Kelsey Sprague lives in Sammamish, Washington, and has a perfectly direct plaintiveness and heart-bravery that I find immensely appealing.
Take My Heart (live at the Ogden House) – Kelsey Sprague
This song often sticks in my head for days at a time, even as I want to advise our heroine not to get lost in those eyes again. Thanks Kevin Ihle for capturing it.
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Last night in the span of five songs at the Bluebird Theater, in an opening set, I watched Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats become the best band in Denver. It was their very first show and holy mackerel you guys, I was speechless.
My cheeks flushed all red, my friend Andrew and I just kept looking at each other with jaws dropped. As those horns wailed, the piercing songwriter troubadour was reborn as a writhing, kicking soul singer with a seven-piece band behind him. As I surveyed the room, there was a similar look of pure joy on everyone’s faces, as Nathaniel yowled and yelled like a man possessed.
I know my video skills last night were extremely sub-par (I figure it out, and rotate my phone) but this electrified minute of video will give you some idea.
Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats’ next show is Friday, May 17 at the Boulder Theater, and they’re opening for Dawes at the Mishawaka on May 24.
As Nathaniel sings here: son of a bitch / god damn.
SATURDAY MORNING UPDATE OF ECSTASY: Someone recorded the ENTIRE show in hi-def video!!
How can Dash Hammerstein be a real name? Or better yet, since I think it is, how could he do anything but make humble retro-inspired pop songs of mooning and harmony, with a moniker like that?
Dash Hammerstein wrote to me that he is a twenty-four year old carpenter from Brooklyn, and also that “I make these little surfy country tunes whenever I get a chance.” The two technicolor tunes I heard on Bandcamp were just exactly the sort of immediately-hummable reminiscence that I needed this week – all Buddy Holly and tears on my pillow, with handclaps. I want to do a hot summer house party with this guy and You Won’t.
You and Your Boys – Dash Hammerstein
In addition to that new free EP charmer, Dash has a full free album called Bito Cabrito. So good. Come swoon with me.
My next Fuel/Friends house concert is one week from today!
On Wednesday night, April 24, Will Johnson is finally coming to play after a long time planning. Will is a Texan songwriter who fronts Centro-matic and South San Gabriel, making smoldering, understated music for the last twenty years. He’s also collaborated on some of my favorite side projects in recent years: with Jim James and Jay Farrar on that tremendous Woody Guthrie album New Multitudes last year, as a part of Monsters of Folk (with Conor Oberst, Jim James, and M. Ward), and on the smoky duo album with Jason Molina (of Magnolia Electric Company, who recently passed away).
There is something in Will’s honest voice and way of phrasing that makes me persistently uncomfortable (in a way I very much like); it’s a red-hot ember held real close to the skin. I’m so looking forward to an evening of just close listening to him and his guitar.
I have been completely riveted by Will’s music ever since I first saw this song that my friend Dainon recorded years ago in the radio station studios where he worked:
“And we tried innocence and we tried formaldehyde / in the end you were left with the string and I, the kite” — ooof. That’s still one of the most powerful songs I’ve personally ever heard about a marriage ending.
I, The Kite (live on KRCL) – Will Johnson
Last year, his record Scorpion was this sun-scorched, potent slow-burner of densely woven wonder, and I think I listened to the track “You Will Be Here, Mine” on repeat for months. It is so full of wonderful hesitancies and fumbling that make it even sweeter when everything finally hits its stride in that song.
TWO OTHER THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT WILL:
1. He just announced a collaborative project with (Fuel/Friends two-time house show alum) David Bazan, called Overseas:
2. Will loves baseball (a man after my own heart) and makes acclaimed paintings about it. Wonderful.
YOU MUST BUY ADVANCE TICKETS FOR THIS SHOW.
Do it now, as other cities (see below) have sold out!
I like the rambly, literate way that Jesse Elliott always lets his heart and words bleed all over everything. For years with (chapel session alums) These United States, and now through his new project Ark Life, it always sounds like his mind is rambling so fast and so pure that the rest of all of us around him can barely keep up. He is one of my favorite kinds of musicmakers.
His new Denver-based band Ark Life blends together a crew of good musicians to make some fine open-air/open-highway music, all tied up with three-part female harmonies. Tomorrow night they are playing a Fuel/Friends House Concert, and if you’re in Colorado, you should be there.
Let Your Heart Break (live on Daytrotter) – Ark Life
You can download the rest of their Daytrotter session from last week over here. It’s the first recorded material available anywhere on the internets from Ark Life, so if you want to hear more, well, you’ll just have to come to my house show tomorrow night.
Also playing with Ark Life tomorrow night, I am excited to welcome Denver band Poet’s Row for the first time, maybe named after some cool art deco apartments on Capitol Hill? Either way: it’s a show not be to missed.
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Nathaniel Rateliff may have one of the most piercingly uncommon voices I have yet welcomed into the chapel. It zings through the air when he lets it loose and it is absolutely impossible not to turn your head and gape. Nathaniel makes music that you can’t ignore, and you really don’t want to. Looking like a hard-swilling sailor stumbled off a boat on leave with his turquoise rings and pearl snaps, he disarms with his cathedral-filling voice that grew up singing in churches and, likely, breaking a heart or two.
I remember hearing Nathaniel years ago, fronting his band Born In The Flood, opening for Kings of Leon on a rainy Denver night. Even with a full, loud band behind him I could tell that this was something special. He has honed his voice as a spry instrument over the years I have known him, and now I find it as powerful in the whisper as the wail. There’s also this wry half-smile behind everything I hear Nathaniel sing, a patience and an insight that this song will, eventually, get you, as it alternates cartwheeling in the best wandering-troubadour showmanship and quietly probing in truths and failures.
Three of these songs are brand new creations, unveiled just for us in the chapel, the grey afternoon before our house show. Nathaniel seems to be in a fomenting fertile stage right now, starting new soul bands (Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, probably my favorite new band name in a good while) and playing with old friends in groups like Miss America (with longtime bandmate Joseph Pope III and other Denver luminaries, incidentally playing May 10 in Colorado Springs for The Changing Colors CD release party).
All of these new songs ache, all of them need to be listened to. I am so glad he’s writing like a maniac these days, and we get to reap the results.
FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION #24: NATHANIEL RATELIFF
February 21, 2013 – Shove Chapel, Colorado Springs
No Place To Fall (Townes Van Zandt)
Nathaniel started the session with this cover, which seems almost unfair to knock the wind out of me so soon. There is such a gentle lilt and cadence to the way he sings those cripplingly sad lyrics about knowing you need to fall, like a slow-motion tumble down stairs. And that sideways wince when he sings the lines, “but I’m sure wantin’ you…”. I didn’t think there was a way to make Townes songs even sadder, but somehow — there it is.
Don’t Get Too Close
This song dances almost mischievously, an easy shuffle even as it warns us not to come any closer, as if it could spin away at any moment. “Wait, don’t come any closer,” it warns, maybe kindly, maybe evasively. “It was something you couldn’t see.” (watch the video)
Forgetting Is Believing
There’s a line in one of my most-beloved poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which places us “when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table” and in the streets there is “the yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, licked its tongue into the corners of the evening.”
This song curls and nuzzles and rises hazily just like that, the siren song of forgetting. (watch the video)
Closer
“Can I play that?” Nathaniel asked, eyeing towards the back of the stage at the shining Steinway piano. “Yes, PLEASE,” I replied — and wow. What tumbled out of him is this rueful, elegiac hymn that tugs at long winter days and growing older in frozen slumber.
I’ve been thinking of piano a lot lately, as we fight through the final, sometimes-brutal days of Spring before Summer. Songs like this are why.
DOWNLOAD THE ZIP: NATHANIEL RATELIFF CHAPEL SESSION
[thanks to our new film intern (just gave her that title) Kendall Rock, who did a tremendous job, to Kevin Ihle for the post-processing, and for the wonderful Blank Tape Records audio talent]
Last week I spent some long hours in an old Volvo, driving across the flat beige heart of this country from Colorado to Chicago. The first stop and one of the main impetuses behind this adventure was Lawrence High School in Kansas, and the Room 125 Productions film studies classroom of Mr. Jeff Kuhr.
Jeff and I have been connected through a series of kismet-laced events that started the same week that The Head and The Heart played that first house show for me in November 2010, a few days after Jeff met them across the street from his house in Lawrence and decided on a whim to ask the band if they’d come play some songs in his classroom and talk about their creative process, while his students filmed and learned.
That initial classroom visit has led to 21 other bands and artists coming into his classroom – folks like The Civil Wars, Damien Jurado, Night Beds, Drew Grow & The Pastors’ Wives, Bryan John Appleby, Kelli Schaefer, The Local Strangers, Nathaniel Rateliff, Small Houses, Hey Marseilles, Shenandoah Davis, and The Devil Whale (you could say we have some overlap). Many of the questions these kids come up with would make any serious interviewer jealous, as they shoot past the trimmings to focus in on “the thing behind the thing,” as Drew Grow said when he visited.
This is an uncommon classroom, and a teacher unlike any I ever had in high school. In addition to assigning prep listening homework to his students before each artist session (and having them come up with questions and film the sessions and do the post-production), Jeff composes an eloquent and probing introduction to read to the class that day.
When Jeff read this one last Monday for Mike Clark, all about faith and beauty and struggle in art and in our lives, the recognition I felt in his words made those stupid hot tears well up in my eyes (they’ve been doing that more than usual lately). Even as I write this, it does the same, and makes me think that this course’s content might be some of the most important things these kids learn in high school.
“Again, it’s about recognition,” Jeff said, “and the best art does this — we recognize something, maybe familiar, maybe foreign, but it sets us seeking, questioning, not the great out there but the great in here. And when that happens, when that really happens, you’ll know. You’ve been shaken, you’ve lost your cool, things will never be the same.”
“I’m thinking of a moment like the one the poet Rilke describes in the poem ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo‘ where upon seeing that piece of art, its power engulfed him, saying to him, ‘you must change your life.’”
“To me, Mike’s music is a reminder of all this, the soundtrack, I suppose. The music, maybe, for courage, for action, for doing something about your shakiness, your oh shit moments, come what may. It’s the music for losing your cool and taking chances, of faith and love and longing — music that reminds you that there is something more, something beyond surfaces and screens.”
Man.
Here’s the way Mike answered that:
(the first of five videos total; the rest coming soon)
Spurred by Jeff’s brave capacity for rumination on Things That Matter (one of my very favorite traits, incidentally) and being back in that uncertain space of high school, and hearing Mike talk about his finding music and deciding to change his life — it was a deeply affecting day that helped remind me why I love and need songs like this, and engagement with people like this.
I am appreciative for those passing periods, the pressing past each other in the halls; the sweet uncertainty of confronting ourselves in the other and feeling, for a minute, that rush of recognition.
Jeff is doing good work with those kids. They probably know a lot of things I’ve forgotten. Whatever they pursue, whatever any of us pursue, if we chase that recognition and challenge Jeff talks about, I think we’ll be heading in the right direction, whether that’s to Paris or grad school or a cabin built in rural Alaska. As I walked out the door, I noticed a Friday Night Lights quote tacked on the classroom wall and indeed — with clear eyes and full hearts like that, we can’t lose, not one of us.
I’m real glad that someone like him is running a classroom like that, and you should spend some time in the archives of the videos these students have filmed and produced to help these artists tell their stories.
FIND ALL THE CLASSROOM SESSIONS HERE
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.
I AM FUEL, YOU ARE FRIENDS is brought to you by Fuel/Friends LLC. Ownership of all audio and visual material displayed here remains with their creators and/or owners and is cited accordingly.. Illustrations by Luke Flowers. Design & Layout by Dayjob.
