Saturday Songs - Oct. 29

Oh well…so I’m a day late with the songs again…you know how life is. But no worries! Here they are! You can also expect two posts during this week as opposed to the lackluster single one that I’ve resolutely churning out. Enjoy the songs!

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1. “Wildwood” – Chatham County Line

A fantastic traditional bluegrass group, Chatham County Line has flown under the radar for a while now. Maintaining more of a purist bend to their music unlike other “bluegrass” acts such as the Avett Brothers, But despite their seemingly straight bluegrass sound, Chatham County Line takes inspiration from a variety of artists, including Gram Parsons and even the Rolling Stones. I’d even go so far as to claim that the harmonies on this song recall Crosby, Stills and Nash. Get it for free below!

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2. “Cabrón” – Mancha de Rolando

I’ve already featured this Argentine band on the blog before—as part of my “Canciones de Sábado”—but I think they deserve a little more mention than that. “Cabrón,” is a rollicking, Spanglish tune punctuated by a ragged horn section that provides the band’s rock sound with exactly the right edge.

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3. “Gillian Was A Horse” – Damien Jurado

Jurado is another artist I’ve previously featured on the blog, with his skeletal song “Ohio.” That song, however, was drawn from quite a few albums back in Jurado’s extensive discography. In recent years, Jurado has taken to a busier folk-rock sound, including (*gasp!*) some pretty brash drum playing and rhythmic guitar strumming that might lead to some head-nodding.

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4. “Strawberry Flats” – Little Feat

The quality of Lowell George’s songwriting is matched only by those songs’ endearing weirdness. Drawing heavily on life out on the road, George’s early songs tend to focus on misfits and sad cases, such as the narrator at the center of “Strawberry Flats”—who was “ripped off and run out of town / had [his] guitar burned when I was clownin’.” The song details this man’s travels across Texas as he searches for a “hole to recline in.”

But the curiosity of the song is not necessarily its narrator, but rather exactly what the narrator did to get run out of town. The mystery of his expulsion is never solved, but rather left to curiosity.

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5. “Los Angeles” – Denison Witner

A sad, somber song with lyrics that seem to fold back in on themselves, Witmer (especially early on) was seen as the natural successor to Elliott Smith. Listening to this track, that comparison shifts into perfect focus—even more so in light of Smith’s equally somber song “Angeles”—with only an accompanying acoustic guitar and then Witmer’s frail voice singing lyrics you could imagine as lines in a tattered notebook.

Coldplay Wears (And Doesn't Wear) Fancy Clothes

Borrowing a phrase from Kurt Wolff’s excellent biography entry on Townes Van Zandt on the All Music website, I like to think about music in terms of the “fancy clothes” that it wears. Some music is stripped down to its very skeleton—no more than chord changes and lyrics—while other music is layered and complex…wearing, I think, “fancy clothes.” Music that wears fancy clothes is not bad; there have been significant contributions to musical history that rely on their fancy clothes. It's true that I prefer music without the fancy clothes; I tend to like music that has a solid, clear structure—such as Townes Van Zandt—but I certainly enjoy other musical approaches that rely on their fancy clothes to get by, such as My Bloody Valentine and Radiohead.

But not many bands find a balance between the two approaches quite like Coldplay does, especially on Mylo Xyloto, their most recent release. While even Chris Martin has termed it “a schizophrenic album,” I think that the album holds together by virtue of the band’s (and Brian Eno’s) seeming insistence on balancing well-written songs with those fancy clothes. The band has figured out how to write insightful, melodic pop songs and how to appropriately dress them in the studio.

Listening to Mylo Xyloto side by side with 2008’s Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, the key difference is how both albums deal with organic sounds. Viva La Vida finds Coldplay exploring a fascinating, but immaculate soundscape, in which every unpolished sound has been scrubbed away. The tracks on Viva La Vida sound consciously worked over and treated; Mylo Xyloto, on the other hand, displays a surprising number of honest moments—not quite so candid as studio chatter, of course—but there are guitar squeaks (“Us Against The World” / “U.F.O.”) and problematic low notes for Martin’s voice (“Us Against The World”), among other clear lacks of sonic pretension.

Speaking of pretension, that’s the other clear step up in the world that Martin et al have taken with Mylo Xyloto. All of the artiness that, at least to me, seems obvious in listening to Viva La Vida, has not so much disappeared with Mylo Xyloto as it has been fully integrated into the album's presentation.

One of those arty gimmicks that troubled Viva La Vida—the conflation of material, whether through pushing two songs together into one (“Death and All His Friends,” “Yes”) as well as those weird stretches of swirling, Eno-inspired synthesizers (again “Death and All His Friends” and the intros/outros to a number of Viva tracks)—is confronted and foiled in this album. Mylo Xyloto is a helluva lot more effective in dealing with that sort of conflation. Firstly, every song on the album is under the five-minute mark; three songs on Viva La Vida overshoot that mark. Secondly, those keyboard-washy interludes tied into so many Viva La Vida tunes are all actually separated into interludes here! And of those three "intro" sections, not one of them seems to me to be gratuitous. The builds that they lend to the songs they precede all feel consequential.

As cohesive and interesting as this album is, it also represents the closest that Coldplay has come to pop/dance music. Martin’s duet with Rihanna, “Princess of China,” is filled to the brim with dancefloor synths and a loud crunchy drum beats…oh, and Rihanna. (There’s certainly the thought that everything Rihanna touches turns to Top 40 gold.) But not only that song, but also the thumping “Hurts Like Heaven” and “Charlie Brown,” which features both those high, annoying childlike sounds perhaps best employed in Passion Pit’s “Sleepyhead” and a gigantic guitar riff. 

If it wasn't already obvious, I’m  excited to see where the band will go next and what they're capable of with this new surety in sound...but I can probably live with this album for a while…

Saturday Songs - Oct. 22

1. “San Francisco” – Steve Tannen

Anyone who’s been around the past few days has heard my speak of my latest obsession: Steve Tannen. Tannen, of course, is the male half of the folk duo The Weepies, the other half being Tannen’s wife Deb Talan. But unlike the Weepies music, which has always seemed to me not exactly mopey, but soft-spoken and sort of meditative, Tannen’s two solo albums have a quite different feel.

Although The Weepies have covered “San Francisco”—originally off Tannen’s debut album The Big Señorita—their cover sounds nothing like the original track, which, I think, shows Tannen exploring some dark emotional territory. Not that The Weepies haven’t ever delved into the sadder parts of life, but Tannen seems awfully earnest about a broken relationship and its aftereffects of yearning, unlike most of The Weepies' catalog. (See songs: "Gotta Have You," "Be My Honeypie," etc.) The first lines of "San Francisco" are some of the best I've heard in a long time: 

“Well, she…she gave the big see you later
And I…well, I don’t think I will…”

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2. “Sydney, I’ll Come Running” – Brett Dennen

This is one of the songs that could quite easily be termed “catchy-as-hell.” While Dennen’s opening lines may seem to lag in energy, it’s more like a ruse to set up his explosive pre-chorus and chorus, which grabbed me from the first listen.

If there’s a problem with the song, it’s Dennen’s voice, which finds him singing some high notes that make him sound strained and uncomfortable. Other than that, Dennen strikes pop gold.

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3. “Adrenaline And Heresy” – Son Volt

Son Volt—more of a solo project for Jay Farrar, formerly a member of Wilco with Jeff Tweedy—has always been a favorite band of mine. Farrar has an ear for writing punchy country-rock songs, something he showed as early on as Uncle Tupelo’s album No Depression. “Adrenaline And Heresy,” off Son Volt’s album The Search, is not so much a straight country-rock song as a careful build. In some ways, the song is unbearable; Farrar’s lyrics are depressing, bitter, and verging on hopelessness:

“A concrete conscience here is worth nil,

Placebo pill full of bitter comfort,

Bitter comfort.”

But the real treat of the song is the escalating (if still somewhat hopeless) refrain: “High on adrenaline, it’s a new day” which closes out the song. Happy? Not so much…but there does seem to be some hope there.

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4. “Dixieland” – Steve Earle & the Del McCoury Band

Taking off of traditional Celtic folk as well as bluegrass, Earle crafts a brilliant tune about an Irish fighting man who leaves his homeland for the United States to fight for the Union in the Civil War. (Dropping in real Civil War references is always a bonus; Earle makes clear reference to Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, who led the 20^th Maine Infantry.)

What makes the song fascinating is Earle’s clearly 21^st century angle, in that he implicitly makes some Marxist allusions in the song’s conclusion:

“I am Kilrain of the 20th Maine and I damn all gentlemen

whose only worth is their father's name and the sweat of a workin’ man.

Well, we come from the farms and the city streets and a hundred foreign lands

and we spilled our blood in the battle’s heat.

Now we're all Americans.”

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5. “Dudes” – David Mead

Thanks to $20,000 raised using crowd-funding platform Kickstarter, David Mead is releasing his six full-length album, Dudes, on November 15. In anticipation of that release, Mead has released part of his back catalog and lead single “Dudes” through Noisetrade. If you haven’t listened to any Mead before, you’re in for a real treat on this 25 song collection—check out “Indiana,” “Nashville,” and “Girl On A Roof” if you’re new to Mead’s music.

“Dudes” is a funny, likable ditty about depending on a man depending on his friends (“But you’ve got dudes”) in the wake of a tough break-up. Sad, sweet, and sort of great. Download the full 25 songs from Noisetrade using the widget above!

A Proof of Poe's Law

A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a link to the website Christwire.org, in particular an article on the ostensibly right-wing site about “vajazzling…latest threat to young men in college.” Vajazzling, the bizarre but apparently not untruthful practice of decorating the pubic area with Swarovski crystals, is presented in the article as an engagement of “whore antics” on the part of “college females” to tempt their male counterparts and lure them into sexual activity.

The article, which you can find here, seems almost too absurd to be real, but…shit…there are some crazy people out there, so I was on the verge of writing off the site as only another Westboro Baptist Church knockoff group of people (if somewhat less hateful) when I figured a quick Google search might be worthwhile. It’s hard for me to explain exactly what prompted the search, but the quick search bar was sitting on top of my screen so I figured that there was no reason not to pull up some background information on these clearly bonkers Christwire people.

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As some of you may have already guessed (or known from the beginning), Christwire.org is not a “real” website. It’s a parody of the websites of extreme, right wing groups. The writers (and, I suspect, the defendants of the writers who often appear in the comments section below) are merely Internet pranksters. Taking a step back and having a second look at this sentiment: “if you have a college daughter, at least talk to her and tell her to keep her antics to herself, not using her vajazzled groin in attacking young men at fraternity socials or at late night study hall meetings,” it seems clear that we’ve got a parody at work.

But that doesn’t really explain away the angry comments below or my initial reaction to the article. It seemed absurd, but somehow credible. I’ve excerpted one of the angry comments here in its entirety because I think the length really helps illustrate how angry she is (keeping the original syntax and typos, of course):

I’m sorry but how fucking close minded are you? Im a young woman and I know 9 out of 10 of my friends do not want children ANYTIME soon, are you retarded? you think woman are always the ones luring college boys in? what about the thousands of times yearly young girls in college are taken advantage of or even slipped drugs and raped, I’m not saying woman don’t try and make themselves look attractive to the other sex, but you can have sex for the reason to not have a child for the enjoyment of it as well, Im very sexually active and I always look nice for the man I’m with, and I don’t plan on having kids for 10 more years i have been on birth control for almost 3. So were the fuck do you get off pulling this bullshit and letting people tolerate it? You read this and actual believe it like young college woman everywhere are RUINING college boys chance at life because they both have crazy hormones and want to enjoy sex and enjoy life, it takes two to tango buddy, and you my friend sound like a FOOL writing something as ignorant as this. Stupid stupid people get with the fucking program.

So people buy Christwire—hook, line, and sinker. They have no idea they’re being scammed. But I didn’t have any idea either and I doubt that you would have had much better luck had I not keyed you into the trick beforehand.

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Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Christwire.org is not an isolated phenomenon. The phenomenon is best explained by the Internet wisdom that has become known as “Poe’s Law.” Essentially, Poe’s Law states that it is impossible to differentiate between extremism and a parody of extremism without an open indication of the intent of the author. One Internet solution that has been offered by some is to include a sideways smile [ :-) ] to “I’m only kidding” along with (unclearly) parodic or ironic statements. But any admission of the parody as parody clearly butts into the very concept of a parody itself. But then again, these parodies of extremism run into foul territory by virtue of the fact that parody is, in some sense, supposed to be clearly a comic exaggeration. No one sits down and watches Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles and comes away from it thinking, “WOW. What a great, tried-and-true example of the American Western!” The nature of extremism itself serves as the thorn in the side of any extremist parody.

Not too long ago, there used to be an informal publication on my college campus (by “informal” I mean that it was unapproved and unfunded by the Media Board) called The Young Socialist. The broadsheet trumpeted an extreme socialist viewpoint in the form of a long essay, often making jarring contradictions within the essay itself. I still don’t know for sure whether or not the publication was intended seriously or as a parody. It could have been either…but the extremist attitude got in the way of both interpretations. On one hand, the ideas were so extreme that they were hard to grapple with in an open, intellectual way. On the other, the argument and its contradictions pointed parody of such extreme ideas. 

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Correction: I just learned from a New York Times article that Christwire.org is actually not intended to be a parody of extremist groups…rather it’s meant to be a forum for exploring how readily people believe the news and how they trust Internet sources. So if you’ve been hoodwinked by the site as I have, then I guess that’s good news; that’s what they were trying to do all along.

On the other hand, that sort of throws my argument into some doubt. However, because I think some of the discussion is worthwhile, I will leave up the post as it stands, despite its factual errors and misconceptions. Additionally, I will leave the comment from the woman up there because I think it represents exactly the struggle between parody and the real thing that I’m concerned with…even if the intent of the website differs from straight parody. Oh well…I gave it a try.

 

Saturday Songs - Oct. 15

1. “Starman” – Seu Jorge

Coming directly out of the soundtrack for Wes Anderson’s film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, this is Brazilian samba star Seu Jorge’s cover of David Bowie’s “Starman.” The song—translated into Portuguese by Jorge—is a bizarre cross-cultural amalgam. Bowie’s beloved melody remains, but is transformed by Jorge’s spare studio performance, featuring only vocals and acoustic guitar.

Additionally, Jorge also worked out 10 other Bowie tracks, which are equally interesting, although not quite so striking as “Starman.”

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2. “Eleanor” – Jay Nash

Eleanor

With more of a mainstream rock feel than some of Nash’s other, more acoustic work, “Eleanor” comes off Nash’s album Some Kind of Comfort, recently voted as Nash’s best album by his fans. (He temporarily put up a free link to the album on his website earlier this week—that’s how it ended up in my hands!)

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3. “Tree By The River” – Iron & Wine

In an earlier post, I talked at length about “growers”—those albums that don’t capture your fancy immediately, but take some time to get used to—and I mentioned Iron & Wine’s 2007 album The Shepherd’s Dog as a prime example of this phenomenon. It took me a few years of letting it hang out in my CD collection for its subtle brilliance to dawn on me. I posited in that post that I didn’t think Iron & Wine’s 2011 album Kiss Each Other Clean would strike me the same way.

But, as slow to the punch as I am admitting myself to be, I’ve recently been investigating Kiss Each Other Clean again and I’ve begun to find some of the charm beneath its somewhat slipshod surface. The album, which sounds somehow paradoxically clean but frazzled, has the same beautiful textures as The Shepherd’s Dog. “Tree By The River” exhibits the clean side of that equation, with a mixture of acoustic guitars and keyboards that is positively ecstatic.

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4. “A Cedar Dream (II)” – River Whyless

Hailing from of Asheville, North Carolina, River Whyless (formerly Do It To Julia) provided me with this pleasant poppy surprise that carries a neat atmospheric sound with some alternating male/female vocals—a dynamic that I always enjoy. Find it for free here!

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5. “Big Machine” – Goo Goo Dolls

One of Kayla’s favorite songs, we heard this Goo Goo Dolls song on our recent trip up to Montreal. Starting off with compact, angular guitars, it’s a version of the band that I’d like to hear a little more often. Rzeznik, coming out of a recent divorce, sounds hurt and angry, with lots to say about romances past and future. Definitely one of their best efforts, they could learn a lot from this song; great melody + memorable guitar + vitriol > the somewhat banal Dizzy Up The Girl.

How Steve Jobs Changed Music Forever

With all that’s been said about the late Steve Jobs over the past week, I am left with the lingering feeling that there’s not much left to say. The tributes, obituaries, eulogies—whatever you’d like to term them—have focused (rightly so!) on the magnitude of Jobs’s contributions to the business and marketing sides of the technology industry. But perhaps not enough has been said about the other aspect of his career: how he changed our cultural understanding of music.

The iPod, of course, was not the first .mp3 player on the market. But it was the sleekest and the most consumer-friendly, providing a comfortable, integrated system along with iTunes (on either a Macintosh or a Windows operating system) and the iTunes Store. The popularity of the iPod was, and still is, unprecedented. As Harry McCracken and Lev Grossman point out in their fantastic commemorative article on Jobs in the most recent issue of Time magazine, even the white iPod earphones themselves became a fixture in American society.

But Jobs’s contributions to music are larger than that. While the iPod had important ramifications for music lovers—the obsolescence of the CD, the physical condensation of the music collection, the overall mobility of music—but more than anything, the major long-term change effected by Jobs’s neat little device is on the way we think about music in the first place.

One of those changes is already obvious: more than before, music has clearly become a badge of identity since the introduction of the iPod. Of course, music has, to some extent, always been a badge of identity for people. There have been followers of bands and musical artists since the early days of classical music; we only have to look back a generation to the “Deadhead” phenomenon to get a sense of how enthusiastically people associate themselves with their preferred music. Not only that, but people have engaged in legendary tiffs over their musical likes and dislikes for centuries. Taking music to be an important part of one’s identity is nothing new. But the appearance of the iPod has brought the strong ties of that identity into a new era.

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For instance, how many times have you looked through a friend’s iPod (or iTunes, for that matter)? I’ll go out on a limb and guess that you’ve done this on more than one occasion. A harder question: What runs through your mind as you look at those songs?

Depending, I suppose, on how judgmental a person you are (I am known among my friends to be pretty critical…), there are certain thoughts that pass through your mind. When you flick through a friend’s iPod who you know loves Top 40 radio, it would come as a minor shock to see something like The Tallest Man On Earth. Conversely (or almost conversely…whatever), you’d have a similar reaction flicking through the iPod of your hipster friend and uncovering a Britney Spears album.

Those may be exaggerated examples, but they seem to me emblematic of this badge of identity constructed by the existence of the iPod. The music on your iPod becomes integral towards the formation of a musical identity. I do admit that my argument operates on some shaky premises and is, in some senses, simplistic. People don’t have all the music they like on their iPods—sometimes they don’t even have their favorite music on their iPods. I have one friend who periodically exchanges all the music on his iPod by lending it to a friend and letting that friend supply a new batch of tunes, so any possibility of seeing his musical identity through his iPod is…well…tough.

But then again, the tendency to “read” the music on an iPod in relation to its owner is certainly out there. The device is understood to reflect the owner in some sense. Another friend of mine, who was embarking on a nine-month journey, needed to pick 125 songs to put on her IPod Shuffle. Although I was not privy to the final music selection or how she felt about it, I have little doubt that she chose to put some of her favorite music on there. (Then again…it is a Shuffle, so you can’t look through the songs and it’s not exactly representative of an entire music collection…)

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Another change wrought by the iPod is the way in which music, for some people, has become a component of one’s sonic reality. Perhaps living on a college campus exaggerates this tendency, but lots of students walk from one place to another with those distinctive iPod earphones in their ears (and many others, obviously, with different earphones). The typical cultural criticism to make about this practice is to point out how disconnected these people become from their surroundings. In some ways, one can read this use of music as a purposeful self-isolation.

But the other way to look at this practice is to note its concurrent effect on the music itself. Ironically, the mobility of music changes the value of music. Music becomes part of the sonic reality—a step above the sound of rustling leaves or passing cars—but I can’t help but feel that it somehow cheapens the experience. The same goes for running or exercising with music. While I understand and appreciate the ostensible value of “pump-out” music in its ability to push people towards a better workout, I think that “pump-out” music shares the same basis as “walking-to-class” music.

[Having been on a number of athletic teams in high school, I know the value of a good song before heading out to the field for a game or practice, but I never understood how a half-hour of loud music (whether rap, hip-hop, rock, country, pop, or house music) really pumped anyone up for the big game. It always seemed to me more like the practice of walking-to-class music.]

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I’m not here to offer any pronouncements of good and evil on the part of Steve Jobs due to the changes wrought by the iPod (though there is some editorializing…), but rather to recognize that, while Jobs certainly understand how to market the product and, perhaps better than anyone, understood what the consumers wanted, he didn’t see the long-term effects on the medium of music itself.

The Bizarre Isolation Of A Concert Web Stream

The notion of streaming live music concerts online is not a new one; musical acts and concert distribution outfits have been looking for ways to conflate a strong live presence with a strong presence online. Any discussion of concert streaming is bound to conclude that even an HD-quality screen, Bose-speaker-equipped system cannot provide the concert-going experience of well, actually being there. Real concerts will always be louder, sweatier, more fun, more soaked in alcohol, more…you know…real. If you’ve ever used Skype—or any other video chat program—you’d quickly agree with me; talking to someone through a digital channel doesn’t quite measure up to a face-to-face exchange.

All that said, I won’t deny that I’ve spent large chunks of my time hunched over my desk watching YouTube clips of Drive-By Trucker shows and James McMurtry shows. In some sense, I might argue that this kind of rabid clip-viewing habit is somewhat like an hors d'oeuvres to an entrée—like a pre-show warm-up before actually seeing the show.

But that’s not quite true. In many cases, these clips are more than that. Sometimes they can be a warning: I shouldn’t see this performer live—they’re temperamental, they’re bad live musicians, they have an awkward stage presence. Other times they can be informative: don’t expect this song to sound like the album track…expect this song to sound like an African drum collective, not the regular band. And other times, they can even provide an opportunity I won’t otherwise have. For example, an artist like James McMurtry usually sticks to touring around the Southwest and when he does it make it this far north—meaning the New York area—I’m usually away at school. But these Internet clips and streams don’t substitute for the real deal. I learned this the hard way last night.

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On a whim (or, to be more accurate [and honest], because it popped up in my Twitter feed) I recently tuned in to a live show by Jenny Owen Youngs, a Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter, whose recent single “Great Big Plans” I featured in a Saturday Songs post this past summer. Youngs just so happened to be playing a house show somewhere up in the Berkshires, which the host thoughtfully decided to stream online through Livestream—a (duh!) live stream website. Judging from the general set-up of the concert, the owner of the house seemed like an old hand in setting up shows with artists, but was not so familiar with the idea of streaming a show online.

At first, the experience was not unlike that of watching a prerecorded late-night television show—particularly that The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, in which Ferguson makes continual meta-reference to the actual television audience, going so far as to deliver his opening monologue directly to the camera. At Youngs’s show, the show host as well as Youngs made references early on in the concert to my existence—the anonymous, invisible Internet user watching through the camera—but then, to my sort-of-bewildered surprise, it was as if myself and all the other streamers (there were roughly 50 of us throughout the show) had dropped off the face of the earth. Youngs gave not so much as a mention of the camera in the room or the Internet after the first ten minutes of the show. (An admission: there may have been a few whispered audience asides regarding my web existence at the show; some of the onstage banter was a just too quiet to hear on my computer.)

The show quickly became a bizarrely isolating experience. I was sitting in my room, lingering over the first act of Hamlet (still in the middle of that act, I’m sorry to inform you…) and listening with my headphones and watching this tiny, pixilated version of Jenny Owen Youngs on my computer screen and feeling just a little sorry for myself. Much of her solo acoustic act, it turns out, is engaging with the audience and having all these little mini-conversations and just generally opening up a warm-hearted dialogue between herself and the audience. The audience…of which I was paradoxically a part…and yet not so much a part. Perhaps in another concert setting, it would not have mattered so much. During Death Cab for Cutie concerts, Ben Gibbard isn’t about to be curious about BBQ joints in western Massachusetts, if you know what I mean.

But beyond the issue of being mute, there was the issue of having a rather inflexible neck and an acute case of tunnel vision. Several times over the course of the show, Youngs made reference to an excited baby in the audience. The baby, of course, was sitting with its mother somewhere behind the camera, in a place wildly out of my framed experience. You’d think this would be an isolate incident, but Youngs referred to the small child like clockwork, the visible audience in the frame craning their heads around to look in a way that I could not.

But that, to be honest, didn’t bother me that much; I could get over not being able to turn my head and see the cute baby behind me. What did bother me was the slide to the left made by the camera with a little less than 20 minutes left in the show. It seemed that the host, or whoever was responsible for the streaming, had not adequately tightened the camera to the tripod before the show and it ended up slipping loose and twisting away from the stage.*

Thankfully, the camera didn’t pan so far to the left that Owens left my sight altogether; she remained at the far right of the frame, while the camera repositioned itself with the host of the house show at the center of the shot. He looked up at the camera few times, clearly noting the new Internet perspective, but made no move to help. 

*The host of show contacted me and corrected my interpretation of the action; it was not a loose camera, but rather an ill-placed foot by one of the guests that caused the camera to swing the way that it did.

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But there are still other downsides to this sad concert experience. An obvious one, which I’ve already alluded to, is the loneliness of it all. I suppose I could gather a group of friends and sit down to watch an acoustic show like Youngs’s show, but that still really wouldn’t substitute for the energy of actually being in the audience itself. If there’s anything I notice when I’m at live shows, it’s that you learn an awful lot from the audience. I don’t mean that in a literal way—I’m not sitting there scribbling theorems or historical dates—I mean that in the sense that you learn how to listen when you’re physically at the show. If you’re at a rock show and no one is head bopping or jumping up and down—then you probably won’t be egged on to do so yourself. But if, on the other hand, you’re sitting in neat rows of seats and everyone is standing and cheering and clapping to the beat…well, you’re probably not going to sit there fiddling with your smart phone.

Of course, I learned a little from the audience at Youngs party. But that little didn’t amount to very much. I could sometimes get a vibe from the audience, but I was never moved to applause or head bopping by any sense of camaraderie. (There was one episode of toe-tapping, however, during Youngs’s song “Led To The Sea.”)

And what should I have done about the birthday issue? Halfway through the concert, three people in the audience discovered that their birthdays all fell within that same week. Youngs naturally suggested that everyone sing “Happy Birthday” at the end of the show, which they did. And I sat there silent—partly because it would have been silly to be singing “Happy Birthday” alone in my dorm room (does that reek of loneliness or what?) and partly because I just didn’t really witness that birthday connection in the first place. My lack of connection with this show was reinforced all the more once the show officially ended after birthday wishes and people started milling around the room. Obliviously, people walked straight in front of the camera and paid me not a whit of attention. “Come on!” I wanted to say. “There’s a freaking camera there! You’re on the Internet right now!” But no one listened…and then the camera was turned off.

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So would I do it again?

Yes. But I’ll be ready for it next time. Firstly, I won’t expect a whole lot from the experience. I will know going in that the viewing experience itself, hosted through Livestream, will be pixilated and lacking in quality sound. It will probably also be pretty isolating and not a little weird.

But, on the other hand, it will show me something that I wouldn’t find on an audio CD or even on YouTube. A web stream would allow me to gather some basic ideas about how an artist performs and whether or not it might be worth seeming them live (live for real).

All I’m saying is that if James McMurtry wanders onto one of these concert web streams anytime soon, I’ll be there. 

Saturday Songs – Oct. 8

1. “Fingers Crossed” – Allison Weiss

A boppy, power-pop song that sounds almost as good acoustic as it does with a full band, “Fingers Crossed” manages a restrained, atmospheric feel through its verses before bursting at scenes during dynamic choruses. Drawing heavily from Tegan & Sara, Weiss keeps the vocals soft and relaxed during those verses and appropriately turns it up during the choruses; you can hear a little grit, a little fright, a little courage.

As long as Weiss balances songs like this with slower, wistful numbers like the equally excellent July 25 2007—a simple, sad song that needs no backing other than acoustic guitar to really punch you in the gut. 

Download for free here!

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2. “Shady Esperanto and Young Hearts” – Stephen Kellogg & the Sixers

Hailing from independent music Mecca Northampton, Massachusetts, Stephen Kellogg & The Sixers trounced me with this elegant pop number. In the tradition of great pop bands like The Lemonheads, the group keeps is simple and catchy on “Shady Esperanto.” The most complicated part of the song is probably the tinkling piano during the choruses or the snappy hand-clapping in the background. Other than that, it sounds like a group of friends having fun in the studio.

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3. “Topanga Canyon” – John Phillips

From one of my favorite so-called “lost albums,” “Topanga Canyon” comes off of Phillips’s first solo effort John, the Wolfking of L.A. Written in the wake of the break-up of Phillips’s former band The Mamas and the Papas and in the midst of a serious cocaine addiction, the song tells the story of a drug pick-up by Phillips in the artistic community of Topanga Canyon.

With its meditative pace and laconic narrator, the song suggests that maybe everything fine, despite the narrator’s admission in the chorus:

“Oh Mary, I'm in the deep waters
and it's way, way over my head.
Everyone thought I was smarter
than to be this dead.”

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4. “All The Pretty Girls” – fun.

A band I first listened to not so long ago, fun. is one of those bands who writes songs I’m tempted to describe as “abysmally catchy.” They are the kind of songs that are like saltwater taffy or Swedish Fish—unbelievably sugary and sweet and wonderful—but sometimes there are aftereffects of discomfort. An album by fun. is a little much to tack in a straight listen-through, but individual songs are certainly worth a listen.

Like a manic cross-polination of Electric Light Orchestra and Queen, “All The Pretty Girls” is chock-full of (almost) mechanically perfect harmonies and expertly timed percussion taps and trills and hits à la Queen and once you add in the string parts and the clearly-processed backing vocals (see E.L.O.’s “Sweet Talkin’ Woman), you’ve got a bizarrely fascinating song.

If that song isn’t enough to incite some serious investigation into fun., then “Benson Hedges,” with its simultaneous gospel introduction and its tinkling piano midsection that could pass for either Meatloaf or even one of Styx’s more rocking moments, should probably do it for you. Listen to “Benson Hedges” here.

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5. “Rachel’s Song” – Stiff Whisker and the Driftwood Kids

http://www.myspace.com/stiffwhiskerandthedriftwoodkids

A cover of James McMurtry’s elegiac song off his album Where’d You Hide The Body, Stiff Whisker and the Driftwood Kids make some wise decisions recording this song. Most importantly, they slow everything down, allowing the song to breathe a little. McMurtry’s version—as much as I love it—tends to rush the song, not allowing the song’s imagery to really settle in the listener’s mind.

In terms of vocals, Stiff Whisker really couldn’t have gone wrong. McMurtry has a gritty, sandpaper sort of voice and, often enough, fails to provide the sort of tone and measured approach most expect from vocalists. This band, however, does the added bonus of sharing the vocal duties between a male and a female voices, sometimes singing harmony, other times tackling lines on their own.

Review of Jill Andrews's "The Mirror"

In my Saturday Songs post from July 30, I shared with you all a track with you by Jill Andrews, formerly of folk duo The Everybodyfields. Andrews’s first solo album, The Mirror, while not making a complete departure from the folk/country vibe of her previous band, pursues a more traditional singer-songwriter tack on her first solo effort, as evidenced in the single “The Mirror.”

Jill Andrews in concert; photo by Sean Russell via flickr.com

Both the songs as well as the literal mixing of those songs set Andrews’s excellent vocals front and center. There is some fine playing on the album, but only Andrews’s crooning gets true top billing. (Perhaps the male harmony vocals at the end of “Wake Up, Nico” could have been leveled up to Andrews, but that is minor complaint in a series of songs that values her voice.) Since we’re already talking about production values, it’s worth noting that the production values for the entire album are exceptional. Whether the song is a slow country shuffle like “Sinking Ship” or the more dynamic pop number “Blue Sky,” the songs are clean and never overwrought. The temptation, of course—if an artist has the means—is to include whatever he or she can. I always love when artists remember their roots and keep their recorded tracks simple. “A Little Less” mirrors exactly that philosophy, the song beginning with Andrews’s solo acoustic guitar and later providing the minor frills of subdued electric guitar lines, tambourine, and a lovely male voice (mixed low) in the background. The song needs nothing more than that.

In my earlier post, I noted how much I liked the lead single “The Mirror”: it has some clever lyrics (“I can look it up in a medical journal”), some effectively placed slide guitar, and an irresistible chorus. Having discovered the song not so long before my post, I didn’t have the chance to note that this song essentially owned my consciousness for a week; I hummed it to myself in class and tried to hit the notes in the shower.

Remarkably, “The Mirror” is not the album’s highlight. The most contagious song is easily “Another Man,” which is currently still bopping around my head. I would even go so far as to offer that “Another Man” is one of those songs that makes me want to play the piano. (“Brick” by Ben Folds Five is another; “Samson” by Regina Spektor is another.) The bouncy piano line running through the song is ecstatic and works especially well paired with Andrews’s unruffled vocals. Part of the song’s magic lies in how Andrews conveys the narrator’s sighing acceptance of her erstwhile lover. She delivers the lines “you’ve got a way of making things hard / and I’ve got a way of putting your things in the yard” with an aural roll of the eyes.

For me, the role of “Another Man” in the album is two-fold. Firstly, it demonstrates Andrews’s incredible potential as an intelligent pop-songwriter and performer. The obvious comparison is Sara Bareilles, who can produce a song like “Love Song,” which combines good songwriting with a difficult performing tone. But the other role of “Another Man” is a wake-up call. For me, the song is so good that the rest of the album has some difficulty in measuring up to it. That said, the song points to Andrews’s potential as a songwriter; I suspect there are even better tunes on the horizon.

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Additionally, Jill Andrews’s album is currently available for free download on Noisetrade.com below. For those of you who are a) reaching this link too late to still download it or b) don’t want the entire album, for reasons I cannot understand, you can download “The Mirror” for free right below that.

Ebola Out In The Adirondacks?

My high-school friend Austin once said that the only thing that scared him was the Ebola virus. I, of course, chose to disbelieve him and tried to frighten him every day for weeks, but I never managed to draw any more than the most minor flinch. I resigned myself to the fact that Austin would resist all attempts to frighten him. So it seems that where I failed, Steven Soderbergh might succeed.

Though the protagonist virus in Soderbergh’s latest film Contagion does not resemble Ebola in its symptoms, it has all the hallmarks in terms of its mortality rate and infectiousness. The victims fall not so long after they’re affected. The film, however, caters neither to apocalyptic visions nor to small-town horror dramas. The latter form is probably best represented by Outbreak, the 1995 starring Dustin Hoffman about a semi-epidemic of a disease similar to Ebola in a fictional California town.

But Soderbergh’s film treads the space between carefully. It’s a film that works to contain its storyline nearly as hard as the scientists in it work to contain Ebola. The story flashes back and forth between several characters, some of whom do little more than emphasize the global scale of the problem. The film follows a plot that manages both the general and specific—something that not many stories do successfully. In terms of disaster flicks, Titanic comes to mind before any others; the balancing act between romance/family drama is countered wonderfully by the total chaos of the sinking ship. It goes without saying that Soderbergh in Contagion isn’t quite so deft as James Cameron.

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More striking than anything, however, is the subtle horror of this film. It’s not so much the violent moments—the store lootings, people being trampled trying to get into pharmacies, houses broken into—as it is the suggestions of the disease moving surface to surface. Once Kate Winslet’s character provides what seems like the keynote address of the film, explaining that the average person touches their face 3,000 times a day and in between then we’re touching everything, the film really gets the ball rolling. Every surface becomes a magnet for disease: doorknobs, floors, tables, hands, and really anything that one might touch. Soderbergh does the audience the benefit of lingering on some of these danger areas. The horror is inescapable.

In some ways, I understood my friend’s horror after this film. Ever since leaving the theater, I’ve found myself hyperaware of touching my face and doorknobs and bathroom sinks and toilet seats and water fountains and…well, you get the point.

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All this, I should explain, is somewhat in the way of explaining my absence this weekend. On Friday afternoon, I left for a camping trip in the Adirondacks, which really should have ended sometime around 6 p.m. on Saturday evening. Nature, however, found ways to confound our reading of the trail map and we were lost in the woods for several hours after our projected finishing time, helplessly following a river until we hit a trail. At one point during this problematic adventure, I could not help but have the silver-lining-thought that at least I wouldn’t be touching getting any Ebola out there. No bathroom sinks or doorknobs in the Adirondacks!

Photos from weekend adventures may follow… Until then, keep your eyes on those evil surfaces and your hands away from your face…