Random Crazy Youtube clip

I'm so glad that Al Gore invented the interwebs so that we have things like this video of some really strange Norwegians. This is just funny.

blog activity and new song posted

New post on my creative blog. Mostly notes on recent recording sessions with Peter Stanley. Journal style like normal. Also, a new song called "Blame" has been posted here that we just finished.

Two Albums

There are two "country" albums I've been listening to a lot lateley that have even ended up mixed up in each other's CD cases, but which greatly contrast with one another.

One is "Roots and Crowns" by Califone. I failed to report about this record in my "Best of '06" post because I didn't own it at the time. But I just have to say this: BEST RECORD OF 2006! ...well next to Midlake. Tim Rutili is a genius and if you haven't heard these guys, click here and play the song "The Orchids". Check out my wife's review of this song. And if you're the type of person that likes to by single songs off iTunes, buy "The Orchids" ....it's so beautiful.

And I guess when I say this is a country album, I'm stretching a bit. Most of Califone's stuff is "atmospheric", hinging its sound on layers upon layers of percussion (a lot of found percussion) and electronic samples and analog tape manipulations. They blend these lo-fi elements with a folk/country sound and the result is beauty.

The other record is "What aCrying Shame" by the Mavericks. It was released in 93/94 at the height of the whole "young country" thing. So it definately has that pop production style, but the songs are just so great. I find myself playing this loud. Yesterday, I was driving around town playing this record so loud without knowing it that I pulled up next to a car with loud rap music and they sneared at me the way that people snear at them, as if to say, "Young wippersnapper!" Except I was playing early 90's young country.

Love the line:
Hey now, mister bouncer
All I wanna do is dance.
But I swear I left my wallet
Back in my workin' pants.

M. WARD- show review

A week ago, I went with some friends to see M. Ward at Bimbo's in Northbeach.

He played a solo show- meaning it was just him. Him and an acoustic guitar and a piano. Usually, if someone's just gonna do a guy-and-a-guitar thing, I'd rather be seated in a coffee shop, but this guy is so talented, he really kept the show going. I've seen Matt Ward before when he was on tour opening for Vic Chesnutt, so I knew that if it was just him and a guitar, he was entertaining enough to carry the show based on technical guitar chops alone.

But it was obvious that in the years since then, constant touring has allowed him to really hone his showmanship. He added a lot of cool showy touches that went off so slick, like very cool covers, the "premier" of a funny "music video", using a loop station to layer guitars on guitars, finishing by having a young kid come up and play piano with him for the last song.

What a fun night.

Barber Shop

I love the barber shop. When asked what my hobbies are, I am usually too sheepish to say that getting my hair cut is one of them. There's something about it that I just love- that you can't get at a salon......like:

* When your'e waiting your turn and a shrunken old man climbs up into the chair the way a child scales a jungle gym and quietly suggests, "My wife likes the waves." and points to his head. He means- leave it longer on top.

* Watching a boy get his first haircut at the barber's.

* Listening to barbers' stories- like about the drill seargents in boot camp who, when teaching a group of new enlistees to hand wash their clothes, said, "First, you take the left sock...." just so they could mess with the guy who said, "Which one's the left sock, sir?"

or chatting about the strange habbits of the mysterious men that actually exist somewhere who come in and pay the $10 for a "Beard Trim".

* Hot foam shaving cream. Straight razors. Cigar smoke.

FULL OF LIFE

Reading a book by one of my favorite authors, John Fante, called Full of Life. It's an autobiographical piece about his wife being pregnant in the early 1950s. I bought it years ago (at the height of my Fante fanboyness) and always planned on reading it whenever Jill got pregnant. Last week it ocurred to me that I have this book. So I started reading it.

I will probably be the last to read this particular copy, as each page all but turns to dust when I turn it. An illegible name and the year 1957 is penciled in the inside cover. 25 cents is marked on the cover.

I love this picture of Fante. Love his hair. The attitude.

Peter Stanley

I've been helping out a songwriter friend of mine by playing in his backing band and it's been a lot of fun. I get to play like 4 or 5 different instruments. Photos from a show the other night here. Hear one of his songs here.

Giddy!

Holy Ravioli! The new Son Volt album is coming out in March and I am as giddy as a school girl!

Emmy Lou sings "Pancho and Lefty" by Townes Van Zandt

What a treat!

"He wore his gun outside his pants for all the honest world to feel."

Townes Van Zandt and Raymond Carver at the same time!

Man, I sold some crappy CDs at Ameoba a couple days ago and got a Townes Van Zandt disc with the store credit. Man it's heavy duty. He was the real thing. Reading Carver and listening to this music is a double dose of uniquely American, desparate life........ Man.

Year In Review

MIDLAKE Trials of Van Occupanther- If I had a top 10 list, this would be #1. Oh, man. Psychadelic rock has become so contrived and pretentious. Midlake prove through strong instrumentation and the craft of songwriting that neo-psychadelia can be straightforward and beautiful and without gimmic. BEST ROCORD OF THE YEAR! Hands down.


GOB IRON Death Songs for the Living- This is a side-project collaboration between Jay Farrar of Son Volt and Anders Parker of Varnaline. Their mission on this record was to revive the "folk process", which is to constantly change traditional songs by adding lyrics, changing melodies, putting in unusual instrumentation. It's a great record, but probably for fans only, as it is probably the least accessable of either of their works. If my rantings on Jay Farrar/Son Volt intrigue any readers, they should check out Son Volt's "Trace" album. I went to see Gob Iron in early December. Here's my review of that show.

JEREMY ENIGK World Waits- Jeremy Enigk was one of my first loves. The emo pioneer fronted Sunny Day Real Estate in the early 90s and had a fantastic boroque pop solo album that I treasure. When this one came out, I had to get it, hoping he had returned to the boroque-ness of his first solo record, but this fell short for me. Just epic prog-rock type stuff. Didn't feel like old times. Sorry, Jeremy. We've just grown apart, you and me.

SPARKLEHORSE Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain- This record does too much of what I hoped the Jeremy Enigk record would do. It revisits/recycles an already overused sound that is very specific to Mark Linkous, but this record is nothing new and feels tired. Say no to drugs, kids.

FLAMING LIPS At War With the Mystics-
Very sucky. Bad move, guys.



MATES OF STATE Bring it Back- Their most accessable album to date. Proves that Team Boo was not just a fluke success. Mates of State beginners should check out "Team Boo". It's fantastic.



PERNICE BROTHERS Live a Little- Pernice Bros revisit the sound of their 1st record and it sounds great. Lots of string arragngements. All the depressing suicide and drug references you'd expect from Joe. Got a bonus CD with my pre-order, but it's nothing to write home about.

MAGNOLIA ELECTRIC CO. Fading Trails- Got this one for free. Might be their worst yet. Dunno. This is compiled from 3 different sessions that produced 3 full albums. They're supposed to release these albums soon. Hopefully they have better stuff on em.


M. WARD Post War- Not his best. It's worth it to hear the song, "Right in the Head" from an older brother's perspective.




SUN KIL MOON Tiny Cities/Ghosts of the Great Highway MAGNOLIA ELEC CO. Hard to Love a Man- This are not 2006 records, but they deserve a mention. Keith got them for me for Xmas and Bday in late 05. They served as a soundtrack for working in my cold, dark bombed-out house in Jan/Feb. The drab, lagging, mournful folk rock served as the perfect backdrop to leaking roofs, rusty nails, and numb fingers.

New-Years-Policy?

I'm interested to hear if anyone has made any New Years Policies. Gohead and post them hear if you have any.......

Where I'm Calling From

Reading another Carver book. Is there anyone more real than Raymond Carver?
Who else would insert the line:

"She worked Wednesdays through Sundays."

on its own in between two paragraphs? No one, that's who.

Policy VS. Resolution

I dislike New Years resolutions. I've never made one in my life. Besides disliking the fact that they are temporary and are rarely kept, I dislike the word resolve because it is awkward-sounding to say and it started becoming popularized and excessively used in noun form (as in: I admire your resolve) by President Bush (and then the common American vinacular) soon after 9/11. But I digress.

I wanted to share with my readers some success I've been having recently with what I call "policies". I've been setting policies for myself regarding what I will and won't do in social situations. Most are won't-dos, but that's OK. It prevents me from being roped into doing something I dislike and it prevents me from feeling bad and coming up with lame excuses. Policies also prevent pretentiousness and create honesty and people like that. Policies are much more permanent than resolutions and are more about protocol, rather than will-power.

Here's a couple for instances:
- When someone says a word and I don't know what it means, I stop them and simply say, "I don't know what that word means." rather than pretending I do know what it means.

- I won't listen to "jam bands" or try to like them for someone who tries to get me to listen to My Morning Jacket or Phish or Dave Matthews or Greatful Dead. I don't listen to jam bands and I skip over the articles about them in magazines.

I have a handful of solid policies that help me navigate my social world and I'm creating more. Want to make a policy of your own? Here are some places to start:
* food
* borrowing/lending
* sharing opinions
* products you won't buy
* fashion
* vocabulary
* social norms

Remember, resolutions might be just for January, but a policy can be instated/amended at any time!

How embarassingly fanboyish I am!

Gob Iron (above) Jay Farrar (below)

Oh man. I went last night to see my rock idol, Jay Farrar (of Son Volt fame) play a solo set and then play with his side project Gob Iron (Brit slang for harmonica) at Slim's. Brilliant.

First of all, I've gotta say Hans and I had sucky luck at first- finding the place was difficult and then I thought I lost my wallet, but I didn't. Then the girl in front of me at the box office turned around and gave me a free ticket and said she won 2 tickets online and didn't need the other one. FREE. My luck had changed.

Jay played 4 or 5 songs from the upcoming (can't wait!) Son Volt album just on the acoustic guitar. Man, the lyrics are so visual and uniquely American and tragic and my brain was teleported to a far off place in my inner mind! Even with just those stripped down skeletal songs, Hans, who is not a Farrar fan, seemed affected by them. Either Hans was bored or blown away because his jaw had dropped.

That would've been good enough by itself, but guitarist/lapsteelist Mark Spencer came out and backed Jay up with a telecaster and it was just amazing. I'm not sure I've seen that many virtuosic performances of that level up close and personal. Spencer was out of this world and at times, it didn't even sound like a guitar. If I had a choice between some first-chair violinist slinging a Stradivarius and Mark Spencer, I'd choose Mark Spencer. Heck, I'd choose Spencer with his hands tied behind his back, he sounds so amazing. And you would too!

Gob Iron is a side project of Jay Farrar and Anders Parker (of Varnaline fame). They have reworked traditional folk songs with altered lyrics/melodies on their new album. They came on and played a great short set- basically played through the new album. The three guys traded between drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, and lapsteel. Their encore was just sort of a jam session thing where they played covers and reworked each others' solo stuff. The encore was kind of sucky except that I love Jay's electric guitar solos and you don't get to see that that much in Son Volt.

But holy crap, what a good show!

The guys traded off on this guitar(above), belonging to Anders Parker. It's a costom made telecaster made out of pieces of his mom's barn. Click here to see more beauty.

Happy Thanksgiving!

HATED IT!

So, as I said in a recent post, most of the movies I rent have something to do with music. This also goes for about half of the books I read. High Fidelity is a novel about a British audiophile who also owns a record store. Unlike the movie, which kind of portrays the main character (I forget his name- that's how sucky the book is) as a street savvy indie guy who collects rare Belle and Sebastian B-sides, this British guy goes gah-gah over weird Tina Turner LPs and stuff (?????). He's also annoyingly clueless about women and does horrible things to them, but still thinks it's their fault. Immature. Kind of a weenie. It's like- get it together! You're 30, not 21!

Anyway, I quit reading it halfway through the book.

Some authors can create a character who you are supposed to hate. This wasn't one of those. Some authors can create a character who is pathetic and you start to love them because you are sympathetic to them. I think that's what Hornby tried to do, but he missed the mark. It's like when you're sitting next to somebody on the BART who is infringing on your personal space or something. Instead of sitting there and taking it, you get up and move to the next car at the next stop. So that's what I did. It's OK to just stop reading a crappy book.... or a book that just annoys you for that matter.

So I picked up a western detective novel that my friend Scott mailed me called "No Country For Old Men" by none other than Cormac McCarthy. A guy starts killing people with one of those blunt pnuematic hammers they slaughter cattle with in the first couple pages. Now that's a classic!

Headphones

These kinda headphones that come with the ipod are serious crap. Mine were always super quiet, distorted when the music was bassy, and stopped working at the drop of a hat. So I went to my local Walgreens and bought some cheapies for $9.99 and they're spectacular! They openned up a whole new world to me! Super full sound, can go way louder that the ipod ones, and they don't fall out or feel like they're half-way in your ear. I know I shouldn't crank the volume way up, but let's face it, when riding my bizz-nike to work and listening to All Songs Considered or This American Life, Bob Boilen and Ira Glass don't exactly have those razor radio voices and they can't compete with Dwight/San Pablo traffic. I even was able to play the drums along to a whole Son Volt album- something I could've never heard over the drums with the ipod headphones. I'd rather have a pair of my cheapies than ten thousand ipod ones.

Really great songs with music videos that are cartoons:

C'mon, you're not doing anything else right now.

Beulah "Gene Autry"


Of Montreal "Wraith Pinned to the Mist"


Aberfeldy "Love is an Arrow"

Love is a verb and a noun as well.
You'll find it in the dictionary under 'L'.

Movies about Music

I would say that the majority of movies I put on our Netflix queue have to do with music. It's pretty hit-or-miss with them because what looks like a festival documentary (Bonaroo 96) turns out not to have real live footage, but montages of the weird naked hippies at the festival while the music plays in the background. Or band documentaries, like the one on Beulah (one of my favorite bands) that are nothing more than cam-corder footage from inside their van. However, I had a couple big scores in the last week.

The first was the Chorus. I thouroughly enjoyed it. One of the things that popped out to me was the Math teacher. He sucked at teaching math, but I totally related to how he just couldn't stay away from the chorus. He wanted to be around music and wanted to help out. He was just frantic about being close to music, because there wasn't any other music to speak of.

Also, movies/books about boyhood really get me right here (I'm making a gesture as if being stabbed in the heart) when they tackle the theme of what I call "the dichotomy of boyhood." What I mean is that I think we, as boys, have this inate dichotomy where we want to be Superman, firemen, cops and save/help people, but we also fantasize violence and killing. Young boys adore their female cohorts, but despise them as well. We love to build things, but delight in explosions and demolition. I think this movie touched on this in a subtle but thought-provoking way and it makes me nostalgic in that way that you can get nostalgic about even the darker parts of your life.

Also, surprisingly, I really got to like the name Boniface.


I also rented a movie about the making of Nirvana's "Nevermind" album. It's from a series called "Classic albums" and it was super in-depth and technical. A lot of it was filmed at Butch Vig's (producer) sound board as he literally deconstructed each song and showed the viewer things like what this song would have sounded like had the voice not been doubled, or what it would've sounded like if the song had drums instead and why and so on.

He explained, in a way that both JIll and I understood, how one song was not working out, so Kurt went over, sat on the couch with an acoustic, and said, "It should sound like this." Butch Vig ran and brought the mics out to him and had him just play it. What Vig explained so well was how it became a problem to record the drums, bass, and cello because Cobain had not recorded the song to a click track, so the tempo is all over the place. His guitar was also not in tune, the the bass and cello had to be tuned strangely. Fantastic.

I have often blogged about wanting musical writing/journalism and movies to be more technical and this one didn't dumb it down at all. This movie will convince you why this was one of the most important pieces of art ever.