when her feet hit the ground / she could still hear the sound

So this happened last night:

Fuel/Friends Chapel Session #6 :: The Changing Colors

There is a sweet intuition in watching brothers playing or sisters singing together. Some of that familial DNA seems to weave its way through the verses, the octave changes and the rhythm shifts. When my sister and I sing together, it’s like singing with myself but in stereo. Watching Colorado Springs’ Conor and Ian Bourgal of The Changing Colors play together, it’s as if one person splintered into two – a river of fraternal goodness.

I’ve come to know Conor and Ian as some of the finest purveyors of good music in Colorado Springs — our town known for many things but not necessarily that. Originally from New York, this twin superpower finesses the audio behind both my chapel sessions and for local label Blank Tape Records (Haunted Windchimes, Joe Johnson), but they also make beautiful music in their own right. I’ve been wanting to feature The Changing Colors in their own chapel session since the beginning, and finally got my chance on a recent Sunday, together with their cellist Aaron Fanning.

I hesitate to even use the word “autumn” in this still-summer context (don’t go, August, please, I’ll change, come back baby) but true to the innuendo established in their band name, these songs usher in a particular crimson and orange wistfulness, and whisper to us about the season that’s just right on ahead. When I first saw The Changing Colors perform live, I was grabbed by Conor’s husky, rough-hewn voice – try and not be reminded of Ray LaMontagne. You can’t. I’ve been listening to this session all day.

THE CHANGING COLORS
On The Side Of The Light
I’m Going Away
Take Care Of All My Children (Tom Waits)

ZIP: THE CHANGING COLORS – CHAPEL SESSION

The final song is a Tom Waits cover from the “Bawlers” disc of 2006′s Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards collection, and sounded pretty much perfect in a church. And after you enjoy that sweet, sweet slide guitar in “On The Side of the Light,” listen for the perfect timing of the church bells that started singing above our heads with Conor’s final guitar strum. We always try to time the recording in the fifteen-minute windows between chimes and this time our calculations were off, but also wonderfully so. I hope the Bourgal brothers never go back to their native New York; heaven knows our city needs them here.

The Head and The Heart Chapel Sessions to be officially released

I am beyond thrilled to announce that the Fuel/Friends Chapel Sessions recordings with The Head and The Heart will be officially released on August 15th as bonus tracks on the deluxe UK version of their debut album, via Heavenly Recordings/Rough Trade. Import-only bonus tracks have always held a certain music nerd mystique to me, so the 15-year-old Heather is totally geeking out right now.

If you want to complete your collection and come over to nerd out with me, you can pre-order it here via Rough Trade. Wahoo!

PS – We still have some of those posters from that same weekend in stock, all screen-printed and shimmery!

Fuel/Friends Chapel Session #5: Denison Witmer

Philadelphia songwriter Denison Witmer crafts songs of uncommon incisiveness, sung directly and piercingly in his simple tenor. I’ve known his music for a few years, having probably first noticed him through his musical collaborations with his friends Sufjan Stevens and Rosie Thomas.

I fell hard for his cover of “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” years before that fella from Wisconsin did it, and his song “The Gift of Grace” scores every Christmastime for me. I’ve adopted “California Brown and Blue” as a (slightly depressing) theme song. There’s something in the way that he sings that just lays it all out for me, bare and unadorned.

But there is also much more to Denison’s music than I was familiar with. On a sticky hot Sunday last weekend, he sat comfortably in a big empty church, slight and snappily-clad in a pink micro-checkered shirt. He unfolded four of his songs for us, and each one blew us away. His voice is unassuming, and I find it all the more powerful for that – similar to how one of those nimble lasers can cut you so much more quickly and effectively than the big heavy scalpels. If I had to pick one single word to describe his music, I would call it simply “piercing,” right to the core.

DENISON WITMER CHAPEL SESSION, JULY 24, 2011

Take More Than You Need
This. Song. Is. Amazing. Denison hopes to release it on a future EP, and I had never heard it before. As I sat next to Conor the sound guy while Denison did a few takes of this, we kept looking over at each other, wordlessly saying “Wow.” To me, this is a stunning song about authentic (and scary) intimacy. Intimacy is a word that gets thrown around a lot, with varying meanings and depths implied. But the way Denison understands it reminds me of Kelli Schaefer’s song “Gone In Love” as she sings: “When the burden is love, it is the only weight that ever was worth carrying.”

It’s an invitation to gorge on a reliable love. We get so damn used to taking just the minimum from each other, afraid to be ravenous at times, afraid to be desperate, even though we all are.

Stay, stay with me here for a while
when the water in me dries, when the water in me dries
Wait, wait with me all afternoon
when the spirit in me moves, when the spirit in me moves

…If you’re lying awake
with my hands on your waist
wondering what you can take from me
…take more than you need.

California Brown and Blue (revisited)
I came across this perfect song when I was crafting the very personal San Francisco mix last year, full of all the songs all about and for and reminiscent of my hometown area. It does a really good job at getting into this hot-edged tangle of feelings I have in my belly and my heart for California, and for the people that live there and still hold parts of me. The arrangement Denison played at the chapel session is elegant and reinvented as something even more stunning. Another coastline gives in to waves and fades away…

Your Friend
According to Denison, the themes of his newest record are patience, mindfulness, and reverence. This song carries through some of the themes of the work of growing in intimacy that I hear in “Take More Than You Need.” Denison wrote:

“I wanted to take a very simple phrase like ‘I’ll be your friend’ and dive into what it truly means. I wrote this song for my wife… so it is primarily about getting married — the long term implications of that type commitment. It feels overwhelming because there is a certain death of self or lack of ego required to make things work. I don’t see the death of self as being a bad thing at all. I see it as a positive. We have much more to gain from losing our ego than we do in holding tightly to our selfish motivations.

Jennie and I got married in our early 30s. We had both been in a decent number of serious relationships before we met each other. We all carry the baggage of our past into our future relationships. We carry the baggage we create in real-time in our relationships as well. In the last verse of the song leading up through the ending, I sing: “…scattered our young hearts in the stones / in the weeks away / how your garden changed / but day by day you’d hardly know / now the fruits of our love fall out of the trees…” Even though we feel like we aren’t improving at times, being patient and mindful can result in true change within… The garden grows even when we don’t notice it.”


Three Little Birds (Bob Marley)
Denison is known for loving covers, arguably as much as I do. It’s one of the reasons we get along so well. He’s reinvented so many fantastic songs in his own vernacular, as part of his Covers Project (now permanently hosted over at Cover Lay Down); he probes the underpinnings and the rough edges in songs, bringing them to us in ways we’ve never heard them. Instead of a steel drum dancealong tune, this one becomes a simple little wisp of reassurance.

ZIP: DENISON WITMER CHAPEL SESSION

Denison’s new album The Ones Who Wait is out now, as well as a great collection of live material from house shows in the past year, Live In Your Living Room, Vol. 1. The live album is fun because it also captures Denison’s banter; for all the pristinely humble beauty of his songs, he can absolutely tell a great story or ten. We went out for beers after the chapel session and he had us in stitches with his story about the worst Denver show he ever played: it involved a dude with a skullet (bald mullet) and a lady that looked like Stevie Nicks, lifting up her flowy skirt during his set. It was incredible.

If you’re new to Denison, I would strongly recommend his 2005 album Are You A Dreamer? for a starting point (Sufjan appears on almost every track; this was around the time they were touring together), and watch for his new EP sometime later this year. Denison is a gem.

Fuel/Friends Chapel Session #4 :: Strand of Oaks

I try real hard not to peg musicians based on appearance, but when you meet Strand Of Oaks for the first time (aka Tim Showalter) you can’t help feel that he should maybe have a CB radio handle and/or make music that sounds like The Allman Brothers. But then he wraps you in a big bear hug and you learn that he used to be a second-grade teacher, and you realize he is a study in contrasts.

His music made my jaw drop the first time he heard it live, there in the church. It was completely unexpected. I am not savvy in the use of pedals and effects in music; as far as I am concerned, it may as well be magic. From the first song “Kill Dragon” that Tim played in the big gorgeous church, there was this polyphonic, shimmering wall of sound that he created with just him and his guitar. It sounded like a thousand pipe organs, or angels, or something extraordinary.

As I interpret it, this first song is about wrestling with talking to a God that seems to have vanished: “Lately he hasn’t been listening to me / I guess he’s a man and he’s meant to leave.” In the void he’s left, Tim traces the litany of things that have gone awry in his life (deaths, sickness) and says he is coming up with an interesting new prayer – to run away with Mary. A little surprised the walls of the church didn’t like, you know, crumble all around us.

Tim writes thoughtful, piercing songs about sleeplessness, faith, and that which we’ve lost. This music is mesmerizing.

CHAPEL SESSION: STRAND OF OAKS
Kill Dragon
End in Flames
The Golden Age (Beck)

ZIP: STRAND OF OAKS CHAPEL SESSION

If you like this music, check out Strand of Oaks’ haunting, gorgeously wrought album Pope Killdragon, and his cover of Joe Pug’s “Hymn #101.” Tim also sang on that cover of “Hard Life” with Joe Pug in this same chapel session.

ALSO: That Beck cover he did reminds me of the version that Beck himself did, also in a chapel – Union Chapel in London.

The Fuel/Friends Chapel Sessions with Joe Pug

Like his quick, punchy name, the music of Joe Pug can be deceptively simple. At first pass, one could be forgiven for thinking he is just another earnest singer-songwriter with a heart full of thoughtful lyrics and an impassioned strum on the guitar. But if you listen more closely to his deep repertoire (especially to these three songs that he chose for this session), dark and complicated themes begin to emerge out from the calico of words.

Last Saturday afternoon (with some sort of tribal pulsating student dance festival taking place right outside the heavy church doors), a handful of us gathered in Shove Chapel to record some of Joe’s songs in that vast silent space. The musicians asked if I had any song preferences, and I told them that whatever they would pick would be better than what I could pick. And perhaps it’s the storyteller in me, but in listening carefully to these recordings for the last week, I’ve seen a wonderfully strong narrative emerge from the tunes selected. A leitmotif, if you will.

This is music for wanderers who nonetheless miss a home; songs of an “optimistic sadness”; words for those of us who stop to think sometimes if we might be denting the undefined future with the necessary choices we’re making this week.

Joe spoke beautifully about believing in things when I interviewed him, and nowhere is that more apparent than watching him sing words like these. He believes things, and passes that on to the listener. They’re rending, these stories. And completely beautiful they way Joe tells ‘em.

FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION: JOE PUG

Dodging The Wind
The few of us there fell into initial silence of expectation, as Joe leaned into his harmonica and blew these first penetrating notes. The resultant ache feels like a scalpel. Maybe like a lonesome train whistle pulling me off somewhere else — no instrument evokes wanderlust more for me.

This song starts the session with the dusty-tracks theme of an itinerant drifter that would wend throughout the session. The staying and the leaving. It’s the song of someone just passing through, over and over again: “call that boy by his name, smile as he turns and he waves / don’t you shed a tear as he walks way from here, he’ll come but he ain’t known to stay.”

My favorite part comes towards the end of the third minute, when Joe’s voice starts to careen a bit, like steering too fast into a curve and starting to be overwhelmed.

In The Meantime
This particular song has been wrecking me all week, as it gently prods at the decisions that we make for now at the potential expense of later. This is the song where I hear “optimistic sadness” — a waiting for someone, a confidence in finding what you’ll need, and a crippling black-hole in your gut for now. You should know that Joe used to work as a carpenter before he became a musician, building houses and such. I hear this song drawing taut lines between the constructive, durable life of a craftsman and the itinerant, often-lonely life of a musician — “I’m dreaming for a living, I got no time for work.”

In particular, the fourth verse snags me, singing of prying up sheets of plywood from the floor to burn. “The house is out of lumber, at least for now I’m warm,” Joe sings, and “in the meantime, I should find another room.” A trail of ashes, the destruction we can wreak in the meantime, while we wait.

Hard Life (Bonnie Prince Billy cover)
Joe is touring with the uber-talented, impressively-bearded, former second grade teacher Tim Showalter who plays music under the name of Strand of Oaks (aka Chapel Session #4). The two of them asked me, “Can we do a cover song?” and I replied incredulously, “Um, have you met me?! Yes!” Then they told me it was a song by Bonnie “Prince” Billy they were considering, and I just about keeled over.

Joe and Tim harmonized so flawlessly on this ode to the struggles of marriage, toeing that line between submitting to our demons, our desire for faithful abiding love, and the desire to flee. Sounds pretty accurate to me. Aside from the aural perfection in the blending of their voices, I also enjoyed the contrast in the perspectives in the song – the married man and the unmarried one, both singing about how hard this life can be, whichever your lot. It’s a perfect bookend to the themes of Joe’s set when Tim sings “So let me go, lay it down / on my own, let me drown. Let me go, go where you don’t know.”

Also, the final bluesy guitar solo on this song hung with such a ripe melancholy, and left me breathless. Again.

ZIP IT UP: JOE PUG CHAPEL SESSION

That night, we had a house show at my place. As you can imagine, these musicians created everything a house show should be; all of us packed warmly and tightly into an effusive shoulder-to-shoulder bunch, with more varieties of Colorado microbrews in-hand than you could count. There were folks of all ages from 7 to 70, with smiles stretched wide everywhere you looked, and the furrowed brows of concentration you get when you hear music that really says something. Joe and Tim both cast a spell over all of us there.

You can see my photo album from the show on the Fuel/Friends Facebook page, and also some pictures from local supernova Lindsay McWilliams here. Tiffiny from The Ruckus came down from Denver and posted a review of the evening here, also with gorgeous pictures.

All of us agree, it was a very good night.

(oh! and there are still a few of these terrific house show posters left for sale, if’n you might want one for your wall – screenprinted and sparkly, two different designs)

House pic by Lindsay, poster pic by Tiffiny. Church interior photo above by Conor from the amazing Blank Tape Records, who is responsible with his brother Ian for all the excellent audio we all enjoy in these Chapel Sessions. You guys rock.

The Fuel/Friends Chapel Sessions with Kelli Schaefer

Kelli Schaefer took me by complete surprise the first time I saw her perform, at my inaugural house show back in November. Her voice is massive and swells effortlessly (and shiver-inducingly) from deep places within her, just as her piercingly smart lyrics do. One of the most immediately riveting performers I have seen in years, she has silenced the crowd every time I have seen her since then. In her kinetic, can’t-take-my-eyes-off-of-you magnetism, a friend commented that she is reminiscent of The Tallest Man On Earth’s live show. While their music is divergent, they hold power over a crowd in the same way.

On the same gorgeous Saturday last month when The Head and The Heart performed in the historic Shove Chapel for me, Kelli sat high in the pews, listening underneath the stained glass windows. She took the stage herself to grace us all with two stripped and strong acoustic songs from her debut full-length album The Ghost of The Beast (2011, Amigo/Amiga Records). She was feeling a bit under the weather and apologized for her voice, to which all of us listening laughed out loud. She was incredible. She was magnetic.

I am thrilled to present her as the second Fuel/Friends Chapel Session.

Gone In Love – Kelli Schaefer
This song is one of the most gorgeous and compellingly authentic explorations of what true love looks like that I’ve ever heard. By true love I don’t mean roses and greeting cards — I mean wiping someone’s tears with the sleeve of your jacket, holding someone even though your arms are shaking, and singing hymns to someone you love as they are passing. Serious stuff, the times when we all need love the most. As Kelli sings, “When the burden is love, it is the only weight that ever was worth carrying.” Those of us sitting in the pews may have felt like we were hearing one of the truest sermons around, and by the end of the song I had silent tears running down my face but couldn’t say why. As the song says, “We will beat the nighttime bloody with this song, joy’s strong mallet.” It is a song to push back the darkness, with each other.

Ghost Of The Beast – Kelli Schaefer
Many of Kelli’s songs seem to wrestle honestly with faith and salvation, especially the way that it meets the punch-in-the-face reality of illness, desire, and failure. I appreciate this, very much. This song took on a different dimension as it rang out through the church (interfaith though it is) – “Oh mother, you taught me good, you made me want to do the things that I should/ you told me Jesus’ gonna make me a saint, gonna take my hand and make my life complete/ but the narrow path is closing in / sometimes I think I’m too fat to fit on it…” The song, like all her music, plumbs the depth and is beautiful because of her honesty. When she struck the last note and the song ended hanging cliffside, there were several seconds of stunned silence among us sitting there, we onlookers and the other band, and then we all started clapping as loudly as we could.

ZIP: KELLI SCHAEFER CHAPEL SESSION

We’ve already got a few more Chapel Sessions in the pipeline; stay tuned!

[Huge-hearted thanks again to the fine folks at Blank Tape Records for the audio recording and engineering; the last photo is credit the talented Genevieve Pierson]

The Head and The Heart :: the first Fuel/Friends Chapel Sessions

Two weekends ago on a sunny Saturday afternoon, we recorded the very first Fuel/Friends Chapel Sessions in an empty stone church sanctuary, something I have been wanting to do for years now and never had the help I needed to make it happen. The Head and The Heart and Kelli Schaefer filled those colossal stone halls with a sound that was so huge that I kept feeling like I was drowning.

The Saturday afternoon before the house show, I rousted Jon, Josiah and Charity from my couch and coaxed them over to the historic Romanesque halls of the Shove Chapel on the campus of the college where I work, and they rewarded us with a profusely vivid, simple, stunning time of musical inspiration. Thanks to my wonderful friends at local Blank Tape Records, the recording gear was running.

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 (“Rivers and Roads”) is reinvented with the richly profound resonance of the piano instead of the fiercely-strummed acoustic guitar that we’ve previously heard. I could not be more pleased with how these turned out. Growing from the fertile feeling of comfort that filled that space, it felt more like a private songwriting session than a concert.

It was a session permeated, for me, by a flooding sense of luckiness. There were only three of us non-participants sitting in that sanctuary watching the three of them play, their instruments and voices reverberating off the old stones and the stained glass. You can hear it on these recordings, the dusty space in the air as the light streamed in. I have a strong intuition that this band is going to be significant to a much larger audience, as they have been to me and so many of you. The three of us sitting in the pews kept just looking at each other across the room; we couldn’t believe how heady it felt when the moment resonated and the chords struck and the harmonies fit like keys and locks, or fingers interlaced, or an embrace.

After the session when I hugged each of them, they were sweaty and elated — clearly electrified from the moment we all felt hanging in the air all around that Saturday. Listen.

THE HEAD AND THE HEART ::
FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSIONS

In The Summertime
In its purest essence, this is a song about the certainty of love, and the undeniable beauty when you just know. Some things you just know. Josiah wrote this song in the green room in Memphis before their show with Dr. Dog last month. At the beginning of our session while we were setting up mics and cords, and the band was exploring the gorgeous setting we found ourselves in, Josiah sat down at the massive black piano that was on the stage, and started to pound out these chords, then launched into the words, “Lord, give me to the one that makes me whole…“  There is a traditional structure here that made me first think it was an old gospel or hippie-church song, but I soon realized it was all his.

It was one of the first times he had played it for his bandmates, and Jon walked over with his guitar and started feeling out the strum of the chords alongside Josiah, gauging the building ferocity as Josiah’s voice strengthened and cracked, smiling at Josiah so that his eyes crinkled. As I stood there, I could almost see the bluish-purple energy crackling between the two of them when things hit just right. Then the sad sweet song of Charity’s violin pierced across the stage as she felt out the parts where it wound and fit into this new song that they created there. When they recorded it a bit later in the session, her last notes sound like a deep cold river and make it hard to breathe.

Chasing A Ghost
This is a new song that readers first started emailing me about just in the last few weeks; the band closed the Chicago show encore with this one, a heady and molasses-sweet song with Jon on lead and the duetting “oooooh”s sweetly shading in the colors. The song has the flickering warm campfire glow of an old country lovesong, ballasted with Jon’s raspy warmth that commands notice. The lyrics detail the struggle to not fall in love with someone you’ve already kinda fallen in love with, the jumping without a rope to catch you.

There’s a point at 2:30 where everything else cuts out and Jon belts “and I am falling, falling for you…” and it shot chills up my neck, both when we recorded it and again now each time I listen to this.

Josh McBride
From what I understand of this song, it’s an older one, based on words penned by an old friend of Josiah’s. This is the same one I have been calling “Attic Ladder” or “The Seat Beside Me” for several months now since I first heard it; I love the weight of classicism and the delicateness woven throughout it. It feels very ancient somehow, timeless. As they played this song, Jon slid behind the piano and started feeling out those little piano fills you hear in between the guitar picking, for the first time. This weekend as we listened to it, my friend Michelle pointed out that the piano cadence that Jon made up sounds like the ladder referenced in the song, the up and down.

There’s a direct contrast between “you are in the seat beside me” (I picture driving in a car, knee close enough to touch) and “you are in my dreams at night.” It is a wonderful thing when the actual aligns with the nighttime meanderings of our dreams.

There is also so much resonance in me with the line about how this is “not the last time, we are learning who we are, and what we were.” Oh, we all are. This is a song for that.

Rivers and Roads
There was a Daytrotter session once with The Tallest Man on Earth where he sang his song “I Won’t Be Found” completely on piano. The first time I heard it I literally stopped dead in my tracks, riveted. That also happened with the pendulous sadness that “For Emma” absorbs when Bon Iver plays it on piano, and it’s the same way I feel about hearing this song reinvented with Josiah on piano, and Jon and Charity crowded in closely behind him, over the building chords.

It’s an undeniably great song either way but, wow, this version has my number and stole my heart; I think the piano is my favorite instrument. The tinkly top notes on the piano towards the end (after the “rivers ’til I reach you” lyric) come from Jon leaning in over Josiah’s shoulder to plink out those shiny accents. And inbetween the tapping of toes, those harmonies on the last line of this song create one of the most chill-inducing moments of the entire session — you can hear the echo and feel, truly, like you are at church. A benediction and a blessing, a hope of paths that will continue to cross. Oh, and Charity also completely knocks it out of the park on her verse here. She leaned back and opened her chest to the heavens.

Everything was opened.

ZIP: The Head and The Heart – Fuel/Friends Chapel Sessions

[stay tuned for the next Fuel/Friends Chapel Session, with Kelli Schaefer, sometime later next week!]