I’ve sat down to write this post about fifteen times and never quite get the words out right, because this song by Cataldo (Seattle’s Eric Anderson) is much more of an impressionistic short story than a song. Trying to write about my feelings for it is kind of like trying to tell someone about a dream, scratchy-voiced as the sun rises: it never comes out right.
It starts with only Eric’s words alone in a room for the first several lines, echoing as he tells us a fleshed out, highly personal dream. Unfolding in a town where everything’s been demolished, it is a story of seeing that person again, finding yourselves in that one house where you lived for the summer, and hesitantly playing a song together (you on an old piano, she on the violin that someone left). It’s that dream where — oh, we’re back in this room again? It’s the deep desire for reconstitution that tries to address those loose frayed ends that our hearts want to knit back together again, so much. Even if only in dreams.
This is my favorite song on the new Cataldo album, Prison Boxing, which some of you helped Kickstart, and is the second Cataldo album that’s been mixed by the intuitive Tucker Martine. It’s now streaming in full over on Bandcamp, along with the past two releases.
I had a dream last night
everything that happened, had happened
The air cracked in my throat, a dry highway through stubble fields
all the businesses were torn down, flat lots on the left and right
i wasn’t tired or thirsty
i felt almost home
Like probing a wound that we didn’t know was still healing, it’s a dreamworld that puts us back in those places and times we wish we could still inhabit with that person, in that way. It’s one where everything, wonderfully, makes no sense but in that freedom there is finally peace: a version of trust (with no future, no insight, and no guarantee).
We didn’t kiss (everything that happened had happened)
but we embraced
in a way I imagine we will someday
melting what years have hardened
I first listened to this song as I drove over the Continental Divide, through Colorado mountains in a verdant July. I texted Eric to thank him for writing this perfect song, with a perfect crescendo, and incisive truth that just gets me every single time. It keeps getting better, from where the piano comes in, to the achingly sweet violin piercing the song after “melting what years have hardened,” to when the mandolin delicately sings, like the rebirth of hope.
[a non-traditional photo, for an exceptional chapel session]
I mean no slight to the eminent photographability of the man behind this post, as I usually start all my Chapel writeups with a visual of our time spent beneath those Romanesque arches. But I came across this photo as I was marveling for the three-dozenth time at the songs that Eef Barzelay poured out for us that night, and it just fit, so flawlessly. The ossified yellowy shades of need, affection, accident, and habit — all cradled and balanced perfectly. For once. When you listen to this extraordinary chapel session, maybe it will make sense to you too.
Let’s set this straight from the beginning. Saying that Eef Barzelay (of the band Clem Snide) is a standard songwriter is akin to saying that David Foster Wallace uses a few moderately interesting vocabulary words in his books. Eef thrills me. Eef pens songs that flay me. There are just a select few songwriters in this world that feel as though they are thinking with my same brain. They say things that make me gasp with how stunningly they fit the neural pathways I have threaded together over my lifetime. Eef gets my brain, my ways of characterizing and explaining things, my heart.
One of the primary effects I am looking for in a song is for that minute where it takes me completely out of my head and away from my logic, and I feel something burning hot and bright – cut free from the crud of the world, and defying logical connection. Something feels like it will be okay, even if it is not okay.
I saw Eef Barzelay perform three times the weekend this chapel session was recorded. The first night was in the small Marmalade Art Gallery by the train tracks just south of downtown, where Eef played to a full small room of folks perched in folding chairs, under a flock of paper cranes swinging in flight overhead. He introduced several of his short films assembled from “found footage” — primarily clips documenting slowed-down natural animal and human behavior, scored with his own original songs, layered with visual effects, and all coming to a gluey, sharp point.
Something in me cracked open during one of his films of a snake slowly eating a baby owl alive, soundtracked by a potent punch of an original song. In that four minutes there was a strange peace in the cessation of the fighting. As sad as it was (fuzzy baby animals!), it was utterly and completely brilliant, that song. There in my folding chair, I just leaked a steady, quiet, miniature river of tears for the next hour through the rest of his films and on through his live acoustic set with his bass ukulele. I couldn’t even exactly say precisely why, except that maybe I felt understood.
This is one of my favorite chapel sessions so far, because it is so densely loaded with stunners, and with truth. As Eef sings in another one of his songs, “No one gets through this life without making a mess.”
The quietude of the chapel naturally seems to extract the reverential, introspective songs from musicians. That evening was the perfect setting for Eef to introduce us to several songs all about a woman named Mary, from a forthcoming record, Songs For Mary. I don’t know who she is — a real person, an alias, or an abstract summation of femininity — but that is not important, because what we do know is that Eef pours the most beautifully honest truths out to her. Come.
EEF BARZELAY CHAPEL SESSION
SEPTEMBER 25, 2011
The Ballad of God’s Love
Man — right out of the gate, this song packs one of the biggest wallops of truth I have heard about any of our insides in a long time. Eef plainly sings, “And don’t, don’t be shy to look yourself dead in the eye / the emptiness you feel inside, well would you believe …but that’s where God’s love hides.” Paired with track 3, and you got yourself a pretty potent theology that I can get behind. I haven’t felt that in a long time.
Let Us Sail On
Eef described the late night that he wrote this song, in a Motel 6 off I-40 in Arkansas, listening to trucks rumble by outside at 3am. As the TV glowed soft and blue with music infomercials, Eef decided to pen his contribution to “yacht rock.” Despite the affinity that I think Christopher Cross might feel toward the idea, this one pierces much more deeply. Oh, how we diffused the light.
History
Of the five, this is the song from the session I have listened to the most. It contains the absolute jaw-smack of a lyric: “Mary, history is never wrong / still it’s only to this moment we belong. So if your inner scaffolding feels frail / just remember God loves mostly those who fail.” The lines that follow those ones are also just as staggering. This song came on shuffle for me in November, when I was wandering the National Gallery in London alone at night. I love to wander alone at night in museums, soundtracking with songs that take on new meanings through the hybrid. Across the room, my eyes landed on a Michelangelo painting, an unfinished Michelangelo. It was the beginnings and the middles of his attempt to paint Christ’s entombment. In the lower right-hand corner, Mary was slated but missing. Like all of Michelangelo’s work, it spoke to me like seeing an old friend across the crowded room. I sat on a bench in front of that picture and thought for a long time about omissions, changes in directions, Mary, art, and what we call failure.
Fill Me With Your Light
The only already-released song from our session, this sweetly unnerving song is off of the 2005 Clem Snide record End of Love. I believe Eef said it was about a guy he used to work with at a record store in Boston who said he was being visited by aliens in his room at night, and that the song was about a different kind of dark.
All Good Hearts Go Astray
Another wide-open, penetrating song to Mary that confronts myriad failures (burning the barns that we’ve raised) with a simple plea for the forgiveness that we all, really, need so much. All good hearts go astray, sometimes. There is so much grace woven throughout this chapel session, the real, crushingly difficult kind. And for that I am grateful.
Red Baraat melds Indian dohl drumming with a nine-piece brass band, and whoa – that’s a whole lot of fun to pack into the NPR Tiny Desk space. They’re from Brooklyn and are playing the weekend I am in NYC. Count me in.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Sometimes an album pops in your mailbox at midnight on a Sunday when you stop into the harshly-lit post office, and you find yourself wishing there was anyone else in the building to excitedly bubble over to: “Sweet jesus, did you see who is on this record?!”
Advance warning of the incredible New Multitudes record escaped me until this weekend: a dream-team collaboration between Yim Yames (My Morning Jacket), Will Johnson (Centro-Matic), Jay Farrar (Uncle Tupelo/Son Volt), and Anders Parker. Right!?
I listened straightaway, late into that night, and my first thought was how much it reminded me of the rambling, haunting joy found in the Kerouac-sourced (and also California-focused) record that Farrar made with Ben Gibbard, and also of course of Wilco’s collaborations with Billy Bragg on the Mermaid Avenue records. This July would have been Woody’s 100th birthday, so the record was intended as part of the celebration of the immeasurable mark he left on American songwriting.
As she did to jumpstart Mermaid Avenue, Woody’s daughter Nora chose these four musicians to pore through more than 3,000 of her father’s unrecorded lyrics (many from his earliest songwriting days in Los Angeles), and use them as fodder to create new songs. After diving into boxes of diaries, notebook, handwritten scraps, typed and coffee-stained pages, Farrar decided to focus the songwriting on Woody’s California period. That sounds like an amenable decision to this California girl.
Stylistically, there’s all sorts of wonderful stuff happening on this record, but that lack of coherence adamantly doesn’t work to the album’s detriment. We’ve got the African-inspired/Graceland feel of Yim Yames’ “Changing World,” the slow-burn Texas desert sadness of Johnson’s “Careless Reckless Love” (always the hardest way to do it), or the bouyancy of Farrar’s “Hoping Machine” (reference #19 on this fantastic meme). There is an intuitive chemistry and threads of collaboration all throughout this record, regardless of who sings lead vocals, or who wrote the music.
“No Fear” sounds just like something you’d want to sing at the end of a Sunday southern church service, an old spiritual with all four of their voices rising. “Chorine My Sheba Queen” by Johnson will, I promise, break your heart (and the provenance story will make your pulse race a little).
I’m still absorbing this record, but so far it couldn’t be more fantastic.
LISTEN NOW: You can stream the entire record thanks to Conan, and order it immediately here. It’s out next week on Rounder Records; the bonus disc version will have 24 songs total, and the artwork is also by Woody.
THE “I’M TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET TO ONE OF THESE CITIES” MINI-TOUR
March 6 – The Fillmore – San Francisco, CA
March 7 – Music Box – Los Angeles, CA
March 9 – Crystal Ballroom – Portland, OR
March 10 – Showbox – Seattle, WA
March 12 – The Birchmere – Alexandria, VA
March 13 – Union Transfer – Philadelphia, PA
March 14 – Webster Hall – New York, NY
March 16 – Paradise – Boston, MA
PS: In Jay Farrar/Colorado news: Did you see that Son Volt is headlining the Meadowgrass Festival in Colorado Springs/Black Forest this Memorial Day Weekend? Damien Jurado last year, Son Volt this year — way to go organizers!
The wild, celestial scale of musical largesse has tipped off its fulcrum in my favor, and we are currently splashing around in a sparkly, melodic deluge of fantastic upcoming Fuel/Friends concerts that I am hosting in the coming weeks. I feel truly awed and thrilled; all four of these special headliners have been listed in my year-end tops lists before.
You’re invited to all four warm wonderful nights, or if you have friends in Colorado, please let them know. Whoever comes from the farthest will get a song dedication and a hug.
On their way to open for some Blind Pilot tour dates, Cataldo is stopping by my house to fill an evening with music. Eric Anderson crafts plaintive, thoughtful, catchy pop that I have been head-over-heels for since I first heard it. His bio tells you all you need to know, I think: “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.”
Drew Grow is a name you’ve heard me talk a lot about, because I believe in their brand of potent musical gospel. DGPW performed at the very first house concert I did, and the four of them have become my good friends, because they have beautiful hearts that create impassioned music. Their songs are soulful, varied, and incendiary live.
I’m presenting their Friday night show at Moe’s BBQ, before they head out for the month of March with The Head and The Heart; come stand underneath their torrent, feel and believe things, oh — and we can bowl and get BBQ. Nothing could go wrong with this plan.
From the first time I clicked play on a Tyler Lyle song, it was musical exhilaration, and I’ve only gotten deeper and deeper into this wonderful record. His debut album was all recorded in one day, just before he moved away from Atlanta for good. Because of that, more than anything this album feels like one exceedingly honest and humble snapshot of a moment of change and loss, without artifice, in the best possible way.
After he plays San Francisco’s Noise Pop this weekend, and after his Daytrotter session recording, Tyler is stopping by to spend the evening with us (joined by Portland’s John Heart Jackie). I can’t wait to see this fresh new voice for myself.
This is a huge one, folks. Typhoon wowed everyone at SXSW last year, with their approximately three hundred members (okay, thirteen) and their heads-thrown-back jubilance and shimmery, multicolored songs.
After their Letterman appearance and before they head out to play some big summer festivals in 2012, I’ve set them up to play a cool art gallery in town for us, all bedecked in twinkly white lights and with a sound system that can do them justice. I am co-presenting this show with our local NPR affiliate/college radio station, KRCC, and we both love Typhoon’s cavalcade of instruments and voices, and the way it feels truly overwhelming. There’s some of the redemptive waves of orchestral joy and colossal thumping force that we find to love in Fanfarlo. When they all throw their heads back and sing “alleluia, it will be gone soon,” I get chills, every time.
I am also thrilled to get to see Seattle’s Motopony, who I hear off-kilter great things about.
TICKETS:on-sale now at the KRCC studios, and at Venue 515 in Manitou Springs for $10.
A handful of Colorado’s favorite sons (and daughter), DeVotchKa, took the stage tonight with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra for an immense evening of their mariachi-gypsy laced music made even bigger.
Tonight was an electric, flawless, intuitive pairing. Coupled with the ululating vibrato of Nick Urata, which is an instrument in itself, DeVotchKa writes complex, challenging songs that have been ripe for this sort of reinvention. Songs that are already brilliant to begin with shot into the sky tonight with a thousand colors.
It’s a brilliant phenomenon lately, some of my favorite musicians recording sessions with anything from small string quartets to the sixty-person symphony orchestra I saw tonight. As I sat damp-eyed during the final gorgeous explosion of “How It Ends,” I tried to put my finger on what exactly it is that these songs gain from going through the transformation from guy-on-a-guitar to full-blown-orchestra. Best I can articulate is that I feel like it has something to do with colors, and with size.
Hearing a pop musician play with a symphony makes their songs balloon into ten thousand gradations of hue where there once were five or six. It feels like a chorus of voices (instruments) all swelling with you to agree, yes, this is a terrific song and all eleven of us violins will speak with you on that — as will a half-dozen trumpets, and those plinky wood-box percussion things. It was deeply thrilling to hear these songs get so colossally huge, and tremendously more expressive. I found myself picturing stars coming out into the sky at night during “Dearly Departed” when all the string instruments began a complex plucking pattern, the song so immense that it transcended the hall we were in. It got at that effect I am always longing and looking for in music: an overpowering sense of the vast other, the cresting of the tidal wave, the moment when it knocks you down.
We don’t, as a young-people whole, go to see the Symphony much — at least, I know I don’t. I’m sure you’ve spent many times more money in the past year on live popular music than on the symphony or other forms of “high culture,” even the raddest former band-geeks among us. I wonder if more of these incredible pairings could help remind us all why we sometimes need to sit ourselves beneath the cerulean thunder of the waves of sound that sixty people can create.
I was also watching the joy radiating around the musicians in the symphony as they performed, and from the young ones to the rad ponytailed older dudes on percussion, there was a definite energy created by this merger of forces, and what it teased out of the crowd. I would absolutely love to see more nights like tonight; I think of recordings I cherish that have captured this sort of pairing (Augie March, Josh Ritter, Joe Pug) and then fantasize about ones that would probably kill me dead if I ever were to see them live with a symphony (The National, mostly). This is a good idea with only good effects, as we stretch our musical boundaries and conceptions.
Tonight left me breathless. Musicians, let’s do this again.
One of my favorite songs off one of the albums I’ve listened to the most in the last year, this new cover of Damien Jurado’s “Beacon Hill” is suffused through the warmed-up, knowing rasp of Jon Russell (of The Head and The Heart). It’s been on constant repeat for me this week, since it was unveiled as part of an extremely cool mini-series of covers over on Andrew Matson’s music column in the Seattle Times.
Jon takes an icy, somber song that originally aches of that echoey sort of desperation, and infuses it with his own glowing embers. The harmonies of Brenna Carlson are enveloping, and perfect.
Get Saint Bartlett if you never did, and stream Damien’s entire new forthcoming record, Maraqopa, here. Highly recommended — is anyone else also hung up on “Life Away From The Garden” (in addition to “Working Titles,” of course) like I am?
Keep your ears tuned to Matson’s column for the Seattle Times (check out Pickwick’s!). I don’t know what covers are coming next, but they can’t help but be amazing if this is the magnetic songwriting fodder we have to work with.
Denver’s own Lumineers released a free EP this morning called Tracks From The Attic, nicely showcasing their floor-stomping, instrument-clanging, yell-out-loud goodness that first made me fall in love with them at this Denver house show in 2010.
Download the full EP now for the price of your email address (worth it): it includes this redone version of “Classy Girls,” originally from their old handmade self-released EP that we got back in the day.
LUMINEERS “BIG PARADE” TOUR 2012
Fri-Mar-2 – Vail, CO @ Snowball Fest
Tue-Mar-13-18 – Austin, TX @ SXSW
Wed-Mar-21 – San Diego, CA @ The Casbah
Thu-Mar-22 – Los Angeles, CA @ Hotel Café
Sat-Mar-24 – San Francisco, CA @ Café Du Nord
Sun-Mar-25 – Santa Cruz, CA @ The Crepe Place
Thu-Mar-29 – Eugene, OR @ Axe & Fiddle
Fri-Mar-30 – Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios
Sat-Mar-31 – Seattle, WA @ Tractor Tavern
Sun-Apr-01 – Vancouver, BC @ Media Club
Wed-Apr-04 – Boise, ID @ Neurolux
Thu-Apr-05 – Salt Lake City, UT @ The State Room
Fri-Apr-06 – Bellvue, CO @ Misawaka Indoors
Mon-Apr-09 – Ames, IA @ The Maintenance Shop
Wed-Apr-11 – Minneapolis, MN @ 7th Street Entry
Thu-Apr-12 – Madison, WI @ The Frequency
Fri-Apr-13 – Chicago/Evanston, IL @ SPACE
Tue-Apr-17 – Burlington, VT @ Higher Ground Lounge
Wed-Apr-18 – Northampton, MA @ Iron Horse
Thu-Apr-19 – Fairfield, CT @ StageOne
Fri-Apr-20 – Berklee, MA @ Café 939
Sat-Apr-21 – Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg
Sun-Apr-22 – Vienna, VA @ Jammin’ Java
Tue-Apr-24 – Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brendas
Thu-Apr-26 – Chapel Hill, NC @ Local 506
Fri-Apr-27 – Nashville, TN @ The Basement
Sat-Apr-28 – St. Louis, MO @ Blueberry Hill
Sun-Apr-29 – Kansas City, MO @ The Riot Room
Fri-May-11 – Denver, CO @ Bluebird Theatre
Sun-May-20 – Gulf Shores, AL @ Hangout Fest
Sat-Jun-2 – Ozark, AR @ Wakarusa
In January, the marvelous website couchsurfing.org brought us a terrific set of houseguests: a couple from the beaches of California asked to stay in my home while they came to Colorado to pick up the due-any-day baby that they had just been chosen to be the adoptive parents of. For two weeks we got to host them and their brand new little guy, all wide eyes and stretching fingers. It was, in a word, magnificent. We forget that they make people that little, that new. Light as air and just about perfect.
As I am wont to do, I made up a mix to send to them back in California (I take seriously my obligation to set the kiddo on the right musical path, since I was the first home he came back to), and thought that you probably know someone in your life who could appreciate it as well. It’s music that little kiddos can love, but also will not drive adults crazy in any way. I tried to throw in some foreign languages for the ole’ neuron connections, and (of course) paid special attention to the lyrics. You could even put it on with no kids around, if you wanted, and I wouldn’t tell. The last half is good for falling asleep to, whatever your age.
I also found myself gravitating towards a lot of self-reflective songs that celebrate and delve into the metamorphosis of welcoming new life into our communities – the breaking up of the earthen crust that hardens over our lives, not even realizing how dry we were until the new green shoot comes pushing up through the cracks. This is a mix about falling in love.
FRESHLY HATCHED: A FUEL/FRIENDS MIX FOR NEW PEOPLE *the mix fits on one CD, meaning you now have the awesomest (no-cost) present to bring to the next baby shower you get invited to, or for your coworker/cousin/pal. You’re welcome.
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.
This is my favorite song on the new Cataldo album, Prison Boxing, which some of you helped Kickstart, and is the second Cataldo album that’s been mixed by the intuitive Tucker Martine. It’s now streaming in full over on Bandcamp, along with the past two releases.
PS: In Jay Farrar/Colorado news: Did you see that Son Volt is headlining the 
Next Wed., Feb 29 (LEAP DAY!): 
Next Friday, March 2: 
Next Saturday, March 3:
Tuesday, March 20:
Name: Heather Browne
