The other night I headed up to the Hi-Dive to see (what was, of course) a completely fantastic Damien Jurado show. This, I expected. I am never disappointed by his astounding talent. But somehow up until 10:00pm that night I had sidestepped the music of Peter Wolf Crier. By about 10:02pm, I was blindsided by its taut magnificence and colossal, confusing heft.
Peter was riveting; he confused me in a sense where a scan of my brain in those moments would have been lighting up all sorts of conflicting colors like a holographic palette, fiery hot and thoroughly happy. With just Peter and his drummer Brian Moen on stage, they looped together these hauntingly tumultuous, soaringly vibrant sonic pictures. Their songs live are completely different than the thoughtful beauty on the album – they breathe fire and become chimera-like mythical beasts, life injected confidently. Peter reminded me very much of live videos of my beloved Jeff Buckley.
There was a tightly-strung tension and magnificent improvisational quality to Peter’s performance that glued my eyes to him and Brian (brilliant on drums) for the entire performance. This song in particular feels like a struggle, like one of those dreams that you fight to untangle yourself from all night long, but keeps looping and pressing into your head with images of birds and old family home movies and the gravitational pull of the shoreline.
Peter’s second record is Garden of Arms, and it is out now on the fine Jagjaguwar label (Bon Iver, Sharon Van Etten, Cave Singers).
Listen to the whole thing over on Bandcamp; and, more importantly, find a way to see him live as soon as possible.
[photo by Kevin Ihle, who was at the show, and when I saw him I said, “oh good, I can put away my camera.” You can see why]
Adam Arcuragi has this rumbly deep, soulful voice that roils down into the bottom sediments of the lagoons and trolls up things for me. His is a kind of sturdy music that radiates equal parts gospel retribution, the pull of the sea or the drive of torrential rains, and so many voices rising together to answer the questions (or at least give it a shot, with conviction). Somewhere along the line his music got deemed “Death Gospel,” a name that totally fits when you listen to the way he describes it: “Death Gospel is anything that sees the inevitability of death as a reason to celebrate all the special wonder that is being alive and sentient.”
I fell for Adam Arcuragi & the Lupine Chorale Society pretty instantaneously when I saw them pouring out all their musical joy and four-part harmonies in their song “Bottom of the River” in a NYC flea market for the Blogotheque Sessions. Then after I finished the battery of my first graduate school residency, feeling dessicated, the torrent of his songs roared through again with the release of Like A Fire That Consumes All Before It… (out now on Thirty Tigers), saving me from that particularly pernicious breed of self-doubt and soul-weariness.
This chapel session was the first one recorded in the shiny new year of 2012, at the end of January on a Saturday morning so gorgeously clear and perfectly ice blue. The band had slept at my parents’ house the night before, due to me being full-up with wonderful couchsurfers, and my mom had laid a clean set of towels on each bed and made them all breakfast. So I think they were in a pretty good mood (me too), so much so that they were taking requests and inviting me to sing along. Like most bands who end up in the church, I knew from the first time I heard them that I wanted this recording to happen (Lupine: “of, like, or pertaining to wolves” – I’m all for the howling) and it didn’t disappoint.
As I said in January, how can any of us doubt our reserves when there is music like this to explain the questions?
ADAM ARCURAGI & THE LUPINE CHORALE SOCIETY
THE FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION (JANUARY 28, 2012)
President’s Song
The opening growls that Adam uses to start this song off remind me of a massive engine trying to turn over. It’s got an immense load to haul here, so forgive if it bucks a bit. Adam puts all his wonderfully wordy lyrics up on his website (like vocab-porn for me) and this song seems to juxtapose a foreign influence bringing church and promises, contrasted with the wilderness and surety of elemental certainties like the coming rain.
Broken Throat
Many of Adam’s songs strike me as either being taut with the sense of something unknown looming on the horizon, or the sure certainty of knowing certain secret things. This song is the latter for most of the verses, the reassurance of all our voices rising together to answer that which we do know, and making sense of us all in there together. As you can see beaming off me in the video, I loved being part of this knowing, this chorus of voices (I have a secret aspiration to be in a gospel choir, true story).
But for all the choruses and verses, the line that still sticks in my throat a good deal is towards the end, sung quietly: “And if I saw it, I still don’t think I’d know.” Huh. Yeah, I don’t know if I would, either.
(this song was my debut singing on a chapel session with real musician-folks. I’m available for weddings and background vocal tracking.)
Port Song
I’m pretty tickled to know an actual living-breathing sailor who goes off for months at a time and then returns to step down off that boat. From what I gather, the fragmentation of life at sea & life on land with the stability all around you of those you love can be disorienting, even when it is welcome. This song gets right at that, and always makes me think of my sailor friend. It’s a beautiful metaphor not only for reconnection but for the ceasing of the fighting alone. The first verse sounds restrained, like fatigue mixed with the slow creeping regeneration setting in around the roots, and then by the end everything is fully re-engaged, full-throated and wailing. “So, let me be your come back down, steady as a hand to hold / let me be the first voice as you step down from that boat / and tell me of the sea and foam, a thousand ocean miles from home / the simple gift is the song you hear from this small familiar shore.” It also gets me right in the gut how Adam makes his voice sound like an otherworldly theremin at the end, all Neutral Milk Hotel-like. Unsettlingly penetrating.
Bring It On Home To Me (Sam Cooke)
As the band loaded their gear into the church on that dazzlingly sunny morning, I was suddenly gripped with a string of melody that wrapped itself around my brain – the magnificence of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home To Me.” I casually asked the guys if they ever covered it BECAUSE IT WOULD BE PERFECT. They smiled, and this was the result. (I once posted about seven trillion versions of this song. Adam’s reminds me of the spaciousness of Britt Daniel’s version the most, but with more ooomph and soul-sadness). This rendition could have easily been a forgotten b-side to a vinyl single sixty years ago; I love the space and the clatter and the toe-taps, underscoring the uncertain shuffle and the pleading wail.
I’ve heard this song, and covers of this song, roughly 847 times. It hasn’t made me feel the way this video does in a very long time. I love Daniel Blue, I love Motopony, and I will never tire of honesty in a church.
This is ab.so.lutely stunning, and penetrating all the way to the little crackly-lightning neuron connectors along the base of my spine, and the scattered hardened-black corroded outputs around my heart.
Spring has its own special brand of fidgetiness. I start to feel slowly like there are little invisible crawly things on my skin, in a picnic sort of way, and I get all these ideas about exploring and adventures. Combine that with the calescent glow of things warming up all around us, and I spend a noticeably increased amount of time staring out the window lost in daydreams.
As with any other season for the last few years, I’ve stitched up a soundtrack of twenty songs that are compelling me in these days, wafting out my opened windows and across the lawn that is slowly turning green. We’ve all been beaten back a bit this winter, haven’t we?
Let’s come on back to life.
REARRANGE THE OLD / CALL IT NEW :: THE FUEL/FRIENDS SPRING 2012 MIX
The Scientist (Coldplay) – Willie Nelson
With birds chirping and a slow-build of the world waking up & all of us going back to the start, this Willie Nelson cover is one of the most perfect April songs ever. It’s also a Chipotle commercial so, you know, now you want burritos. Sorry.
January White – Sleeping at Last
This is where the title of the mix comes from, and even though it’s technically a song for the new year, it also works effervescently well for the rebirth of springtime, exceedingly so. Every word of this song is just exactly where I am in life right now. The future is brighter than any flashback.
Spring Forward – Baobab
This North Carolina band fuses febrile African rhythms with sweet electronica bleepy-boops to make one of the most infectiously catchy songs I’ve heard in a while.
Don’t Stop (Loving Me Now) – Floating Action
Like Andrew said, reggae for the indie rock kids. Tis the season for a little ungainly dancing, with your pale white limbs.
Best Thing For Me – Release the Sunbird
Zach Rogue from Rogue Wave has a new endeavor, a shimmery gorgeous album full of songs that feel like sunrises. He really is one of my favorite musicians for this particular time of year, in all his incarnations.
Hallways – Islands
Cue more ungainly dancing. Pounding piano, handclaps, and strong multi-part vocal harmonies: SOLD.
Ten Years Old – You Won’t
One of the most charming songs on an album jam-packed with damn charming songs. After wooing me at SXSW, You Won’t is on tour with Alcoholic Faith Mission, and coming to Denver on May 8.
Broken Minds – Northern Youth
Northern Youth is the musical endeavor of one Luke Messimer who all by himself has crafted songs of clattery delight and uber-melodic underpinnings. He’s just finished a stint working on the railroads of Arizona (no, really) and is finishing an album — Kickstart him!
Seer – Motopony
There’s so much swagger and animalistic growl to this song that it reminds me of feral skinny bears waking up from hibernation and coming out of their caves ready to rip something apart with their teeth. And yes, that is a metaphor.
Old Pine – Ben Howard
My friend Craig played this for me in my car recently, as we rode through the neighboring hamlet of Manitou Springs with all the car windows down, and wow what a gem of a tune. Ben is part of the Mumford-Communion Records family, and I love how this song starts about a thousand sonic miles from where it ends. Also, all this talk about cold sand in sleeping bags is giving me ideas.
Danse Carribe – Andrew Bird
“Here we go mistaking clouds for mountains again / here’s the thing that brings the sparrows to the fountains.” It’s kind of like bringing all the boys to the yard, but with more whistling.
Flowers In Your Hair (EP version) – The Lumineers
And then we grew a little, and romanticized. The Lumineers’ new album is one of my soundtracks to this season – and here’s an early version of a song off their first self-released little EP, which I think I got at a house concert in Denver. They entered the Billboard charts at #43 last week, after selling 10,000+ copies of their record on debut. That blows my mind. They are on to terrific things.
Your Own Kite – Isaac Pierce
From that same humble wonderful waking-up EP that gave us “Warm Bruise,” Isaac Pierce sings here about kites and I can see them dipping and nosing through the April winds.
Always Spring – I’m From Barcelona
There’s a sort of childlike joy in this song, those remembered twitches you’d get in your legs from sitting behind a desk in grade school towards the end of the school year and wanting to just go out and ride your bike hard.
Lakehouse – Of Monsters and Men
Every single song off this entire marvelous debut record could soundtrack spring because it is an explosion of color and jubilance. I just picked this one because I want to go to a lakehouse right now. You try out the other ones on the album and let me know if you come up with something different.
Little Spring – Rocky Votolato
This song is how I found out that Seattle’s wonderful Rocky Votolato has a new record that just came out a few weeks ago, and he’s coming on tour in the coming months all over god’s green earth. He continues to be so gooood.
The Road – Bryan John Appleby
Listening carefully and intentionally to this song with headphones on is closely akin to a resurrection.
Unto the Resplendent – The Mermen
From a compilation of surf music that I have, this song makes you see all sort of wavery watery patterns reflecting off the sand and up under your umbrella in shades of green and blue. It’s like floating.
What Am I Living For – Van Morrison
…and this is the slow shuffle back and across the deck, making me think of slow-dancing in the porchlight. Ending the perfect springtime day with some Van Morrison on the record player is just about the finest there is.
[album art, as always, by the fabulous Ryan Hollingsworth, who somehow interprets my vague requests (“ummm….like blue? and….spriiinginess?”) and nails it every time]
Seattle songwriter Damien Jurado has been making exceptionally good music for a very long time. His latest record Maroqopa sees him paired up again with Richard Swift (who produced Damien’s incredible Saint Bartlett in 2010, and also that great Mynabirds record, and the forthcoming Pickwick debut). I still stand by my previous three-word review of Maraqopa: “ghostly doo-wop sadness.”
With his newest record, there came a small stack of 7″ singles, with six additional incredible songs. This song absolutely BREAKS MY HEART, and it is a bonus track. I mean COME ON Damien, it is unfair the crazy talent that flows out of this gentleman.
COLORADO CONTEST: Damien is playing Denver’s Hi-Dive tomorrow night. This will be one of the very best shows of the springtime in Colorado, guys. You can buy tickets here, and also email me to enter to win one of the pairs I have to give away! I can’t wait til tomorrow night. Come join me.
AND: In addition to immediately buying Maraqopa and coming to the show tomorrow night, you’d also be well-advised to listen to other Seattle luminaries covering his songs, via the Seattle Times (or, you know, on a rooftop).
DAMIEN JURADO SPRING TOUR
Apr 17 – Hi-Dive – Denver, CO
Apr 18 – Velour – Provo, UT
Apr 19 – Neurolux – Boise, ID
Apr 21 – Biltmore Cabaret – Vancouver, Canada
Apr 22 – HOLOCENE – Portland, OR
May 16 – Schubas – Chicago, IL
May 17 – Warhol Museum – Pittsburgh, PA
May 18 – Davis Square Theater – Somerville, MA
May 19 – Mercury Lounge – New York, NY
May 20 – Johnny Brenda’s – Philadelphia, PA
May 21 – Black Cat – Washington, DC
May 22 – King’s Barcade – Raleigh, NC
May 23 – The EARL – Atlanta, GA
May 25 – The Basement – Nashville, TN
May 26 – Russian Recording – Bloomington, IN
May 28 – Sasquatch Music Festival – George, WA
Aug 09 – Haldern Pop – Haldern, Germany
Aug 17 – Green Man Festival – Wales, United Kingdom
There are certain musicians that you love with your whole fast-beating 15 year-old heart in 1995 that you grow apart from like a Sadie Hawkins Dance date (I’m looking at you, Toby Clary. You never call). The 2012-you puts the album on and winces at how minimally the music still aligns with what you love, for all the fervor and the cassette tape trading you may have devoted to it in your teenage years.
But then there are the artists that age with you, that burrow warm like a nest around your body and your heart as you grow. They are the ones that you can look back at after having lived through a few more years and heartbreaks and deeper joys than you ever predicted, and find that their songs can still bloom for you, can still come along with you through the currents.
For me, Glen Phillips and the music of Toad the Wet Sprocket does exactly that. We’ve both got some crinkles around our eyes when we smile, and we’re both about a thousand metaphorical miles from where we were in high school, but something in there still connects wonderfully. I was a colossal Toad the Wet Sprocket fan in high school. Dulcinea had just come out in 1994, Fear is (still) an unbeatable record, and my skies were wide open and cerulean blue. I was on a text-based email listserv devoted to Toad (yup), and we would tree cassette tapes of shows and unreleased songs, and talk about band details and show reviews. I have every single record they ever released, and all sorts of CD singles. I think I was in a fanclub — remember those?
Existing evidence.
Life being the funny thing that it is, on a cold night this past autumn, I ended up sitting in an echoey church at midnight with Glen Phillips, after a long dinner filled with rich conversation and some good wine, beaming ear to ear as he played so many songs for our session — some old, some brand new, and one jaw-dropping cover — and we just enjoyed the heck out of that particular brand of magic.
I interviewed Glen back in Nashville in 2009 during his tour with the spirited Works Progress Administration super-musician band, and we hit it off as friends immediately. Glen is one of the most lovely, wrenching songwriters that I know of who is still plugging away intelligently from those bands I loved in the ’90s. There is a specific timbre his voice hits that other longtime fans will understand when I say just slices through all those deadened layers that calcify around my insides. Just a straight shot through. As the years pass, I hear him harnessing a certain type of weariness –no, quietness, maybe– but also there is still that bubbling current of hope and a satisfaction with the lives we have woven together from all of this crazy life.
Rise Up
Glen wrote this to first appear on the Works Progress Administration record, back in 2009, and when he sings about the fog in the canyon and the vapor in the keep, I can hear it silently permeating this unsettling, questioning song. To me, it feels like a nice bookend to the social-justice bent in the super old Toad song “Chile” – please only talk to me in the dark.
Return to Me
I’ve been strangely drawn to movies about the alienation of outer space and the parallel celestial worlds that might spin around us, from any number of eerie Twilight Zones, to Moon, to the amaaaaazing Another Earth. This darkly beautiful song wants to be in one of those cinescapes, with futuristic lyrics about seeing the sun rise twice within one day, and how “with a finger i will lift you gently from your seat and draw you near / embrace you as we spin, all grace and beauty.” I don’t even want to know how this song came to be — I just love its exotic otherworldliness. It’s from Glen’s 2008 thematic record Secrets Of The New Explorers.
The One That Got Away
Because this is a new one, it might not even have a finalized name yet, but for now Glen’s going for this wistful title of something missed — a silvery girl slipped through the netting. As I recall, this was played on a ukulele (the night got pleasantly fuzzy) and somehow manages to feel sad and effervescent, all at the same time.
Liars Everywhere
Wow, when I recognized the chords to this one…. This is a song from the second Toad album, Pale, self-released in 1989 for $6000, when the band was barely out of high school. On the album version Glen sounds like the shiny, slightly-sullen, longhaired teenager that he was, and I love it fiercely. When I listen to this recording from the chapel, he sounds so much warmer, and so much more real, which I suppose might be a nice metaphor for what’s happened to all of us in the last twenty years. After those opening guitar notes when I realized what song he was playing, boy did the tears start flowing silently as I sat there quietly humming harmonies. That was a permanent win life-moment of beauty for me.
Don’t Need Anything
As Glen introduces this older tune as “a feel-good song,” and it feels like a comfortable old robe that I can slip into as Spring mornings mean coffee on my back porch. “Got gardens growing, got quiet days…” It works as a perfect companion piece for “I Will Not Take These Things For Granted,” from Fear, and unwinds like a modern benediction of simplicity. There is so much to be grateful for.
Two-Headed Boy (Neutral Milk Hotel)
And finally: All I have to say is that this might be the most perfect cover ever recorded in a chapel session. It was the last song of the night, nearing 1am. Incisive, plaintive, capturing the spirit of the original but in a terrifically unique way — like this version was always meant to be. So, so good. The world that you need is wrapped in gold silver sleeves.
Glen has some tour dates going on right now this week (Portland Thursday, Seattle Friday, here in Denver Saturday — not bad) and more in May. Take yourself, to remember and discover.
If we leave now, we can get to the overlook by sunset and still have time to build a fire. Over the echoey slam of our car doors we’ll start tentatively, remembering in a flood about all the bruising and fumbling, but also both hearing how the opening notes of this song on the stereo are dancing that same hesitant waltz that we are. There’s so much goodness here, so much gratitude, and a blissful reservoir that remains unknown. And still so much that we both know.
Your car wheezes and gets going on the highway right as the handclaps start in on the song and the twinned harmonies gather strength to hit their stride together. The yellow lines flick past. The road is open.
after the accident, inside the ambulance
you walked right out with a warm bruise
saying:
we get to be alive
sleep on your porch tonight
with certain distant songs playing
remind me to thank you for
bringing us out here
just in time
another minute would have been
Here is a little preview of the forthcoming Chapel Session we recorded with Adam Arcuragi & The Lupine Chorale Society, which at their behest also included me for a few minutes that afternoon. I guess I can say I’ve now recorded my debut chapel session, and on one of my very favorite songs of Adam’s. “Broken Throat” is a marvelous song, and the one I often sing when riding my bike home from work, as the wind whips past. Can’t wait for the whole session to be ready.
Field Report has put together a gorgeous, slow-building record of sleet and woodsmoke and fever dreams. Appearing from seemingly nowhere, this record is needling and soothing me over and over these days of schizophrenic springtime ice storms.
“And no one saw my banners, my bruises, my flares, my flags.” BLAMM.
Field Report is a surname anagram (I love clever things) of Chris Porterfield, who used to play in DeYarmond Edison (the other members of which were Justin Vernon/Bon Iver and Megafaun), and you’ll hear those musical tentacles woven over this beautiful record. Porterfield has strung together his own collection of songs carefully-crafted over the past few years, and I have the whole thing on repeat lately. It’s understated, and keeps yielding up new quiet colors on multiple listens.
The full Field Report debut was recorded at Justin Vernon’s studio in Wisconsin, and is out this July. For now, listen to these over and over, please.
Field Report is currently on tour with Megafaun, and in my hometown Bay tonight.
04/03/12 – San Francisco, CA @ Cafe Du Nord
04/04/12 – Santa Cruz, CA @ The Crepe Place
04/05/12 – Los Angeles, CA @ Bootleg Theater
04/06/12 – Tempe, AZ @ The Sail Inn
04/08/12 – Santa Fe, NM @ Sol Santa Fe
04/10/12 – Austin, TX @ Mohawk
04/12/12 – Birmingham, AL @ Bottletree
04/14/12 – Saxapahaw, NC @ Haw River Ballroom
And: this is new. The band gives a Wisconsin phone number on the website, where folks can text them. TTYL.
(414-215-9956)
This weekend was pushing 80° all along Colorado’s Front Range, and I enjoyed the bejesus out of every single one of them.
Saturday night I was at my favorite vinyl-loving buddy’s house for the first BBQ party of springtime, and Andrew pulled out a Floating Action record from 2009 and laid it carefully on the record player, lowering the needle onto some specific sort of fantasticness from those audaciously raw opening drumbeats:
Sure I’m a few years behind the curve on this one, but it’s never too late to have happy ears. Floating Action is mostly one guy, Seth Kauffman of North Carolina, creating music that he describes as “a southern band that longs for the West Coast.” I think Andrew described it as reggae for indie kids, and I loved the squonk and quirk and groove – kinda like the winning warble of Okkervil River’s Will Sheff fronting a soulful dusty band somewhere on an island.
Floating Action is part of the Park the Van Records family (also the home of Dr. Dog, Generationals, Spinto Band) — and speaking of Dr. Dog, here is a wonderful video of a song project commenced for the Shaking Through Series, showing Seth working with Scott McMicken of Dr. Dog as curator and producer of a song in two days, “Dead Reckoning.” Read more about their creative process and get that song on the Shaking Through site, for free.
As a wonderful bonus, here’s Floating Action on Daytrotter covering my favorite Rilo Kiley song ever, complete with triangle flourishes at the correct moments.
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.
Peter’s second record is Garden of Arms, and it is out now on the fine Jagjaguwar label (Bon Iver, Sharon Van Etten, Cave Singers). 
COLORADO CONTEST: Damien is playing Denver’s Hi-Dive tomorrow night. This will be one of the very best shows of the springtime in Colorado, guys. You can 
Name: Heather Browne
