Good post, lazy title

Do you ever set up rewards for yourself?

I do.  Daily, weekly, hourly.  You have to pace yourself with rewards, though.  You can’t put in a busy day at work and then buy a new computer.  What happens when you have three busy days at work?  Or a busy week?  Just like the waistline in that new suit you just purchased, you’ve got leave yourself room to grow.

So the key is to start off small.  Busy week at work?  An evening reading a good book.  Running errands on a Saturday afternoon?  Caribou Coffee.

Volunteering to coach lacrosse when you know nothing about coaching or lacrosse?  And then being on the sideline for 29 games in one season for three different teams?  New music.

And not just new music, but new new music.  Recently released music.  Cutting edge stuff.  Relevant.

Stay tuned.

She’ll rock your clothes off (and love herself for it)

It always annoys me when new musicians constantly draw comparisons to older more established ones.  I know writers want to make new musicians more accessible to potential music purchasers, and making positive comparisons between artists remains one of the best ways to do this, but it feels lazy.

Ida Maria, for example, is catching a bad break with all of the comparisons she’s drawing from writers.  Yes, she is a young female vocalist with a strong voice, equally strong personality and a damned catchy album in Fortress Round My Heart.  That doesn’t mean she deserves to be compared to Courtney Love. (Who really does deserve to be compared to Courtney Love?)

The wounded maturity Maria shows on her 10 song powerpop punch of an album hit me harder than a desire to make easy comparisons.  She sounds like a thriving active woman in her 20s while also channeling a slightly regretful wiser woman in her 40s.

Take her single, “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked” for example.  When she hits that line of the chorus, I roll my eyes a little and think of every 20-something woman I know who shows her “maturity” by talking about sex and hooking up constantly.  Maria, though, follows that fluffy line with: “I like me so much better when you’re naked.”  Doesn’t that sound like something an adult reaching middle aged would think while reflecting on past relationships?

Don’t worry, though, the maturity doesn’t weigh the album down at all.  From the driving guitar notes and bassdrum beat that opens the album to the pulsing 9^th song (the 10^th song has an acoustic singer/songwriter sound to it), this album rocks.

The substance that Maria provides keeps the music from floating into the indie rock clouds. Tracks like “Oh My God,” “Queen of the World” and the single mentioned above aren’t overly dramatic, they provide brief flashes of depth that keep us from being too swept away with youthful exuberance.

A sad song, a beer and a smile

A coworker recently admitted to being a John Mayer fan, and as I geared up
to unmercifully tease him (I’ve always thought of your body as wonderland.
Zing!), he commented that he doesn’t listen to lyrics, just rhthms.

I felt my Mayer jokes fade away (they weren’t that good anyways), and I started thinking.  I’m a lyrics guy.  I’ll take a good Dylan album over Kid A any day.  Heck, I’ll take most things over Kid A.  It’s not that I don’t listen to rhthyms, I’m just attracted to lyrics (and spunky blondes, but that’s a different post).
Engaging music, that I return to again and again, tells stories.  Todd
Snider and Chris Knight are two of my favorite musician story-tellers, and
guess what?  I’ve been listening to them a lot, lately.

Knight does not write happy songs.  Not his style.  He tells stories about
love being lost, life being hard and farms being sold.  The undercurrent to
these tales of woe supplies an image of a slowly fading working-class way of
life.  Toys are shinier, screens are brighter and life may not be better for
it.

If Knight is gritting his teeth through the difficult days, then Snider is
dancing barefoot around the flames.  He takes a satirical knife to anyone
stepping on someone else to get ahead, and laughs the entire time.

These two men take opposite sides to the same coin, and damned if I can’t
get enough of them.

Rap vs. Folk, Who will survive?

As usual, I’ve been trying to force a blog post about these guys and
how the music business lied to us when they promised us this and we
got this.  In order to do my idea justice, I’ve got listen to a
couple of other albums and the whole thing was getting a little too big for
my brain to handle as I drive home from work (when I do my best prewriting).

Anyways, as I avoided those other albums, I started listening to some new
stuff I’ve had lying around and boom! Completely different blog post pops
into my head.

Here’s something to wet your pallet while I work on a new post.  More to
come.

Local musicians play The Beatles

Cover songs are weird things, right?

I generally like them.  Listening to reinterpretations of songs, even ones that don’t quite live up to the originals, offer glimpes into the creative minds of musicians.  This one, for example, loses me when it starts screaming and thrashing around, but that’s alright.  By that point I’ve moved on to the original anyways.

This desire to reinterpret pieces of music stretches to most genres of music.  Beethoven’s late piano sonatas still attract musicians.  These highly emotional pieces, written by a man whose hearing abandoned him, still draw pianists to record, not just play, them.  How ballsy is that?  “Sure, people have been playing this piece since before the Civil War, but wait till you hear my version of it.”  Wow.

Sound cool?  Then let me introduce you to the Minnesota Beatles Project Vol. 1.  A charity album (proceeds go to Minnesota public schools music programs) made up of local musicians playing their cover versions of Beatles songs.

Don’t think of these songs as cover songs in the contemporary sense, though.  These aren’t album fillers or “We-need-another-single” songs, they’re personal interpretations.  A lot of times, musicians just added to what was already present.  Nicholas Mrozinski adds a little more soul to “Across the Universe” without losing the sorrow of the original.  Similarly, The Pistol Whippin’ Party Penguins added some fiddles and banjos (always a good idea) to “I’ve just seen a face” without losing the giddy excitement of the original.

Mark Mallman and Lucy Michelle & The Velvet Lapelles, though, are the only artists who do more than just add to what was already present.  Mallman on “The Fool on the Hill” sounds more empowered on his version than the almost arrogant tone McCarthy took.  The passive aggressive cooing by Lucy Michelle & The Velvet Lapelles on “Sexy Sadie” comes across as comfortaing and damned harsh at the same time.  Mean Girls scare the hell out of me, and I’m glad her scorn is pointed elsewhere.

I know classical music and folk music are rerecorded on a regular basis.  Those genres just breed a culture where musicians are encouraged to revisit established classics.  Even if the Beatles aren’t your thing (and we probably can’t be friends if that’s true), this album makes local musicians and styles more accessible to average music listeners.  That’s a win, right?

Not a supergroup *wink*

Lets talk some more about influential music not just helping us with our
work commute, but wiggling its way into our bones.

I really like the New Pornographers, but man they can be intimidating.  Not in a “Oh god,
that guy with the weird eye won’t stop looking at me,” sort of way, but in a
“White Album” sort of way.

Does that make sense?  In high school, when I drifted away from
top40 radio, I remember staring at the White Album in my local music shop
(Shout out to CD Connection!) and thinking I wasn’t ready.  It was too
good, too smart and too complex.  I needed more time with other, lesser, music before fully
appreciating its intricacies.  White Album = Major League.  Me = Minor League.  Let’s call this my White Album Theory, which sounds a lot better than my Intimidating Media Theory.

Don’t call NP an indie-rock supergroup, at least to their faces.  They don’t
care for the label, even though the members all represent different corners of
the indie-music world.  They’re just a band, like any other band that has
trouble going on tour b/c the individual members have such demanding touring
schedules with other successful bands.

So this indie-rock supergroup (don’t tell them I said that) create some
really strong albums.  Lots of variety in rhythm/style, great lyrics and of
their 4 albums, two have been fantastic and two have been pretty good.

Here’s the thing, though, this isn’t music where you can sing along after
listening to half of a song for the first time.  “Party in USA” it isn’t.*

*  On a side note:  How bitchy is Miley when she says ” I guess I never got the memo,”? That is a teenage girl in her prime right there.

Anyways, the sing along factor is nonexistent, which is actually kind of cool.  Every time I listen to one of their albums, it feels like the first time.  I get excited when the album starts up and sweeps me away.  There’s enough complexity to make it interesting and enough familiarity to make it enjoyable.

Blog Evoultion

The thing about music, good music anyways, is that it makes you think about things not related to music.  Love?  Sure, that’s a standard music theme.  Pop artists knead the subject over and over to produce a lot of material on the subject.  Not all musical thoughts, though, are fluff, think of the political music from the 1960s, the racial implications of bebop jazz or Nirvana’s declaration of identity on Nevermind.

Billy Bragg & Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue doesn’t have as clear of a message as the previous examples, but it definitely made me think.  The outcome of which, is that I’m going to do less reviewing here (b/c who cares about my opinion anyways) and talk more about what thoughts and feelings spring to mind by the music I feature.

Writing about this album has been difficult.  I mean, I tried standard like/dislike posts, but when I finished they just felt below average and that some vital part remained absent.  I kept trying to type my thoughts into a tidy little box where my grammar’s perfect, my ideas are clear and concise (very concise) andmy sentences flow majestically from one to another.

Really, that was goal for this blog.  I wanted to use it to make me a better writer.  What I forgot, though, is that I’m a good story teller with slightly above average writing ability.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my still-young-but-middle-age-is-in-sight life, it’s to embrace who I am and not worry so much about who I’m not (even if that is pretty difficult at times).

So, if you haven’t already figured it out, this album made me think.  It’s a bunch of songs written by Woodie Guthrie and performed by English indie rocker Billy Bragg and American alt-county/rock/alt-folk band Wilco.  There’s a back story to how all of this came together that you can read
about on Wikipedia; I’m not going to waste time with it.

There were a lot of parts to this album that I loved: the barroom stomp feel to the lyrically elusive opening track, the self-awareness that came with “Way Over in the Minor Key” and 15 other lyrical things that sets Guthrie’s lyrics apart from 95% of the music we hear today.  Wilco does a great job of updating 40 year old music to make it more modern and engaging, while Bragg’s soulful approach to “At My Window Sad and Lonely” and “Another Man’s Done Gone” offered an emotional hook for me whenever Guthrie’s lyrics became a little two heady.

But none of that matters.

What I’m trying to say, is that this album didn’t jump out at me for any of these reasons.  It’s been playing in a constant loop (driving my wife crazy) because it made me think about music from a larger picture.  What is it about an album that makes it good and enjoyable?  What’s the best way for me to convey my thoughts and feelings about this album to the blogosphere?  Why isn’t anyone writing lyrics as powerful and enjoyable as Guthrie did 60 years ago?

My unpublished/deleted posts all tried to tackle these questions with little success.  Instead of writing a neat little blogpost critiquing the album, it made me rethink my whole purpose of blogging and reevaluate what the heck I’m doing with the time and energy I put into these posts.

Damn, that’s some powerful music.

(I didn’t even touch on how well this modern sounding music connects us to the graceful simplicity of classic music, but I think this youtube clip conveys it pretty well.)

It grows on you (but not like mold)

I’ve been trying to write a post about an album for the past couple of weeks (give or take some days devoted to Holiday craziness), but it’s just not coming to me.

It seems odd, but I’ve always struggled to articulate why I like some albums and not others.  I should be able to identify why I like about an album and communicate that to others, right?  Right?.

In fact, a lot of my favorite albums are the ones that I initially disregarded.  I did it with this one, this one and even this one.  After the initial rejection, something about them started calling to me.  I’d start humming one of the songs or think, “I’ll just listen to  it one more time,” and suddenly I couldn’t put it down.

I kind of refer to this as my Bob Dylan Theory.  Basically, it’s that everybody hates Dylan the first time they hear him.  We all thought his voice was awful, there wasn’t anything very musical about his guitarmanship and his songs didn’t make any sense.  Isn’t that what you thought the first time you heard him?  No?  Liar.

It’s on the second listening to Dylan or even the third that he starts to make sense.  The lyrics that didn’t make sense suddenly open up to a depth unheard of in most modern music and you realize that the simple guitar work compliments the complex lyrics pretty nicely.  Some might even say perfectly.  And the voice?  Well, it’s definitely not getting more melodious, but it combines with the lyrics and music so damn well.  You know what I mean?

This isn’t exactly what’s happening to this album I’ve been listening to lately (I liked it immediately), but I’m just having trouble putting my thoughts down.  I’ll work on it and get back to you.

New twist on old style

There’s something graceful about really good Newgrass Music.

Similar to alt-country (I’ll get to that another day), Newgrass takes the rhythms, harmonies and, if done well,  soul of traditional bluegrass music and arranges them over  Rock music instrumentation. Usually, you’ll find a drummer,  guitarist,  bassist, fiddler and, in the case of Old School Freight Train, mandolin player.

Pete Frostic,  OSFT’s resident mandolinist, plays a prominent role in most songs.  I’ll be honest, though, I have no idea how a great mandolin player should sound.  Sure, if Frostic nimbly played a billion notes in 4 bars of music, it’d be easy to tell, but he doesn’t indulge on this album.  Instead, his mandolin dances around the melodies laid down by Jesse Harper, lead singer and guitarist,  Darrell Muller, playing the upright bass, and fiddler Nate Leath, which might speak more to Frostic’s abilities than if he just went crazy.

At times, Six Years sounds more pop music than Newgrass, which can be both good and bad.  Some of the songs come off a little too syrupy sweet for me, and I wanted Harper to be a bit more adventurous with his subject matter.  This doesn’t make songs like “Let Me Go,” “Memphis” or “Dunedin” any less enjoyable, but compare those to the ridiculously creative cover song that opens the album and it makes me wonder what kind of music they could have made with a little bit more creativity.

Don’t get me wrong, though, because I really do like this album, sweetness and all.  Musically, I can’t get enough of fiddles, mandolins and upright basses.  I also don’t mind that OSFT is leaning more towards pop music than new grass (I get  they’re trying to be more accessible to people who might be intimidated by mandolins and fiddles), I just hope they don’t lean too much further.

Heartbroken and Angry (yikes)

So here’s the thing, I love country music. Love it.  No, not the country music that makes soccer moms weepy as they pick up their kids at practice.  I’m talking about real country music where  songs tell stories and performers sound just as heartbroken as their subjects.

It’s an acquired taste, I get that.  Not everyone wants to hear another sad song about a farm being sold or love being lost.  I get it.

Come on, though, in today’s economic world, who can’t relate to a song about a farmer working his ass off to save his land only to see the bank reposes it in the end.  And who hasn’t had their heart broken?  Anyone?  So when Lucinda Williams murmurs “Are you alright?  All of a sudden you went away.” on the beginning of West, who doesn’t think of a loved one who’s checked out of a relationship?

The stark emotions Williams brings to this album become even more poignant as it moves past the opening track.  As Williams reflects on her mother’s recent death and her long-term boyfriend leaving her, we see a woman moving through various stages of grief.  We’re swept away with the sprawling lyrics of “Mama You Sweet,” and pulled into her heartbroken confusion in “Where is My Love.”  She even gets pissed off at her ex (and, apparently, hair bands) in “Come On.”  She’s driving the car here, yelling at other drivers with mascara running down her face, and we’re just along for the ride.