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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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Florence + the Machine

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Ceremonials

One of my favorite podcasts in the entire universe is Radiolab, a show based out of WNYC that features all sorts of stories about science, not to mention some of the snazziest editing and production I’ve heard anywhere, ever, in anything. They can turn the painfully boring stuff that used to make your mind wander in the direction of bludgeoning your high school chemistry teacher into riveting radio gold.

In January, they did a show about the bad side of human nature, and spent some time talking about an experiment that was done at Yale in which (long story short) a psychologist named Stanley Milgram tested how much pain people were willing to inflict on other people in the name of science. While, on the surface, the experiment showed how obedient people can be, one of the most interesting findings was that when a white-coat-wearing authority figure told reticent subjects that they had “no other choice” but to continue administering painful electroshocks, 100% of the people told them to stick the experiment where the sun don’t shine. People really, really don’t like being bossed around. I didn’t realize it until hearing about Milgram’s experiment, but I feel similarly about negative record reviews.

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Jack White

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Just a quick post about a quick video that hit me like a ton of bricks when I saw it over the weekend. No… a ton of bricks seems way too slow. This video for Jack White’s new song “Sixteen Saltines,” which features a terrifying hellscape where kids are left to their own (apparently) depraved and destructive devices, is more like the audiovisual equivalent of speeding down a residential street at 70 mph and blasting every single mailbox along the way to tiny bits with a baseball bat. The song itself clocks in at just 2:36 — good news, because I don’t know if I could have stood one more moment of this video. Not because it’s gory or scary in a conventional sense, but because it traffics in a special kind of anxiety that may very well have been extracted, Monster’s, Inc.-style, directly from the brains of worried parents whose children are out past curfew. But as hard as it is to watch, and as little interest as I have in watching it again, this is definitely one of the best, most complementary videos I’ve seen in a long, long time. These disturbing, impossible-to-forget images are the perfect face for the song’s aggressive tone and instantaneously catchy “who’s jealous who’s jealous who’s jealous who’s jealous of who” melody. Seriously — listen below or watch above and try to get that puppy out of your head in 5 minutes or less. Ain’tgonnahappen. Look for “Sixteen Saltines” on Jack White’s very first solo album, entitled Blunderbuss, out April 24 (you can pre-order it here).

Jack White — “Sixteen Saltines” [Spotify/iTunes]

Lady Gaga

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The Edge Of Glory

One of the best things about living in Richmond is the Monument 10K. It’s an incredible event, well worth a trip if you live out of town. There’s so much to love. The frenetic energy. The coordinated costumes. The overflowing goodwill that inspires RVA residents to line the course and cheer on the runners, even when it’s cold and rainy. The fact that many of those residents are holding solo cups that are themselves overflowing with bloody marys and mimosas. The nightmarish brunch scene after the race is over. Wait… that part sucks. All that aside, the best part has to be the live music. A staggering number of local bands plug into strategically located generators and provide entertainment throughout the race, right up until the very last walkers are swept off the course by the van of shame. It’s a herculean musical effort, given that it starts at dawn, lasts up to four hours and the only pay is a race t-shirt and a case of water. So maybe you can understand why I feel guilty as hell that, after several years of playing this gig myself, I ran the race for the very first time last Saturday and… I uhhh… listened to my iPod the entire time. As sacrilegious as this may be, I CAN’T HELP IT — I love the solipsistic trance induced by running with music blasting directly off my ear drums via earbuds and mp3s. It is, without exaggeration, one of my favorite things in the entire universe. And as perfect as Dana Buoy and Fun. proved to be for inducing my hyp-jog-ic state, unbeknownst to me, my friend Travis was taking this idea to a whooooole ‘nuther level. You’re going to think I’m lying when I say this, but I’m not… Travis listened to the Sultan & Ned Shepard remix of Lady Gaga’s song “The Edge of Glory” on repeat FOR THE ENTIRE 10K. That’s 6.2 miles of Gaga. Wild, right? As I understand it, they’ve used similar methods at Gitmo to extract information from suspected terrorists. The moment he told me about his marathon Gaga (non)mix, I knew what I had to do — I had to throw myself into the belly of the very same beast. And that’s just what I did early Wednesday evening, taking off on a 5-mile run with the wind in my face and Lady Gaga burrowing her way deeper and deeper into my consciousness with every step. It was intense, but I lasted 42:34. I believe Travis lasted a solid 20 or so minutes more in the 10K. So… how long can you last? Download the remix here (you can preview the shorter radio edit below) and see how long you can listen on repeat. You don’t have to be running; you can be driving, gardening, cooking, whatever. But proceed with caution. The Gaga Challenge is not for the faint of heart. I have seen the edge of glory, and what has been seen cannot be un-seen. Good luck and godspeed.

Lady Gaga — “The Edge Of Glory” (Sultan & Ned Shepard remix) [Spotify/iTunes]

 

Dr. John

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Locked Down

The role of the record producer has always been somewhat mysterious to me. I mean, I think I have a pretty good idea of what they do — recruit backing musicians; oversee tracking, mixing and mastering; provide general creative direction, yadda, yadda, yadda — but when I was younger, I pictured the producer as a suit-wearing, arms-crossing grump who hung out in the control room, called people “baby” and yelled things like “You tell that sonofabitch that I’ll rip his head off and shit down his throat!” into a Zack Morris cell phone. Crazy, right? And I realize now that the linchpin that held this warped mental image together was the assumption that the producer was older, wiser and more powerful than the musicians.

Two recent albums have helped sweep away the few remaining shards of this ridiculous image, in large part because their producers are a whole generation younger than the artists they’re advising, and because the artists are already legends in the recording industry. The first of the albums was Mavis Staples’ You Are Not Alone, on which Jeff Tweedy of Wilco — 28 years her junior — has the producer’s credit (he wrote a few songs and played some guitar as well). In a way, it felt like he was curating as much as he was producing and participating, given Staples’ place in the soul canon and the reverence that Tweedy showed in all the interviews that accompanied the album’s release. The whole project had a wonderfully positive feeling to it, and the album itself is fantastic (I wrote a short post about it last May).

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EMA

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Past Life Martyred Saints

I’ve always considered this blog a safe place to share even the most embarrassing stories/insights/confessions, and today I’d like to share a noteworthy and useful discovery that is shrouded in a fairly thick layer of moral ambiguity. [takes deep breath] OK, here goes…

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Daniel Rossen

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Silent Hour/Golden Mile

Back in early February, good friend of the blog Greg and I played a game called Adjective Battleship, wherein we tried to sum up songs we liked using 5 words or less. There were some fun similarities in our descriptions, the spookiest of which being that Future Islands’ tune “Balance” made us both think of elephants. Hmm. As weird as that was, I think the most meaningfully similar descriptions belonged to Daniel Rossen’s dark and beautiful “Saint Nothing” (mine was “Rainy days are pretty too” and Greg’s was “A smile buried alive”). I had no idea how close we were to the truth until last Monday, when Pitchfork posted a brief but revealing interview with Rossen, who spends most of his music-making hours as one quarter of the brilliant, brooding Brooklyn band Grizzly Bear. In the interview, Rossen talks about how alienated he felt after finishing an especially long and grueling tour with the Grizzlies, saying things like, “I wasn’t really sure what I was doing, and if I really even wanted to make music anymore.” Heavy stuff. The rest of the interview focused on Rossen’s stunning and highly recommendable solo EP, Silent Hour/Golden Mile, which just came out yesterday. Please don’t let the gloomy introduction fool you. There’s a reason both Greg and I alluded to positivity in our descriptions of “Saint Nothing.” One of the things I love most about the EP is how tantalizingly close each dissonant moment comes to a blissful resolution that hovers just inches out of reach. The natural urge to obtain that shiny, withheld joy results in a deeply enthralling and rewarding listen. It also results in kids getting stuck in those claw game machines. I mean, who hasn’t that happened to, right? Start your own claw game by sampling Rossen’s “Up On High” and “Silent Song” below. If you dig ’em, click here to buy Silent Hour/Golden Mile on iTunes. Who knows what you’ll snag!

Daniel Rossen — “Up On High“

Daniel Rossen — “Silent Song“

Gotye

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Making Mirrors

Let me start by saying that if you haven’t watched/heard Bruce Springsteen’s keynote speech from SXSW, you absolutely, positively must watch/hear it. Go on, I’ll wait. Done yet? Great! Wasn’t that amazing?!? Using Elvis performing on the Ed Sullivan show as a jumping-off point, the Boss gives a fascinating music history lesson, walking us through his development as a musician, how popular music has evolved over the past 50 or so years, and the fractured yet hopeful nature of today’s musical landscape. And while I could spend all day writing about takeaways from his speech (and probably will at some point), I wanted to share with you one thing he said that rang so true that me and Chris Tucker did this when he said it. After commenting about how heartfelt musical expression can’t be confined by genre or instrumentation, Springsteen let loose the following thesis, set off in its own paragraph for dramatic effect…

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Balkan Beat Box

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Give

Late this past Saturday night, I received a pair emails, which Gmail dutifully grouped into a conversation, notifying me that my friend Tex, with whom I’d been real-life conversing just hours earlier, had gifted me some music via iTunes. 2 albums worth, to be exact. This is a picture taken of me moments after reading those emails.

As if that wasn’t awesome enough, one of the albums he gave me came with a set of listening instructions. I love when this happens. It always makes me think about Almost Famous and the note William Miller’s big sis leaves him about lighting a candle, listening to Tommy and seeing his entire future. Maybe because my own big sis was a similarly powerful musical influence when I was William’s age. Hmmmm. Anyhoo, Tex’s instructions for listening to Balkan Beat Box’s conveniently named album Give were as follows: “Listen to it backwards and let me know what you think.”

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Fun.

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Some Nights

Did you know that Cher’s record company wanted to remove the now-famous auto-tuning that producer Mark Taylor added to the vocals of her 1998 hit, “Believe“? Crazy, right? What do you think the world would be like nowadays if Warner Brothers had gotten their way? Would we have flying cars? Would Lehman Brothers still have collapsed? Would there be an independent Palestinian state? What would T-Pain be doing at this very moment? We’ll never know, because Cher responded to her label’s request by saying that the digital effect on her voice would be removed “over [her] dead body.” Well then. But with all due respect to “Believe,” it stands to reason that, much like a synthesized disease that squirms its way out of a top-secret government lab, setting in motion a zombie apocalypse that sweeps the entire planet, leaving nothing but horror, violence and destruction in its wake: auto-tune was bound to get out at some point. OK, maybe that’s a hyperbolic analogy. And in truth, I’m not campaigning against auto-tune at all. On the contrary, auto-tune is a fascinating phenomenon to think about, especially when you’re dealing with a group like Fun. and a singer like Nate Ruess.

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