Fuel/Friends Chapel Session #16 :: Tyler Lyle

I’ve always had this metaphorical soft underbelly where the scales never grew, which feels far too vulnerable at times; I’m sensitive to the flicker of dark clouds across the eyes of those that I love, wanting to intuit out all the discord and weave it back together into something whole. With each year that passes, I realize more how the wounds and the brokenness and the bruises sometimes, most times, have to just be sat with while they knit themselves back together. Or they don’t. Often they don’t. This has been The One Thing I have been faced with learning in the past four years and, with heightened intensity, in the past six months or so. I am still trying to believe in hope and magic, as much as I can, with a flimsy protective coating. Some people are beetles that can survive an emotional nuclear attack. I’m more like a naked mole rat.

That oblique introduction is directly related to Tyler Lyle, because in meeting him and punctuating the last year of my life with his music and now his friendship, I’ve seen a fellow naked mole rat (sorrry Tyler, not my finest allegory). Tyler believes boldly in hope, choosing his eyes wide open and his heart half-broken every time, as he sings in one of his new songs. This chapel session is a sweet one, but the kind of sweetness that is rooted in sadness, and the smoldering under the ash.

Tyler’s self-released record The Golden Age and The Silver Girl was one of my favorite records of last year, and the night after this session was recorded, he performed at my house (a highlight of all my concerts thus far). I wrote a lot of words and feelings about it here; it still leaves me feeling radiant to remember.

Tyler indicated recently that he is working on 44 new songs (two of which you can hear over here, that I have not stopped listening to since March), and I want to hear the other 42. This kid leaves me with my jaw dropped with every song he writes, and I can’t stop telling people about him with a missionary fervor.

I have a feeling about this one.

FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION: TYLER LYLE
MARCH 3, 2012

Free (I Am)
I was in NYC in March, and I spent one sunny Sunday afternoon walking loops through Prospect Park listening to this song on mega-repeat and singing along when no one was around (and sometimes, even when they were). This is a brave and beautiful new tune that cements Tyler’s standing in my mind as a potential major songwriter in my pantheon of great songwriters. There is no artifice in this folk song, only extraordinarily bold hope despite the entropy all around us.

Personally in my last few transformative months, I’ve claimed this song as an anthem of removing the fish-hooks of detrimental love from your heart and swimming off into the glittering water. “Not afraid of giving you all my love, and I’m not afraid to say goodbye.”

When I Say That I Love You
This song’s probably the most perfect summation ever penned of looking back at that one hot, pure young love that grabbed you and shook you before you knew what to do with such a torrent. There is no other feeling like that, and it’s a feeling that dissipates so quickly as we get older and develop scar tissue around all the soft parts and spaces.

This song remembers. Another year, another ring around my bones.

(and: that violin? It’s like a river that’s almost too much to bear. Sitting on the edge of stage when this was recorded, I just perched there and cried. Because I remembered, too.)

For Love To Come…
There’s a strong thread of melancholy that weaves its way through all the songs on Tyler’s record last year (because it’s a breakup record, all the songs about one Silver Girl). This song traces a theme that he’s explored in a few different places: the fact that we have to unclench our tight, white-knuckled fists before we can move on, even though stepping into that neutral liminal zone of nothingness can be terrifying. I haven’t minded doing it this year as much, with this soundtrack. “Sometimes for love to come, love has to go.” Also, the harmonies on this one are really something.

Closer To Me
At the outset, this song sounds the cheeriest of the session — an effervescent strum, an exhortation to come closer. But then I notice near-sinister undertones to the song which reminds me of the subject matter of Josh Ritter’s “The Curse” – “Come closer, closer, closer to me / I am a loaded gun, you are a symphony / …past those warning signs, out into the sea.” I hear it as wanting to love someone and being worried that your love might be corrosive (“I got a heart with holes, it don’t keep much heat“). Maybe I’m just glum. In any case: I also love the very Paul-Simonesque whistling at the end.

These Days (Jackson Browne)
Whoa, this cover is the gut-shot: one of the most penetrating covers I have ever, ever heard. Where the version I first heard, recorded by Nico, is all German alienation and that oddly-endearing frigidity, Tyler’s version pulses pure and gold in all that sadness. The fatal, exquisite line in this recording is: “Oh I had a lover, I don’t think I’d risk another these days …it’s just that I’ve been losing / …for so long.” Blammo.

I also, detrimentally, never realized this song was written by Jackson Browne. That just goes to show, yet again, that all the best stuff is probably by Brownes.

ZIP: TYLER LYLE CHAPEL SESSION

[Audio, as usual, by the fantastic guys at Blank Tape Records. Church interior photo by Kevin Ihle]

all by myself (i won’t lose it)

Pretty sure I’ve been waiting for this day to happen ever since the first (and second) time I heard the music of Walk The Moon, and I didn’t even know it.

Perfection.

I Can Lift A Car (with PS22 Chorus) – Walk The Moon

Meadowgrass it up this weekend

This Memorial Day weekend you’ll find me in a yurt on the grounds of Black Forest’s 400 wooded acres at the La Foret conference center (the historic summer home of local philanthropist Alice Bemis Taylor) for the fourth annual homegrown Meadowgrass Festival, just north of Colorado Springs.

I’ve never been to this fest before, but it’s growing in stature and quality (last year Damien Jurado, Horse Feathers, and John Doe from X played!) and sounds like it will be simply incredible. Denver luminary Nathaniel Rateliff is headlining Friday night before he heads off to the UK to open some more shows for Mumford & Sons, and the incomparable alt-country progenitors SON VOLT will rock Saturday night in their only Front Range show of the summer! Also notable in the lineup are The Barr Brothers and Alela Diane, as well as local blues-wunderkind Grant Sabin, and The Flumps. Sunday morning will feature a Bluegrass Mass (!), Telluride style.

Many musicians stay on-site, and the festival welcomes back any artist that’s played there in the past to come enjoy the fest’s current iteration, so I am hoping for a neat Doe-Bay-feel to the environment with little division between artist and festivalgoer.

I’m very much looking forward to the campfire jams both nights for folks who are camping, where everyone is encouraged to bring their instruments and head on down to the fire pit. There’s a swimming pool on-site, Bristol Brewing beer tent, and all kinds of cool events for the kiddos, like the Millibo Art Theatre and also Mountain Song Community School where the little ones can make musical instruments.

WIN A PAIR OF TICKETS! I have a pair of day passes to give away (you pick the day: Friday, Saturday, or Sunday) to a lucky reader! Email me if you would like to be entered to win, and I hope to see you all out there.

Come for the weekend: twenty-one bands are playing!

tell me not to trip or to lose sight

I first fell in love with Sharon Van Etten for her talent in phrasing lyrics in a perfectly excoriating way, and then stayed for the powerfully gorgeous music. The opening stanza of the first song of hers I heard, “A Crime,” has a simple line directed at someone that she is still in love with “after all this time,” and she delivers it perfectly scaldingly:

“…I’d rather let you touch my arm until you die
seduce me with your charms until I’m drunk on them
go home and drink in bed and never let myself be loved like that again”

Vibrating with a tight string of elegant sadness woven through, Sharon’s latest album Tramp is punched through by her understated insight. She articulates those quiet, insistent anxieties that I also feel, with a very sharp edge of intelligence.

The album feels to me like Jacob wrestling the angel, but all painted up in summer-hot orange reds like Gauguin’s version of the telling. The perspective is off-center and powerful in that obliqueness; the foist and the shove, the arching of the back to shrug off the weight is camouflaged in clear strong artistic lines, and the quiet grace of the ladies in profile in the foreground.

This is an album of heft and grief, but also of a hovering loveliness. You don’t often get those two together because the one usually crushes the other. Sharon balances both.

“We Are Fine” is one of my favorites on the record; it’s co-written with Aaron Dessner from The National, and features the swoopy-fantastic vibrato voice of Beirut’s Zach Condon. Win-win-win.

We Are Fine – Sharon Van Etten

I have been listening to this loping album over and over since January, and it is so laden with terrific songs. “All I Can” is usually almost too potently eviscerating to play (yet, I do, and again). The song traces the taut sutures that bind together our (beautiful) wounds and our hopes for regeneration. We all make mistakes. Sharon says it like this, perfectly: “Wanting to love as new as I can / wanting to show I want my scars to help and heal.” The ethereal, silvery-black “Joke or a Lie” feels like an answer to any song on The National’s Boxer, like the female part of the conversation. “Kevin’s” is drowsily exquisite. This whole album is.

Tramp is also probably one of my favorite records of 2012, and it’s only May. Sharon alone is more than enough, but the record is also bursting almost unfairly with contributions from members of The National, Beirut, The Walkmen, Wye Oak, and Doveman.

Sharon is on tour now, coming through Colorado on my birthday. I’ll take it. Cross your fingers for a Chapel Session with her; she’d be one of my all-time most-desired in that cathedral space.

they may take my joe pug cd, but they’ll never take our freeeeedom

The thief that busted my car window last night and stole the stereo that my dad gave me for my birthday also took the excellent new Joe Pug CD that was stuck inside of it. I hope the thief listens to it and then feels very very bad and convicted about being an earnest man who is worth something in this world; I also hope he goes out and buys the rest of Joe Pug’s superb catalog and changes his life. And stops being a jerkface jerk.

Hymn 76 – Joe Pug

In the meantime, I will attempt to anesthetize my wounds by going to see Joe’s afternoon BBQ show tomorrow, part of the Larimer Lounge’s excellent BBQ Series. This is a good way to spend your Saturday afternoon and you should come with me.

CONTEST! I have two pairs of tickets to give away for the Joe Pug BBQ (3pm tomorrow). Email me if you would like one of the pairs! Tickets are gone! Come anyways!

Also: this interview I did with Joe is still one of my all-time favorites.

[photo above was totally taken at my house, actually, by the wonderful Todd Roeth]

Fuel/Friends Chapel Session #15 :: The Head and The Heart, encore

Ten days shy of the one-year mark from the Saturday morning in March 2011 when we recorded our very first fledgling chapel session ever, my friends in The Head and the Heart made a special trip south to meet me at my house one Friday so we could head into the chapel again. I’d left my door unlocked for them, and walked in to them eating the leftover Cuban black beans I’d mentioned in the fridge, with a Townes Van Zandt documentary on the television, and music doo-wopping on the kitchen stereo. I loved how much it felt like home again to all of us.

It has been a hell of a year, a rollercoaster that I’m sure was hoped for but never would have been predicted when I first met this band in the summer of 2010. After their debut album wowed people and their live show exploded across the US (back and forth and back again), Europe, and even Australia, it’s been gratifying to see their exuberant songs of home resonate with so many. The album that’s out now was recorded over two years ago, and while the band has always had a fertile creative process and freely experimented with new songs in their live set, actual recordings of these songs are hard to come by while we wait for the sophomore effort.

Therefore I feel pretty dang lucky to get to peel the lid off this second Fuel/Friends Chapel Session with The Head and The Heart, filled up with new and re-envisioned songs. They’re the first band to come back for another go-around. This session was recorded in a very small, secret-feeling white clapboard chapel nestled next to a creek in the Manitou Springs foothills on the way to Pikes Peak, amidst all the resonant golden wood and humble stained-glass windows. It was called Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and felt like Sunday school. I palmed the keys and let us in those creaky painted doors with no one around but maybe the church mice, and the songs started unfolding.

The session was laced with the fresh. I just laughed to myself as I re-read what I wrote about that very first session: “After multiple takes of whatever felt right, three of the four songs we ended up with here are not recorded or released anywhere else, and the fourth is reinvented.”

Ditto on this one: three new, and one reinvented. Bookends.

THE HEAD AND THE HEART
FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION (MARCH 2, 2012)

Honey Come Home (chapel version)
The version of this song on their debut album sounds downright jaunty in comparison to this fingerpicked, darkly re-worked rendition. Here the song is weary, and almost completely defeated. It sounds older. It sounds bruised and slow and exhausted. None of these things are bad things, because the sentiments Josiah is singing about are difficult and they are sad. The laser focus of grief in this version smolders and hurts, echoed somberly by Charity’s prescient and mournful backing vocals, and I am immediately drawn to it.

I feel like this version of this song could have only come two years after the album version. “…And I am ready to be home.” This time, I might believe him.

Gone
Starting with lyrics about sailing into the fog and vanishing, this is an unreleased song that strongly invokes a departure from a solidly known shore and a journey away. It’s been a fast favorite since I first heard it in 2010, then googled various live versions and fell in love with it. There is the resonance in the naked wail of a confession that we are tryiiing here. On this version, Jon growls a little in seeming frustration. Don’t send me no postcards telling me you miss me. Maybe sometimes we don’t want to miss anybody.

Fire/Fear
This is a brand new song that I had never, ever heard before, and hoooo is it a kicker. This is the second time in the chapel that Josiah has brought something completely new, working out chord changes and sketching notes in the margins. After listening to the first performance (because I am linear in my narrative and always like tracing connections) I told Josiah that it sounded like a bookend to the song “Honey Come Home” – the same ache of a breaking or broken relationship, the same interminable distance from one person to another even as you sit nearby, or across town. He smiled the way that makes his eyes crinkle and affirmed that this is indeed a preface to that very song from their first album, but written from the perspective of the woman in the relationship, and from a younger time in their story. My favorite line in this new song is “so hold me down if I’m running off.” That one slices me, in particular, since sometimes I can appreciate a firm hand on the shoulder and an incentive to “come back.”

He also smiled as he said, “And let’s call it Fire/Fear, in honor of where it was first recorded.” Um, sure. Yes.

Untitled
The session ended with a nuanced performance of this untitled, unreleased song from Jon. I hope that it is someday called “Not Afraid,” because that lyric and that declaration feels like the place in the song where everything hangs for a second, the limbs bend, the constitution is braced. A very early version of this was also part of the first fantastic house show they did for me in November 2010, but this is the only time I’d heard it on the piano, echoing so redolently. The punch infused by the piano is the perfect accompaniment to this song, changing it from a striking campfire song to an irrevocably gutting eulogy. It’s getting harder these days.

At the 2:14 mark, this song made my stomach hurt.

This whole session left me reeling, which by now I should be used to for these folks and their music, since the first time I heard them. I’m glad I’m still not used to it, and that they keep furrowing deep and leaving us shimmering.

ZIP: THE HEAD AND THE HEART CHAPEL SESSION #2

Fitting.

[audio done, as usual, by my favorite talented guys at Blank Tape Records]

You Won’t tomorrow night in Denver? Oh I most certainly will.

One of my favorite live experiences at SXSW this year was seeing the buoyant and catchy music of You Won’t. Not only is their debut album completely irresistible, but during their live show they won my heart by playing their drums with kitchen utensils (because it made me pretty sure they’d wash their dishes if they ever come through Colorado Springs and stay at my house), and generally making everyone want to dance, even though it was Saturday and all our feet were blistered. Listen:

Right?!

CONTEST! WIN TICKETS: You Won’t is currently on tour with Alcoholic Faith Mission, and Fuel/Friends is co-presenting their Denver show tomorrow night at the Hi-Dive! I have two pairs of tickets to give away. Please email me if you want to check out the show and I’ll pick some folks tomorrow morning! It is going to be totally terrific, and a lot of fun — help kick this grey drizzle right out of town.

[photo by the lovely Brittney Bush Bollay, from the band’s KEXP SXSW show at Mellow Johnny’s]

if i show you my hands, will you carry the beast?

Her adopted name comes from a literary quote that couldn’t be more apt at describing the way her music glints. From James Joyce’s Ulysses: “Born in all the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil, lights shining in the darkness.”

I’ve written about Cold Specks back in December, on the strength of one cover song b-side that resonated so strongly with me as everything lay icy frozen in the world. After listening to her debut record on tremendously emphatic repeat these last few months, I’ve finally slowed down enough to watch (and re-watch) the accompanying video to the a-side, her first single “Holland.” I am completely riveted, eviscerated by its statement.

This video is one of the best things I’ve seen in a very, very long time. I generally don’t seek out music videos, but I can’t stop watching the way this one replicates the best of what I see in my head when I listen to a genuinely amazing song. The visuals knit together and contrast the external and the majestic with the quiet, the internal, and the personal. I feel like there is a giant patterned spiderweb strung through and around all that we see and know of ourselves. When the silvery dew falls on it, you can see the web for a few minutes.

This record is that dew.

So watch this video three times full-screen, at least, to start. From the opening grainy peephole examining the microscopic world of swimming protozoa, it begins humbly, but with acute observation. Eyes wide open as we listen: the starry scatter of galaxies juxtaposed next to our busy boulevards, our arteries of headlights. A spiraling c-curve of an ocean wave aside a silent snail-shell of a human ear. A thousand red Chinese lanterns rising, illuminated and flickering into the night sky, right next to the silent phosphorescent translucence of a jellyfish orbing through the black ocean, miles away from where any human can see it.

With the crash of the chorus at around 2:06, it really digs down with a pickaxe. A hurricane force wind whips branches off full-grown trees, while in the parallel frame the sun dapples the last of a dandelion seed breaking free from its stalk in the gentle breeze and floating off to become someone’s wish. A mushroom cloud of crushing destruction detonates on the horizon in unison with a thousand pink spring blossoms opening, smiling and soft in time-lapse.

Olivier Groulx, who made this video, is a genius because of this reason — and listen: he linked together beauty and death, the torrentially massive with the invisibly internal, the chaos with the intention. And it made me realize — maybe they aren’t so far apart after all.

The provocation made the hairs stand up on my neck: the simultaneous burial in the terrifying avalanche and the slicing forward relentlessly through the ice. Sometimes we can be both: overwhelmed and making progress. Defeated and possibly decomposing, while budding into something stunning. My brain has trouble comprehending that. And my brain also gets it, if I just let it. IT HAPPENS AT THE SAME TIME. Why do we think it happens separately?!

When she measuredly states, “I predict a graceful expulsion” (also the title of her album, out May 22), you don’t doubt her at all. All will be expelled. And all will be radiant.

Holland – Cold Specks

There is a sense of suspended restraint on this record that speaks louder than thunder could. With a voice that summons the celestial, each song commands me to listen — to stop, and listen. Although there are those epic swells and crashes (like on “Holland” — wow), there are times when the song stays tightly wound, aching for a release. On “Lay Me Down,” I keep expecting, every time after that pause at 0:56, for there to be a release and a break of all the tension — but instead it’s that single strum, a chime hit. It’s as if you were to round a corner and see a colossal waterfall but hear only the sound of the kitchen faucet dripping slowly in the middle of the night. I always feel suspended in that silence, feet kicking.

There’s also a definite primal, raw element to this record, maps bloody and blank all at the same time. On several songs, she brings in a strong single male voice rising strongly behind her, to help shoulder the load in the darkness. The effect is not unlike an old Southern spiritual in its unity. She was mesmerizing live at SXSW. The Globe & Mail called her “a songstress flung from darkness,” and I love that because there is definitely a feeling that she brings words from a place I can’t quite see into. Friend and fellow blogger Adam wrote eloquently about her recently; “the more I listen to it the more I’ve become convinced that there’s no way she could have lived with these songs inside her any longer.” Yes.

The debut record from Cold Specks is out May 22, on Arts & Crafts in Canada and Mute Records in the U.S. It will be one of the best records you could spend time with this year. Completely stunning and understated and wise, this woman is.

listen to my SXSW panel!

At the SXSW conference this past March, I was delighted to be a panelist for a session called Man vs Machine: New Music Discovery. Anyone who has ever had the (mis)fortune of sitting me down in person and asking me my thoughts about the role of music in a healthy society, why music resonates with us, and how media serves (or doesn’t serve) this goal – those folks know that I like a good rumination, a good extrapolation of ideas. I’ll talk for hours; more if you give me a good beer to cogitate over.

For this event we only got a little over an hour, and the panel was a lively discussion between me, Anil Dewan from KCRW, Philipp Eibach from wahwah.fm, Richard Slatter from We Are Hunted, and Scott Perry from New Music Tipsheet as moderator. It was a substantial deal of fun, to sit back and discuss where we might all be going with this, and why. As I wrote in March, the panel was pitched intentionally as a somewhat false dichotomy, since we all know that both the human recommendation and the technological algorithm can lead to a rad discovery — I suggested we just cage-match fight but no other panelists took me up on that at 8:45 in the morning.

My points eventually crystallized around the fact that I believe the nature of music discovery has changed: where you used to need a friend in the know to play you that punk 7″ they got in London in 1976 because humans helped to counteract musical scarcity, nowadays you need humans for almost the opposite reason – to place songs into some sort of a meaningful context, and to genuinely curate good music in a neverending flood of songs.

“Man vs Machine: New Music Discovery” SXSW Panel audio

Now that you can all listen in and join the discussion, what do you think about the things we reflected on? What role does context play, and how important is human connection in new music discovery? Should machines be able to cry? Is there a perfect robot DJ, and will he also clean my house like on the Jetsons? So many questions.