On loan from a generous coworker. (He also loaned me a DVD copy of Runnin’ Down a Dream, the four-hour Tom Petty documentary Peter Bogdanovich made.) This is the first I’ve heard of Mudcrutch, but wouldn’t you know it, the rejuvenated Petty project just released an album last Friday. Wild, eh?
Tom Petty called the band’s name “really terrible.” I call it “really fitting” because it won’t stop raining and there’s mud everywhere and I can never remember to take off my shoes before I go in the house and Toddler YHT is laying waste to my backseat by grinding her adorable and sparkly but also muddy Crocs into the fabric opposite her rear-facing car seat.
Speaking of saying goodbye, I was very sad to see Sounds of RVA’s farewell message. I’ve enjoyed following along with Sarah’s posts and have learned a lot from them. Between this announcement and RVA Playlist’s, it feels like the end of an era. Sarah and Andrew have felt like partners in crime, and I’ll always appreciate the added motivation I’ve gotten from knowing there are people our there with whom I share a sense of purpose. Definitely going to deploy my prized Sounds of RVA coozie tonight in Sarah’s honor.
Important PSA: Don’t forget to check that the albums you find at Goodwill actually have the right records inside. I thought I’d found a nice, clean copy of Pearls Before Swine’s Balaklava. I had actually found the cover of Pearls Before Swine’s Balaklava with some crusty big band nonsense inside.
A few Friday News and Notes items to finish out the week:
CD Monday update: The Sufjan song is excellent, and I enjoy the Rafter track, but the real winner is the Helado Negro song I posted on Monday. Baby YHT (who isn’t really a baby anymore — maybe she should be Toddler YHT for now?) even liked it and gave it the “Again!” seal of approval a couple times.
I can’t remember what day this week it was, but I had to get out of the car right when Marketplace was starting a story about Radiohead’s finances and, presumably, how they start new companies for each record they release. Bandmate 4eva Doug unknowingly came to the rescue by sending me this Guardian article about the same thing a day or two later. Interesting stuff, I think. Maybe I need to start a couple corporations for YHT, especially now that I bought an actual domain for the site.
Hey! I forgot to tell y’all! I bought youhearthat.com, so there’s that. Feels like I got my own little plot on this great big internet, and it feels like I should be saying that while standing with a cup of coffee in one hand and a suspender strap in the other, looking out over my growing crop of blog posts through the early morning haze. That’s how the internet works, right…
James Blake? Gooood. Radiohead? Goooood. Beyoncé? I trust that it’s good, but I still haven’t heard more than a couple songs. I don’t want to pay to download it, since it might come out on vinyl at some point, and it’s not on Spotify, and I’m not about to sign up for Tidal while I’m still paying for Spotify Premium, so…
I’ll be heading up to NYC this weekend, which makes three trips up 95 in four weekends. Yet somehow I still get a kick from zooming through E-ZPass only toll lanes. It doesn’t take much.
Asthmatic Kitty threw this sampler in with a record I had delivered, and I grabbed it this morning not knowing that Pitchfork had posted a review of Helado Negro’s Island Universe Story: Selected Works this morning. Neat coincidence.
I really enjoy Helado Negro and am very interested in hearing Island Universe Story so I can get a more complete picture of his music and how it’s changed over time. I’m most familiar with Double Youth, which is the album the song on this sampler comes from (the Pitchfork review actually mentions it — “Invisible Heartbeat”), and while I’ve seen him perform, I only caught a few minutes — at Gallery5 during 2013’s Fall Line Fest. But those few delightfully weird minutes left a strong and positive impression. I remember thinking how cool it was that just a little time in the same room with a band or artist can be enough to form a lasting connection. It’s also reassuring. That was before my daughter was born, but I often think back on that night when it looks like I’m going to be late to a show or have to leave in the middle so I can wake up early the next day.
Here’s “Invisible Heartbeat” — I’ll check in about the rest of the sampler on Friday!
Happy Friday Cheers, y’all! A few News and Notes items to celebrate the start of my favorite 1/6 of the year:
An article I wrote about Friday Cheers and Lucy Dacus for River City Magazine just hit the interweb yesterday. Stephen Lecky and Lucy Dacus are such tremendous people and tremendous contributors to this musical community (who happen to have the same birthday, which happened to happen this week), and getting to meet and interview them meant fulfilling two huge #rvamusic bucket list items. I hope you’ll click here to check the article out or grab a print copy, which has a really snazzy “Cheers to Cheers” cover. Speaking of Friday Cheers…
The season kicks off tonight with The Soul Rebels and Mighty Joshua & the Zion #5. Wanna hear something crazy? Mighty Joshua has that same birthday! As Stephen Lecky pointed out on Twitter, this calls for a party on Brown’s Island. How does tonight sound? It may be a little wet, but some of my absolute favorite Friday Cheers experiences have been in the rain. Charles Bradley, the Funky Meters… I’m sure this week will follow suit.
Lots of great new music this week. Radiohead’s newsongs are instant classics, James Blake has a new album out today (I’ve yet to hear it the whole thing, but what I’ve heard I love), and I’m really digging this new Red Hot Chili Peppers song.
CD Monday update: What a wild ride. Sunrise can feel disconnected, and my lasting impression of it will be as a collection of individual moments, but one endearing constant glued the whole thing together for me: Masabumi Kikuchi scratchily singing along with his piano parts. His voice borders on a growl, and while it’s quiet, it’s almost always there, so it’s something of a reassurance amid the chaos. NPR described his voice this way: “His hazy voice is like a walkie-talkie transmission from the moon. It’s too weird to dislike.” Well put.
The Broadberry is the place to be this weekend. Clair Morgan’s release party tonight, People’s Blues of Richmond’s release party Saturday night. If you find a good enough overnight hiding place, you might not have to leave all weekend! Speaking of show recommendations, I highly recommend following along with Drew Necci’s RVA Must-See Shows. Great advice from one of Richmond’s most thoughtful and knowledgeable music journalists (she’s also one of the contributors to Off Your Radar).
Have a great weekend, y’all. Don’t forget Mother’s Day!
I took this picture on Record Store Day at Sugar & Twine in Carytown. Seeing these posters around town has made me so happy, because this album that’s bringing me a great deal of joy is poised to do the same for so many other people.
There are a lot of good albums out there, but music that can make you feel pure joy is rare. There has to be something about it that worms way down, through the topsoil of everyday stuff — Is this recycling week? Do I need to go to the grocery store on the way home? — to the core of what makes us who we are. The permanent stuff. The stuff that was forged years ago via childhood experiences we may have only snapshot memories of.
New Lions & the Not-Good Night (streaming now over at Pure Volume) gets to that place. It’s filled with the wonderment that’s harder to feel the older you get, starting with the album’s narrative concept and cover art, both of which were based on Clair Morgan’s two sons. There are lions and fawns and falcons and masks — things that make me want to close my eyes and imagine an animated world where all of this is unfolding. And, as is the case with the animation I find most affecting, there’s a strong undercurrent of darkness to all of it. Tim Skirven’s stunning cover art isn’t all primary colors — the visual universe he created is somewhat ominous, and a quick glance at the track list lets you know that beds are going to catch fire at some point.
And there are lyrics on this album that just knock me over. I can’t help but nod my head when I hear “Don’t understand how we could be depleted” in “Rogue Island,” given the more than somewhat significant energy disparity between my almost-two-year-old daughter and her more than somewhat occasionally sleepy parents. Speaking of foggy consciousness, “The Sea” pulls you into this great middle ground between waking and sleep, but shakes you awake with a line I can’t stop thinking about: “If your perception is wrong, then let it be.” When I interviewed the band for River City Magazine, I loved hearing Morgan talk about this aspect of the album — the idea that how you experience things as a child is vastly different from your experiences as a parent:
“When you think about an adventure you took as a child,” Morgan said, “when you’re looking through that lens, that really happened. But now you’re looking through a completely different lens, whether you’re an adult or a father, and you look back at that scenario from a completely different perspective. What did you not soak in that actually happened that you were not able to absorb?”
But here’s what’s so remarkable: Even without the cover art and the lyrical arc — if I’d heard “Rogue Island” for the first time on the radio without any context — I think I’d still get to that place of wonderment because Morgan puts so much of that feeling into the music he makes. His last album, No Notes, pointed in this same direction, with these beautiful and complicated guitar patterns that few guitarists could execute once, much less in rapid repetition while singing. It’s positively hypnotizing live — I watch, quickly become overwhelmed, and after moving past the thought of “How the hell is he doing that?” I get to a really peaceful, amazed place. Like a kid who’s purely soaking in information because processing it might mean missing something.
Clair Morgan shows are such rich experiences, and it’s not just because of the guitar work. Morgan has surrounded himself with the perfect set of collaborators — the combination of diverse instrumentation and tight precision means that they can go so much further than most bands in exploring ideas and filling them with color and shape. With New Lions, Morgan’s has truly become a shared vision, and the people who have joined him on this journey seamlessly access and add to the adventurous sensibility that made his music exceptional in the first place. The vibes’ countermelody in ‘The Sea.” The great climbing bass lines and backing vocals in “New Company.” The interplay of the guitars in “Amelia Graveheart.” Together, Clair Morgan the band operates as a machine that can convert dreams to reality, whether they’re voicing tricky harmonies, shifting time signatures or engaging in vivid storytelling. When they start playing, it really feels like anything is possible.
Take a look below at Good Day RVA’s excellent “How To Set Your Bed On Fire” video to get a sense of how the group works as a whole. It’s really inspiring, I think, in the same way that New Lions & the Not-Good Night is. To get an even better sense, head to the Broadberry on Friday for the New Lions release party. The lineup is stacked — Manatree, Spooky Cool, Way, Shape, or Form — and you can get your hands on your own copy of the album, which promises to be a 2016 bright spot, both here in Richmond and elsewhere.
My mom sent me this a few years back (I’d guess she heard this NPR story) and my daughter grabbed it on the way out this morning. The outer sleeve made it hard to pull out of the tower, but she was resolute.
So often, when I think of free jazz, I think of chaos. Screeching saxes and dissonance. The feeling of being overwhelmed. (Side note: I read this article about Albert Ayler over the weekend and would recommend it.) By contrast, Sunrise is slight and delicate, like you could break it if you looked at it wrong. Yet these performances are built on the sturdy connection between drummer Paul Motian and pianist Masabumi Kikuchi — two jazz outsiders nearing the ends of their lives. Given how sparse these tracks are, and how close to the end these two men were, tones and sounds carry so much more weight than they would in other settings. When I’m listening to more upbeat jazz, single tones can seem cheap, because the big, impressionistic picture is really what matters. Here, every note is impressionistic. The whole is almost irrelevant.
Funny story — my daughter just started trying to sing actual songs (“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” is taking shape nicely), but for a while, I’ve been repeating random tones she blurts out to see if she’ll respond with the same note and how long we can go back and forth when she does. She gets a kick out of it and I like to think I’m planting musical instinct seeds here and there. That’s just what we ended up doing on this morning’s drive to daycare, and I bet Kikuchi and Motian would have approved.
Took this while running on the north end of Atlantic City’s boardwalk this Saturday.
It’s tempting to make that house a metaphor for something — the huge casino-industrial complex towering over this run-down little house, new ways of life replacing old ones — but that casino is shuttered too. It’s just a whole bunch of sad under a grey sky and intermittent rain.
Things perked up a bit as we ran south. There were busy casinos on the boardwalk, even though the season hasn’t started in earnest (I was there for a bachelor party). Sections of the boardwalk were lined with elevated screens that looped a promotional video, and what song played behind the series of happy, sunny photos? You guessed it — the Band’s version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City.”
It was heavily edited, so the only words you could hear were “Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty/And meet me tonight in Atlantic City,” which sounds fine and dandy, but if you know the song, you know that it’s pretty dark, and I can’t decide if it’s horribly inappropriate or horribly fitting for that campaign.
The details get a little hazy, but we know the dude in the song can’t find work, he’s in debt, he’s falling in with the mob, and that he’s taken all his money out of the bank. Not sure if that’s to bet it all in AC, or just because he’s moving there to work for the mob — I’ve always wanted it to be that he’s planning on making one big bet to get out of debt entirely, but I don’t know if the lyrics support that. Either way, if you asked me what that song was about, I’d say desperation. And that it’s depressing as hell. But that’s my interpretation. I’m not a gambler, and I’m risk averse to a fault. I played slots twice this weekend, and babysat a blackjack hand for like five minutes. Not exactly the profile of someone who’d buy his lady a bus ticket so she could watch him put it all on the line.
But to someone who’s from Atlantic City, or who spends a lot of time there, this could be a song about hope. About the devotion that makes you stay with someone who’s backed into a corner but just may find a way out, against all odds. Given the city’s financial struggles, “Maybe everything that dies someday comes back” is just the kind of hope people there need right now. And doesn’t the Band’s version sound nice and jaunty?
Rolling around this week with this sampler I got on my way out of BK Music on Record Store Day. I haven’t listened all the way through yet, but I already love it, because it serves as a reminder of a very fun and fruitful Saturday.
What I got:
Matthew E. White — “Cool Out” B/W “Maybe In The Night”
This was my one must-get item this year. Y’all’ve already heard me freak out about the A-side, but I’m just as psyched for people to hear the B-side, “Maybe In The Night,” which has a fantastic singalong chorus that climbs right into White’s falsetto wheelhouse. And it was mixed at Abbey Road, which is neat. I’ll update this post whenever that one makes it online.
This was a leap of faith, but given how much faith I have in Phil Cook (who recorded a cover of Parr’s “1922 Blues“), I shouldn’t be surprised that it paid off. Parr has such a great, whip-smart writing voice, with a dry humor I’m really enjoying. You can get a taste of that deadpan humor at the start of this video of Parr doing the EP’s title track.
Gonna have to report back about this one. I’m waiting for just the right cooking situation — something that involves lots of chopping — so I can get a good listen.
So BK does a raffle before the store opens on Record Store Day, and by some glorious stroke of luck, Bandmate 4eva Doug and I had the first two numbers, giving us first crack at a bin full of box sets, t-shirts, and other fun stuff. My adrenaline was off the charts when I was walking up to see what the choices were, and it reached Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction levels when I saw this 6-LP Ryan Adams set was there. I love these big, career-spanning live albums — Doug actually got something similar, the one Drive-By Truckers put out last year — in part because they function as greatest hits albums as well. I’ve listened to Ryan Adams a fair amount, but I don’t have physical copies of many of his albums, so Live at Carnegie Hall fills in gaps that would have gone unfilled for who knows how long.
This particular situation feels almost star-crossed, because the album of his that I’ve listened to more than any other isn’t an official release — it’s just a download of the live set he did before his 2011 Letterman performance. I love Adams in that setting, where he can tell discursive stories and jokes and jump between eras of his career. Many have said that Adams needs to self-edit more, but the flexibility of the solo acoustic environment suits him well, I think, and I love having two full nights of his music and storytelling at my fingertips. One hell of a raffle prize, that’s for sure.
One more note before I go — BK Music continues to amaze me with their customer service, from the good-natured way they approach the chaos of Record Store Day, to their willingness to go above and beyond to help you find what you need. If you haven’t been to BK, I recommend going and getting to know the nice people who work there. Such a great place.
I had a whole other News and Notes post written, but there are a few Prince-related things I’d like to share instead.
Like a lot of people probably did, I found out he died via Twitter. It’ll most certainly be a “Where were you when…” moment for me, though where I was seems so lame: Zaxby’s. Waiting for my order of chicken fingers. The juxtaposition of such an inspiring cultural figure and such an uninspiring setting is enough to make me want to make some serious life changes.
Like David Bowie, Prince represented, for me, a profound bravery. A willingness to be super weird in the name of being true to yourself. I feel intense, normative pressure — I’ve felt it my entire life — and I’m not sure I’ll ever manage to strip enough of that away to be all the weirdo I could be, but listening to artists like Bowie and Prince is one way to experience weirdness vicariously and safely. It’s a pale shade of actually putting yourself out there, but it strikes me as a crucial part of the enormous contribution that Prince made.
Social media platforms can facilitate a kind of performative grief that I’m not crazy about, but I do like seeing pictures of the records people are listening to at a time like this. There’s a line from Almost Famous that I’ve always loved, and I think it applies here: “If you ever get lonely, just go to the record store and visit your friends.” Prince may be gone, but you can still pick up and hold a copy of 1999. It’s a real thing with size, weight, and shape. It’s a comfort. Seeing that other people are holding and spinning the same albums — it’s like a big, diffuse vigil. I joined in by spinning Around the World in a Day while cooking dinner last night.
Records are especially important in this case, because of Prince’s vigilance when it came to pulling his music from streaming services and sites. You can’t just go to YouTube or Spotify and channel memories that way. I don’t have all his albums, but I have enough to last me until the inevitable and unfortunate postmortem price gouging runs its course. When it does, I recommend getting your hands on hard copies too. It’s the right thing to do generally, but it’s extra meaningful this time around.
The last record of his that I bought before he died was a used copy of the Batman soundtrack, and I’d been meaning to write a thing about what that album says about Prince’s character. Doing the soundtrack for a superhero movie that your label’s parent company is making sounds like a recipe for disaster, but he absolutely dove in, writing songs from characters’ perspectives and changing his iconic look to match the universe that Tim Burton created, and the album was a huge success. Some of that has to do with cross-platform promotion and the movie itself being a hit, but still — that spirit of taking something frivolous and fully inhabiting it creatively says a lot about the kind of artist Prince was, I think.
Overheard at work yesterday: “There is nothing better than when Prince comes on the radio.”
My band does a cover of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which was written by Prince. Somebody got a crappy iPhone recording of our version at practice one night, and I put it on Soundcloud a couple years back. It’s pretty harsh — watch out for a jarring, loud start — but it’s more in the vein of original arrangement than Sinéad O’Connor’s, so you might get a kick out it. I definitely do when we play it. Soloing during a Prince song feels incredible, like total freedom. Like you’ve been temporarily transported to another musical dimension where confidence is infinite and gravity doesn’t exist. I’d like to think that’s exactly where he is now.
You Hear That 