The Dead South - OurVinyl Sessions / Paste Studio NYC

 

 OurVinyl Sessions

 

 

 

Paste Studio NYC

 

 #The Dead South #folk #bluegrass #roots music #contemporary folk #acoustic #live music video

 

The Dead South, the four piece from Regina, Saskatchewan, whose high energy take on bluegrass has won them deserved plaudits, are back on the road. When last in London two years ago they played to a packed out Brixton Academy. This time it was the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, a majestic old theatre on four levels, where The Dead South’s dedicated fans again turned out in force for what felt like a homecoming. The standing room seethed while those above gave the balconies a good shake as all participated in what felt at times like a kind of revival meeting. That sense of cult, in a nice way, was intensified by the many fans who matched the band’s sparse pioneer look of big hat, white shirt, black trousers and braces. These folks looked as if they’d come in from a day in the fields rather than the Central Line to Shepherd’s Bush. They came looking for togetherness and a show of furious intensity. They were not disappointed.
The Dead South have had a few line-up changes but are now back to the quartet who formed the band a decade ago. Traditional bluegrass has branched out into alt-bluegrass, jamgrass and all manner of derivations as many outstanding bands have taken bluegrass in new directions. Where The Dead South have carved their own furrow is in the sheer simplicity of their style that drives in part from their punk roots. Acoustic guitar, mandolin, cello and, of course, banjo, with a kick drum for rhythm is all they need. They look the part with a deep sense of darkness about their lyrics that in some cases come across as almost a pastiche on traditional bluegrass. Whether that is the intention or not (in some songs it probably is), the show is blistering. All four put every ounce of their musical ingenuity and sheer energy into their performance. The stage setup is similarly stark. What look like four stained glass windows are spaced out along the back of the stage with corresponding low light from the storm lanterns in front of each of the four mic stands. The absence of any drum kit, keys or amplification turned the stage into a kind of dark secret meeting place, which in a way, it was.
House lights off and the rendezvous with these mysterious players from Saskatchewan was underway. A menacing banjo abruptly stopped for a tantalising few seconds as frontman Nate Hilts rasped, “My baby wants a diamond ring” in a voice that sounded as if it had been soaked in a vat of whiskey for years. On guitar, Hilts duelled with Colton Crawford’s banjo as mandolinist Scott Pringle and cellist Danny Kenyon harmonised on the chorus. The Dead South were back.
“Hello, we’re The Dead South” announced Hilts politely, if slightly unnecessarily. He was among friends. Thus began a setlist played mainly at ferocious pace, punctuated with precipitous drops of speed, that spanned the Dead South’s three studio albums. A newcomer, if there were any, might have felt rather overwhelmed by the sheer pace as songs could seem to blend into each other. For others, a Dead South show is the perfect way to let off a bit of steam and after a two year furlough, why not? But live, The Dead South convey the incredibly skilled musicianship as they recount the stories, usually bleak, that make their albums so compelling.  From: https://americana-uk.com/live-review-the-dead-south-shepherds-bush-empire-london-18th-march-2022

Bluegrass Situation: “Diamond Ring” doesn’t end well for one of the characters, which is common in bluegrass. What story were you trying to tell in this song?

Nate Hilts: It’s a story of a man who’s trying to appease his partner. She finds that a diamond ring would make her happy and so he is going to do whatever he can to make sure that he gets that diamond ring for her. And it turns out to be a tragic ending, of course. Just like all of the songs I write. [Laughs]

Did you know it would end so gruesome?

NH: You know what, no! But when you’re doing a video it’s like, yeah, we need a body count!

Videos have been a crucial part of your career. Do you find that that’s been a good way to be introduced to new fans?

Colton Crawford: Yeah, I think so. We had our first big splash with the “In Hell I’ll Be In Good Company” video. So I think a lot of our fans discover us through YouTube. I think like our songs work well with music videos, too. They’re cinematic and “soundtrack-y.” We’re definitely inspired by film soundtracks and Tarantino and Spaghetti Westerns.

Are there filmmakers that inspire you or that really resonate with you?

CC: Clint Eastwood for sure. Tarantino for sure. Even those old B horror films, Wes Craven and that kind of stuff.

NH: You could give us an array of movies and we’ll find stuff that we like about it. Who did Drive?

CC: That was Nicholas Winding Refn. That movie is all about the atmosphere. I think our songs are kind of like that too.

Was there a certain encounter that triggered you to write “Blue Trash”?

CC: Lyrically, yes. [Laughs]. This one was a lot of fun for me because the verses and the chorus are the same banjo part. It’s just the choruses are played in halftime with that shuffle feel, but it’s the same thing. I do a couple of different bends and stuff like that. I came up with that slow part first and wanted to “Scruggs-ify” that slow part, so it was a lot of fun.

NH: But lyrically that song was triggered by listening to a purist group on Bluegrass Junction that was dismissing bands like us, who aren’t quite pure. You know, we stem from bluegrass, but we do our own thing with it. And this song we heard was basically telling us to go away.

CC: “Blue Trash” is sort of like a cheeky love letter to bluegrass. It’s a bit of a response to that.

NH: It’s not a hateful or hurtful response. It’s more like, you know what, we’re here and we love bluegrass music.

So what’s your response when someone’s like, “Well, they don’t play bluegrass…”?

NH: “Yes, you’re absolutely right, but what do you want us to do?” We’re not saying that we’re playing bluegrass. We love bluegrass. The reason that this band was started was bluegrass. And here’s what we do with bluegrass. We take our parts of it. Colton on the banjo, he’s playing better than half the folks you hear on Bluegrass Junction, and it’s fantastic that we can have those elements, but we’re not claiming to be the best, or to be stealing it. We’re just trying to be a part of the community and play music.

Tell me about what you mean when you say the band started because of bluegrass.

NH: Oh, when I first met Colton, I was listening to a lot of Old Crow Medicine Show and Trampled By Turtles and listening to some older bluegrass. Colton had just got a banjo, started playing.

CC: Steve Martin was the first actual banjo player that I listened to. Actually there were indie bands that I was into in high school and university, like Modest Mouse — their one record Good News For People Who Love Bad News, there’s a lot of banjo on that. I always just loved the sound of it. And then I discovered that Steve Martin was a world class picker. I was always a metal guitarist. So there was actually a lot of crossover. I just love that fast picking style. Growing up, my guitar lessons were all classical fingerstyle guitar, but then I played in metal bands in high school. So the banjo is like the perfect middle ground between an acoustic fingerstyle guitar and metal guitar.

Colton, did you take some time off?

CC: I did, yeah. When we first started the band, we just hit the ground running with the touring and we were making no money. So we’d be on the road for a month and a half to two months at a time in a minivan, playing every single day. I’ve always had this tough time sleeping, but I had a year of really, really bad insomnia. I think the worst part about insomnia is that you’d think at a certain point you get so exhausted that your body would just pass out and you’d have a great sleep. But the thing with insomnia is the more tired you get, the less likely you are to sleep. It’s the worst, it’s just hell. I went through a year of that and I just said, OK, I’ve got to step away from this. And of course, like two weeks after I left, “In Hell I’ll Be In Good Company” got posted to Reddit and everything started to blow up. But I was still really good friends with Nate, kept in touch with the guys all the time, always figured that’d be part of writing the next record regardless. And then I got some help and figured it out a little bit. Then sort of approaching it a couple of years later, I just said, you know, I want to take another swing. Thankfully these guys, they could’ve told me to fuck off, but they didn’t. So I’m grateful for that.

NH: Yeah, Colton wouldn’t even look me in the eyes when he sat down with me. He was doing a lot of this [looking down] “I’ve been thinking…” and just staring at the table and I’m like, “What’s he going to say? What’s coming?”

CC: I had no idea how you guys were going to react at all.

NH: He said, “Hey, we should go for a beer, I want to talk about something.” I was like, “I think he’s going to come back.” [Laughs]. In our minds I was like, he’s probably never coming back because we travel a lot and that was a big, big part of it. So what do you do? Unless we stop traveling as much as we focus just on writing or something.

CC: It’s not realistic.

NH: Yeah, for what we do, besides YouTube content, the way that we’re able to function so well is by touring.

CC: Yeah. Our main product is our live show. I love our records but definitely our show is what we do.

Tell me about when you’re off stage. What is your dynamic like?

CC: It’s pretty much just like this. Just hanging out and everyone gets along pretty well for the most part, which is really nice. We’ve been a band for almost seven years now and we still like being around each other, so that’s good. Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. We always say we’re friends first, a band second, and a business third, so we try and keep that in mind.

What do you hope people will take away from that experience of seeing you guys play live?

CC: I think most people show up for a really, really good time, and that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re not a political band. We don’t really have any kind of message. I think our main focus with the live show is just fun. It’s a weird thing because it’s almost frowned upon in the arts. You know, [the perception is that] if something’s fun, it can’t really be true art. We don’t agree with that at all. I don’t think there’s enough fun these days. Everything’s so serious all the time, so we just want people to come and enjoy themselves and have some fun. It stands out when a band’s having fun, because there’s a lot of serious songwriting and sadness out there.

NH: We write tragically, but a lot of times we have humorous spins on stuff, or the song sounds super cheery but it’s actually quite sad. But we still have fun with it. We don’t take ourselves too seriously.

From: https://thebluegrasssituation.com/read/the-dead-south-have-a-message-for-bluegrass-purists/ 

 

 

Kristeen Young - Catland

 #Kristeen Young #alternative rock #piano rock #avant-garde #prog punk #operatic punk #multi-genre #no-genre #music video

Holy crap, where did THIS thing come from? I’ve heard some Kristeen Young stuff before and thought it was unusual and compelling, but this record - whoa, mama! It’s full-on ass-kicking weirdness of the kind I used to revel in at the turn of the millennium. Young has been compared to Kate Bush before (her tendency to favor the higher registers, her unconventional delivery), but she also reminds me of a couple of Scandinavian singers such as Sofia Hardig and an artist whose name escapes me. Point is, there is a focused, melodious quality to Ms Young’s voice that you hear at times, but she is making the case here for high-stakes sonic melodrama. Young is a wild thing, untamed and sometimes scary. She takes a risk in virtually every song, and it’s breathtaking. You don’t hear stuff like this very often. And despite the title, Live at the Witch’s Tit, this is NOT a live album. It’s Young’s eighth studio album and, although Tony Visconti is listed as co-producer and he has worked with Young for many years, this album was largely recorded just after David Bowie’s death; Kristeen has said Tony was not around that much. Bowie’s passing and the release of Blackstar affected his availability during the sessions. Guitars growl, the bass lumbers around not necessarily keeping it linear, and Young herself stalks these soundscapes like an utterly fearless musical predator. It’s really quite glorious.
In “You Might Be Ted, But I’m Sylvia,” a title that invites discourse, Young carefully balances some emotive, disciplined singing with a series of loud, boisterous piano octaves. At the one-minute mark, a ferocious sound emerges that sounds at first like it could be an attacking animal, but no, it’s an ominous synth sound distorted to resemble a primitive electric guitar, that bites instead. It’ll take a piece right outta ya if you aren’t prepared. “There’s a chance he might disappear,” the singer tells us, before intoning the song’s title, powerfully, preceded and followed by a hypnotically dissonant piano interval banged over and over, taking you prisoner. You CANNOT remain indifferent to the sound slicing into your ears here. You’ll either find it enthralling, as I did, or you’ll run away with your tail between your legs. “Why Am I a Feelmate” turns up the electronica, and takes things into territory occupied by the Knife (I’d be real surprised if Young was not familiar with Karin Dreijer). The vocal is spooky, partially distorted, and the music seems to celebrate chaos. And yet, Young’s control over this boundary-bashing sound is remarkable. I honestly feel rather inadequate to describe it. It’s thoroughly modern and thoroughly uninterested in anything but its own path. You can follow, yes, but you better stay a few steps behind, or something vicious may chomp into you. “Catland” begins with a child’s voice wanting to coax a sound out of a “kitty cat,” but you just KNOW that kind of cuteness will be short-lived. It is. The song quickly turns into a crazed rocker with tempo and chord changes that the likes of Zappa might have admired. There is no attempt to please the audience here at all, unless you are, like me, in the audience that adores flat-out weird music. The word “challenging” was meant for discs like this.  From: http://zacharymule.com/wp/?p=4370

Steely Dan - Show Biz Kids - The Midnight Special 1973

 #Steely Dan #jazz rock #pop rock #album rock #classic rock #The Midnight Special #music video

Earlier this month, rare footage of Steely Dan playing Reelin' In The Years and Do It Again on The Midnight Special appeared on the show's official YouTube channel. The footage came from a show broadcast in February 1973, but the band returned to the show in August the same year and played three more songs. They revisited Reelin' in the Years and added My Old School, alongside a sensational Show Biz Kids, and the latter is the latest video to make its way online. And it is sensational. Donald Fagen, famously nervous about singing live, shows absolutely no sign of being so. Jeff 'Skunk' Baxter plays Rick Derringer's original slide guitar part with an exuberance bordering on maniacal. And the two backing singers, Gloria 'Porky' Granola and Jenny 'Bucky' Soule, have more fun with the famous "You go to Lost Wages, Lost Wages," lines than you can possibly imagine. Impressively, it appears that the band refused to self-censor the "You know they don't give a fuck about anybody else" line – later used as the basis for the song The Man Don't Give a Fuck by Welsh psychedelia enthusiasts Super Furry Animals – forcing the show's producers to punch in a brief moment of family-friendly silence during the edit.  From: https://www.loudersound.com/news/steely-dan-show-biz-kids-the-midnight-special

This is a song which disparages a certain class of L.A. residents - wealthy offspring of entertainment moguls - show biz kids who don’t give a fuck about anybody else. Steely Dan were New Yorkers who had relocated to L.A. for work. Later they moved back to NYC but at this point much of their lyrical content outlined their dissatisfaction with many of the sleazier things about the West Coast. They kept writing about it even after they returned to the East Coast, for example in 1980’s “Babylon Sisters” from ‘Gaucho’, and also 2000’s “West of Hollywood” from ‘Two Against Nature’.  From: https://genius.com/Steely-dan-show-biz-kids-lyrics

"Show Biz Kids" was such an utterly bizarre choice for the first single from Countdown to Ecstasy that one has to assume that Donald Fagen and Walter Becker chose it deliberately as a veiled affront to ABC Records and anyone who expected "Do It Again" redux. Although the song features a stellar slide guitar solo (by guest Rick Derringer instead of group members Denny Dias and Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, the first example of the studio musician ethos that would soon become Steely Dan's stock in trade) and a funky piano-led groove, "Show Biz Kids" is eccentrically structured, without a bridge or middle eight, giving it an endless, plodding quality that suits the bitter lyrics about cliquishness and hedonism in the group's adopted hometown of Los Angeles. It also seems unlikely that a song whose payoff line is "Show business kids making movies 'bout themselves/You know they don't give a fuck about anybody else" was likely to top the charts in 1973. Incidentally, that repetitive chant of the female backing vocalists is "You go to Lost Wages," a Rat Pack-era joke name for Vegas.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/song/show-biz-kids-mt0000372379

Savannah Pope - Creature

 #Savannah Pope #art rock #hard rock #progressive rock #glam rock #singer-songwriter #ex-SpaceCream #music video

Rock singer-songwriter Savannah Pope, formerly the lead vocalist of SpaceCream, is proud to announce the release of her new video and single, “Creature.” “Creature” is an explosive, operatic, and hard-rocking song featuring lyrics brimming with both moxie and self-deprecation. Boasting soaring, gorgeous vocals, the song’s melodies cross over to metal while retaining a bona fide glitter rock vibe. Savannah made the video for “Creature” by blending original footage with sophisticated original motion graphics. It took her an entire year to create, frame by frame, and the resulting imagery is beautiful and disturbing.
Savannah makes incendiary, soulful rock music. Her songs boast stunning lyricism and vocal power. Her stage presence is larger than life, and should be experienced firsthand by any music lover. Influenced by such luminaries as David Bowie, Amy Winehouse, Lou Reed, Queen, Joni Mitchell, Rocky Horror Picture Show and Heart, her music blends classic rock elements with a unique modern sensibility.
Savannah has been a fixture in the Los Angeles music scene for over five years. Until one year ago, she was the vocalist and leader of glam rock band SpaceCream, which released the acclaimed album Pterodactyl Sky in 2016. As lead singer for SpaceCream, she played LA Fashion Week and opened for national artists such as Jesse Hughes (Eagles of Death Metal), Nick Oliveri (Queens of the Stone Age), and VOLTO (Danny Carey of Tool). SpaceCream won the Battle for Vans Warped Tour at House of Blues Hollywood, and played numerous live shows at storied venues like the Viper Room and the Troubadour.
Born in LA, Savannah’s background story is definitely different from the average musician’s. Savannah was an angsty, precocious, and unique kid who wound up at a boarding school for wayward teens when she was 14 years old. “I was sent away because I was extremely depressed and wild, and running away all the time,” she reveals. “My parents never knew where I was. I fought them on everything, and they were scared for me.” During her two years there, a friend taught Savannah some chords on the guitar, and she started writing songs.
After graduating high school, Savannah traveled extensively. “I went to Ecuador with some very intense hippies and we lived off the land. We climbed volcanoes, and one guy actually got hit by lightning. No joke. We also stayed with Quechua natives in the jungle for a hot minute. As it turns out, I am entirely unremarkable in the art of being one with nature. I mostly got eaten alive by insects and resembled a leper.” Savannah then went to college, dropped out, stopped by Harlem for a while, spent a year painting/being a wild thing in Barcelona, and eventually landed back in Los Angeles, where her journey began. She fell in love with performing by accident, when she wandered onstage during some friends’ open mic and got an incredible response. And she’s been hooked ever since.
Perhaps the best way to immerse oneself in Savannah’s world is to see her onstage. She utilizes her live performances to present a new brand of art rock steeped in glam and prog; an unpaired blend of riveting musicianship, garish style, and theatricality.  From: https://music.allaccess.com/an-interview-with-the-rock-singer-songwriter-savannah-pope-on-her-newest-music-and-more/

Dead Register - Alive

 #Dead Register #gothic rock #post-punk #industrial #gothic metal #gloom-gaze #music video

This Atlanta trio has graced a few of my end of the year best of lists. They are known for flirting with various shades of heavy, sludge and doom being the two sub-genres that come closest to describing the darkness thickly emoted from the sonic swathes they summon, using only bass, synths, and drums as the primary instrumentation. Their new album finds the band continuing deeper into the despairing abyss their previous work has gazed into. This time around the grooves are just more refined.
The title track that opens the album carries a sleek industrial stomp. The drumming gives the vocals plenty of room to lament. At times the tension has a shadowy post-punk feel, but with more oppression to its heavy-handed melancholy. The slithering minor scales on “Circle of Lies” provide a romantic contrast to the song’s more pounding sections. Overall this is a heavier grooving album from what they have done in the past. The atmosphere that drips from the corners of their sound is weaponized negative space, crushed when the riffs contract. This is demonstrated on “In Between” which is one of the album’s more driven songs thanks to the frantic drumming.
I would not say they are a band that aspires to be beloved by the masses, as they refuse to dumb anything down to the lowest common denominator, but you can hear how “Jaded Love” might be the closest they have come yet to something radio friendly. It works off of a more straightforward chug. This band can never be accused of just being heavy for the sake of being heavy. Instead it is a sonic intensity that is a by-product of this band writing great songs no matter what genre you want to pin to them. Heaviness is used as a color rather than the sole purpose of creation.
Regular readers here will not be surprised that this band has some almost goth leanings, given my taste in music. Here the “goth” qualities are not a Type O Negative like languishing over headstones, but instead come from how the ambience adorns the melodies of songs like “Two Silhouettes”. Chvasta‘s baritone croon might add to coloring their sound in a gray bleakness. It also serves to give the album’s narrative a unified voice during the stylistic shifts. “Longest Day” floats somewhere in a middle ground between the crossroads of sounds the band dips into.
On the last song the band dig deeper into the rock-tinged side of what they do. It is moodier, which is a more vulnerable side of heaviness. This causes the sound to become more doom-flavored in its intentions; rather than mourning or loss, it is more of a burden of the stark feeling one gets from just being alive in today’s world — a feeling for which this album provides a much-needed soundtrack. The message might not be to abandon all hope, but it does provide the sonic colors to lean into dystopia with.  From: https://www.nocleansinging.com/2022/03/14/dead-register-alive/

The Soul Motivators - Raise a Glass

 #The Soul Motivators #soul #funk #R&B #psychedelic soul #retro 1970s #Canadian

Canada's The Soul Motivators (TSM) are a premier funk outfit based in Toronto. TSM blend classic 70s funk, soul, and psychedelic grooves to create a modern fresh sound with their strong craft for songwriting. In February 2020, the Motivators released their acclaimed third album 'Do The Damn Thing', featuring powerhouse frontwoman Shahi Teruko. With the accompanying tour derailed due to the pandemic, the band switched to a series of online and drive-thru concerts to keep them going. Now they're back and ready with their fourth studio album, 'Do it Together.'
The 8 track album takes the listener on a cosmic trip filled with groove and optimism guided through aural landscapes. Imagine the Toronto Yonge Street strip in the 70s. Flares, arcades, neon, cinema, record shops - grit and funk. Yet modern beats and rich rhythm infuse each track to lift you up and get you moving - floating into outer space yet deeply rooted on solid ground.
From the first note played on 'Raise a Glass', the band switches on their classic Motivators mode: hard-hitting, clav-heavy harmonic, smooth horn line, a timeless deep funk track. Next up, 'Power' pushes the TSM sound to new celestial limits - Interstellar synths and drum n' bass inspired breakbeats are mediated by Teruko's ethereal vocals with the fire and passion of Bettye Lavette and tight rhythm of The JB's. Other highlights include, 'It is what it is' - a smooth soul groover that would easily blend into any Hitsville playlist!
"It tackles the subject of our collective ups and downs, inspiring us to keep moving through the darkness." With 'Try', TSM channel Muscle Shoals with a deep cut of southern soul, with passionate vocal delivery, evoking Sharon Jones and Charles Bradley, infuses this tune with a heavy Daptone influence. 'Do It Together' is The Soul Motivators at our best - fusing familiar influences with new elements and pushing our musical boundaries to new limits."
Since the release of their explosive 2015 full-length debut Free to Believe (Do Right! Music), TSM tirelessly toured to bring their high-octane live show to the masses. The acclaimed Dirt On the Floor EP, and collaboration with Detroit's Funk Night Records released over two highly sought after 7" singles, saw them dig deep into the funk crates.
The core of the band consists of Teruko (vocals), James Robinson (keys), Marc Shapiro (bass), Voltaire Ramos (guitar), Doug Melville (drums), and Derek Thorne (percussion), with a rotating cast of talented horns and special guests.  From: https://www.broadwayworld.com/bwwmusic/article/The-Soul-Motivators-Share-Power-From-Upcoming-Full-Length-Do-It-Together-20230301

The Grip Weeds - Porpoise Song

 #The Grip Weeds #power pop #psychedelic rock #psychedelic pop rock #garage rock #indie rock #folk-pop #Monkees cover

The Grip Weeds are one of the foremost modern practitioners of the psychedelic rock, garage rock, and power pop genres. The music of this well-respected New Jersey band is strongly influenced by the mid to late 1960s sounds of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and Buffalo Springfield. Since the band formed back in 1998, they’ve been captivating their fans with fantastic live performances and excellent discs such as 1994’s House of Vibes and 2015’s How I Won The War. The current lineup of the band features Kurt Reil on vocals, guitar, drums, and keyboards, Kristen Pinell Reil on guitars, percussion and vocals, Rick Reil on vocals, guitar and keyboards, and Dave DeSantis on bass. The Grip Weeds have just released their latest album, DiG, on JEM Records. It’s an outstanding disc, celebrating the garage rock and psychedelic era music that inspired the band. DiG includes classic songs from The Zombies, The Byrds, and The Monkees, but the album is also chock full of lesser-known (and equally memorable) tunes from bands such as Mouse and the Traps, The Gants, and The Nightcrawlers. The liner notes for the album are provided by Lenny Kaye, whose groundbreaking 1972 compilation Nuggets was one of the first retrospectives of the music of the garage rock and psychedelic era. I recently had an in-depth chat with founding member and producer Kurt Reil about the making of DiG.

Q: What was the genesis of DiG? Given the fact that your sound is deeply entrenched in the music of the 1960s, encompassing genres such as rock, pop, psychedelia, and garage rock, the songs on the album feel like a perfect fit for the band.

A: DiG is partly a discovery or re-discovery of our roots, and partly a way to get through a very difficult time during the pandemic. The album was something we found we could do as a band, and in some cases, work long distance because of the circumstances. We were planning to start a new record of original material, and we worked on a few things, but it quickly became apparent that we were actually having more fun playing the cover tunes we were messing around with, so we just shifted gears. It was just something we just found ourselves gravitating towards at the time.

Q: One of the things I love about the album is that you didn’t just pick familiar songs to cover. The selection of tunes is wonderfully eclectic. Even though there are some well-known songs like “Journey to the Center of the Mind” from The Amboy Dukes and “Lady Friend” by The Byrds, there are a number of tunes from less familiar garage rock bands such as “Lie, Beg Borrow and Steal” by Mouse and the Traps, and “I Wonder” by The Gants. Before the advent of CDs and internet radio shows like Little Steven’s Underground Garage, the only way to hear these records was on a vinyl compilation like Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets, or to search them out in places like used record stores.

A: We went pretty deep on DiG. When we started out as a band, we were excited by the songs that we hadn’t heard or that hadn’t been played to death. They were hard to find, and when we discovered them, we were saying “Wow! I can’t believe this record.” It was very exciting. Part of the DiG concept is the musical excavation of these nuggets or buried treasures. That’s what it was like for us in our early days when we would track down these records at flea markets or garage sales. When we started out in the late 1980s, these records were just gone. They had been forgotten by the industry because they’d had their run. They were really hard to come by, and CD re-issues of this kind of music hadn’t kicked in yet. What spurred on these garage bands to make music in the first place, was dreaming about becoming stars, because of The Beatles. We started out that way, too. That was the dream that The Beatles made possible. These groups, particularly the ones featured on Nuggets, were often teenagers, and in a lot of cases, they didn’t have much money. The bands would make a record in a local studio, they’d have some success, and their songs would take off for a while. Then they went on with their lives, and that was it. Those records are like time capsules of that era.

Q: One of the other cool things about the music of that era is that the “garage rock” bands actually wrote and recorded songs that encompassed a number of genres, including rock, pop, and soul. It wasn’t just one type of music, and that’s reflected by the songs on DiG.

A: These groups were looking at the charts and listening to the radio, and there were a lot of different kinds of music being played on “pop radio” back then. The garage bands were mirroring what they heard, so if what they heard was The Rolling Stones, they did a blues kind of thing, if it was The Beatles, they went for a pop or rock sound, and sometimes their inspiration came from other things, like Motown or vocal groups. We tried to accentuate that on DiG. One example is the song “Little Black Egg” which is included on the deluxe edition. The band used to play it in our early days, during our acoustic shows at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey. We wanted this version to have a really playful tone, so we pulled out a banjo and temple blocks to help give it that child-like vibe. One of our friends suggested Kristen should sing the lead because she has such an innocent-sounding voice. “Little Black Egg” was really fun to work on. Each song on the album has a particular significance and a story behind it.

From: https://www.culturesonar.com/the-grip-weeds-dig-some-cool-covers/

Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss & Gillian Welch - Go to Sleep Little Baby

 #Emmylou Harris #Alison Krauss #Gillian Welch #Americana #folk #traditional #movie soundtrack #O Brother Where Art Thou

Most famously heard in the movie "O Brother, Where Art Thou", the traditional lullaby "Didn't Leave Nobody but the Baby" is performed by artists Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, and Gillian Welch. This song appears to be a southern folk song, and was also previously recorded by Sidney Hemphill Carter in 1959 and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax in 1942. What is the history, origins and meaning of the lyrics in this song? It appears to be a song born out of the anguish of slavery (as noted by former slave Annie Little in the Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16). I have however, heard that this may depict a father trying to keep his baby quiet by giving it morphine in order to hide him from a slaveowner (perhaps on the underground railroad, or possibly in order to commit infanticide). Is there any reputable, authoritative evidence that this is the case?

My grandmother, who recently passed at 98 years old, used to sing this to me and she said her grandmother who was a slave sang it to her. She said all the mammies used to sing this to their children.

This is a Black American folk song, originating in the slavery era. At that time, it was dangerous for enslaved people to speak openly about their concerns, so many songs of the era have hidden or concealed meanings. As a folk song, however, neither the lyrics nor the interpretations are fixed, so it can be difficult or impossible to make a definitive determination. Like many of the most popular lullabies and nursery rhymes of many traditions (compare Rock a Bye Baby or Ring Around the Mulberry Bush) there's some dark and ominous imagery here. It's perhaps most instructive to compare it to All the Pretty Horses, another lullaby with similar origins, and a more established meaning. As in that song, we can surmise that this song is being sung by an enslaved caretaker of a baby belonging to the slavemasters, leading to a mix of tenderness and anger in the lyrics.

    Your momma gone away and your daddy's gone to stay
    Didn't leave nobody but the baby

The "momma" having gone away indicates that the woman singing is not the baby's actual mother. Likewise, the baby's father is also out of the home.

    Everybody’s gone in the cotton and the corn
    Didn't leave nobody but the baby

With all the masters gone, the baby is at the mercy of its caretaker.

    She's long gone with her red shoes on
    Gonna need another loving baby

The mother is out having fun, and doesn't care what happens to her child. She might need a new one, because her current child may not have long to live.

    You and me and the devil makes three
    Don't need no other loving baby

This moves more into pure speculation, but "don't need no other loving baby" may be a veiled reference to her being unable to take care of her own children (as in All the Pretty Horses) because of being forced to caretake her master's child. The devil is present, because she is having fantasies about killing the baby in revenge.

    Come lay your bones on the alabaster stones
    And be my ever loving baby

This seems like the most clear threat in the song - the alabaster stones, are, of course, the headstones in the graveyard. Compare also "Summertime," as discussed here: What's the origin of the phrase "Rise Up Singing"? Although not an authentic slave-era lullaby, "Summertime" draws upon many of the same themes, including the caretaking of someone else's child, and the veiled threat.

This is a song that seems to have originated among slaves in the southern US and has been passed on orally from generation to generation by people who might not even have been able to write, so there is no 'authoritative' version of the lyrics. So, of course, no interpretation of those lyrics is going to be 'authoritative'. There are probably almost as many different interpretations as there have been attempts at interpretation. A recurring theme in these is that the baby has been abandoned by both parents and the singer is preparing to poison it, but there are plenty of other variations.

Funny. I’ve been singing this to my kids for the last 12 months. They love it. Knocks them out every time. But I always forget the words because I can’t think of the story. Really interesting. I mentally started to wonder if it was a seductive song, but mostly because of the imagery from “Oh Brother Where Art Thou”. If you think of it from the perspective of someone trying to seduce a man while his “momma’s gone away” you can almost force some meanings as well. Don’t need another lovin’ babe - you and me and the devil make three. And then a bit of a Romeo and Juliet moment. Or maybe now that I’m reading that it was maybe a slave song. Then there’s the inevitable death that will occur if the mistress is a black caretaker and she’s singing the song for the husband of a partying wife.

From: https://musicfans.stackexchange.com/questions/10086/origin-and-meaning-of-didnt-leave-nobody-but-the-baby

David Crosby - Music Is Love

 #David Crosby #Crosby, Stills & Nash #folk #folk rock #West coast folk rock #singer-songwriter #contemporary folk #ex-The Byrds #1970s

Contrary to popular opinion, the most stacked supergroup of the early 1970s was not Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. CSNY were not even, in fact, the most auspicious collective to include David Crosby, Graham Nash and Neil Young at the time. That honor went to a bigger, wilder, albeit less-heralded amalgam known briefly as The Planet Earth Rock And Roll Orchestra. It’s discography was sketchy, its personnel fluid, but PERRO pivoted around Crosby, Nash and most of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, with auxiliary memberships for Young and Joni Mitchell, among others. Named by Jefferson Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner, they convened for his late 1970 album, Blows Against The Empire; a baroque psych gang show that recast the counterculture’s desire to escape urban life as a sci-fi mission to distant planets rather than as a rural property grab in Laurel Canyon or Marin County.
Crosby had moved next door to Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart’s Marin ranch in late 1969, and the Orchestra members had many other things in common, not least a fondness for Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, and for Kantner’s awe-inspiring “Ice Bag” weed. It was at Heider’s that CSNY had battled through Déjà Vu, and where the Dead had crafted the sepia-toned epiphanies of American Beauty. As sessions for that last album were winding down in the summer of 1970, the Orchestra’s amorphous jams began to coalesce into their finest achievement. The stories that have become legend about Crosby and his circle often fixate on feuding, egomania, and patterns of behavior that in most every light look morally unconscionable. But If I Could Only Remember My Name reveals an alternative, parallel truth: a solo album, predicated on one man’s grief, where a musical community came together to help him transcend it.
On the morning of September 30, 1969, the same week that the first CSN album went gold in the States, Crosby’s girlfriend Christine Hinton handed over a few joints to Crosby and Nash, loaded her cats into a green Volkswagen bus, and left their Marin place on the way to the vet. En route, she crashed into a school bus coming in the opposite direction; Crosby would have to identify her body later in the day. The tragedy did not derail work on Déjà Vu, and by the summer of 1970 Crosby was still processing his loss. “I didn’t have any equipment to deal with that,” he told Jesse Jarnow for the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast in 2020. “The only place that I knew I wouldn’t be utterly terrified and crying and distraught was in the studio. They all knew that the only time I was happy was when I was singing, so they got me singing every chance they could get. It was an act of kindness, but it was also joy.”
If I Could Only Remember My Name had a large cast, but they moved with great discretion. There were communal healing rites like the opening Music Is Love, and one solemn indictment of The Man – What Are Their Names, featuring a chorale of Nash, Young, Mitchell, Kantner, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Grace Slick and David Freiberg. Mostly, though, their presence was blurred and indistinct, giving Crosby the space to express himself in the distrait way – abstracted tunings, wordless harmonies, an aesthetic at once psychedelic and medieval – that he’d been finessing since his time in The Byrds.  From: https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/david-crosby-his-masterpiece-revisited/

Fairport Convention - Suzanne

 #Fairport Convention #Sandy Denny #Ian Matthews #Ashley Hutchings #Richard Thompson #folk rock #British folk rock #electric folk #British folk #psychedelic folk rock #1960s #Leonard Cohen cover

Fairport Convention has long been British folk-rock with the emphasis on British and folk, but listeners most familiar with their revved-up interpretation of traditional English ballads (and like-minded originals) often forget that the band started out as the U.K.'s response to Jefferson Airplane. Heyday collects 12 performances (ten of them covers) recorded for the BBC during the early period when Sandy Denny and Ian Matthews were both singing for the group (and a bus accident had not yet taken the life of original drummer Martin Lamble). While most of the songs were written by noted American folk-rockers of the day, the Fairports put a very individual stamp on every selection here; if you don't think you ever need to hear another version of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" or Bob Dylan's "Percy's Song," you might well change your mind after hearing Fairport work their magic with them, and their takes on Joni Mitchell's "I Don't Know Where I Stand" and Gene Clark's "Tried So Hard" actually improve on the very worthy originals. Fairport Convention approaches these songs with taste, skill, and subtle but potent fire, and Richard Thompson was already growing into one of the most remarkable guitarists in British rock (and if you're of the opinion that he doesn't know how to be funny, check out his goofy double entendre duet with Sandy, "If It Feels Good, You Know It Can't Be Wrong"). While Fairport Convention would create their most lasting work with Liege and Leif and Full House, Heyday offers delightful proof that this band's talents (and influences) took many different directions, and it captures one of the band's better lineups in superb form.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/album/heyday-bbc-radio-sessions-1968-1969-mw0000201000

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half-crazy but that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer that you've always been her lover

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And then you know that she will trust you
For you've touched her perfect body with your mind

And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

And you want to travel with him, and you want to travel blind
And then you think maybe you'll trust him
For he's touched your perfect body with his mind

Now, Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river
She's wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor
And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And then you know that you can trust her
For she's touched your perfect body with her mind

Richard & Linda Thompson - A Little Night Music - Nocturnes BBC 1981

Part 1

 

Part 2

 

 #Richard & Linda Thompson #folk rock #British folk rock #contemporary folk #singer-songwriter #ex-Fairport Convention #1970s #music video

It’s nearly 55 years since Richard Thompson began his career in music. A pioneer of folk-rock, hugely influential singer-songwriter and one of Britain’s most astonishing guitarists, he was only a month out of his teens on the morning of 12 May 1969 when all promise was nearly stopped short. His band, Fairport Convention, had been signed on the spot in 1967 when producer Joe Boyd saw his talent with a guitar at 17, and their mission to reconnect British rock with the older, beautiful songs of their home country was well under way. He’d already jammed with Jimi Hendrix and supported Pink Floyd; now Thompson’s band had recently finished their third album, Unhalfbricking, with singer Sandy Denny. A work full of ambitious originals and covers that still regularly appears in best British album polls.
That morning they were driving back to London from a Birmingham gig, approaching the last service station on the M1. Guitarist Simon Nicol was trying to sleep off a migraine, stretched out on top of the speakers in the back. Thompson’s girlfriend, fashion designer Jeannie Franklyn, was asleep. Thompson was dozing between her and roadie Harvey Bramham, who was driving. “It was starting to get light. Nearly dawn, nearly home,” Thompson writes in Beeswing, his forthcoming memoir. Thompson noticed the van, travelling at 70mph, suddenly veering towards the motorway’s central reservation. In those days there were no crash barriers. He turned his head to Bramham – his eyes were closed. Thompson grabbed the wheel to avoid hitting a pole. The van came off the road. In one of the most arresting passages of the book, he describes crawling over to Jeannie a few yards away. He is bleeding, with broken ribs; he finds her upside down on a sloping embankment. They had been together a fortnight: he didn’t really know her at all, and then she died. Martin Lamble, the band’s 19-year-old drummer, also didn’t survive. Remarkably Nicol got out and walked down the road, flagging down a passing car. He is still the leader of Fairport Convention, 52 years later.
But Thompson left in early 1971, still shell-shocked by the crash, to pursue a solo career that flew well beyond British folk. Ever since, he’s lovingly explored and excavated genres from rockabilly to flamenco, music-hall to pop. A favourite of both Robert Plant and Elvis Costello, Thompson has also been covered by acts as varied as feminist punks Sleater-Kinney, REM, David Byrne and, most recently, Mark Ronson, who covered the 1974 title track of Thompson’s album with first wife Linda Thompson, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight. Ronson tweeted how much the song had given him comfort during lockdown. “It’s the ultimate song about a messy weekend night out. I miss that all very much.”
That period of Thompson’s career is especially rich: he met Linda in 1969, and they married in 1972, then made fantastic music together for the next decade. Linda is one of Britain’s greatest, but most overlooked, singers, possessed of a bold, beautiful voice that carried the songs Richard wrote for her, and accompanied dramatically with his guitar. Their story outside music is dramatic too. It involves Richard’s conversion to Sufism, a move with their two young children to a rural commune without hot water and electricity, subsequent adultery during pregnancy, and a traumatic tour after their breakup where Linda kicked Richard in the shins while he played guitar solos (it’s known by their fans as The Tour from Hell). From: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/mar/14/richard-thompson-beeswing-fairport-folk-rock-interview

Richard Thompson left Fairport Convention after 1970’s Full House, his reputation secured as an excellent songwriter and guitarist. He released a spectacularly unsuccessful solo album, Henry the Human Fly, in 1972. He then married Linda Peters and they released six albums between 1974 and 1982; their relationship broke down before an ill-fated North American tour in 1982. The duo’s music is often melancholic, and it’s a common trick of Richard Thompson to pair upbeat music with depressing lyrics. They often play acoustic folk-rock, especially on their early albums, but 1978’s First Light uses an L.A. rhythm section and 1982’s Shoot Out The Lights has few vestiges of folk remaining. Linda and Richard share the vocal duties – while Richard’s gruff voice is limited, Linda’s pristine voice is able to capture a range of moods, from joy on ‘I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight’ to resignation on ‘Walking on a Wire’. The pair’s first album, 1974’s I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight and their 1982 swan song Shoot Out The Lights are generally considered as their strongest. In between they spent time in a Sufi Muslim commune, taking three years away from music. Richard has stated that he considers their late 1970s albums as weak, as he didn’t have his mind on the job.  From: https://albumreviews.blog/reviews/1970s-album-reviews/richard-and-linda-thompson/

Four decades after Richard and Linda Thompson released 1974’s I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, their beautiful and terrifying first album as a duo—after their music failed to attract significant commercial interest; after the conversion to Sufism, the three kids, the arduous years spent living on a religious commune; after he left her for another woman just as mainstream success seemed within their reach; after she clocked him with a Coke bottle and sped off in a stolen car during their disastrous final tour —after everything, Linda was working on a new song about the foolishness of love. It was a lot like the songs Richard used to write for them in the old days: Despairing, but not hopeless, with a melody that seemed to float forward from some forgotten era, and a narrator who can’t see past the walls of his own fatalism. “Whenever I write something like that I think, ‘Oh, who could play the guitar on that?’” she recalled later. “And then I think, ‘Only Richard, really.’”
Can you blame her? Though both Thompsons have made fine albums since the collapse of their romantic and musical relationships in the early 1980s, there is something singular in the blend of her gracefully understated singing and his fiercely expressive playing, a heaven-bound quality that redeems even their heaviest subject matter, which neither can quite reach on their own. As lovers, they could be violently incompatible, but as musicians, they were soul mates. The existence of latter-day collaborations like Linda’s 2013 song “Love’s for Babies and Fools,” one of a handful of recordings they’ve made together since the 2000s, proves the lasting power of a partnership that seemed doomed from the start.
The Thompsons met in 1969, while Richard was working on Liege & Lief, the fourth album by Fairport Convention, the pioneering British band he’d co-founded when he was 18. With his bandmates, he envisioned a new form of English folk music, combining scholarly devotion to centuries-old song forms with the electrified instruments and exploratory spirit of late-’60s rock. The misty and elegiac Liege & Lief was their masterpiece, but it had come at a price. Months earlier, Fairport’s van driver fell asleep at the wheel on a late-night drive home from a gig, and the ensuing crash killed Martin Lamble, their drummer, and Jeannie Franklyn, Thompson’s girlfriend at the time. According to Thompson, the decision to press on and record Liege & Lief was driven in part by a desire to “distract ourselves from grief and numb the pain of our loss.”
The folk-rock musicians who orbited Fairport in London comprised a hard-drinking scene, where money was usually tight, and revelry and song took precedence over talk about feelings. “They didn’t send you to therapy in those days - we didn’t grieve properly,” Richard Thompson told a podcast interviewer this year. The losses would keep coming. Nick Drake, an ex-boyfriend of Linda’s and occasional collaborator of Richard’s, who struggled to find an audience during his short life, was sliding toward oblivion by the early 1970s. And Sandy Denny, the radiant and mercurial former singer of Fairport, as well as a close friend of both Thompsons, was not far behind him. The fading spirits of fellow travelers like these haunt I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight. Its songs treat drink, festivity, and even love as fleeting escapes from life’s difficulties, staring through the good times to the black holes that often lie behind them.
Richard lasted for one more album with Fairport, then left the band with hopes of making it as a solo artist. Legend has it that Henry the Human Fly, his 1972 debut, was the worst-selling album in the history of Warner Brothers at the time. He was working steadily as a session and touring musician, but at the ripe old age of 23, he couldn’t help feeling a little washed up. Linda’s career as a folk singer, despite the arresting clarity of her voice, had been only moderately successful, and she was entertaining thoughts of cashing in, going pop. She was only a “weekend hippie,” she has said. And though he was still a few years away from embracing Muslim mysticism, he was already something of a monastic: declining to cash checks for his session work, and following a devotion to modernizing English folk that was so intense it led him to turn down invitations to join several high-profile bands because their styles were too American. Despite their differences in approach to life and career, something clicked. She moved into his Hampstead apartment, and they married in 1972.
Their reason for starting a musical duo was practical, but also sweetly romantic: They wanted to spend more time together. They began touring the UK’s circuit of folk clubs, humble institutions that mixed socialist idealism with commercial enterprise, often operating in the back rooms of local pubs, where Richard and Linda would share stage time with whatever barflies wanted to belt out “Scarborough Fair” or “John Barleycorn” on any given night. Audiences were receptive, but it was a rugged and unglamorous way to make a career, even compared to the modest success Richard had seen with Fairport Convention. After about a year on the circuit, they were ready to graduate to bigger stages, and to make an album.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/richard-and-linda-thompson-i-want-to-see-the-bright-lights-tonight/

Trigger Hippy - The Door

 #Trigger Hippy #blues rock #hard rock #Americana #roots rock #Southern rock #ex-Black Crowes #music video

I love bands that bring a melting pot of styles to the table to generate a sound all their own. The Nashville-based band Trigger Hippy exemplifies that aesthetic. This is one of the most anticipated listens (to review) of the year for me. Trigger Hippy is back with “Full Circle & Then Some,” available in your virtual and analog record stores as of Friday, Oct. 11, 2019.
The Trigger Hippy story is unorthodox, but genuine and interesting. The band is the brainchild of longtime Black Crowes drummer Steve Gorman, and Nashville-based bass player and songwriting extraordinaire Nick Govrik. When Gorman and Govrik jammed with former Crowes guitarist Audley Freed in the mid-2000s, they all conspired to start a band. Trigger Hippy has had several incarnations over the years, with its lineups including Freed, Jimmy Herring, Joan Osborne, Jackie Greene, Tom Bukovac and Will Kimbrough. Trigger Hippy’s self-titled debut was released in 2014, and featured Greene, Bukovac and Osborne throughout. However, that lineup didn’t last. The new and reformed lineup includes singer/saxophonist Amber Woodhouse and Band of Heathens guitarist and vocalist Ed Jurdi.
The new lineup is excellent, and the results are right in line with the previous album’s efforts, which I already thought might be the best record by a Black Crowes band member in this millennium. Jurdi and Woodhouse scratch all the same itches that Greene and Osborne provided vocally, along with Jurdi’s exceptionally precise guitar playing, coupled with Govrik’s rock ‘n’ soul songwriting and Gorman’s best-of-the-modern-era deep pocket rock backbeat. Jurdi and Woodhouse sound, feel and vibe like Greene and Osborne, but it doesn’t seem like a knock off at all. Still feeling fresh and exuberant, it is a testament to the care taken with these songs, along with the recording and production process — and the new chemistry of the current ensemble. I don’t know of many bands founded by the rhythm section, where the frontline can get switched out and the results are steady-as-she-goes, a continuation of the spirit of the band without missing a beat.  From: https://tahoeonstage.com/album-reviews/trigger-hippie-full-circle-then-some/

Music Mecca: So can you talk about the origins of Trigger Hippy and how y’all came together?

Steve Gorman: So Nick Govrik, the bassist and I, started jamming together right when I moved to Nashville in 2004. That fall we put together a weekly jam at a friend’s bar. We would just set up a tip jar and play. It was me, Govrik, and whatever two guitarists were available that night and we called it Hey Hey Hey, originally. It was literally just an excuse to play on Wednesday night somewhere. But right from the jump when I first met Nick, we felt like our playing was right in sync with each other; we were super copacetic. And before long, literally within a few times playing together, we would say, “Man, let’s do something for real,” whatever that meant. That conversation meandered around for years. I would leave and go on tour with The Black Crowes and come back, then Nick and I would hook up and talk about doing stuff. Around 2009, after this sporadic four-year conversation, Kirk West, who works with the Allman Brothers, asked if I wanted to do something in Macon, Georgia to put on a gig for a fundraiser for the Big House Museum (the Allman Brothers museum). And I said “Yeah, let me put a band together for the night and we’ll do it.” So it worked out that Nick and I, along with Jimmy Herring from Widespread Panic and Audley Freed just put together a set list of covers to play. And for that gig, I came up with the name Trigger Hippy. Jimmy and Audley were soloing nonstop and I was like, “We should call the damn thing Trigger Happy with the two of you guys.” (laughs.) And as soon as I said that, I thought, Trigger Hippy was pretty funny. It’s not hippy/peace signs; it’s more hippy get-your-hips-moving. I like the duality of those two words together. So we called that gig Trigger Happy, a one-off/one-night-only thing. It was me, Nick, and a revolving door of other musicians. In 2013, we made a record, and put it out in 2014. That version of the band was more of a weekender band, and we wanted it to be more of a primary band. When that version of Trigger Hippy stopped in 2017, we found Ed [Jurdi] and Amber [Woodhouse] and then here we are.

MM: So Trigger Hippy’s latest album Full Circle and Then Some came out this past fall if I’m not mistaken. Where did you record it and who was involved in production?

SG: The production was me, Nick, and Ed. We did it ourselves. We have a studio here in Nashville that we just built for our purposes. It’s a house on Love Circle: we call it The Treehouse. It’s a rental property that Nick owns and we set up shop and write and record demos there, and ultimately made the record there.

MM: What’s the primary influence and inspiration behind this particular album?

SG: The short answer is all the same stuff we’ve always listened to; which is the gamete of all-American music forms. And all of which are southern music forms: rock n’ roll, jazz, bluegrass, and all of that stuff is in the mix. But one thing we did discuss in this album was that we really wanted a certain groove-thread. Just one of those records where everyone knows it, but they don’t even know they love it. Like Little Feat records, or the Meters. When those records are on at a party, the whole room is just moving, whether they even know it. We wanted this record to have that vibe. You can put the album on at the beginning and go all the way through. There’s a groove and vibe that holds together. So a song like, “Long Lost Friend,” “Butcher’s Daughter,” and “Paving the Road,” they’re all very, very different songs, but they all have a continuity, and it just works in a certain way.  

MM: Do you sometimes have certain artists in mind when recording certain songs as maybe kind of an ode to them? Like your song “Goddamn Hurricane” to me is very reminiscent of The Band.

SG: When Nick wrote that song he wasn’t necessarily thinking of writing a Band-type song, but when you write that song and that’s the expression - his vocal approach is somewhere between Levon Helm and Lowell George. Their bastard lovechild would be Nick Govrik. Everything he does is swimming in that end of the pool. But we don’t have to discuss what kind of tune it is, they usually just speak for themselves.

MM: How does the songwriting process work within the band? Do one or two of you do most of it, or is it more of a regimented and group collaboration?

SG: If you look at the liner notes on both Trigger Hippy albums, at least half the songs say Nick Govrik by himself. And if another member contributed just a few lines of the lyric, Govrik would give them credit, but they were pretty much Nick’s tunes. He’s very prolific. There are times when he comes in with a song, and he’s like, “Hey, I got this song! Listen!” And it’s done. Like the song is full circle and done, like “Goddamn Hurricane” was just finished. But then there are songs like “Born to Be Blue,” and it’s just the three of us sitting in the room and throwing ideas at the wall. And we realized, “This should just be a meditative number. Like, this thing should just simmer.” I think, right away, we all could hear something similar.

From: https://musicmecca.org/steve-gorman-talks-new-nashville-supergroup-trigger-hippy-and-more/

Psychedelic Porn Crumpets - Bubblegum Infinity

 #Psychedelic Porn Crumpets #psychedelic rock #garage rock #psychedelic pop rock #music video

Like all the best inventions, Perth’s Psychedelic Porn Crumpets were born out of a simple idea that soon got out of control. Of course, most simple ideas don’t usually result in a group of humble musicians touring the world, rubbing shoulders with iconic artists, and kicking goals most lifelong tunesmiths could only dream of, do they? That, however, is exactly where we find Psychedelic Porn Crumpets in 2021. The Porn Crumpets’ (as brevity dictates) origin story is one that countless artists around the world could relate to, with English-born Jack McEwan launching the group as a solo bedroom project during a period of procrastination between uni studies.
Having performed in a Radiohead-inspired indie-rock outfit with drummer Danny Caddy beforehand, it was a chance meeting through connections that brought Golden Slums guitarist – and former semi-professional skateboarder – Luke Parish into his life.
“Me and Luke actually met through a mutual drug dealer,” McEwan recalls over Skype, his south-eastern English accent offering up a hearty laugh as he does so. “I’d end up bringing my little amp and guitar around there, because I think we spent most weekends there. The dealer had an electronic drum kit, and then Rish came around, and he started playing drums, or something like that, and we just kept going. I’d play drums, Rish would play guitar, and then we’d keep swapping.” Even today, many years later, Parish is still saved in McEwan’s phone contacts as “Luke Jams”. After all, the idea of forming a new band with his new musical mate wasn’t quite on the cards yet. A few months after they first jammed together, McEwan showed Parish an early demo of “Cornflake”, with the guitarist so taken by what he had heard that he met with McEwan the very next day to record the guitar parts for what is now the track “Cubensis Lenses”. Thus the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets were born, with the full lineup being rounded out by the addition of Caddy, guitarist/keyboardist Chris Young, and bassist Luke Reynolds, who departed in 2020.
At the time of Psychedelic Porn Crumpets’ arrival into the world in late 2014, the Perth scene they were born into was a perfect breeding ground for their type of music. “It was this real bubble of guitar-based bands, like blues and psych,” Parish recalls, raising his voice to be heard over a neighbour’s exceedingly-loud gardening routine. “There was a real explosion at that point.” “Everybody had a Cry Baby Wah and a facemelter fuzz pedal,” quips McEwan, as he professes his love of local groups such as Red Engine Caves, the Love Junkies, or even Parish’s Golden Slums. “We just managed to get the tail-end of the psych scene after Tame Impala and Pond,” he adds. “The door was still open for that style of music. For us, it was like Australia had sort of died down a bit, just as Europe and America was getting wind of it.” While acts such as the aforementioned Perth locals Tame Impala and Pond had served as influences upon the entire Australian music scene, McEwan notes that he had been fond of bigger names like Karnivool, The Mars Volta, Wolfmother, and Tool before Kevin Parker’s brand of music helped to kick things off.
The local Perth music scene was undergoing a few changes when the Porn Crumpets entered the fray. Major festivals such as the Big Day Out and Soundwave had just held their final events in the city, leaving only Laneway (held in Fremantle) and Southbound (held in Busselton) as the big draw cards on WA’s musical lineup. Instead of imploding, the local scene thrived, with countless artists springing up to fill the Perth stages which rarely played host to as many international acts as some fans would have liked. “It was like, ‘Well there’s no jazz fusion band here’, and then you end up with Grievous Bodily Calm, and, ‘There’s no other bands trying to do punk music, and we don’t have that’, so Boat Show came out of that,” McEwan recalls. “There was a big gap for people to be able to do their thing and not have the battle of competing with international artists.” It was this fertile ground that allowed bands like Psychedelic Porn Crumpets to fulfill a musical need and find their feet. Relentless live shows allowed the group to hone their talents on the live stage, growing their profile as a presence on the local scene. Behind the scenes though, the group worked tirelessly at becoming a force to be reckoned with in the studio.  From: https://au.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/the-perpetual-rise-of-psychedelic-porn-crumpets-25341/

Sisters Ov The Blackmoon - Haunt

 #Sisters Ov The Blackmoon #heavy metal #doom metal #heavy blues rock #stoner metal #occult rock #music video

Blood Cauldron is an EP you need to own, an EP that promises so much for the future and an EP that actually blew a speaker on my PC. To be honest I think the speaker was on its way out anyway but never mind this is still a super EP. The band who created this superb EP go by the name of Sisters Ov The Blackmoon and play a blend of gritty bluesy stoner and occult doom-ish rock. Exploding  out of Los Angeles the band consist of Josh Alves – drums, Andrew Vega – guitar, Dan Schlaich – guitar and Jared  Anderson – bass, but it is  the powerful bluesy tones of Sasha Wheatcroft on vocals that sets this band apart from others ploughing a similar musical furrow.
Blood Cauldron sets the tone for the EP with “Haunt”, a barnstormer of a track that opens with the sound of cicadas chirping and an owl hooting and segues into a rolling guitar riff with a  horror movie soundbite over its top, then the guitars pick up the volume, drums crash and pound just as it gets gnarly everything drops down for the verse. Here is where you first get the “Wheatcroft” experience. With a voice that mixes Beth Hart’s bluesy holler with Miny Parsonz’ (Royal Thunder) smokey stoner howl, Ms. Wheatcroft is a revelation, her voice dripping with passionate power and control making every phrase and inflection count. One person does not make a band though and the other “sisters” more than prove their worth on this collection of songs. Vega and Sclaich complement each other perfectly on guitars coming on with earth shattering riffage and sublime solos and every now and then breaking into Lizzy-esqe twin melodies. The bottom end is held up just as well too with Alves and Anderson locking in as tight and creating a solid base for everything going on above them.  From: http://stonerking1.blogspot.com/2015/06/sisters-ov-blackmoon-blood-cauldron-ep.html?m=0

Cat Stevens - Father and Son

 #Cat Stevens #folk rock #pop rock #album rock #singer-songwriter #1970s #music video

This song is a conversation between a father and son, with the father counseling his son to stay home, settle down and find a girl, telling him this is the path to happiness - after all, it worked for him. The son, though, feels compelled to leave and is frustrated because his dad makes no effort to understand why he wants to go or even hear him out.
Stevens made up the story, but his relationship with his own father, Stavros Georgiou, was an influence on the song. His dad owned a restaurant in London, and Cat (known to his dad as Steven Georgiou) worked there as a waiter right up until he signed a record deal at age 17. Stavros was hoping his son would join the family business. When he appeared on The Chris Isaak Hour in 2009, Stevens said: "He was running a restaurant and I was a pop star, so I wasn't following the path that he laid out. But we certainly didn't have any antagonism between us. I loved him and he loved me."
Stevens veered away from his upbringing again in 1977 when he rejected Christianity and became a Muslim, changing his name to Yusuf Islam.
The generational divide that plays out in the lyric can apply to many families, but Stevens had a specific storyline in mind, writing it from the perspective of a father and son in a Russian family during the Russian Revolution (1917-1923). The son wants to join the revolution but his father wants him to stay home and work on the farm. Stevens, a huge fan of show tunes, wrote it in 1969 for a musical he was working on called Revolussia, which is set during the Russian Revolution. The song is part of a scene where the son feels it is his calling to join in, but his father wants him to stay home. The musical never materialized, so the song ended up being the first one written for Stevens' Tea For The Tillerman album. The song has a very unusual structure, which owes to its provenance as a number for a stage musical. There's no chorus, but the son's part is sung louder, providing a kind of hook. The dialogue is an interesting lyrical trick with the father and son expressing different perspectives on the situation.
This is the song that got Stevens signed to Island Records. His first two albums were issued on Deram, a division of Decca. Stevens met with Island boss Chris Blackwell to talk about the musical he wrote this song for, but when Blackwell heard the song, he set his sights on getting Stevens on his label as an artist. Stevens' first Island release was Mona Bone Jakon earlier in 1970; it was not just a new label for Stevens, but a new producer as well, with former Yardbird Paul Samwell-Smith taking the helm from Mike Hurst (ex-Springfields), who helped Stevens get his deal with Decca.
In 2020, Stevens released a re-recorded version of "Father and Son" for Tea for the Tillerman 2, a re-imagining of Tea for the Tillerman 50 years later. The revamped rendition brings together his smooth vocals from when he was just 22, and the seasoned voice of the 72-year-old Stevens. Chris Hopewell's top-frame animated video for the new version of "Father And Son" nods to the original release with groovy clips from the original 1970 video.  From: https://www.songfacts.com/facts/cat-stevens/father-and-son

Let's Eat Grandma - Rapunzel

 #Let's Eat Grandma #art rock #pop rock #dream pop #experimental #avant-pop #electronic

The project of lifelong friends Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth, Let's Eat Grandma's boundary-breaking pop stems from their intuitive creative connection. Featuring songs they wrote in their early teens, their 2016 debut album, I, Gemini, felt equally inspired by chart-topping acts, Grimm's fairy tales, and the likes of Björk and Kate Bush. The luminous synth pop of 2018's acclaimed I'm All Ears, which found Let's Eat Grandma collaborating with cutting-edge producer Sophie, was more sophisticated but no less exuberant, while the heartfelt songwriting on 2022's Two Ribbons reflected the changes and losses that reshaped - but didn't break - Hollingworth and Walton's bond. Similarly, the duo's work on the score to the Netflix series Half Bad: The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself expressed Let's Eat Grandma's continued creative growth with its eerie fusion of electronic and traditional instrumentation.
Growing up in Norwich, U.K., Hollingworth and Walton became best friends at age four, when they bonded during a kindergarten art class. From there, they embarked on creative projects that ranged from building tree houses to making short films and, eventually, music. They made their first song at age ten, and by the time they were 13, they were writing in a rehearsal space in Walton's home. Taking their name from a joke from the humorous punctuation book Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Let's Eat Grandma began recording songs for their album at the local music college when Hollingworth and Walton were 14 and began playing shows soon after. Around this time, they caught the attention of Manchester singer/songwriter Kiran Leonard, who saw their name on a poster for the 2014 Norwich Sound & Vision Festival. The pair soon shared management with Leonard and signed to Transgressive Records, which released a trio of singles - "Deep Six Textbook," "Eat Shiitake Mushrooms," and "Rapunzel" - in early 2016. Featuring the duo on every instrument, Let's Eat Grandma's first full-length, I, Gemini, arrived that June consisting of songs Hollingworth and Walton wrote several years earlier and earning critical acclaim for its clever songwriting and whimsical instrumentation.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/lets-eat-grandma-mn0003481701/biography

Dälek - Classical Homicide

 #Dälek #experimental hip hop #industrial hip hop #electronic #glitch hop #noise #avant-garde

Forged in the fires of the East Coast underground music scene in the 90s, Experimental Hip Hop pioneers Dälek have spent decades carving out a unique niche fusing hardcore Hip Hop, noise and a radical approach to sound. Founded by Will Brooks (aka MC Dälek) and Alap Momin (aka Oktopus), Dälek debuted in 1998 with Negro, Necro, Nekros; a sonic tour de force built upon thunderous drums, blissful ambient sections and gritty, insightful lyrics. From the very beginning, Dälek came out the gate, following in the footsteps of their predecessors Public Enemy while drawing from influences as varied as My Bloody Valentine and German experimentalists Faust, Dälek have succeeded in adding completely new textural and structural dimensions to rap music. After signing with Mike Patton’s renowned label, Ipecac Recordings, Dälek went on a virtually unparalleled run throughout the 2000s releasing a string of ambitious and challenging albums including From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots (2002), Absence (2005), Abandoned Language (2007), and Gutter Tactics (2009). A visceral and powerful live act, Dälek spent over a decade touring and bringing their raucous and blistering performances to audiences around the world.  From: https://deadverse.com/artists/dalek/

This avant-garde hip-hop stuff is spreading fast. You know the stuff of which I speak; hip-hop built from samples harder to grasp than a wall of Jell-O, whose time signatures change faster than a 15 year-old girl's fashion sense, all strung around beats dirtier than the old man asleep at the bus stop. Innovators like cLOUDDEAD, El-P, and the Anticon Crew have been redefining what hip-hop is for years now, so it's nice that people are finally starting to take notice. If you've been paying any attention, you know what's bound to happen next: the market will glut, and innovation will make way for imitation. But first, Dälek returns to the scene, fresh off collaborations with Faust, Techno Animal and Kid606, with a sophomore album inventive enough to extend avant-garde hip-hop's stay in the limelight for, at the very least, a few more weeks.
So what is it that makes Dälek - alongside producer Oktopus, and turntablist/producer Still - stand out amongst a seeming onslaught of original, challenging hip-hop? Namely that their songs are set to moody musique concrète backdrops that sound like something out of a David Lynch nightmare. Yes, there are rhymes set to hand-drums and cowbells. Yes, the lyrical content would feel more at home in a lit hall than in some trash-ridden alley. Yes, there are times when Dälek opts to speak his vocals rather than rap them. And yes, he's more sensitive than your average bear. But what really separates Dälek from the rest isn't his rabid experimentation as much as the way he builds a bridge between the avant-garde and the traditional.
While his contemporaries experiment with slant-rhyme and abstract poetics, Dälek takes a comparatively standard lyrical approach, setting forcefully delivered rhymes to some of the strangest soundscapes that will ever be labeled 'hip-hop.' Pleas for understanding, cries of frustration, and even the occasional ray of hope weave in and out of music that owes more to 80s Western European industrial music a la Psychic TV and Nurse with Wound than it does to Grandmaster Flash or Public Enemy.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2148-from-filthy-tongue-of-gods-and-griots/