I can’t believe I haven’t posted this song yet. It is easily already my most listened-to song in a very long time; I crave it like a simple, sweet, potent drug. I’ve gone on drives where I played it at full volume, on repeat for an hour – my brain merrily flitting around trying to figure out what was going on with the percussion and the voice: the only two elements.
How To Dress Well is Tom Krell from Chicago. His sophomore album Total Loss came out in the fall on Acéphale Records, and he plays Denver’s Larimer Lounge on April 3 (after jaunts through Australia and Asia).
Jim James delivered one of my favorite live late-night performances earlier this week on Fallon (who hosts Night Beds tonight). There is such blissful joy in this performance, especially at the end when it all explodes in a dazzling burst of orchestral happiness with The Roots and all their instrument-wielding band-geek friends, apparently. Jim also seems to be radiating peace — and not just because of his passing resemblance to a certain messiah.
I am somewhat obsessed with this completely magnificent song; isn’t it just a perfect way to start the year? Used hearts, fresh starts, and all.
Jim James’ debut solo record Regions of Light and Sound of God came out earlier this week, and has set me off on a Jim James / Yim Yames / My Morning Jacket listening binge. I’m especially re-crushing terribly on The Tennessee Fire — every song on there just….geez. Jim’s on tour, let’s get him in the chapel, stat.
JIM JAMES TOUR DATES
2/18: Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s SOLD OUT
2/19: Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg SOLD OUT
2/20: New York, NY @ McKittrick Hotel SOLD OUT
4/17: Louisville, KY @ Brown Theatre
4/19: Milwaukee, WI @ The Pabst Theater
4/20: Chicago, IL @ Vic Theatre
4/21: Minneapolis, MN @ First Avenue
4/23: Columbus, OH @ Newport Music Hall
4/24: Toronto, ON @ Phoenix Concert Theatre
4/26: Boston, MA @ Royale
4/27: Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer
4/29: New York, NY @ Webster Hall
4/30: Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
5/2: Nashville, TN @ Cannery Ballroom
5/3: Asheville, NC @ The Orange Peel
5/4-5/5: Atlanta, GA @ Shaky Knees Music Festival
5/6: Austin, TX @ Stubb’s Waller Creek Amphitheatre
5/7: Dallas, TX @ House of Blues
5/9: Denver, CO @ Ogden Theatre
5/11: Los Angeles, CA @ The Fonda Theatre
5/12: San Francisco, CA @ The Fillmore
5/14: Portland, OR @ Crystal Ballroom
5/15: Seattle, WA @ Neptune
Also, as a Friday bonus, if you like “A New Life,” relisten to this 2007 Magnet song from Norwegian shores; my brain pleasantly linked the percussive feel in them.
I’m so pleased to announce that the next Fuel/Friends House Concert will be on Thursday, February 21 with the beguiling voice of one of Denver’s favorite sons: Nathaniel Rateliff.
I saw his music years ago when his old band Born in the Flood opened for Kings of Leon in Denver. In the years since, Nathaniel has been a consistent fixture of amazingness first with The Wheel, and now under his own name. He got to know the Mumford & Sons fellas early on, and you may have seen him on the Gentlemen of the Road caravan, or heard him play on the Mumfords’ Daytrotter, as well as three Daytrotter sessions of his own.
This show will be a fundraiser for Nathaniel. Some jerkface jerk in a stolen car rammed his touring van. Those repairs are not cheap, and we want to step up to help him, and enrich our ears in the process. We are suggesting a donation of $10-15 for this show. It starts at 7pm, February 21; location details here.
Winston Yellen walked into the side door of the chapel on one of the last days of 2012, with a denim shirt and an easy smile, his younger brother Abe along to play drums and piano. Gregarious and unassuming in appearance, he looks like any other 23 year-old from Colorado Springs, but when he sat down at the microphone and opened his mouth to sing the a capella “Faithful Heights,” we all fell completely silent. Dumbstruck. That voice just flies out of him, with no warning.
The music of Night Beds walloped me with a colossal punch the first time I listened to it, and so far this has not lessened, not even a little bit. As someone who both deeply loved Jeff Buckley and also remembers the earliest days of Bon Iver, I feel like this guy has something in his music that could be listened alongside of both, and I would permanently give access for this music to get at all of the rawest parts of my psyche. It’s magnificent torment, this record – direct and unadorned.
We recorded these songs a couple of days before the year 2012 ended, while Winston was home from Nashville for the holidays. The handful of us in the church were speechless at the power in Winston’s voice, and the smart, literate force of his lyrics. There’s so much melancholy weighted in the single electric guitar that Winston plays here — those bluesy notes hung in the air and felt like water in my lungs, slowly accumulating. Winston floats and swims strongly through the spaces in his song, letting his exceptionally powerful voice pierce through the resonance.
His debut record Country Sleep is out today in the UK, tomorrow in the U.S. Like I said at the end of my last post of 2012, I think Winston’s efforts could be one of the most notable and promising of the year that lies ahead of us. Stay tuned for the in-depth, fascinating interview I got to conduct with Winston; his first in the United States. I hope to post that later this week.
FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION: NIGHT BEDS
DECEMBER 29, 2012
Faithful Heights / Ramona
First off, stop what you’re doing before you click play here, because you’re not going to be able to continue doing whatever you were doing once Winston starts singing. Secondly, I like these versions even more than the album because they manage to come off even more potent and honest. We talked a lot about these two songs, which bravely open up Country Sleep. I wondered who they were about, who Winston was inviting to crawl into his arms for comfort, who Ramona was, and why she needed to fuck everything she’d been taught. I was surprised and intrigued to learn that both of these could be about him, or for him. Changes the whole perspective, in a poignantly sharp and self-compassionate way, when we sing to a side of ourselves.
22
At the end of our session I commented to Winston that this was a fitting song for him to play, for our 22nd chapel session recording. This song sings about hearing the trains in the August night, and that’s shaped how I picture it: on a Tennessee hillside somewhere in the dense summer heat. His voice keens like a lonesome whistle in the darkness while the percussion clacks over the rail ties. This is a darkly lush song, on a lush album.
Lost Springs
“And I never have known / why I feel so alone…” The more I listen to the new Night Beds record, the more I feel like this line repeated in this song might be the theme of it, in a way that the movie Melancholia fought with its fists pounding against the giant meteor of depression hurtling towards earth and threatening everything we love and enjoy. The sweet piano topnotes that Abe adds on the grand piano feel almost like stardust falling.
You know that scene in That Thing You Do, when The Wonders (Oneders) hear their song on the radio for the first time and everyone stops and turns up their radio and starts to dance and whoop? When I first heard the uber-catchy opening track “Burn You Up” off Mike Clark & The Sugar Sounds‘ new album Round and Round on KRCC radio, I did the same thing. Except I was at work, so minus the whooping. For your Friday joy:
I grew up listening to oldies all the time (KFRC: San Franciscooo); I have an encyclopedic ability to sing, hum, and snap along with a huge variety of songs from the classic foundations of rock and roll. This record hits every single one of those sweet spots for me, in a current way. I hear Otis Redding, I hear Roy Orbison — yet as Josh at the Denver Post so perfectly wrote, “There is no revival, no costume play, no irony. These are brand-new, honest songs that resonate as classics.”
Mike is my same age, and I get the feeling he loves all those old songs as much as I do. This record is an unabashed celebration of music from the 1950s and ’60s, but done with clean urgency. Mike also plays in one of the best-known Americana bands from Colorado, The Haunted Windchimes (who you may have heard on A Prairie Home Companion), but this is a total departure; these songs kept coming into his songwriting brain but not fitting with what the Windchimes were recording. These are songs that evoke a whole other landscape of glowing yellow radio dials, and a time when rock and roll was the rebellious domain of young people, and not the safe “oldies” you now hear in the dentist’s chair. Mike does it with so much joy.
Spurred by the tremendous chapel session we recorded with Mike last week, I have been listening to this album pretty much non-stop for the last two weeks on my big kitchen stereo. Sometimes, at home, I dance. The record is another fine Blank Tape Records release, the same folks who donate their magic skills to producing each and every one of the Chapel Sessions. Hear one more song off the record, the irresistible “Summer Girls.” There is a 100% chance this will make the Fuel/Friends Summer 2013 mix, the way “Smooth Sailin’,” also on this record, made (and titled) my Summer 2012 mix.
TOUR: Mike is playing his Denver album release show tonight at the intimate, awesome Deer Pile (above City O’ City), with R.L. Cole and Joe Sampson. Then he sets off on a West Coast tour for the next month; if you go, I bet you’ll like it.
You might even dance.
MIKE CLARK & THE SUGAR SOUNDS TOUR
Feb 4 – Cavalcade – Fruita, CO
Feb 5 – Soul Poles – Park City, UT
Feb 7 – Jones Radiator – Spokane, WA
Feb 8 – Caffe Mela – Wenatchee, WA
Feb 10 – Huck Notari Springville House – Portland, OR
Feb 13 – The Horned Hand – Bend, OR
Feb 14 – Axe and Fiddle – Cottage Grove, OR
Feb 23 – Crepe Place – Santa Cruz, CA
Feb 24 – Mercury Lounge – Santa Barbara, CA
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
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.
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.
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.
Name: Heather Browne
