Outside everything felt bluntly muffled and icy-silent under the thick blanketing of snow last Thursday, but my snow day ennui was pierced through by the voice of Nathaniel Rateliff, wowing us all in a house concert that was every bit as incredible as I’d been thinking it would be for years.
With just him and his acoustic guitar, Nathaniel held all of us contentedly squirming under the laser of that voice that can slice right through, with such purity and insight.
“Shroud” and “Laughing” are both well-loved songs off In Memory of Loss, his 2010 release on Rounder Records. Nathaniel also recorded a breathtaking chapel session with me earlier that same day, doing three new songs (one on the grand piano), and covering Townes Van Zandt’s “No Place To Fall,” which, oof. That song. Him singing it. I need a moment.
Desirae Garcia (of The Haunted Windchimes) opened the evening, and I think nearly stole the show. Armed only with her bass ukulele and a walloping dose of deadpan candor, her nascent solo career is going to be one to absolutely pay close attention to. The way she can deliver the simplest of lines is devastating.
I am unveiling something new here at Fuel/Friends today that I hope will become a new regular feature, linking us together in the dogged and thoughtful pursuit of music that means something to us personally.
Josh Ritter‘s team and I have come up with an idea to create a new endeavor called the Fuel/Friends Album Club, modeled after a book club. I am looking for five to ten thoughtful readers who would like to listen to & absorb the intimate, personal new Josh Ritter record with me, help come up with some questions for Josh about the album (which he will answer on my site) and then everyone in the Fuel/Friends Album Club gets to come to Josh’s show at Denver’s Ogden Theatre on March 27, with time to meet & talk with Josh.
The Beast In Its Tracks (out next week) is a striking record, and there are many threads to discuss. You can stream the entire album here on NPR this week, and you should do that. Everyone picked for Album Club gets the new record from me for free.
Interested in being considered for Album Club? Please email me ASAP. (edit: I’ve got more than enough wonderful entrants. Thanks!)
I am also very deeply pleased to feature this piece of guest writing today.
THE BEAST IN ITS TRACKS: a hyper-personal review
written by An Anonymous, Sweet Friend of Heather’s
It is a weird thing to be scared to press play on a record, especially when you love music, but that’s where I found myself with Josh Ritter’s new album The Beast In Its Tracks. See, I had just lived the stories I knew it contained, just had the love of my life leave, just had my world flipped upside down and lit on fire, and I wasn’t sure I was in a place where I could handle having those tales sung back to me. A funny thing happened, though, when I did finally scrape together the courage to hit play: I found the entire thing comforting, despite verse after verse that rehashed what had just hurt me so badly- I’ve stood in that cold, lonely kitchen he describes in ‘Hopeful,’ been unable to say her name because of it catching in my throat like in ‘New Lover,’ and been scared of each coming night like Ritter in ‘Nightmares.’
There’s a weird comfort in knowing you’re not the only one to live something, that those feelings you’re consumed by and which swing wildly and without warning aren’t out of the ordinary. The album is a lot of things- devastating, honest, raw, angry, heartbreaking, and full of grace- but the idea that Ritter’s story, and by extension, mine, has a happy ending is what sticks with me each time through, that this winter of discontent will end and that love, which I still believe in despite all that’s happened, will win out in the end. When you’re struggling with heartbreak, and the times are dark, it’s tough to allow that hope in, to allow yourself the belief that you will build a strong, rich life on your own out of the ashes of your old life and the pain and confusion that inhabits the new, foreign life you’ve been forced to start.
The Beast In Its Tracks is a focused, stunning piece of work, a collection of songs about a heart breaking and healing that manages to never crush itself under the weight of its sad, heavy subject. It’s an album that pushed me to a limit I didn’t want to test — and ended up showing me that I, and indeed all of us, will be fine in the end, that a happy conclusion isn’t such a far-fetched idea.
There’s a sweet spot of ineffable cool that you have when you’re ten years old that you never get again.
For me, my dance moves were never as sweet or as futuristic as when I saw Captain E.O. at Disneyland when I was ten. I can remember tapping my toes on the (rumbling, jolting) ground and dancing in my (moving) seat. This new song from Jamie Lidell immediately invoked those exact same feelings in me when I listened to it this morning, from the get-go with those mysterious opening notes. I can practically smell the dry ice. Grown-up me is not nearly as cool as ten-year-old me, but this did lead to some dangerously impressive run-dance moves on the treadmill in my basement today. Download it for free:
Jamie Lidell has been a complete badass in my book since I heard Multiply in 2005. His new album is self-titled, and you should get it right now. Your dance moves need some EOing.
April
01 Seattle, WA, Neumos, USA Facebook Event
02 Vancouver, BC, Fortune Sound Club, USA Facebook Event
05 Minneapolis, MN, Fine Line Music Cafe, USA Facebook Event
06 Chicago, IL, Lincoln Hall, USA Facebook Event
07 Grand Rapids, MI, They Pyramid Scheme Tickets
08 Toronto, ON, Lee’s Palace, USA Facebook Event
10 Burlington, VT, Signal Kitchen Tickets
11 Boston, MA, Brighton Music Hall, USA Facebook Event
12 Washington, DC, Rock N Roll Hotel, USA Facebook Event
13 Brooklyn, NY, Music Hall of Williamsburg, USA Facebook Event
14 Philadelphia, PA, Union Transfer, USA Facebook Event
The Nomad Theatre in Boulder, Colorado was founded in 1952 by a group of local actors who wanted a stage for performing their plays (at the cost of 75¢ a show), with the generosity of a local liquor store owner named Bauldie Moschetti who let them use his grassy field and helped pay for lights. So that’s awesome. The Nomad grew over the years to become a cultural hub for the region, and is one of Colorado’s oldest theatres, now fallen on some hard times.
I am pleased to bring you the announcement that a team of citizens, musicians, and cultural soliders in Colorado have joined together to raise the funds to salvage The Nomad and return it to its former glory. There will be a rad benefit kickoff concert on Saturday, April 6, featuring music and contributions from many Fuel/Friends favorites who love Boulder as much as I do.
Lots of other good folks wanted to help out, but couldn’t be in Colorado that weekend, so there will also be silent auction contributions from musicians like Pickwick, Blind Pilot, Josh Ritter, Ben Sollee, Jackie Greene, Ani DiFranco, Andrew Bird, and Brandi Carlile. The benefit concert will be held at Macky Auditorium on the CU Boulder campus. Tickets go on sale tomorrow morning (Thursday) at 10am, and are $15 for CU Boulder students and $20 for the general public.
I CALL FIRST DIBS on the donation page, where you can kickstart the efforts and receive perks like meet & greets and limited edition show posters.
The efforts are helmed by my friend Travis Albright, the same guy that two years ago put together the Pearl Street Fest which brought a lineup that included Dr. Dog, Mason Jennings, The Lumineers, The Head and The Heart, Paper Bird, and Gregory Alan Isakov, among others. He knows good music, obv., and I am excited for how this venture can enrich our historic cultural vibe in town.
Go join me and throw down some bucks for a very good cause, and feel damn good to help save some Colorado cultural history.
Tonight I’m grateful that songwriters like Tyler Lyle exist in this world, creating something that is unvarnished and open-hearted amidst the grey rows of quotidian obligations that can often feel overwhelming. Tyler released a new EP Expatriates out of the blue this weekend, and I have spent the last 72 hours listening to it over and over.
“Ithaca” is the final track on the 5-song EP, and it is pure and bittersweet, and it tells a wending story that feels like a dream.
And yeah, this is my second post in a row with a Turner painting at the top. Apparently Tyler and I think wonderfully alike.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
–by Mary Oliver, from New & Selected Poems (Harcourt Brace)
(with this soundtrack:)
Internally paired this morning.
Read about Julia Kent’s new found-sound and cello record here, read more about Mary Oliver here. Turner’s paintings go with a lot of complicated, powerful things.
I could probably listen to this record every day (if my ventricles held up under that assault, which they wouldn’t), but always annually on this particular day.
I’ve been trying for the last two years to figure out where Elvis Perkins is these days, his website hasn’t been updated since 2010 and I selfishly miss him. I want him to come in to the chapel and record something incredible. How amazing would that be? Any leads anyone has, please connect me. The ventricles of all the Fuel/Friends readers will curse/thank you.
If you’ve never bought this record, the complete experience is elegant, lugubrious, and perfect. I honestly think I will never tire of it. Such an incisive and poignant wading through neck-deep grief.
It takes some serious gumption (and a beautiful fragility) to start a record with just your voice for over a minute. Either that or: the song comes to you that way, as the record does, and you record it how it arrived in your consciousness. The first time I clicked on a link on a cold October day to stream the two opening songs on Country Sleep, the debut album from Colorado Springs / Nashville’s Night Beds, I was completely transfixed by whatever beautifully fragile and gumption-filled soul was able to record music like this.
I met Winston Yellen two months later to record our chapel session, and began to learn more about the person who had had this stunning record in him. In the waning hours of 2012, at a remote cabin in the Colorado mountains, Winston and I retreated to a couch in the basement for his first in-depth interview in the U.S.
As the floor above us pulsed with my friends having a New Year’s Eve dance party to the sounds of Frank Ocean, we discussed where these songs come from, the function this art serves, and the beautifully damaged music that inspires him. This is a long interview (and is, of course, edited for clarity, length, and readability). I was very curious, and Winston is my favorite kind of deeply articulate ruminator.
FUEL/FRIENDS INTERVIEW:
WINSTON YELLEN OF NIGHT BEDS
DECEMBER 31, 2012
Fuel/Friends: Can you tell me a little about where the songs on Country Sleep come from, and the process by which they came into existence?
Winston Yellen: It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where they come from, but I had an idea in my head that I wanted to make something that was almost …the word that I use is rudimentary — it’s very simple in form. Moving back to Nashville and out to Hendersonville, I got really excited again based on some of the music I was listening to at the time, old country. I got excited again about listening to music that just – it was what it was. I was drawn by that idea of making something completely simple, what people have sometimes written off as rudimentary or sparse and minimal – that was the form I took on, and I think that’s what a lot of old country music was. I kinda made a bastardized record of old country music, that was my attempt, my stab at it.
What was your process in writing this record?
For people who may have liked Night Beds before we made this record, this now is a record that’s very intentional in its form – it’s intentional as an old country record. I wanted to make a simple, stark, minimal record – no fluff because I’d done that in the past, and this record is what it is. As insecure as I am about my voice, I’m just gonna put it out there and put it in the forefront and write my songs on an acoustic guitar or electric guitar. It’s about the song.
I just knew what I needed to do in the moment, and it totally made sense for me and the people involved to make the record that we made. I mean, when you’re living in Johnny Cash’s cabin, you’re gonna make a record…
You lived there?
Yeah…I lived there for five months. He had barns and homes that were all on this plot of land on a hill, and it was very secluded and hidden. He had a main house that he and June occupied for most of the time, I just occupied one of the guest houses that his best friend now owned.
Did you feel that?
Oh yeah, there were definitely some spectres, some weird kind of nights where I was like (in Even If We Try)… “come on Johnny please / won’t you speak to me….” There was a presence there that maybe I just conjured up in myself, but an energy, almost like a struggle within myself to want to make work that is tangible and real. I felt those things, being secluded, and working in this really… weird place. His best friend was living right next door, and coming over and listening to tracks, saying, “Well now. Keep going, I guess.” We were recording through the heat of summer. Felt like a winter record to me, but it’s a summer record.
What was the first song on the album that you recorded?
Ramona. The writing? Faithful Heights because it’s a capella – I wrote that one in my car, I was just driving around. That song, for me, is the weirdest one – it’s so foreign to me, like, “Where did that come from? Who gave that to me?” I don’t know. Then you put it on your iPhone and sing it, or play it really quick, and are like, “Don’t forget that.”
Wow. Do you feel that way about any of the other songs?
I feel blessed to have all of them – I just don’t feel like I should have any of them. Because the fact that I get songs that make me feel good, they kind of just come and I feel the need to be thankful because I just didn’t get them. Someone else should have easily grabbed those by now. That’s how I feel about it. I shouldn’t have gotten those. So yeah, pretty much every song. Yes.
When you’ve written these songs that you feel came to you from “somewhere else,” I mean – do you feel a sense of ownership or catharsis, after they’re recorded down onto the record?
Yeah, and it’s terrifying. For me, I had never gotten that vulnerable with the work I’d done. Some of the stuff I’d done in the past was a little more guarded, a little more ambiguous as to what I was trying to say. I felt very intense about it, but I still felt like I was a little bit removed. But with this record, it kind of did get, at a certain point like I would look around at the other guys in the studio and be like, “We’re gonna have to all talk after we track this. It’s gonna be weird.” There were times in the studio that all of us would be crying. And then listening back in the control room, I’d feel like, “Well that’s not really me. It’s a character.” And it’s like, “yeah, no, of course that’s you.”
I think the writing on this was exciting for me, and also uncomfortably …honest, and it made me a little queasy saying some of this stuff, writing some of these lines. I was hyper self-aware, I just knew – I knew what I was getting myself into as soon as I started doing it, writing this. At the end of the day, yeah, getting that inside of yourself and being willing to spew things that you think are genuine about what’s going on …you hope that if you’re willing to put yourself through that, it might connect with other people. And maybe it will. Maybe it won’t.
I wanted to just say something in a very real, in a very …elementary way. Not a lot of metaphor, not a lot of poetic analogy – just calling a spade a spade, and being direct. There’s times when a songwriter can be ambiguous and abstract, but I didn’t see the point on this record of trying to code it and spice it up and dress it in this way that doesn’t make sense.
And you listen to old country music, that’s what it is – very linear, very direct. They are singing a song, and it is gut-wrenching. When I started hearing those old songs, from country to blues, from the ’30s, all the way into, say, the ’60s, you found stuff that was just so raw, and there was just so much …damage. And they made it so beautiful.
So, you cried in the studio during the making of Country Sleep?
Is this a real question? Do I have to admit this right now? Every song I’ve tracked, I’ve wept. Period. But it can just validate what you’re doing. It’s like, okay now I know why I work a shit job to pay my bills and pay for making this record – If it’s not doing that, you’re not only wasting your time, your wasting other people’s time as well.
At the end of the day, you’re putting out music and asking people to enter in and feel something, and if you’re not feeling something while doing it, I mean – don’t waste people’s time. Don’t show up on their doorstep; leave them alone. I end up having very strong emotions to the recording process, and that’s why you don’t want very many people around when you’re doing it.
Some rare days of recording, there’d just be a perfect storm in all the right ways and we’d put ourselves through it, and we’d walk out and we’d just know that we were …chinking away at the armor.
What musical experiences influenced you, if any, in the way you made this record, or why you made this record?
I heard Robert Johnson, Son House …and I was floored. I was floored. It just really messed me up. I just couldn’t handle the emotion that was going on, couldn’t wrap my head around it; I have a hard time talking about it, to be honest. It really messed me up, how broken they were. These dilapidated creatures that just croaked and moaned and made these songs. Just their circumstances –I mean, being black in the ’30s and ’40s, I remember watching this interview on YouTube with Son House and his eyes were watering, talking about his life. Hearing him start the songs a capella, clapping his hands – “John The Revelator” and “Grinnin’ In Your Face.”
It inspired me enough in that they were so honest. It gave me courage. I’m indebted to that kind of music: I didn’t know that before I heard that. If you don’t feel something when you listen to those voices singing, you’re just not a …not a human being, if your throat doesn’t get swollen up listening to that, to “Sweet Home Chicago,” or “Crossroads.”
What relationship do you see between your art and commerce?
I feel very much ill-equipped to comment on this yet, being so new to it, I don’t know yet. I’m going up there every night playing songs, I don’t know too much about the business, or the culture. I kind of stay out of it. Maybe there will be a time to start getting involved with it. Commerce and art? I don’t know – I think at this point, not to be narcissistic, but I just focus on the work and let other things take care of themselves – I think the best way to service the music and the art and your self, you have to kind of put on the blinders, and put your head down and work, and try to do stuff that’s honest and has an inherent value for yourself, and hopefully for other people. You do it for yourself first, and hope that other people dig it. Yeah, I think I’m gonna have to get there at some point, thinking about the commercial side of things, but that topic does scare me a little bit, for sure.
Country Sleep is such an intensely personal record, and it also sounds …there’s a bravery in there that I hear. What are your goals for this record?
I think I just want to service the work. I felt so strongly the need to make something for myself. But I never believed in myself – I’m never gonna have that belief like, “Hey, bro, you got this.” I just don’t have that, I will never have that. I don’t care what comes; I mean hopefully my label won’t hate me and think I’m the biggest con artist ever, I don’t know. I just put it out there with total fear and trembling, and it came out on the other side, and a few friends were like, “Hey maybe you should pass this around, see if anybody cares,” and I was like “Probably no one will, but I will try,” since I had a little budget left over from the loan I had taken out to make the record, from living on Ramen and peas and rice.
I think any musician has bravery, anyone who goes out on a limb to make the kind of art that they want to make – I mean, you, you’re curating a blog…I think anyone who just puts themselves out there, I just have so much respect for people who take a chance. I love those people. Theatre, writing for a cooking blog, whatever form – submitting yourself to major criticism in order to do the things you want to do. Bravery is rewarding. At the end of the day I think I sleep a little better knowing I’ve been honest and gotten to the heart of the matter, and just gotten it out there in a context I feel is my art.
What’s the motivation? I didn’t have too much – I just knew that I needed to create something at that point in my life, I had been through so much personally. When you’re in that place, you just have to do something. I didn’t know what else to do. (laughs) I had to fail at something else on a grander scale than the menial jobs and what I was failing at then. You kinda have to fail at something grandiose, in order to say, “well, at least I tried.” Put yourself out there, get naked and run around on the highway and not get in trouble. It was my chance to risk myself and give myself the option of being ravenous within the context of art, and work, and see what happened. I feel very blue-collar about music. It’s a blessing to be able to go to Albertson’s and afford to put $80 worth of groceries in my kitchen. So if you’re asking about goals, that’s it: I can do that now.
So …you’ve completed this record and shrink-wrapped it and it’s done, and you tour behind it, you all of a sudden you’re playing with Sharon Van Etten in London. It seems like you’re in this liminal transitional space now between taking this piece of you, externalizing it, and then opening it up and allowing people to interpret and attach their own meaning to it, once you commit it to tape. There’s a certain amount of detachment that goes along with that. I’m curious about your process this year, to go from this intensely personal recording experience, externalizing those songs, and then looking forward in 2013, and in this tour, moving into this realm of transition.
I guess the easy way to say it would be surreal, which I am sure so many people have said in so many of your interviews. But – to do something that was never meant to get beyond the context of your parents and your sister and brothers? To have my sister and brothers talk to me about the record, that was big, that was crazy for me. And then all of a sudden I am in Europe playing songs before Sharon -– I kind of occupied a dream, and I know it sounds cheesy saying that. I still haven’t really wrapped my head around it. I think the fact that people are willing to subject themselves to very personal art that’s not theirs, and they come and they pay money to experience something else and someone else that’s putting themselves out there, for me I really genuinely feel that that’s humbling. I feel a sense of responsibility that I try my best to present the work in the best way possible, because I owe it to people who pay; “I’m gonna come watch your dumbass for ten dollars.” I don’t get it. I won’t get it for awhile.
So, when you and I sit down and talk on New Year’s Eve again next year….
Nothing’s gonna change about how I feel about what I’m doing. Nothing is going to change.
Do you think about the people you wrote the songs about when you’re up on stage?
What do you mean?
Well, I mean I guess if you wrote the songs about other people.
At the end of the day, the songs are about me. No, they’re not about other people. Other people informed the songs, but writing any song is going to correlate back to you. I’m terrified to play music, if that gives you any context. You’re up there playing your songs for people, which you don’t necessarily jones off of. You’re not getting up there saying, “Well I just fucking dig myself-” I don’t. I don’t dig my songs. I …I …They serviced a need that I had. I needed to write those songs and I felt those songs. At this point you get up there and now want to do something that connects – you did it for yourself already and you made the work, now you wanna go reach people and you wanna help people. If people aren’t throwing beer at you, you’re okay.
What did this record fix and what did this record break?
The record didn’t break anything. If you subject yourself to something very intense, and go through the process, which any artist knows in any form, whether it is writing a book or a play, or participate as an actor…. it didn’t break anything. I don’t think it winds up in any of those solidified, exact categories. It’s gonna temporarily fix some things, but it’s gonna keep going and I’m gonna have to address things in the next record, and the next, and probably the next one too.
Just to pour yourself into something, I think there is something to be said for that. Something I say a lot, which I’ll probably continue to say, but this is the first time I’ve said it in an interview and not just to friends, but — I don’t take myself seriously, but I take music really seriously, and I took this record very seriously. With Country Sleep, it was very strict, there was a lot of experimentation but at the same time we were always cutting the fat, striving to make it minimal, because that was the idea and the form, and there’s something very healing about that.
There was something uncomfortable in that, in being so …open. When you’re overexposed, I think it heals something. People go to counseling to be overexposed. I did that on a record. That saved me a lot of checks for therapy. Anybody that does work that’s very personal and overexposed knows – making a record, versus, like spending $100 for thirty minutes with some gal in a suit, that’s how I left it. I’m so broken down when I am in the process of making music, though, not too aware of what’s happening because I am right in it. You know, when you’re looking at a painting and you’re right here….
Ha, yeah, I just got in trouble at the Denver Van Gogh exhibit for standing closer than eighteen inches away from the paintings.
That’s beautiful. Because when you’re so close to art, you’re always in trouble.
CONTEST: Night Beds plays Denver’s Hi-Dive on Wednesday night. Leave a comment if you would like to win a pair of tickets to the show, Winston’s first official one in his home state of Colorado. I will pick a winner Tuesday, and see you all there.
I just wanted to throw in my good-luck wishes to The Lumineers tonight on the Grammy Awards, and smile as I remembered this night we all shared back in November 2010, at the house show I put together with them and The Head and The Heart. This was a completely ridiculous, end-of-the-night group effort. Go team:
The warmth and resonant connection of the Denver music community flowed so apparently out of the article this week by Jon Pareles in the New York Times; it is just as he says, and I am so grateful to live here.
I can’t believe I haven’t posted this song yet. It is easily already my most listened-to song in a very long time; I crave it like a simple, sweet, potent drug. I’ve gone on drives where I played it at full volume, on repeat for an hour – my brain merrily flitting around trying to figure out what was going on with the percussion and the voice: the only two elements.
How To Dress Well is Tom Krell from Chicago. His sophomore album Total Loss came out in the fall on Acéphale Records, and he plays Denver’s Larimer Lounge on April 3 (after jaunts through Australia and Asia).
Name: Heather Browne Location: Colorado, originally by way of California Giving context to the torrent since 2005.
"I love the relationship that anyone has with music: because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. It's the best part of us, probably, the richest and strangest part..."
—Nick Hornby, Songbook
"Music has always been a matter of energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel." —Hunter S. Thompson
Mp3s are for sampling purposes, kinda like when they give you the cheese cube at Costco, knowing that you'll often go home with having bought the whole 7 lb. spiced Brie log. They are left up for a limited time. If you LIKE the music, go and support these artists, buy their schwag, go to their concerts, purchase their CDs/records and tell all your friends. Rock on.
Name: Heather Browne
