Step 1: Immediately click on the link in this Pitchfork tweet about Natalie Prass’ performance on Jools Holland. Watch video of Prass’ A+ performance.
#live
Avers
Can’t let the week come to and end without saying a few words about Avers’ fantastic set at the tUnE-yArDs show on Monday.
Son Lux
Got to see Son Lux open for tUnE-yArDs on Monday night. I’d consider it a new speed record for a band going from unfamiliar to beloved.
Friday Cheers
Backstage with Richmond’s Brewery Boom
Talk about arduous research. I got to write an article for River City Magazine about the symbiotic relationship between Richmond’s breweries and bands. Lots of boozy fun was had, and I’m super-duper excited to share the results — click here to check it out over at Richmond Navigator’s site.
Natalie Prass
At some point last year, I stopped writing about the shows I was going to. I’ve still been taking notes on my phone — quick bullet point observations of songs and performers — but I haven’t been committing them to blog paper lately. Last night’s Natalie Prass show was one hell of a wake-up call, however, and I can’t resist sharing this time around. Here are my notes as they would have looked if I’d been able to pull a Zack Morris and pause the show to wax rhapsodic about what I was seeing. (As a side note, I once told my parents during an episode of Saved By the Bell that I wanted to change my name to Zack. They didn’t oblige, which seems like the right call in retrospect.)
Backstage with Richmond’s Music Venues
This was fun. As part of a River City Magazine article, I got to interview folks who work at some of Richmond’s most beloved venues about their favorite shows and live music moments. When I was done working on it, a few things became clear:
White Laces
This feels like a moment — the kind worth acknowledging and consciously savoring as it goes by.
William Bell
You look tense. How’s your week been? Cray? I feel ya. I think we all just need to relax a little bit.
I’ll tell you how I’m planning to relax tonight… William Bell. The Richmond Folk Festival. Just look at the album cover above — that dude is clearly qualified to help you find a more leisurely mindset.
Landlady
[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.
You Hear That 