The Hot Seats

2016 in Review: Stuff I Wrote

/ You Hear That?!? / Leave a comment

river-city-magazine

So I’m going to attempt to end this jerk of a year with five wrap-up posts in five days. Fingers crossed this works. I tend to overwrite these things until they become albatross-y, so I’ll try to keep things snappy, starting with a quick list of links to music writing I did in 2016. Add in weekly contributions to the Off Your Radar newsletter and an August appearance on Sound Gaze and I can definitively say that this is the most blabbing about music I’ve done in a year.

Many thanks — seriously, too many to mention here — to the people I interviewed and the people who made what I wrote sound better and look prettier. Y’all know who you are, and I hope you also know how awesome and appreciated you are. Lots of fun stuff in the works for 2017. Until then…

Featured Off Your Radar weeks:

For Boomer Magazine:

For Richmond Navigator online

For River City Magazine

For RVA Magazine

For West End’s Best

 

The Hot Seats

/ You Hear That?!? / Leave a comment

The Hot Seats

Call it creative vision. Call it a sense of purpose. Clarity. Self-awareness. However you want to describe it, talking to drummer/percussionist Jake Sellers convinced me: The Hot Seats have it.

I walked away from our recent interview with a stomach full of delicious Pho Tay Do food and a huge amount of respect for the group, which has won fans on both sides of the Atlantic. They strike me as protectors of something vital — something funny and fearless and closer to the actual “root” of the roots music that’s experienced a recent resurgence.

This quote from the article might say it better than any other:

“I think we very much as a band like [what’s] scratchy, looser … I don’t want to say dangerous, but less safe. Take a chance. We’re certainly willing to fall on our faces trying a song we’ve never played before in front of an audience because that’s where the excitement is.”

I love that, and I want to thank Jake for taking the time to meet and explore what he and the band are doing. Click here to read the whole River City Magazine article, or pick up a hard copy at one of these locations.

The Hot Seats — “I Ain’t No Better Now” [Spotify/iTunes]

Seen/Eaten/Heard

/ You Hear That?!? / Leave a comment

Early Bird

I love Early Bird. Lately, it’s become routine for me to check the clock after depositing Baby YHT at daycare to see if I have time for a pre-work biscuit run. Sadly, this routine has an expiration date — they’ll soon be moving into a bigger space on Robinson St. in the Fan — but I can’t be too sad, because I’m thrilled to see Early Bird doing so well.

I got to interview Tim the owner for Richmond Grid magazine a while back, and he’s one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. He’s also got great taste in music, and one of my favorite things about stopping by is that we always end up talking about what we’ve been listening to or which shows are coming up. I was there on Tuesday, and in the span of just a couple minutes, we talked about the Hot Seats (I recently interviewed Jake, he took guitar lessons from Josh), Alison Krauss, and the Robert Plant/Cheap Trick show that took place at the Richmond Coliseum in 1988.

Oh, and I got a delicious andouille cheddar biscuit, a brownie, and two pralines. Happy Mardis Gras to me.

The Hot Seats — “Darling Of Mine” [Spotify/iTunes]

Cheap Trick — “Southern Girls” [Spotify/iTunes]

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss — “Killing The Blues” [Spotify/iTunes]