Free - Doing Their Thing 1970

Along with Cream and Led Zeppelin, Free stands as one of the most influential bands of the late 1960’s British blues boom. Formed in London during the spring of 1968, Free‘s original lineup included drummer Simon Kirke, bassist Andy Fraser, lead vocalist Paul Rodgers and guitarist Paul Kossoff. Kirke and Kossoff were heavily influenced by American blues artists and, as teenagers, joined an R&B band called Black Cat Bones. Despite their youth, Kirke and Kossoff were seasoned musicians with a strong and growing reputation among the London blues scene. “Kossoff,” explains Kirke, “while only 17, was a serious student of music.” Kossoff’s background had been classical and he had studied for years. But he also loved all of those great soul and blues records from America. Veteran producer Mike Vernon best known for his work with John Mayall enlisted Black Cat Bones to back Champion Jack Dupreee on the legendary pianists When You Feel the Feeling album for Blue Horizon. Apart from their celebrated session with Dupree, Kirke and Kossoff grew restless and disbanded the group.
While scouting for a vocalist to front their new band, Kossoff and Kirke visited the Fickle Pickle, an R&B club in London’s Finsbury Park. It was here that the two first heard Paul Rodgers, a young vocalist then performing with Brown Sugar. Kirke and Kossoff were immediately impressed with Rodger?s expressive voice and charismatic style, and recruited him for their group. “Paul owed a great deal to Otis Redding,” recalls Kirke, “his voice had power and presence. We knew that he was – and still is – unique.” With Rodgers in the fold, Kossoff and Kirke, to round out their new ensemble, turned to one of their mentors, British blues legend Alexis Korner. “Korner was a big help to us,” says Kirke simply. “Kossoff had been very friendly with him and Alexis recommended Andy Fraser to us. Though Andy was only 15, he had played with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, which really won our respect. When we first saw him play, he was sitting in with Alexis’ Band, wearing these flared trousers and ruffled shirts with rough collars.” “We thought, bloody hell, who is this little punk! But when he started playing we knew that he was really quite good. Impressed with Fraser’s abilities, Korner helped arrange an set up at the Nag’s Head Pub in Battersea,” remembers Kirke. “It was great, a very fertile meeting. In fact, at that initial get together, we wrote six blues based songs. About five or six hours in, Alexis came down and stood in the wings watching. He not only gave us his seal of approval, he also gave us our name: Free.”
Korner’s simple choice met with immediate approval. “You must remember,” says Kirke, “in those days, it was all sort of arty-farty in Britain. Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker and Graham Bond once had a band called Free at Last which was a name we really liked, however it had already been used though we did use it later as the title for one of our albums. We were a blues band, so we decided on Free, which we thought was something a bit more nebulous.” Beginning with that initial jam session, Free sought to establish their own distinct sound and style, shunning excess amplification and instrumentation for sparse arrangement and a gritty, high energy mix of rock and blues. “Though we were only kids fresh out of adolescence,” explains Kirke, “we were very serious about the direction of our music. We were never interested in the trappings of psychedelia. We wanted it very simple Bass, Guitar, Drums and Vocal. Paul Rodgers could play both bass and guitar but we rarely called on him for it. We never wanted to have a gaudy sound.”
1968
On Korner’s recommendation, Free was signed to Chris Blackwell’s Island Records and, subsequently A&M Records in the U.S. Working with producer Guy Stevens, Free entered London’s Morgan Studios to begin recording Tons of Sobs, their debut album. Despite the band’s emerging success as a touring unit, capturing their sound in the studio was, at least initially, more of a challenge.”We were really wet behind the ears when we went to record Tons of Sobs,” explains Kirke, “we didn’t know what to do. Our producer, Guy Stevens, was very talented and was forever buzzing about the studio. Guy sensed that we were struggling and he pulled us aside. He told us to relay and just play the two 45-minute sets that we had been playing in the clubs. That’s how we did the album. Tons of Sobs (a title coined by Stevens) was recorded in a week. When I think about it today, it seems amazing. Now it seems to take a week to get the right snare sound!” Released in November 1968, Tons of Sobs and tracks such as I’m a Mover and The Hunter were obvious examples of the band’s earthy roots and considerable blues influence. Walk In My Shadow, cited by Kirke as the first song the band ever wrote together, is equally charged, powered by Kossoff’s muscular riffing and Rodgers confident lead vocal. On the heels of Tons of Sobs, Free followed with Broad Daylight, their stylish debut single. However, despite a superb vocal performance by Rodgers, the song failed to chart in both the U.S. and U.K. “As a single, Broad Daylight was a disaster,” remembers Kirke. “I think it sold three copies in Sheffield. It was a funny song, totally unrepresentative of the group at the time. Even though it was early on in our career, the release of Broad Daylight was when I had my first inkling that Fraser wasn’t quite on the same wavelength as Kossoff and I. Andy wrote it with Paul and was really insistent that it become a big single for us. It just wasn’t meant to be.”
1969
Despite their lack of chart success to date, the band enjoyed a loyal following built on regular tours throughout Britain. That effort appeared to pay immediate dividends with the release of Free, the band’s second album, in 1969. With Free, the group displayed an emerging individual style framed by Kossoff’s stinging lead guitar, Fraser’s bass, Kirke’s rock solid beat and Rodgers anguished vocals. Unburdened by extended solos or lengthy jams typical of the era, such powerful original material as I’ll Be Creepin’ showcased the talents of Kossoff and Fraser, while tracks such as Woman provided a vehicle for Rodgers considerable vocal prowess. Behind the scenes, Fraser’s reputation as a child prodigy was further enhanced by his contributions to Free. “Fraser’s bass playing on I’ll Be Creepin’ was fantastic,” says Kirke, “I always felt that, pound for pound, Fraser had the most talent of the four of us. Fraser was quite advanced for his age and, in many ways, a lot like John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin-someone who could play a number of instruments well and was a strong, but quiet influence.”
In America, neither of Free‘s first two albums had generated much interest. Their big break would come in Summer of 1969, when the band was asked, along with Delany & Bonnie, to open dates on Blind Faith‘s massive U.S. Tour. “That turned out to be very fortuitous for the band,” recalls Kirke. “Our tour with Blind Faith ended with a big show at Madison Square Garden. Afterwards, we were offered a chance to play at Woodstock, but that fell through. Instead, we were offered a week’s worth of gigs at Ungano’s popular Nightclub in New York. The second night that we were there, Clapton and Baker walked in and we were stunned, absolutely in awe, because we had very little contact with them during the tour. Clapton came backstage and asked Kossoff to show him how he got such strong and fluid vibrato in his playing. Kossoff nearly died. What, me showing you stuff?? You must be joking! But Clapton was serious, as Kossoff, among the guitarists fraternity, had really begun to develop a name for himself.
1970
With two strong albums and nearly two years of touring already under their belt, the quartet’s combination of blues and rock was, perhaps, best captured on their seminal Fire and Water album, released in 1970. An engaging mix of ballads and strident rockers. Fire and Water also featured All Right Now, the group’s breakthrough single. An edited version of All Right Now had a major chart impact, reaching No. 2 on the U.K. single chart and, in the USA, No. 4 on the Billboard chart. Driven by Kossoff’s incessant riffling, All Right Now has proved remarkably durable, remaining, nearly 25 Years later, the band’s signature tune. According to Kirke, the song actually drew its roots from necessity. “All Right Now was created after a bad gig in Durham, England. Our repertoire at that time was mostly slow and medium paced blues songs which was alright if you were a student sitting quietly and nodding your head to the beat. However, we finished our show in Durham and walked off the stage to the sound of our own footsteps. The applause had died before I had even left the drum riser. When we got into the dressing room, it was obvious that we needed an uptempo number, a rocker to close our shows. All of sudden, the Inspiration struck Fraser, and he started bopping around singing All Right Now. He sat down and wrote it right there in the dressing room. It couldn’t have taken more than ten minutes.” Heavy Load and Oh I Wept also from Fire and Water were superb examples of Free‘s unique marriage of solemn blues and swaggering hard rock. With the release of Fire and Water, Rodgers had emerged as one of hard rock’s premier vocalists. “In the studio,” remembers Kirke, “Paul was a one take wonder. He might have done an occasional vocal twice, but that was it. His vocal style was very dry and stripped down with no embellishments at all. I can’t remember one instance when Paul used any effects such as reverb on his voice. What you hear on those record’s is exactly what he sounded like – and that’s what makes him really, really special.”  From: https://freebandofficial.com/biography/

Richard & Linda Thompson - Just the Motion

From 1973 to 1982, British folk legend Richard Thompson (having quit Fairport Convention in 1971) recorded as a duo with his wife Linda Thompson. This period saw a great amount of critical praise for Richard’s songwriting and Linda’s voice, though not much popular success. Following their divorce, both pursued solo careers. The Thompsons recorded three albums, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight (1974), Hokey Pokey (1975) and Pour Down Like Silver (1975), before they decided to leave the music business and moved to a Sufi commune in East Anglia. Songwriting was by Richard throughout, lead vocals generally by Linda, and backing by a consistent core band of English folk-rock stalwarts.
I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight showed a clear development from Richard Thompson’s first solo effort Henry The Human Fly with Linda’s vocals adding grace, as well as the opportunity for Richard to write from a female perspective. Although Thompson’s trademark gloom is already evident, the lightness and beauty of the arrangements counterbalances this to produce moments of great beauty. The use of brass, from the renowned CWS silver band in particular, takes forward Thompson’s continuing crusade to find a more contemporary and ordinary expression of Englishness in music,(as opposed to say the forays into the Morris form of his Fairport contemporary Ashley Hutchings, solo and with The Albion Band). The next year’s release, Hokey Pokey, to some extent repeats the formula, although it is improved in production values, and is stylistically more adventurous still. A Heart Needs a Home is a minor miracle of songwriting, expressing the longing for love without cynicism and has a standout multi-tracked vocal from Linda.
Pour Down Like Silver extended the reach of Richard and Linda’s music, and without the occasional weaker tracks of the preceding releases. Here the writing cynicism is balanced with humour, (Hard Luck Stories, Streets of Paradise), and love and need is expressed directly, and to touching effect (Jet Plane in a Rocking Chair, Beat the Retreat). The impact of Sufism on their lives is expressed in Night Comes In, which borrows imagery from Sufi mystic poetry, and the practice of finding union with the Spirit through dance. The playing, arrangements and production are uniformly excellent throughout.
In 1978, Thompson decided to take his family out of the commune and go back to their old home in Hampstead. He also decided to return to making music, partly because, as he commented at the time, he’d come to realise “that [he] wasn’t really any good at anything else”. Re-uniting the core band, the resulting album, First Light, was warmly received by the critics but did not sell particularly well. Neither did its follow up, 1979’s harder-edged and more cynical Sunnyvista. Chrysalis Records did not take up their option to renew the contract, and the Thompsons found themselves without a contract, but not without admirers.
About a year later Joe Boyd signed the Thompsons to his small Hannibal label and a new album was recorded. Shoot Out the Lights included new recordings of many of the songs recorded in 1980, and was clearly a very strong album. Linda Thompson was pregnant during the sessions, and so the album’s release was held back until the Thompsons could tour in support of the new album. Linda’s pregnancy also meant that she did not sing on all of the songs. On its release in 1982, Shoot Out the Lights was lauded by critics and sold fairly well – especially in the USA. The Thompsons, now a couple for professional purposes only, toured the USA to support the album and then went their separate ways. Both the album and their live shows were well received by the American media, and Shoot Out the Lights effectively relaunched their career – just as their marriage was falling apart. As against the first phase of their career, this last offering is sparer, without the instrumental augmentation that characterized the earlier albums, much more rock oriented, and altogether more ferocious. Although Thompson in interviews has always resisted over-personal interpretations of his songs, it is difficult not to see in its energy, tone and themes the difficulties of the final stages of the Thompson’s marriage, transmuted into musical gold.  From: https://thevogue.com/artists/richard-linda-thompson/#bio

Uni and The Urchins - Subhuman Suburbia

New York City is home to many artists, and among those who live under its gloriously creative umbrella is glam rock group UNI and The Urchins. The band—comprised of bassist Charlotte Kemp Muhl (who goes by Kemp), frontman/vocalist Jack James, guitarist David Strange, and drummer Andrew Oakley—has recently celebrated the drop of their debut album Simulator via Chimera Music, the artist-run label from Kemp and Sean Lennon, and is gearing up to have a fruitful 2023 in its wake. As part of the band’s debut record release, High Times has the exclusive worldwide premiere of the music video for the single “Dorian Gray,” which provides a trippy experience through both sound and visuals. To learn more about the album and the group itself, we drop in a Zoom interview which, per UNI’s request, takes place at 4:20pm. Kemp then kicks things off with her thoughts on cannabis in a free-flowing chat that morphs into an exploration of the group’s creative inspirations, how drugs and psychedelics can open new and different creative doors, and how authenticity pertains to the relationship between art, commerce, and creation as a whole.

Kemp: I feel like a lot of weed puritans are actually against the legalization in a sort of roundabout way because it fucks with their pipeline.

David Strange: But true or false: Part of the fun of doing drugs is that you’re not supposed to be doing them? I feel like part of [weed] being illegal is it made it so that you really had to want to do drugs. You had to really seek them out and you usually had to do something super sketchy to get them. I know I sure did when I was in junior high. We would take the train down to the worst place in the Bronx—so dangerous—and buy it from legitimate gangsters with fifty-dollars worth of crumpled up ones and fives that we’d scrounge together from all of our friends’ lunch monies. We got mugged a couple of times doing that.

Kemp: And they just sold you tic-tacs.

David Strange: God knows what was in that weed. When we got it, we were so fucking stoked to have lived through the experience that it made it that much more meaningful—the fact that [weed] was difficult to come by. Nowadays, in Los Angeles especially, you can go to the health food store and they’re like, “Have some flaxseed or pot brownies.”

Kemp: Or CBD lube.

High Times: Everything is now so infused.

Kemp: Well, isn’t music kind of the same way? It’s so easy-access now with Spotify and all of these apps. You just discover band after band that it takes the fun out of discovering them from an odyssey to the record shop or a friend making you a mixtape from some other city or something.

David Strange: With all of these technological advances making parts of life easier to attain, it takes the fun out of the experience and makes the experience less meaningful. It’s like the harder it is to do something the more you appreciate it, is what it boils down to. With weed being so normalized, I think we need to up the ante now.

Jack James: To David’s point on how drugs used to be hard to find or how music used to be hard to find, we did pick a band name that was universally very difficult to find on any streaming platform. And then we changed our band name and everyone was like, “Well, why on earth would you change it?” It’s the same thing with “Weed should be legalized, weed should be legalized,” and then it’s no longer fun.

High Times: Is the band name now more of a conversation piece than it was before?

Kemp: The unsexy truth of it is that the Spotify algorithm thought “UNI” was a prefix, so it would be the last thing to come up after “unicorn,” “university,” everything “uni.” But it’s a Japanese word that means “sea urchin,” which is one of my favorite foods. UNI and The Urchins is technically redundant, but it’s cool because “Urchins” makes it feel more like a collective and a Warhol factory. We’re UNI, but the “Urchins” is anyone who wants to be involved in this movement. There really haven’t been any art movements happening, and New York used to be such a hub for that. We’re very nostalgic for those times. Videos of Bowie hanging out with Dylan. It was such a scene. The Beach Boys used to be competitive in a friendly way with The Beatles and it made them make their best work. There’s not a lot of that, so the “Urchins” sort of represents the community we imagine we would like to have.

Jack James: For every video we do, there are so many people who come on and we can’t pay them what they’re worth, but they come on because they love it and it’s representative of the art collective like Kemp is saying. But the brass tax of it is no one could find us on Spotify [laughs].

David Strange: I also had a really funny joke about the real reason we had to change our name from what it used to be but I can’t say it.

Kemp: We’ll just have to take your word for it that it’s the best story.

David Strange: I just wish people weren’t so sensitive these days.

High Times: Sometimes it seems people want to go out of their way to be offended, which often takes more energy than to simply live your existence.

David Strange: What’s the last thing that offended you, Andrew?

Andrew Oakley: Me? I’m always offended.

David Strange: Just my question offended you, huh?

Kemp: We have a culture within our band of really hazing each other and it really takes the pressure off. There’s no feeling of walking on eggshells because we just call each other horrible things that I can’t even say here. It’s in a loving way.

Jack James: It’s nice, weirdly.

Kemp: And it’s very hard to offend us internally because we all come from a place of love and camaraderie. In terms of the album, the thing that we were saying earlier about access and deflating value, technology has done that with recording in a lot of ways. I spent all of my last money on investing in vintage music gear, for example. Over the course of the pandemic, I decided to go to the dark side a little bit and flirt with some of these more sample-based programs. It’s been interesting, but I am nostalgic for our old way of making music, which was tracking live-to-tape as a band. It does make me really think about the ratio of satisfaction-and-value to ease-and-accessibility. It’s great how egalitarian these new techs have made everything now. People who are barely a musician can now just push a button and make a track that sounds like a hit. I feel like such a grandpa about it.

High Times: There’s an authenticity that’s lost in any type of art when you can just press a button and it spits out something that wasn’t coming from a place within somebody.

David Strange: But maybe soullessness is the new soul?

Kemp: [Laughs]

David Strange: No, really. Warhol said the best kind of art is “business art.” He had the whole factory and he wasn’t even making his prints. Now there’s a huge argument in the Warhol community over whether the prints were real or not, or which printmaker was making them. Talk about going to the dark side, I’m kind of with you Kemp—I don’t think you can fight against the tide. I think it’s going in that direction and maybe there’s some new soul to be discovered within all the soullessness. One thing that Kemp has really gotten into lately and turned me onto is the new AI renderings that are creating original content. It’s putting to the forefront: What do you do to become a good artist? You study other artists, you learn your craft, you go to school, and you take inspiration from the things you want to take inspiration from. These AI generators are doing that by condensing a lifetime full of references and learning them down to thirty seconds and just processing the AI in a computer and spitting it out. Surely it’s the same thing if you’re one of the cool people in New York who lives downtown—like a DJ who knows all the cool references and Iranian psychedelic music from the seventies and afro-pop from the sixties—and you can put all of that into your pot and have these cool original tracks based upon it. Why is it then that we should look down upon AI for being able to do the same thing in a matter of seconds? Is it less authentic or is it evolution? I don’t know.

Kemp: What it is is like a gun to the samurai; it levels the playing field. It’s like Uber to the taxi driver. It’s inevitable, but it creates a class of resentful Luddites. It’s the Industrial Revolution 3.0.

David Strange: If I really feel something while I’m creating it, does that make the end result more important or better compared to if I feel nothing at all when I’m creating and the end result is really awesome?

High Times: Though if you’re feeling something in the moment of creation, people can pick up on that through the work.

Kemp: I agree with you, except a lot of people’s most successful work is the shit they cared the least about. There’s that scene in Of Mice and Men where he’s strangling a girl and he doesn’t mean to be strangling her and he’s like, “Why aren’t you smiling? Why aren’t you smiling?” She dies and he doesn’t mean to kill her and I feel like artists do that to their own art when they care too much. So, I think there’s a sweet spot there of being too precious. I think also with putting out a first album, you’re always overly precious and second guessing. That was definitely a factor for us in that we had like forty songs and we didn’t know which ones to put on the album. We were losing perspective, so we were finally just like, “Fuck it,” lets just throw out these ten songs and then put out the next one. We’re learning to be less precious, which is good. But I agree with you, you do have to have a boner for what you’re working on.

High Times: How did the song selection process work with having so much material?

Kemp: For Me, Jack is really my read on stuff because I go into a jazz trance and lose perspective on everything when I’m working on tracks. Each one that I’m working on at the moment becomes my favorite child. The way that Jack will respond to a rough mix will kind of be a gauge for me on what we should pursue.

Jack James: Although to be fair, the last single we put out—when I went upstate to the studio and [Kemp] was showing me the song “Subhuman Suburbia,” I was like, “I dunno, I’m just going to roll with it,” and then it turned out to be my favorite song I think off the album.

David Strange: Not to bring it all back to drugs, but sometimes when you think things are good, it’s really hard to trust yourself and your own internal experience versus other peoples’ external experiences.
For instance, I went on a really heavy trip recently—a full day thing—and went immediately to this party at the house where I was staying and just tripped my balls off. The other people at the party hadn’t been tripping, so I was explaining to them what had happened to me and how incredible and life changing the experience had been and it was so uninteresting to everyone at this party. The only person who it was interesting to was me.
I was telling them, “There I was in the jungle and I could see the fabric of the universe,” and people were like, “Oh, cool. Anyway, is that juice over there? I think I’m gonna go get a cup.” My point is, you can imagine [thinking] That song, I’m really feeling it, the way I was feeling after that trip and then other people are like, “Yeah, it’s cool that you’re feeling it, but I’m not feeling this at all.” It’s really hard to tell.

Jack James: For our songs, eventually we decided the songs we chose for the album encompassed whatever the hell we’re trying to say and we thought they were the best to fit on a ten song vinyl.

High Times: Creatively, is there something you hope that the audience and fans take from the debut record Simulator?

Kemp: This is where it gets like that Frank Zappa quote: “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” It’s always hard to put it into words. David Lynch was like, “If I wanted to put it into words, I would have just written a book instead of making a movie.” I think the best art is open to interpretation.

Jack James: Yeah, whatever they take from it is really nice and I appreciate them listening to it. It’s whatever you take from it. We keep an audience in mind, but it’s like-minded outcast weirdos like [us] and I hope they find some solace in that they have another friend who is out there when they listen to it.

Kemp: We’re all drawn to each other being weirdos and outcasts but we’re all very different and that’s what makes us feel like the motley crew from Lord of The Rings or something. I am very dark and nihilistic and Jack is very spiritual and positive. Andrew is the cool metal Black Sabbath analog rock dude and David is the insane freak poet charlatan hobo. Normally if we saw each other at a bar and we didn’t know each other, we’d probably never talk to each other. But we somehow ended up together and it’s this beautiful synthesis of our very different personalities. The thing that binds us is sort of feeling alienated from the rest of society.

High Times: Is there a lot of parallel thinking that happens when you’re creating or are you each bringing something unique to that process?

Jack James: I think both, though it depends, especially if we’re doing a music video and we’ve been around each other enough. You sort of finish each other’s sentences very quickly and there’s a simpatico thing going on. Other times, one of us will come with an idea and the others will look at it like, “What are you fucking talking about?” I think for as different as we are, we are very like-minded in what we enjoy to see and enjoy listening to.

High Times: How does cannabis and/or psychedelics play a role in that creation process?

Andrew Oakley: I’m pretty into edibles these days, especially something with heavy CBD.

High Times: Sativa or Indica?
Andrew Oakley: Sativa for sure, especially if you’re playing music. It gives you a little energy, gets you focused. It’s the way to go.

David Strange: We have all partaken on the spiritual quests together on multiple occasions and what I think is pretty cool about psychedelics is that they tend to open up doors. Those doors lead to rooms within you that already exist and there’s a lot of ways to open up those doors. Psychedelics are just one way to open those doors.

Kemp: I don’t think you can make rock or psych or glam or any of the genres that we love without having done psychedelics. It’s really what created the genres.

Jack James: I remember growing up thinking, “I bet all the coolest shit was written on drugs,” but then you try to do it and you find how difficult it actually is.

David Strange: That’s what I was saying about the doors—the drugs are the training wheels that show you those doors because, truly, a lot of the experiences that we’ve had either on stage or in studio have been psychedelic without any drugs at all. But if you can’t access those rooms on your own, sometimes doing a drug like that is the key that can open up that door and give you access to it. If you treat drugs in the right way, you will retain the combination or key to that door so you can go through it again and again when you need to.

Kemp: That being said, I think drugs should not be done flippantly. Yeah, it’s fun to occasionally do them at a party, but they definitely are spiritual keys and should be used with purpose like creativity, sex, thinking, and introspection.

From: https://hightimes.com/culture/music/uni-and-the-urchins-are-more-than-music-theyre-an-art-collective/

Lauren Ruth Ward - Soul Kitchen (Doors Cover)

Last December, singer-songwriter Lauren Ruth Ward released a seven-song Doors cover EP called Happy Birthday Jim. She also made a video for each song. The whole thing was done in just seven weeks, a way to keep busy while her label waited for the right moment to release her new album. “We did that out of sheer boredom. I was like, ‘I am dying, I need to put something out,” Ward says. “They’re being so precious about these songs and the plan. I want to respect it, but my fans are asking me when I’m going to put something out. It really drives me nuts.” The cover EP was a collaborative project. She gave each of the seven songs to a different videographer, told them what the color scheme should be, and gave them each two weeks to make their videos. She didn’t even watch the videos until they were uploaded. Despite having released the critically praised, fiercely queer art-rock record Well, Hell early in 2018 on Weekday, a subsidiary of Sony, putting together the Jim Morrison cover record on her own really excited her. There was a freedom to it that she really missed. “They want you to work with names,” Ward says. “In L.A., if you’re working with somebody in their closet in Sherman Oaks, I understand it sounds sketchy, but I’m like, ‘It is a very creative human being.’”
The label let her make the Morrison cover record on her own, but they didn’t see eye to eye on her overall career trajectory. She was actually relieved in early January when she got the call that Weekday had folded, leaving her without a label. “I’m super creative. I like to stay active,” Ward says. “That was such a problem. I didn’t foresee that. It would totally dampen who I am as a person, thus affecting my art.” Since being label-free, she’s already released the highly energetic and self-empowering “Valhalla” as a video, as well as the audio for low-key and reflective “Pull String.” She’s got several more songs and videos in the works, and she can’t wait to get to them all out. “I don’t really have a passion for an album. My thoughts don’t feel like they’re coming together as a chunk,” Ward says. “I’m just having a notion and writing about it, seeing a visual and creating it, and then releasing it as its own thing. That’s always been who I am.”
Originally from a small town in Maryland, she left her life as a hair stylist in 2015 and moved to L.A., where she entered the music scene full throttle. There she also felt a freedom to explore her sexuality. She’s now engaged to female singer-songwriter LP. Ward is fiercely creative musically and visually. Getting signed to a label seemed like the opportunity she needed, but she found that she’s much better suited to being independent and having no one telling her what she can and can’t do. She still works as a hair stylist in L.A. In fact, in the four years she’s lived there, she’s been able to build up her client base enough that she can now fund her music videos herself, and pretty much express herself how she wants.
“I see visuals for every song. Sometimes I see the music videos before the songs are finished, or when it’s being written,” Ward says. “Before the label, I wanted a music video for everything, but I couldn’t afford it. Now after the label, I have a day job that I can use to fund projects.” She’s had the unexpected offer this past year of joining a newly revived Divinyls. Through mutual friends, she met Divinyls guitarist Mark McEntee, who was blown away by her voice and energy, which reminded him of original singer Crissy Amphlett. They recorded a version of “I Touch Myself” with Ward and it was incredible. He booked a Divinyls tour in Australia earlier this year, but it got postponed due to some personal issues he was dealing with. She’s hoping it gets rescheduled soon. “My generation does not know them at all. I’m excited to be a megaphone for my generation to be like, ‘This band was insane,’” Ward says. “Some of my friends were like, ‘I saw you post about going on the road with some Australian band. And I looked them up and holy shit, Crissy Amphlett, I lived my life not knowing who this person is.’ I was excited to put them on blast, because they deserve it.”  From: https://www.goodtimes.sc/preview-lauren-ruth-ward-catalyst/

Motorpsycho - Spin, Spin, Spin (HP Lovecraft Cover)

Motorpsycho is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get. Or let’s kick off critically, because when it comes to the Trondheim-based band we do know we can expect a yearly dump of new music. Also in the past five years or so we know much of the releases consist of sprawling heavy prog rock (Gullvåg trilogy 2017-2020) or epic odes to the powerful psych rock of the 1970s. On this year’s offering Yay! Hans Magnus Ryan and Bent Sæther however do truly surprise by breaking away from the previous years and now deliver a summery acoustic folk rock album. With music from The Tubs and Ghost Woman already out there, summer solstice parties just became even more festive. On the other hand is this the Motorpsycho we want to hear? Let’s dig in. Yay! bursts with an array of flavours, much like its colourful cover art and musically again draws inspiration from 60s and 70s. Elements of acoustic folk rock reminiscent of Led Zeppelin’s substyle, as well as the dreamy and spiritual prog rock of bands like Yes shine throughout the album while that band also blends in their own Britpop phase from the mid-90s. The album features diverse tracks such as the two-sided Cold & Bored, which starts off as a simple acoustic song but also mixes through an airy Mediterranean vibe. Sentinels takes a mostly instrumental approach while Dank State brings a catchy singalong atmosphere. This lighthearted pop-format comes forth on several of Yay!’s songs. W.C.A.’s delicate melody and percussion or the summery finale The Rapture serve as good examples. To us Yay!’s best song is Hotel Daedalus which also happens to be the sole rocker on the album. As it partly draws inspiration from the psych rock age, Hotel Daedalus is the only handhold we have to last year’s Ancient Astronauts and what came before. This, together with the acoustic pop songs and the melancholic ballads of Loch Meaninglessness & the Mull of Dull and Real Again (Norway shrugs and stays at home) shape this 2023 release. In conclusion, Motorpsycho’s Yay! once again showcases their ability to evolve and surprise. This time a thorough change of course seemed inevitable since drummer Tomas Järmyr left and the band started showing signs of being stuck in the process of outdoing themselves. A less epic work therefore is a breather.  From: https://soundsfromthedarkside.com/2023/06/16/motorpsycho-yay/

Jazz, soul and folk guitarist/singer-songwriter, Terry Callier released his debut album in 1968 and continued recording until 1978 when he disappeared off the radar.  Amazingly, the reason for this was that (at this time) his music just wasn’t making him the living he so rightly deserved! For the best part of 20 years he disappeared! Callier’s musical career started as a teenager when he auditioned for Chess Records in 1962, but he didn’t release his first album for another six years. Recorded by Samuel Charters, who persuaded Callier to come to Prestige in 1964, the record was originally due for release in 1965, but was delayed for a further three years after Charters ran off to Mexico with the tapes shortly after the sessions were laid down. The crazy thing about this story is, that Callier didn’t even know that the album was released until his brother saw it for sale in a book shop! Craft Recordings later released a 50th anniversary edition in 2018. Written by Chicago Poet, Kent Foreman, Spin Spin Spin featured on Callier’s debut album, The New Folk Sound of Terry Callier.  This warm, inviting and jazz-tinged delight is simply stunning and Callier’s vocals are sublime and velvety. If you haven’t heard the whole album and like this tune, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll like the whole record! Interestingly, there was another take on this track released very close to Callier’s (also in 1968) and this is also a rather captivating listen – a rendition I can also wholly endorse! H.P Lovecraft’s version is quite a treat too!  From: https://thelisteningpostblog.wordpress.com/2022/02/18/song-of-the-day-terry-callier-spin-spin-spin/

Eurythmics - There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)

My childhood was filled with a very healthy overload of music and I was one of those incredibly lucky kids that saw the latter half of the ‘70s come to a close, lived through the entirety of the ‘80s, was a teenager as I entered the ‘90s and a fully blown young man as I entered the new millennium. My musical influences were, and are, as diverse as they possibly can be. A big part of this diversity had strong roots in the ‘80s and one band, Eurythmics, played an instrumental role in my musical education. Fresh from the success of the band’s two previous studio albums—Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) and Touch, both released in 1983—the duo of Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart moved into a more commercial pop/rock sound for the first time with their fourth studio album Be Yourself Tonight. Pulling from the ‘60s and utilizing the sounds of American soul and British pop, Eurythmics managed to combine these two sounds perfectly on the album’s first track and lead single “Would I Lie To You?”
There is no denying that Eurythmics were at the forefront when it came to experimenting with their music via synth sounds and the usage of Lennox’s hauntingly, but incredibly soulful voice. For many, Be Yourself Tonight was a departure from this formula and was even perceived as “selling out” given its phenomenal commercial success. I disagree. Even with the introduction and implementation of a more traditional lineup and usage of instruments, their distinctive and somewhat unconventional take on the norm was still in full view. Be Yourself Tonight is no doubt Eurythmics’ most commercially successful studio album to date. The album spawned four singles, with the aforementioned lead track storming the charts around the globe, ultimately securing the number one spot in Australia, whilst cracking the top ten and top twenty in the US and UK respectively. Two months later, the duo released the gospel inspired “There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart).” Again proving that Eurythmics where onto something special, the song hit number one in three countries, including the U.K., the only number one the band has ever achieved there. A harmonica solo by the legendary Stevie Wonder adds an extra, soulful layer to an already ethereal song.
Towards the latter half of 1985, the band turned up the soul to full blast by releasing “Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves,” featuring the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. The feminist anthem was filmed in the now historical Music Hall in Detroit, Michigan and also featured three of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. Mike Campbell provided the lead guitar, Benmont Tench on the organ the legendary Stan Lynchan on drums, all bringing an extra layer to a song that remains anthemic to many women around the world to this very day. Tina Turner was originally offered the track by Eurythmics, but was unavailable. Imagine if there is a long-lost demo floating around somewhere out there of the Queen of Rock going head-to-head with Annie Lennox. One can dream. The fourth and final single from the album was “It’s Alright (Baby’s Coming Back).” Whilst it did break into the top 20 in the UK, it failed to make an impact elsewhere, like the album’s first three singles. The duo did go on to receive an Ivor Novello Award in 1986 for best song, recognizing the composition’s musical and lyrical importance.
There are some other treasures on this album too. “Conditioned Soul” opens with some beautiful instrumental work courtesy of the pan flute, which continues throughout the track, coupled with Dave Stewart showcasing some of his spectacular guitar work. Another equally interesting track on the album saw Elvis Costello join Lennox on vocals on the romantically fear laden “Adrian.” Yes, the commerciality is present in this album, but it was a move in the right direction both financially and yes, even creatively.
Whilst this album covers a wide array of musical styles, many of them new for the duo at the time, it is safe to say that each song independently brings something of value to this album. There is no question that Be Yourself Tonight is by far one of the best pop/rock albums of the 1980s. As mentioned earlier, the creativity and even grandeur that was delivered by Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart is something that is rarely rivaled, let alone heard today. Their innovation and ability to not succumb to the “machine” that was so prevalent with so many artists at the time meant that like most of their work, this album has also remained one of music’s finest masterpieces.  From: https://albumism.com/features/eurythmics-be-yourself-tonight-turns-35-anniversary-retrospective

Xiu Xiu - Pumpkin Attack on Mommy and Daddy

Xiu Xiu (pronounced shoo-shoo) is my favorite band. I’m drawn to them for many reasons, but some of those are the same reasons that people find Xiu Xiu polarizing and challenging to listen to. In the wake of their recently announced 15th album, Oh No, I’m here to provide a guide to Xiu Xiu, what I find appealing about them and how to get into them, because with a discography this diverse and wondrous, there’s something for everybody. To start, what does Xiu Xiu sound like? This is a difficult question to answer as they tend to change up their sound quite often and blend many genres. Xiu Xiu combines aspects of synth-punk, art pop, and post-industrial, often all in one song. It’s this unique blend of pop and noise that creates something truly unique and keeps me and many others hooked. It’s not just this unique sound that makes Xiu Xiu difficult to navigate, but also their lyrical style. Frontman Jamie Stewart’s lyricism is unparalleled. Though his brutal truthfulness is what made me fall in love with Xiu Xiu, some people might find it overwhelmingly sad, just wallowing, or in some cases even triggering. Jamie’s willingness to discuss personal struggles so openly is refreshing. As someone who struggles with trauma and depression, I have found comfort in Jamie’s words. No other artist I’ve found is so blunt; it’s terribly cathartic.  From: https://acrn.com/2021/03/03/ce-finding-comfort-in-a-hopeless-place-a-guide-to-xiu-xiu/

For over twenty years, Xiu Xiu have been confounding expectations, pushing boundaries, exploring personal experience through sound, and so, so much more. Those two decades are bursting at the seams with avant-rock, experimental pop, dreamy electronica, reimagined soundtracks, otherworldly collaborations – far too much to condense down into a few mere paragraphs here for your perusal. If you’re unfamiliar with their oeuvre, then our strongest suggestion is to plunge yourself straight in and see where you come up for air.  If your sonic explorations lead you directly to Roadburn 2024 then Xiu Xiu will be there waiting for you with a very special set titled The police bear such resemblance to those they pursue.  It’s part retrospective, part preview, all guaranteed to be something unforgettable.  They tell us: “For thee superb Roadburn Festival, we will be playing bad dream, newly intense, experimental arrangements of Xiu Xiu songs. The set will include unreleased songs from our next record and exploded versions of deep cuts and smashy smashy bangers.” So if you were doubting whether to pack your dancing shoes, the decision has hereby been made for you. Through their open-hearted approach to their own music over the years – in particular the vulnerability and candour of founding member Jamie Stewart – Xiu Xiu create a space to look inwards and shine outwards however you see fit. This set promises to be something special – we can’t wait to witness it.  From: https://roadburn.com/band/xiu-xiu/

Meat Puppets - Armed And Stupid

Usually slotted as part of punk music’s “post-punk” development during the 1980s, the Meat Puppets have surfed atop the rise and fall of that movement, riding beyond it into the “grunge” rock boom of the 1990s. Given such a history, it’s not surprising that critics have spent a decade arguing over the correct term for the band’s music, taking their cues from the mutations occurring from one Meat Puppets album to the next. “With each of their five albums,” Simon Reynolds wrote in Melody Maker, “the Meat Puppets have not so much made a giant leap forward as a perplexing step sideways; each time hitting on a totally new, totally original sound that any other band would have milked for 10 albums.” While Kurt Loder called them a “thrash band” in Rolling Stone in 1984, other critics later commented on their distance from the conventions of hardcore punk. One of the effects of such a resistance to tidy categorization has been the Meat Puppets’ reputation for forward-looking music—for anticipating and spearheading changes in musical style.
As teenagers, Cris and Curt Kirkwood and Derrick Bostrom, who would later create the Meat Puppets in the late 1970s, had grown up in the open spaces surrounding their hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. Brothers Cris and Curt arrived in Phoenix from Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1965, when Cris, the younger sibling, was about five years old. The Kirkwood family’s income came from racehorses that they owned. Bored with how little the city had to offer, the two brothers found recreation in using drugs amid Phoenix’s desert landscape. “Punk rock began as an urban phenomenon,” Ivan Kreilkamp wrote in Details, “a musical response to miles of concrete and industrial noise. The Meat Puppets were the first group to adapt punk to the twisted landscapes and open spaces of the American Southwest.” Curt Kirkwood told Kreilkamp, “There’s no trees, there’s no real society. It’s easy to get into drugs there because there’s nothing to do.” Their hallucinogenic experiences would eventually be credited with shaping the distinctive sound of their music. Kreilkamp, for example, speculated that “The Puppets’ music is rooted in the experience of three kids, heads throbbing with LSD-induced visions, riding motorcycles on a canal bed in the Saguaro desert.”
After a brief effort at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 1977, Curt returned home. Having had some musical training, including classical study, he and his younger brother started playing house parties with area bands. They also played in local cover bands, with Curt on guitar and Cris on bass. After one of the more successful local bands, Eye, broke up in 1979, the Kirkwood brothers decided it was time to do something on their own. At that point, Derrick Bostrom came on board to play drums. Bostrom had a practice space in which the Meat Puppets could shape their sound, already heavily influenced by an odd jumble that included the Grateful Dead, the Sex Pistols, Johnny Cash, and Iggy Pop. The group had no particular venue in mind, simply a desire to see what kind of music they could make. “I came to hardcore through experimental music,” Curt told David Fricke in a Melody Maker interview. “I started getting into Edgar Varese, when he was composing things that sounded like raindrops. I didn’t give a shit about composing anything. But I thought if I hooked up a couple of fuzzboxes to my guitar and turned it up real loud, and played faster than anybody could think, what was going to come out was going to be heavily impassioned.” Curt quickly emerged as the band’s major force, lending a compelling character on vocals and guitar, as well as his odd skill as a songwriter; Kreilkamp referred to him as the trio’s “chief visionary.” Jas Obrecht, writing for Guitar Player in 1994, described Curt as the “master of the enigmatic lyric and monotone delivery.”
While critics have often suggested the dual influences of drugs and the desert landscape on Curt’s style, the musician himself also attributes it to a specific childhood experience: “I had encephalitis when I was nine,” Curt told Reynolds, “my head swelled up, I was in a coma for a long time. After that I started to daydream an awful lot, I was able to pick and choose what I wanted from my imagination.” Reynolds dubbed the three “modern visionaries who liberate the flux of experience from the grids with which we attempt to structure and manage time and reality.”  From: https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/meat-puppets

Mary's Danish - Yellow Creep Around

In the song “Axl Rose Is Love,” Gretchen Seager of the Los Angeles rock band Mary’s Danish goes after Guns N’ Roses’ singer the way Thelma and Louise take on a sexist trucker. Incensed by the hotheaded Rose’s use of racial and sexual invectives in his song “One in a Million,” Seager takes aim at the rocker on the new Mary’s Danish album, “Circa”. So Seager’s easy to peg, right? She hates Axl Rose and loves “Thelma & Louise.” Wrong. “I’m a fan of Guns N’ Roses,” Seager says. “I just don’t agree with their politics. The song is my way of making a social comment. I mean, Rose is criticized for being racist and misogynistic, but the bottom line is there are a million people who love him and Andrew Dice Clay, so there has to be some truth in what they’re doing. And that in itself says a lot about our society. . . But I love Guns N’ Roses’ music.” And being well-versed in feminist literature, Seager found the conclusion of “Thelma & Louise” to be “totally contrary to the feminist statement,” even though most of her own songs are about taking control and taking responsibility for one’s own life--just as that movie’s heroines do.
Those are just a couple of the many complexities and contradictions that make Mary’s Danish perhaps the most intriguing and promising band to emerge from the L.A. alternative-rock scene since Jane’s Addiction. Those contradictions have at times nearly torn the band apart. But to Seager, 25, they are the sextet’s strengths. “You should just look at our record collections,” said the blunt, bright blonde, sitting in a Melrose Avenue restaurant with the band’s other singer-lyricist, Julie Ritter, 24, and Louis Gutierrez, 28, one of the band’s two guitarists. “There are a few common threads, but for the most part the influences are so different. When you see Mary’s Danish you’re seeing a bunch of people who really don’t have that much in common musically. “One guy in an interview criticized us, saying that the diversity hurts us. He said, ‘You have these two Exene-style singers, a funk bassist and drummer, one psychedelic guitarist and another who plays more blues-based. Where’s the continuity?’ I said, ‘That is the continuity.’ We’re not going to shy away from any styles or ideas.”
Seager and Ritter were bored French majors at UC Berkeley when they decided to transfer to UCLA early in 1987 so they could start a band in the city where they had grown up. After choosing the name Mary’s Danish (“for no particular reason,” according to Ritter), the pair hooked up with David King, a guitarist who was working as a clerk at Tower Records, and bassist Chris Wagner. With a succession of other players, the quartet recorded the demos that were eventually released in 1989 as the album “There Goes the Wondertruck,” which was hurried out by the independent Chameleon Records to capitalize on the airplay that the spunky single “Don’t Crash the Car Tonight” was receiving on KROQ.
Just before the release of “Wondertruck,” guitarist Gutierrez and drummer James Bradley Jr. joined. The pair brought a background of music-biz experience to Mary’s Danish, whose other members were relative newcomers to professional music making. Gutierrez had been a member of Los Angeles’ Three O’Clock, which released several heralded albums of fragile psychedelic pop, and Bradley had played with the likes of Anita Baker and Chuck Mangione. The members of Mary’s Danish don’t have a lot in common outside of music, either, and the different backgrounds and interests helped make the two years between album releases a tumultuous time. Though Mary’s Danish was rapidly gaining recognition and musical stature--aided by tours opening first for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and then Jane’s Addiction--the group nearly broke up on several occasions. Seager actually did leave at one point, having tired of the touring grind and fallen out with King. “We fought like cats and dogs,” Seager said of both the musical and personal disputes. “It seemed more trouble than it was worth. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in a rock band. There was no money, and we had all been putting in a lot of time and energy beating our heads against the wall. . . . Ultimately I had to give that up in order to discover that being in the band was something I really wanted.” Her frustration was compounded by several other personal crises suffered by band members and by legal entanglements over the group’s recording contract that delayed the release of “Circa,” which was recorded more than a year ago. (In the interim, a partly live EP, “Experience,” was released last year.) Finally released by the new Morgan Creek label, the album reflects many of the hard-learned lessons of all that turmoil.
As hard as Seager is on Axl Rose on the album, she and Ritter are even harder on themselves. In “7 Deadly Sins,” Seager berates herself for sticking with a bad relationship.  In the album-closing “Cover Your Face,” Ritter is even more resigned to a self-imposed fate. “I meant for ‘Cover Your Face’ to be heavier than ‘Sister Morphine,’ ” Seager said, referring to the Rolling Stones song. “I wanted it to be the most depressing song ever.” That’s the kind of self-examination and self-torment that have characterized the most dynamic rock to come out of Los Angeles since the late ‘60s, from the Doors through X and the Blasters through, yes, Guns N’ Roses and Jane’s Addiction. “I don’t know if we think of ourselves as part of L.A. history,” Seager said. “But it’s hard to escape that.” Added Ritter: “I think you can’t help but be influenced by your environment and what came before you. I grew up seeing X a lot, and that had something to do with me wanting to be in a band. There’s a legacy that goes on.”
Perhaps what distinguishes Mary’s Danish from those other bands--besides the musical diversity--is the fact that all the lyrics are written by women. “These songs are really about emotional violence and being put through--or putting yourself through--hell,” Seager said. “I don’t know if they’re supposed to be from a woman’s point of view, but just ‘cause we’re girls means we write from that perspective. But anybody can relate to emotional abuse.” “I’ve been through so much in the 4 1/2 years since the band started, and it’s all chronicled in the record,” said Ritter, wearing a myriad of earrings on both lobes to go along with a nose ring and a new tattoo on her upper back. “I wonder if I was working as a bank teller if it would be the same thing. It seems to me I’ve gone through an extraordinary amount of problems, but then it’s my job to write about that . . . questioning relationships and your own sanity and confidence.” But for all that, it’s the attack on Axl Rose that is getting the most attention for the band now, including a recent spot on “MTV News.” That’s a mixed blessing. “As far as I’m concerned, the song shouldn’t be the focus of our album,” Seager said. “But I’m ready to stand behind my viewpoint and the reasons I wrote the song. The main message I’m trying to say is, ‘Yes, everybody has freedom of speech and the right to say what they want, but what does it ultimately say about that person when they say things (like Rose said)?’ Axl Rose, whether he likes it or not, is influencing millions.” “There are more dramatic songs lyrically by both of us on the record,” Ritter said. “It’s funny how you can pour out all this poetry, and it’s this song that gets the attention. Pop culture loves pop culture.”
Will the attention be enough to get the band the national recognition that has come to the Chili Peppers and Jane’s Addiction, especially considering how hard the band is to pigeonhole? “They certainly don’t sound like a Top 40 band,” said Craig Marks, editor of the College Media Journal, which tracks sales and airplay of alternative bands. “But often whether a band makes it has more to do with what label they’re on and the label’s patience. Morgan Creek is a new label that’s very involved and has made the band a high priority. The single, ‘Julie’s Blanket,’ is pretty catchy, and even though the rest of the album is very different, it only takes one song to break through.”
Also helping to set up the band to move beyond recognition within the fragmented L.A. scene is its new manager, Peter Asher, who has guided the careers of, among others, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor and 10,000 Maniacs. Now, having survived its time of turmoil, Mary’s Danish is chomping at the bit to get moving again. Tour plans are pending while bassist Wagner recovers from surgery to repair a damaged hip, but a national trek is penciled in for September and October, with a Los Angeles show likely to come sooner. “With this record I feel like we’re still playing catch-up, like we were with the first album, because we’ve been playing the songs live for a year now,” Ritter said. “I can’t wait till the next record, when we’ll finally be on track. . . . A lot of different writing combinations are happening between people. I’m curious to see what direction the band evolves in.” Gutierrez is also eager to move forward. “The record is so old and we’ve been sitting on it for so long that it’s almost like it’s part of another era,” he said. “We’ve gone through so many changes since then, a lot of complications and a lot of problems, not knowing if we were gonna be together, not knowing if we were going to have enough money to feed ourselves.” The three musicians sat silently for a moment. Finally, Ritter spoke. “You know, Gretchen has always said that if it ever stops being fun, it’s over. Well, she was wrong, because it has stopped being fun at certain times, but so far you’ve always had the feeling that it will come back. There’s always been a sense of hope. This is what I’ve always wanted to do--what we’ve all wanted to do--and I’m just so grateful.”  From: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-08-04-ca-375-story.html

Durand Jones & The Indications - Smile

Playing tough soul music that deals with good times, heartbreak, and the realities of life in the 21st century, Durand Jones & the Indications are a potent deep soul revival band based in Bloomington, Indiana. Formed by college students with a taste for vintage R&B and a desire to have some fun, the band found themselves jumping to professional status when their self-titled debut album (2016), recorded on a shoestring using mostly amateur gear, became an underground success as their emulation of classic East Coast and Midwest soul styles won over fans and critics. A storming live show and a reissue of their first album by a larger label helped boost Durand Jones & the Indications' profile, leading to two more full-lengths, American Love Call (2019) and Private Space (2021), the latter of which drew more from '70s inspirations.
Durand Jones grew up in a small town in Louisiana, and first performed in public as a member of the youth choir at his church, where the congregation was impressed with his strong vocal abilities. Jones' grandmother, who persuaded him to join the choir, also urged him to take up the saxophone, and in 2012, after receiving a BA from Southern Louisiana University, he left home to attend the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University in Bloomington as a graduate student. While performing with a campus saxophone ensemble, Jones stuck up a friendship with fellow students Aaron Frazer and Blake Rhein, who shared his love of vintage soul and R&B. Jones was a reluctant lead singer, but Frazer (who played drums and sang) and Rhein (who played guitar) felt he had potential as a frontman. Bassist Kyle Houpt and keyboardist Justin Hubler, bandmates of Frazer and Rhein in the blues-fueled rock band Charlie Patton's War, rounded out the lineup, and Durand Jones & the Indications began playing parties off campus.
As their popularity grew, the group began penning original material, and they started recording in Frazer's basement, using a four-track recording rig and a karaoke microphone for lead vocals. Some of their early recordings made their way to Terry Cole, who ran a small soul-oriented label called Colemine Records, and in 2015 Cole issued their debut single "Smile." In 2016, Colemine issued the Durand Jones & the Indications album, which they recorded at home for just $452.11, which included the cost of the beer they drank. Word of mouth and the support of indie record stores helped the album find an audience, and the band hit the road, winning new fans with their powerful live act. The independent Dead Oceans label struck a deal with Colemine to release an expanded edition of the debut album in 2018, fortified with the inclusion of several live tracks. Dead Oceans and Colemine joined forces for the March 2019 release of American Love Call, the second Durand Jones & the Indications album and the first cut in a proper studio, featuring new keyboardist Steve Okonski, who replaced Hubler.
Between albums, the band offered a pair of ballads with indicative titles, the slow-grooving "Cruisin to the Park" and the reassuring "Power to the People," and welcomed bassist Mike Montgomery following the departure of Houpt. Frazer, who previously cut a gospel single under the name the Flying Stars of Brooklyn NY, released a solo album, Introducing..., in January 2021. Jones' activity outside the group had included some saxophone work and a collaboration with Stone Foundation; he also co-wrote and fronted the Bamboos' "If Not Now (Then When)," which appeared on the album Hard Up in May 2021. Two months later, Durand Jones & the Indications returned with Private Space, on which the band delved into smooth soul and disco. The original demo mix of "Power to the People" was released as a limited 45-rpm single for Record Store Day in 2022, with an unlimited pressing following in 2023.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/durand-jones-the-indications-mn0003515392#biography

Gillian Welch - Caleb Meyer

David Rawlings told me Gillian Welch’s life story. She had grown tired of telling it herself. Welch is a singer and songwriter whose music is not easily classified—it is at once innovative and obliquely reminiscent of past rural forms—and Rawlings is her partner. Welch describes them as “a two-piece band called Gillian Welch.” I had asked her to talk about her past, and she demurred. Then she said, “Why don’t you tell it, Dave.” We were in Asheville, North Carolina; Welch and Rawlings were making a brief tour from Nashville, where they live.
Welch and Rawlings’s music is deceptively complex, despite its simple components: two voices, two guitars, and four hands. The broadest category into which it comfortably fits is country music. In the Country Music Hall of Fame, in Nashville, a video of Welch and Rawlings performing is shown with other videos that are intended to convey the breadth of modern country music. Welch and Rawlings are portrayed as defenders of a faith—old-time string musicians—practitioners of a lapsed form. They initially found a model for their enthusiasms in records made in the thirties and forties by musicians such as Bill and Earl Bolick, who performed as the Blue Sky Boys. Vocal duets unaccompanied by other musicians were eclipsed in the forties by the more forceful sound of bluegrass—the Blue Sky Boys broke up in 1951—leaving duets as one of the few forms of American music not yet completely covered with footprints. The music Welch and Rawlings play contains pronounced elements of old-time music, string-band music, bluegrass, and early country music, but Welch and Rawlings diverge from historical models by playing songs that are meticulously arranged and that include influences from rhythm and blues, rockabilly, rock and roll, gospel, folk, jazz, punk, and grunge. Furthermore, Welch prefers tempos that are languid. A typical Welch song has the tempo of a slow heartbeat.
Welch’s narratives tend to be accounts of resignation, misfortune, or torment. Her characters include itinerant laborers, solitary wanderers, misfits, poor people plagued at every turn by trouble, repentant figures, outlaws, criminals, soldiers, a moonshiner, a farm girl, a reckless beauty queen, a love-wrecked woman, a drug addict, and a child. Her imagination is sympathetic to outcasts who appeal for help to God despite knowing from experience that there isn’t likely to be any. Their theology is ardent and literal. They are given to picturing themselves meeting their families in Heaven, where mysteries too deep to comprehend will finally be explained. “Until we’ve all gone to Jesus / We can only wonder why,” she sings in “Annabelle,” a song about a sharecropper who hopes to give his daughter more than he had but who delivers her to the cemetery instead. A number of Welch’s songs are written from the point of view of male characters. “My Morphine,” the drowsy, intoxicated lament of a man whose addiction is souring, is the only song I am aware of about a narcotic which creates the sensation of having taken the narcotic. She is accomplished at compressing dramatic events into a few verses and a chorus. In “Caleb Meyer,” a man appears, transgresses, dies, and is revived as a spectre in the imagination of the woman who slit his throat in self-defense. Welch admires the troubadour songwriters Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, and Hank Williams, and she writes good car songs. The first song she made big money from was “455 Rocket,” which was a hit for Kathy Mattea in 1997, and is about a hot rod. More and more, Welch’s songs describe her actual life. “No One Knows My Name” is about her birth parents. “My mother was just a girl seventeen,” she sings, “and my dad was passing through, doing things a man will do.” Her mother was a college student in New York, and her father was a musician. By the time she was delivered, her adoption had been arranged.
Welch was born in New York in 1967. Ken and Mitzie Welch already had a daughter, Julie, who’d been born in 1961. She and Welch are close; she lives in California, is a graphic designer, and also teaches improvisational comedy. Julie’s birth had been difficult, and Mitzie wasn’t eager to go through another pregnancy. According to Welch, when they approached adoption agencies “the agencies said no dice because they were entertainers.” Ken Welch had been a performer since childhood, in Kansas City. He had begun piano lessons at four, but the teacher soon told his parents that she couldn’t do more with him until his hands were large enough to span an octave. “I couldn’t reach an octave on a piano, but I could on an accordion,” he says. By the time he was seven, he was tap dancing and playing the accordion throughout “Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa, the remains of the old RKO circuit,” he says. Eventually, he attended Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh, where he studied painting. He met Mitzie at an audition. They moved to New York separately. She sold handbags at a store on Broadway, and made twenty-five dollars on Sundays singing in the choir at Norman Vincent Peale’s church. She auditioned for Benny Goodman and got the job, but she had only a few weeks in which to learn Goodman’s repertoire. She ended up writing lyrics on the palms of her hands and on her fingernails.
As the comedy team “Ken and Mitzie Welch,” they appeared in clubs where Lenny Bruce also performed. Bob Newhart was once their opening act. They had their most public success on the “Tonight Show,” when Jack Paar was the host. They performed a slowed-down version of “I Got Rhythm.” Mitzie faced the audience and sang, and Ken stood with his back against hers, playing the accordion. By the time the Welches adopted Gillian, with the help of their doctor, Ken was writing music for television shows, and Mitzie was working in commercials and on Broadway.
When Welch was three, her parents moved to Los Angeles, to write music for “The Carol Burnett Show.” As a little girl, Welch came home from school one day weeping because she had been reprimanded in art class for making a black outline around snow in a painting. This led her parents to enroll her in a school called Westland. At Westland, the students gathered every week to sing folk songs and Carter Family songs, with Welch accompanying them on guitar. “On the tapes from the period, she sounds the same as she does now, except that her voice is higher,” Rawlings said.
Welch’s parents bought songbooks for her, and, sitting by herself in her room, playing guitar, she made her way through them. When she got to the end, she wrote songs of her own, “about ducks and things,” Rawlings said. “Like a kid who writes poems, and they go in a drawer.” Welch attended a high school called Crossroads, “where I get way into ceramics and art and stay hours after school building things and they let me,” she said.
Welch and Rawlings appear often on the Grand Ole Opry. They also perform in clubs in the United States and abroad, where their audiences tend to consist of between a thousand and two thousand people. They play very quietly. Welch sang so much by herself in her room that she never learned to sing above the sound of other musicians. Audiences at even the beeriest clubs attend them closely, as if they were at the theatre. Her voice resonates more in her head than in her chest. Its range is not wide—it is more an alto than a soprano—and it has a mournful, vernacular, almost factual quality, as if she were a witness to the scene she is describing. She conveys emotion through dynamics, not vibrato, and by a self-effacing absorption with the narrative. What ornamentation she employs comes mainly from bluegrass and brother-team singing—the pounce on certain syllables, the dying falls, the trills, the quick fades and returns, the small tear—though she manages, partly by the solemnity of her bearing, to give the impression of singing without artifice, which in itself is dramatic.  From: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/09/20/the-ghostly-ones

Bubblemath - Routine Maintenance

Received wisdom would have it that Bubblemath take aeons to release new music. Absolutely ages. The faithful left awaiting new crumbs of musical comfort from their Minnesotan heroes after the release of the band’s debut album, Such Fine Particles of the Universe, in 2001 had to wait a full sixteen years for the next transmission. But what a transmission it was; Edit Peptide was my favourite album of 2017, and remains so, its intricate prog-math sound still getting under my skin to force a break out of off-kilter and jerky movements, to the point where the uninformed might think I need an ambulance.
Bubblemath’s music hits all the right receptors in my noggin, and the news that a new album was due for release only five years after Edit Peptide brought whoops of joy in our house. Well, from me at least; my better half started twitching at the thought of having to listen to more of this convoluted madness: it’s safe to say, it’s not her thing. You have to invest yourself a bit into Bubblemath and let it all just happen to you. Go with the flow, allow it to work its magic without expectation. Give the alchemic musical interactions the space they need to do their peculiar synapse altering thing in peace. Once in, this stuff is bloody compelling.
There’s so much to take in from Turf Ascension‘s four lengthy tracks, three around the 10-minute mark, with opener Surface Tension running to almost 18-minutes. All of the band’s hallmarks are in place with the dextrous arrangements supporting the wide-eyed vocals of Jonathan G. Smith in a swirling stew of the largely unexpected. No wonder it takes them years to put this stuff together, the often dense passages exploding in all directions before resolving into memorable hooks and lead parts. It’s a stunning achievement, a fascinating and fully satisfying listening experience, hugely entertaining whilst keeping the brain agile.
From the off, with a keyboard rush into an enticing chord sequence as the pace increases, Surface Tension is engrossing. Jazzy piano asides move into thumping sections and soloing guitars, all the while Smith’s forceful voice dexterously delivers Kai Esbensen’s dense words (about a school becoming an access point to a secret underground complex that aims to ensure the survival of humanity as a catastrophic war unfolds above) with aplomb. Mood shifts and angularity combine to give a driving momentum, the whole band contributing fully to the symphonic math swirl. A chiming lyrical section emerges from the intense verses and Jonathan G. Smith’s keening guitar (with support from Blake Albinson) offers hope as the subterranean population await the moment when they can emerge and start again. It easily sustains its length and crams ingenuity into every pore.
Everything eases the intensity a little, its melancholic setting around electric piano driving clever lyrical focal points concerning the complexities of modern life, where misinformation and obfuscation make everything even more confusing. It’s all crisply delivered, with James Flagg’s beautifully understated drumming particularly worthy of praise. The scene of a decaying apple tree springing back to life each year is beautifully set as a metaphor for life in Decrypted, the pace picking up a couple of minutes in with a distinctly King Crimson vibe, which moves on in a mathy direction with slide-rule interplay between the instruments, repeating patterns evolving and reinventing. The frenetic forms ebb away and the low-key conclusion sees the tree fall back into slumber.
Refuse exudes power from the off, a jazz-fusion thread running through it. The lyric is again fascinating, utilising a similar style to Everything as power corrupts, militarisation increasing at every turn, driven by insinuated fear. The intensity ramps up into a frenetic instrumental call and response, Jay Burritt’s bass leading the way out as the pace increases, Esbensen’s keys joining the fray in a rampaging torrent of riffs. It’s quite something, the abrupt stop at the end suggesting a poor outcome for everyone.
Expertly mixed by Blake Albinson, Turf Ascension is exhilaratingly high-energy for most of its length, but it never gets wearing as the dexterity, both in the instrumentation and the delightfully delivered lyrics (Smith doing a fantastic job throughout), keeps the mind racing along with the music. The vocal lines and melodies are often unorthodox but they sit within the intricate musicianship like a particularly satisfying pearl in a beautiful oyster. Bubblemath are on a roll now and the thought of more new sounds from this most engagingly obtuse band before the end of the decade can no longer be ruled out as the deranged ramblings of a loon.  From: https://theprogressiveaspect.net/blog/2022/07/03/bubblemath-turf-ascension-draft/  

Cellar Darling - Rebels

Dark/Live/Mag Interview with Anna Murphy, Cellar Darling
- On Bats, Squirrels And The Love To Death

Marco: Anna, first of all thank you so much for taking the time for an interview with us.

Anna: Thank you for having me.

Marco: 2018 was a very busy year for you. You toured intensively, in the UK, Japan, South America, played at the WGT in Leipzig and other big festivals. And on top of that you were working on your highly anticipated second album. How are you and the band doing at the moment?

Anna: I for one am exhausted. The album took a lot of energy to write and record. But it was worth it - I'm happy with the result. As for the band, we're currently switching back and forth between rehearsing and working... we all have other jobs and passions which we are trying to balance with our commitment to Cellar Darling. I'm a producer and sound engineer at the Soundfarm Studios in Lucerne, currently working with a death metal band and writing music for my other projects.

Marco: Well, that sounds like little sleep. Which brings me to 'Insomnia'. It was the first released single of the new album, which brought you a lot of positive feedback. The fans are now even more excited about your second longplayer. What can you tell us about it?

Anna: We've just announced that our new album will be a concept album by the name of 'The Spell'. We've released two small parts of a long, intense story... the latest song being the title track and the 'center' of the story about a girl who falls in love with death. The album will be released on the 22nd of March.

Marco: Now you make me even more curious! Would you reveal more of what the story is about?

Anna: Okay, it tells the tale of a nameless girl who is birthed into a world that is in pain, damaged and debilitated by the human beings that inhabit it. We follow her as she searches for a meaning in life, when suddenly she meets and falls in love with death. A spell is cast and a painful, elaborate journey begins.

Marco: Let's talk about Jacob the bat. When I first listened to 'Insomnia' I was immediately caught by the depth, the captivating variety and your beautiful vocal lines. The work seems original, fresh, but also complex, which makes it even more exciting. In the video, the oppressive atmosphere and melancholy is emphasized by the magnificent artwork of Costin Chioreanu. What did Jacob do to you that in the end such a work was created?

Anna: First off, thank you. I'm glad that you can sense what atmosphere we wanted to create with the song as well as hear how much work was put into it. Jacob came to visit us while I was recording the demo vocals in the control room of my studio. It was exciting of course and at one point we were just running around the studio being chased by him, but my main concern was if he'd find the way back out. We left all the windows open over night and he was gone the next day... or at least he hasn't come to say 'hi' since. A few weeks later a squirrel came to visit us at Tommy Vetterli's New Sound studio where we recorded more songs and mixed the album. It was during the only song of the album that has something "lighthearted" about it, a spark of hope. Kind of cool, the bat being there during a dark song and having a squirrel there for the lighter one. The animal world seems to be on board with our music!

Marco: And so do we! The combination of heavy guitar riffs, rocky drums, hurdy-gurdy and your voice has already provided you with a recognition value in your still young band history. But it's hard to assign you to a certain genre. I think that's on purpose, too. And one notices with your songs that your ideas unfold fully because you set no limits to them. When and how did you realize for yourself that you wanted to create new and unique things? I once heard that you are a talented painter as well?

Anna: I've just never had an affinity for boundaries. I think some artists need those 'restraints' and clear formulas in order to function, but I'm the opposite. Genres, set song structures, formulas.. it bores me. The fuel for my creativity is chaotic, 'all over the place', scattered... which also makes the results more difficult to enjoy or understand at times. I also admire the other thing, finding something that works, repeating it and being successful with that. It takes an equal amount of skills as the chaos principle does that I'm messing around with. As for the painting, it's like with the various instruments I play. I love doing a lot of different things, but that also means I gradually and slowly progress with each of them - I don't do one thing perfectly or overly virtuosic, I half-ass my way through ten things and hope I'll be able to do a few of them as good as somehow possible, haha.

Marco: But you seem so calm and balanced. How do you deal with stress? How do you balance yourself and what are you busy with if you don't want to have anything to do with music - or doesn't that happen at all?

Anna: A lot of people say that and it's interesting, because I'm quite a mess to be honest. I would say my core is calm and balanced, yes. But I have bouts of anxiety, paranoia and depression that come and go as they please. So far they haven't gotten the better of me though and I guess that's why I'm perceived as calm - the outside world rarely sees the other side. What helps me the most is being outside, hiking in the mountains is the most cleansing experience for my mind. I try to meditate and read as much as possible to stay grounded. And I surround myself with few, but good people... Oh and wine. Red wine.

Marco: Oh wow, that's an intense mix of emotions you have to deal with. Thank you for this insight in your inner life. Let's get back to your future plans: For 2019 you have already announced a number of tour dates in spring. The focus so far is on the UK. Are there already plans for more countries in Europe, as headliner or support band? What are the next steps you want to take?

Anna: We're working on doing more shows this year, as many as somehow possible. Most of it is still 'in progress' though... I don't really think about the next steps, I just do my part and work towards something unknown in the end. What I can do is create, be present and spread our stories - the future will happen on its own accord anyways and it did so wonderfully last year where we got to see so many parts of the world.

From: https://www.facebook.com/cellardarlingofficial/posts/interview-with-anna-murphy-thank-you-darklivemag-/2152823064784080/