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]

Fuel/Friends Chapel Session #14 :: Adam Arcuragi & the Lupine Chorale Society

Adam Arcuragi has this rumbly deep, soulful voice that roils down into the bottom sediments of the lagoons and trolls up things for me. His is a kind of sturdy music that radiates equal parts gospel retribution, the pull of the sea or the drive of torrential rains, and so many voices rising together to answer the questions (or at least give it a shot, with conviction). Somewhere along the line his music got deemed “Death Gospel,” a name that totally fits when you listen to the way he describes it: “Death Gospel is anything that sees the inevitability of death as a reason to celebrate all the special wonder that is being alive and sentient.”

I fell for Adam Arcuragi & the Lupine Chorale Society pretty instantaneously when I saw them pouring out all their musical joy and four-part harmonies in their song “Bottom of the River” in a NYC flea market for the Blogotheque Sessions. Then after I finished the battery of my first graduate school residency, feeling dessicated, the torrent of his songs roared through again with the release of Like A Fire That Consumes All Before It… (out now on Thirty Tigers), saving me from that particularly pernicious breed of self-doubt and soul-weariness.

This chapel session was the first one recorded in the shiny new year of 2012, at the end of January on a Saturday morning so gorgeously clear and perfectly ice blue. The band had slept at my parents’ house the night before, due to me being full-up with wonderful couchsurfers, and my mom had laid a clean set of towels on each bed and made them all breakfast. So I think they were in a pretty good mood (me too), so much so that they were taking requests and inviting me to sing along. Like most bands who end up in the church, I knew from the first time I heard them that I wanted this recording to happen (Lupine: “of, like, or pertaining to wolves” – I’m all for the howling) and it didn’t disappoint.

As I said in January, how can any of us doubt our reserves when there is music like this to explain the questions?

ADAM ARCURAGI & THE LUPINE CHORALE SOCIETY
THE FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION (JANUARY 28, 2012)

President’s Song
The opening growls that Adam uses to start this song off remind me of a massive engine trying to turn over. It’s got an immense load to haul here, so forgive if it bucks a bit. Adam puts all his wonderfully wordy lyrics up on his website (like vocab-porn for me) and this song seems to juxtapose a foreign influence bringing church and promises, contrasted with the wilderness and surety of elemental certainties like the coming rain.

Broken Throat
Many of Adam’s songs strike me as either being taut with the sense of something unknown looming on the horizon, or the sure certainty of knowing certain secret things. This song is the latter for most of the verses, the reassurance of all our voices rising together to answer that which we do know, and making sense of us all in there together. As you can see beaming off me in the video, I loved being part of this knowing, this chorus of voices (I have a secret aspiration to be in a gospel choir, true story).

But for all the choruses and verses, the line that still sticks in my throat a good deal is towards the end, sung quietly: “And if I saw it, I still don’t think I’d know.” Huh. Yeah, I don’t know if I would, either.

(this song was my debut singing on a chapel session with real musician-folks. I’m available for weddings and background vocal tracking.)

Port Song
I’m pretty tickled to know an actual living-breathing sailor who goes off for months at a time and then returns to step down off that boat. From what I gather, the fragmentation of life at sea & life on land with the stability all around you of those you love can be disorienting, even when it is welcome. This song gets right at that, and always makes me think of my sailor friend. It’s a beautiful metaphor not only for reconnection but for the ceasing of the fighting alone. The first verse sounds restrained, like fatigue mixed with the slow creeping regeneration setting in around the roots, and then by the end everything is fully re-engaged, full-throated and wailing. “So, let me be your come back down, steady as a hand to hold / let me be the first voice as you step down from that boat / and tell me of the sea and foam, a thousand ocean miles from home / the simple gift is the song you hear from this small familiar shore.” It also gets me right in the gut how Adam makes his voice sound like an otherworldly theremin at the end, all Neutral Milk Hotel-like. Unsettlingly penetrating.

Bring It On Home To Me (Sam Cooke)
As the band loaded their gear into the church on that dazzlingly sunny morning, I was suddenly gripped with a string of melody that wrapped itself around my brain – the magnificence of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home To Me.” I casually asked the guys if they ever covered it BECAUSE IT WOULD BE PERFECT. They smiled, and this was the result. (I once posted about seven trillion versions of this song. Adam’s reminds me of the spaciousness of Britt Daniel’s version the most, but with more ooomph and soul-sadness). This rendition could have easily been a forgotten b-side to a vinyl single sixty years ago; I love the space and the clatter and the toe-taps, underscoring the uncertain shuffle and the pleading wail.

ZIP: ADAM ARCURAGI CHAPEL SESSION
(for other videos from this session, go visit Kevin Ihle’s YouTube)

They’re in Europe in May, my foreign friends. Please GO. And tell them I said hello.

[Recommended reading/listening: Death Gospel’s got a Wikipedia page and a Spotify provenance playlist, and even an article from the University of Chicago’s divinity school about the genre. Ooh]

Fuel/Friends Chapel Session #13 :: Glen Phillips (of Toad the Wet Sprocket)

There are certain musicians that you love with your whole fast-beating 15 year-old heart in 1995 that you grow apart from like a Sadie Hawkins Dance date (I’m looking at you, Toby Clary. You never call). The 2012-you puts the album on and winces at how minimally the music still aligns with what you love, for all the fervor and the cassette tape trading you may have devoted to it in your teenage years.

But then there are the artists that age with you, that burrow warm like a nest around your body and your heart as you grow. They are the ones that you can look back at after having lived through a few more years and heartbreaks and deeper joys than you ever predicted, and find that their songs can still bloom for you, can still come along with you through the currents.

For me, Glen Phillips and the music of Toad the Wet Sprocket does exactly that. We’ve both got some crinkles around our eyes when we smile, and we’re both about a thousand metaphorical miles from where we were in high school, but something in there still connects wonderfully. I was a colossal Toad the Wet Sprocket fan in high school. Dulcinea had just come out in 1994, Fear is (still) an unbeatable record, and my skies were wide open and cerulean blue. I was on a text-based email listserv devoted to Toad (yup), and we would tree cassette tapes of shows and unreleased songs, and talk about band details and show reviews. I have every single record they ever released, and all sorts of CD singles. I think I was in a fanclub — remember those?

Existing evidence.

Life being the funny thing that it is, on a cold night this past autumn, I ended up sitting in an echoey church at midnight with Glen Phillips, after a long dinner filled with rich conversation and some good wine, beaming ear to ear as he played so many songs for our session — some old, some brand new, and one jaw-dropping cover — and we just enjoyed the heck out of that particular brand of magic.

I interviewed Glen back in Nashville in 2009 during his tour with the spirited Works Progress Administration super-musician band, and we hit it off as friends immediately. Glen is one of the most lovely, wrenching songwriters that I know of who is still plugging away intelligently from those bands I loved in the ’90s. There is a specific timbre his voice hits that other longtime fans will understand when I say just slices through all those deadened layers that calcify around my insides. Just a straight shot through. As the years pass, I hear him harnessing a certain type of weariness –no, quietness, maybe– but also there is still that bubbling current of hope and a satisfaction with the lives we have woven together from all of this crazy life.

FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION: GLEN PHILLIPS
(OCTOBER 5, 2011)

Rise Up
Glen wrote this to first appear on the Works Progress Administration record, back in 2009, and when he sings about the fog in the canyon and the vapor in the keep, I can hear it silently permeating this unsettling, questioning song. To me, it feels like a nice bookend to the social-justice bent in the super old Toad song “Chile” – please only talk to me in the dark.

Return to Me
I’ve been strangely drawn to movies about the alienation of outer space and the parallel celestial worlds that might spin around us, from any number of eerie Twilight Zones, to Moon, to the amaaaaazing Another Earth. This darkly beautiful song wants to be in one of those cinescapes, with futuristic lyrics about seeing the sun rise twice within one day, and how “with a finger i will lift you gently from your seat and draw you near / embrace you as we spin, all grace and beauty.” I don’t even want to know how this song came to be — I just love its exotic otherworldliness. It’s from Glen’s 2008 thematic record Secrets Of The New Explorers.

The One That Got Away
Because this is a new one, it might not even have a finalized name yet, but for now Glen’s going for this wistful title of something missed — a silvery girl slipped through the netting. As I recall, this was played on a ukulele (the night got pleasantly fuzzy) and somehow manages to feel sad and effervescent, all at the same time.

Liars Everywhere
Wow, when I recognized the chords to this one…. This is a song from the second Toad album, Pale, self-released in 1989 for $6000, when the band was barely out of high school. On the album version Glen sounds like the shiny, slightly-sullen, longhaired teenager that he was, and I love it fiercely. When I listen to this recording from the chapel, he sounds so much warmer, and so much more real, which I suppose might be a nice metaphor for what’s happened to all of us in the last twenty years. After those opening guitar notes when I realized what song he was playing, boy did the tears start flowing silently as I sat there quietly humming harmonies. That was a permanent win life-moment of beauty for me.

Don’t Need Anything
As Glen introduces this older tune as “a feel-good song,” and it feels like a comfortable old robe that I can slip into as Spring mornings mean coffee on my back porch. “Got gardens growing, got quiet days…” It works as a perfect companion piece for “I Will Not Take These Things For Granted,” from Fear, and unwinds like a modern benediction of simplicity. There is so much to be grateful for.

Two-Headed Boy (Neutral Milk Hotel)
And finally: All I have to say is that this might be the most perfect cover ever recorded in a chapel session. It was the last song of the night, nearing 1am. Incisive, plaintive, capturing the spirit of the original but in a terrifically unique way — like this version was always meant to be. So, so good. The world that you need is wrapped in gold silver sleeves.

ZIP: GLEN PHILLIPS CHAPEL SESSION

Glen has some tour dates going on right now this week (Portland Thursday, Seattle Friday, here in Denver Saturday — not bad) and more in May. Take yourself, to remember and discover.

my chapel runneth over

In the last few days, we’ve gotten to record devastatingly rich Chapel Sessions with both The Head and The Heart (our first encore session) and Tyler Lyle. I have felt exceedingly blessed, and can’t wait to share them with you.

Josiah from The Head and The Heart stopped in the Louisville studios today of my friends at WFPK, and revealed a little more about our wonderful Friday afternoon together:

Josiah (THATH) talks Chapel Sessions – 3/6/12

We have a backlog of great sessions in the hopper (four total), all in store for the coming weeks and months. I’m excited.

Fuel/Friends Chapel Session #12 :: Eef Barzelay (of Clem Snide)

[a non-traditional photo, for an exceptional chapel session]

I mean no slight to the eminent photographability of the man behind this post, as I usually start all my Chapel writeups with a visual of our time spent beneath those Romanesque arches. But I came across this photo as I was marveling for the three-dozenth time at the songs that Eef Barzelay poured out for us that night, and it just fit, so flawlessly. The ossified yellowy shades of need, affection, accident, and habit — all cradled and balanced perfectly. For once. When you listen to this extraordinary chapel session, maybe it will make sense to you too.

Let’s set this straight from the beginning. Saying that Eef Barzelay (of the band Clem Snide) is a standard songwriter is akin to saying that David Foster Wallace uses a few moderately interesting vocabulary words in his books. Eef thrills me. Eef pens songs that flay me. There are just a select few songwriters in this world that feel as though they are thinking with my same brain. They say things that make me gasp with how stunningly they fit the neural pathways I have threaded together over my lifetime. Eef gets my brain, my ways of characterizing and explaining things, my heart.

One of the primary effects I am looking for in a song is for that minute where it takes me completely out of my head and away from my logic, and I feel something burning hot and bright – cut free from the crud of the world, and defying logical connection. Something feels like it will be okay, even if it is not okay.

I saw Eef Barzelay perform three times the weekend this chapel session was recorded. The first night was in the small Marmalade Art Gallery by the train tracks just south of downtown, where Eef played to a full small room of folks perched in folding chairs, under a flock of paper cranes swinging in flight overhead. He introduced several of his short films assembled from “found footage” — primarily clips documenting slowed-down natural animal and human behavior, scored with his own original songs, layered with visual effects, and all coming to a gluey, sharp point.

Something in me cracked open during one of his films of a snake slowly eating a baby owl alive, soundtracked by a potent punch of an original song. In that four minutes there was a strange peace in the cessation of the fighting. As sad as it was (fuzzy baby animals!), it was utterly and completely brilliant, that song. There in my folding chair, I just leaked a steady, quiet, miniature river of tears for the next hour through the rest of his films and on through his live acoustic set with his bass ukulele. I couldn’t even exactly say precisely why, except that maybe I felt understood.

This is one of my favorite chapel sessions so far, because it is so densely loaded with stunners, and with truth. As Eef sings in another one of his songs, “No one gets through this life without making a mess.”

The quietude of the chapel naturally seems to extract the reverential, introspective songs from musicians. That evening was the perfect setting for Eef to introduce us to several songs all about a woman named Mary, from a forthcoming record, Songs For Mary. I don’t know who she is — a real person, an alias, or an abstract summation of femininity — but that is not important, because what we do know is that Eef pours the most beautifully honest truths out to her. Come.

EEF BARZELAY CHAPEL SESSION
SEPTEMBER 25, 2011

The Ballad of God’s Love
Man — right out of the gate, this song packs one of the biggest wallops of truth I have heard about any of our insides in a long time. Eef plainly sings, “And don’t, don’t be shy to look yourself dead in the eye / the emptiness you feel inside, well would you believe …but that’s where God’s love hides.” Paired with track 3, and you got yourself a pretty potent theology that I can get behind. I haven’t felt that in a long time.

Let Us Sail On
Eef described the late night that he wrote this song, in a Motel 6 off I-40 in Arkansas, listening to trucks rumble by outside at 3am. As the TV glowed soft and blue with music infomercials, Eef decided to pen his contribution to “yacht rock.” Despite the affinity that I think Christopher Cross might feel toward the idea, this one pierces much more deeply. Oh, how we diffused the light.

History
Of the five, this is the song from the session I have listened to the most. It contains the absolute jaw-smack of a lyric: “Mary, history is never wrong / still it’s only to this moment we belong. So if your inner scaffolding feels frail / just remember God loves mostly those who fail.” The lines that follow those ones are also just as staggering. This song came on shuffle for me in November, when I was wandering the National Gallery in London alone at night. I love to wander alone at night in museums, soundtracking with songs that take on new meanings through the hybrid. Across the room, my eyes landed on a Michelangelo painting, an unfinished Michelangelo. It was the beginnings and the middles of his attempt to paint Christ’s entombment. In the lower right-hand corner, Mary was slated but missing. Like all of Michelangelo’s work, it spoke to me like seeing an old friend across the crowded room. I sat on a bench in front of that picture and thought for a long time about omissions, changes in directions, Mary, art, and what we call failure.

Fill Me With Your Light
The only already-released song from our session, this sweetly unnerving song is off of the 2005 Clem Snide record End of Love. I believe Eef said it was about a guy he used to work with at a record store in Boston who said he was being visited by aliens in his room at night, and that the song was about a different kind of dark.

All Good Hearts Go Astray
Another wide-open, penetrating song to Mary that confronts myriad failures (burning the barns that we’ve raised) with a simple plea for the forgiveness that we all, really, need so much. All good hearts go astray, sometimes. There is so much grace woven throughout this chapel session, the real, crushingly difficult kind. And for that I am grateful.

ZIP: EEF BARZELAY CHAPEL SESSION

Fuel/Friends Chapel Session #11 :: Bryan John Appleby

I am enjoying my attempts to weave myself into the city of Portland these last few days, jogging on mossy sidewalks while the grey sky spits rain, breathing the deep smoky-damp smell through my nostrils as I walk to catch the bus, and listening to a lot of music that helps spark and warm that seeping coldness away.

Bryan John Appleby is one of those artists whose music I have been leaning heavily on since I got here for this grad school residency; his music is smart and sharp, steeped in intelligent songwriting and crowned with a piercingly pure voice that resonates with me. He was one of the first artists we welcomed into the chapel when the seasons started to turn from summer to autumn, and the night he came also brought a cold snap that sent us all inside seeking a glow.

Bryan’s debut album Fire On The Vine is thoroughly superb, from front to back. I wrote about him last summer, after seeing him live (it was “decimatingly muscular”) and before the full-length was released. I have been delighted in the craftsmanship and the illumination in this album, which takes a thousand tiny moments and holds them up to let the sun shoot through.

BRYAN JOHN APPLEBY – FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION
SEPTEMBER 15, 2011

Glory
As I sat on the edge of the stage, I had to suppress every fiber of my everloving harmony-singing self here, because this song on the album has incredible, exuberant multi-part choral joy potential. But I found it every bit as wonderful as a solo acoustic creation – something laden with truth and honesty.

Sprout
Perhaps it is my unique spiritual heritage that seems to connect on several flashpoints with Bryan, but when I listen to his music I see this complicated map of faith sprawl out before me — one that has been folded and refolded til it is faded and worn, trying to figure out how to make it fit, now. This particular song seems to be one of hope, despite lines like: “When I woke, I had been slain in the spirit of reason / Baptized in the rolling dark waters of doubt / ‘Cause I’m told it’s Your will to withhold, but it feels like treason / A rain cloud refusing to pour in a season of drought.”

Duncan (Paul Simon)
Bryan’s tenor radiates a clarity in the song that you come across just every once in a while – Paul Simon does it for me in a similar vein, and so I smiled about a thousand feet wide when Bryan launched into this cover of Simon’s 1972 song “Duncan” — so, so perfect. Listen to this and tell me he doesn’t nail it. Plus, he whistles. Yup.

…And The Revelation
This is 1/2 of the sibling duo of songs on his album that repeats the brilliant, brilliant line “you, you will not dig a hole in me, you will not chop down my tree, hold me under the water…” When I saw him live last summer, I just stood there jaw-dropped with the power of that declaration, hearing his defiant howl in concert on these words. For the full effect, also hop over to his Bandcamp and listen to the other part of the thought, “The Words of The Revelator.”

And here is one bonus song that we only have (incredible) video of. Chills:

ZIP: BRYAN JOHN APPLEBY CHAPEL SESSION

Later this night, after we recorded in the chapel, Bryan came to do a house show for me and my friends, and in honor of the stormy night, we decided to illuminate the show simply with candles, and sent out a Facebook request for guests to bring a candle or two. We got dozens, and the room flickered and glowed around his stunningly rich music. It was a good night; these are good songs.

I am seeing BJA this very Friday, at the Doug Fir with Pickwick and Jessica Dobson (The Shins, Deep Sea Diver). It is going to be a pret-ty amazing Friday, if I can make it through the week.

[video and that gorgeous still photo with the chapel ceiling by Kevin Ihle]

Fuel/Friends Chapel Session #10 :: The Lumineers

About a year ago, I had the pleasure one quiet snowy December Sunday night to go to a house of a new friend to watch a new local band called The Lumineers play a raucous, joyful house show set. A few weeks earlier, they’d played at my house show with The Head and The Heart, and after a final multi-band Bon Iver cover singalong, we all walked away singing a hearty “hey! ho!” to ourselves, shaking our heads at how damn good live this band was.

Fast forward almost exactly one year, when Paste Magazine just named The Lumineers one of the 20 Best New Bands of 2011, an assessment I can absolutely get behind. Wesley Schultz has a terrifically expressive voice with range and beauty that swoops all over the songs. Jeremiah Fraites on the drums a) always wears suspenders every time I see him, which is impressive, and b) adds a raw percussive backbone of urgency to every song, while cellist/mandolin/piano player Neyla Pekarek reminds me of a super-talented elfin rockstar, radiating joy.

This set was recorded that same humid July evening that The Lumineers played the Fuel/Friends House Show with These United States. Many of these songs have been part of the trio’s live repertoire for several years, but none of them were on their self-titled EP. So these are four songs that could be considered “new,” and might make an appearance on The Lumineers’ debut full-length album, expected in March 2012 (get on their mailing list to order it early)

They call their music “front porch folk,” and they can come play on my front porch (and/or back porch; we have options) anytime. Watch for The Lumineers on tour in the springtime –they play Boulder on December 30– and go see them if they come from Colorado to wherever you are.

And man, try to listen to these without tapping SOME part of your body. Toe, finger on the desk, the head nod — I’ll even predict some stomps/dances.

FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION: THE LUMINEERS
JULY 31, 2011

Big Parade
The Dead Sea (umm…3:06. that’s all)
Morning Song
Ho Hey (“I don’t know where I belong, I don’t know where I went wrong / oh but I can write a song…”)


ZIP: THE FUEL/FRIENDS LUMINEERS CHAPEL SESSION

[photo of Neyla + piano by Sarah Law, others mine]

Fuel/Friends Chapel Session #9 :: These United States

Watching the five guys in These United States make music has always reminded me of a river. There is something serpentine, endless, and powerful that torrents out of the mouth of Jesse Elliott and through the arms and legs of all five of them. It rambles. It breathes. They also tour so freaking much that you would think that they’d lose those potent abilities and stray from the source in favor of rote and rockin’ performances, at some point. Yet for the handful of years I’ve known them, that has never happened. Every performance, even small ones, are infused with their trademark literacy, urgency, with dust-and-sweat notes and slide guitar quaver hanging in the air.

We recorded this chapel session back in late July when the nights were so blissfully long, and the air in the church was uncharacteristically sticky and close. We’ve never done a session with this many people in the band before, and we tried to capture more of a field-recording feel to what was happening that day. I love the way the lone central mic picks up the echo of Jesse’s voice, the cadence of the piano chords, the loose rattle of bang as Robby thumped on a few pieces of my drumkit (in its debut recording appearance).

The band is in the studio at this moment working on their fifth record.

THESE UNITED STATES: FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION

The Angels’ Share
This is a brand new song, and the one that first made me start thinking in the aforementioned metaphors of rivers. When I asked Jesse if the title was plural or singular, he thought about it for a minute and pensively nodded as he answered: “It’s gotta be multiple angels. One angel couldn’t catch all that.”

Yes.

What Do You Want With My Heart?
A song that’s been around for a handful of years, but just made its recorded appearance on their last album, 2010′s What Lasts. J Tom shines on the big, old, beautiful grand piano that sits in the corner of the church and occasionally gets discovered during one of these sessions. It’s a stripped song of honesty, asking a question that many of us would be well-served to listen to the answer to. I remember reading something a long time ago on Daytrotter in 2007, when Jesse spoke about the “most honest particle.” This band digs that out over and over again, and is relentless in the scouring.

Hit The Ground Running (Smog/Bill Callahan cover)
A concession to my always-kindly-suggested mantra of “you know –I mean– I love cover songs. If you wanted to maybe do one in your chapel session? Or whatever. I mean, anything is wonderful.” This one is a live end-of-the-night favorite for these guys, and more than anything for me evokes the feel of their half-Kentucky heritage (equally split with Washington, D.C.), teasing out all the rootsiness from this 1999 Bill Callahan song.

ZIP: THESE UNITED STATES CHAPEL SESSION

[most photos by Sarah Law, who I appreciate.]

Fuel/Friends Chapel Session #8 :: Drew Grow & The Pastors’ Wives

So, what’s a girl to do when an immensely talented band of friends is coming to visit and all of your audio recording guys are out of town? Drew Grow & The Pastors’ Wives looped through Colorado last weekend on their western states tour before heading into their current leg with Wild Flag, and we decided to get creative with a guerilla video session on a Sunday morning.

Kevin Ihle has done stunning video work with artists in and around Colorado Springs, filming folks like Damien Jurado, Sera Cahoone, and Bryan John Appleby (during his chapel session), but this is the first time we’ve tried recording a whole chapel session only through a visual lens. And actually — I can’t think of better guinea pigs than DGPW.

Each of the four people in this band is fascinating to watch perform. There is a deep authenticity and soul in their music that works its way out through all of their faces and every fiber of their beings. Heads are thrown back, eyes squinted shut, bodies bent at the waist. You know, for sure, that in the music they mean it.

Their songs also lend themselves extremely well to the sort of collective uprising of the spirit that we typically associate with churches, chapels, and other spaces for the sacred. Buoyed by the incredible acoustics we discovered in a small side-chapel once we wandered from the stage (think: reverberation from every angle, almost overwhelming), this represents a cherry-picking of songs from their catalog perfect for the setting.

Starting with the grand-piano-laced “Bon Voyage Hymn,” Drew & Co sang of a mighty chorus that sets slaves free, then moved to a brand new (heartbreaking) song “Pony” and an vocally-focused older song called “Us,” circling back thematically for a deeply-redemptive closing rendition of “Do You Feel It”: so break into a chorus, maybe a saving melody….

Indeed.

Bon Voyage Hymn

Pony (brand new song)

Us (from 2007′s Next Lips)

Fuel/Friends Chapel Session #7 :: Tyler Ramsey (Band of Horses)

The tall and lanky Tyler Ramsey is best known as the guitarist for Band of Horses, but wise folks also caught on to his two solo albums (s/t debut in 2004, A Long Dream About Swimming Across the Sea in 2008) and his upcoming third solo release is out this week. Hearing him open the two recent Colorado BOH shows with his own material was stunning. On a recent Saturday he met me for coffee at the shop by my house, and we headed over to sit beneath the tall arches of Shove Chapel for an hour of intricately-wrought magic.

This session is easier to write about as one complete unit, because all of the songs Tyler performed seemed to radiate imagery of birds and angels, songs of flying away and rivers of sorrow that flow out into the blackness of the night.

I thought as I sat on the edge of the stage, my back against the giant stone pillar, that this was the most celestial-feeling of the chapel sessions so far. Tyler’s voice is high and vulnerable, and in that fragility can be all the more powerfully piercing. He reminds me some of the effect Neil Young has on me, making me feel helpless, or Mark Kozelek in the smoky honesty, and sad glory. The echo of his voice seemed right at home in that space.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever seen Band of Horses live, but it’s spellbinding to watch Tyler’s fingers fly over the guitar strings. From a few feet away I kept furrowing my brow trying to keep up with the sounds I was hearing and how quickly and effortlessly his fingers moved on the frets. Tyler played a worn Gibson Folksinger guitar from the 1960s, one he bought in a pawn shop in Fletcher, North Carolina. It seemed to somehow carry all sorts of stories within the wood.

These songs come from Tyler’s third album, The Valley Wind, out this week on Fat Possum. For as beautiful as these chapel arrangements are (note the loooong extended intro Tyler puts on “1000 Black Birds”), the record takes it to a whole new, lush level — very highly recommended.

Tyler ended his set with a wrenching cover of “All Through The Night,” which my ’80s-loving sister recognized immediately from her pew seat as being a huge Cyndi Lauper hit. Since the ’80s usually give me hives, I learned from Tyler that this was written by Jules Shear. The way Tyler performs it here, it sounds like an old country rambler on the AM radio, completely stripped of any veneer. It was perfect.

Take and digest this session as a gorgeous, substantive whole:

TYLER RAMSEY CHAPEL SESSION:
Angel Band
1000 Black Birds
The Nightbird
All Through The Night (Jules Shear/Cyndi Lauper cover)

ZIP: THE FUEL/FRIENDS TYLER RAMSEY CHAPEL SESSIONS