37 result(s) tagged “Interviews”

The Ani DiFranco appearing on stages these days might not be the same Ani DiFranco who became something of a legend over the past two decades.

The old Ani averaged a record a year from 1989 through 2006, toured incessantly, and was a punkish-folk, feminist, do-it-yourself, and bisexual icon.

The new Ani has a 20-month-old child and a “baby daddy” (her words, referring to producer Mike Napolitano), and in September released her first studio album in two whole years: Red Letter Year.

Chris Thile doesn’t like musical boundaries, and the mandolin player seems to almost relish pissing off those who would prefer to pigeonhole him.

On Punch, the first recording released under the name Punch Brothers but the second performed by Thile and this particular quartet of musicians, the centerpiece is a four-part, 42-minute suite that fuses classical structures with a bluegrass style.

In an interview last week, Thile’s shrug was almost audible when he was asked about how fans of his previous work with the platinum-selling Nickel Creek were reacting to this ambitious work.

“Losing people was going to happen,” he said.

In the fifth chapter of his 2007 book Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, David Sloan Wilson writes:

“It turns out that something very similar to my desert-island thought experiment has been performed on chickens by a poultry scientist named William Muir.”

That probably sounds odd.

It will likely sound even odder when you find out what the desert-island thought experiment is: a set of three hypothetical situations to explore human morality through the lens of evolution.

(This article dates from late January 2008, when it was published, in slightly different form, in the River Cities’ Reader. Ra Ra Riot’s debut album, The Rhumb Line, is out today on Barsuk Records.)

The future of Ra Ra Riot sounds as if it’s in doubt.

The New York group has an album that’s being mixed and mastered, but it doesn’t have a label. The band is hoping for a May release, but that could be pushed to September. It’s now considering its options — such as self-releasing a digital version of the album — if it doesn’t find a corporate home soon. It wants the album out there, but it wants a label push, too.

“We don’t want to sit on this record forever,” said guitarist Milo Bonacci last week. The band plans to take some time to write new songs next month, but “to make sure that [a second record] is even going to happen, this album needs to get off the ground, and we need to tour to support it.”

If this sounds like standard unsigned-band talk, it is.

And it isn’t. In June, 23-year-old Ra Ra Riot drummer John Pike died under mysterious circumstances after leaving a party following a show in Rhode Island.

As dismissive as many people are when it comes to blogs, what’s often neglected is that they can sometimes represent genuine grassroots movements. And Minneapolis’ Tapes ’n Tapes has been a major beneficiary.

Even though Tapes ’n Tapes’ members have been made poster boys for the term “blog band,” keep one thing in mind: The group deserves the hype. As My Old Kentucky Blog wrote: “Argue it until you are blue in the face, but this ‘blog band’ proved that we music blogs actually get it right some times.”

In addition to “blog band” — which is mostly said with derision — Tapes ’n Tapes have acquired another term of ambivalence: “indie-rock classicists,” which suggests that the band is too busy gazing back lovingly to chart a course forward.

But that’s never been a fair criticism for Tapes ’n Tapes, whose two albums are consistently surprising and never performed with less than full conviction — even as their components are eminently familiar, starting with Grier’s natural vocal resemblance to Black Francis/Frank Black.

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.

A foolish person doesn’t recognize that one can learn much from opponents. So liberals have begun to understand that they need God on their side as much as the Christian Right does.

The lesson from conservatives, said Rabbi Michael Lerner, is that it’s okay to base policy on faith and spiritual values, and it’s important to stand up for what you believe in. “When they come to a decision about what they believe in, they fight for it,” he said of the Christian Right in a recent interview. “And they’re willing to lose an election for the sake of what they believe in.”

Near the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, spiritual-documentary filmmaker Martin Doblmeier conducted a survey on his Web site. He asked whether people supported constructing a “garden of forgiveness” at Ground Zero in New York City.

Thousands of votes later, the results were overwhelming: Roughly 95 percent of respondents said “no.”

Although he wrote and directed The Power of Forgiveness, Doblmeier offered this anecdote in a recent phone interview without judgment. His point was that forgiveness is something that spiritual people tend to embrace as an abstract concept, but putting it into practice is shockingly difficult. For many, he said, forgiveness is the equivalent of a spare tire, something you “keep ... in the back of the trunk and hope to God you never need it.”

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.

In the 1985 HBO mockumentary The History of White People in America, co-writer and host Martin Mull offered the world mayonnaise-loving WASPs — suburbanites who had lost any sense of their roots, to the point that one child’s understanding of his own heritage was limited to the streets on which he and his parents had lived.

White people, the show seemed to be saying, are beyond ethnicity and culture.

Mull doesn’t see a meaningful connection between that work and his paintings, which are presently touring the country in a retrospective. The only link, he said in a recent interview, is that they reflect his childhood in Ohio. “It comes from the same vein,” he said, “the same mother lode.”

Yet they share more than just a Midwestern upbringing. The History of White People in America is the light-comic flip side to Mull’s ambiguous but loaded paintings. Both represent a tug of war over the American dream, a recognition of both its allure and its pitfalls.

It might sound like a lame excuse.

But if a man cheats on his wife, he might explain himself this way: “I couldn’t help it. My evolved psychological mechanisms made me have an affair.” And he’d be right.

Sort of.

David M. Buss, a psychologist at the University of Texas, has spent more than two decades studying sexual desire and behavior. And his research has led to one overarching observation: Across cultures, people’s mating strategies are universal.

It is in times of crisis that a person learns who his or her true friends are. Alejandro Escovedo discovered he has a lot of friends.

Even if you haven’t heard of Escovedo, you’ve likely heard of them: John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Los Lonely Boys, the Cowboy Junkies, Son Volt, Charlie Musselwhite, Lucinda Williams, Calexico, Steve Earle. Those people and more than two dozen others cut tracks for Por Vida: A Tribute to the Songs of Alejandro Escovedo. The goal wasn’t merely to honor the man, or just to offset some of his medical bills, but to perhaps save his life.