“Music” Category Archive

Philip Dickey had a burning question about the pizza place that his band, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, would be playing in January.

It was not about the size of the room, or the setup, or the acoustics.

“Is it really good pizza?” he asked.

I recommended the calzones, but the odd thing was that Dickey seemed genuinely interested in my answer. The question was offered with eager enthusiasm, and the songwriter/drummer/singer/guitarist sounded like he was trying to establish a rapport. As we ended our interview, he not only invited me to the show but suggested that we keep in touch.

The guy wanted me to like him. More than that, I think, he wanted to be my friend.

And how could I not like Dickey? In conversation, there isn’t much that can’t be described as “confusing,” and his band makes charming, lovely, and lively pop music without sacrificing its soul, hitting earnest and honest notes somewhere between the Shins and Weezer, well-suited to the soundtrack of a Wes Anderson movie. Conviction gives the music life, and keeps it from feeling the least bit derivative.

When Spoon was finishing its 2001 album Girls Can Tell, the band didn’t know what to do with “Chicago at Night,” which would close the record.

In an interview last week, drummer and co-founder Jim Eno told this story about what he and guitarist, singer, and chief songwriter Britt Daniel decided to do: “I never would have tried this, but Britt and I were so young, and we were just like, ‘Oh yeah, let’s do it.’ We had to turn all the mixes in for mastering. ... We have these two versions, and we like different things about each version ... . So Britt says, ‘Why don’t we use the left side of this mix and the right side of this mix?’”

So Eno broke out Pro Tools, put the left channel of one mix with the right channel of the other, and time-compressed one so they were the same length.

It was a moronic idea — a simple-minded, jokey cop-out.

And you can hear the strangely spectacular results on the record.

This isn’t a list of the “best” songs of 2007, or even my favorites. It’s a personal 2007 compilation that tries to capture my experience with music over the past 12 months. The songs are meant to play off each other — sometimes in obvious ways, often not — and there’s a purpose to the sequencing.

My goal is simple: to give readers some ideas for new listening, or perhaps to spur you to go back to an artist you’d dismissed. There are a lot more familiar names in this year’s mix than last year’s, and that’s because of the accelerating fragmentation of the music market; it seems increasingly difficult for anything to capture the public’s imagination for more than a few seconds.

So here are 18 songs that I felt deserve more love than our short cultural attention span typically allows.

On “Puttin’ People on the Moon,” the Driver-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood sings a litany of tragedies personal and regional: “Mary Alice got cancer just like everybody here / Seems everyone I know is gettin’ cancer every year / And we can’t afford no insurance, I been 10 years unemployed / So she didn’t get no chemo so our lives was destroyed / And nothin’ ever changes, the cemetery gets more full / And now over there in Huntsville, even NASA’s shut down too.”

The song is typical Drive-By Truckers: bleak, detailed, populist, Southern, and with enough twangy muscle that you can play it loud and ignore the skill of its songwriting and the loving attention it pays to the downtrodden, heard in the indignant desperation of Hood’s damaged falsetto on the chorus.

And therein lies the tension of Drive-By Truckers: This is a band that writes great songs and then drowns them out with three blaring guitars.

There is nobody like Andrew Bird in the world, a songwriter and a performer who makes his whistling, his glockenspiel, and his violin at home with guitars, drums, and vocals in detailed, pitch-perfect pop songs that never seem precious or forced, as eccentric as they are.

But when you’re as idiosyncratic as Bird is, that means there aren’t many people whose vision matches your own.

Some things are too embarrassing for public consumption, so the man born Garrett Dutton and known as G. Love exercised some control over the content of his new documentary and concert DVD, A Year & a Night with G. Love & Special Sauce.

When the director showed him his initial cut of the documentary portion of the DVD, coming it at roughly two hours, G. Love demanded that some material come out.

The running time was one concern, but image was another, G. Love admitted in a recent interview. “You’ve got to take this shit out,” he told the director. “I don’t want to come off like this.”

But don’t expect a scrubbed and polished portrayal of the shambling, Philadelphia-based bluesy hip-hop artist on the DVD, or in a conversation with him. If you want to be considered authentic, it’s important to let people see your flaws. As G. Love said of the DVD, “You can’t just paint your shit so it smells like roses. You’ve got to leave a little poop in there.”

In an interview, pedal-steel guitarist Robert Randolph once suggested that somebody would come along and be the instrument’s Jeff Beck or Jimi Hendrix.

When I asked him recently where that put him in the pedal steel’s development, the singer/songwriter/guitarist appeared to backtrack a little. “Somebody has to put me there,” he said of the class of guitar revolutionaries that includes Hendrix. “I wouldn’t put myself there.”

But based on his own criteria, that class is probably where Randolph belongs.

One reviewer has called Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky the best Eagles record the Eagles didn’t make, and it’s impossible to shake the timeless soft-rock vibe in the sound, the vocals, and the easy pace.

“A Ghost Is Born was to me really jagged ... abrasive,” bassist John Stirratt said of his band’s last studio album. “And this record has a certain warmth.”

The lyrics that open Low’s Drums and Guns are as forceful as singer/guitarist Alan Sparhawk is tentative.

“Pretty People,” over a stark wave of fuzz, sets the tone for the record: “All the soldiers / They’re all gonna die / All the little babies / They’re all gonna die / All the poets / And all the liars / And all you pretty people / You’re all gonna die.”

It’s a grim assessment, and the mood doesn’t abate for the Minnesota band, known for its minimalist, slow songs and the often-haunting vocal interplay between Sparhawk and drummer Mimi Parker.

Singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer tells about a friend who leads a group of people who knit for the local food bank. They’ll set up somewhere and knit with a sign that reads, “Knitting for the Food Bank.”

“People will come and talk to them,” Newcomer said in a phone interview last week. “Folks who might not maybe go up to someone on the corner and talk to somebody who has a sign will sit down with a group of women knitting and talk about the issue. ‘What’s happening with the food bank?’”

The lesson is that directness often isn’t the best way to reach people. “Sometimes our most powerful activism, our most potent activism, comes out of what we love,” she said.

It’s no surprise that Jen Chapin was pulled in several directions.

Her father, the late Harry Chapin, is most famous for writing and performing “Cat’s in the Cradle” but was also a humanitarian, co-founding World Hunger Year in 1975. (He died in an automobile accident in 1981.)

Jen Chapin is following her own social-justice calling. She chairs the World Hunger Year board of directors, and on tour will sometimes lead events geared toward activists, such as an upcoming forum on “Music and Social Action” at a Unitarian church the morning after a show.

Year-end lists of the best albums of the past 12 months are cruel, because either you’ll go bankrupt buying all these fantastic records or you’ll resent how much great music you’re missing because you can’t afford to buy them.

I’m not typically a nice person, but these are the holidays, so my year-end list is something that most anybody can afford. I’ve selected and sequenced 15 favorite songs (by 15 lesser-known artists) from 2006 and — in 11 cases — provided Web addresses where you can download or at least listen to the song for free. The remainder can be purchased from iTunes (and, most likely, other download sites). And it’ll all fit on a single CD (if you’re still into that sort of thing).

You hear it and you cringe immediately. Who the fuck thought of that stupid-ass name?

“Clap Your Hands Say Yeah”? Clap your hands learn to punctuate run-on sentences assholes. Or learn to use a damned conjunction.

“Dogs Die in Hot Cars”? Public-service slogans do not a band name make.

So Culture Snob here introduces a regular feature, offering free band names to whoever wants them. The goal is create the ultimate database of potential band names, to avoid travesties such as those cited above.

That’s not to say these are any good.

In part three of my River Roots Live trilogy, I present the September 22, 2006, performance of guitar hero Junior Brown. Junior was a bad boy, using an encore to go over his allotted 60 minutes. You might not be able to tell by listening, but Brown and his guitar did a mean train imitation when a locomotive threatened his set.

This recording is a little funky. Although a single file, the concert is in three distinct sections: the first song followed by a fade; the rest of the set followed by a fade again; and the encore. There is no good reason for this except that in my first attempt at bootlegging, I had a stupid notion about separating songs while recording. Basically, you lose a bit of the second song.

My recording of Alejandro Escovedo’s one-hour set at River Roots Live in Davenport, Iowa, on Saturday, September 23, 2006.

I changed a few settings for Saturday’s recording, and I think it sounds better. I’d love to get some feedback in the comments section of this entry and the Martin Sexton recording I posted yesterday. I’m trying to see if projects such as this are worth your and my time.

Pretty self-explanatory: Martin Sexton’s one-hour set at River Roots Live in Davenport, Iowa, on Friday, September 22, 2006.

This is my first attempt at a live recording of a national act. The quality is mediocre, with too much crowd noise. If anybody wants to try to clean up the source file so I can post a higher-quality version here, please e-mail me or leave a note in the comments section.

Also, feel free to comment on whether it’s even worth my time to post these audio files. Is the quality good enough to merit downloading?

I’ll be changing a few things when I record Alejandro Escovedo tonight. We’ll see if it’s any better.

I also have Junior Brown’s set from Friday and will post it if anybody wants it. Please let me know in the comments section if you’d like to hear that, too.