directing a reading of Othello and I was on my way to a rehearsal, and “Forget Her” came on my iPod. I started to hear this conversation while the song was playing, “She was heartache from the moment that you met her.” I heard these two voices in Jeff’s voice, a back and forth in his lyrics, seeming to really be fighting. I had this moment where I said, “Wow, that really sounds like Romeo and Benvolio talking about Rosaline.”
It was a buzzing in my head, so I went back and found the play and opened it up and Benvolio says to Romeo, “Be ruled by me, forget to think of her.” And it wasn’t just that amorphous connection, more importantly that conversation I heard was an active process — and what we ended up with was the songs taking their place in the scenes in a very interesting and cool way.
F/F: So it started with that song, and went from there?
MK: Well once that happened I went through that whole doubt process of, “Well there’s no way this would work with the rest of his music!” I spent three months combing through everything that I had access to, Sin-é, Mystery White Boy, My Sweetheart The Drunk, all the stuff that’s readily available, and came up with a first pass of songs that I thought really fit well. At that point, I pursued getting in touch with Sony Music to see if this was even going to be possible before I got too far down the road. They came back to me and said “Mary Guibert [Jeff's mom, who owns all the rights to his music] really wants to talk to you about this.” We ended up having a phone conversation where I told her what the idea was. She was really interested, and I think a little skeptical.
A few months later in mid-2008, she ended up being in New York, and I took her down to a theatre in downtown New York, and I sat on the stage with a copy of Romeo and Juliet and I just had a friend on an iPod, and I took her through the whole story and how the music fit, and then we went out for a three hour dinner, and she was really really interested. We left that night with her wanting to see more, and we decided that I would put up a concert reading so that she could get a sense of the whole thing.
Lauren Fitzgerald from Williamstown introduced me to Kris and we endeavored to put this concert reading together for Mary to see it, and we only opened it up to the Jeff Buckley fan club and a couple of industry people. We came out of there and she saw it laid out and she completely got behind us. At the same time, the person who programs this venue called Joe’s Pub, the cabaret space of the public theatre, ended up seeing our reading and wanted to program us on their stage. So we also ended up doing three concert readings at Joe’s Pub last May, and that was our first true public presentation of the show. I describe those readings as basically a rock concert with a little bit of a play thrown in, you know, no costumes, no sets, just a cast of fourteen and a live band.
F/F: Is there a clear time period in your version? Modern times? Shakespearean times?
MK: It’s definitely set in modern times, in a modern version of “Verona,” and by Verona I mean a landscape that takes its cues from downtown New York of now. The actors are mostly in their 20s.
F/F: Do you find that most of the actors come to it knowing Jeff Buckley better or Shakespeare better? Or both?
MK: Casting is tricky, because it’s not musical-theatre music, and we’re not going to make his music something that it’s not – the rawness and the passion of it has got to stay for this to make sense. So finding people who can connect in that way is always a challenge, because it’s a different kind of performer than you would necessarily find in a typical “musical.” Sure, a lot of the people we’ve been working with are huge Jeff devotees – our Romeo is like a Jeff historian and has been hugely influenced by Jeff’s music. But that’s not to say that it’s not also equally great to find someone who is just being introduced to his music. I mean, the first time I heard Grace I said, “Wow, someone actually put a voice to that!” Seeing that in someone else is really gratifying.
F/F: How did it come to premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival?
MK: Well, the Joe’s Pub shows sold out well in advance and there were a lot of industry folks there. We spent a lot of time after those performances meeting with people and trying to look for the RIGHT path for it to take. It’s always been at the forefront for me, and I know for the others as well – getting this right.
F/F: What does that look like for you, this “getting it right”?
MK: It’s always constantly evolving and changing, from our first concert reading to Joe’s Pub, to now, it looks different. Now with the addition of choreography and getting it up on its feet, I think the way that it’s done right is that you walk out of the performance feeling re-invested in a story that’s been known for hundreds of years, and the music is the way in for that. And not only being invested in it, but seeing it in a different way. And you’ll probably appreciate this more than most, but I always say that there aren’t any halfway Jeff Buckley fans – they are a committed group.
F/F: It must be a good feeling for you to have the fans so strongly behind this, understanding what you are trying to do.
MK: I hear they are endeavoring to make a movie of his life, but where I feel that people can get behind us is that I am not interested in telling the story of Jeff’s life. What I am interested in is telling the story that I think he was trying to tell, and I think there is a big difference. It is a Herculean task. When I was able to start piecing all this music together, you really see a narrative, and it mirrors a lot of the narrative of Romeo and Juliet. I’m not the person to tell the story of his life. I am better suited to tell the story that I think he wanted to tell, the one that is suited to the stage.
What I learned from talking to fans after the readings is that people have a profound attachment to Jeff’s music that can be traced back to a very specific moment, whether it’s heartbreak or first love, and people have been sharing all their stories with me. That attachment and identification with his music, the intensity, I think is what makes it work so well. It connects those pieces to the story of these two kids, and attaches a sound to it that restores something I think the story has lost.
F/F: Right, because I think to a lot of people, Shakespeare just evokes high school English class, and that’s about it.
MK: Yeah! And I teach too at Fordham University in New York, and I teach it from a theatre perspective, not a literary perspective, and everyone’s impression is often just, “eh.” When you go back to the play, one thing that is always really interesting about Romeo and Juliet is that at the beginning of the play, Shakespeare ruined the ending. He tells you exactly how it is going to end. But what really appeals to me is that the ending is an afterthought, and it’s really the journey there that’s important – which also mirrors Jeff’s life to me.
Whenever anyone mentions Jeff now, it’s always, “died tragically. Died tragically.” For me, the death is an afterthought. It’s about the journey and this body of music that he left us and his evolution as an artist that matters. That’s the important part of it.
So when I say re-investing in the story, the idea is that if we do our job right, this time you hope that somehow it works out differently. And of course, after seeing umpteen productions of this play, there’s a sense of tragedy that pervades the whole play from the beginning – God, the weight of what happens at the end kind of carries through. For us though, it’s funny, and it’s messy, and it’s intense, and gritty and dirty and fumbling and insecure, but it’s never sad. It’s hopeful, you know?
KRIS KUKUL, MUSICAL DIRECTOR
Fuel/Friends: So were you a fan of Jeff Buckley’s music before this production? What’s been your connection with him?
Kris Kukul: I knew him a little bit. My previous roommate was a huge fan of his, she was the manager of the Club Fez in New York, and she would listen to him all the time. I knew some of his songs, but nothing like her – I got really familiar with him actually because of the show.
F/F: So has she seen the show?
KK: She’s obsessed with it. It’s amazing. She actually did know Jeff Buckley when he would play in New York. Folks like her are some of our biggest supporters. There’s always that hesitation before they see it, you know, like – “Wait a minute… is this going to sound like Cats??” I’m pleased with the way we are able to honor the music in this production, and tell the story with different voices.
F/F: Did you think it to be a daunting project, or exciting? Or both? I’m sure you became aware pretty quickly of the cult of Jeff Buckley fans.
KK: I wasn’t so much worried about how people were going to take it, it was more just trying to take a body of work and adapt it from the voice of one person who sings these fifteen songs. And to make it work for men, for women, for groups, for characters in this story. I think because of the strength of his lyrics, it just worked so well, and it wasn’t that difficult. From the very beginning, it was just so clear how well it worked together.
F/F: Explain to me what a music director does. I know that’s a dumb question, but help the non-theatre girl.
KK: For this production, I’ve done the orchestration and arrangements, and adapting the music, as well as the other side — teaching the singers the music, teaching the band the music. I conduct the band, and we don’t have any keyboards yet but if we put some in I might play that.
Jeff’s songs in the production aren’t exactly the same as they are on the album in terms of structure, there are a couple where songs are weaved together. Like “Lover, You Should Have Come Over” and “I Know We Could Be So Happy Baby” is turned into a duet, with Juliet singing the former and Romeo the latter. There’s a lot of group singing, the ensemble plays a big part so there is a lot of harmony added in that regard, added vocal arrangements. And I just had to make the songs fit the scenes, the dialogue gets weaved in and out.
F/F: So your job was taking the songs from the way Jeff recorded them, and not changing them drastically, but weaving them into the Shakespeare.
KK: Yeah – there are some of his songs that are like eight, twelve, fifteen minutes long, so we didn’t always use the whole songs, that would be a decision of mine and Michael’s, if we left out a verse, or chose to repeat something. Like “Dream Brother,” for example, is used in the dance where Romeo meets Juliet, and Mercutio sings the song as the scene progresses. So Mercutio sings a verse in a scene with Romeo and Juliet, then there’s another verse in a scene with Tybalt, and then everyone shows up at the party and the whole group sings together: “Don’t be like the one who made me so old, don’t be like the one who left behind his name…”
Then we weave in the line from “I Woke Up In A Strange Place” about “fate is gonna find your love” gets weaved throughout the whole play. So in the midst of the dance, then that line will come back in.
F/F: Ooh, that gave me chills.
KK: Yeah! I mean, it’s weird and uncanny how well the lyrics fit. Also in “Eternal Life,” which is the big song at the end of Act One where Mercutio dies, there’s the line about “there’s a flaming red horizon that screams our names.” That line is also used throughout the entire play, it’s in there like fifteen times. That one line sums up what these young people are heading towards.
F/F: The only other theatre adaptation like this that I’ve ever written about on Fuel/Friends is Spring Awakening, when I went to an interview roundtable with Duncan Sheik who penned all those songs. Now, that seems like a similar idea of taking a very old play and trying to set it to contemporary music. Do you see any connections with what you are doing here?
KK: I think by definition they actually are similar, although I haven’t seen Spring Awakening, sadly! I know lots of the songs and like them actually, but I think with Spring Awakening is much more of a concept, in terms of there’s the play and then the songs are actually in a separate universe where they are internal thoughts, as opposed to a traditional musical where the songs are actually part of the story, which is what The Last Goodbye is using the songs for. In Spring Awakening, they had this device where every time people would sing they would pull out a handheld microphone, so that the singing became part of a different, expressionistic universe. That play is about sexual repression, so they would sing about all the things they couldn’t talk about in life. So that actually lends itself to that concept very well. Ours is just kids in love.
Jeff’s lyrics are also incredibly poetic, so Shakespeare meshes well with this highly beautiful, poetic lyricism. He’s much more of a poet than just a lyricist.
We’re not beholden to the original Shakespeare text either, a lot of things are moved around. In the play, as in all Shakespeare, there are these big soliloquies, and so in this production those soliloquies are what have become the songs and where we’ve placed them.
F/F: What kind of band do you have playing with this show?
KK: There is drums, bass, two guitars, and a violin and cello. Possibly some keys, if we decide to put piano in the songs – but that might tip it too much into musical theatre land, which we don’t want to do. Jeff rarely used piano in his songs, there’s only a few, like, “Everybody Here Wants You” where he uses just those two accent bars. I don’t want this to be American Idiot, I don’t want this to be Spring Awakening.
F/F: “Everybody Here Wants You” is among my favorite Jeff Buckley songs, so damn sexy. How does that appear in the play?
KK: Oh, that’s in that scene after the party on the balcony song, and Romeo sings it to Juliet, and then she joins in. Everyone is looking for her and she’s out making googly eyes with Romeo. But yeah, it’s such a great song, it’s like R&B!
F/F: How involved was Jeff’s mom in the process?
KK: She’s been at every performance, she holds the rights so she had a lot of say in everything, but she’s been totally supportive from the beginning. I mean — she suggested a viola once, but that’s been the extent, she’s been happy with the choices we’ve made and how the songs sound.
F/F: How does the choreography work with the music?
KK: We have Sonya Tayeh [editor’s note: the one choreographer I have actually heard of!]. She’s a judge on So You Think You Can Dance, the one with the mohawk, and she is an amazing choreographer. We tried very hard to have non-conventional choreography, we didn’t want a lot of Broadway in it, we wanted weird, organic, avant garde work, and she absolutely did that. She’s incredible and crazy and amazing, but that’s what we wanted. Really young, hip movement.
F/F: So a lot of people without a background in theatre, like me, experience a kind of a disconnect when they go to musicals, because all of a sudden everyone is doing jazz hands and bursting out into song [reference]. Do you think non-theatre audiences will feel that way at all with The Last Goodbye?
KK: We’ve economized it, and the actors are young and sexy and rockstars, and it just makes sense. I don’t think people will have that disconnect, at all. But that being said, my mom is probably not going to like it. It’s loud. But it’s not a vaudeville play or a waltz scene. At the end of the day, it’s Jeff’s songs.
This Kathleen Edwards cover is just stunningly gorgeous. My good friend Dainon pointed me in the direction of his Salt Lake City musician friends Paul Jacobsen & The Madison Arm yesterday afternoon, and so I spent the rest of my next three hours at work intermittently working on a spreadsheet and clicking play every five minutes and twenty nine seconds.
The piano echoes as if this was recorded in a sad, empty room. My friend ruminated today, “Isn’t that song just like someone draws the curtains so they can hold you while you weep?” Depressing as hell, but yes. How is it that a piano can evoke feelings that no other instrument can even touch in me?
It feels something like Love is Hell-era Ryan Adams sitting in front of his piano, all the shiny gold country Americana stripped down, sanded off, and made more beautiful.
Paul Jacobsen also did an interesting National cover that’s grown on me and into me like moss. The National is a hard band to cover. Where the original is elegant, restrained, baritone grace all throughout, on this cover I love how Paul’s voice raises in lament right after the 2:15-mark. It almost evokes Peter Gabriel to me.
They run in the same musical circles as neighbors Jay Henderson and Band of Annuals, both of whom I’ve written about before. And if you’re in Salt Lake City, they are opening for Colin Hay on July 31.
When I was studying abroad in Italy in 1999, Italian superstar Jovanotti (aka Lorenzo Cherubini) had just released his eclectic, electronic, pale-blue album Capo Horn, which I bought at Discoteca Fiorentina in a little cobblestone back alley next to the very best panino shop in all of the land. I’d first heard his music when my language teacher at Syracuse Florence had used his song “Per Te” as one of her “songs of the week” on cassette tapes to help us learn italiano. That song was a sweet lullaby to his newborn daughter, but the rest of the album, I came to learn, skated from bleep-bloop odes to extraterrestials, to sunny pop jingles, to rambling spoken word constructions.
I remember Jovanotti’s level of fame that autumn as being somewhere in the league of Bono, a man he actually counts as a friend due to social justice initiatives and songs that they’ve worked on together. Jovanotti first hit fame as a somewhat goofy 20 year-old DJ with ebullient, light-hearted songs, and has grown to be one of the most massive pop music stars Italy has produced in many years.
He’s long incorporated global sounds into his music (one of the most fun songs ever live is his “L’Ombelico del Mondo,” with its massive African drums), and I opened last year’s summer mix with his Spanish/Italian collaboration “Storia di un Corazon.” Lorenzo sold out a string of shows at NYC’s Joe’s Pub last year –packed with ex-pat Italians and Williamsburg cognoscenti alike– and The Philadelphia Inquirer called him “a musician whose time in the U.S. has come.” He also did a marvelous interview on NPR’s All Things Considered. I’ve never had a chance to test out for myself what a Jovanotti show will be like on U.S. soil — until now.
Buoyed by a cheap flight and a willing friend to greet me, I am headed to Los Angeles on Thursday to see Jovanotti play a free summer night concert at the Santa Monica Pier, presented by KCRW. I also get to interview him (in my mind, that is followed by about 30 exclamation points). I have no idea what to expect, I just know this makes me deeply, deeply happy.
I’ve loved watching his music develop from “Penso Positivo” rap songs (think positive! because we’re alive!) to a more rootsy, organic, socially-conscious body of work that collaborates with folks like Michael Franti (“Dal Basso,” among other songs) and Ben Harper, on this song from his 2008 release Safari:
(Io lo so che non sono solo, anche quando sono solo – I know that I’m not alone, even when I am alone)
Even if you don’t speak the language, anyone can find the mellifluous effect of “Fango” (“Mud”) soothing as it rushes over your ears — a phonetic maelstrom of earthy awesomeness.
There is something uniquely wonderful in the half-spoken, half-sung lyrics of Lorenzo, and the small observations he knits together. I can remember sitting at the small green kitchen table in my apartment near Santa Croce church with my host sister Elena, as she translated Jovanotti’s Italian lyrics from “Io Ti Cerchero” into English. I remember thinking how in my own language they might feel facile and rote, but in Italian they brought a hard lump into my throat and seemed, truly, like some of the most beautiful lyrics ever.
Call it the language of true poetry, the language of Dante, the actual sound of falling in love. Everything sounds like gospel in Italian. So you should read more about what this song means here. I appreciate the way that Jovanotti looks at mottled, cracked pieces of the world, and cements them together into something crazy and beautiful, flawed but absolutely worth admiring.
Last time I saw him in Bologna, he appeared on stage in orange pants, hoisted high above the crowd in a harness, flying back and forth while he sang the first song. His music has matured and deepened since then (he’s 43), and while he likely won’t have the flashy stage production on the pier, just him and his guitar will be enough to make me sing along.
Here are a few of his older songs as well. His newest album (2008) is called Safari, and is out on Mercury Records.
Give your ears something new:
L’ombelico del Mondo
Rome used to be called the “umbilicus mundi,” or bellybutton (center) of the world. This is Jovanotti’s pulsing African homage – when I saw him live in Bologna, a battalion of musicians wearing djembe drums around their waists ran out and Jovanotti played a huge tom with mallets.
Dal Basso (with Michael Franti) Tutto nasce dal basso e poi va su – everything starts from the bottom and rises up. A social anthem with a coiled, dense bass line and shared verses between Jovanotti and Michael Franti (in English). The song talks about all the places that revolutionary ideas will not be found (the classroom, the pages of the newspaper, in our heroes) but instead in vibration, joy, and freedom.
Per La Vita Che Verra (“For The Life That Will Be”)
Lorenzo recorded portions of his 1997 album in South Africa, and this song is such a glorious melding of continents, I never get tired of it.
Piove
This last one is on my playlist tonight because it is thundering and pouring big fat summer raindrops in Colorado today, and this is a song about rain. The rhythm of his words actually feels like rivulets and torrents.
JOVANOTTI U.S. TOUR – SUMMER 2010
July 21 – The Viper Room, Los Angeles, CA
July 22 – Twilight Dance Series, Santa Monica Pier, CA
July 25 – Stern Grove Festival, San Francisco, CA
July 31 – SummerStage, New York City, NY
I was clicking around on Threadless a few weeks ago and noticed their cool new “Living in Harmony” dual guitar design (acoustic? electric? how about both). I tend to be lamely paralyzed by indecision when buying clothing online and didn’t get it then, but serendipitously now the folks at Threadless have contacted me with a sweet little promo contest for you guys!
Fuel/Friends has a prize pack to give away containing the tshirt design by artist Josh Perkins, and matching Havaianas flip flops as well. You may or may not wear them together, depending on how completely dedicated to the idea of musical fashion you wish to appear.
TO WIN! I know this might cause you to groan, but you need to find a great joke to leave in the comments for me — one that makes you laugh out loud. The other night on a bicycle pubcrawl, I was talking about jokes and how hard it is to remember them when needed, and I realized I need some new fodder. Here’s my latest favorite: How do you get 100 Canadians to get out of a swimming pool? You say, “Please get out of the swimming pool.”
And because I like this song, both the original electric and this acoustic re-interpretation:
There is something so exquisitely elegant and hammeringly sad about the way that St. Vincent sounds on the verses of “Mistaken for Strangers” here. Matt Berninger of The National comes in with his weighty vocals as accent – like a marvelous “Sleep All Summer” redux.
The visuals are nothing exceptional (afternoon soundcheck at a Roman theatre in Lyon, France a few days ago) but the way this song is woven into some sort of suspended, breathless delicacy just simply breaks my heart.
Based on a recommendation from a friend who saw The Mynabirds last night at San Francisco’s Rickshaw Stop, I’ve googled and clicked and fallen in love with the toe-tapping sultriness and all these indie-rock goddess vocals.
Half of the former D.C. duo Georgie James, Laura Burhenn possesses a powerful alto voice that owns this album and every song on it. Ranging from dusty old soul to big gospel harmonies, with clattery percussion that evokes Spoon at times and smolders at others, What We Lose In The Fire We Gain In The Flood (Saddle Creek) is eclectic and thoroughly enjoyable. Burhenn’s voice channels the confidence of females like Dusty Springfield circa 1968, to Cat Power or Jenny Lewis in the modern-day lexicon. This song even has a touch of Cowboy Junkies?
I also strongly recommend that you listen to the piano-thumping fun of “Let The Record Go” and the echoey girl-group soul of “Numbers Don’t Lie,” among others.
What We Lose In The Fire We Gain In The Flood was recorded with lots of whiskey and dancing in an Oregon hillside cabin, and was produced by the uncannily flawless ear of Richard Swift (whose pop confections opened a Wilco show for me once). Nate Walcott (Bright Eyes) arranged the shiny horns, and my friend J. Tom Hnatow of These United States brings his wicked slide guitar. It is a fantastic record, been listening to it all day.
CONTEST FOR THE DENVER KIDS: Wanna come see the Mynabirds on Monday night (July 19) at the Hi-Dive? I have a pair of tickets to give away. It’s an 18+ show, with Dark Dark Dark. As usual, please email me if you can for sure for reals come. We’ll get you on the list.
For the non-Denver residents, here are your other options:
MYNABIRDS TOUR DATES * = w/ David Bazan
& = w/ Crooked Fingers
07/15: Seattle, WA @ Sunset Tavern
07/16: Portland, OR @ Doug Fir Lounge
07/17: Boise, ID @ Neurolux
07/18: Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge
07/19: Denver, CO @ Hi-Dive
07/24: Omaha, NE @ MAHA Festival
08/01: Council Bluffs, IA @ Stir Cove (w/ Al Green)
08/07: Council Bluffs, IA @ Stir Live and Loud
08/27: Omaha, NE @ Outside at Slowdown ( w/ Built To Spill)
09/03: Austin, TX @ The Mohawk &
09/05: Tucson, AZ @ Club Congress &
09/06: San Diego, CA @ Soda Bar &
09/08: San Francisco, CA @ Café Du Nord &
09/16: Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall*
09/17: Detroit, MI @ Magic Stick*
09/18: Toronto, ON @ Lee’s Place*
09/19: Montreal, QC @ II Motore*
09/21: Burlington, VT @ Club Metronome*
09/22: Cambridge, MA @ TT The Bear’s*
09/24: Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Bowl*
09/25: Wahsington DC @ Black Cat*
09/26: Charolottesville, VA @ The Southern*
09/27: Carrboro, NC @ Cats Cradle*
09/28: Atlanta, GA @ The Earl*
09/29: Nashville, TN @ Exit/In*
10/01: Jacksonville, FL @ Jack Rabbits*
10/02: Orlando, FL @ The Social*
10/03: Tallahassee, FL @ The Engine Room*
10/05: Birmingham, AL @ The Bottletree*
10/06: New Orleans, LA @ One Eyed Jacks*
I’ve written several times that I believe Idahoan Josh Ritter is one of the most important and talented songwriters of our generation, making music that is weighty and beautiful, that will stand up to time. Each of his six albums over the last 11 years has trod different musical ground, from folksy acousticism to uptempo soulful rock, and all shades in between. Yet all of this is ballasted by his insightful, dazzling lyrics – drawing lessons from mythology, psychology, religious narratives, archaeology, and historical figures, but never inaccessibly so.
I am an unabashed lover of words. I’ve been known to fall for folks strictly on the basis of their vocabulary. For me, the way Josh can excise things deep within me using only a handful of words is truly rare. Here is a guy who gets it, who pursues stories and emotions relentlessly to evoke them powerfully in his music. He gets my highest respect – I mean, even how created his own major at Oberlin College in “American History Through Narrative Folk Music”; I’m incredibly jealous that I didn’t think of that. Plus, he just rocks, and is one of the most ebullient live performers you will ever see.
I walked into this interview with so much apprehension, not because I thought he’d be anything but marvelous (I’d been warned how generous his hugs were, and he didn’t disappoint) but because I am so deeply impressed with what he does. My usual types of interview questions seemed to fall so short it wasn’t even funny. So under some big trees in Telluride on a Thursday evening, we just talked instead. And it was warm and wonderful. It went like this:
JOSH RITTER INTERVIEW
Fuel/Friends:I have a whole jumbled bunch of questions that I would love to ask you, but hmmmm . . . I think I want to start with something that references your new album, something I’ve rolled over a lot in my head these past months. In “The Curse” . . . do you think it was worth it for her?
Josh Ritter: Ooh, wow. That’s a really good question. I don’t know. Well, let me think . . .
I think that love is like a trap sometimes. You get deep in and you think, “This is the wrong place to be,” and by that time, it’s all built around you. I’m not sure, but I typically tend to stay away from an idea like [says grandly] “But it was all worth it.” I mean, if it wasn’t right in the end, then it wasn’t worth it. My experience with love has been this: if it’s good, then it ends good or it continues good. But if it’s not good then it’s just . . . not good. I mean what is the difference between a tragedy and any other sort of genre? The tragedy ends badly. I think of that song as a tragedy, but the interesting part to me is that he knows the whole time that he’s doing this to her.
F/F: So he knew? I always couldn’t tell if he knew, or if he just somehow hoped that it would be different this time, that his curse wouldn’t be destructive.
JR: Yeah, I do like the idea that it could be interpreted a number of different ways. But I like seeing him as calculating, like he built this thing around himself (“Think of them as an immense invitation”) so that this one day this would happen. As much as there may have been periods when he was truly in love, he was ultimately using her.
F/F: See, I was thinking about how it might not have been a bad exchange for her — I think of the lyrics about how they talk of the Nile and girls in bulrushes, and I mean, through that relationship, she got to be as close as she would EVER be to that world of Egypt that she had dedicated her whole studies to.
JR: I never thought about it quite like that. That’s really cool.
F/F: And the video is amazing. I never expected puppets to make me cry, the way his eyes twinkle.
JR: I know, I know! I feel exactly the same way! Liam (our drummer, who made the video) is a ninja.
F/F: Do you think that you are telling old stories with a new voice? Or new stories?
JR: Oh, old stories, definitely. There is nothing new. Whether it’s Cormac McCarthy, or Mark Twain, or whoever, they are never telling a story that’s completely brand new. There’s always an archetype. It reminds me of that quote about: “See what everybody else has seen, think what nobody else has thought.” (Albert Szent-Gyoergi). Songs are just reimagining old stories, old feelings. It’s like in science how an electron microscope helped us to see things that had always been all around us since time immemorial, but now we saw it in a whole new way.
F/F: There was a time you considered a career in science. Is music at all like science?
JR: I think science is like art, yeah absolutely. There’s a tendency to put your own discipline on a pedestal, and hold it above all others, but there are so many similarities. There’s an idea that scientists wear these white robes on a mountainside and write down these massive truths, but science fills a societal need of figuring out answers to questions we have, just the same as art does. For example, my parents are studying appetite and how it affect diabetes and obesity, and that’s important research, but really it is filling a need – the same thing that happens in art. You see a need out there that interests you and you follow it, and there’s gotta be a reason why you are interested in it. They speak to different needs in different ways. Science and art and religion are all very similar – all trying to fill in the gaps.
F/F: You mention religion, and many of your songs almost strike me as parables, or at least allegorical fables.
JR: A parable is like a multi-faceted metaphor. To go back to what we were talking about with “The Curse,” you can see it a lot of different ways – and that’s what makes it so interesting. Elaine Pagels is an amazing writer about religion, and she talks a lot about the Gnostic Gospels, and this idea that a few parables of Jesus had been written down before he died, and then after Jesus was dead all these people came along who knew these parables, but they meant something different to everyone, whether it was Peter and Paul, or Mary Magdalene, or Mary, or James, all these people that claimed to have a secret knowledge about what that parable meant – Thomas, the gospel of Thomas is the best example of that, and the secret teachings. Even when we talk about something like the Sermon on the Mount, there are things that seem perfectly clear, and also completely mystifying the next moment. Like Leonard Cohen says, “from the staggering account of the Sermon on the Mount / which I don’t pretend to understand at all.”
But maybe it’s really holding a mirror up to yourself, and how you interpret something tells you a lot about yourself. If you think A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O’Connor is funny, are you being honest with yourself, or are you just a mean person?
F/F: Well, I think my last question is…..
JR: (interrupts, leaning forward) – I got a question for you. What’s your favorite song in the world, that you’ve ever heard? If you had to choose.
(I am stunned with the vastness of this question, and Josh asking it to me. I feel like I haven’t studied for a really cool test. I cannot pick.)
JR: I think mine would maybe be “I Dream A Highway” by Gillian Welch.
F/F: Oooh! Such an excellent, excellent choice. That song has everything you could ever want. Hmm, that kind of reminds me of a song I love that I was listening to on the way here, I don’t think it is my favorite song ever, by any means, but one that speaks volumes to me – “Mary” by Patty Griffin.
JR: Oh, yeah! Yessss, that song is a SICK song. “….Stays behind and starts cleaning up the place,” (we both say in unison). It shows so many facets of her . . . and it makes you mad that she’s just being used every which way.
F/F: Agreed. So I want to talk a little about the sticky intersection between art and commerce – do you think they are mutually incompatible?
JR: I certainly hope music is a commercial venture. I have no bones about the fact that I feel I deserve to make a living off my music. I mean, what else would I do? People who choose to follow art are often ill-suited to be anything else. The best writers or directors or comedians, you cannot imagine them doing anything else. I’m curious if I could do something else – I mean I wrote a book, but I guess we’ll see if I can do that well. What I do helps me survive; I definitely wouldn’t want to do anything else. Whatever there is about God or whatever, I think it helps to believe you were put somewhere for something. And if someone decides their profession will be one of an artist, that’s a noble choice. In the end you are selling something that you think is important, because you are spending your time doing it. And also, I think people can tell when you don’t think it’s that important, and there’s tons of artists that are doing that as well.
Commerce and art are only good when you have a level of trust with the people that are buying your music. What they are actually buying is a chance for you to spend more time doing what you do – playing shows, putting out albums. That is your responsibility to account for yourself, for the money they have given you. That that’s gotten a lot harder, I think, is not necessarily a bad thing. The last 50,000 years of human history have been about artists working hard for very little, and only about 50-60 years now where that hasn’t been the case. So it is a kind of historical aberration right now. But I definitely think that the amount of stuff that musicians and other artists go through, and the relatively small returns, you know, we all deserve the same kind of normal life that everybody else has. Like I would like to have kids and be able to support them. So to those ends, there’s probably not much I wouldn’t do to be able to keep up playing music and be able to support my family.
Certain decisions would need to be made on a situational basis, like commercials. I did a commercial for Crayola with my song “Great Big Mind,” which I was really happy with. But I’m not The Black Eyed Peas, I’m not gonna go out and do, like, the Camel Cigarette Tour or anything like that. It’s also sort of a thing that sticks with me a little bit because I feel like people in the last generation have always looked askance at making money from commercials, you know? There are people like Tom Waits, who I love in every way, except that I don’t agree with him (in his staunch opposition to commercials). He came up in a different time where people sold records, and made money selling records, and that’s not a thing that happens anymore so we have to look in other places.
F/F: Do you ever feel the struggle in the balance between writing something that will sell and something that is artistically true to you? Is there a conflict selling something that comes from the deepest parts of you?
JR: There’s that point when somebody is running for office, when they are attracting the people who will vote for them based on who they are, and I feel it switches at some point (I believe Hemingway calls that the “pilot fish” – the one swimming ahead of the pack and leading all the other fish to that place). At some point it flips and then the leader becomes the follower of the other fish in his pack, the other fish that supported him to get him to where he is now. You stop becoming a leader and you start becoming a follower, you become part of the mob.
You cannot allow yourself to become that. If you try to shape your music to fill a certain hole, it’s not gonna work that way, it just ends up sounding bland. You have to do your own thing because that’s all that anybody really wants. It’s harder, but at least you don’t feel like you’re a faker. The worst thing I can think of would be writing songs desperately, trying to get a hit.
F/F: It reminds me of the article I read once about Weezer trying to mathematically analyze their hit songs, what made them hits.
JR: Everything I’ve ever seen with music leads me to think that there is no way to know what people are going to like. I think I know, but I don’t have any idea of what happens once it leaves me.
All you can do is do what you do, and hope that the side effect of making music that you yourself love is that other people are going to love it too. And when I die, I’ll leave something behind that I was actually proud of.
[photos by the luminous Sarah Law. His hands in the top picture remind me of this. Thanks, Sarah.]
In addition to being a mile high, Denver is also known as the Queen City of the Plains, since we are regally awesome. We have a feisty and fertile music scene here, and this occasional feature aims to spotlight the best of our music to the rest of the world.
I’m a few weeks late on the draw with new Denver duo Tennis, and their summery lo-fi brand of fuzzed out goodness. They just played a packed show at the Meadowlark on Friday night (I was busy happy houring on my lawn as the sun set, so not entirely a bad trade?) and are the latest Denver band to garner a healthy amount of buzz.
Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley are married, and they fled the landlocked Denver (I know the feeling, guys) to head towards the pull of the ocean. They spent eight months sailing before returning to record songs like this one.
Recommended if you like Beach House, Wavves, Girls, and other summer things. They’re so new that they’re not playing Denver’s big Underground Music Showcase July 22-25, sadly.
TENNIS TOUR DATES Aug 10 – The Hi-Dive, Denver, Colorado
Aug 16 – The Slowdown, Omaha, NE
Aug 17 – Vaudeville Mews, Des Moines, IA
Aug 18 – DAYTROTTER, Rock Island, IL
Aug 19 – tba, Chicago, IL
Aug 25 – Cakeshop, New York, NY
Aug 26 – Glasslands, Brookyln, ny
Aug 27 – Subterranean, Washington, DC
Aug 28 – HEXAGON, Baltimore, MD
Aug 30 – The Layabout, Durham, NC
I love Clem Snideso much, and it just keeps getting stronger. You may have noticed my minor affinity for covers, and frontman Eef Barzelay can delight me with his straightforward, completely earnest renditions that find veins of truth in the most unexpected of places. So here even the #1 ironic-karaoke band Journey sounds almost wistful. It gets even better when his two bandmates come in whistling at the end, and no one cracks a smile.
Perhaps you remember the Clem Snide cover of Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful,” but my all-time favorite version he does is that of the Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” Instead of Nico’s halting alienation, Eef’s sweet earnestness makes me believe good truths, laced through with that elegant and knowing cello.
I also never get tired of listening to their original song “Born A Man” – Eef’s a super smart songwriter, like an SAT study party soundtrack. The new Clem Snide album Meat of Life came out in February.
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.
Another favorite song on the album is the fantastic “Five Years Coming.” Over a banjo and piano melody, Anderson sings the truth: 
F/F: The only other theatre adaptation like this that I’ve ever written about on Fuel/Friends is Spring Awakening, when I went to 
Here are a few of his older songs as well. His newest album (2008) is called 
CONTEST FOR THE DENVER KIDS: Wanna come see the Mynabirds on 
But I’ll make a point to be at their next show at 
Name: Heather Browne
