The middle of bitingly cold Beijing seems like a totally unlikely place to fall in love with the music of a kid who actually grew up about five blocks from where I am writing this (in Colorado Springs). But that’s where it happened to me, and happened hard. I have seven songs from Night Beds on my iPod, and I must’ve listened to each more than a dozen times. That’s a lot of “repeat all”s in two weeks.
Winston Yellen’s voice has a gorgeous measure of this transparent honesty in it, letting it show light through the cracks. It is a tremendous voice, with a swooping sadness that rivets me, like Jeff Buckley’s shivers with Ray LaMontagne’s warmth.
(if you have a Daytrotter subscription, get thee to that session as soon as you can – every song is terrific. If you don’t have a Daytrotter subscription, this is a worthy tipping point to get you there)
Yellen now lives in Nashville, but I like to think that something of the golden Colorado freshness has permeated its way into his songcraft. Night Beds is now signed to one of my favorite label families, Dead Oceans (home of other good folks like Tallest Man on Earth, Bill Fay, and Bowerbirds) and the 7″ for “Even If We Try” is available now, to tide us over until his debut full-length Country Sleep comes out in 2013.
The streams I’ve heard for the first two tracks on this record are riveting – it starts out a cappella, and I love it in similarly fervent measure to that Cold Specks song that first struck me like lightning around this time last year.
There is something colorful and dizzying in the orchestral swoops of Hey Marseilles‘ music. Bookended on either side of the stage with two of the Anderson brothers on cello and viola (two of nine kids, apparently all musical – good job, Mr. and Mrs. Anderson) this Seattle band is fortified with a sparkling range of instruments. Matt Bishop soars at the front of this carnival with words of love and loss and the wide world that’s out there waiting.
There’s a lot of sonic wealth in these songs – especially when those strings dance across your ears. The music of Hey Marseilles is richly thoughtful and expansive. On this collection of songs, they seem to be wrestling with a grownup love and all the commitments that entails; this is one to sit with for a while.
Watch out for their new album coming in March 2013.
HEY MARSEILLES – FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION #19
Elegy
There’s a mischievous gleam in this new song, much more than you’d expect from something called “Elegy.” I do not waltz (or two-step, or anything so formal), but I believe this is the song I would like to waltz to if I did. My favorite part of this song comes at the end where everything cuts out but the two Anderson brothers weaving their cello and viola together – it made me draw in my breath and hold it until the measures died away. So good.
Hold Your Head
If the last song was a waltz, this one makes me practically see ballerinas bouncing spry and quick on their toes. It also reminds me of rain, the springtime kind.
True Love Will Find You In The End (Daniel Johnston)
There is something so open-hearted and earnest in this song, sung as matter-of-fact truth set to music by the reticent Daniel Johnston. I don’t have this kind of faith yet, but I am glad some folks out there do – and this version of the song is all dressed up stunningly.
Looking Back
This is a brand new song that doesn’t seem to exist out there in recorded or video form, so I was especially delighted. On this, I hear chronicles of weariness and peace with past mistakes. “If you’re looking back, that’s all you’ll ever see / when I find my way to you, I know I’ll stay.” This is a song about finding a nest, a haven, a home.
Also, hey: if you download this and like it, please enter your email address in the widget thing for the band, below where it says “Free Download.” That way they can let you know when they are coming through your town — they are lovely, lovely guys and you should be in direct contact with them.
[visuals by Kevin Ihle, and videos for all the songs are on his YouTube page]
Seven years ago I had just moved to Colorado, away from California where I had spent my adolescence and young adulthood going to concerts, developing my musical footing, and making friends who loved music as much as I do. At the foot of the Rocky Mountains I had moved into a big, quiet blue house up in suburbia and worked part-time contract work for my university that I’d left to seek greener, more mountainous pastures. This meant there were long stretches of quiet in that house, ones that made all my molecules ache for the same connection I’d left behind with all my friends and places that felt like home in the San Francisco Bay Area. I put on records, but those aren’t as fun to listen to alone all the time, or with a two year-old kiddo; plus you have to turn it way down at naptime.
I remember that blogs were a brand new experimentation to me; I hardly read any, nor did I know yet what purpose they could serve in the media landscape. They were still all written in largely hyper-personal terms, and if you know me, you know I like that trait in pretty much anything. One day I remember opening a window on Blogger, poising fingers over the “Name your new blog!” field, and thinking I’d give it a try. I was drawn to the idea of being able to keep in touch with the folks I’d left in California, and having a mouthpiece to externally process this new fire hydrant of undiscovered music that I was just starting to read about on blogs like Aurgasm, Largehearted Boy, Marathon Packs, Said the Gramophone, and Aquarium Drunkard. My first posts are charmingly conversational, and I remember the rush when I installed a Statcounter and saw that I’d had more than fifty hits one day, and they came from all over the globe. I remember one ping came from some small industrial town in the middle of Russia and I sat there blinking, trying to reconcile this new, one-sided form of pen-pal possibility with the faceless folks who had found me.
Seven years later, I feel like all of this has gone through several iterations around me. Blogs quickly became this strangely-officially-recognized media outlet, and all of us responded in very different ways in that freedom, without a roadmap of where we were going. Some of us took on staffs of writers and made it a full-time thing; some specialized even more precisely into one genre and have created a vast and passionate documentation of forgotten music, or started their own carefully-curated record label. The array of blogger parties at SXSW make me dizzy just to think about them. I found my email inbox inundated with review requests, my mailbox full of promo CDs, and my interview dance card as full as I wanted it to be. I have loved this freedom to explore, and to share my wanderings and my passions with all of you guys. The connections with each of you are why I keep doing this; I’ve have some of the best readers in the blogosphere, and this blog has been the glue that has melded me to so many likeminded souls around the world who are pursuing music for the same reasons that it draws me. For this, I am grateful.
I was ruminating with a friend yesterday morning about that reflection from Jana Hunter on our relationship with music, and how perhaps it’s becoming cheaper. The relationship with music is a subject I think about a lot; all you have to do is read the Nick Hornby quote that’s greeted you on my sidebar since the very beginning: “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…”
Contrast this with what Jana writes in 2012: “If you consume all the music you want all the time, compulsively, sweatily, you end up having a cheap relationship to the music you do listen to. In turn, this kind of market makes for musicians who are writing with the burden of having to get your attention, instead of writing whatever they’d write if they were just following artistic impulses. It’s increasingly difficult and un-rewarding to write music that is considered, patient, and simple when the market increasingly demands music that is easy, thoughtless, and careless.”
My friend and I discussed how the upped dosages of new music available on blogs and out there in the world have changed our own personal listening habits, and the deepest relationship that we form with these radiant, external, gossamer threads that we call songs. This is not a blanket statement or a political directive of what you should do, but we talked about how the intimacy and the depth that we forge with our music seems damaged when it becomes just one more “thing” in our busy lives that we have to “get through,” as it piles up next to the stereo the way my grad school assignments pile up on the kitchen table. Oh yeah, there are twelve new albums in the last two months that HOW HAVE I NOT LISTENED TO?! Or ones that I have listened to, just to have listened to them.
I don’t sit there in the dark of my living room much anymore, after my kiddo is in bed, and just listen. Things are loaded up and shuffled and re-shuffled and refreshed with new tracks I’ve downloaded that day.
After seven years, where are we going? I try to always write about music that connects with me and excites me in that unexpectedly primal, mysterious way, and then to wrap words around that silver slipperiness. I write to stay in touch with the things that help us feel alive; and I myself have rarely felt more alive than these days at a house show, or sitting in a chapel watching pure magic being spun in front of me. Those are things that I am proud of, and that give me a deep delight to have a hand in creating for others. But blogging is an oddly ephemeral and insatiable media in which to chronicle those sorts of connections. I find myself wanting to be satiable more often, to sit, to be deliberate and content. I think we can do it; I’m not sure the steps I take to get there.
I’ve just landed in San Francisco after nine days in China: Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai. My brain is buzzing with the welcome vertigo of being completely foreign, a pinball pinging through a world that you neither understand or can communicate with. And yet, I could observe all day long, trying to sift out meaning where words didn’t work. It was a pretty rad and much-needed solo adventure. I saw some live music two nights in Shanghai, both shows put together by wooozy.cn – I loved seeing what kind of music young Chinese kids are making. Because of course I saw it through my own cultural filters, I heard threads of The Strokes, Explosions In The Sky, and even a male-female duo that totally resonated of the White Stripes, if the White Stripes were singing in Mandarin. It was a familiar sentiment, this urgency in music, even five thousand miles away.
I’m recharged, and disoriented. I’ll be back with more this week, including a new chapel session or two. Happy thanksgiving week (I think, right? — what day is it? I landed before I took off.)
If you are not enjoying your life and your music as much as Allen Stone, you are doing it wrong.
Tonight, I am feeling optimistic for tomorrow, and this music is the perfect soundtrack. Taped backstage at Sasquatch in one of the most gorgeous spots on earth I have ever stood myself, Allen takes on the wind and lodges a victory for all that is right with the world.
ALLEN STONE FALL TOUR
11/7 – Milwaukee, WI – Turner Hall
11/8 – Indianapolis, IN – Deluxe Old National Centre
11/9 – Chicago, IL – Lincoln Hall
11/10 – Columbus, OH – The Basement
11/11 – Cleveland, OH – Grog Shop
11/13 – Ferndale, MI – The Magic Bag
11/14 – Toronto, ON – The Opera House
11/15 – Montreal, QC – Cabaret du Mile-End
11/16 – Portland, ME – Port City Music Hall
11/17 – Cambridge, MA – The Sinclair
11/21 – London, UK – Cargo
11/22 – Manchester, UK – The Ruby Lounge
11/23 – Dublin, IE – Sugar Club
11/24 – Glasgow, UK – Classic Grand
11/26 – Amsterdam, NL – Melkweg The Max
11/27 – Copenhagen, DK – Ideal Bar – Vega
11/28 – Stockholm, SE – Debaser Midis
11/29 – Hamburg, DE – Klubsen
11/30 – Berlin, DE – Bohannon Soulclub
12/1 – Zurich, CH – Eldorado
12/3 – Ghent, BE – Handelsbeurs
12/4 – Paris, FR – La Maroquinerie
12/7 – Seattle, WA – Paramount Theatre
12/9 – Bellingham, WA – Wild Buffalo
12/12 – San Diego, CA – Balboa Theatre
12/14 – San Francisco, CA – Nob Hill Masonic Center
12/15 – Boise, ID – Knitting Factory Concert House
12/16 – Portland, OR – Kink.fm Jingle Bell JAM
I am a complete sucker for symphonic accompaniments, and the way they expand the available palette and tease out the colors and nuances of a song, in breathtaking ways. The Avett Brothers have long pierced me with their earnestness, and now with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, even more so. This is terrifically beautiful.
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.
Tonight, I am feeling optimistic for tomorrow, and this music is the perfect soundtrack. Taped backstage at Sasquatch in one of the most gorgeous spots on earth I have ever stood myself, Allen takes on the wind and lodges a victory for all that is right with the world. 
Name: Heather Browne
