When I first read rumblings of the newly-formed “supergroup” collaboration between three artists who have all released incredibly strong albums in the last few years, I was eager to hear what they could cook up together. Imagine the expansive, sunny Laurel Canyon grooves of Dawes, the incisive pianowork and gruff yowl of Deer Tick, and the clever surf-tinged pop of Delta Spirit — all in one group. That seems to me like almost too much goodness for one album to hold.
The first track off the album proves all my suspicions:
STREAM: Me, Me, Me
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Download this track as a free Christmas present from the band, over on their website. Their full-length self-titled debut album will be out in March on Partisan Records. Yes, please.
This is among my top three favorite modern Christmas songs, from the 2003 self-titled album from Leona Naess. Sublime, laden with those sweetly sad cellos – I really could listen to it for hours. It’s the aural equivalent of snow falling and thinking about those you’ve loved this year.
I fell for this Bill Fay song the first time I heard it in the Wilco movie I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. But where Jeff Tweedy’s version is a humble benediction that casts out fear (and which I’ve used on a dozen mixtapes), this version from Damien Jurado and Richard Swift rises up all spectral and echoey, like a lost gospel choir in some knockaround vacant Southern church. Affecting and fabulous.
This is the first track on the collaboration album Other People’s Songs that Secretly Canadian labelmates Jurado and Swift recorded late this summer and released for free. Yup, free.
Go get it here, and read more about the song selection and recording process over here. Swift produced Jurado’s Saint Bartlett album this year, and I once saw Swift open for Wilco — a neat perfect circle of music.
I have two musical items that I would like to share with you tonight related to Admiral Fallow, a sextet from Glasgow that I’ve just been introduced to. This band couples winsomely intelligent, sharply evocative lyrics with ambling orchestral builds — starring both clarinets and foot-stomping in equal measure.
There is an immediately warm similarity to countrymates Frightened Rabbit, and in fact the two will be sharing the stage on several dates this spring. The Admiral Fallow debut album Boots Met My Face will be re-released in March 2011. It’s spun together both fine and real.
You’ll probably be singing along with that song after two or three listens, like I was. You can stream the whole album on Bandcamp; I am particularly captivated by their songs “Subbuteo,” and “Taste The Coast,” — even though the latter may have been written about a cold northern sea five thousand miles from my home near the coast of California, I feel the same way they do about the salty air. The clever simile-lover and poetry-reader in me also stopped short over the song “Dead Against Smoking,” in which a woman with skin the color of a violet golden sky, and inspires this striking chorus:
You’re like gasoline.
You’re like the willow tree.
You’re like a split screen.
But you’re the green in me.
I’m a sucker.
Second item of note: Admiral Fallow frontman Louis Abbott (below in the stripes) recently took part in this rad mini-movement in Glasgow where the city’s finest folk musicians do “wee jaunts,” playing a number of short shows en masse in completely unlikely places, like restrooms, subways, and stairwells. This made me laugh in utter delight; they sound so joyous covering Bon Iver, with their voices reverberating all around them.
I can’t get enough of the simplicity and perfection in this song — the way Feist’s malleable, honeyed voice melds so perfectly with Kyle Fields’ (Little Wings).
This is from the documentary film Look At What The Night Did Now (out last week) about Feist and her collaborators, directed by Anthony Seck and produced by Jannie McInnes — now screening in select awesome cities.
Collaborations? Here is another one of my favorites:
Despite a somewhat peculiar lack of snow so far this December, I went ahead tonight and made myself a White Russian and felt very mysterious (like the kind of girl who makes herself White Russians on a quiet Sunday evening) and sifted through my favorite seasonal music by the twinkling tree for this year’s Christmasy/wintry mix.
As I say every year, and as we are reminded in every lonely drugstore and crowded mall, there is a colossal amount of craptastic holiday music that should never be played again, ever. Synthesizers, no. Chipmunks, no. Every year I wonder if I will be able to find enough good new songs to use for a complete mix of meaningful, pensive, spirited Christmas music. Every year find that with some searching and selective culling, I can.
This year’s mix ranges from the brand-new to quite-old melodies, but all are road tested by yours truly, and I hope they add a pleasing lilt to your holiday celebrations. Last month marked five years of Fuel/Friends, and this is a little year-end gift to you all. Thank you for reading and listening.
An opportunity to celebrate all that is right with music in Denver, and look forward to where we can be headed, the Denver Music Summit is happening this Friday! I am extremely excited to be a part of this multifaceted event that will both serve as a crash course for Denver-area musicians on how to get their music heard on a wider scale, as well as for policymakers and music folks from around the country to come together to discuss how we can help from the top-level policy perspective.
A joint vision of both the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs and WESTAF, the Western States Arts Federation (who commissioned that in-depth study on the Denver music scene last year), the Denver Music Summit is the culmination of a lot of planning and dreaming. Musicians have scheduled one-on-one consultations with experts in a variety of fields, including promotion and booking, blogging/press, audio engineering, song licensing, and artist management. In the afternoon, my amiable southern friend Storm Gloor (who teaches music business at UC Denver) will be presenting a series of seminars to the large audience with the help of guest speakers like me, to talk about topics like The Future of The Music Business, and Marketing Effectively in the Digital Age.
On Friday morning I’ll also be helping to facilitate a policy symposium with high-level folks from arts organizations, universities, fellow music-centric cities (like Austin), record labels, and more. We’ll be discussing things like cultural policy, the creative economy, music education – things that I could talk about all day. I am pretty excited to hear what all we can come up with, and actual ways that it can affect music in this great city.
Plus, the mayor/governor-elect is gonna be there for lunch (I call him Hickenloop) so I am wearing my Sunday pants.
WIN TICKETS!
The Summit proceedings are pretty much full-up this time around, but you can still win tickets to come to the kickoff concert celebration tomorrow night!
Come join your fellow music lovers at the Bluebird to hear a varied gathering of local musicians: some of Denver’s best artists in classical, jazz, hip-hop and rock. Performers include the Lamont School of Music’s Playground Ensemble, internationally-renowned jazz artist Ron Miles, local hip-hop luminaries Mane Rok, DeeJay Tense and Prime Element, and local indie popsters Fingers of the Sun. It should be interesting and fun! Come drink and dance with us.
KICKOFF CONCERT CELEBRATION
Thursday, December 9
Doors – 8 p.m. / Showtime – 8:30 p.m.
Bluebird Theater, 3317 E. Colfax Ave., Denver, CO 80206
$10, or email me by noon to win a pair of tickets!
Last weekend a quiet snow was blanketing Denver (turning the streets icy slick) but I slowly made my way across town to a Sunday night house show with local shining stars The Lumineers. These four musicians opened for The Head and The Heart when they were in Colorado last month (both the sold-out show in Denver as well as the Fuel/Friends house show) and thoroughly wowed me.
I got their raw, acoustic EP and have been listening to it every day on my walk to work — think of Adam Haworth Stephens’ music (Two Gallants), and the first Avett Brothers records. The hint of a warble in Wes’ voice on songs like “Submarines” (below) also reminds me some of Ryan Gosling with his ace Dead Man’s Bones tunes.
The video up there captures one of my favorite new songs from the house show, and I am thrilled Isaac Ravishankara recorded it, as he apparently was standing right behind my perch on the wooden floor. After this song and all the clapping and stomping, we headed into the dark dining room and sang along to “Darlene” in the pitch blackness. Man, I am really getting spoiled with (and addicted to) all these house shows.
The Lumineers headed out earlier this week for shows criss-crossing the West. If you live in one of these gorgeous cities, please head out to see them and tell ‘em I sent you. They put on an absolutely terrific, genuinely joyous stompalong show, and plus they teach you valuable lessons through their music about how (for example) classy girls don’t kiss in bars.
They make me smile, and their music deserves to be heard widely. Go!
LUMINEERS WINTER TOUR
MON 12/6 – Hotel Cafe – Los Angeles, CA
TUES 12/7 – Amnesia – San Francisco, CA
THUR 12/9 – The Baltic – Richmond, CA
SAT 12/11 – Shook Twins House Show, Portland, OR
SUN 12/12 – Farmhouse, Portland, OR
MON 12/13 – Mississippi Studios, Portland, OR
TUES 12/14 – Filling Station, Bozeman, MT (with Langhorne Slim) WED 12/15 – Top Hat, Missoula, MT
FRI 12/17 – Jackson’s Hole Bar & Grill, Jackson, WY
SAT 12/18 – ‘Matt Donovan=Legend of Jackson’ Party, Jackson, WY
The Lumineers also have a residency at the formidable Living Room in NYC for all Tuesday nights during the month of March.
There is an intimate immediacy of music recorded and released in a matter of weeks, as if you are somehow more privy to and connected with what the artist was thinking. Like the brown leaves that wreath bandmate Kris Doty on both sides of the new Comfort Feel EP from Drew Grow (streaming as of this evening), it radiates an autumnal beauty: things dying and drying up, yet golden and striking – with a hint of what may come next spring.
Two old songs straddle two brand new ones, with reworked versions of Drew Grow and The Pastors’ Wives songs in between. As much as I love Drew’s full-length from earlier this year, I was extremely keen to hear new creations. He played “Lightning Rod” at my house show in October and I remember it slayed me, so I am thrilled (and cut) to have a version I can listen to over and over: “If I were as brave as a lightning rod / bet you then I’d know for sure… I’d feel the kill, but I’d know for sure.” The older song “The Other Shore” feels like walking heavily through a softly medicinal dream, while “King On Your Throne” is dry and crackling, like a gospel tune on an old-fashioned heavy wax record, hissing and popping.
When I talked to Drew tonight about this EP, he described a night of some musical urgency: him, in a basement, with music that wanted to be heard and played that night, and a bottle of wine. “I wanted to see which songs could survive being this naked,” he said.
STREAM THE WHOLE EP:
The physical CDs will be available this Wednesday at the DGPW show at The Woods the Portland, and also at their holiday fundraiser at the Doug Fir. I know what I want for Christmas.
I mentioned recently that I had devoured Jonathan Franzen’s latest book Freedom over the Thanksgiving holiday week, staying up late into the night (until 2, 3am) reading what is one of the best books to come across my nightstand in several years. A reader challenged me to write more about what I thought of it, and I find it really daunting to do so.
This was a deeply piercing, near flawless book, and so hard to explain to others. Simply put, it’s a story about the inner lives of a handful of wounded folks over many years of struggle and conflicted motivations and messy decisions. I devoured all 500+ pages over a handful of days, disregarding sleep to pick through those tangles of the lives of the characters with Franzen. The people he created seemed so real that they stood right up off the page beyond fiction. Several times I had to just stop and roll a sentence he wrote over in my head a few times to grasp at the ache and the tiny deaths it summed up. There are some choice musical references woven in there for you folks who came looking here for a music reference (my favorite being where Jeff Tweedy was mythological friends with a main character here named Richard, a musician), along with smart political commentary and sharply incisive, eminently readable prose.
But through the intensity of Franzen’s words I found myself hit hard with deeper insights into the crags and stains in people I’ve loved or hurt or lost in real life. What if broken love is all we’ve got? Or, as the book says, “There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it’s the right unhappiness.”
This is a heavy, dense book, clotted with a rich sadness and offering a riveting glimpse into the lives of other people — all the things that are going on behind the faces that we see, and the observable circumstances that we think define or explain all of who a person is. That may sound like a depressing premise for a book, but it is actually obscenely fascinating. I was also surprised to find an unlikely redemption that hangs over the book and settles in once you get through it all. Let me explain with one simple allegory.
A few days after I finished Freedom, I was driving down a road that provides a direct vista towards Pikes Peak. It was sunset and I started musing about mountaintop removal, which figures heavily into the major plot of this book. One of the main characters, Walter, works for an organization that is trying to save a certain type of songbird by designating swaths of land on their migratory routes as sanctuaries. However, the way they accomplish being able to piece together the huge tracts of land necessary (and also co-desired by the mining companies) is to literally destroy it first – blow the tops off the mountains to get at the rich coal seams underneath, and let the mining companies have at it, voraciously, until it is gone. The land is then reconstituted and rehabilitated, and can grow back into a wilderness that will be forever untouched going forward. The songbirds get their home through destruction.
Maybe I was too close to the book to see it while I was reading it, but –in a moment that felt akin to lightning striking the top of my head– it suddenly became clear to me that mountaintop removal is an allegory for the entire book. It’s like looking at one of those 3D puzzles at the eye doctor where suddenly you can see the butterfly that wasn’t there before – I suddenly saw the allegory that is the whole damn point of the book. The total obliteration and violent blowing-up of everything that is beautiful and familiar, ancestral and home; the subsequent mining of the deep veins beneath the surface; with the end result of that new growth that we are desperate for — the creation of a sanctuary where one seemed thoroughly unlikely when looking only at the steaming wreckage in the recent past. What’s left looks completely different than what we started with. I wasn’t sure at the end of the book which was better, or if one had to be.
That’s the best I can do to describe this book, and the unpredictable way that I loved it. Let Amazon try to wrestle out the plot points enough to give you a summary; I’ll just say it is about having the tops blown off your mountains, and be okay with that simplicity.
There’s also a line repeated twice in the book, fanned out years apart in its occurrence, about how characters are “still figuring out how to live.” I guess if the allegory of mountaintop removal is a visual image of what this book is about, then that sentence kind of sums it up for you textual types. So many page corners in my copy are turned down, with razor-sharp words and phrases and twists of writing, noted and committed to memory. This is the first thing I have read by Franzen; it is absolutely superb, and painful. And worth it.
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.
There is an immediately warm similarity to countrymates Frightened Rabbit, and in fact the two will be sharing the stage on several dates this spring. The Admiral Fallow debut album 
WIN TICKETS!
Name: Heather Browne
