take this train across these fifty states: That Utah Music

I’m writing this from a quiet campground near the Utah/Colorado border, by a wide silvery river. Tomorrow I end a month of travelling all over eight Western states, and tonight I find myself sitting here with all sorts of rambling thoughts bumping around in my head, like stones in a tumbler. The road has such a strong and lovely allure; there are all these vistas I’ve never stood and looked over, so many rutted highways I am just starting to make an effort to take. Going home is going to be tough.

Utah was my final state to spend some time in before I re-entered Colorado tonight at sunset; last night, several of Salt Lake City’s finest musicians got together for a summer evening BBQ to welcome me to the Beehive State. Since many of them are on the mix, I was reminded of a terrific little compilation CD that my good friend Dainon made me last year to celebrate all the music happening in his home state. After I floated in the Great Salt Lake today (and blasted a little Band of Horses in honor), I listened to Dainon’s Utah mix on my five-hour drive across the state, between those red mountains.

I want you to download a bunch of music from Utah? You don’t even know Utah.

Well, yes. But let’s be adventurous. Two thoughts struck me as I listened: first, Utah is a completely gorgeous state that I haven’t given much thought to. Second, Utah has this fantastically vibrant and diverse musical scene that I haven’t given much thought to. These twenty songs are the perfect score for any roadtrip, but especially one through this state where it was made. If you wish that you could also go on a roadtrip through the desert this summer, but maybe can’t, this tasty and substantive collection can whisk you away.

Utah music as Dainon presents it here to me is strongly-rooted in folk with a distinctly Western feel, and reflects a genuine community of folks who overlap on each others’ projects in the best ways. Several of these musicians I have written about before or included on other mixes (like Paul Jacobsen & The Madison Arm, Band of Annuals, Jay Henderson, Joshua James), but so many of these songs were new to me.

Dainon wrote in the liner notes for me: “While I am not sure the state has an easily recognizable or definable sound, what its musicians create, they create well. There’s a sense of community, of belonging, of wanting to be and do and perform more and better and with new ideas. These are men and women who have created some fantastic songs. Listen hard and you can see images, too: mountains and desert and snowflakes. I think you’ll like this.”

He was very right. I do.

THAT UTAH MUSIC
Apocalypse Wow (Take 3) – Paul Jacobsen & The Madison Arm
Dreamcatcher – The Mighty Sequoyah
Freak Out – The Future of The Ghost
Oak Tree – Desert Noises
Thread Paper Girl – The Happies
Coal War – Joshua James
Excuse – Ruru
Boring – The Poorwills
Element of Surprise – Bronco
I Never Did My Best – Ryan Tanner
Don’t Let Me Die – Band of Annuals
14 Years – Parlor Hawk
Calling Your Name – Sarah Sample (with Paul Jacobsen)
Magic Numbers – The Devil Whale
The Sun Will Burn Our Eyes – Jay William Henderson
Dirt – Sadye Price
If We Should Fall – Cub Country
Suture & Sing – P.L.A.T.E.
Where Does The Time Go – Dustin Christiansen
I Saw The Light – The Lower Lights

EXPLORE THAT UTAH MUSIC (zip file)

The lyric in the title of this post comes from the aching roadweary song from Parlor Hawk. I completely fell in love with the song from Ryan Tanner and listened to that about ten times in a row, and it’s also worth noting on this mix that Jon, Tyler and Charity from The Head and The Heart are the backup singers on that Devil Whale track. I added the final two tracks based on delightful music discovered at the BBQ last night (Dustin Christiansen, and the new Lower Lights Vol. 2 album).

But I think the most affecting moment on this mix for me might have come with the Sarah Sample song, as the sun sank behind huge black storm clouds on a stretch of highway that didn’t even show any names on the map. Sarah sings, pure and piercing:

no one’s to blame for being lonely
no one’s to blame for getting lost
I’m so far from anything holy
I’ll just send my prayer up
and hope that it gets caught

out-of-office auto responder

I’m off exploring highways, byways, and other goodness in the Pacific Northwest and California. BRB when I have my fill of being blissfully detached.

my thoughts were upside down

I’d reckon that the Campfire OK show tonight at Seattle’s Crocodile Cafe will involve a healthy dollop more joyful bouyancy, tambourining, and electrically-transmissible energy across the air than the gorgeous quietude here. But this slice of redolence is how I started my morning today as I lay in bed with the window open, and I enjoyed every bit of it.

This rendition of “Brass” (from 2011′s Strange Like We Are) was recorded in an abandoned steel jail cell, just the band and the sunlight. Video-wizard Christian Sorensen Hansen continues to impress me every time he makes a video. I want him to film me brushing my teeth, all dulcet and golden-hazy in rich bathroom light. He could make even that look good, I’m pretty confident.

Campfire OK is playing a set punched through with new songs tonight, from their forthcoming sophomore release (which we’re anticipating in late 2012). I’ll be there. You should come too.

Fuel/Friends Chapel Session #17: Typhoon

Let’s be absolutely clear about this: the first moment I ever heard the music of Typhoon, in the same month I recorded my first chapel session, I desperately wanted them all in there in my little cathedral to reverberate their expansive, yell-out-loud, massively melodic symphonies of songs all around me and my microphones. Almost a year to that March day, they did. And this session is everything that any of us could have hoped it would be.

One of Typhoon’s strengths and glories is all the people that this Portland band makes good use of. There are eleven members of the band, and probably twenty instruments played among them. They also have two drummers, which is essentially the best idea I can think of. Kyle and I discussed how he is the primary songwriter, which lends a continuously-wending feel to all of their songs, but also how each addition of another musician’s coloring and shading into the song helps make them come alive. It was joyful to hear them fill that space.

You had to peel me up off the floor multiple times during the recording of this session, what with all those yelling-together crescendos that felt like one of those chest saws they use in open heart surgery. Only one of these songs (“CPR – Claws Part 2″) has been on an official record; the other three are new or unreleased. “Common Sentiments” will be on their upcoming album that they just spent a month recording on Pendarvis Farms outside of Portland, while “Pain, love” is even newer, and is slated for the album after this next one.

I’ve tried to write about each individual track in this session, but maybe because of the coherence of their music, it all just keeps jostling and nestling around each other and I can’t untangle it into discrete parts. Just do yourself a wonderful favor and put the whole session on continuous loop, like I’ve been doing nonstop lately in these weeks I’ve been in Portland.

Their music was made for this setting. Come, listen.

FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION: TYPHOON
MARCH 20, 2012

Pain, love

And to get the whole thing…

ZIP FILE: TYPHOON CHAPEL SESSION

[audio by the wonderful guys at Blank Tape Records, and on this one, also by the terrific Paul Laxer, Typhoon’s sound guy for their records and the road. Thanks, Paul!]

i feel it pushing down on me / so please baby, just drive

I woke up this morning still glowing and reeling from last night. Justin Townes Earle captivated the Aladdin Theatre in Portland, the way I have a feeling he does every single time he brandishes that guitar and opens his mouth to sing. I see hundreds of shows, and this man sparkles with charisma of the real deal. I had a strong sense that I was watching greatness. I don’t say that lightly.

Justin is Steve Earle’s son, sure. Justin is named partly after his dad’s friend Townes Van Zandt, sure. Both musical legends swim in his blood, alongside all the bits of experience and struggle he’s accumulated. But there is a whole other kind of self-impelled magic that he owns and possesses that is solely his and, whoa — that is unmistakeable when you see him for yourself.

You should add him immediately to the very top of your “must-see live” list. Justin is a consummate storyteller, in the vein of the traveling salesman that rolls into your town with a twinkle in his eye and a smile that twitches with a deep, unseen pleasure that’s unfolding in his brain and he tells stories through his songs. He’s watching worlds that we can’t see. It’s riveting to watch his process from four feet away, as I did. As I said the last time I saw him, “I wouldn’t mess with him, but I’d believe him and let him buy me a drink so he could tell me a story.”

This is a song from his newest album, Nothing’s Gonna Change The Way You Feel About Me Now (out now on Bloodshot Records), and when he sang it last night by himself under those blue lights, it hung out there in the air and pressed down on me as one of the loveliest, saddest, most perfect songs I’ve heard in a very long time. It’s a simple song about a girl named Anna, and about that longing we’ve been trying to name and wrestle down for a long time. The way he weaves it is breathtaking and timeless — somehow completely young and entirely his own, and also belonging to the ages. Like all of his songs.

[last night's setlist]

if you’ve got a plan, i’ve got a reason

Britain’s Neil Halstead writes albums that grow slowly, the way a science class time-lapse video of a seed turns into a green shoot, curling into a bud and finally unfurling into a flower.

I keep returning the music of this former Slowdive/Mojave 3 frontman as a perennial favorite: deep, understated, and redolent in its reminiscence. Neil has a new album coming out later this summer called Palindrome Hunches (Brushfire Records, Sept 11), and lately I just keep listening to it in full. This is the first we’ve heard from him in four years, since 2008′s Oh! Mighty Engine, a record that was one of my favorites that year.

Full Moon Rising – Neil Halstead

In honor of that big bright full moon on the horizon tonight, here’s the first single from the new record. All pensively resonant piano and wending violins, it’s pretty damn perfect for summer evenings.

[image via]