Wanted to check in quickly and say something here that I said on the radio last Saturday when I joined Doug Nunnally for his Sound Gaze show on WDCE:
I really like this Shovels & Rope album.
That’s the short version, at least. The long version won’t be all that long, but I did want to point out something that I think is really special about what Shovels & Rope are doing.
This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of joining Doug Nunnally for an hour of his Sound Gaze show on WDCE. We had an awesome conversation — both while we were on the air and in between interview segments — covering everything from Fall Line Fest and Richmond music in general to the value of negative criticism and my Spotify stalking habit. I’d never been a guest on someone’s radio show like this (you’ll hear me exhaling before answers in an attempt to calm my nerves), but Doug asked really thoughtful questions and made the whole experience an incredibly positive one. Getting to talk to someone who loves music as much as Doug so clearly does is a rare treat, and I’m looking forward to the next time we can chat like this, be that on the radio or elsewhere.
Take a listen below — I come in around the 30-minute mark, but I recommend listening to the whole thing, because Sound Gaze is a great show and Doug’s a great host (he’s also a great writer — check out his recent Foo Fighters piece for rvamag.com here).
Big week, y’all. I’m writing this on Thursday night, immediately after confirming that my silver 64 GB iPhone 6 is still scheduled to be delivered sometime on Friday. Given that my current phone qualifies for not one but two recalls — one concerning a sleep/wake button that no longer works and the other concerning a battery that just kind of says “fuck it” and shuts the phone down randomly — you’ll understand why I’ve been looking forward to this Friday for some time.
And yet…
…I might be even more excited about Tuesday’s Heigh Ho release.
[cracks knuckles] OK, it’s been a hot minute since I wrote one of these blog things, so let’s see if I can remember how to do this. Band I feel strongly about? Check? Experience with that band I can’t not share with the whole damn Internet? Check. Picture to put at the top/song to put at the bottom? Check and check.
Let’s do this thing.
Landlady! Remember them? I wrote glowingly of their 2014 album Upright Behavior just before going on baby break. My feelings have only grown since. We shared a Twitter exchange about Spotify’s inadequate payout system, I ordered and received a special Coke-bottle-green pressing of Upright Behavior from Bandcamp, I got to see them perform last Friday night as part of the second-annual Fall Line Fest… it’s been a torrid affair — rewarding in ways I couldn’t have guessed it would be.
Mrs. YHT and I have been fairly bunkered-in lately, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to those of you who have kids and remember what that first month was like. In some ways, it’s felt like a month-long snow day — you huddle close, maybe start a new series on Netflix (we’ve knocked out more than three seasons of Friday Night Lights) and the most contact you have with the outside world some days is noticing the temperature of the air that rushes in when you open the back door to throw a can in the recycling. Much more of the outside world rushed in when I went back to work, but the snow day resumes every evening when I get home. It’s just as magical as an actual snow day, just replace the sense of spontaneous freedom with its polar opposite — a sense of responsibility you’ve spent months joynervously preparing to shoulder.
I love our little bunker, and I love that music has a physical presence in it. It’d be a stretch to lump my collecting vinyl for the last half dozen years into the nesting process, but those records are a non-minor part of the world Mrs. YHT and I prepared for our daughter, and that thought makes me very happy. I’ve gotten a huge kick out of choosing which records to play for Baby YHT. I waited until we got home from the hospital to open the copy of Lullaby Renditions of David Bowie I got last Record Store Day and made that the first record my daughter heard. She’s heard dozens since, and while I haven’t picked up on any nascent preferences, watching her facial reactions and knowing that every song she hears she’s hearing for the first time — I can’t even put it into words. I could do it all day every day and never get bored. (She might though — that kid’s attention span needs work.)
As amazing as the bunkered life has been, venturing out for Friday of Fall Line Fest was a real treat.
I thought a guest post might be a good way to ease back into the bloggin’ life after spending the last three weeks getting to know my new baby daughter, whom I may or may not have named after Beyoncé. Well, her middle name, anyways. That’s a story for a different day.
Today’s story was taken from an email exchange I had with Bill, the husband of one of Mrs. YHT’s lifelong friends and my partner-in-crime for the Drive-By Truckers show that took place at the National in March. I won’t offer too much of a preface, other than to say that his account of falling (back) in love with vinyl wonderfully articulates some of the key reasons why collecting records is so meaningful to me.
Hope you enjoy.
We’ve eaten spicy food, we’ve gone on many, many walks… this kid just refuses to leave the friendly confines of Mrs. YHT’s midsection. Well the adorable little squatter is in for quite a surprise this weekend, as our doc has decided it’s time to induce. Eviction party starts Saturday night. Wish us luck, y’all.
Darlings — “Eviction Party” [Spotify/iTunes]
There are few things I enjoy more in life than finding the perfect song to complement what’s going on around me.
I’m pretty sure I have my dad to thank for this impulse. He was a college professor, and every year, after he was finished grading spring semester exams and had driven into work to turn in grades, he’d come home, walk triumphantly over to the CD player in the den and play the Jamies’ iconic “Summertime, Summertime.” He was never happier or more carefree than he was when that song was playing. My sister, my mom and I all loved it.
I’ve carried on the practice by pairing meals with records and prepping for important basketball games by playing certain strategic albums — Mrs. YHT and I have even started a tradition of playing my vinyl copy of How The Grinch Stole Christmas and sporadically proclaiming “What a dick!” while decorating our tree — but there’s one accompaniment nut that’s been impossible to crack: What should be the first song my daughter hears after she’s born?
In certain areas of life, you’re better off not seeing how the sausage is made. Unfortunately, pop music can be one of those areas. It’s not on the same level as legislation, or ya know, actual sausage, but what you find when you pull back the curtain and learn about how your favorite top-40 songs were made can be stomach-turning nonetheless. The corrective recording technology. The lists of songwriters that would reach the floor if published in scroll format. The contradictions between artists’ public personas and personal lives. It can get ugly. I’m not proud to admit it, but there are times I’d rather not know who was singing that radio hit I’ve grown attached to for fear it’ll turn out to be a star whose fame has crossed over into infamy. It’s judgy, I know, but who is doing the singing and how something is created matters. It just does.
That’s why seeing the “Bird Of Prey” video, which gives us a glimpse into Natalie Prass’ collaboration with the Spacebomb team, made my day yesterday.
I’ve written at length about Daniel Bachman before, but I’d like to mark the release of his new album Orange Co. Serenade by sharing a slightly different impression of his playing, along with a sample track off the new record.
I’m sure you’ve heard people who are confronted with an adorable baby or puppy say something to the effect of “Oh my god, [he/she/it] is so cute I just want to eat [him/her/it] right up!” Everyone knows they’re not cannibals or puppy eaters — it’s just an expression that spills out as a result of overflowing enthusiasm. (Then again, cuteness has been shown to activate the part of our brains that regulates aggression…) You hear similar language in book reviews. Prose is “gobbled up” when it’s particularly enjoyable. Some things are so good you just want them to be a part of you — to be absorbed, so you can go about your daily life with the elevated level of joy you felt when you first encountered them.
There’s a close cousin to this type of enthusiasm, and it’s another book review mainstay — “I just want to crawl inside it.” When a writer builds an especially vivid and inviting fictional universe, the words pull you in, and before you know it, you’re wishing you could cross the page’s divide and join the world the characters get to inhabit. (It happens in movies too — you might remember that a number of movie-goers were swept up in a wave of depression after seeing James Cameron’s Avatar because they couldn’t cope with the fact that the idyllic Pandora wasn’t a real planet they could emigrate to.)
That — minus the delusional depression bit — is how I feel when I listen to Daniel Bachman play the guitar.
Landlady broke my Spotify classification system.
I have a bunch of Spotify playlists, but one has become absolutely indispensable since I started adding to it — my hastily named That’s My Jam playlist. It’s where I drag the songs I get most excited about and want to hear over and over (well, the upbeat ones — I have a separate sad sack playlist I’m too embarrassed to share the name of). Sometimes a song jumps out at me and has to go on TMJ right away, other times I’ll decide that I like a new album and will add one of its tracks so I’ll have a lasting tether back to it. “Lasting” is the operative word there, because I would be crushed if I lost this playlist. Whenever I have trouble logging into my Spotify account, a deep-seated, panicky feeling rushes in. (I really need to back up this list somewhere, but you’re talking to the same person who puts off doing laundry until he’s wearing bathing suits for underwear, so who knows when that’ll actually happen.)
I recently started another list called Favorite Whole Albums, for releases that seem are particularly suited for front-to-back listening. Usually they’re cohesive in some meaningful way, like how Beck’s Morning Phase feels like a single idea played out over multiple tracks, or how Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city tells a story that builds from beginning to end, with interludes that need to be played in the correct order.
When I step back and look at those last two paragraphs all typed out, it’s painfully clear how helpless trying to categorize and catalog your listening really is. It’s like trying to bottle up wind with a napkin, or something — just plain insufficient when you zoom out and consider the massive musical universe and all it has to offer. Taxonomy can feel insufficient in micro sense too, as Landlady just taught me.
You Hear That 