This has been a rough, frigid, silent weekend in Colorado Springs, you guys.
There’s a sadness hovering in me and around me, temporarily pushing me under fuzzy blankets inside secure houses for protection against the glaring bleak evil that exploded Friday just a few minutes from my house, at a place that has always been a source of wonderful, empathetic care for me.
The music of Kevin Large, who plays under the name Widower, has been a delicate balm that I’ve been playing on repeat these last few days as the snow falls. I’m appreciative for that beauty.
Kevin writes literary songs that are often laced with a lovely uncertainty, an earnestness that he tries to convey using just the right string of alliterative language (“telltale tequila tears in a taxicab” is still one of my favorites). There’s no artifice with him, only thoughtful contemplation and a shining heart. So, it’s just what I needed this weekend.
FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION #35: WIDOWER
Shove Chapel, Colorado Springs, CO
June 15, 2014
Almost, Always, All Yours
I have always loved the sweet loss in this song, the sense of being so damn close and trying so hard but still overshooting it, or undershooting–missing what we were hoping for, in any case.
It stopped me cold the first time I heard it, during the grey winter weeks I spent listening to his Fool Moon album over and over again in rainy Portland, on buses and trudging through puddles in the streets during a grad school residency. I wrote: there’s this gorgeous hesitancy woven through this record, and nowhere do I hear it more than in the final song ‘Almost, Always, All Yours’ — because really — when are we ever completely anyone’s?
Your Copy of Catcher In The Rye
This is a new song from Kevin’s new Dark Blue EP, just released last month. I love the deep exhalation that Kevin lets out into that echoey church before he starts singing. Here we go. I hear this as a song about a breakup, a re-dividing into two the stuff that was just ours, but more than that, about a kind of silent, steely fear:
when the fire in your heart’s just another false alarm
and you feel you’re fading away and the focus is lost
it’s all my fault
it’s a stiff, it’s a still-life, it’s framed and hanging in the hallway
always there when I close my eyes
and I may be paraphrasing, but it frightens me at night
like a taxidermied sparrow’s wing, sparkling in the light
Exit For Eden
The second new song Kevin played– missing the exit for Eden and keeping on going towards whatever the new reality is that rests ahead. Every room’s got a view, if you just open up your eyes.
Other than maybe the Cyndi Lauper cover, this is one of the last artists I would have thought that I’d hear covered in the chapel. And yet Kevin manages to take a pogoing youth anthem from 1997 and distill all the sadness right up to the top, turning this into something wistful.
Oh Catherine, My Catherine
The intricacy of this melody has always been mesmerizing to me, and in addition to the telltale tequila tears in a taxicab lyric I mentioned earlier, this one also has some lovely turns like “my long-stemmed loneliness your beck and call / we were roadside roses, we were record rainfall.” Wonderful.
[Recorded on the gorgeous Blue Microphones. Audio wizardry, recording, and mixing time donated by the Bourgal brothers at Blank Tape Records, as always, and video and photography from the supreme Kevin Ihle. Thanks for being part of creating these special sessions.]
I feel a change in the weather
I feel a change in me…
A decade ago today, I sat at my kitchen table on my pink Dell laptop in my new hometown of suburban Colorado Springs and I started writing a new blogspot called “I Am Fuel, You Are Friends,” named after a favorite Pearl Jam song. I never thought more than a handful of people would read it, but I had things I wanted to say that were withering in the silence of my kitchen.
And so I decided to write. For me, for music, for you, even though I didn’t know you yet.
Days are getting shorter
and the birds begin to leave
Even me, yes yes y’all
who has been so long alone
I’m headed home
headed home…
It’s ten years (and almost ten million pageviews?!) later, and I am so far now from where I was then. You’ve all been the best part of that long road, hands down. These last few weeks as the leaves change in Colorado, I’ve been listening to a lot of the new Josh Ritter album, Sermon On The Rocks. The parts of life that were withering ten years ago are growing in golden and full. The lyrics throughout this post are from his perfect song of homecoming, which has become my anthem in this season.
Lift the valley from the floor honey
little town into the sky
they’ll say that it’s a miracle
and you’ll know damn well they’re right…
Yesterday morning as the sun rose, I was driving along under golden branches that line my street and listening to Josh Ritter sing about his homecoming. I realized that this has been a sweet season for me of coming somewhat unexpectedly to a home within myself. I know Josh has been through similarly rough seas in the last few years, and this record is one where we both sing along to the idea of seeing land, of finding home.
I realized with a start that this is what I wished for a decade ago when I named this blog, even though I didn’t know it yet: Will myself to find a home, a home within myself; we will find a way. All of a sudden, I realized I’d found it — and I’d found it in the gratitude, in refusing to abandon wonder.
Nights are getting colder now
the air is getting crisp
I first tasted the universe on a night like this
So, I’m writing this from a different kitchen table, in a different house, and I am aware of how full it is to bursting. Full with the sound of clocks ticking from different rooms tracking the avalanche of a gift of moments. I hear the coffee pot whooshing quietly and the baseboard heaters gently clinking as they fill my house with warmth, with comfort. This morning I sat in the glowing dawn and stroked the still-soft cheek of my twelve year old son who is getting bigger every minute, I realized the overwhelming sweetness of living every moment as if it is the last time you get to do it. I wondered what the last time was that I picked him up and held him in my arms before he got too big.
I feel a change in the weather; I feel a change in me.
I also want tell you about how this has been a year of reconciliation for me, because I think it’s important to suture up hurts from old wounds and letting them heal. In March I was in Buenos Aires to visit a university program there and I found myself in the company of a wonderful human named Fede who has been reading this blog since back in 2006–almost the very beginning. He first found me through a Google search on Pearl Jam lyrics, and after almost a decade of following my meanderings from a different continent, he welcomed me to his city as more of a longtime friend than a tourist.
As we walked around that vibrant, gorgeous city of Buenos Aires that expansive Saturday, we kept talking about Pearl Jam, each knowing all the same details before the other person even finished the beginning of the sentence. We mused about specific live renditions of songs, the precise date of our first times seeing the band (11/4/95 and 10/25/2005, respectively) and what the first song they played at that show was, Ten Club Christmas singles album art, and the relative merits of their different drummers. We both remembered what Stone and Jeff were wearing in that picture Rolling Stone published during the Department of Justice hearings over Ticketmaster (pink button-down, backwards hat, dopey looks).
Drive east of Eden
’til we’d start to feel the west
we were never far from nowhere
you could see it from the edge…
Maybe it was just the liminality inherent in travel, but that was a wide-open day of different perspective for me. We sat at a cafe by the river and the conversation drifted towards the topic of anger in the world in general. “I don’t believe in anger anymore,” Fede mused in his soft voice. “I don’t know the point of it.”
I confess, you guys: I’ve been darkly angry and hurt for years about the falling out I had with Pearl Jam (or more accurately their management). It’s been years of letting a little sharp hard pebble of being wronged sit in my gut and burrow in and fester. At the time that all happened, I felt justified in my indignation because I really believed that fan enthusiasm was valuable and inherently good, and mine felt rejected — sealed with a legal cease and desist order. And that stunk. I felt small and maltreated in some other substantial areas of my life too at that point, and so the whole Pearl Jam debacle just got tangled up in the stinging sandstorm.
But I started thinking about Fede’s comments about anger as we walked, and the futility of it all, especially as we get older. As both of us ate helado and glowed to talk about the songs that we have both flowered up towards for so long, I remembered all the reasons why I loved Pearl Jam in the first place, the fervent and pure sentiments that made me want to name this blog after their song lyrics. They have played a huge role in my life, in my formation, in my musical raison d’être. And so in one very specific moment this spring, walking down a narrow Buenos Aires street, I decided to reconcile with Pearl Jam. I’ve carried that pebble of indignation around long enough, I don’t even recognize it anymore.
Fede and I made plans for me to find a copy of Cameron Crowe’s PJ20 documentary once I got back to Colorado (since I hadn’t seen it), and to watch together on FaceTime with a bottle of red wine on either end of the connection. As we watched the documentary, all my synapses blissed out. I was reminded of who I had been. I sang all the words, and remembered songs I hadn’t thought of in years. It may have been the entire bottle of Argentinian Malbec in me, but towards the end I cried.
The reconciliation, the homecoming, felt really good.
This will be my last post on this blog, this document and travelogue of my musical journeys this past decade, and I don’t want to go out with jagged edges; I don’t want to go out with any part small and bitter. I’ve found more connection and open-hearted joy and insight through the process of writing this blog for the last ten years than I ever could have imagined. I found my voice here (in a million important ways), and I feel profoundly fortunate to have gotten to share music that I love with you. We’ve been illuminated together, I hope — stars against the dark of cynicism.
Fuel/Friends gave me the means, and now the amends have been made. The fiery gyre that I felt chewing up my insides a decade ago, as my big, bright thoughts about music fell silent into the abyss, has ceased– and been replaced by a flourishing community of flesh-and-blood people that I tend to talk to more with my voice these days instead of my keystrokes. I may write every now and then in the future, but I feel like the time when I needed it is more distant every day, and I’m turning inward, coming home to myself.
Would you leave me a comment if you have a story about your engagement with Fuel/Friends from these last ten years that I don’t know? Writing into the ether is liberating and lovely, and also often anonymous. Some of my most worthwhile moments of the last decade have been connecting with all the beautiful individual humans who have listened and read along all these years.
I want to say thank you for — igniting things that matter along with me, for collectively recognizing the beauty and magic in music all around us, and for being friends.
It’s OK (Dead Moon cover) – Pearl Jam
“Sing loud ’cause it’s outside / sing loud ’cause you’re still alive.”
Virginia Beach, August 3, 2000
The air is getting colder now
the nights are getting crisp
Forty years ago, Bruce Springsteen released Born To Run. It took me thirty more years or so to discover the album for myself, and I came to love it first through hearing stripped-down versions of the songs that I grew up saturated with as radio hits. When I think about my earliest experiences with songs that I first dismissed, I’m reminded of the wonderful Josh Ritter lyrics: “Radio waves are coming miles and miles, bringing only empty boats / whatever feeling they had when they sailed somehow slipped out between the notes.” Because Springsteen’s songs and videos were everywhere when I was a kid, singing about things I hadn’t felt yet, I dismissed them as someone else’s songs from someone else’s more bombastic narrative and not mine.
And then maybe ten years ago, I accidentally (yup) downloaded this kismet-laced acoustic version of “Born To Run” that for the first time in my life made me stop and really listen, really hear all of the beautiful dusty sadness in the song that I’d always missed. That cracked open his entire oeuvre for me; you can hear the heart of the song so much better when it’s stripped down to its aching ribs.
I don’t care what you think you think about Springsteen;
YOU MUST LISTEN:
Eight years ago as part of a series for WXPN in Philly, I posted one of my favorite (young, hungry) live recordings from Springsteen, the iconic Main Point show from 1975, along with Jon Landau’s equally epic piece of music writing about the show, Growing Young With Rock and Roll, which starts with the lines:
“It’s four in the morning and raining. I’m 27 today, feeling old, listening to my records, and remembering that things were diffferent a decade ago.”
Here is a re-up of that show, from right around the time that Born To Run was being recorded (including an early version of what would become “Thunder Road,” with one of the starkest, prettiest bridges I’ve heard in that song). It’s a show that my friend Bruce Warren of WXPN, who was there, calls “one of [Springsteen’s] greatest shows ever,” and I concur.
It’s one of the truest I’ve heard, still.
“Tonight’s busting open and I’m alive.”
After the very first performance of Nathaniel Rateliff with the fiery soul-saving Night Sweats in 2013, I knew that I had just witnessed something electric and exceptional that struck a chord in me and everyone else in attendance that night at the Bluebird.
“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 (and chapel session alum) 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.”
Therefore, I was thrilled a few weeks ago when Jimmy Fallon, Questlove, and the rest of the Tonight Show-viewing world caught up with that assessment, following their explosive performance of the show-closing revival song “S.O.B.”
I can’t seem to embed it, but if you already watched it, watch it again.
I happened to be in NYC that night and got to watch it from a bar with the band, all of us singing along and clapping our hands with an assortment of friends and strangers – but even if I had been at home in my living room, I would’ve been singing along all the same. You can’t help it.
I’ve been listening to the debut album Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats (due out tomorrow August 21, on the inimitable Stax Records imprint) pretty much non-stop this summer, as anyone who has come over to my place for a BBQ or a taken a mini-roadtrip with me can attest. After listening so much to all the demo versions of many of these songs since 2013, I was wondering how the full album would capture the raw joy and terrific energy of their live show. I think they did it, guys, through working with the wonderful producer Richard Swift (The Shins, Damien Jurado), and leaving a lot of space for fiery joy on the record. The album feels the way that first performance felt, and I think that’s why people responded to the Tonight Show appearance as they did. It is irresistible.
“Howling At The Moon” is the track I can’t take off repeat these late summer days, because it just feels so damn good. The record also has the very best cover that I’ve seen in a long time. Perfect / badass / if it wasn’t Nathaniel, it’d be creepy. Buy the album tomorrow, and remember how great they’ve been all along: Trying So Hard Not To Know (demo)
[from the Fuel/Friends Summer 2013 retro boogie mix]
Michael Hann at The Guardian nailed it in his terrific long piece on the band: “For now though, this is the stuff that’s reminding me how much joy music can offer. These are the shows at which I’m feeling unselfconscious and ready to cut loose. These are the shows played by people who sound like they’re making music because it’s bursting out of them. And sometimes that, rather than something that confronts the desperate heart of modern life, is what the soul craves.”
Hey, PSSSST Denver! You have two very special chances to see Nathaniel Rateliff in small South Broadway venues, to celebrate the release of this terrific album!
Monday, August 24 – where so much of it began, The Hi-Dive. Doors @ 7pm, 21+ Wednesday, August 26 – the superb Syntax Physic Opera. Doors @ 8pm, 21+
Both shows will benefit Denver’s Youth On Record music center, and since these are pretty small venues, the tickets will sell out quickly. They go on-sale in a few hours here on Nathaniel’s website.
Saturday, August 29 – come dance with me and Nathaniel (it’s all in the hips) at the Belly Up in Aspen.
Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats are in the middle of a massive tour all around the U.S. and Europe, from now until almost the end of 2015. Chances are good that they’ll be somewhere near you; chances are great that you will be flush-cheeked ecstatic if you go.
Back on a good day in 2008, I sat under a hot tent in Golden Gate Park at the Outside Lands festival and talked with burgeoning talent Grace Potter; she was fiery and fascinating and we walked away having articulated that we totally could’ve been friends if we lived in the same place. In that interview she said things like, “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.” Amen.
So, if we want to talk about speaking from her soul and owning her element in the extreme — ho-ly shit, I have rarely been so (oddly) proud of someone I barely met (but really was impressed with) than I was watching this recent concert video.
I’ve been pinging around a couple European countries for these last few weeks that I’d never been to before, across five borders and three currencies and at least five languages, with plenty of time to think. Trains are good for thinking, aren’t they? I’d missed the steady mechanical whoosh and the panorama of a thousand possible lives rolling outside the window.
The night I got home, I discovered this song from Ireland’s Villagers. Play count says I listened 22 times.
Not only does every lyric, every hard sentiment of this song sound like something I’ve thought (or wish I had the poeticism and clarity to think) in the last week–the video might be in the running for one of my favorite Blogotheque Take-Away Shows (which is a competitive landscape). This video is the perfect vehicle, the way it starts so sweetly and a bit restrained, pausing in the doorway of the simple empty chapel, and then a raising voice as Conor O’Brien moves into the reverberating center.
When you feel that fullness, you just know. I recognize the fondness behind his eyes as he sings about these memories. There are so many things reverberating in me, too, when I listen to this perfect summation of a song, but I’m weary of laying myself bare, or trying to do it without giving away too much.
So I’ll just beg you to listen. Maybe 22 times, if it grabs you too.
So you thank me for my hard work
but you’ve had it up to there
’cause this shouldn’t be hard work
but I’ll fight to care if you’d care to fight
Thank you for your hard work
but I’ve had it up to here
’cause this shouldn’t be hard work
least not the kind that makes us half a person, half a monster
stuck together in this hot scary summer
oh Lord
Remember kissing on the cobblestones in the heat of the night
and all the pretty young homophobes looking out for a fight
We got good at pretending, then pretending got us good
we’ve always been up against it but now it’s sad to see
we’re up against each other
in this hot scary summer
oh Lord
Ohh I live inside you and you live in me
and I live inside you and you live in me
Nothing’s gonna change that dear nothing’s gonna change that dear
not even being apart
we travelled right to the heart
of this hot scary summer
Oh, where do I start with this one? Gregory Alan Isakov has grown over the last decade from a soft-spoken friend that I would see playing his winsome, warm songs at dozens of small shows, into one of Colorado’s genuine state treasures. I have a collection of little cardboard-sleeved, hand-stamped EPs and early recordings from Gregory (“all songs written by me and recorded to 8-track on a thursday morning in my room, Boulder, CO“) dating back to 2003.
Now’s he’s at Red Rocks with the symphony, having his most recent (magnificent and charming) music video debuted by NPR’s Bob Boilen, with Rolling Stone calling him the “Best Subtle Storm.” Perfect.
One thing I have always loved about Gregory and his music since the first time I heard it is the hint of sly joy that underlies everything he seems to sing. I almost feel like I can feel a shy, candescent smile just waiting at the corner of his lips.
He writes rambling songs that really stab at a certain heart of foolish beauty that exists all the time in the world around us, but that I am often too hurried to see, much less to give it the attention it deserves. He weaves words together into perceptive lyrics that I can’t get enough of, songs that skiffle and flicker as they grow slowly.
In this session, Gregory and his band performed three songs from their latest (2013) album The Weatherman, and one stunningly jaw-dropping cover of one of my favorite songs ever written. So, you know. That was alright.
FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION #34:
GREGORY ALAN ISAKOV January 9, 2014
Shove Chapel, Colorado Springs, CO
Suitcase Full Of Sparks
This song speaks directly to the always-gnawing wanderlust that sometimes hides under the ashes in me, but that is always ready to be stoked by this wide, wild world around us. It makes me want to do nothing more than head off onto a roadtrip — anywhere that promises campfires, or even better, an ocean. Gregory’s wanderings here are trying to find their way to someone, but I find the song works just as well for me if we think that the someone we are rambling everywhere trying to find is ourselves.
Saint Valentine
A song for mostly-misremembered Roman saints, and also for banjo-plucking dancing around in the pouring rain. Also notable in this song is the great delight I get from such an old-timey sounding folk song that contains the line “while the girls in the glass, they’re just throwing me shade.” Aw, Gregory.
The Universe
the Universe, she’s wounded
but she’s still got infinity ahead of her
she’s still got you and me
and everybody says that she’s beautiful…
JESUS. Here’s to that.
The Trapeze Swinger (Iron & Wine)
Welp. I sat in stunned silence when Gregory suggested this song as his cover. The original is one of my top five songs ever — this baffling, beautiful, confused, peaceful elegy that feels like it never started and will never end. I wrote about this song once five years ago; I might have been a little drunk when I wrote it, but I said (and I still believe):
I remember a book from when I was about ten years old, something like A Wrinkle In Time or one of those fascinating imaginative visions of other worlds and things unseen. My brain stretches hard to recall a passage about tapping into a current of singing that existed outside of normal time, these pulsing jetstreams of melody and poetry and all the human longing – timeless and universal. Always there. Not always heard.
When I listen to “The Trapeze Swinger” by Iron & Wine, that’s the closest I can come to expressing its perfection. It sounds like waking from a dream on your front porch in the late afternoon in springtime — or maybe not waking at all, but being suspended. Somewhere where, for once, you can hear the currents. “Please remember me, happily, by the rosebush laughing, with bruises on my chin….” the song begins, all golden beauty and purplish contusions from the first lines.
Gregory does 100% justice to the original, in the noble hesitation, in the smiles around the edges of his voice, and with the gorgeous golden guitar solo in the middle. Man, oh man.
Also, just announced: Fuel/Friends is pleased to be presenting Gregory’s March 1 Colorado Springs show at Stargazers Theater! Ticket info here.
[Audio recording and production by my beloved Bourgal brothers of Blank Tape Records, and photography/video by the fabulous Kevin Ihle, who nearly died a thousand deaths of joy photographing this session. Thanks to Blue Microphones for the terrific consideration in giving us some sweet mics to capture this magic.]
I have always said that Alex Dezen, of the beloved Brooklyn band The Damnwells, has a romantic voice.
I don’t mean that in the way we picture Valentine’s Day cards or the airbrushed bodices on paperback romance novellas. By “romantic” I am alluding to the artistic movement that wished to remove us all back to nature, to crack through the dust on our Mannerist hearts. I hear the febrile brushstrokes of light and lightning in a Turner landscape, or the kind of voice that can carry one off to war, or the high plains, or to sea.
Strong words: yep. But this is an exceptionally strong and expressive voice. One listen to these chapel sessions will introduce you, perhaps, to a voice that does the same for you. After so many years of being a fan of his songs, it was a genuine delight to have his voice fill and echo in that chapel space.
He gave us two of his newer solo songs, an old (gorgeous) gospel-tinged Damnwells tune, and a cover from one of my favorite soul artists of all time. If you want to hear more, Alex has put out a series of four intimate (Bedhead) EPs this past year, and all are worth delving deeply into. The fifth Damnwells LP is due in April 2015 on Rock Ridge Music.
FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION #33:
ALEX DEZEN (of The Damnwells) Shove Chapel, Colorado Springs, CO
November 22, 2013
I’m not sure if this is a song about divorce, but it sure sounds like one to me. What a bittersweetly beautiful song, so simple and conflicted:
I don’t expect you to and
I don’t need you to and
I don’t wish you would
I just wish you could
I just want to sleep
While the sorrow’s cheap
But I think I hear your keys
The cover art of Dezen’s four recent acoustic EPs show him sleeping peacefully under different bedspreads, face showing no discontent. But this song sounds like the complicated bad dreams that leave us tangled up in sheets, unsure how to find our way out.
God, I love this song.
I love the whole record it comes from, 2006’s Air Stereo. I tell you guys every now and then that this is a sleeper record you might have missed, but it is never too late. As fully-fleshed out as this song sounds even with just Alex’s voice and a guitar in a chapel, the album version has shimmering, resonant Memphis horns and backing vocals (that I add here every time I listen to this chapel version).
I can’t think of a better song for a classically romantic voice to wail on than this one. This is the second time someone has said, “I was thinking of covering Otis Redding?” in my chapel, and the second time I have blissfully said “OKAY.”
[Audio recording and production by my beloved Bourgal brothers of Blank Tape Records, and photography/video by the fabulous Kevin Ihle. Thanks to Blue Microphones for the terrific consideration in giving us some sweet mics to capture this magic.]
Even though we’re just about as firmly in the center of the dead-cold dark of winter as we can get these days, there will always be something inherently late-summery about the music of Small Houses (Jeremy Quentin) for me. I hear a redolence of ending or closing, the reels of the season playing back slowly-flickering in glowing (but fading) color. Jeremy writes beautiful songs, it’s as simple as that – I think he has the heart of a poet, and words matter to this guy. It works out with us because they matter to me, too, and he can string together a song unlike many people I know. Vulnerable, memorable, potent.
There is a cast of humans that a listener gets woven into as you know his songs: Karen, Jesse, Sarah. It’s a bit like piecing together the chatter on an old party-line phone call on a summer night, in a town you’ve never visited. It reminds me of Springsteen’s Mary, never sure how much she is a real person and how much she is a metaphor for something else, for a summation of things. (update: mystery cracked in this Paste Magazine feature on Jeremy and his songwriting, “The Best Of What’s Next“!).
Exactly Where You Wanted To Be was one of my favorites of 2013 (and I still listen to it often). Jeremy’s new album Still Talk; Second City is coming on February 10th, 2015 via The Cottage Recording Co and I can’t wait for you all to hear it. Three of these four songs in the chapel session are from the new album, which was recorded last year in an Atlanta cottage — and the first time Jeremy’s been off the road for a while. Recently another new album track “Staggers and Rise” premiered as well with a great, road-worn video to go with it.
He’s currently holed up in Denver for a long minute (you may have seen him onstage with Nathaniel Rateliff and Ark Life last weekend doing that insanely raucous cover of “Caravan”?). All my Colorado readers should please come see him with me on February 7 for the album release show at Ubisububi Room because that space is terrific and the show is going to be the best thing.
FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION #32: SMALL HOUSES
August 11, 2013
Shove Chapel, Colorado Springs
This song was blatantly my first request, because it is heart-stoppingly gorgeous, especially that pause and the bridge right at the two-minute mark that has wooed me since the first time I heard this song — it brings tears to my eyes every single time I hear it. I can’t even really articulate why, except for that it feels like a reflex, like your knee kicking when the doc whaps it with a rubbery mallet.
There’s something sad in this song that surpasses the cognitive parts of my brain. To watch him do this on that piano alone in the chapel space… man.
“Old Habits” was the first song that Jeremy recorded for the new record, at the cottage by the quarry in Atlanta where he would go on to record the whole album. He settled down for a first time in a while to make the new album, and said in the Paste piece: “Changing your standard of living often kind of opens you up to new things often. Get a house, live in it, love it, feel stability, and the next week, kind of find whatever you need to find to have the courage to just give up everything you have.” I hear that vulnerability in all these songs.
This song always sounds like the soundtrack to a memory — watching an old Polaroid develop, the images rise and solidify. Like every road we were ever on was a summer road.
The closing song on the new record, this cover was written by Jeremy RR (Robert-Raymond). “Her hair’s the color of a dirt road, and one that bears her name / her eyes the color of a riverbed / though I miss them all the same.” Something so sweetly timeless rests inside this song, this song about leaving.
It was such a joy having Jeremy in the chapel, and knowing this wonderful human. Go see him this winter when he comes to your town for the new album.
SMALL HOUSES 2015 TOUR DATES
Jan. 7 – Goldstein’s Mortuary and Delicatessen – Fresno, CA*
Jan. 8 – Pappy and Harriets – Pioneertown, CA*
Jan. 9 – The Mint – Los Angeles, CA*
Jan. 10 – The Partisan – Merced, CA*
Jan. 13 – House Concert – Berkeley, CA*
Jan. 14 – Hotel Utah – San Francisco, CA*
Jan. 15 – The Crepe Place – Santa Cruz, CA*
Jan. 16 – Yosemite Bug Resort and Hostel – Mariposa, CA*
Jan. 17 – Don Quixote’s International Music Hall – Felton, CA*
Jan. 21 – Volcanic Theatre – Bend, OR*
Jan. 22 – Axe and Fiddle – Cottage Grove, OR*
Jan. 23 – Sam Bond’s Garage – Eugene, OR*
Jan. 24 – Fluff and Gravy Headquarters – Portland, OR*
Jan. 25 through 31 – Al’s Den residency – Portland, OR
Feb. 5 – TBA – Olympia, WA
Feb. 6 – Skylark Lounge – Seattle, WA
Feb. 7 – Ubisububi Room (Album Release Show) – Denver, CO
Feb. 8 – O’Leaver’s – Omaha, NE
Feb. 9 – Total Drag – Sioux Falls, SD
Feb. 10 – Nicollet – Minneapolis, MN
Feb. 11 – High Noon Saloon – Madison, WI
Feb. 12 – House Concerts – Iowa City, IA
Feb. 13 – The Rozz-Tox – Rock Island, IL
Feb. 14 – Mike and Molly’s – Champaign, IL
Feb. 15 – Red Barn – Peoria, IL
Feb. 16 – Schuba’s – Chicago, IL
Feb. 18 – The Fix – Bay City, MI
Feb. 19 – Holy Oak – Toronto, ON
Feb. 21 – Dreamland – Buffalo, NY
Feb. 22 – The Bug Jar – Rochester, NY
Feb. 25 – TBA – Montreal, QC
Feb. 26 – Monkey House – Winooski, VT (Burlington)
Feb. 28 – Union Hall – New York City, NY
March 1 – Ortlieb’s Lounge (Album release) – Philadelphia, PA
March 5 – Jammin Java – Vienna, VA
March 6 – Pink Warehouse – Charlottesville, VA
March 7 – Blue Plate Special – Knoxville, TN (early show)
March 7 – The Music Room – Atlanta, GA (late show)
March 12 – Shack Up Inn – Clarksdale, MS
March 13 – The Beatnik – New Orleans, LA
March 17 through 22 – SXSW 2015 – Austin, TX
March 28 – Spacebar – Columbus, OH
[Audio recording and production by my beloved Bourgal brothers of Blank Tape Records, and photography/video by the fabulous Kevin Ihle. Thanks to Blue Microphones for the terrific consideration in giving us some sweet mics to capture this magic.]
As if the original version of “Carry Me Home” from Hey Rosetta! wasn’t already one of the best new Christmas-song standards written in the last few years, Tim Baker has to go and sing it with a whole choir of folks. All my seasonal soft spots, stimulated.
I first posted the original in my 2012 Christmas mix, which is still up for the downloading (along with all past years’ mixes). No new Christmas mix this year (I know, I miss it too), but that handful of Chapel Session stocking stuffers starts tomorrow, with Small Houses!
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.
DOWNLOAD THE ZIP: WIDOWER CHAPEL SESSION
Name: Heather Browne
