#it was also the first song i ever did fingerpicking

[literatureisdying]

the first song i wrote was about my first love and despite the lack of songwriting experience i had when i wrote it (which is very evident looking back lol) it’s still one of my favorites

[papercherries]

I've not really had the motivation to write anything for the past couple days. Hence the photos. I'm just floating at the moment, waiting for something to happen. It's been getting hotter which has been awful for me but I got paid from work finally so I bought myself a banjo. It sounds pretty and I looked a bit mad on the bus because I got it used and the guy didn't have a case so I had to carry it bare. My fault for not thinking ahead. Though some of the chords don't sound right to my little brain and learning fingerpicking has been interesting because my fingerpicking is mediocre at best on guitar.

It's a bit dirty, I'll clean it this week. Though it smells like the guys. It's a very typical house smell but I could never understand why some houses smell different from others. The amount of cleaning is obviously a factor but I imagine it's also affected by other random little things like what's cooked there or where their water comes from. Maybe it just smells because it was played at heated live events and it's just the culmination of those sweaty rooms. I'd rather not think about that. It falls out of tune quite quickly but I suspect the strings are quite new. The stringing is very neat and it stands out from my other stringed instruments as the strings are wound (or cut) so there is no loose strings. I haven't got a strap for it (I only have two in total, one for my acoustic guitars and one for my electric) so I stole some rope from my friend who works at the boatyard. I am very aware I've fastened it wrong by tying the string under the string just above the fretboard and having it's usual place at the bottom. But it's become a small signature of mine, as I also commit this sin on my acoustics.

Some songs just sound so much better, or they fit me better. AJJ songs are really fun to play, Back when I was 4 by Jeffery Lewis was a fun surprise, a lot of Anti-Folk stuff feels quite nice. Though it's mostly because I've only had it for 2 days and I still don't know all the "basic" chords (I've learnt all the "base" chords (A,B,C,D,E,F,G) but not all their minor/sharp counterparts, let alone all the variations). I'll probably try learning Defiance, Ohio songs, I just haven't got to it yet. OH though I have been playing "I wanna boi" by Sister Wife Sex Strike. As much as I'd love to play it live, the original band who made the song are problematic, but I suppose in a way it could be reclamation? Does that really work in this case? Not my place to say currently. I just think Sister Wife Sex Strike's version is pretty awesome.

I'm picking up my cat tomorrow. I am very excited. Though, I'm not sure how she will feel about the banjo.

All the actors who have applied for my film, who I have then got in touch with have ghosted me. It is causing an awful lot of scheduling issues as I can't find actors for my film. This needs to be fixed within a week, god help me.

Emotionally, I can feel the impending stress from the shoot, edit and sound design all falling on me very slowly. I also need to start my production file. Perhaps I'll do that whilst I'm picking up my cat. I need to get a good grade. I'll get a 2:1 at least but I'd rather get a first as I've already said to some masters courses that I will. Whoops.

I'm trying to find more things to write about as my washing is still in the dryer for another 20 minutes.

I've been playing through Fallout 1. I think I was encouraged by all the fallout content that has been on my youtube feed for the past 4 weeks. I am not immune to propaganda. I'd never been able to get through the game before but I am the furthest I've ever been and I'm really enjoying it. I think Baldur's Gate 3 gave me a much better understanding of the genre which then allowed me to better understand how to undertake Fallout 1, as I didn't really understand Fallout 1 as a Dnd-esque rpg but more like Fallout 3, New Vegas and 4.

The fallout show however did piss me off at first. But the longer I've left it, the less frustrated I've been with the show. I still think Besthesda's "everything should still be a wasteland" take is a little dumb but I'm interested where they'll take the show now. However, the end still annoys me. Mostly because that "place" didn't seem like it would fall, honestly the area seemed too populated for that to even occur. The only option I can think of is Nuke's or (skip this park if you don't want to figure out what I am talking about) the Sierra Madre. But, the show as a whole is pretty entertaining, whilst it doesn't explore the political aspects I enjoy from Fallout, it does capture a lot of the series charm and what makes Fallout, Fallout. I am also quite surprised they refrained from showing a deathclaw or a radscorpion. Though, the missing family member thing was an immediate red flag for me. Just screamed "I AM BETHESDA FALLOUT". Not to say that's a bad thing.

Though, I did see a really interesting crackpot theory on R/Fallout (or I may have seen it somewhere else) that suggested this "chapter" of the Brotherhood was an extension of the legion. As they seem to be less "BOS like" and share a lot of qualities with the legion, the branding, the more latin names. The brutality, that just wasn't present with the rest of the brotherhood stories. Though, I will say I am not very well versed in the Brotherhood of Steel lore. But this would be a super interesting place to take the brotherhood and I would really respect that creativity.

7 minutes left on the timer. I think, I am out of ideas. I am really tired and I just want to go to sleep but I need to pack, the only reason I am awake is because my flatmate took forever to take his stuff out the washer because he was playing Rainbow Six.

I think that's all I got.

[ofbooksandaesthetics]

Battle of the Bands

Attack on Titan/ Shingeki no Kyojin 

Levi/Reader

Modern Band AU

Summary: As the guitarist of The 104th, you are invited to play with your favourite band The Scouts. 

Warnings: slight profanity but not much 

Author’s note: I listened to Queen of White Lies by Orion Experience 10 times in one bus journey and couldn’t help but imagine Jean singing it about Mikasa. And voila! This imagine was born :) 

From a young age, you’d always been obsessed with music. From your dad playing jazz on a lazy Sunday afternoon to your mum playing R&B as she cleaned, you had always been surrounded by it. It followed you everywhere so it was no surprise when you were gifted a guitar for your 9th birthday. 

You spent hours each day practising fingerpicking, then moving onto chords and then fully-fledged songs. As you grew so did tastes - and your guitar collection. 

Before moving into the 6th grade, your family moved for a new job, leaving you without friends and having to start a new life in the city of Trost. The one thing that was ever consistent was the strings of your guitar and the beats from the speakers, which became your solace in the coming weeks. And said beats caught the attention of your new next-door neighbour. 

Jean Kirstein was also massively into music, and when he walked past your house he could hear the amp blaring from your open window. He became enthralled and would often leave his window open to catch even just a few notes. 

The Saturday before school started, Jean was forced by his mother to introduce himself to you (she said you had to have at least one friend before starting school) and by doing so Mrs Kirstein caused a life long friendship to bloom. He was forced into your house by your mother and lead upstairs to your room. He was greeted by band posters, from MCR to The Beatles, and an acoustic and electric guitar hanging on the wall side by side. But what caught his gaze was the massive “SCOUTS” poster above your bed. 

“WOW! That’s so cool, you like The Scouts!” He exclaimed as he entered your room, causing you to jump from your magazine and stare at the brown-haired boy invading your space.

“WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?” You shouted, giving your mum a quizzical glare as she smiled at the boy's excitement. Your voice seemed to pull the boy out of his oasis and he met your eyes with a blush and a shrug.

“I’m Jean. My mum sent me, we live next door.” Before you could introduce yourself, he had already started to speak again “I’ve heard you playing your guitar. You’re really good!” 

At this your mum left the two of you two it, only returning 3 hours later to find you both on the floor, with you playing whilst Jean sang along. Noticing the time, Jean jumped up remembering his mum warning to be back by dinnertime. 

“It’s been great meeting you! If you want I can meet you outside on Monday and I’ll introduce you to my friends. They’d love to hear you play too! Connie’s really into the drums and Marco has been learning bass.”

Hearing this your eyes lit up and your mum’s heart warmed at the idea of you finally enjoying your new life.

“That sounds great, I’ll see you then!” You called as your mum lead him out.

                                         4 YEARS LATER

The years passed quickly and it didn’t take you long to forget the pain of your old life and become enamoured with your new friends. Jean did indeed introduce to his friends Connie, Sasha and Marco, and it didn’t take long for you to become the best of friends. The five of you would all meet Connie’s garage, sometimes just chatting but more often than not bringing along your instruments for a jam session. Four years went by of you playing lead guitar, Marco jamming on bass, Connie smashing on percussion and Jean accompanying with his gruff drawl, whilst Sasha sat atop of the counter, sadly not having any musical talents other than occasional tamborining. And the four years went by easily until Sasha let out a suggestion.

“You guys should start a band. Like a proper one, with gigs and shit” She declared, soon after stuffing her mouth with a cake Mrs Springer had brought in. 

“See at least someone appreciates my musical talents” quipped Jean with a quirk of his eyebrows, causing you all to laugh. 

“I’ve got to admit, I’m down! We’ve been playing for years, we even played at last years prom.” Seeing no reason against the idea, you voiced your opinion. 

“Yeah but that was prom. We know all of them anyway, if we did gigs it would be to strangers and critics and stuff” Huffed Connie. 

“Yeah, and potential talent scouts! Imagine if we got signed! What do you think Marco?” Jean turned to face he freckled boy awaiting his response. 

“I guess it could be fun.” He said, tilting his head to the side and turning to Connie. “I think we should” 

With a consensus of four out of five, all eyes were set on Connie, pleading him to agree. He spluttered, not expecting you all to be serious. After a moment of staring at you all incredulously, he finally gave in.

“Fine! But if we got told we’re shit it’s on you guys” He sighed, but was drowned out by all your cheers. 

                       2 YEARS LATER

After that day, you had all put in the effort to perfecting your craft and coming up with your own songs. You and Jean would have weekly sleepovers, pulling all-nighters to get the perfect verses. And it wasn’t long until you booked your first gig, which was a success. Nearly the whole grade had turned up to support you, and you soon became a local legend. And in honour of them, you had named your band The 104th, due to being the 104th grade since your school was founded. 

Your increased fame, got you gigs outside of Trost, on larger stages than the small bars you were used to. You had released your first album and we’re having a small jam session, when Sasha’s, who had taken up the role as manager, phone rang. You all carried on with your conversation until Sasha quickly stood up and ran across the room, her voice getting slightly louder, causing you all to stare at her.

“OMG! That sounds great, we can be there for the soundcheck in less than an hour. Thank you so much, for this opportunity. We appreciate it! Thank you, bye!” She exclaimed with wide eyes as her smile grew and grew. After ending the call she whipped around, before letting out a screech 

“OI, OI! What’s going on?” Asked Connie, as he walked up to Sasha flicking her forehead as she squealed again. 

“GUESS WHO’S OPENING FOR THE SCOUTS?!” She all but screamed whilst running to the front of the garage and throwing your jackets at you all. Realising what she meant you stood in a state of shock before opening your mouth. 

“What do you mean? Opening for The Scouts. As in THE SCOUTS? They’re playing tonight, we can’t open for them.” You justified, meeting Jean’s stunned gaze. 

You two had always imagined what it would be like to meet your legends, let alone open for them. After your initial meeting, the two of you had gone on for hours about your favourite songs by the band and sang along to them. You had even let him in on your crush on the lead guitarist, Levi Ackerman, for heaven’s sake. As good as an opportunity this was, you were a nervous wreck. It was one thing to play on the same stage that your favourite band had stepped on, but to play with them and meet them. That was a thing of its own. 

You were knocked from your thoughts by a shoe to your head, and as you focused back in you watched Connie running around like a headless chicken. Attempting to back up his drum kit, he panicked until Sasha assured him there’d be one there for him. The rest of you seemed to kick into action and you ran about gathering your equipment before rushing home to grab gig-worthy clothes. You all met up back at Connie’s house before all piling into Jean’s minivan. Connie and Sasha were as loud as always but you, Jean and Marco seemed to still be too shocked to talk.

As you rolled up to the venue, you saw a queue of about 20 Scout super fans lined up three hours before the gig even started. You wondered how many were your fans, as Sasha had sent out announcements on every social media site possible after you guys left. You hauled your guitar case out of the van before following behind Sasha into the main doors of the venue. The crew were rushing about everywhere, and if you weren’t already used to the atmosphere you were sure you’d pass out. As you walked into the main hall, your eyes fell to the band on top of the stage. All five of you froze, in the realisation that you were in the same room as your childhood heroes. Putting your kit down, you watched as Hange Zoe lazily sat on her drum set, tapping out a quiet beat, as the lead singer Erwin, counted in the beat. Miche Zacharias swayed his hips as he set out the bassline, and Levi almost languidly strummed his electric guitar. 

The five of you were pulled behind the stage before you could watch their practice start but you could still hear it as they performed their soundcheck. Experienced in the world of gigs, the four of you prepped your instruments, tuning them in case they had been messed up in the hurry of your departure. And by the time you’d finished the Scouts were walking towards you. Hange greeted you first. 

“HI! OMG, we’ve heard so much about you guys. You guys are practically famous around here!” She blurted out, her excitement surprising you all. Connie seemed to be frozen as his inspiration complimented you guys. Miche let out a greeting and moved on to sit down. Leaving Erwin and Levi in front of you. Erwin stepped forward and placed out his hand, shaking and greeting you all individually. Now there was just Levi left. 

Your eyes met his and you couldn’t help but blush, as he gave a small nod. Appreciative of the small gesture, you calmed slightly until Jean ruined it

“HI! We love you guys so much. Y/N even has a crush on Levi!” He blurted, his face turning bright red after realising what he had said. You gasped and without thinking smacked him across the head. 

“WHAT THE HELL’S WRONG WITH YOU? WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT?” But before you could apologise and defend yourself to Levi and Erwin, you were escorted to the stage for your own soundcheck. Glaring at Jean, you got in position, and were done in half an hour. 

After the soundcheck, you were given time to rest, giving you all time to calm down, after the more than lively introduction. You eventually forgave Jean for his outburst but not without consequences. He would be carrying your gear for the next year’s worth of gigs.

You hadn't yet gained back the confidence to talk Levi but had spoken to the other members of The Scouts. Miche and Erwin told you about how their touring band had ditched them last minute and how they needed another opening band pronto. You were astonished to find out that Hange herself had requested you guys, but it filled your heart with warmth knowing someone as famous as her held your small-town band in high regards. 

Everyone could sense your apprehension to talking to Levi but we’re all shocked when the quiet man joined you whilst getting a drink. You almost blushed when you noticed him next to you but pushed the feeling down and smiled at him. Although Jean had embarrassed you beyond belief, there was no reason to push away your childhood dream and miss the opportunity to talk to him. 

“You know you we’re what inspired me to start learning the guitar?” You said. Levi didn’t reply but you decided his silence wasn’t in annoyance. “My parents were always super into music anyway but when I heard your guys' debut album it pushed me towards the guitar.” You watched him finish making his tea and leave but before he sat down, he turned his head over his shoulder. 

“I’m glad to hear it” He replied, turning again and leaving. You smiled, happy that he didn’t think you were a complete freak. 

                      2 HOURS LATER 

The time had finally arrived. From the side of the stage, you could see a sea of people filling the venue and could hear the symphony of chatter. The boys were stood next to you, panting with nerves. You had never performed to such a large crowd before. You took a sharp breath before turning to them. 

“Come on boys! We’ve done this before and we’ll do it again. This is just another small step before we get our own main stage like this!” Your small pep talk seemed to calm the boys and caught the attention of Erwin and Levi who were waiting to watch your performance from the side-lines. You smiled at the two but we’re now filled with dread as you realised they would be watching. You threw that fear away and gave Marco a side hug as you fixed your strap, and then followed Jean to the stage. 

The lights blinded you but once your vision cleared you all but gasped at the sheer amount of sweaty bodies in front of you. You beamed brightly and gave a wink to a figure in the balcony. At least you could seem confident even if you were dying inside.  

The beat of the drum surrounded you and Marco’s strumming blared out from the amps. You started plucking at your guitar and forgot about the crowd. Jean’s gravely word floated out into the dark room, and it was easy to forget you were on a stage and instead it felt like you were back in Connie’s house. As the song reached the chorus, you and Marco joined in, accompanying Jean. Eventually, you loosened up to a point where all three of you were able to dance slightly to the beat during the bridge. This seemed to get the crowd going even more and you let out a laugh, completely forgetting your inhibitions. [I imagined them performing Queen of White Lies]

Once the song finished, Jean introduced himself, and you prepared yourself for another half an hour of playing and dancing. But it passed quickly and before you knew it you we’re all sat on the sofa. Connie was still flushed chugging on his 3rd bottle of water whilst the rest of you leant back with smiles upon your faces. Your attention was piqued as The Scouts took the stage and you all shouted words of encouragement to them. This brought a smile to their faces, including a small smirk on Levi’s. You all rushed to the sidelines to watch and we’re in awe as you saw the four of them play as if they were reading each other's minds. It was as if they were symbiotic, each knowing what to do without even the slightest hesitation. 

Even though you tried to focus on all of them, your focus always came back to Levi. You watched how his brow rested into a scowl as he neared a faster part of the song and how he threw his head back when lost in the moment. Your eyes widened when he took his shirt off after four songs, which Jean noticed, and started to nudge you for. Time seemed to go by so quickly that you barely noticed them finish their final song. They waved to the crowd as they left but stayed in the wings as the crowd screamed for an encore. Erwin still seemed to smile and nudged Levi towards the five of you. 

“Do you guys want to join us for the encore?” He asked gruffly, his eyes set on you. You looked at the rest of the band and you all nodded before you verbally replied. 

“Of course! What song are you thinking?” 

“Nirvana - Love Buzz? You guys know it?” Miche asked, wiping some water from his chin. You all nodded in unison and before you know it you were all kitted up and back on stage. 

The crowd went wild seeing both The Scouts and The 104th back on stage and you couldn’t help but smile as you found Levi stood next to you. You guys let loose on the song and you even attempted to have a little contest with Levi during the guitar solo for dominance. This gained a smile for the man, and you guys finished the song in no time. 

Leaving the stage for the last time, you gave out a clumsy bow before running off stage. You guys went to get changed and pack up your gear but before you could get in the van the Scouts we’re back in front of you. Erwin took the lead yet again. 

“We loved having you guys on stage with us! And after some thinking, we’d love it if you replaced our old band with us on the rest of the tour.” 

At this Jean slammed the van door and stared at Erwin in shock. The five of you looked at each other in shock. The silence was eventually broken by Connie, who let out a scream as he ran around the van, followed by Sasha letting out profanities. The rest of you gushed and thanked the other band profusely not knowing how to appropriately respond. After formally Sasha accepted the other, Hange launched into giving out hugs, whilst Miche and Erwin gave out handshakes. Levi ignored the rest of your bandmates and made his way to you.

“I look forward to more guitar battles.” Levi remarked as dryly as ever but with a small smirk playing on his lips. Luckily this time, the others were too distracted and you were able to reply with some confidence. 

“You mean to look forward to losing right?” you quipped, knowing this would be the start of something great. 

[bananaofswifts]

Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’: Album Review

It’s hard to remember any contemporary pop superstar that has indulged in a more serious, or successful, act of sonic palette cleansing than Swift has with her eighth album, a highly subdued but rich affair written and recorded in quarantine conditions.

While most of us spent the last four months putting on some variation of “the quarantine 15,” Taylor Swift has been secretly working on the “Folklore” 16. Sprung Thursday night with less than a day’s notice, her eighth album is a fully rounded collection of songs that sounds like it was years in the interactive making, not the product of a quarter-year’s worth of file-sharing from splendid isolation. Mind you, the words “pandemic hero” should probably be reserved for actual frontline workers and not topline artistes. But there’s a bit of Rosie the Riveter spirit in how Swift has become the first major pop artist to deliver a first-rank album that went from germination to being completely locked down in the midst of a national lockdown.

The themes and tone of “Folklore,” though, are a little less “We can do it!” and a little more “Can we do it?” Because this new collection is Swift’s most overtly contemplative — as opposed to covertly reflective — album since the fan favorite “Red.” Actually, that’s an understatement. “Red” seems like a Chainsmokers album compared to the wholly banger-free “Folklore,” which lives up to the first half of its title by divesting itself of any lingering traces of Max Martin-ized dance-pop and presenting Swift, afresh, as your favorite new indie-electro-folk/chamber-pop balladeer. For fans that relished these undertones of Swift’s in the past, it will come as a side of her they know and love all too well. For anyone who still has last year’s “You Need to Calm Down” primarily in mind, it will come as a jolting act of manual downshifting into actually calming down. At least this one won’t require an album-length Ryan Adams remake to convince anyone that there’s songwriting there. The best comparison might be to take “Clean,” the unrepresentative denouement of “1989,” and… imagine a whole album of that. Really, it’s hard to remember any pop star in our lifetimes that has indulged in a more serious act of sonic palette cleansing.

The tone of this release won’t come as a midnight shock to anyone who took spoilers from the announcement earlier in the day that a majority of the tracks were co-written with and produced by the National’s Aaron Dessner, or that the man replacing Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie as this album’s lone duet partner is Bon Iver. No matter how much credit you may have given Swift in the past for thinking and working outside of her box, a startled laugh may have been in order for just how unexpected these names felt on the bingo card of musical dignitaries you expected to find the woman who just put out “Me!” working with next. But her creative intuition hasn’t led her into an oil-and-water collaboration yet. Dessner turns out to be an ideal partner, with as much virtuosic, multi-instrumental know-how (particularly useful in a pandemic) as the most favored writer-producer on last year’s “Lover” album, Jack Antonoff.

He, too, is present and accounted for on “Folklore,” to a slightly lesser extent, and together Antonoff and Dessner make for a surprisingly well-matched support-staff tag team. Swift’s collabs with the National’s MVP clearly set the tone for the project, with a lot of fingerpicking, real strings, mellow drum programming and Mellotrons. You can sense Antonoff, in the songs he did with Swift, working to meet the mood and style of what Dessner had done or would be doing with her, and bringing out his own lesser-known acoustic and lightly orchestrated side. As good of a mesh as the album is, though, it’s usually not too hard to figure out who worked on which song — Dessner’s contributions often feel like nearly neo-classical piano or guitar riffs that Swift toplined over, while Antonoff works a little more toward buttressing slightly more familiar sounding pop melodies of Swift’s, dressed up or down to meet the more somber-sounding occasion.

For some fans, it might take a couple of spins around the block with this very different model to become re-accustomed to how there’s still the same power under the hood here. And that’s really all Swift, whose genius for conversational melodies and knack for giving every chorus a telling new twist every time around remain unmistakable trademarks. Thematically, it’s a bit more of a hodgepodge than more clearly autobiographical albums like “Lover” and “Reputation” before it have been. Swift has always described her albums as being like diaries of a certain period of time, and a few songs here obviously fit that bill, as continuations of the newfound contentment she explored in the last album and a half. But there’s also a higher degree of fictionalization than perhaps she’s gone for in the past, including what she’s described as a trilogy of songs revolving around a high school love triangle. The fact that she refers to herself, by name, as “James” in the song “Betty” is a good indicator that not everything here is ripped from today’s headlines or diary entries.

But, hell, some of it sure is. Anyone looking for lyrical Easter eggs to confirm that Swift still draws from her own life will be particularly pleased by the song “Invisible String,” a sort of “bless the broken roads that led me to you” type song that finds fulfillment in a current partner who once wore a teal shirt while working as a young man in a yogurt shop, even as Swift was dreaming of the perfect romance hanging out in Nashville’s Centennial Park. (A quick Google search reveals that, yes, Joe Alwyn was once an essential worker in London’s fro-yo industry.) There’s also a sly bit of self-referencing as Swift follows this golden thread that fatefully linked them: “Bad was the blood of the song in the cab on your first trip to L.A.,” she sings. The “dive bar” that was first established as the scene of a meet-cute two albums ago makes a reappearance in this song, too.

As for actual bad blood? It barely features into “Folklore,” in any substantial, true-life-details way, counter to her reputation for writing lyrics that are better than revenge. But when it does, woe unto he who has crossed the T’s and dotted the I’s on a contract that Swift feels was a double-cross. At least, we can strongly suspect what or who the actual subject is of “Mad Woman,” this album’s one real moment of vituperation. “What did you think I’d say to that?” Swift sings in the opening lines. “Does a scorpion sting when fighting back? / They strike to kill / And you know I will.” Soon, she’s adding gas to the fire: “Now I breathe flames each time I talk / My cannons all firing at your yacht / They say ‘move on’ / But you know I won’t / … women like hunting witches, too.” A coup de gras is delivered: “It’s obvious that wanting me dead has really brought you two together.” It’s a message song, and the message is: Swift still really wants her masters back, in 2020. And is really still going to want them back in 2021, 2022 and 2023, too. Whether or not the neighbors of the exec or execs she is imagining really mouth the words “f— you” when these nemeses pull up in their respective driveways may be a matter of projection, but if Swift has a good time imagining it, many of her fans will too.

(A second such reference may be found in the bonus track, “The Lakes,” which will only be found on deluxe CD and vinyl editions not set to arrive for several weeks. There, she sings, “What should be over burrowed under my skin / In heart-stopping waves of hurt / I’ve come too far to watch some namedropping sleaze / Tell me what are my words worth.” The rest of “The Lakes” is a fantasy of a halcyon semi-retirement in the mountains — in which “I want to watch wisteria grow right over my bare feet / Because I haven’t moved in years” — “and not without my muse.” She even imagines red roses growing out of a tundra, “with no one around to tweet it”; fantasies of a social media-free utopia are really pandemic-rampant.)

The other most overtly “confessional” song here is also the most third-person one, up to a telling point. In “The Last Great American Dynasty,” Swift explores the rich history of her seaside manse in Rhode Island, once famous for being home to the heir to the Standard Oil fortune and, after he died, his eccentric widow. Swift has a grand old time identifying with the women who decades before her made fellow coast-dwellers go “there goes the neighborhood”: “There goes the maddest woman this town has ever seen / She had a marvelous time ruining everything,” she sings of the long-gone widow, Rebekah. “Fifty years is a long time / Holiday House sat quietly on that beach / Free of women with madness, their men and bad habits / Then it was bought by me… the loudest woman this town has ever seen.” (A fine madness among proud women is another recurring theme.)

But, these examples aside, the album is ultimately less obviously self-referential than most of Swift’s. The single “Cardigan,” which has a bit of a Lana Del Rey feel (even though it’s produced by Dessner, not Del Rey’s partner Antonoff) is part of Swift’s fictional high school trilogy, along with “August” and “Betty.” That sweater shows up again in the latter song, in which Swift takes on the role of a 17-year boy publicly apologizing for doing a girl wrong — and which kicks into a triumphant key change at the end that’s right out of “Love Story,” in case anyone imagines Swift has completely moved on from the spirit of early triumphs.

“Exile,” the duet with Bon Iver, recalls another early Swift song, “The Last Time,” which had her trading verses with Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol. Then, as now, she gives the guy the first word, and verse, if not the last; it has her agreeing with her partner on some aspects of their dissolution (“I couldn’t turn things around”/”You never turned things around”) and not completely on others (“Cause you never gave a warning sign,” he sings; “I gave so many signs,” she protests).

Picking two standouts — one from the contented pile, one from the tormented — leads to two choices: “Illicit Affairs” is the best cheating song since, well, “Reputation’s” hard-to-top “Getaway Car.” There’s less catharsis in this one, but just as much pungent wisdom, as Swift describes the more mundane details of maintaining an affair (“Tell your friends you’re out for a run / You’ll be flushed when you return”) with the soul-destroying ones of how “what started in beautiful rooms ends with meetings in parking lots,” as “a drug that only worked the first few hundred times” wears off in clandestine bitterness.

But does Swift have a corker of a love song to tip the scales of the album back toward sweetness. It’s not “Invisible String,” though that’s a contender. The champion romance song here is “Peace,” the title of which is slightly deceptive, as Swift promises her beau, or life partner, that that quality of tranquility is the only thing she can’t promise him. If you like your love ballads realistic, it’s a bit of candor that renders all the compensatory vows of fidelity and courage all the more credible and deeply lovely. “All these people think love’s for show / But I would die for you in secret.”

That promise of privacy to her intended is a reminder that Swift is actually quite good at keeping things close to the vest, when she’s not spilling all — qualities that she seems to value and uphold in about ironically equal measure. Perhaps it’s in deference to the sanctity of whatever she’s holding dear right now that there are more outside narratives than before in this album — including a song referring to her grandfather storming the beaches in World War II — even as she goes outside for fresh collaborators and sounds, too. But what keeps you locked in, as always, is the notion of Swift as truth-teller, barred or unbarred, in a world of pop spin. She’s celebrating the masked era by taking hers off again.

Taylor Swift “Folklore” Republic Records

[elleroodles]

hello el :] i was wondering if you have any advice for someone wanting to start playing guitar with no prior experience!!

man oh man this is SO exciting!!! i love that you asked me this!!! i have so many thoughts!!! i hope i make sense!!! if you have any questions about anything at all do not hesitate to reach out!!! i’m!!!!

1) the guitar itself! (+ other equipment!)

so i started on what was quite literally a grocery store brand guitar my dad got when he was in his 20’s, and if you want to take up guitar as anything more than a fun little thing to dabble in every so often (which is completely fine!) then you might want to start saving up for a trusty brand.

i can’t remember the name of my first guitar since it was a hand me down, but you can literally get them for like. $25 on amazon. i’m going into this assuming you mean acoustic, i’m not entirely sure what the price points are for electric. fender’s the big name brand, but i vastly prefer guild. i love the wood and the sound, and some people at my music studio have said they work realllll good with amps. there’s also several different sizes other than the standard, which is very nice for my tiny little body

the reason i’d invest in a guitar early on if you’re looking into music for the long-term is because they’re super durable if you take good care of them. my guild will probably last me into my thirties, and maybe even longer than that. my dad’s old guitar that i started on obviously did last a long time, but it did Not sound very good. it’s also worth noting that i started learning music with a cheap uke and definitely don’t regret it, this isn’t to say that you Need an expensive instrument to play music, it’s just definitely something to consider if you’re looking for playing in the long term

other stuff i’d advise spending money on is a capo and tuner!! a capo is used to change the pitch of songs and can make playing easier if you need to transpose a song, i wish i got one earlier than i did. it opens up so many more songs!! having a physical tuner is moreso for convenience, phone ones work just fine, but i once lost my phone at a music festival and was Very thankful for my tuner. plus they can help you find the right notes if you’re fretting or singing!! the brand i use is snark

oh and picks!! i don’t really use picks all that often unless i’m live because they mostly serve to make strumming louder, but it’s really up to personal preference. i find fingerpicking harder w a pick but it’s something you gotta mess around with and see what works for you!! picks are incredibly easy to lose, so i’d buy cheap and plentiful packs. i like the nylon jim dunlop .46 mm ones, but picks are really something that varies from guitarist to guitarist

now for the FUN PART

2) actually learning lol

befriend ultimate guitar and never lose it. i would live and die for ultimate guitar, it is probably the best way to teach yourself guitar. there’s chords and strumming patterns you can actually play, and the community’s truly wonderful. there’s a premium option, but i’ve been using the free version for years now and i’d marry it if given the option.

after you’ve signed the marriage license to ultimate guitar, make a playlist!! at first i’d just put any old song you want on it, and then launch into the easy tabs on ultimate guitar (which i’ll just refer to as ug from now on). ug has a playlist system which i’d also ulitize! i’d recommend some guitar songs i started out with, but the best advice my music teacher has ever given me is that if you play music you’re not passionate about, you’ll lose interest so quickly. i have never taken a formal guitar class in my life, and i honestly would say i’m a better player because of that (though i did come from a few years of uke, so i had a pretty good grasp on fretting/strumming). find a song you love that’s easy and learn it!

before launching straight into songs, you probably want to learn some chords. the most common chords in western music are c, g, f, d, a, and e, so i’d nail those down as well as am (a minor) and em (e minor). if you’d like a lesson in music theory and chord structures, i’d be more than happy to help. same goes for strumming patterns, ug is great for listening to and learning strumming patterns but i also like listening to songs and just trying to figure out the strumming pattern. this may sound a bit like bragging and i apologize, but guitar came very naturally to me because i have a good ear for music, so i never really had a whole lot of those beginning struggles. that sounded really arrogant shdgsg but what i’m trying to get at is that i’m probably not the best person to go to if you can’t figure out the rhythm of a song because my brain just does it for me shdgdg

misc stuff:

tuning: standard tuning is eadgbe, another one i like is cgdgbe (a good chunk of wilbur’s songs are in this tuning 🙄🙄🙄🙄). i personally Hate retuning and try to avoid it at all costs so i’d recommend getting comfy with it

more string stuff: strings go out of tune really easily!! especially on new guitars!! it’s super duper important to keep your guitar in tune when you’re a beginner so your ear gets that muscle memory with sound (ie being able to hear an a7 as an a7 and not an out of tune a7)

little bit of vocab:

dim: diminished

m: minor

b: flat

maj: major

don’t be afraid of chords that are all wonky like fdim7!! they’re not scary!! most are very pretty!! but definitely get good at your basic before moving on the trickier stuff

barre chords: UGHHHHH most songs have a pesky little f in them which is a barre chord (a chord where you gotta stick your fretting hand over multiple strings). another scary thing i’d very much recommend getting used to!

oh god i feel like i’ve missed so much, like i said, i had a very unorthodox learning experience so i might make a part 2 to this sometime soon when i get my thoughts in a better order and some sleep but for now i’m so excited that you’re looking to learn guitar!! it’s so fun!! ty for reachin out and if you have any more questions don’t even hesitate to ask, i’d love to help :))))

[sinceileftyoublog]

Nashville Ambient Ensemble Interview: A Little Help From My Friends

BY JORDAN MAINZER

“I feel like Nashville his my home,” Michael Hix said. The experimental musician, who now leads the Nashville Ambient Ensemble, is fully immersed in the ambient country scene that’s logically emerged from the fingerpicked guitar renaissance of the early 2010s. But for him, it took coming back to Tennessee to get there.

Hix grew up in Southeast Tennessee in a rural town, the closest city Chattanooga, before going to college in Nashville and staying there for a few years after. Then, like many before him, he moved to New York, exploring the various experimental music scenes thriving in the nation’s biggest city. After he and his wife had a child, they realized they needed more space and moved back to Nashville two years ago. “It’s been great to be back,” Hix said. “The avant garde and experimental/music scene--there’s always been a space for that here, but I really noticed when I moved back two years ago, it’s really grown an amazing amount. There are a lot of new people in the scene I didn’t know previously.” 

Many of those new people would end up playing with Hix in Nashville Ambient Ensemble and on their debut album Cerulean, released last month via Centripetal Force. The group--Hix on synth and keys, venerable pedal steel player Luke Schneider, pianist Kim Rueger, baritone electric guitarist Jack Silverman, singer Deli Paloma-Sisk, guitar synth player Cynthia Cárdenas, and electric guitarist Timon Kaple--came together slowly as Hix would meet the various members at shows and parties. (He knew only Kaple and Schneider before moving back to Nashville.) Once he had a group and music that embraced improvisation more heavily than any of his solo material--he calls each song “a loose constant theme and a cycle of solos”--the band rehearsed a couple times and recorded over two sessions. Their chemistry is palpable, on the arpeggiated “Ingia”, the guitar-forward title track, and swaying “Coda”. And as it turns out, having a kid also influenced Hix’s ability to let go. “Part of this project was me realizing as a parent that I didn’t have the time anymore to sweat over my solo compositions where I’d have things ornately composed down to the smallest detail,” he said. “If I called on a little help with my friends and got an ensemble environment together and relied on improvisation, I could make more music with less content.”

Speaking with Hix earlier this year over the phone, I got the sense that not just collaboration, but taking in other types of art directly seep into his creative output just as much as anything. Hix is as likely to cite ambient legend William Basinski and director Andrei Tarkovsky as formative influences as he is instrumental or experimental country music; he trades music, book, and film recommendations with passion and curiosity. With an increasingly open approach to music making, you realize how Hix and Nashville Ambient Ensemble both lead and transcend the ambient country scene highlighted by artists like Schneider and Chuck Johnson. Laying the groundwork but providing space for expression, the Nashville Ambient Ensemble could switch out members and instruments and still retain the exploratory spirit of the group and the scene.

Below, read my conversation with Hix about moving back to Nashville, starting the Ensemble, making Cerulean, and what the future holds. 

Since I Left You: When you lived in New York, did you feel isolated from the Nashville scene?

Michael Hix: Yeah, I was kind of isolated from it. In fact, when I moved to New York, I honestly didn’t see myself ever moving back to Nashville. I was planning on just staying in New York. I wasn’t really keeping up with what was going on here. I was just totally invested in the kind of music I was doing in New York. I was really surprised when I came back here that there were so many new artists doing really great work, and a pretty good, sizable experimental music community. That’s been really cool to see. I’ve been able to meet a lot of new people.

I expected that I would get back in the groove in my old circle, but I’ve met so many new people.

SILY: Of the folks in the Nashville Ambient Ensemble, how many were in your old circle, and how many were new?

MH: The only person I really knew was Timon Kaple. We went to college together, and he was in my larger circle of friends. The only other person I knew was Luke Schneider. He was just an acquaintance of mine, and we had never hung out but ran into each other when I moved back. At the time, he was starting to record his own solo, ambient, new age kind of music. We just hit it off and started to exchange music. Those two guys were the only ones I knew, and the others I met when I moved back to Nashville.

SILY: When was this group formed, and when was this music written and recorded?

MH: This took off in a crazy way. I feel like I didn’t really have to think about it very much. It happened very organically and quickly. One of the things I was struck by when I moved back to Nashville was how unique it was in how music is made here, in a really collective manner. Even if you’re not getting into a project with someone, they want to jam with you. I played one show in January 2019, and just at that first show, I had 3 or 4 people ask me if I wanted to jam or if I collaborated. That’s really representative of Nashville. That first show that I played, Timon came up to me--we hadn’t made music before--and asked to get together some time. It’s the same night I met Jack Silverman. I also met Deli Paloma-Sisk that night. She played that show as well. After that, I got together with Timon once in 2019, and I had a couple more people in that period ask me if I made music, so I thought I’d just make a supergroup. 

I had been in a similar group ensemble thing before I left Nashville, back in 2011. I was really wanting to do that again. At a certain point, I just started asking people if they were interested in an ambient ensemble. I asked Jack if he wanted to be involved, Luke, he was on board. Deli joined. The other two, Kim and Cynthia, I met Cynthia at a party one night and Deli was telling her about the project, and Cynthia asked to be in the group, and I was like, “Yeah, sure!” She has this MIDI guitar synthesizer set up. That’s what she plays on the album--really amazing. Kim Rueger, who goes by the moniker Belly Full Of Stars, I was speaking to her at a show one night asking her if she knew any pianists, and she was like, “I play piano.” It came together super organically. We had two rehearsals January 2020. These people are all really talented. We booked two days at the Battle Tapes studio in Nashville and recorded everything live in the studio in two sessions. It was really quick.

SILY: That’s a lot of lead up to a short recording process!

MH: Organizing it together took some time, but once we got everyone on board, it was really quick. I sent around some demos, we rehearsed twice, and then we recorded the album.

SILY: The opening track, “Breve”, is effective because you can hear all the elements going on, and it’s a unique hybrid of styles, the electronics with the country western instrumentals. Why did you lead off with this track, and what’s the story behind it?

MH: The pieces came together really quickly. I wrote every piece except for “Cerulean”, which was written by Jack Silverman. All the tracks I wrote came together really quickly, and it just so happened I had two that were a lot shorter than the other three, and I had the idea of bookending the album with these short tracks that serve as a prologue and an epilogue, which is why I placed “Breve” first. Knowing it was gonna be the first track and an introduction, I wanted to showcase all of the sounds in a very concise, clear way. That was kind of my direction with the track.

SILY: It’s interesting the title track is the only one not written by you!

MH: [laughs] Right.

SILY: Why did you name the album after that track?

MH: I was speaking to my wife about this, and I had a couple other ideas for album titles. She said, “Read me the names of your tracks.” We both thought that Cerulean was a really great title that was evocative but not heavy. You didn’t really have to read into it very much. It provided a tone for the album. This project was honestly about trying to get myself out of the way. I really wanted the other players involved to really shine on the album. I really liked the idea of using someone else’s [song] for the album title.

SILY: The track “Inga” seems to me to be exemplary of the mix between structure and improvisation that’s on the record. Can you talk about balancing those two aspects of the music?

MH: “Inga” and “Conversion” are probably the two examples where we achieved what we were aiming towards the most. In “Inga”, I definitely provided, to use a metaphor, the structure of the house, but everyone else made it a home. Something that had beauty in it. All of the songs, we had a very loose structure, some charts with the chord changes, but the sheet music for the songs would be a list that was just the order of the solos. I think the reason “Inga” works so well along with "Conversion” is that everyone has a solo in that song. You have the extended experience of the piece cycling through solos for each of the soloists.

The way we recorded that one, we had a loose structure of these chord changes and some from my modular synth, but the primary structure of it was the order of the solos. In the studio when we were recording, I had a microphone and would just call out whose solo was coming up next.

SILY: Why did you release “Conversion” as the first single?

MH: I thought about “Inga” for the first track, but personally, “Conversion” is generally the strongest track on the album. At the same time, I think it’s the most representative of what I wanted to achieve with the project and the concept.

SILY: What’s the inspiration behind the cover art?

MH: The cover art is a painting by Wendy Walker Silverman, who is a really great Nashville artist who is also the wife of Jack Silverman, the guitarist in the band. The cover features her painting. It’s been kind of altered by the person who designed the album art [Alethea Hall], but that is her painting there.

SILY: Are there loose plans to perform any of these songs in a live stream or socially distant show?

MH: We would definitely like to play some shows. Due to the nature of the project and the fact that every person involved has their own music projects and other things going on, it would be hard for us, once touring is a thing that happens, to go on tour. But we would like to play an album release show in Nashville once that makes sense to do so. We’ll probably wait till we can have a good amount of people attend in terms of COVID restrictions. We’ll see what happens after that and what kind of opportunities arrive for performances.

SILY: What else is next for the Ensemble?

MH: I’ll see what kind of level of interest people have in it, both listening and enjoying as well as other artists and musicians in the community here, whether anyone expresses interest in being involved. I’ve definitely already started to think about a round two and have some ideas of people I’d love to ask to be involved. I’d like to change things up a bit and get some other people and instruments involved. We’ll see: I’m not exactly sure. It was a ton of work organizing the whole thing, being a big group, and getting the recordings done. I mixed the album, so having a regular job, being a parent, and trying to carry through a project like that is a lot of work. I definitely want to do it again.

SILY: What have you been listening to, reading, and watching lately?

MH: I love the new William Basinski album Lamentations. I really loved the new compilation from Music From Memory, Virtual Dreams: Ambient Explorations In The House & Techno Age, 1993​-​1997. I just listened to a reissue from Aguirre Records from Morgan Fisher and Lol Coxhill, called Slow Music. It’s one of those albums that really didn’t get a lot of attention back then but could be considered an essential or cornerstone album for a genre of music. Morgan Fisher is a really great composer--he has a few great albums--but this is the best one I’ve heard of his. It takes some tape recordings of Lol Coxhill playing I think soprano saxophone, and he cuts the tape up and makes a composition out of the various recordings. 

I watched the films of Bi Gan: Kaili Blues and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Both are absolutely mind-blowing. I’m a big Andrei Tarkovsky fan, and he’s a big influence on me. Bi Gan definitely has some strong Tarkovsky vibes but definitely has his own language. Long Day’s Journey Into Night was in particular amazing.

SILY: Is there anything I didn’t ask about the record you want to say?

MH: One of the things I’m most satisfied about this album is I’m almost not on it. I didn’t anticipate it, but realized it when listening to the recordings. I’m always working on trying to remove my ego as much as possible from my music, which is hard when you’re making solo music. I think William Basinski achieves that in an amazing way, and I haven’t been that effective at it. But I think it happened in the Ensemble album. There’s my modular synth sound, and I play keys, but I didn’t do any solos on the album. It was really satisfying to know that though I organized the project and wrote the music, it was the other people who shined through.

The other thing I’m happy about is that it really does have a Nashville sound, in large part because of the pedal steel, but it’s there with the other players as well. To some extent, the music does give you a flavor of what Nashville is about and what’s unique about it. There are some really great artists doing some really progressive sounds.

Cerulean by Nashville Ambient Ensemble

[clumsyclifford]

i'm glad i checked your blog again before going to sleep: tell me your top 5 niall songs then please i realise now that there are truly too many good songs in between all of them -fiancee

thank you for the wisdom im also going to take this opportunity to do my top 5 louis songs with your other ask because i dont think anyone’s gonna ask me it but i love louis’s solo stuff so fucking much let’s goooo

small talk: goddd just something about the way there’s this vibey verse that goes into this absolutely CRACKING chorus it hits you out of fucking nowhere what a fucking banger

still: im sorry but holy hell “if honesty means telling you the truth, well i’m still in love with you” like thanks niall but you couldve just kicked me in the face if you wanted to cause me pain :)))

on my own: i really just like. identify STRONGLY with this song lmaooo

too much to ask: when he said “don’t it feel fucked up we’re not in love” i felt that

slow hands: ok im mostly putting slow hands because i simply COULD NOT pick between flicker and hbw for my final favorite here but while i know that slow hands was a slightly overplayed single it really did not lose its power??? like the dum dum dum WOO hits every single fucking time niall rly did something with that

honorable mentions to this town for being the first song i ever properly learned to fingerpick, arms of a stranger for being my initial favorite song off heartbreak weather (still goes hard), and uhhh bend the rules and cross your mind and.....god heartbreak weather is all just SO GOOD

[doomedandstoned]

Chrome Ghost Give Emphatic Close to the Decade with ‘The Diving Bell’

~Doomed & Stoned Debuts~

There's always been something endearing to me about the sound of Roseville, California's CHROME GHOST. Their last two EPs are decades-long favorites of mine, chiefly due to the bittersweet comingling of earnest vocal harmonies with punishing low-end. Each of their releases has brought unique and unforgettable moments and I've long contended that they would stand up well as openers for the likes of Alice in Chains or Tool, Yob or Bell Witch, in terms of how they compliment and contrast elements of both bands.

'The Diving Bell' (2019) opens in classic Chrome Ghost fashion, with a steadily unwinding ballad with a Lovecraftian twist. "Waltz in the Shadow of the Hillside" will hook you for the long haul. It definitely passed the "hum test" for me, in any event, as I've been thrumming the main vocal theme for days now. "Halo" follows this by unleashing a torrent of pent-up tremors, followed by a calming mantra accompanied shortly by an ascendant guitar lead.

"The Diving Bell" presents a solitude and stillness that is rare, even in genres like depressive and funeral doom. Sadly serene, the song is like the calm leading into a storm, for minutes in a march-like rhythm and growling vocals announce the approach of something awful. Then like intermittent patches of downfall, the storm clears and gives way to a warm, confident stride with dreamlike lyricism. I dare say you don’t need to know the words (at least not on first hearing) to get the full effect of this 14-minute wonder, for on a sonic plane it taps into that mysteriously intuitive musical language we all seem to relate to emotionally. On a compositional level, I’m quite impressed (and satisfied) by how the band has developed to this point in their career. Like I said, deserving of much more mainstream attention.

From ascendant to transcendent, the record closes with the cavernous "Visions." There's something about it that reminds me of Gregorian Chant. Certainly the layer-upon-layer effect of the complementing vocal harmonies aids in its sacred vibe. Unexpectedly, the tempo quickens towards the end of the song, as though a great window to the heavens had opened and Jacob's dream of angels ascending and descending like an escalator is before us.

Regardless of how you interpret it, revelations abound in The Diving Bell, which releases this Saturday, November 30th (pre-order here). And now, Doomed & Stoned is pleased to present the worldwide exclusive debut of Chrome Ghost's most accomplished effort to date. A triumph.

Give ear...

The Diving Bell by chrome ghost

A Listener's Guide to 'The Diving Bell'

We're grateful for the opportunity to visit with Jake Kilgore (guitar, vox), Jake Hurst (drums), and Joe Cooper (bass) of Chrome Ghost, who recently gave us the low-down on their most accomplished effort to date, taking us on a tour from the inside-out.

Art

The cover art was painted by Sacramento artist Molly Devlin (@devlinmolly on Instagram) She has an incredibly sensitivity to her work, and the way she works with elements of nature and organic stuff blew my mind. We are extremely lucky that she was into the idea, and honestly the album cover influenced the way I felt about the whole process. I like to have art done before the recordings are done for that exact reason.

Recording Process

The Diving Bell was recorded in May 2019 by Patrick Hills at Earthtone in Sacramento, California. Patrick has recorded all Chrome Ghost releases to date, as well as CHRCH, King Woman, Tera Melos, and more. We have developed an extremely strong working relationship with Pat, and we tend to understand each other with minimal discussion. Half the time we’re not recording, we are getting through the day by watching stupid youtube videos while files are rendering.

The album tracking was spread out over three days, drums, bass, and guitar, with vocals tracked at home. No click tracks were used throughout the process in an attempt to give the record a more organic feel, and to give us the ability to push and pull the tempo as needed. It goes without saying that this method is way harder, and we definitely punished ourselves with long work days trying to get things right.

We were originally slated to track the album in February 2019, but I (Jake Kilgore) ended up breaking my wrist right before we were meant to go into the studio. The injury not only delayed our plans, but sent me into a spiral. Unable to work, I spent most days on the couch, feebly trying to find positions to hold my guitar so I could keep practicing. In some ways, this benefitted the band by really narrowing our focus. We would rehearse with no guitar, only bass, drums, and vocals. I’d stand there and sing the guitar parts when necessary and it became something of a thought exercise for all of us to stay in sync while only imagining what we were supposed to hear.

General Themes

This record was meant to be personal and introspective, but I also wanted to incorporate more classic gothic themes. Instead of being as blatantly autobiographical as Chrome Ghost has been in the past, I got a little more abstract and started to incorporate images and moods that resonated with me in some way.

Jacob and I share a fear of deep water, and I couldn’t shake the image of a primitive Diving Bell from my mind for months. The idea of being totally submerged, surrounded by a small pocket of air, was so claustrophobic yet serene, and it helped direct the mood of the album quite a bit. Always contrasting the heavier and suffocating music we make with the lighter, more reflective stuff.

Photo by Kevin Carpio

"Waltz in the Shadow of the Hillside"

The opener was inspired by a Lovecraft story called Whisperer In The Darkness, which starts off with reports of massive floods sweeping away strange alien bodies. I was struck by the thought of bodies washing through floodwaters, and it sparked from there. That idea met with this mantra I'd had cycling in my head; Wild Rose, Dog’s Blood. Something beautiful and something terrible, side by side. That sense of duality might be cliché at this point, but it seemed to fit very well in the sense that the water in this song is an element of destruction, but obviously water is an element of life.

We built this song around that clean fingerpicking guitar part after the heavy intro, which I originally wrote while I was still in high school. Everything else was added to accent those voicings and melodies present in that sequence. Exploring that very primitive and repetitive 3/4 rhythm, and twisting it around in different contexts, was a lot of fun to figure out. The droning, experimental part in the middle is probably my favorite because we got to use a bunch of studio tricks on the drums, and I got to use some rad guitar pedals to get those washy reverse guitar parts.

LYRICS

night falls shadows bloom rise slow dance in the hillside

shifting earth hums below outstretched arms drag through the water

soft glow of eyes that shine dark cold shrouds all who wander

obscured shapes draw near long black hair drags through the water

hark! now comes the flood slow rain crushes the hillside

pray they will rest well see them all dragged by the water

wild rose dog’s blood pray all rest well

all that once was is gone from here whispered laments fall on deaf ears

washed clean of all but memory swollen in death and revery

wild rose dog’s blood pray all rest well

"Halo"

Halo was a strange one to write, because the lyrics kinda just came to me in a flurry and I wasn’t aware of what they meant until after the record was made. I sometimes suffer from debilitating panic attacks, and Halo ultimately became an ode to my wife, who in these moments has shown compassion and cared for me to the best of her ability. The song is about that paralyzing feeling of sickness that can render you temporarily dead to the world, but more importantly it’s about the debt that we owe to those who are there for us.

This is our attempt at a pop song. It’s the only song on the record with a chorus that repeats, and it loosely follows a verse-chorus-bridge-chorus formula. Other than that, we got to stretch our limits a little bit by making this the fastest song we’ve written.

LYRICS

healer weakened by the dark

wild rose cloven from the torn gently as the wind had blown resting high upon your crown

frail in your arms aching from the warmth bound to remain here suffer evermore

suspended in this moment of loss every nerve severed and raw the door’s nailed shut chained to the bed i’m so tired my eyes shut again

halo

"The Diving Bell"

The mantra Breathe Deep anchors this song, returning multiple times to reinforce that claustrophobia. This song explores the peak of a true panic episode, catatonia, helplessness, etc. The feeling of being out-of-body, and calling out into the void for help.

Obviously this track is a sort of centerpiece for the album, musically. There are repeating phrases and motifs that let you feel like you’re hearing something new, but in actuality you’re just hearing a different version of something from earlier in the song. This track was meant to showcase the most extreme distance between the heavy and light elements of the band.

Pat Hills also did the dual guitar lead part with us, and that is one of my favorite things we’ve ever recorded.

LYRICS

breathe deep the only way out espaces me

sinking lower in a slow dive

lay here motionless alone

breathe deep in waters of purity lungfuls of what is to be

sinking in waters of purity lungfuls of what is to be

lay here in waters of purity lungfuls of what is to be

quiet weightless catatonic eyes unblinking mute and empty bury me in silt

the pain comes in distant waves echoes of what once were hidden wounds voices cast out through still air listen for me calling home

breathe deep

"Visions"

The lyrics to Visions were meant to give it finality, as the end of the album. It’s about accepting death, and the darkness that follows some of us throughout life. It’s also about holding on, even in our final moments. Asking to be “buried slowly”, to let us all have time to think and work through some shit before we have to call it a day.

This track is a sort of mashup between a spindly clean riff that King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard might use, and a powerful seasick drone that a band like Yob might use. Visions has a very chant-like, almost Gregorian element to the vocals, and when that’s laid over almost tribal drums, we knew we had something interesting on our hands. That sorta didgeridoo-like sound during the choruses is an electric bass with two strings being played with a bow. That was 100% Jacob’s idea and he executed it perfectly.

LYRICS

sickness floating in the eye of all men

fallen tears in the well poison the crumbling earth rose in bloom thorned red and gold baby’s breath like cancer, grows

fading light casts a glow over my face alone when I go bury me slowly when I go bury me slowly

visions

Shallows by chrome ghost

Reflection Pool by chrome ghost

Choir of the Low Spirits by chrome ghost

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[swonderlous]

Ok it’s been a couple days since I saw Joan Baez live and I’ve been thinking about what to say and how to decribe the way it felt being in the same room as her, experiencing that voice from only a few feet away... Not sure I can even put it into words but here’s a run down of that night:

I started amping myself up around 4pm after work, watching Joan interviews and playing her songs on guitar to the point that I had pre-concert adrenaline and excitement. I got to the Paramount Theatre right as the doors opened at 7pm for her 8pm show. Immediately started laughing because I was the only one in this theatre lobby under 65 years old (aka my parents’ age) and I’m 24. People were like looking at me and whispering, trying to figure out who my grandparents that brought me were and then realized I was there alone lmao. In the end, of course, the next youngest people happened to have seats right next to me and it was a group of women in dresses with cocktails that came in right as the lights dimmed and ignored both the no alcohol rule and the no video rule that Joan had that night much to my annoyance. Meanwhile I had already turned my phone off and was visibly shaking as the director of the paramount started describing Joan’s career and influence.

She came on stage and I stood to applaud with my spaghetti legs barely holding me up. She was wearing a white t-shirt with a giant Texas flag in the shape of our state on it and said she almost wore one that said something about everything bigger in Texas or something like that but left that one home. She’s beautiful and I already knew I was in love with her before seeing her in person  but like... I love her so much I was a literal heart eyes emoji already and she hadn’t even sung a note. With the TX shirt she had a blazer and some jeans with a belt. She was immediately gracious and personable making us all feel like her friends and joking with us in between songs. Now bear in mind everything I mention after this is going to be a little out of order and jumbled because though I remember almost everything that happened I don’t necessarily remember the order. I do however remember that she came onto the stage alone and the first song she sang, with just her guitar as accompaniment in typical folk fashion, was Don’t Think Twice - one of my favorite Dylan songs and covers ever and one of the first full on fingerpicking songs I taught myself to play on guitar after Landslide and a few other easier ones. For once, she actually changed the pronouns in “I once loved a woman, a child I’m told, I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul” instead she sang “boy” and “him” but although I made a surprised mental note of it I couldn’t be that disappointed because there was Joan Baez in person in front of me, my idol the woman who made me learn to play guitar when I was a kid and inspires me every day to speak up and trust my voice. I was already in tears tbh

Although her voice was still in Great form and absolutely beautiful, it did sound a little different in like the natural aging process way. She didn’t have those high soprano notes she once had. In between songs she actually said that this was her last formal tour because her voice was not what it once was and when she was younger and asked how she’d know when to stop singing and using her voice - she was told that her voice would tell her. She believes her voice is finally telling her it’s time. But she also seemed happy about that and glad to spend some time out of the spotlight now so I’m happy for her too but selfishly hope she still does shows every so often because I want to see her again.

She told a lot of stories about her time in the southern states in the 60s and 70s, she even said it’s because she was in Texas and knew we would probably appreciate them more than audiences at her northern shows. She also made more Spanish references and even sang Gracias a la Vida and Deportees (some of my all time faves from her songbook) probably knowing that we were the exact audience for it in Texas as a border state and with a large hispanic population. (would like to point out that I was maybe the only one in the audience that knows all the words in spanish to Gracias a la vida and per Joan’s urging I sang along). 

She told a few stories about Martin Luther King Jr. Most notably when she was in Alabama with him for an important protest speech he was going to make and he was still in bed at like 3pm and no one could wake him up - they sent Joan in to wake him and she went in and sang Swing Low Sweet Chariot, instead of waking up he just rolled over and said “I do believe I hear the voice of angel let’s have another one Joan” haha. She said he was always joking around with them when they weren’t protesting, marching, making serious speeches, singing, etc.

I knew she was funny and had a sense of humor but it really shows during her patter between songs and even during some of the songs when she’s being super serious and then she’ll just crack a joke in there and change up a lyric or two. I adore her.

She played It Aint Me Babe and A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall. She played Diamonds and Rust and of course I cried. 

She played all the songs from Whistle Down the Wind, my favorite being Silver Blade which she called “the answer to the song Silver Dagger” from her first album. Gabe (her son) played drums for some of the songs and she had a back up singer for high notes on some of the songs her voice can’t handle anymore. She also covered the Indigo Girls’ song Welcome Me which is an all time fav song of mine sung by either of them.

Her guitar work is amazing as usual, much more amazing in person and inspired me to keep playing even more than I thought she could.

House of the Rising Sun was Incredible.

She sang a lot of southern protest songs like Aint Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around and Freedom, and we all stomped and clapped with her and cheered.

She played for 2 hours and then did 5 songs after finishing her original set bc we cheered so much.

I left the concert feeling not only post concert adrenaline but full of fire and completely grateful for everything I’ve been given despite all of my hardships that have made me almost want to give up...I was grateful for Joan and for my parents and for life. Grateful for my Spanish blood from my mother and my father’s obsession with folk when he was young which was passed on with his records as I was growing up - giving me this love of Joan that I still have. I felt inspired to protest so much so that when the concert was done I almost wanted to run down the street to the Texas capital and start chanting. She made me want to use my voice, never give up, never let anyone bring me down and keep fighting for peace. I know it’s cliche but I couldn’t sleep that night thinking about everything I could be doing to help and stay active and involved and use my extreme empathy for good. 

Will add to this when I piece my memories back together more but overall I’m just extremely grateful to have seen her. Can’t even vocalize how amazing this experience was and what she means to me.

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Isasa

Isasa, a guitarist and composer based in Madrid, started in punk and hardcore bands in his native Spain, but became fascinated with the American primitive tradition. Inspired by artists including John Fahey, Glenn Jones and Jack Rose, Isasa’s third album Insilioprompted Byron Coley to observe, “Many of the songs (especially those including a single line melody) have a very precise and lovely way of suggesting the future rather than the past.” Jennifer Kelly reviewed the record for Dusted, writing, “Throughout, Isasa pursues his ends with a meditative clarity. Every note seems surrounded by a golden glow, and there is plenty of time to consider the last one before the first intrudes again.” Here Isasa assembles some of his favorites.

Glenn Jones—The Wanting

When, after a musical hiatus of several years, I picked up the guitar back again, I did not know really what to make of it. I was getting slowly into Mississippi John Hurt and John Fahey’s but, despite how much I love their music, I could not relate to it in a more personal level. What I mean is I could not picture myself composing something similar or in the same style as theirs. Then I discovered Glenn Jones’ music and it stroked me like a lightning bolt. I found everything I was hoping for, a deep connection with a way of playing the guitar and a direction to point all my creativity. Listening to this record made want to work hard in my guitar chops, compose my own music and get to play live again.

Jack Rose��S/T

The first time I heard Jack Rose music was the intimate performance DVD of his and Glenn Jones that Jesse Sheppard directed called “The Things We Used to Do”. It was shot some months before Jack Rose premature death at 38. His music, the same as Glenn Jones’, really blew my mind away and it still does every time I listen to him. His control of his instrument, his timing, his proficiency at composing and melody are one of a kind. But mostly, he played with an open heart. I cannot tell you enough how much his music means to me. In this self-titled album, he is only playing weissenborn and it is beautiful.

Negro—Formación del espítitu nacional

Negro is an electric guitarist from Valencia, Spain. Besides being a good friend of mine, he is one of my favorite guitar players around. I think he has a unique voice; he is one of those musicians that just by listening to him one second, you know it is him. His musical universe and approach to the guitar are very personal. This record made me realize it is possible to make great music just by yourself.

Micah Blue Smaldone—The Red River

The Red River (Bonus Track Edition) by Micah Blue Smaldone

I was lucky enough to see a couple of times Micah Blue Smaldone performing solo twice in Madrid, Spain (the city I live in). I love his singing and his guitar playing is just something else. His syncopation and timing are brilliant and remind me many old guitar players as Mississippi John Hurt. Micah is one of those musicians that makes guitar playing look easy.

Borealis—Tumba para un caballo cojo

Tumba para un caballo cojo by borealis

Borealis is an acoustic guitarist from Asturias, Spain. He is a very fine 12-string guitar fingerpicker. His fingerpicking patterns are really original. Some friends of mine call him the “Spanish Robbie Basho”. I have listened to this album a ton of times it inspired me not to be afraid of composing long songs. I think Borealis is very brave in his approach to song structure. I wish he was more known in the American Primitive scene.

Van Pelt—Sultans of Sentiment

Back the 90’s I was very into emo, alternative, slow core music. The very moment I first listened to this record, I felt in love with their guitar sound and their use of space. There is no trace of rush anywhere and music is just floating around in the air. The way the two guitarist play complementing each other made me think differently on how to fit in a band as a guitarist. I still listen to this record every now and then and I still find inspiration in it.

Karate—S/T

This is also from my emo/slow core phase when I was in my 20s. Karate’s guitarist, Geoff Farina, is one of my favorite guitar players ever. After Karate broke up, he focused on his solo carrier and has become a blues scholar as well as one of the finest acoustic guitar players I have heard. Following his music career, I discovered Mississippi John Hurt and that was one of the reasons why I decided to focus on fingerstyle guitar.

Chavela Vargas

Chavela Vargas was one of the greatest Mexican singers (although she was born in Costa Rica, her musical career took place in Mexico). For those of you who may not know her, she is like a Mexican Billie Holiday. She really had to struggle in her life. Her music and her life sometimes got so close that you can feel how she is singing her own life history and not someone else’s lyrics anymore. She managed to have amazing guitar players backing her up most of the times. If you pay attention to the guitar arrangements, you will see what I mean. The sound, the colours of these guitars are a big inspiration to me.

Federico Mompou—Música Callada

Federico Mompou was a great composer and pianist from Barcelona, Spain. His works for solo piano are just as beautiful as music gets. I love his use of space and economy. He had a way of bringing together familiar melodies and impressionistic chords that I find brilliant. To me, his music is the way the Mediterranean see sounds like.

Bebo Valdes & Cigala—Lágrimas Negras

Until the release of “Lagrimas Negras” by Cuban piano virtuoso Bebo Valdés and innovative cantaor El Cigala, nobody could imagine that Cuban music and Flamenco could match so nicely without having to compromise each of their musical idiosyncrasy. This record is full of heart-felt performances. It captures the freshness and the connection of two musicians who love each other’s music. Their performance of the Spanish Standard “La bien pagá” was my inspiration to cover that song in my second album “Los días.”

[antti-nannimus]

Once I lived the life of a millionaire Spending my money'n I did not care care Carrying my friends out for a good time Buyin’ bootleg liquor, champagne and wine Lord but I got busted and I fell so low Didn't have no money and nowhere to go This is the truth, Lord, without a doubt Nobody wants you when you're down, I mean Nobody wants you when you’re down

Lord, the other day I asked a man for my rent He told me, boy, the money he had spent But I tried my best to try one or two That's everything that I could do Lord, nobody let me have one lousy dime I now get worried now all the time But I'm gon' tell you this is the truth, Lord, without a doubt Nobody wants you when you're down Nobody wants you when you're down

Lord, if I could get my hands on a dollar again I would hold it till that eagle grins I would try just for one little house Nobody knows me when I'm down and out Lord, I tried for another day To make troubles in my own way But I'm gon’ tell you the truth, Lord without a doubt Nobody knows me when you’re down, I mean Nobody knows me when you're down

"…Bob Dylan said, "There is a strong line in all our music that can be traced back directly to Scrapper Blackwell. He was a truly great musician …" Hell, even Robert Johnson covered one of his tunes. But who remembers Scrapper Blackwell? Between 1928 and 1935, Scrapper Blackwell and his partner, pianist Leroy Carr, were the most popular blues duo in America. Their first hit, “How Long, How Long Blues,” was the top blues song of 1928. In fact, so many copies were pressed, causing the original metal masters to wear out! Vocalion Records called Carr and Blackwell back into the recording studio twice to record “How Long, How Long Blues No. 2” and “How Long, How Long Blues No. 3!”

Unlike the tragic stories of many other bluesmen, Vocalion paid the duo fairly, each netting $4,000, which translates to $55,000 in today’s money. And they continued to get royalty checks every six months.

For the next few years, Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell continued their string of hits, including “Kokomo Blues,” “Blues Before Sunrise” and “Mean Mistreater Mama.” Feeling slighted for Carr’s top billing (and often omitting Blackwell’s own name on the label), Scrapper entered the recording studio in 1931 and 1932 to cut some incredible solo records under his own name. As a former bootlegger, he often sang of making and drinking homemade whiskey, such as “Down in Black Bottom.” Listen to his fluid fingerpicking, recorded four years before Robert Johnson ever cut anything to wax…

Blackwell’s solo recordings were hits on their own, guaranteeing his name to always be included with Carr’s on their duo recordings.

Blackwell and Carr continued to record together until 1935, ending with a bitter recording session in February of that year. Both musicians left the studio mid-session and on bad terms, stemming from payment disputes. Two months later, Blackwell received a phone call informing him of Carr's death due to heavy drinking and nephritis.

Blackwell soon recorded a tribute to his musical partner of seven years ("My Old Pal Blues") and then walked away from his recording career, working in an asphalt factory.

Blackwell was rediscovered in the late Fifties, poverty-stricken and living in his cousin’s house. He didn’t even own a guitar. When one was provided for him, he immediately went back to his old chops, not missing a single lick. The folk music boom was on, and Blackwell was just the hero they were looking for. He was brought back into the studio and cut three albums' worth of material. He also started planning festival appearances.

All his plans were cut short October 7, 1962, when Blackwell was gunned down in front of his house in an apparent mugging. The crime remains unsolved to this day.

Blackwell left a wealth of recordings, showcasing his single-string leads that influenced generations of performers (whether they know it or not). Bob Dylan said, "There is a strong line in all our music that can be traced back directly to Scrapper Blackwell. He was a truly great musician who did deserve more than was ever given him…"

[more--than--music]

2018 Albums of the Year

Here’s my albums of the year. 2018 has been a brilliant year for music, and so I thought I’d lay out my favourite albums, and the reasons why they’re my favourites.

10: Unknown Mortal Orchestra – Sex and Food

Kicking the list off at ten, we have the fourth full-length project from the New Zealand lo-fi psychedelic group Unknown Mortal Orchestra. An album that calls to mind at various points dusty late 70s grooves, 80s synth work and yet very modern production sensibilities, Sex and Food bounces between deeply introspective balladry, and funky danceable beats. A sure step forward for a band that only looks to become more experimental as time goes on.

9: Ben Howard – Noonday Dream

The Devon based singer-songwriter gives a compelling vision of the future of indie-folk with this transient and supremely accomplished set of songs. Taking a further stride away from the straightforward acoustic sound of 2011’s Every Kingdom, Noonday Dream shows an artist unafraid to utilise aspects of electronic and ambient music into his soundscapes, resulting in a transcendent, elegant, and above all beautiful set of tracks. The opening duo of Nica Libres At Dusk and Towing The Line are a particular high point.

8: Thom Yorke – Suspiria (Music for the Luca Guadagnino Film)

Surprisingly his first ever venture into soundtrack work, Thom Yorke’s masterful score for the Luca Guadagnino film of the same name could be in this list simply on the strength of its lead track; Suspirium is an otherworldly waltz, a spartan piano line presided over by Thom’s instantly recognisable vocals. But it is the deeper cuts for which this album earns its place; Open Again begins with a fingerpicked guitar progression that grows into a monolithic walk to the gallows and then fades out once more. A master at the height of his powers.

7: Sports Team – Winter Nets

Undoubtedly the least well-known name on this list, the debut EP from the London-based indie-pop outfit Sports Team has been one of my most played records yet this year. A cerebral mix of Jarvis Cocker-style lyricism preoccupied with the minutiae of suburban life, and pitch perfect indie rock arrangements teetering on the edge of chaos, this shows talent beyond their years; the only EP on this list, these five tracks managed to catch my attention early on, and have stayed with me through the year. Ones to watch.

6: MGMT – Little Dark Age

A name I would not have expected to see on this list at the start of the year, the comeback from the early 2000s electro-pop group is unexpectedly brilliant. Far from the runaway chart success of singles such as Electric Feel, Little Dark Age is full of tracks that could have been pulled from the dusty archives of pretty much any 80s synth bands, but combined with so many left-field production choices, and lyrics that belie a dark sensibility beneath the bright instrumentation, this album becomes a very mature release indeed. The single, Little Dark Age, is just magic. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

5: Car Seat Headrest – Twin Fantasy

Bringing us into the second half of this list is Will Toledo’s project Car Seat Headrest, with a rerecorded, remastered version of his 2011 breakout album Twin Fantasy. Toledo’s DIY ethos calls to mind contemporary Kevin Parker, of Tame Impala, although the two go about their self-imposed individualism rather differently. Toledo’s recordings retain the lo-fi teen emotion of the original Twin Fantasy, while adding the production sensibilities of Toledo’s later Car Seat Headrest ventures, resulting in such a dizzying barrage of pitch perfect indie ballads that display mature, incisive and insightful lyricism. The peaks of the album slip off the rails in the most glorious way, and culminate in simple, honest, and resounding emotional resolutions. Few albums so perfectly capture the teenage experience... a brilliant achievement.

4: Father John Misty – God’s Favorite Customer

It will come to no surprise to those of you who know me that Josh Tillman has made his way into this list; I have been following Father John Misty since last year’s existential crisis of an album, Pure Comedy. But God’s Favorite Customer is an entirely different beast- aside from the single, Mr Tillman, the typical luscious arrangements of a usual Father John Misty album are conspicuously missing here. Gone are the chamber pop orchestras and parlour ballads; here is FJM with an acoustic guitar, a month’s stay in a hotel room, and some utterly shattering songwriting. Tillman has abandoned his lofty perch overseeing the human condition in favour of personal, painful lyrics that dissect a failing relationship in real time. Many of these songs are addressed to, or from the perspective of, Josh’s wife, Emma, and the narratives are as autobiographical as ever. But the key here is that Tillman has ceased to be just an observer of the phenomena he comments on; in God’s Favorite Customer he has no choice but to experience them from the inside, and it makes for devastating listening in places. However, Misty has not abandoned all hope; closer We're Only People (And There's Not Much Anyone Can Do About That) ends the album with a remarkably beautiful and optimistic look at humanity, and leaves you ready to emerge from the hotel room, blinking against the sunlight, into the outside world.

3: Blood Orange – Negro Swan

London born producer, multi-instrumentalist, and general prodigy Devont Hynes, has outdone himself on his fourth project under the moniker Blood Orange; Negro Swan represents exactly the kind of progressive song writing Hynes is so sought after in the pop world for, and brings together a beautiful collage of sounds and textures to produce an album that is so of the moment, it feels like a time capsule of today. Swan embraces diversity, revelling in a celebration of sexuality and identity that feels almost carnival-like in its embrace of so many aspects of modern R&B and Hip-Hop. On what other album can you find Puff Daddy monologuing about his own fear of being loved? This whole project is filled with moments such as this, with trans black activist Janet Mock providing a loose narrative thread tying the album together. But for me, the true highlight of this album is Hynes himself; a young black artist showcasing a striking talent that simply refuses to obey the laws of genre or society. The musical prowess on show is undeniable; in particular, Hynes’ guitar work is so accomplished, tracks such as Charcoal Baby are sheer joy to listen to because of it. The vocals on this record are equally impressive; comparisons will undoubtedly be drawn to Prince, although personally I see Hynes as akin to Frank Ocean, both showcasing a new vision for R&B in the 21st century, and Swan feels in many ways a sibling to Ocean’s 2016 album Blonde, in its transient nature and almost soundscape-like mixture of sounds and feelings. Negro Swan is a glorious celebration in which all expression is embraced, and no identity is off-limits. This is what all modern R&B should aspire to.

2: Arctic Monkeys – Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

Those monkeys, eh? Four years after their last studio effort, with each member having done something entirely different (and accomplished, see Alex Turner with The Last Shadow Puppets, and Matt Helders on the latest Iggy Pop record) with their sabbatical, no one quite knew what shape their return would take. Recorded in London, Paris and Los Angeles, the sixth album from the band synonymous with early 00s indie could have taken quite a number of directions; furthering the slick arena rock of AM, delving deeper into the baroque pop offering the Last Shadow Puppets pursue, or perhaps even a return to their raucous indie rock roots. Naturally, they did none of the above. The first sign of their step in a different direction was a video they posted in mid-April, announcing a return with an eerie synth line and a fuzzy guitar lick; in hindsight it was the perfect segue into the TBH&C era, both a nod to the leather-clad rock of AM, and yet the space-age synths and fictional space resorts of Tranquility Base. And when the album did come? Oh boy. I’m not sure a release in 2018 divided fans quite like the Monkeys’ did. I’ve heard it variously described as “sheer genius”, “derivative retro nothing” and “f*cking lift music”. It really was that polarising. I’m sure that from its spot on this list you can guess which camp I fall into. From the go, the surreal lyricism of Alex Turner is front and centre, and the record is all the better for it. From surreal references to Kubrick film techniques, and obsession with sci-fi jargon, to ridiculous pastiches of Hollywood clichés, critics weren’t short of liner notes to unpick. But the key for me was the way that the album, as all great sci-fi does, comments on modern life through the lens of futurism, while also keeping you scratching your head the whole time. Furthermore, the actual songwriting is as good as ever, with Turner making a tune about a less than perfect review for a taquiera on the moon into the rhythmic centrepiece of the album. I do have to confess, I am slightly biased; I’m a lifelong AM fan, and I did see this performed live, which only deepened my admiration of it but truthfully- listen to this album. Then listen some more. And then some more again. Because when it clicks, you won’t experience anything else even remotely like it all year.

Bonus Round

These are albums that I discovered in 2018, but weren’t released this year… they deserved recognition along with the rest of these projects.

5: Frank Ocean – Endless

Frank Ocean is one of, if not the, best and most innovative artists working in modern R&B. That much is undisputed. But until 2018, despite being a huge Frank Ocean fan, I had neglected his 2016 visual album, Endless. Perhaps this was due to laziness, not having Apple Music, or perhaps it was because for me it was vastly overshadowed by the release of the seminal Blonde a few days later. Or maybe I simply thought a visual album wasn’t worth my time. Whatever the reason, I was a fool to overlook it. Endless is an ethereal journey through Ocean’s psyche, with a vast soundscape of beautiful, flowing synths and guitars. Furthermore, Endless features some of Ocean’s best rap work since Channel Orange. A truly beautiful project, and Higgs is, for me, Ocean’s most devastatingly sad track… further evidence that Frank doesn’t put a foot wrong.

4: Leonard Cohen: Songs Of Leonard Cohen

In 2016, the music world lost one of its most treasured talents, in the form of Leonard Cohen. However, although I have always been aware of Cohen’s work (Hallelujah, his inspiration of Nick Cave, The Last Shadow Puppets’ Is This What You Wanted cover), I had never taken the time to sit down and immerse myself in his work. Well, I was very much missing out. His cinematic, confessional storytelling, and his instantly recognisable voice and manner, mean that his songs are almost exactly the type of ballads I love, and Songs is his finest work. From start to end, you see the world through Cohen’s eyes. A poet.

3: King Krule: The OOZ

King Krule (real name: Archy Marshall) is a divisive artist; many see him as a visionary, however he is also, to many (including my dad) just “the one with the awful voice”. To me, Krule is a fantastic lyricist and producer, with an instantly recognisable sound. From the moment you enter The OOZ, you are in Marshall’s world, a London of grimy concrete and eerie loneliness. However, there are moments of beauty among the sluggish, smog-filled music; Slush Puppy, despite descending into madness near the end, is a really quite endearingly desperate performance. Cadet Limbo also shows off Krule’s more jazzy influences, and is all the better for it. A view into the future of singer-songwriting.

2: Father John Misty: I Love You, Honeybear

Josh Tillman has already featured on this list once, and it’s no secret I think he’s one of the best artists working today. However, until this year, I had never given his 2015 romantic opus, Honeybear, a proper listen. I was turned on to Misty by his 2017 work Pure Comedy, and after an existentialist view on all of Humanity, a romance album seemed like a step back, so I didn’t give it the time it deserved. How wrong I was. Honeybear is a beautiful, tender, and being an FJM record, deeply satirical and funny, look at love, relationships, and society. It features lush, beautiful arrangements, and gorgeous melodies, all delivered with Misty’s characteristic tongue-in-cheek smirk. Not one track on the album is dead space, and there are several high points, right from the start. Favourite for me is I Went To The Store One Day, which is a simple, yet incredibly beautiful and moving ballad to close the album. Stunning stuff indeed.

1: Everything Everything – A Fever Dream

I’ve known of Everything Everything for quite a while now, but in early 2017 I was gifted tickets to see them on their A Fever Dream tour, and it absolutely blew my mind. EE have crafted brilliant electronic indie music in the past, with catchy melodies and odd, skittering rhythms. However, A Fever Dream builds on this in the best possible way, building on their electronic sound and adding an even more fiercely of-the-moment view on songwriting. One of the highlights for me was Jonathan Higgs’ vocals, which electrified the music with a fierce intellect, and sparkling melodies. An ecstatic blend of so many musical styles, which results in a fantastic album. A masterpiece for today.

Okay, finally the main event. My album of the year 2018 is…

1: IDLES – Joy as an Act of Resistance.

Here we are then. Number one spot. And again, if you know me, you know there could never really have been any other album here. I first discovered IDLES earlier in the year, riding off the success of their breakout debut album Brutalism, an unstoppable punk locomotive of an album, with guitar and bass lines that are so, well, brutal, that they break down the door and hold you at gunpoint until you sit up and pay attention. This band is the perfect voice for austerity Britain, more mature than Slaves, more relevant than Sleaford Mods, and yet they walk an incredibly fine line. It’s almost impossible to define until you hear a band that possess it, but they simply make. So. Much. Sense. Joe Talbot talks with such a fiery intensity that it’s impossible not to listen, and an eloquence that is so often missing from punk. He’s so likeable, and oddly enough for punk, easy to listen to. However, don’t mistake that for the album lacking brutal riffs. Because it has those in spades. From the opening bass rumble of Colossus, JAAAOR picks you up by the scruff off your neck, and doesn’t put you down until the last manic notes of Rottweiler fade away. This is a rock record that defies rock, a punk record that doesn’t define itself as punk, and a political statement that bases its politics on the phrase “Love yourself.” This provides an infectious alternative to the toxic masculinity of so much mainstream rock, and a uniquely vulnerable take on an incredible variety of issues. Beginning with an immediate left-footing with Colossus, the album the catches its witty and caustic stride with Never Fight A Man With A Perm, going from strength to strength the whole time. I’ve never quite identified with a track lyrically as much as I’m Scum, a rallying call for liberals everywhere: “I'll sing at fascists 'til my head comes off, I am Dennis Skinner's Molotov / I'm lefty, I'm soft, I'm minimum wage job”and erupting into the chant of “this snowflake’s an avalanche”. It goes on to postulate about not caring about the next James Bond, as “we don’t need another murderous toff”. The next track is the joyous Danny Nedelko, an ode to Talbot’s friend, and frontman of Heavy Lungs, Danny Nedelko. It’s a quite magnificent celebration of immigration and diversity, and embodies the sentiment of the album as a whole quite simply with a roar of “Unity!”. Potent stuff. The next highlight (or rather lowlight) for me is the one-two punch of June and Samaritans. June is a singularly moving ode to Talbot’s stillborn daughter, building all the time to a non-existent crescendo, and repeating the six-word mantra “Baby shoes, for sale. Never worn.” Incredibly painful, raw and poignant; you feel as if you’re witnessing a moment that you really shouldn’t be, a would-be father grieving at the bedside. It then transitions into Samaritans, an anti-toxic masculinity manifesto, furious in its denial of male stereotypes: “Man up, sit down, chin up, pipe down”, and building relentlessly to sheer ecstasy of the decree: “I kissed a boy and I liked it”. Powerful, powerful stuff. Track eight, Television, is pinned down by a juddering riff complimented by the incredibly able drumming of Jon Beavis (a very much unsung hero of the group), and a wonderful self-love mantra. Moving on, Great is an anti-Brexit track than manages to reveal the hypocrisy of nationalism without ever moving into preachy politicism, which is Talbot’s greatest strength; he can make any point sound like the simplest and most honest declaration ever. Gram Rock and Cry To Me are witty, and the least overtly political tracks of the album; but even these apparent low points aren’t by any means stale, quite the opposite. Every moment of this record fizzes with energy. Finally, Joy rounds off with the magnificent Rottweiler, a searing discrediting of the UK media, ending in the wheels coming off as the tension built throughout the 42 minutes comes to a chaotic end, with Joe yelping “Unity!”over and over. I have one final thing to say about Joy; it’s production is pristine throughout, with clarity in even its most chaotic moments. This is my record of the year, because I feel no other record held my attention so completely, and was so representative of the sentiment of this year. Pure joy.

Well then, thanks for sticking with me. 2018’s been a belter of a year for music, and I can’t wait to see what 2019 brings.

[hobbit-in-the-city]

Hello there! For the ask, 9, 32, 38, 75 and 100? If any have been done, pick one you liked.

What CD did you play to death as a kid?

it was the first CD I've ever gotten, czech singer Aneta Langerová, I loved it, especially since it was something new for me, I also got a player for it cause since then we only had a gramophone (my first vinyl - if I don't count the one with fairytales - was Led Zeppelin)

What song is stuck in your head?

House of the rising sun and that's just because I have some issues with my hands - damage of my nerves, was young and stupid and screaming for help - and I love the chord progression there so I've been messing around on my ukulele, fingerpicking etc.

What’s your favorite flower?

dandelions and sunflowers! first the colour, I love yellow, it's safe and warm for me, but also dandelions are amazing, they can grow literally anywhere, between the cracks and just don't care about it, it also means that the spring is full time here, and in the grass? it's like looking at the night sky full of little suns and stars

sunflowers because I am basic bitch who loves Vincent van Gogh and also the way the flowers are moving with the sun

What top three cities do you want to travel to?

I want to go back to Firenze, but also Singapore and Wellington are on my wishlist

What’s one of your fondest memories?

Recent one? Holding my baby niece for the first time

Old one? Watching my great grandpa with the bees, he woke me up at 4am, sat me in little cart and took me with him into the forest, we drank white coffee (it's a decaf, done out of roots etc.) and just spent the whole day there, lately I was told it was because my great grandma was kinda... well, let's say I never was exactly the favourite child in our family

my second favourite is the one when my step grandpa taught me how to fish, I miss the early mornings at the river

[rockrevoltmagazine]

IBOTW: LENNE

Introducing LENNE, the new project with Jim Taylor, Morgan Rose, and Lenny Cerzosie Jr.

NEW SINGLE “Letting You Down” OUT NOW via IMAGEN RECORDS can be downloaded/streamed at

  https://songwhip.com/lenne/letting-you-down

  Back in the early 2000’s, Leonard Cerzosie Jr. started a band with his brother called The Infinite Staircase that did very well as an independent band. the band worked with artists like Earl Slick from David Bowie’s band, Candlebox, Sevendust, and even Zakk Wylde. In 2009, they scored a slot on tour with Black Label Society, Sevendust, and Dope that sealed a lot of friendships they still have to this day.

“In 2010, the love of my life passed away suddenly. Pill overdose. It was a devastating time. She was only 27. Morgan Rose and I wrote and recorded the EP, No Amends that was a dedication to my love” says Leonard Cerzosie Jr.

He continues, “Over the years, I’ve had my hand in multiple projects. I formed “Le Projet” around 2013 that featured members of Candlebox, Sevendust, and The Infinite Staircase. I also joined the Baltimore band “The Mayan Factor” a few years ago and have toured with them in Mexico City and the states. During all this, my mother was diagnosed with ALS. One day- after performing a friend insisted on introducing me to someone. He was confident we needed to meet. That was the day I met Jim Taylor. We did get along immediately and have since been composing all sorts of music together.”

“When my mother passed away, Morgan got very involved with what was going on with me and my dad. He invited us out to his place in Atlanta multiple times. We started recording songs with Corey Lowery that would ultimately become “LeNNe”. We spent much time digging deep for the right lyrics and tones. There were multiple artists involved over the course of a few years, but the official line up is me and Jim led by Morgan” he adds.

“Lenne is one of the most real artists I’ve ever come across. He wears his heart on sleeve, and expresses vulnerability that hits you in the heart. I love how he tells a story. These songs are an emotional roller coaster into the mind of a tortured soul” says Morgan Rose.

“We are very excited to have Lenne on the Imagen Records roster. I can’t wait for everyone to hear the music” says Bob Winegard, President of Imagen Records.

“Letting You Down” is the first single to be released. The song features Leonard Cerzosie Jr., Morgan Rose, Jim Taylor, and Corey Lowery.

  Why did you pick your band name?

Lenny: It kind of picked itself. We had various musicians record with us. The only constants were me, Jim, and Morgan. So, a name for the project never seemed that urgent until Imagen was interested. We were writing very personal stuff & had no gimmick. Just naked. So, Morgan felt we should just call it “Lenny”. Plain and simple. We decided to change the spelling to differentiate from other artists like Lenny Kravitz, among other reasons.

  Anything you would like to share, from new merch to upcoming shows/tours or songs/albums?

Lenny: “Letting You Down” is just one of 5 singles we’re going to release over the next few months. Hopefully, we’ll release a full album after that. If a touring opportunity comes up this year, we’ll definitely jump on it.

  How do you describe your music to people?

Jimmy: Big melodious heavy hooks with an ambient soundscape.

  How do you handle mistakes during a performance?

Jimmy: Adapt depending on the situation but DON’T STOP altogether!

Lenny: Pretend it didn’t happen. Laugh about it later. Learn from it for next time.

  Do you get nervous before a performance or a competition? What advice would you give to beginners who are nervous?

Jimmy: ALWAYS!!! Take a step back, breathe, then give it hell!!

Lenny: Nervous every single time. Best advice is to be prepared. Practice. Know your material so well you can play it without thinking. It’ll give you confidence on stage.

  What type of recording process did you use? Who produced your recording?

Jimmy: We started recording these in Corey Lowery’s studio in Georgia, then headed to Jose Urquiza in Illinois for additional overdubs and vocals.

Lenny: The songs themselves didn’t have much pre-production. We did most of the writing “in studio” and recorded as we went. Morgan is credited as producer. His brain is a wild place.

  How often and for how long do you practice? What do you practice – exercises, new tunes, hard tunes, etc.?

Jimmy: It depends but it’s generally a couple hours a day and I tend to switch it up between keys, mando, or guitar. I have books I’ve used over the years with music theory and scales. I’ve also been developing odd patterns and repetitious exercises for practicing. A HUGE one for me is playing alongside Youtube playlists or our own mp3s and finding something different each time. Lenny: My practice habits depend on if I’m in home mode or show mode. If there are shows lined up, I strictly practice the material I’ll be performing. In downtime, I like fingerpicking classical acoustic stuff or running modes on the electric. Jim and I always say you should touch your instrument at least once a day. Pun intended.

  How does music affect you and the world around you?

Jimmy: Simply put,I cannot live without it.

Lenny: It’s been such an important part of my life for so long. I can’t even imagine not having it to escape to.

  How did you form?

Lenny: Introduced by a friend. Invited to Atlanta by another friend. Studio chemistry with a new friend. It was a few years of this particular group just getting together every so often to record music. It became a thing. There was a natural vibe. Sometimes a bit dark but always honest.

  Which instruments do you play?

Jimmy: I do my best at keys, mandolin and guitar and typically weird stringed instruments haha

Lenny: I’m just a guitar player. I’m only a singer in the rock world. lol

  Where do you usually gather songwriting inspiration? What is your usual songwriting process?

Jimmy: We jam from the gut and then take the pieces that fit for a particular song we jam out and Len constructs his vocals around that. The riffs that we cut away we throw to something else! Morgan has this way of not only his insanely brilliant drum patterns but these hooks and melodies that grab ya! It’s wonderful!

Lenny: Inspiration for songs typically come from life events. It can start as a lyric or a chord or riff. We usually hit the studio with some idea or maybe a set of lyrics. Everyone does it differently but with this particular project the songs are molded as they’re recorded.

  Who are your favorite musicians? Groups? CD’s?

Jimmy: Metallica, The Chieftains, movie composers like Henry Mancini, Ennio Morricone, Max Steiner, Junkie XL, Dire Straits, Floyd, In Flames

Lenny: Sabbath, GnR, Floyd, Tool, Alice in Chains, Pantera, BLS.. I really dig Blues Saraceno & Richie Kotzen, too. My guilty pleasure is Sarah Brightman. Ha!

    Connect with Lenne (click icons):

IBOTW: LENNE was originally published on RockRevolt Mag

[grapevynerendezvous]

Love - Da Capo

Love released their second album, Da Capo, in the same year as their first one, 1966. It was recorded in five days, and released in November. It was preceded by the release of the single 7 and 7 Is b/w No. Fourteen, which was an outtake from their first album. 7 and 7 Is was recorded in June and hit the stores in July, topping out at No.33 on the Billboard Top 100. That song was then included on Da Capo, which after its’ release reached No.80 on the Billboard Top 200.

The band consisted of five members when 7 and 7 Is was recorded, but was up to seven by the time they recorded the album. The five existing band members when the eponymous Love album was recorded were founders Arthur Lee vocals and guitar, Johnny Echols vocals and lead guitar, plus Bryan McLean vocals and guitar, Alban "Snoopy" Pfisterer drums, and Ken Forssi bass. While recording  7 and 7 drummer Pfisterer had a particularly difficult time with the frantic rhythm. After about 30 takes he was intermittently replaced by Lee, who continued to teach Pfisterer how to play the parts. It’s said that it took over seventy takes to get it done. Both Lee and Echols stated that Pfisterer is the drummer on the released version. Something that made the song particularly memorable was an explosion, toward the end, of a nuclear bomb. The use of this in the song is an example of what is called musique concrète; the utilization of recorded sounds in a music composition. The song then shifts to a peaceful bluesy fade to conclusion. According to Bruce Botnick, the sound for the explosion was “taken from a sound effects record”. ”He speculated that it was a recording of a gunshot slowed down.”

Once that was completed, musicians added to Love were Tjay Cantrelli (born John Barberis) on woodwinds and Michael Stuart on drums. Snoopy switched over from drums to harpsichord and organ. The now seven-piece band recorded the balance of Da Capo from September 27 to October 2 at Sunset Sound Studios in Hollywood. The producer was Paul Rothchild who had just finished with The Doors first album a few days before, but Da Capo was released two months before The Doors album. The two sides of the Love record couldn’t have been more different. The six songs on side one varied in style and delivery, and among them was what critic Robert Christgau called, “the perfect rocker”, 7 and 7 Is. Side 2 had one song, which was simply a long jam.

Instrumentally the band explored new concepts on Da Capo, some rarely seen in rock music up to that time. This included harpsichord, and the use of classical music, in what could be termed “baroque pop”. They explored jazz-driven jams and use of sax and flute blended into garage rock, folk-rock, psychedelia, blues, R&B and punk rock, not that all those had actually been defined yet.

Concerning the new band members, Michael Stuart (later Stuart-Ware), was playing drums with Sons of Adam in Los Angeles. The leader of that band was Randy Holden, an unsung guitar god in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Stuart made a point of seeing Love play live at a club called Bito Lito and appreciated them for their “distinctive raw energy”, as he called it. Having had a jazz background, Stuart was surprised when he joined up with Love, just after they had recorded the single 7 and 7 Is, “to discover the album was geared to have a kind of “jazz rock” flavor.” Tjay Cantrelli (born John Barberis) departed Love, after being its’ reed player, by the end of 1967. In the early ‘70s he was in the band Geronimo Black fronted by drummer Jimmy Carl Black of Mothers of Invention fame. On the band’s eponymous album, Cantrelli is the credited composer of two songs plus co-writer of two others. In the early ‘80s he was also associated with Black’s band, Grandmothers. Not much is known about Cantrelli’s life or career other than his stints with these bands. According to several sources Cantrelli/Barberis died in 1985.

TRACKS

Greeting the ears in the first cut is Pfisterer’s harpsichord proclaiming the rocker, Stephanie Knows Who. Immediately announcing a new direction for the band, they ripped through hard psychedelic rock with a flute-driven jazz interlude. While in most of Da Capo Arthur Lee vocalizes in softer tones, on Stephanie Knows Who he sings in a harsh style, similar to much of their first album. The song, written by Lee, is about a mutual friend of his and Bryan MacLean, for whom both had affections for.

Orange Skies comes next and is an immediate shift to the aforementioned softer tones. Sung by Arthur Lee, but written by Bryan MacLean, the song is the first he had ever written. Done so at the time he was a roadie with The Byrds, MacLean said he based the melody on a section of Roger McGuinn’s guitar arrangement of The Bells of Rhymney. It is built with jazz shadings using Latin rhythms, with a somewhat fanciful air about it. Critic Matthew Greenwald points out an influence of “Broadway musicals (such as Oklahoma and Carousel)”, as well similarity “to Stevie Wonder's My Cherie Amour.”

With the pop of a cork the mellowness continues into the next track, as does the latin jazz influence, this time a bossa nova rhythm. ¡Que Vida!, (What is Life, in Spanish) is the stated title, but the working title is With Pictures and Words. Several sources indicate that the melody is based on the Bacharach/David song Lifetime of Loneliness. Lyrically composer Lee speaks not only of life, but of death and reincarnation as well. The melody flows freely throughout, but as Matthew Greenwald indicates, “although the chords always resolve, they go in surprising directions. He also felt this was a "true groundbreaking composition for Arthur Lee”. Another pop of the cork and ¡Que Vida! finishes with quiet rustling sleigh bells leading into the crashing guitars of Seven and Seven Is. That song was addressed above. ¡Que Vida! was released in March 1967 as a single, b/w Hey Joe (off of the Love album), but didn’t reach the Billboard Hot 100.

Incorporating Bryan MacLean’s Spanish-style fingerpicking, flowing harpsichord ala Pfisterer, and precision percussion work by Michael Stewart, The Castle is, in effect, a mini-suite. Whether physical or in the mind, the theme of travel is something Arthur Lee explored in songs like this at the time. He does this for just over a minute into the song after which the rest of the journey winds through creative instrumental twists and turns. The ending note rests on a precipice, but not quite landing where one might expect.

The final number on side one has been suggested to possibly be “the best song Lee ever wrote” by Richie Unterberger. Arthur was inspired to write She Comes in Colors by a Love fan named Annette. According to bandmate Johnny Echols, “Annette came to shows “wearing these outrageous gypsy clothes.” The whimsical flute played throughout by Tjay Cantrelli, gives a flowing, almost airborne feel to it. The baroque pop meets folk-jazz melody incorporated many “strange chords”, per J. Emerson in his book Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and His Book of Love. Johnny Echols considered it the most difficult song on the album to record because of that. She Comes in Colors was released as a single b/w Orange Skies in December 1966. While it got significant airplay in Los Angeles and several other localities it failed to break into the Billboard Hot 100.

The final track of the album takes up side two. At just under nineteen minutes its’ length extended past the few other long tracks out there by seven or eight minutes. Revelation had developed into a concert showcase for the band. Originally titled John Lee Hooker, it is a blues/R&B jam that takes up the vast majority of the track. The brief intro however, is the Giga from J.S. Bach’s Partita No.1, which reprises for a slightly longer time at the conclusion. The early stages of the jam hold promise, but that only lasts about five minutes before it devolves into less exciting territory. Arthur Lee said that they did the long jam “so the musicians could express themselves.”  What transpired is a run through by each musician, voice, guitar, harp, sax, bass, drums all bookended by harpsichord. As seems to be with many things, some say it’s “tedious” (Richie Unterberger) and some say, “I like 'Revelation', what of it?”, according to a RateYourMusic reviewer ‘acidballroom’. Generally Revelation gets panned, but it’s not the worst thing that ever happened on record.

There are those who say that if Revelation had been shorter, while concentrating on its best features, it may have been better received. In any case, long songs or jams, while not appealing to everyone, started being recorded more often. Longer tracks in general were appearing more as well. Radio, particularly the increase in FM availability, helped albums increasingly become the greater source over singles for the buying public. To this end Revelation was assuredly one of the very earliest examples.

Of the the three or four songs that exceeded ten minutes in length at that time, The Rolling Stones’ Goin’ Home, which was recorded for their artistic breakthrough album, Aftermath, was the true herald of what was to come. Goin Home, ‘only’ 11:35 in length, was recorded at RCA studios in Los Angeles in the midst of a Stones tour. Interestingly there has been some dispute about the relationship between it and Revelation. Tracks for Aftermath were laid down in December 1965 and March 1966. The record was released in April, seven months before Love’s Da Capo. Yet while the Stones were in LA they made the rounds of a few clubs. As Arthur Lee put it on the back cover of the 1980 Best of Love compilation by Rhino Records, “The Rolling Stones saw us play (Revelation) at the Brave New World, and they recorded a long song on their next album. After our album came out, I got the blame for copying them!”

Overall, the album fell just short of a masterpiece. The six-song first side is, at the very least, a full psychedelic potpourri. One could say that overall, the music hits just about everything but country music and the kitchen sink. The general consensus seems to be that some of the songs written by Arthur Lee (along with Orange Skies by Bryan MacLean), are the best, or among the best they’ve done. The follow-up, Forever Changes, is indeed considered among the best rock records ever issued. Still, at least some of the songs on Da Capo’s side one can stand toe-to-toe with many from Forever Changes. The decision to record Revelation had a definite impact on the fate of the album. However, the fact that the band chose not to tour mostly beyond the LA area may have caused the most damage to sales. This being true not only for Da Capo, but with all three of their first records and the singles issued from them as well. They did find their way up to San Francisco and thereabouts resulting in stronger popularity for their music in the wider Bay Area. —————————

My impetus for getting Da Capo was two-fold. I was quite excited about the single “Seven & Seven Is” being included in the album: the other being a nineteen minute song on one whole side. It was about the time I purchased it that I had started going to the record store conveniently located in the shopping center across from my high school. Usually along with my good buddy Dave, I spent many a day after school there, listening to records through earphones on the store’s turntables. Da Capo’s first side was immediately intriguing, while the second side seemed passable. Of course I never even came close to listening to that whole side and undoubtedly missed some of the less appealing aspects of it until listening to it at home.

I was struck by the eclectic nature of the material in Da Capo, which I was personally attracted to. It became pretty simple to listen to songs on side one, and just not flip it to side two. I believe I probably listened to those other songs more often that way. Looking back, I am pretty sure I only listened to Revelation a few times. It wasn’t until I got the CD years later that I did so once again, but that was about it for awhile. Once I began writing my original blog three years before this update, I listened to it in more depth than ever before. That turned out to be quite worthwhile because I finally was able to absorb the good things about the jam.

It’s fair to say that Da Capo is likely my favorite half album, because I truly consider the six songs on side one among the best ones I know, For most albums it’s rare to find all songs to be fully acceptable. With six out of seven songs, the rate of  eighty-five percent favorability would make it a pretty incredible record, and well, Da Capo is.

I feel fortunate to have finally seen Arthur Lee play a few of these songs in person. After he had been released from prison when his 1996 weapons conviction was reversed, he renewed his relationship with the band Baby Lemonade. They had become his back up “Love” band in the early ‘90s before his arrest and conviction. In 2003-4 they did a Forever Changes tour in Europe and the U.S. When they played Great American Music Hall in San Francisco CA, on January 16, 2004, I was front and center. After completing the entire Forever Changes album live, they played some selections from the Love repertoire, which included Orange Skies and Seven and Seven Is. Within three years Arthur Lee died of leukemia. More recently Baby Lemonade joined forces with one of the Love founders, Johnny Echols, forming Love Revisited. I’ve seen them three times now, and on all occasions those two songs were included in the show. Great stuff, but the big thrill still remains the opportunity to have seen the amazing Arthur Lee in person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_(band)

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Love-band

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/love-mn0000314600/biography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Capo_(Love_album)

https://psychedelicsight.com/no-37-loves-da-capo/

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/love-da-capo/

https://www.allmusic.com/album/da-capo-mw0000195829

https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/love/da-capo/

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-aug-05-me-lee5-story.html

https://www.dallasobserver.com/music/love-hurts-6401143

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-bryan-maclean-1044305.html

http://blues.gr/profiles/blogs/drummer-michael-stuart-ware-of-the-sons-of-adam-love-talks-about

Michael Stuart-Ware book https://recordcollectormag.com/reviews/pegasus-epitaph-the-story-of-the-legendary-rock-group-love

Tjay Cantrelli (John Barberis) died 1985 https://culture.fandom.com/wiki/Love_(band)

https://books.google.com/books?id=Ho5XDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT212&lpg=PT212&dq=john+barbieri+(tjay+cantrelli)&source=bl&ots=l0JhXoR2S3&sig=ACfU3U0x71ysvfzrWKNgu8iItLTVctPiSA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiitqzV6_fpAhURLK0KHWu5AE0Q6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=john%20barbieri%20(tjay%20cantrelli)&f=false

SF/Central Valley shows http://www.chromeoxide.com/love.htm

http://poisgoneforever.blogspot.com/2011/05/love-family-tree.html

https://www.love-revisited.com/about-2/

https://www.discogs.com/artist/48410-Love

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVTsf1XlOneXNytPQnrcL-sg3fjackHIA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Lee_(musician)

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/arthur-lee-mn0000932220/biography

http://arthurlee.phpwebhosting.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Echols

http://www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk/MagSitePages/Article/9244/Interviews/Love-Interview-with-Johnny-Echols

https://www.culturesonar.com/a-piece-of-love-an-interview-with-johnny-echols/

http://www.classicbands.com/LoveInterview.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_MacLean

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/bryan-maclean-mn0000525687/biography

[sinceileftyoublog]

Michael Beharie Interview: Explicitly Optimistic

Photo by Clayton Harley

BY JORDAN MAINZER

With his upcoming album Promise, Michael Beharie has made his most accessible music to date, though his influences remain as wide-ranging as ever. In 2018, the improviser and composer (and current member of Zs) was in the middle of a swath of experimental, noise-based projects when he decided he wanted to also do something basic: write songs. What resulted was a song cycle broadly about ideas of place and memory, a collection of gentle tunes that contrast the harshness of what he’s known for. 

On Promise, Beharie imbues songs like “Red”, “Silo”, and “Eclipse” with circular guitar fingerpicking, resulting in lilting, expansive folk tunes. He brought on friends like drummers Greg Fox (also of Zs), Noah Hecht, and Matt Mehlan and bassist Gui Duvignau, but the most involved collaborators were vocalist Charlotte Mundy and flutist Laura Cocks. Mundy doesn’t sing any lyrics; in fact, her atmospheric melodies and harmonies are really only noticeable on "Red”. For the most part, she gives the songs an unheralded sense of warmth and depth. Cocks, meanwhile, plays flute on songs that couldn’t be more different, like heartland 808s jams “Ghost” and “For Days” and the Renaissance-era sounding “Thakur”. On all of these songs, Beharie references his lifelong affection for North Indian Bansuri flute playing, even on the two stadium-sized rockers. “The North Indian classical tradition is really rule-based,” he told me over the phone earlier this month. “I’m not implying the note to note techniques of that music. But I wanted to make parts that reminded me of the way those flute players play.” Whether meshing disparate genres or juxtaposing organic and digital sounds, Beharie thrives on contrast, the ultimate evidence of Promise’s appeal.

Promise comes out April 8th. Earlier this month at Union Pool in Brooklyn, Beharie played his first show of the album’s songs, with a quartet: Beharie on acoustic guitar and vocals, Fox on drums, Grey McMurray on electric guitar, and Jason McMahon on bass. Expect announcements of more shows throughout the year, and read our conversation below, edited for length in clarity.

Photo by Lauryn Siegel

Since I Left You: What inspired you to make a song cycle about place and memory?

Michael Beharie: In 2018, I was doing a lot of touring with more noise-based groups, playing mainly abstract, improvised music. Aside from those activities, I was just making songs as a counterbalance to all of the noise stuff. I had been working ever since 2017 on a collection of these songs that are more internally facing and delicate. That was the main reason that I wanted to hone in on and pursue the song cycle idea, just to do something radically different from what I was involved in in a somewhat public way.

SILY: How did you approach the sequencing of the songs?

MB: I had about 80 ideas in 2018. Then I laid them out and wanted to try to create a story with some hills and valleys in it. Most of the material is pretty restrained other than “Ghost” and “For Days”. I wanted to feature [Laura Cocks,] the flute player, and the woman who did additional vocals, Charlotte Mundy, in the middle of it, with “Thakur”. But I had the sequence set pretty early in the process when all of the songs were in demo forms.

SILY: On a couple of the songs, you combine natural noise and digital noise. Are you trying to point out the differences between those types of noise or posit that they’re one and the same and question the distinction between the two?

MB: I find it kind of psychedelic to be in a totally organic world and all of a sudden have a very distinct digital sound come through. I think it contextualizes the organic stuff in a new way, and it contextualizes the digital. I love radically electroacoustic music where folks do that. Because I was taking the time to record so many organic sounds for this, I thought it would be really special and important to carefully have some digital elements in there.

SILY: How did you go about balancing your voice with Charlotte’s?

MB: I definitely didn’t want to write her anything with words. That was a big thing. But I also didn’t want to set her voice in a backup vocal kind of way. I wanted it to be really special and dreamy. I took two weeks making MIDI parts in Ableton with fake voice sets and treating the vocal readings of her parts as almost a synth, if that makes sense, rather than a straight-up melodic countermelody. The approach made particular sense for her voice because she can really do the Morton Feldman-esque straight tone with no vibrato. It’s very Anglican church sounding, in a way.

I think the only actual melody that she sings is on the first track on the record, “Red”. Other than that, all of her parts are real versions of voice synth pads, like an 80s Fairlight [CMI] synth.

SILY: A couple of the songs on here you’ve called your rock songs, “Ghost” and “For Days”. Can you talk about them in context of the record and the music you make in general? How new of a thing is it for you?

MB: It’s not really new in terms of daily experience over the past 14 years. It’s new in terms of putting out music. More outward-facing songs like “Ghost” and “For Days” I had been playing out and releasing but in very electronic forms. This is definitely the first time there’s more folk rock instrumentation. “Ghost” is a funny one because it’s definitely the most nostalgic sounding on there. It’s very much inspired by alt pop radio that I would listen to growing up in D.C. I just thought it would be important to have that more outward-facing energy to make the inward, more folky stuff resonate. 

SILY: Then there’s a song like “Thakur” that’s almost Renaissance-era.

MB: [laughs] Totally.

SILY: It, equally, makes the folky tunes stand out.

MB: Awesome. I love that.

SILY: What’s the meaning to you of Promise as a title?

MB: I don’t have a super clear thought about it, but I love the idea of “promise” in its usage of “I promise I will such and such.” I also love it as in, “This thing has promise.” One of the ideas behind the record was that I’m not trying to do anything cutting edge or dark, which is so much different from what I had been releasing. I felt that word, optimistic but not in any specific way, was appropriate for the vibe.

SILY: What’s the story behind the cover art?

MB: The cover art was made from an imaging of nematic crystals. It’s a riff off of the way liquid crystals look. They have this characteristic of being translucent and reflecting light the way crystals do when you look at them from certain angles. It just seemed like a nice bright and multi-hued paring with the music.

SILY: How was the show you just played? Was it your first time playing these songs live?

MB: Yeah, it was our first show. We had so much fun. We had rehearsed 5 or 6 times and had been going pretty hard trying to reimagine the songs in a slightly more rock way and giving time for intros and outros to bloom. We’re planning on doing more shows and bringing in different woodwind players and singers, but at the moment, we just have the core of the band really strong. It felt great to play live again. I hadn’t played a show since before the pandemic, so it was nice to come back to life a little bit.

SILY: How was adapting the songs to this set of musicians and instruments?

MB: Extremely easy and fun. I made pretty detailed charts of every part in the songs in score fashion, but as soon as we started playing, the riffs we needed to have from the record were so easy, everyone picked them up by ear. These musicians are used to playing much more complex music, and this is really basic for them, so it ended up being a really natural process to set them for a rock band. I’m really looking forward to recording the live versions. I want to do a live EP of at least 5 of the songs with the new arrangements.

SILY: What else is next for you?

MB: I wanna do a follow up to the record I made with the cellist [Teddy Rankin-Parker], A Heart From Your Shadow, which was released in 2018.

SILY: I was just listening to that before we started talking!

MB: Oh, nice. I wanna do a follow up to that record, and I want to do another song cycle with drum machine instead of acoustic drumming and oboe and bassoon and bass clarinet instead of flutes. I’m working on that right now.

SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately that’s caught your attention?

MB: Such a good question. It’s strange, but I’ve been listening to mostly Greek bouzouki music. I’m obsessed with this one song “Oles Oi Daphnes” by Evgenia Verra. I kind of want to cover it with the band. I've been trying to learn how to play these bouzouki parts on the guitar.

I’ve been really into the writer Carlo Rovelli, who writes about the illusion of time. He’s a physics writer who makes these high particle physics concepts digestible for us laymen. [laughs] Grey is also reading all of his books, so we geek out over his stuff.