“A new sonic playground” :: Works Progress Administration interview (Glen Phillips)

One snowy Sunday night in October, I sat at my kitchen table after tucking my little one into bed and realized that Glen Phillips of Toad The Wet Sprocket was playing at that very moment right up the road with his new band Works Progress Administration, and I had completely missed it. After listening to their bluegrass-laced toe-tapping goodness, I started looking up other tourdates and noticed they were playing in December in Nashville, where a dear friend lives. And thus, this edition of musical adventure was born.

Works Progress Administration is an expandable collective, centered around the songwriting skills of Glen Phillips, Sean Watkins of Nickel Creek, and Luke Bulla of Lyle Lovett’s Large Band. In various incarnations live and on the album, they are fleshed out with folks from other bands like Soul Coughing, Elvis Costello’s Imposters, and Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. They were playing at the storied Exit/In in Nashville, and I arranged to interview Glen and his new bandmates. To say this was a big deal for me would be an understatement.

I have loved Toad for more than half my life, and with my entire heart. They were one of the first bands I really claimed as my own during young adulthood, and whose perfect songwriting (“Windmills,” anyone?) has taught me so much and fortified more parts of me than I can count. I am a Toad-saturated girl, through and through. I once wrote, “listening this afternoon to toad the wet sprocket does many things for and to my psyche. the first sensation is definitely a heady and pleasant one, loaded with a thousand really good memories and the fierce scent of youth and optimism.” I still feel those things when I hear Glen’s distinctive, earnest voice on any of his current solo projects and collaborations. I was curious to talk to Glen and learn more about how his songwriting has shifted over the years, where his musical interests are taking him, and what he hopes to accomplish next.

I got all that and more when Glen and I sat down with his bandmates Sean Watkins and Luke Bulla after soundcheck one December afternoon. It was one of the most fascinating discussions about music I’ve had in a long time.

WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION INTERVIEW



F/F: I am a longtime fan of Toad the Wet Sprocket and also your solo work, Glen, and one thing I’ve always admired is the songcraft behind your music. As a collective I know you all contributed to this album, and I’m wondering if the songwriting process changes. Since we’re in Nashville, Dolly Parton once said, “Writing songs is my private time with God.” Are you each still working personally and privately on writing your songs, or is it more of a collective effort now?

Glen: Most of the songs came in complete from each of the songwriters – we knew we were doing the album and we just saved up things that we thought would work for the group. There was one co-write that Luke and I did (”Cry For You”) but that was the only actual co-write on the record. And that was a very natural collaboration, like, “I’ve got this idea, let’s play with it.”

There’s a certain way of writing when the songs are for a group like there, where I’d say the difference is mostly you can write with others’ orchestration in mind. Like the song, “Already Gone” would not be a lot of fun to sing by yourself because the whole chaos of the chorus is this three-part, Twist and Shout-style buildup. So you have the freedom to write for harmony, for a particular kind of space or texture for the band.

Sean: I love writing for projects. I didn’t write anything specifically for this album, the songs I contributed were already in place. But I love getting that opportunity to work within the constraints or capabilities of a group – a new sonic playground to aim for. It’s really fun to do that. And I’m always trying to write as much as I can since new reasons will always come up when you need songs. You can never have too many of them sitting around.

Glen: I should just say too that we got together and did this album very quickly, so the next album is really going to be based around this particular five-piece, and we are going to be writing specifically for this project. It will less anarchistic; we’ll have a much better idea of what the palette is.

F/F: There was a quote I read about the making of this album about trying in your songwriting and collaboration to leave space within the songs, rather than everyone rushing to fill up every moment of the song with their unique skill or musical strength.

Sean: Every record is different, and this record came together with a big pile of songs we already had there. So what I think gives this record its personality is the individual players, and yeah, how we did leave space for each other, and tried to see how little you can play and still make it happen. That’s not to say that people don’t step out and do “fancy” stuff every now and then, but this particular group of musicians was a delight to collaborate with.

F/F: And I think that makes it pleasing to hear as well. Sometimes with these so-called “supergroups” you get super-egos as well, where everyone’s trying to do all their noodling and their fancy drum fills and each talent they are known for that will make them stand out, and it can be overwhelming as a listener.

Glen: Yeah, there are a lot of reasons that we’ve decided that we don’t really like the term supergroup. Number one is they tend to be funded and actually be superstars of some kind, and they have a bus…things like that. We’re people with a past, but that’s about it.

F/F: Sure, and also I think supergroup implies certain things, like the term “side project.” It implies that this is not as important as your primary work, like it’s a diversion.

Glen: …and that the personalities are more important than the music. It implies a success of marketing, rather than a spirit of creativity.

F/F: So this album was three days of rehearsal and five days of recording, and I had read a 2003 interview you did, Glen, where you talked about the overuse of ProTools and production in recording, and you said “The world does not need another Auto-Tuned, Beat-Detectived, loop-based record.” Is that how you prefer to record these days, with more of a live, organic feel?

Glen: It all depends. I also have a project called Remote Tree Children that’s Auto-Tuned and Beat-Detectived and it’s a lot of fun. The thing that I don’t like are records that try to sound like a band in a room, and then manicure it to the point where it takes all the life out of it, and there’s too many takes and too many overdubs. You wind up with something that’s supposed to sound like people playing together, but it isn’t.

I think there’s a place for using live performance and there’s a place for using the studio. I mean, Bjork is a perfect example of somebody who balances acoustic instruments and dynamic performances from electronic instruments, and really understands the balance of the synthetic and the real. Peter Gabriel also does the same thing, and LCD Soundsystem has the scratchiest guitars and the weirdest loops. So there’s a lot of room for that, but to make a record that’s really song-based, the slickness tends to detract. There’s a real beauty in going in a room and just playing a song and walking in and listening to it back, and that’s the record.

Luke: That’s what was really great about making this record, just to sit around and play these songs as a band – sitting in Sean’s living room in LA, and just working the songs out for three days. We just went in and played, and maybe later we added a few vocals and fixed a thing or two, but for the most part it’s really a live record, and the group and what we’re about and how we play together really came through.

F/F: I’m reminded of the All-Wave Recording movement championed by Kim Deal of the Breeders and producer Steve Albini (“everything should be an analog sound recording of someone playing or singing, rather than using a computer to generate or digitally manipulate sounds separated from the dimension of time in which they were performed. In short, to record All-Wave, one must use no computers, no digital recording, no auto-tuning, or any other mainstays of contemporary production.”)

Glen: I think people can tell that, though, when a record has that authenticity. In the same way that – and this is the only way in which I will ever equate these two bands – In the same way that Hootie and the Blowfish was a populist answer to everybody being really hardcore and intense and screaming all the time, when it wasn’t cool to be sensitive at all, there’s some part of people that just hungers for something as simple as “Hold My Hand.” They wanna hear something they can just relate to, they don’t want to have to be edgy all the time. I think that 30 million records was a response to this glut of overly-intense, self-important music – even though lots of it was great.

I think the White Stripes in a similar way, people were so hungry for music where the drums were obviously not being made in time, nothing was tuned, nothing was messed with, you could tell that that was rough and real, and you could tell that it was rough and real, and I think people were starving for it. Part of the reaction is the merit of the band itself, but I also think part of the reaction is that they were making a big statement against the way records had started sounding, the slippery slope everyone had gone down into artificiality.

Once again, there are people that run the line better than others, but it’s what happens with any instrument of war; you invent dynamite and then you start the Nobel Peace Prize after inventing dynamite because you think that this is going to end war and instead it just escalates it. Every time a tool like this gets invented to help make music better, the tool takes over for a while and there are different periods of recovery, and I think we’re just starting to recover from Auto-Tune.

F/F: And of course the live music experience is an opportunity for you to really connect with fans, without any of the trappings or tricks.

Glen: Yes, there are bands that are incredibly technological and also absolutely awesome live. They understand making a show and what to leave raw, like MGMT is a great example – they’re very technical, but also know when to leave things raw. I think there’s a lot that’s been done on very manicured records, and now people are striving to find a happy medium.

There was a period, I think, when bands were getting signed very young with great demos, and people got burned a lot live. But I think people went to a lot of shows where they’d heard a record that sounded great and they got there and the band couldn’t play live. That’s one nice thing about the contracting of the music industry, and I think bands that can’t play aren’t getting signed as much anymore. Everybody knows you have to bring it live, or it’s not going to work.

F/F: I feel like technology has helped spread live fan recordings as a way of creating a buzz about a band. Going back to my own history, I was on a Toad the Wet Sprocket list when I was in high school and we would swap compilation tapes from live moments of tours, best-of collections of fan recordings, in a way that I never saw done before the internet came into play for the superfans. Now sites like Live Music Archive or Wolfgang’s Vault help people know if the band has the chops and emotional energy to be worth your time live.

Sean: I’m just grateful that we have that one thing as musicians that can’t be taken away from us, that ability to go out on the road and connect with people live. I think that’s always secure.

F/F: Each of you come from your own distinguished backgrounds and unique fan bases. Are you finding that the people coming out to your shows are coming from a familiarity with one of your previous efforts, or are you converting brand new fans?

Luke: Well, it seems a little different each time. Audiences have been very supportive, there’s been a little radio play, but mostly it’s extremely grassroots, very word-of-mouth. It’s been a learning curve for us to learn how to present it is and where it came from and what we’re trying to do.

F/F: It seems like a dynamic period for you guys as musicians.

Sean: Yeah, you try to make the most of what fans you have from previous incarnations, but you also really want to bring in new people, that’s the best way. And the only way to do that is often to play shows, and then go back and play again, and it’s nice to see as you go along to see new faces and more people coming in. And you hope that people that might have known about one of your bands will come and bring a friend. It’s exciting. In bluegrass and folk circles that I come from, people are pretty diligent about following their favorite musicians in whatever they do.

Glen: It’s been interesting, I lost a lot of people by not being very “rock” after Toad, but even now seeing people write things like, “Oh, well, I didn’t know about bluegrass….but I went to the show and it was awesome.” I mean, it’s interesting to see where people’s prejudices lie. I’ve kind of compared it to – if all you’d heard of rock music was Creed, you might not listen to rock music.

Most people have heard very little bluegrass, they don’t know the depth or the history or understand the context in which to appreciate it. Even to the degree where a band like Nickel Creek, which is very much not a bluegrass band but from a bluegrass background, fans will lump everything together. So it’s been very interesting to hopefully give people an opportunity to confront their prejudices and get turned onto something new and realize they might like it.

F/F: Is it a big leap from pop to rock to bluegrass? How have you crossed it, not coming from the same background as, say, Sean?

Glen: I don’t think that there’s anything to cross. I think songs are songs, and you can take a song like “Bohemian Rhapsody” and do the Weird Al polka version of it (ed: or this, which Glen showed me on his iPhone later that night). Genre has a certain reach, but I think it’s a limited one. We made this album because we wanted to play songs together that we love, as well as we can with the personnel we have.

We have one or two things in the live set that lean towards bluegrass, but there are also things that would be completely wrong for a bluegrass show, like we have an electric guitar, and a drummer, and an electric bass instead of an upright bass, so we’re screwing everything up there. And on the record there’s pedal steel and piano, which have no place in bluegrass at all. So, I occasionally have heard criticisms of the band, “Oh, it’ll be interesting to hear what happens when you guys find your sound,” but we sound like we do because we like that variety. I hate the idea that we would someday show up and you would be able to predict what the tone of the next song would sound like because the last three songs all sounded exactly the same. That would just bore all of us to tears.

Sean: It doesn’t matter what genre it is, it just matters if the songs are good.

Glen: And I think people are becoming more accepting of that. I mean, it is the iPod generation, so many people are proud to have broad tastes, but I think people still have a hard time swallowing musicians from the iPod generation who don’t have a defined sound. I feel this pressure like, “Well, you’ve got to find out what your sound is and then stick to that, so people will know what to expect from you.” Bands like Iron & Wine, I think he’s great but I also can’t take huge doses because there’s not huge variety on his albums. It’s a great place to go, but people seem to have less expectation that you will adhere to a pre-existing genre, but more expectation that you will create your personal sound and never deviate from it.

F/F: Glen, in that same interview from 2003, you talked about your frustration with a blockage in getting music released after recording it. With this record, you guys are doing it all yourselves with no label backing, and you’re using tools on the internet like BandCamp to disseminate your music. Do you think this album could have happened in the same way ten years ago?

Sean: Well certainly the technology wasn’t there ten years ago, but there were other ways back then, like more people bought actual records

Luke: Now people just stream the record online without purchasing it.

Sean: Record sales ten years ago were huge compared to now.

Glen: It’s interesting because more people listen to more music now, but fewer people are paying for it, and at the same time, it’s easier to make records and put them out. There’s a statistic that I heard recently – back when Toad was putting out records there were maybe 20,000 records a year, and now there were 100,000 records put out this year, and supposedly only 1500 of them sold more than ten thousand copies. So you have a shrinking market with a total glut of product.

It’s interesting, I mean ten years ago it would have been different. We probably would have been able to do this record with a label, and get some more attention, and there were things about the world then that seemed more intact. You could actually put one foot in front of the other and predict what would have an effect and what wouldn’t. Radio used to sell records. It’s a strange world right now. I think in a lot of ways it is the Wild West – there’s great opportunities, but the success stories feel like unrepeatable anomalies.

****

After the interview I got to share a meal with Glen and continue our conversation (top 5 night, for sure) and their show impressed me and all of the enthusiastic Nashville crowd. There is a true joy to watching these musicians play together, and I was glad to get a chance to witness it, after hearing them talk about what they want this band to be.

All my heroes have grown up to be awesome.

LOOK: Pictures from the show
DOWNLOAD: A free career-spanning 8 song sampler of Glen’s music

Nobody but you :: The Langhorne Slim interview

Raised on the rollicking farmland in Pennsylvania from which he’s borrowed a name, Langhorne Slim has released a superb album this year with his Be Set Free. I’ve been listening to it nonstop.

In the same way that someone like M Ward is delightfully anachronistic and richly soaked in the blues, Slim moves fluidly between a range of influences that I love. There’s a loosely-tied thread of jangly marvelousness cascading through so many of these songs, like it’s just barely being held together around the edges, while pulsing wild and free in the hot-blooded center.

He can also turn a lyric in a way that pierces me, and is just as sharp and clever in person as he is on his records.

This album opens with a yearning to make sense of life while also realizing that the days are wasting away. The songs wend and weave all the way to the final confident notes of knowing who he is and what he needs to be happy. I love how I can pick up on a sort of transformation on this album from the first song to the last. For all his confidence, though, the songs are gorgeous in their honest searchings. He’s a man that’s flawed but learning, one that I picture occasionally lays there in the quiet darkness with a woman, lamenting lost loves, and striving to be something better. I can relate.

…And really, any man who writes words that promise, “You can have my television, long as I got lips for kissing you…” over a technicolor explosion of gospel claps and Wurlitzer is a-ok with me.

Boots Boy – Langhorne Slim

THE F/F INTERVIEW: Go read my latest Slim shady convo over at Gigbot…

…and then come with me to see him on October 29th, or whenever he stomps through your part of town. He puts on an absolutely wonderful show:

LANGHORNE SLIM FALL TOUR
Oct 14 – Daniel Street, Milford, Connecticut *
Oct 15 – Bell House, Brooklyn, New York #
Oct 17 – TT The Bears, Cambridge, Massachusetts #
Oct 21 – The Grog Shop, Cleveland Heights, Ohio #
Oct 22 – Blind Pig, Ann Arbor, Michigan #
Oct 23 – Lincoln Hall, Chicago, Illinois #
Oct 24 – High Noon Saloon, Madison, Wisconsin #
Oct 25 – 400 Bar, Minneapolis, Minnesota #
Oct 26 – The Waiting Room, Omaha, Nebraska #
Oct 28 – Jackpot Saloon, Lawrence, Kansas #
Oct 29 – Hi-Dive, Denver, Colorado #
Oct 30 – Urban Lounge, Salt Lake City, Utah #
Oct 31 – Neurolux, Boise, Idaho
Nov 2 – Tractor Tavern, Seattle, Washington #
Nov 3 – Media Club, Vancouver, British Columbia #
Nov 4 – Crystal Ballroom, Portland, Oregon #
Nov 6 – The Independent, San Francisco, California #
Nov 7 – Cellar Door, Visalia, California #
Nov 8 – Troubadour, Los Angeles, California #
Nov 9 – The Rhythm Room, Phoenix, Arizona #
Nov 11 – The Mohawk, Austin, Texas #
Nov 13 – The Basement, Nashville, Tennessee #
Nov 14 – Earl, East Atlanta, Georgia #
Nov 15 – Cats Cradle, Carrboro, North Carolina #
Nov 16 – The Southern, Charlottesville, Virginia #
Nov 17 – Rock N Roll Hotel, Washington, Washington DC #
Nov 19 – Johnny Brenda’s, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania #
Nov 20 – Chameleon Club, Lancaster, Pennsylvania #
Nov 21 – Le Poisson Rouge, New York, New York #

* with Murder by Death (oh yeah)
# with Dawes

[photos of course by the formidable Todd Roeth]

Standing at the center of the occupation with the Handsome Furs

We were standing in the center of the occupation
Caught between the ground and the gray gray sky…

Talking Hotel Arbat Blues – Handsome Furs

…and with those seven huge and addictive beats, so begins my favorite track on the newest album from the Handsome Furs — one of my favorite albums of the year. Face Control is unrelenting in its danceability and brilliant in its rock and roll hope, replete with sloppy ragged guitar riffs and visceral howls, all bound up with sharp electronic beats that never quit.

In June, this married pair of (short story author) Alexei Perry and (Wolf Parade’s) Dan Boeckner came to Denver’s Larimer Lounge and nearly caused the place to burst. We all danced and yelled along, while the band did calisthenics up the walls and the stage hummed with a palpable sexual energy between the two.

I sat down with them before their set, after photographer extraordinaire Todd Roeth took advantage of some crazy post-tornado light, and we discussed the Cold War influences on the new Handsome Furs album, rallying against despair through music, and butterflies and underwater candy unicorns in songwriting. Seriously.

This was one of my favorite conversations about music in a long time.

HANDSOME FURS INTERVIEW / JUNE 2009
*Before you jump in, peruse and digest the chronological first part of this conversation over on the Gigbot companion piece*

F/F: To me, if your music could sit with certain artistic movements, I hear a sort of Bauhaus minimalism, blended with this streak of wild romanticism.

Alexei: Yeah, I think I frequently feel dissatisfied with how clinical life seems sometimes and what you have to do within it to feel alive.

Dan: And what we saw in Eastern Europe, too, I mean like the juxtaposition of the blocky sort of soul-crushing, utilitarian, socialist architecture.

Alexei: It’s totally dehumanizing. I mean you’re always the smallest thing. When we were in Warsaw, one of my favorite things that we did was we saw the building that’s nicknamed the Stalin’s middle finger. It’s huge. It was his gift to Warsaw and it’s the tallest thing in the skyline. And you stand in front of it you feel tiny. And yet now things are so changed and all these artists that work around that building want to do all these different things in that area and do different things with that building. Like there’s been these projects about wrapping the whole thing in like brown paper, like weird things. People have all these great ideas that spring through.

Dan: I was thinking about the electromagnetic factory in Bucharest that we went to. That juxtaposition of the music, like what we were trying to get on the record was, and this is a good example, is there was a factory that made magnets for motors, like electromagnetic parts. It’s now completely overrun by dogs. It’s totally decommissioned. And these kids were playing the craziest rock music I’ve heard in a long time in the basement cause they took the basement over, which still has the workers’ showers. So you’ve got that organic, uncontainable art in this awful place.

Alexei: And that’s just how I feel about making art in the world right now. The world isn’t representative of how I want it to be, so I have to always rally against it. And that’s what I want on the record.

F/F: I hear that in the music, very much so. A lot of the songs are pretty unrelenting, minimalistic, and then you’ll have this chorus or guitar riff that just cuts and rises up through that. Alexei, as a writer by trade, are there things you like better about writing songs versus writing a story?

Alexei: Um, it’s been an incredible challenge for me to write lyrics just cause it’s not at all what comes naturally to me. But I think that’s an important challenge and one I really, really like. You have to make things succinct, and you have to make them something that can be twinned with, and something that Dan can emote. Like that he can sing out and have them make sense, no matter whether the words actually do as written on a page. They frequently don’t, but because of how he pushes them out there they do.

Dan: For me, the personal sort of approach to songwriting is not one of sitting at home and inventing a fictional character or using whatever fairytale metaphors to get something across. I’m also not good at doing that other stuff. I can’t, I mean — I’d just feel like a fraud writing like, “the prince came down and the butterflies exploded from your hair and you were dreaming underwater of a fucking candy unicorn.” Grecian metaphor and literary allegory – I can’t do that. Other people can do that really well. Carey Mercer from the band Frog Eyes is kind of one of the masters of that. I love his songwriting. Spencer from Wolf Parade too, God bless him, is really good at that. And I just don’t know how to do it.

I really believe there’s this language of rock, right? Like rock and roll music has been around long enough that when people say stuff like…you take the guy from Spoon. In so many of his songs, he says stuff like “uh-huh” or “yeah,” but it’s just the way he says it, that word ceases to have the same meaning that it does on paper. And it can be interpreted depending on how he inflects it or what point in the song it comes. So, I like that minimalist lyrical school – it works for me.

F/F: Tell me more about the connection you made when you were touring in Eastern Europe with the underground radio station in Belgrade, and what that’s meant to you guys.

Alexei: When we were in Belgrade, there’s a station called B92, that is basically a guerilla radio station that was anti-Milosevic, and they were the people that basically motivated all of the demonstrations against Milosevic. They were the promoters that brought us over.

Dan: On the first visit we became really good friends just right off the bat. One of the actually traveled to Texas to come and see our show at SXSW! I consider them some of my best friends now. We’ve gotten to know a few in particular really well, like Milos and Svetlana. They’ve all had different but equally, completely and totally heartbreaking lives you know.

F/F: How old are they?

Dan: They’re in their mid-30’s. About 35.

F/F: So they’ve grown up with conflict?

Dan: Yeah. And so the first time we went over we became good friends. There was just a real connection between all of us. Then the last few times we’ve seen them it’s grown into this, I mean music, the show is the things that they are putting on and the show is what we a communicating with these kids who are coming out.
But the best part of the visits for me beyond the show is staying up all night getting completely piss fucking drunk and talking politics with them and talking about their lives and them asking us about our lives.

And that’s the whole reason I got into this thing in the first place, is just to be able make connections with people. And I never, never ever thought we’d be able to go somewhere as far away as Serbia and make connections with people there. I mean, who knows when people are going to stop giving a shit about what songs we write. But these connections, they’re permanent.

F/F: It reminds me of a book I loved about the same region called Fools Rush In – just the way that music shines through. There’s this indomitable characteristic of people that wants to play music and be in bands and go out and make love and and do all these things that embrace life. And you have to stay away from the windows so you don’t get shot, or run to the club, to avoid snipers. Meeting people that have lived through that firsthand must have just been really powerful.

Dan: Themes like that really inspired the record that we made, and then to go back — I mean the last time we were back we played for maybe seven or eight hundred kids in Belgrade and to sing those songs about the places that we’ve been to.

Alexei: I was crying after the show.

Dan: …And the shows have been really intense over there. You know like a lot of audience interaction.

Alexei: ..Yeah you got a scar from it.

Dan: It was one of the last songs we were playing in Belgrade. It was at this club called Academy, which has been around since the ’60s. And at the end I had thrown my guitar, and I grabbed the mic, and I was out in the audience. I had twisted and fallen off the stage and cut my head open on the monitors. There was a mosh pit and when I got up…

Alexei: …Suddenly the mosh pit just like moved back like, “What?!”

Dan: Yeah I was gushing blood. But our friend Milos grabbed me after the show and started stitching me up, and I didn’t know what to do. I was like, ‘How do you know how to do this?’ And he said, ‘I cleaned people up after the NATO bombing.’ And I was like, ‘Alright, well, this is slightly more joyful.’ And then we got drunk.

[photos by Todd Roeth]

We promised too much and gave it too soon (Joe Pug interview)

Last month, I sat down with the marvelous Joe Pug (previous post here) on a park bench in Boulder, and we talked about life while the twilight got deeper.

Joe said things like this:

“I think what a lot of people don’t necessarily realize… I mean, there’s no question that as you get older you get wiser. I’m not wiser than anybody else. But I think with youth there’s a certain greater willingness to say these things I say in my songs, whereas when you get older, you’ve experienced so much and you’ve seen so many contradictions in your life that you rightfully are hesitant to say anything out loud because you’ve seen everything proved wrong, at least once, you know what I mean?

In youth, you can make broader declarations, but also at the same time – there was one artist who said, “The entire job of the artist is to not get beat down by the meanness of the world.”

And I’m not talking about hope, or hopefulness. Art can be about that, but doesn’t necessarily have to be about that. It does have to do with believing things, though, whatever those things are. Whether they are the bleakest thoughts on the face of the earth or the most hopeful, you have to believe in them. And even if it’s temporary – even if you just believe them for those five minutes when you wrote the song, or if you’ve believed it since you were three years old until you pass on. So maybe it’s easier to believe in things when you’re younger.”

Joe makes me believe in things. He has a free EP of new music available, and please go read the rest of my interview with Joe over here. Joe plays Denver’s Mile High Music Festival Sunday July 19th at noon.

VIDEO: Hymn #101, live in Boulder
VIDEO: Ol’ 55 (Tom Waits cover), live in Boulder

Warding off demons with Thao Nguyen (Interview)

One of the artists I’ve listened to very most in 2009 so far is the marvelously talented Thao Nguyen, and her band The Get Down Stay Down (N.B. – one of the best band names ever). Her last album We Brave Bee Stings And All (2008, Kill Rock Stars) strikes an eminently listenable blend of sharply clever lyrics and fresh melodic music. Along with the rest of her talented band, her drummer Willis Thompson notably layers in bold percussion, taking the songs to an unexpected level of fantasticness.

Fear and Convenience – Thao Nguyen

Sometimes her songs hit me with playfully familiar roots of girl groups or 1950s classic pop, but then she turns up the layers of fierce rock — she can wail on the guitar and stand up alongside some of the best women in music. Jack White is a fan of her skillful guitar playing, and behind her raw and earnest vocals, this album throws out bright colors of music with banjo, trumpet, handclaps, Wurlitzer and even beatboxing.

Thao studied Sociology and Women’s Studies at the College of William and Mary, and at 25 years of age, she is one of the most articulate and thoughtful artists I have ever had the pleasure of speaking with. You can tell that this is a smart person who has wrestled to present the very best of her thoughts and talents on her albums and in concert. Everything about her is a delight.

INTERVIEW: THAO NGUYEN
Interviewed on the storied brown plaid couch, backstage at the Hi-Dive
Denver, CO 5/6/09

I decide to start the interview with the elephant in the corner that always comes up in her music and in everything written about her. She is a female in rock music. I explore those halls as well, and…well, I want to chat about it. I show her a comic strip that I ripped from the Feminist & Gender Studies newsletter off the bathroom wall at the college where I work:

F/F: What are your thoughts on this, as it may relate to what you are trying to do as a musician?

Thao: (laughs) I think that there is a very pervasive enveloping stigma about women as musicians, and I think that within my personal experience you are, to a degree, immediately dismissed. I know that only as I said through experience, and that it is unfortunate but it becomes part of the deal – not only are you playing music but you are having to sort of debunk negative stereotypes and myths about women who play. For a long time, I was qualified as “a good guitar player, for being a female”…that was immediately the caveat.

Did that drive you crazy?

No, only because I have concerns about my blood pressure, so I try not to absorb it. But of course it does stick with you and float around in your mind. If nothing else, it is a motivator. I want to be good enough that it doesn’t matter what gender I am. That may be the ultimate goal, that we eliminate even the passing thought of it. It’s disturbing how much it plays a factor – but then on the other hand I think it should be totally acknowledged and commended when any woman gains a foothold in any male-dominated industry such as this, that she’s done it as a woman, with no apologies. It’s a weird line to toe and strange territory to navigate – being proud of being a woman, yet being willing to disregard that fact. And all the while just trying to maintain respect for yourself, and command respect at the same time.

I hear that you are volunteering this summer for Rock Camp For Girls?

That is correct! I am so thrilled, it is in Portland this June. I have dreamt of it for so long, since I found out that it existed, but I have been on tour every summer since I found out about it. My friend Laura Veirs mentioned it once a while back when I was on tour with her. This is the first summer that I have been able to make a window so that I can participate. I’m totally excited – I mean this sincerely, I really need a reminder sometimes to keep going and keep playing music and being involved in the industry, pushing along. I was filling out the application, I remember, and it asked me why I wanted to participate, and I think I started to tear up. It’s that significant to me.

I want girls growing up to have this experience, and I think back to when I was young and I would have been ruined without music. I don’t exaggerate, I think it saved me in a lot of ways. I just want little girls to know that it’s possible, you know? Just help them along. I am going to be a band coach and I am going to teach guitar – they haven’t told me what age yet, but I hope younger so they’re not better than me, because that would be embarrassing. But I just want the opportunity to show that it is possible, just to give them a vague idea of where they want to get to, and the rest is up to you. Just to tell them not to be intimidated.

There is a strength and confidence that you have when playing music that to an extent I think the world tries to stomp out of you. I think it is so tough to be a young girl growing up into a woman in this world, with all the weird pressures and the odd demands and the self-hate, and music is totally an outlet for that for these girls, and I swear it wards off demons.

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To read the rest of my interview with Thao (the dirt on her new album out this year, her secrets to rocking cathartic shows, and her work with the Portland Cello Project) head over to the Gigbot Downlowd companion piece.

These great photos here and over there were taken by Todd Roeth, my dream intern extraordinaire, and one of the wildly talented Gigbot inventors. He even makes girls look good sitting on that ratty couch in the basement of the Hi-Dive.

Interview: the refreshing Zee Avi

One of the most surprising new acts that I saw at SXSW this year was the diminutive 23-year old Zee Avi, from Malaysia. Plucked from obscurity half a world away in Kuala Lumpur through her homemade YouTube videos, which were seen by Raconteur’s drummer Patrick Keeler and passed along to White Stripes manager Ian Montone, Zee is freshly signed to Brushfire Records.

Her debut self-titled album comes out on Tuesday, with a sound that is a refreshing throwback to jazz vocalists of the 1920s, cross-bred with an island vibe of acoustic guitar and ukulele.

Zee and I bonded over Colorado beers in a noisy bar in Austin after her daytime set at the Filter Magazine party. She looks maybe 17, so I had to double-check before I ordered us some drinks. Still electrified from her well-received set a few minutes prior, Zee was utterly approachable, and completely passionate about where her music is taking her.

ZEE AVI INTERVIEW

F/F: When you were studying in London, were you focusing on musical education, or law?

Zee: Well, primarily fashion design, at first. I did my undergraduate there at the American Intercontinental University in England, but I eventually decided I no longer had “the passion for fashion”…. I did do eight levels in law when I was seventeen – I joke that I was “bred to be a lawyer.” My dad’s whole family were lawyers, so they had that driven mindset. But I’m really glad that they pushed me towards that, because it did teach me a lot about hard work.

I started teaching myself to play the guitar, though, in Malaysia. I had a lot of free time when school ended each day and I bought this guitar for 19 ringgit, which I would say is around thirty bucks. After I got back from London, I bought myself a chord book and decided to take the guitar out of the closet where it had been sitting and….you know, started jamming my A and G chord. It took me some time to figure out how to stretch my hands around it, I have the tiniest hands – you should see how long a bottle of nail polish will last me (laughs). Oh – and it’s an ongoing joke at practice that a ukulele is actually a normal-sized guitar for me. So, I played rhythm guitar in a couple of bands, and then moved to London. When I moved back to Kuala Lumpur, that’s when I really started with the songwriting.

The first time I heard your music, it was kind of surprising (to me, at least) for a girl from Malaysia to have a sound that’s very much throwback to American music styles from, say, the 1920s onward. Where did that influence come from? Were you exposed to women in jazz a lot growing up?

I actually had that comment once on a YouTube video, something like – “How did a twenty-something Malaysian girl sound like she’s from the Mississippi delta?” But I guess for me, it just came naturally. Of course, listening to music that was from that era really helped a lot, it inspired me. Sure, I went through my rock periods and my British indie phase when I was in London, but I felt like none of them really fit me. So I fell back into listening to jazz, and I connected with its simplicity and honesty and just the lack of sugar-coating to the lyrics. Vocal-wise, I would say that 1920s music has a lot of impact on how I write my music today.

In Malaysia, jazz is a pretty big circuit, so I was exposed to it, but I would certainly never call myself a jazz singer even though I love it. Among my friends I am probably still one of the only one who listens to that era, or looks for vintage vinyl, old pressings, of this music from a different time. But American music in general – I mean, blues and jazz came from here and have shaped and defined modern music. I love going back to the roots to see how it shapes music today. I mean, if it weren’t for Howlin’ Wolf, Led Zeppelin wouldn’t have been around.

The way your music was discovered, through your personal YouTube postings, is pretty cool. Tell me about why you started doing that – was that primarily driven by a desire to have your creativity heard?

Well yeah, the whole internet thing has definitely been a blessing. I think it is such a good outlet to help you put your work out there no matter what you do. It does seems to be a more common story these days, that someone, somewhere has their talent first seen on the internet. It’s been pretty crazy to be heard by so many people, and that Patrick (from The Raconteurs) took an interest in my work. I hadn’t even told my friends or family about it until I got the deal. It was really just a place where I could let things out and just write songs for me.

I mean, I don’t talk much about this part of the story, but the whole reason I had even started with YouTube in the first place is simply because a friend of mine missed my first gig and he’s a poet and I really wanted his feedback on “Poppy,” which is the first song I wrote. He wanted me to send him and mp3 but I didn’t know how to do that, but I did have a crappy webcam and an old IBM laptop, with a call center headset. After he watched it, I was going to delete it, with all of the grainy and crackly sound, but he said, “No, why don’t you just let it nest there for a little bit?”

So I left it up instead, and within a few days I started getting other comments on it from around the world, from random strangers. It was just more encouragement for me. I found that the more videos I started recording, the reception was great and more people started coming to the channel to see them and comment and sharing them with their friends. It was all a big, crazy snowball effect

Tell me about the new record that you recorded at Brushfire Studios in Southern California – was that the first time you’d been in LA?

Yes! It was the first time I had been to the U.S. at all, so you can just imagine everything being brand new, and me being a trainwreck of nerves and jetlag. The material that I arrived with was a blend of older stuff from YouTube and new things I had written more recently that they liked when I played for them, they said, “You know what, we should put that on the record!” It was an incredibly good experience – I feel like they are all family now.

One interesting thing on the album is the Morrissey cover song! Why did you decide to cover “First Of The Gang To Die”?

Well, I’ve always been a really big fan of the Smiths, and that particular song was actually played all the time in this indie club in KL (Kuala Lumpur) but it became kind of like an anthem for all of us in that club. It reminds me of feeling like warriors, and a pact of being different from everybody else, and it is just such a beautifully written song. And apparently Morrissey has heard my version of it — which is daunting for me to think about – apparently Ian (Montone, manager) sent it to him. It’s just crazy!

Are you still writing these days? It has been a pretty crazy few months for you.

Yeah, I’m creatively exhausted at this moment. I plan to go home and recuperate for a little while and be a hermit and grow a shell. I need it. Because this summer I have a lot of touring, some cool festivals coming up for me like No Depression in Seattle (with Iron & Wine and Gillian Welch) and Bonnaroo and Outside Lands in San Francisco. It’ll be a good summer.

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Zee’s self-titled debut album is out Tuesday May 19th on Brushfire Records, and you can stream the whole thing on her MySpace.

The Story – Zee Avi

VIDEO: FOUR ZEE AVI ACOUSTIC PERFORMANCES
Live at the Solar Powered Plastic Plant

ZEE AVI TOUR DATES
May 17 – Boulder, CO Etown taping (opening for Mike Doughty)
May 19 – Long Beach, CA – Fingerprints Instore
May 20 – Los Angeles, CA – The Roxy
May 22 – San Fran, CA – The Rickshaw Stop
May 26 – Towson, MD – WTMD Listener event
May 27 – Charlottesville, VA – Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar
May 28 – Washington, DC 9:30 Club (opening for A Camp)
May 30 – Philadelphia, PA – World Cafe Live
May 31 – New York, NY – Mercury Lounge
June 1 – Hoboken, NJ – Maxwell’s
June 6 – Pittsburgh, PA 3 Rivers Arts Fest (opening for Medeski, Martin & Wood)
June 13 – Manchester, TN – Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival
June 15 – Chapel Hill, NC – Night Light
June 16- Kill Devil Hills, NC- The Pit Surf Shop
June 17 – Columbia, SC – Hunter Gatherer
June 19 – Opelika, AL – Eighth & Rail
June 20 – Birmingham, AL – City Stages Festival
July 9th – Spokane, WA- Knitting Factory
July 11th – Redmond, WA – No Depression Festival
July 12th- Vancouver, BC – Media Club
August 28th San Francisco, CA – Outside Lands Festival

Interview: The expansive sounds of Blitzen Trapper

Through non-stop touring over the last two years and a pair of very strong albums (their latest, Furr, on Sub Pop), Portland’s Blitzen Trapper is accumulating a critical amount of deserved buzz behind their music. Straddling genres of expansively golden CSNY rock, the wide-open folk underpinnings of the wilderness, and the squalling rock of fellow Portlanders Pavement, their music delights simply in its unpredictability.

I sat down with half of the band when they were in Denver a few weeks ago, playing a very sold-out show at the Hi-Dive. Brian Adrian Koch (drums and vocals), Eric Earley (lead vocals and guitar) and Marty Marquis (guitar, keyboard and vocals) piled on a sunken green couch and we chatted about their year, while waiting for Ramen from the bar.

BLITZEN TRAPPER INTERVIEW
Fuel/Friends: Last time you guys were here in Denver I saw you open for Malkmus, which must have been pretty cool. Your non-stop touring seems to have generated a good deal of enthusiasm in the crowd refracted back to the stage – the singing along with each word on songs like “Furr”….

Eric: Yeah, that’s been great and surprising. People also really seem into “Black River Killer” on this tour…

Marty: Oh, and also “Not Your Lover”, when the three of us do it all singing together

Not Your Lover (live 2/27/09) – Blitzen Trapper

F/F: I’d read about a thematic connection between Black River Killer and (author) Cormac McCarthy. What about his novels inspire you creatively?

Eric: On the one hand, that song is a classic murder ballad, but in other ways it’s more ambiguous as well, with some spiritual aspects. To me the imagery of the song feels related to the world McCarthy creates.

Marty: And I think there’s also the same recurring theme of regeneration through violence and some sort of redemptive quality in the most mindless, pathetic slaughter. It’s an interesting character in that story of our song and I think people are drawn to those contradictions. I mean it’s an American myth, that’s one of the things that makes us tick as a culture. I think Cormac McCarthy also taps into some of that.

Black River Killer (live in NYC) – Blitzen Trapper

Eric: He’s like our classic, our Hemingway or Faulkner, our Steinbeck crossed with Joyce. And he does it with an amount of experience that’s strange, and he’s writing right now. It’s amazing.

Brian: As rife as those novels are, when they’re translated into film – I watched No Country For Old Men, and there’s no music in it at all, and I didn’t even notice until someone pointed it out to me afterwards and I had to go back and check. There’s not a stitch. It’s so effective, I was flabbergasted.

F/F: It’s consistent with his books I think, though, since there’s such a space and a stillness and a silence in them.

Eric: Yeah, completely.

F/F: How do you possibly maintain creativity while you’re on the road? How have you been able to work on finishing your next album being on tour so much?

Eric: Well, I don’t write on the road, I write when I get home. And I can write really fast, I can write a whole record in a month. January I spent the whole time recording and writing.

Marty: You can barely think on the road.

Brian: The road’s a really good place to form ideas, for things to bubble and boil in your head. But as far as developing them into actual songs, it’s not very realistic. A lot of time to think though.

F/F: I also read that you have a record made between each of your records? Do you ever revisit those songs or play them live?

Eric: Well, we’ve used em for a few things… the Tour EP that we’ve had the last couple tours is stuff that was outtakes from Furr, and then all the Wild Mountain Nation outtakes were released here and there, on blogs and stuff like that. There’s probably an album and a half of stuff that hasn’t been put out.

The next record is definitely going to have some older songs that have been recorded years ago, some that were written when I was like nineteen, mixed in among all the new stuff. Generally when I’m making a record I record 25-30 songs, so yeah there’s a whole lot of stuff out there.

F/F: Do you ever play those unreleased rough cuts live?

Marty: Well you know, we want to make everyone have a good time, and it helps when they know the music. But we do play some stuff that’s pretty obscure in our set. As far as your average person who knows about Blitzen Trapper, they mostly want to hear the album Furr and even some of the hits from the last record, but we will also play stuff that they are totally unaware of.

Furr (live in NYC) – Blitzen Trapper

F/F: I wanted to hear more about your record label….Lidkercow?

Eric: Yeah, Lidkercow – that’s a Joyce reference.

F/F: ….Are you planning to release your own solo projects on that label, or signing some other bands you admire?

Eric: We are always feeling like we hear bands whose records we’d like to release….

Brian: In our fantasy life, we’ve always looked down the road to a place where people can collaborate and create together, and thinking of ways that we can be a part of that.

Marty: I mean, we’ve learned a lot in the past couple of years, we were a band for a long time and we didn’t know how to get the word out. We were just pretty naïve and playing music around Portland for a long time. So when we finally pushed out, we were really innocent, and it’s been a pretty steep learning curve for us. Now we’re getting to a place where I feel like we could help other artists ascend that curve and it would be pretty cool. There’s definitely some bands and musicians I’ve talked to a little bit that we’re pretty impressed with, but yeah, you don’t want to shortchange people either. What we do is a pretty spartan, bare-bones approach.

F/F: Well, and it is a crowded music market out there.

Eric: It’s difficult to navigate it.

Marty: I think people are getting pretty savvy about navigating all the data that’s out there, though. With music these days you can go and hear something immediately, and that communicates on some super-rational level with your core being and you don’t have to rely on what other people are saying about the music.

F/F: Do you think that people seem to have less patience to some degree for bands that don’t fit into a mold or genre? Like for example, people seem to have no idea how to classify your music – it’s quite amusing reading all the descriptors assigned to you guys.

Eric: Yeah, but all of that stuff is writers though. What I’ve learned on this record the last two tours is that there’s a big difference between writers and the fans. You know, and the fans just hear the music and they connect with it, whether it’s classified a certain way or not, it’s unimportant. But you need the writers to communicate to people about the music too.

Marty: I mean, it’s human nature to want to classify stuff. I definitely think that, yeah, if we had been a more focused band maybe, and we’d just said, we’re gonna be a straight country folk act and we’re all going to wear cowboy hats in our photo shoots….we might have been able to penetrate the marketplace a lot earlier because it’s a sharper instrument that people can comprehend a lot easier.

Eric: But you know, I think the way that we’re going though will have more lasting value, as opposed to being sort of like, “Well, you got your year.” I’d rather be able to make 5 or 6 records that will all last, or at least all contain songs that can stand the test of time.

All photos by special arrangement, from a little fly-by-night session we did shortly before the interview with the amazing Todd Roeth.

[thanks to the awesome NYCTaper for the live tracks throughout]

Interview: The Hollyfelds

A few weeks ago, I helped dragged a table out into a bar parking lot on a lovely Sunday afternoon and interviewed last summer’s winners of Denver’s best alt-country band title, The Hollyfelds. They have a new EP coming out Friday, and they played at our Hillbilly Prom last weekend (oh wait, that was the Lurleens).

Feel free to jet on over to Gigbot.com and see what we had to talk about.

[photograph by my favorite Todd Roeth]

Interview: Cody Dickinson (Hill Country Revue & North Mississippi All-Stars)

Head on over to Gigbot to read my interview with Cody Dickinson, of Hill Country Revue and the North Mississippi All Stars. Cody plays the electric washboard. That’s pretty rad.

Grace Potter interview :: Turn the radio up high, and grab the first guitar you see

Grace Potter can electrify a stage with her fearless and excoriating guitar solos, light up a room with her thousand-megawatt smile, and shoot an arcade-game basket from fifteen feet away. In heels.

In addition to possessing one of the most honest, immense, and soulful wails I’ve heard from a female vocalist since Janis Joplin, Grace is a stellar songwriter and rocks the B3 Hammond organ, among other instruments. At only 25 years old this Burlington, Vermont native leads her band The Nocturnals with some serious rockability, and can beat them at many backstage arcade games. At least that I’ve seen.

I recently had the pleasure of seeing Grace Potter and The Nocturnals live for the second time this summer while I was in San Francisco for the Outside Lands Festival last weekend. Around this time last Sunday I was sitting in a tent with Grace for a few questions before we all loaded up and shipped out. Being that it was the end of a long and festive sunny day for both of us, we started the conversation with Grace confiding in me that I wasn’t the only one that’d been drinkin’ since half past noon. “I have a good liver,” she said to me in a lowered voice as she leaned close and spoke into my hair. “It’ll process it. But we’ll be okay — you and me, we’re gonna throw it down.”
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GRACE POTTER INTERVIEW
SAN FRANCISCO, AUGUST 24, 2008

HB: The question I am most interested in asking you stems from my own experiences being a female blogger in this crazy rock world – I’m wondering if you feel that there’s any kind of double standard when it comes to being a woman in the music industry, as opposed to a guy doing the same things that you’re doing?

GP: I personally think that there’s positives to it, and obviously there are negatives. I actually hate girl musicians — for the most part I tend to really dislike them. But I’m not saying that I’m like, the Savior Girl in rock and roll. I make mistakes, we all make mistakes. Still, I’m not gonna throw a fit, I’m not gonna be a diva… I’m never gonna make a big scene if somebody didn’t bring me my fucking champagne. Today they were apologizing for not having a mirror where I was backstage but — who cares?! What’s most important to me is that we’ve got an environment where we can create great music, and I’m more interested in if my amps work or my gear, or if there’s a string broken, or if the setlist isn’t quite right. I would way rather talk about that than what outfit I’m gonna wear. Of course it is fun being a woman, and I’m glad to be a woman. But what I’m most fascinated by is a woman artist who can speak realistically, from her soul, and not be bullshitting.

The music industry is a hard place to live in, but I love my guys in my band, being in a band with guys. They seem to have more of a sense of team and camaraderie that’s ingrained in them that I also feel I’m lucky enough to have. If I didn’t have that, I feel like I would have been Gwen Stefani-d a long time ago. I’ve toured with other women in the band and in the crew and there’s definitely a challenge I have of being “the boss,” so to speak, but not wanting to be the Snow Queen, not wanting to be the bitch. I kinda cater to the Katharine Hepburn mentality, which is “be as wonderful as you possibly can be onscreen, and as edgy and cutthroat as you can be off-screen.”

Do you ever feel like women who front bands are treated as a novelty?

I would SO much rather it go in this order when people walk by our stage — listen: ‘Wow, that music sounds amazing. Look at that bass player, he’s awesome – this band fucking rocks! . . . Oh my god, there’s a girl singing, and she’s pretty good on the guitar, or she’s pretty good on the B3.’ And then maybe, ‘Oh, she’s kinda pretty’ – instead of the reverse. I mean however you look at it, I feel very lucky to be where we are. I am a 25 year old girl who isn’t afraid to wear a short skirt or to have fun and be myself. Someday I’m going to chill out and be more like Emmylou Harris or Bonnie Raitt or Lucinda Williams and get into a more humble state of mind and a more… subtle state of fashion, but for now this is who I am.

Are those musicians who you mentioned some of the women you admire?

YES. Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams and Bonnie Raitt, in that order – my idols. I’ve met all of them, but have never sang with any of them. I almost asked Lucinda on a song, and I almost asked Emmylou, but I just couldn’t work it out at the shows. Bonnie is actually a really good friend of the band, she’s been very supportive, given us quotes and mentioned us from stage . . . one time she was playing in front of 3000 people in my hometown of Burlington, Vermont and she actually talked about me onstage. She was talking about the local music scene and how hard it is for local artists to get off the ground, and bands who have really been able to do something and she said my name. I mean – I lost my shit.

I’d heard that you guys were heading back into the studio later this year. On your last record This Is Somewhere you’d tried to capture more of a live feeling in the studio. Will you continue with that aim this time around?

I think we’re going to relinquish all desperate attempts to capture a live sound because it’s two very different things. Being in the studio last time we realized that you have to let them be different – you can’t force a live sound from a beautiful studio. I mean, we were in a gorgeous studio in LA and we kinda mistreated it, in that we were constantly trying to force something out of it.

I think this time around, depending on where we record and what kind of songs we’re writing, it’s gonna become whatever it needs to become, and we’re gonna pick the studio accordingly. We are thinking of going back into the studio in February or March to make a new record and who knows when that will come out . . . but hopefully a little bit of a quicker turnaround than last time because it took us like eight months from the time we finished recording it for it to actually be out.

Are you happy with the ultimate result on the last record with that struggle between live and studio sound?

I am proud of it. I would listen to it, I would. But I don’t listen to it. Jeff Tweedy from Wilco told me that one mistake you can make is to overlisten to your own [recorded] music. Just let it be what it is. Just leave it alone – record your record and let it be a moment in time because that’s exactly what you sounded like. Be honest with yourself. I mean, be the best version of yourself –don’t underedit, don’t sell yourself short– but pick the best parts of yourself, put them out there, and then forever from that moment on recognize the fact that that was back when you recorded it, in . . . November of 2006 or whatever, and that that’s not who you are now, and that’s okay.

Yeah . . . Jeff Tweedy gives good advice.

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VIDEO: “STOP THE BUS”
OUTSIDE LANDS, SAN FRANCISCO – AUGUST 24, 2008

VIDEO: “PUT YOUR HEAD DOWN”
RED ROCKS, MORRISON, COLORADO – JUNE 10, 2006

[top image credit Kim Hutchens]