Author: You Hear That?!?

Tom Tom Founders Festival

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If you would have told me in September of last year that central Virginia would see the establishment of three brand new music festivals in 9 months, I would have said, “That’s just cray.” But you would have been right! In the time it takes to make a human child, RVA Magazine has hosted RVA Music Fest (my coverage here and here), Style Weekly has put on the Shadrock Music Festival (Cheats Movement’s coverage here), and now — and I really do mean now, as it’s already started — we have Charlottesville’s Tom Tom Founders Festival, a month-long, SXSW-style music, arts and innovation conference that culminates in two amazing days of music this weekend. More than 50 bands will be performing on Friday, May 11 and Saturday, May 12, and the lineup includes a wonderful mix of heavy-hitting national acts (Those Darlins, Futurebirds, Josh Ritter and J Roddy Walston & the Business to name a few) and VA-based artists that promise to showcase the amazing pool of talent found in the area (Dead Fame, Eternal Summers, The Hill & Wood and No BS! Brass Band among them). Have a look at the full list of performers and their set times here. Though several jump out as must-sees, two in particular have me worked up into an anticipatory tizzy, the first of which is Nelly Kate.

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Doug Paisley

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Golden Embers

Not enough of you fine people are bananas for Doug Paisley. Wanna know how I know? On April 17, I got an email from his record company announcing that Paisley’s new 5-song EP, Golden Embers, was being released. Being a man of action, as well as a huge fan of Paisley’s previous effort, Constant Companion, I did the only reasonable thing — panic and call every record store in town to see if they had a vinyl copy of the new EP. Not a single one did. One even told me the store’s system indicated that the record wasn’t available to be ordered by independent record stores. WTF does that mean? Fortunately, I could buy the release directly from the record company’s website, but having done this makes me feel a little Mugatu-ish, in retrospect.

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Goldrush

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We Don't Have To Worry

The word “timbre” has been rattling around my brain for the past week or so. Z’that ever happen to you? Songs getting stuck up there is more common, but single words get lodged from time to time, bubbling to the surface at seemingly random and uncomfortably frequent moments. I can source the start of this particular affliction to the fact that I’m making my way through This Is Your Brain on Music, by psychologist Daniel J. Levitin. The book starts by defining some familiar terms — “sound,” “melody” and “scale,” to name a few — and my reactions have ranged from “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I thought that meant” to “Whoa. I’ve been using that word inappropriately for years.” Timbre fell somewhere in between.

I had a vague understanding of what it meant, one that’s suffered because it seems to be one of the harder musical concepts to explain, but Levitin’s definition is as clear as it gets: “Timbre (rhymes with amber) distinguishes one instrument from another when both are playing the same written note.” Our brains decode the distinctive frequencies that different instruments produce, so we can tell a guitar from a piano, a saxophone from a flute, etc. Some like to call it sound’s “tonal color.” It’s one reason rock music and classical sound vastly dissimilar, especially when the two are juxtaposed. It’s also the reason Goldrush’s We Don’t Have To Worry EP is one of the most intriguing recordings I’ve heard in a while.

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Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr

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Ladies and gentlemen of central Virginia, start your engines. Race weekend in Richmond is upon us, and it’s got me all nostalgic about how, almost exactly one year ago, I rang in the spring NASCAR race at Richmond International Raceway with my very first post about Detroit duo Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr. Imagine my joy, having found a group that combined my love of soulful electro-pop and brightly-colored sports merch, just a short time before their revered namesake was coming to town for my favorite weekend of the year (keeping in mind of course that the weekend of the fall race is also my favorite weekend of the year). NASCAR in Richmond is a tradition that’s grown near and dear to my heart over the past half-decade, just as Dale Jr Jr has done over the course of the last 12 months.

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Debo Band

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I really like free stuff. I know this from years of experience obtaining free stuff, but I also know this because I recently had a coworker say to me, “You really like free stuff.” When I decided to write this post, I tried to remember the context in which he said this, but there were too many possibilities, and I gave up. Not so coincidentally, this same coworker and I have already updated our calendars with the best Richmond Flying Squirrels promotional giveaway nights, including the one in which they’re giving out an egg timer shaped like a pig, and the Father’s Day one, in which they’re giving the first 2,000 men 15 and older a visor that reads “Head Nut” (my love for the team’s marketing department knows no bounds). Neither of us has kids, but WHATEVER. It’s free!

Speaking of free stuff and nuts (A segue for the ages!), many of the folks who stormed their local haunts on Record Store Day had the chance to grab a complimentary copy of the fifth volume in Sub Pop’s Terminal Sales sampler series, entitled Mixed Nuts (there may be no better example of how one should keep one’s head on a swivel for free stuff than RSD). Having had a little more than a week to check it out — no, I will not rat out the record store that gave it out early — I can confirm that each of the tracks has that extra measure of sweetness than can be found in the complimentary Slurpees dispensed each July 11, or the free scoops handed out on Ben and Jerry’s Free Cone Day. That said, one gave me a particularly potent sugar rush — “Asha Gedawo” by Debo Band, an 11-piece, Boston-based outfit, led by Ethiopian-American saxophonist Danny Mekonnen, with vocals provided by a man named Bruck Tesfaye who, as far as I can tell, is not related to Abel Tesfaye of the Weeknd.

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Fiona Apple

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Every Single Night

A couple months back, I wrote about an epiphany I had that opened the door to a world that had previously seemed hopelessly walled-off. The epiphany went a little sumpin’ like this:

“…having a guy dressed as Beethoven in the balcony can’t exactly change the fact that the real guy died in 1827, but it does call attention to the fact that 4 people with instruments and some sheet music can bring a part of the German composer’s magnificently wired brain back to life, if only for the length of time it takes to play one of his works…”

Though I was talking about how Brooklyn Rider makes classical music accessible, the part about music providing an external, accessible image of a person’s consciousness is fascinating to me. And while every lyricist engages in this process by putting their thoughts to words, hearing Fiona Apple’s new song “Every Single Night” helped me realize that she’s in a class of her own in this respect.

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Record Store Day Superlatives

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Record Store Day is quickly fading in the rear view mirror, and now that we’ve had a couple days to strip off the shrink wrap, listen to the loot and digest the day’s events, I wanted to share a few reactions and a few songs. In lieu of a list of acquisitions (I’m a little scared to a provide the complete inventory, as my better half reads this blog, and I may or may not have some financial splainin’ to do), I thought I’d keep the superlatives theme from earlier this month rollin’ by handing out a few RSD Superlatives. Off we go…

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Record Store Day

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It’s a war out there. Be safe. Be ruthless. And bring sunscreen. I’m currently waiting in long, sun-soaked line, wearing a chocolate brown t-shirt, braising like a rump roast.

Happy Record Store Day!

Radiohead

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(Editor’s note: This is the last of three posts about this past Saturday, which was jam-packed with great music. Click here for the first post, which talked about meeting the stepdad of Jeremy Salken from Big Gigantic, and click here for the second post, which chronicled the fantastic Trillions CD release show at Gallery 5.)

The world is a tiny place. It used to be big. Huge even! So huge that we didn’t even know the fucker was round! Crazy, right? Now it’s so small that I can write a blog post about meeting the stepdad of a famous musician and hear back from that musician via Twitter in a matter of minutes. And it’s so small that we can be several places at once. Thanks to the world wide web of information, just as we can watch every single game of the NCAA basketball tournament, we can now attend music festivals from thousands of miles away, and last weekend was a great example. Throughout the weekend, Coachella was webcasting performances, 3 at a time, and I was in heaven. And though I’m not going to argue that watching on my laptop beats being there in person, there is one HUGE advantage.

I’ve been to Bonnaroo twice, in 2004 and 2005, and one of the most difficult things about the monster music festival experience (aside from not showering for 3 days and being around other people who haven’t showered in 3 days) is the decision-making. One band vs. another that’s scheduled to play at the same time. It’s downright painful in the moment, and there’s around a 95% chance that you will despise your decision a few years later (Jack Johnson over the Black Crowes haunts me to this day). But there I was on Friday night, zooming from Dawes to Arctic Monkeys and back in the blink of an eye. Like I said, heaven. But Saturday was a little more stressful. As I left the Trillions’ CD release show, holding two new CDs, one sticker and a whole mess of excitement, I was also lugging around a serious sense of urgency.

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