I want to stand right in the center of this video for a long while.
Scotland’s Admiral Fallow first charmed me two years ago with this singalong cover (which I still listen to on a very regular basis), and they have a wonderful new record out called Tree Bursts In Snow (Nettwerk Records).
Thanks to reader Laurie for bringing this video into my morning.
There is something downright mesmerizing in the understated, persistent songs of Neil Halstead, former frontman of the bands Slowdive and Mojave 3 and pioneer of the shoegaze sound in England. I keep putting this chapel session on to play at nighttime, to quiet my racing mind like a hypnotist’s gold swinging watch in a darkened study somewhere, or like a metronome that whispers instead of clacks.
On the day we recorded this, an eddy amidst the rush of the workday all around us, Neil amiably walked up the wide central aisle of Shove Chapel with his guitar case in his hand and a tour manager who was doubling as a piano player on the gorgeous Steinway. Neil slowly wove a resonant, dappled set for us, with two songs from his rich new album Palindrome Hunches (2012, Brushfire Records). When reviewers talk about cozy sweaters and thoughtfulness in this album, they’re right, but that’s not to say that it is sleepy or at all boring. Rather, it feels quietly satisfying.
After the new songs, Neil turned to me and asked “Is it okay if I do a Damien Jurado cover?” I nearly choked. “Um, yeah, sure I guess that would be okay,” I replied. The results are as completely stunning as you would imagine. He also played a song I specifically requested that afternoon, “See You on Rooftops” – an older tune from 2002′s Sleeping on Roads (4AD), and one that he hadn’t played in so long that he had to remember how it went.
The whole session felt, to me, like a reawakening.
FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION: NEIL HALSTEAD
OCTOBER 17, 2012
ZIP: NEIL HALSTEAD CHAPEL SESSION
[wonderful photos & video by Kevin Ihle, all audio production as usual by the superheroes at Blank Tape Records]
Tonight in Portland I had the super-pleasure of seeing Drew Grow and Janet Weiss perform raucous, airtight covers under their new band name Slang. Both taking a night away from their other music (Drew Grow & The Pastors’ Wives are finishing mixing a new album, and Janet is busy kicking ass with Quasi and Wild Flag), Slang just radiated joy and fun – two things that I so love in my music, and often miss.
This song has long been a favorite of mine, and was one of the covers they performed tonight. I bought it on a little $5 CD single, backed with “Handle With Care” (Traveling Wilburys). So good.
Writing to try to figure out what love is has been one of the main activities of songwriters since time began. As soon as we all realized that love did something to our insides that went deeper and stranger than other kinds of interactions, and as soon as we saw how devastatingly it could crush us, the chord progressions and lyrical twists started flowing. This is nothing new.
When I listen to the weighty “Song For Zula” by Phosphorescent, I feel like I am listening to the first and only song ever written. I don’t feel like I’ve ever heard a song about love before this one. I want very much to write something about how amazing this song is, since I have listened to it dozens and dozens of times on repeat in the last few weeks, and marveled over its story, its structure, its strings. But I don’t have anything else to say that the song doesn’t say already. Holy shit, this song.
Song For Zula – Phosphorescent
See, the cage, it called. I said, “Come on in”
I will not open myself up this way again
Nor lay my face to the soil, nor my teeth to the sand
I will not lay like this for days now upon end
You will not see me fall, nor see me struggle to stand
To be acknowledge by some touch from his gnarled hands
You see, the cage, it called. I said, “Come on in”
I will not open myself up this way again
Muchacho is out in March on Dead Oceans. That label lately. Man.
I’ve spent the last three days wrestling my blankets in a haze of fever dreams, hours passing in what feels like minutes and vice-versa. The soundtrack to much of my (stupid stupid mean) flu has fittingly been the impressionistic complexity of Field Report in these recordings from Shove Chapel earlier in the fall.
Even before I roadtested this music to my own actual fever dreams, that’s long been one of the best descriptors I could come up with for how Chris Porterfield’s rich songs wrestle over failings and threads of stories long forgotten. In the same way that time out of mind through fevers makes all sorts of strange threads of memory surface, these songs draw you into stories as if you’ve already heard them. Listening for the first time feels like remembering. Porterfield is a master at using odd metaphors that require you to just sort of accept them before they make sense.
I’ve been so deeply entranced by Field Report, and tangled up in their debut record ever since it first surfaced in my life in the icy springtime. The purity and urgency made it one of my favorites of 2012, and I think that all three album songs in this session outshine the renditions on the record. This band is a jaw-dropping talent, and it’s evident from these recordings that touring has only strengthened their songs. Go see them in 2013.
FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION #20: FIELD REPORT
OCTOBER 8, 2012 – SHOVE CHAPEL AT COLORADO COLLEGE
Taking Alcatraz
This is ostensibly a story about the American Indian occupation of Alcatraz in 1969, but it is also a song about staking your battles and pushing back against fears. “If I die here, well — at least I made a choice.”
Circle Drive
This song feels exactly like a string of long, late-night hospital visits, the sterile and dehumanizing blur between the living and the dying. I prefer the slow weariness in this version to the album version. Nick’s sweet piano cadence kills me here, as does the simple way that Chris states, “I am still your man. Some days we do the best we can.” He also leaves out the line, “we’re doing fine” in this rendition, which is good because I wouldn’t believe him anyways.
Whoa whoa. The caged energy of this video is mesmerizing, and Chris does absolute justice to the thin-voiced strained urgency of Neil Young’s ripoff of the Rolling Stones. One of my favorite covers we’ve recorded in the church.
Fergus Falls
You wake up suddenly in the middle of this quietly sad story, a song that doesn’t have the courtesy to fill us in on any of the important details that came before. Someone is reminding me about the time ten years ago when their wings iced up in the fall, and the whole thing feels like a dream. This version is slower and warmer, and feels like swimming towards the surface.
I feel like this whole record is about swimming towards the surface.
ZIP: FIELD REPORT CHAPEL SESSION
[audio production by the wonderful guys at Blank Tape Records, video by the always-terrific Kevin Ihle]
I’ve been listening to a lot of (old) Damien Rice these days, something about the long nights of winter and the perfection in so many of those songs. It’s good to hear Damien’s unmistakable voice on something new, in this collaboration with Irish songwriter David Hopkins. The song was released a few years ago, but it is a welcome discovery for me tonight.
There Are Debts (feat. Damien Rice) – David Hopkins
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.
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