Fuel/Friends Chapel Session #9 :: These United States

Watching the five guys in These United States make music has always reminded me of a river. There is something serpentine, endless, and powerful that torrents out of the mouth of Jesse Elliott and through the arms and legs of all five of them. It rambles. It breathes. They also tour so freaking much that you would think that they’d lose those potent abilities and stray from the source in favor of rote and rockin’ performances, at some point. Yet for the handful of years I’ve known them, that has never happened. Every performance, even small ones, are infused with their trademark literacy, urgency, with dust-and-sweat notes and slide guitar quaver hanging in the air.

We recorded this chapel session back in late July when the nights were so blissfully long, and the air in the church was uncharacteristically sticky and close. We’ve never done a session with this many people in the band before, and we tried to capture more of a field-recording feel to what was happening that day. I love the way the lone central mic picks up the echo of Jesse’s voice, the cadence of the piano chords, the loose rattle of bang as Robby thumped on a few pieces of my drumkit (in its debut recording appearance).

The band is in the studio at this moment working on their fifth record.

THESE UNITED STATES: FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION

The Angels’ Share
This is a brand new song, and the one that first made me start thinking in the aforementioned metaphors of rivers. When I asked Jesse if the title was plural or singular, he thought about it for a minute and pensively nodded as he answered: “It’s gotta be multiple angels. One angel couldn’t catch all that.”

Yes.

What Do You Want With My Heart?
A song that’s been around for a handful of years, but just made its recorded appearance on their last album, 2010′s What Lasts. J Tom shines on the big, old, beautiful grand piano that sits in the corner of the church and occasionally gets discovered during one of these sessions. It’s a stripped song of honesty, asking a question that many of us would be well-served to listen to the answer to. I remember reading something a long time ago on Daytrotter in 2007, when Jesse spoke about the “most honest particle.” This band digs that out over and over again, and is relentless in the scouring.

Hit The Ground Running (Smog/Bill Callahan cover)
A concession to my always-kindly-suggested mantra of “you know –I mean– I love cover songs. If you wanted to maybe do one in your chapel session? Or whatever. I mean, anything is wonderful.” This one is a live end-of-the-night favorite for these guys, and more than anything for me evokes the feel of their half-Kentucky heritage (equally split with Washington, D.C.), teasing out all the rootsiness from this 1999 Bill Callahan song.

ZIP: THESE UNITED STATES CHAPEL SESSION

[most photos by Sarah Law, who I appreciate.]

welcome to doe bay

This past August I spent five days at one of the most incredible, tightly-knit, music-saturated festivals I have ever been a part of. You might remember my raves about The Doe Bay Fest, a small homegrown festival on an island in the San Juans with a radiantly breathless air of magic — pure and simple. There is a new independent documentary in the works which tries to chronicle and identify what makes this festival amazing and so necessary in music today.

Welcome To Doe Bay looks at this phenomenal confluence of artists and attendees with no boundaries, and delves into how festivals like this one –at least to hear me say it in the interview I gave for the filmmakers– just might save the world, or, at least, save our musical souls. I forgot to meet with the directors during the fest because I was too busy running all over the island seeing jaw-dropping music from the time I woke up until long past when I should have been in bed, so they arranged for me to sit for an interview for the film on a sunny Ballard afternoon the day after the fest, to give a perspective as a music-lover from outside the local scene, and my impressions of the weekend. I remember being just glowingly, borderline-incoherently excited about what I had just lived through. I’m not sure how much of what I had to say made it into the film (spoiler: I like to ruminate), but every person and band featured in this documentary gets what makes Doe Bay incredible, and why that kind of organic passion is so, so important in music today.

The documentary is winding up a Kickstarter campaign, and trying to raise enough funds to submit to film festivals like SXSW. I really want to see this love letter of a film completed, and the music industry world of bloat and detachment needs to see what a group of musically committed individuals can accomplish through a festival like this. A donation to their Kickstarter (in these last two crucial weeks – they are so close!) will make a huge difference, and also let you see many of the performances from this last summer in an exclusive look, if you couldn’t be there that weekend. Think of it as your best way to participate in Black-Cyber-Small-Business-spending-day today, and please take a look at the trailer – which just gave me chills to watch again (Pickwick, Kelli Schaefer, The Head and The Heart, Bryan John Appleby, Sera Cahoone, just in the trailer? Yes please I want to go back there).

And if you are an artist, psssst, you should TOTALLY SUBMIT to play the fest in 2012. I guarantee you that it will be the best and most deeply refreshing musical weekend of your year.

like a blinding flash of narcolepsy

I’ve made it back from my sojourn across the Atlantic, feeling just like a shiny new penny with all the oils of a thousand hands rubbed clean off, and the golden copper Lincoln grinning through again. After twelve years, I returned to the city where I studied abroad and where, in many ways, I think I first started to bloom even though I didn’t know at the time what colors I would be. I saw new terrain too, new monuments to beauty and joy and struggle, in cultures that value putting public money into creating and sustaining such majesty. I feel dizzy. I am reminded of things I used to know.

I’ve been enjoying my fast from technology as well, noticing how much more powerful the resonance of my thoughts can sometimes be when they just echo inside my own head and don’t zap out in bits and bytes to everyone else all the time. I have a few chapel sessions coming to share with you all, and they will come when they are ready. For now we’re contented in an inlet, a lull.

This is something I wrote one afternoon last week in a small cafe in Barcelona, alone, on my little iPod touch. It’s the only thing I’ve written lately, more about an internal dialogue than a new song. I thought you might enjoy it.

Barcelona, 11.10.11

Sometimes, I drift unmoored. The seas have been high, and choppy. The focus has been on the salty, windy survival. Today when I walked into Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia, I surprisingly felt closer to God than I have in a long time, as the colorful light brilliantly flooded into all that whiteness. It is the most stunning and overwhelming space I have maybe ever been in. A train might as well have hit me when I walked through the doors; the splattering effect of my psyche was the same. I was derailed. I was, for a short time, wordless.

When you study and live and experience art (also reference: the complicated and sometime emotionally abusive relationship I’ve been in with Michelangelo these years), it’s like a small rip in your fabric is enlarged and pressed and kneaded outwards, sometimes violently. Picture the hands that work the pizza dough from underneath, as it drapes and offers no resistance. There’s a hollow vacancy that’s been left in my life as I try to return to normal dimensions after living daily with beauty and art that challenges and probes. Days like today blow everything back up and out again.

The exterior of the church evoked the dribble sandcastles my mom taught me how to build on the beaches of Santa Cruz when I was a kid. The spires are chaotic and irregular, and expansive and impressive, and dirty from years of exposure, and beseiged by cranes and scaffolding and workers still building. A hundred years after Gaudi started it, craftsmen are still rappelling down the sides.

But indoors.

Walking into that massive space felt like a blinding flash of narcolepsy, where suddenly I knew this place but I knew it from dreams, from a place that I used to be, thousands of years ago. I stood at the base of a forest of columns that turned into trees as I craned my neck, knitting together so high over my head into a canopy. I rolled around Wendell Berry’s words, “I love to lie down weary under the stalk of sleep growing slowly out of my head, the dark leaves meshing.”

There are clean, flat, angular planes everywhere that somehow still feel organic in their sharpness, the way starlight or thistles are organic. Dazzling, pure color (!) and light (!) bleach and stain and permeate the church, and soak through me. Here we are, and we are liberated from tradition, we are severed from heavy gold ornamental oppression, and we have forgotten our grief.

Sometimes you are in a space that is a perfect combination of all the elements that you are uniquely wired for, and this was mine. Gaudi’s got my number, and he has it completely. In art, I felt known.

Dig Down Deep – Vandaveer

In my head, songs often play, even without the tethers of white earbuds. Echoing all around me I heard the 2:17 crescendo of this song, sustained.

catch a boat to england baby, maybe to spain

My iPod is fully loaded with new mixes, my (single! carry-on!) bag is packed, and I am headed to London, Barcelona, and around Italy for the next eleven days.

If you’re in London this Saturday, Barcelona all next week, or Milano next Sunday night, I would love to hear from you. Andiamo!

Always Spring – I’m From Barcelona

N.B. I’m not going by boat. It’s just the song.

hey mom! i’m “a big something” today

During a break in the middle of my crazy workday on Monday, our college radio station/local NPR affiliate KRCC had me over to the studios to interview me about the Fuel/Friends Chapel Sessions, my house shows, and the development of my blog and my perceptions of independent music in general over the last six years. They’re featuring that interview today on their “The Big Something” feature, as well as highlighting a track from my chapel sessions as their free song download of the day:

The International is Local: COS Music Blogger Heather Browne

Fuel/Friends Free Song of the Day, 11/2/11: “Josh McBride” by The Head and the Heart

According to the write-up, I am mild-mannered by day (I apparently fooled them) and they also caught me wearing my “Halloween costume” in the picture — I went to work dressed as ‘a business-casual SF Giants fan living in Colorado.’ The colors were so right.

In all seriousness, it feels really wonderful to continue to meet all sorts of passionate music lovers in Colorado Springs and work to further cross-pollinate and support good music here. I may work more with KRCC in the future on some rad collaborations. Stay tuned.