The 2004 Stars record Set Yourself On Fire splashed with a plunk into my tumult that year like a shimmery, potent anchor of harmonies belying the deeper layers of truth in their music. It remains a hard-and-fast favorite of mine, one that I still put on with regularity (often on long flights, for some reason) and should be part of every music lover’s collection.
In 2007 a remix/cover album of those songs came out called Do You Trust Your Friends?, where the fabulously talented musical community that Stars surrounds themselves with took shots at their own version of those songs, with sharp and illuminated results (I really like Jason Collett‘s contribution, and Apostle of Hustle’s caffeinated take).
This morning, Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) tweeted this demo version of the title track that he recorded for the album, and which never appeared. It sounds like a terrific lost Postal Service track, and makes me so happy for interstellar collaborations.
Lately when I cue up music, I find myself craving something rollicking and urgent that will completely take me away for a few minutes from thinking about my past-due grad school paper I have been wrestling vigorously with this week. Did I say wrestling? Oh, I meant beating into bloody submission.
So I keep reaching over and over for the new Langhorne Slim record like a drug because it is a smart, tightly-wound explosion of howl and clatter that I so love Sean and his music for consistently delivering. I’ve been waiting for the follow-up from 2009′s Be Set Free (one of my favorite albums that year), and it’s out this week and it is terrific.
The Way We Move is Langhorne Slim & The Law’s first release on the top-notch Ramseur Records label, most famous for being the historical home of the Avett Brothers, and this record forges a good sonic kinship with their efforts. Man, they can both let out that rootsy, anachronistic howl.
I like this video for it because it captures the frenetic, bouyant energy of a Langhorne Slim show (which I missed last night in Denver, Idontwannatalkaboutit).
LANGHORNE SLIM & THE LAW TOUR #with Ha Ha Tonka
*with Jessica Lea Mayfield
June 7 – Lawrence, KS /// Jackpot Music Hall #
June 8 – St. Louis, MO /// Twangfest @ Duck Room #
June 9 – Nashville, TN /// Mercy Lounge #
June 11 – Atlanta, GA /// The Earl #
June 12 – Durham, NC /// The Casbah #
June 13 – Washington, DC /// Rock And Roll Hotel #
June 14 – New York, NY /// Bowery Ballroom #
June 15 – Philadelphia, PA /// Union Transfer #
June 16 – Philadelphia, PA /// Main St Music (solo in-store 2pm) July 20 – Pittsburgh, PA /// Club Café
July 21 – Indianapolis, IN /// Radio Radio
July 22 – Madison, WI /// High Noon Saloon
July 24 – Boulder, CO /// Boulder Theater
July 25 – Telluride, CO /// Telluride Mtn Village Sunset Series
July 27 – Stanley, ID /// Sawtooth Music Festival
July 28 – Bozeman, MT /// The Filling Station
July 29 – Missoula, MT /// The Palace
July 31 – Bellingham, WA /// Wild Buffalo House of Music
August 2 – Vancouver, BC /// The Media Club
August 3 – Seattle, WA /// Tractor Tavern
August 3-5 – Happy Valley, OR /// Pickathon Festival
August 7 – San Francisco, CA /// The Independent*
August 8 – Los Angeles, CA /// Troubadour*
August 9 – Santa Ana, CA /// The Constellation Room*
August 10 – San Diego, CA /// Casbah*
August 11 – Phoenix, AZ /// Crescent Ballroom*
August 14 – Austin, TX /// The Parish*
August 15 – Denton, TX /// Dan’s Silverleaf*
August 16 – Memphis, TN /// Hi-Tone Café*
August 17 – Louisville, KY /// Headliners Music Hall*
[top photo by my wonderful friend Todd Roeth, who is also responsible for the purdiest images from any interview I’ve ever conducted]
Before the leader of the free world sort of sang this little ditty, Britain’s marvelous Ben Howard took on a cover of Carly Rae Jepsen’s apparent summer smash hit “Call Me Maybe” on the BBC Lounge. Ben Howard was one of my favorite new artists that I featured on my Springtime mix with that stunner “Old Pine” (thanks Rinker), and Ben’s whole debut album Every Kingdom is a slow-building phenom of deeply-seated goodness.
Ben Howard got his footing as part of the Communion Records family, one of my favorite folk labels in the U.K. right now (um, because of their ability to casually make things like thishappen). I got to have beers with one of the founding dudes when I was in London in November, and I was deeply inspired by the slow, community-focused growth of the collective and the consistently terrific sound that they have curated through their Sunday night shows and carefully-signed roster.
I also got word the other day that they’re also opening a Nashville offshoot of Communion Records this Thursday, which, when combined with Third Man, will increase Nashville’s allure to me even more, if that’s possible.
This cover came to me via the laser-eared Adam Sharp, the final track off his new summer(days) 2012 mix. You’re just killing it lately, Sharp.
[if you like world leaders singing The Pop Hits that the kids dig, I still get a kick from these]
See those little dots waaay down there? Yep, that’s The Head and The Heart
Last week I had the distinct joy of seeing my pals The Head and The Heart play at the legendary Red Rocks, sandwiched between Blind Pilot and The Shins (oh what a night!). It’s transitioning towards being a normal thing for them to play huge venues like this one, but for this gal, it still made me smile goofily like a kid on Christmas — seeing their same explosive live performance that first made me notice them two years ago light up those steep rows carved into the rocks, watching 10,000 people dancing along.
Highlights of the set for me included the jubilant “Sounds Like Hallelujah,” which couldn’t help but resonate strongly in that setting (I mean, Red Rocks is where they start each concertgoing season annually with an Easter sunrise service, after all) and a full-band version of the long-favorite unreleased “Gone,” with a stirringly intricate outro (listen: from about 4 minutes onward) that shows a growing depth and continuing intuition to their full-band arrangements. Also, Josiah sang a brand new song from the band that I had never heard before, a bright and big tune called “What’s The Point” that wended its way past ballad and straight towards anthem. It’s exciting to continue to see them as a band and as individuals, finding their voices as songwriters and consistently delivering that goodness to the ears of their fans with passion.
Yeah. That was a good day.
[photos by the stellar Tyler Kalberg. Thanks, buddy.]
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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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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! 
CONTEST! 
Name: Heather Browne
