I am bringing Typhoon and Motopony to our neighboring hippie hamlet of Manitou Springs, to an art gallery the week after next! This show is guaranteed to be incredible. As in, I personally guarantee it 100% or I will give you your money back (and shake my head slowly as I wonder what’s wrong with your ears). So excited! Tell your friends!
TYPHOON and Motopony
March 20th at 7pm (early show! school night!) Venue 515 in Manitou Springs, CO Tickets on-sale now at KRCC
Tyler is a 26 year-old songwriter originally from Carrollton, Georgia — although he has successfully expunged his accent (regrettably, says the Georgia blood in my veins). He was in town this weekend for a richly satisfying Fuel/Friends house show & chapel session, leaving the air in my neighborhood radiant with his songs.
“Winter Is For Kierkegaard” is a new one that we recorded Sunday morning while we were waiting outside Adam’s Mountain Cafe in Manitou Springs for brunch — because, you know — why not. I’ve probably watched this twenty+ times already, and am so in love with the phrasing, the intricate melody, the way his voice defiantly rises on the line, “and why not?!”
And yes, he was carrying a timeworn copy of Kierkegaard this weekend; I also believe the mandolin here from Thomas Lockwood might kill us all.
I have been raving about Tyler’s album The Golden Age and The Silver Girl since the very first moment I clicked play and heard the opening track. Tyler’s record was one of my favorites of 2011, and I was delighted to spin him on NPR’s World Cafe. But I am here to tell you that he is just getting even better, by leaps and bounds.
I don’t think he’ll be anonymous for long. He recently finished helping write songs for the new Court Yard Hounds record (2/3 of the Dixie Chicks) and he talked about what it was like for him to be in the presence of such talented musical greatness, how he once stopped everyone in the middle of a song just to shake his head and marvel a bit. Despite his nascent presence and clear-eyed youth, I often felt the same way this weekend — having to pinch myself at all this magnificent music that Tyler kept infusing our air with.
On Saturday night at my house concert, I was excited to realize that I didn’t know half the crowd, which is rare in Colorado Springs. There was an infusion of new people in our cozy little domestic music scene, which I interpreted as evidence that there is a buzz growing around Tyler Lyle through word-of-mouth. Even more incredible was when Tyler stumbled over the words to a fan-requested song that he hasn’t played live in a while, and a surge of voices from the crowd picked up right where he faltered. A good dozen of us sang along the rest of the words with him. I did not expect that.
Saturday afternoon I had left Tyler in my house for a few hours to enjoy some solitude, and he was working on writing songs. The crown jewel of the show that night was the first live performance of that same song: the only time it has been played all the way through, and before the ink was hardly even dry from the penning. With the marching cadence and the lyrics brimming with hope, this feels like a folk anthem already.
Right!?
Over and over again this weekend, people who heard the songs Tyler was singing turned to me in a quiet amazement: “This kid is going somewhere.” “Wow.” Yesterday I asked my friend Conor (who records all our chapel sessions) what he thought makes Tyler so special; Conor paused and with a hilarious glint in his eye, remarked: “I don’t know, man …it’s like he can rhyme ‘ramble’ with ‘gamble’ and somehow make you feel like he’s the first person who’s ever done that.”
I found Tyler to be thoughtful, deliberate and well-read, traits that seep out all throughout his music — in the lyrics, in the questions he raises, in the bold statements of hope. There isn’t any artifice in Tyler, and I am sure there are dozens of ways we could prod at him with our collective cynicism, for his lack of a defensive coating. But see, I’m built the same way. His music is imbued with the fiery-hearted purity and optimism of ’60s folk songwriters who see a better world and aren’t afraid to tell you that, unblinkingly. Anyone who can sing this purely, “But I have only love, and I’m convinced it is enough,” as Tyler does, is enough for me indeed.
Oh, and yeah — they ended the night like this, with some help from our engaging openers John Heart Jackie. Yep. What you can’t see is our sea of wide-smiley faces crowded around them, just beaming.
Last night I watched the Townes Van Zandt documentary Be Here To Love Me for the first time, after having it sit by my TV for far too many months now. After two bands coming through here in the last few days both put it on within minutes of arriving (and I was too busy flitting around to sit), I decided I needed to devote some time. I am so glad I did. My insides feel like they’ve been soaked in this vinegary sadness.
There’s a deeply affecting part of the movie where Townes’ voice is heard talking about a song he wants to write that’s just all about birds. He doesn’t sound to be in very good shape, although his spirits are high, and the thought of avian lightness seems to cheer him. “Let me tell you about the other one I’m gonna write; boy, my hand doesn’t work fast enough,” he tells his road manager. “There’s gonna be nothing, nothing in it but names of birds. It’s gonna start off with bluebird, and then something else, another bird, another bird, another bird …verse. Maybe a bridge. Nothing but birds.”
Then this morning, this Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy song came on my shuffle, out of the thousands. It sounded to me like Will Oldham did almost exactly what Townes wanted, what with his lyrics of robins, doves, lovebirds, bobwhite, whippoorwill, seagulls, and hawks. I can’t find any direct connection between the two, but in my mind, it is a perfect bookend. Or I’d like to think it is.
“When we hide our feelings we may as well fly away”
After watching the biopic, I also decided to do some research into Townes’ Colorado connections. I’m now soliciting partners in crime for a TVZ roadtrip.
In the last few days, we’ve gotten to record devastatingly rich Chapel Sessions with both The Head and The Heart (our first encore session) and Tyler Lyle. I have felt exceedingly blessed, and can’t wait to share them with you.
Josiah from The Head and The Heart stopped in the Louisville studios today of my friends at WFPK, and revealed a little more about our wonderful Friday afternoon together:
I’ve sat down to write this post about fifteen times and never quite get the words out right, because this song by Cataldo (Seattle’s Eric Anderson) is much more of an impressionistic short story than a song. Trying to write about my feelings for it is kind of like trying to tell someone about a dream, scratchy-voiced as the sun rises: it never comes out right.
It starts with only Eric’s words alone in a room for the first several lines, echoing as he tells us a fleshed out, highly personal dream. Unfolding in a town where everything’s been demolished, it is a story of seeing that person again, finding yourselves in that one house where you lived for the summer, and hesitantly playing a song together (you on an old piano, she on the violin that someone left). It’s that dream where — oh, we’re back in this room again? It’s the deep desire for reconstitution that tries to address those loose frayed ends that our hearts want to knit back together again, so much. Even if only in dreams.
This is my favorite song on the new Cataldo album, Prison Boxing, which some of you helped Kickstart, and is the second Cataldo album that’s been mixed by the intuitive Tucker Martine. It’s now streaming in full over on Bandcamp, along with the past two releases.
I had a dream last night
everything that happened, had happened
The air cracked in my throat, a dry highway through stubble fields
all the businesses were torn down, flat lots on the left and right
i wasn’t tired or thirsty
i felt almost home
Like probing a wound that we didn’t know was still healing, it’s a dreamworld that puts us back in those places and times we wish we could still inhabit with that person, in that way. It’s one where everything, wonderfully, makes no sense but in that freedom there is finally peace: a version of trust (with no future, no insight, and no guarantee).
We didn’t kiss (everything that happened had happened)
but we embraced
in a way I imagine we will someday
melting what years have hardened
I first listened to this song as I drove over the Continental Divide, through Colorado mountains in a verdant July. I texted Eric to thank him for writing this perfect song, with a perfect crescendo, and incisive truth that just gets me every single time. It keeps getting better, from where the piano comes in, to the achingly sweet violin piercing the song after “melting what years have hardened,” to when the mandolin delicately sings, like the rebirth of hope.
[a non-traditional photo, for an exceptional chapel session]
I mean no slight to the eminent photographability of the man behind this post, as I usually start all my Chapel writeups with a visual of our time spent beneath those Romanesque arches. But I came across this photo as I was marveling for the three-dozenth time at the songs that Eef Barzelay poured out for us that night, and it just fit, so flawlessly. The ossified yellowy shades of need, affection, accident, and habit — all cradled and balanced perfectly. For once. When you listen to this extraordinary chapel session, maybe it will make sense to you too.
Let’s set this straight from the beginning. Saying that Eef Barzelay (of the band Clem Snide) is a standard songwriter is akin to saying that David Foster Wallace uses a few moderately interesting vocabulary words in his books. Eef thrills me. Eef pens songs that flay me. There are just a select few songwriters in this world that feel as though they are thinking with my same brain. They say things that make me gasp with how stunningly they fit the neural pathways I have threaded together over my lifetime. Eef gets my brain, my ways of characterizing and explaining things, my heart.
One of the primary effects I am looking for in a song is for that minute where it takes me completely out of my head and away from my logic, and I feel something burning hot and bright – cut free from the crud of the world, and defying logical connection. Something feels like it will be okay, even if it is not okay.
I saw Eef Barzelay perform three times the weekend this chapel session was recorded. The first night was in the small Marmalade Art Gallery by the train tracks just south of downtown, where Eef played to a full small room of folks perched in folding chairs, under a flock of paper cranes swinging in flight overhead. He introduced several of his short films assembled from “found footage” — primarily clips documenting slowed-down natural animal and human behavior, scored with his own original songs, layered with visual effects, and all coming to a gluey, sharp point.
Something in me cracked open during one of his films of a snake slowly eating a baby owl alive, soundtracked by a potent punch of an original song. In that four minutes there was a strange peace in the cessation of the fighting. As sad as it was (fuzzy baby animals!), it was utterly and completely brilliant, that song. There in my folding chair, I just leaked a steady, quiet, miniature river of tears for the next hour through the rest of his films and on through his live acoustic set with his bass ukulele. I couldn’t even exactly say precisely why, except that maybe I felt understood.
This is one of my favorite chapel sessions so far, because it is so densely loaded with stunners, and with truth. As Eef sings in another one of his songs, “No one gets through this life without making a mess.”
The quietude of the chapel naturally seems to extract the reverential, introspective songs from musicians. That evening was the perfect setting for Eef to introduce us to several songs all about a woman named Mary, from a forthcoming record, Songs For Mary. I don’t know who she is — a real person, an alias, or an abstract summation of femininity — but that is not important, because what we do know is that Eef pours the most beautifully honest truths out to her. Come.
EEF BARZELAY CHAPEL SESSION
SEPTEMBER 25, 2011
The Ballad of God’s Love
Man — right out of the gate, this song packs one of the biggest wallops of truth I have heard about any of our insides in a long time. Eef plainly sings, “And don’t, don’t be shy to look yourself dead in the eye / the emptiness you feel inside, well would you believe …but that’s where God’s love hides.” Paired with track 3, and you got yourself a pretty potent theology that I can get behind. I haven’t felt that in a long time.
Let Us Sail On
Eef described the late night that he wrote this song, in a Motel 6 off I-40 in Arkansas, listening to trucks rumble by outside at 3am. As the TV glowed soft and blue with music infomercials, Eef decided to pen his contribution to “yacht rock.” Despite the affinity that I think Christopher Cross might feel toward the idea, this one pierces much more deeply. Oh, how we diffused the light.
History
Of the five, this is the song from the session I have listened to the most. It contains the absolute jaw-smack of a lyric: “Mary, history is never wrong / still it’s only to this moment we belong. So if your inner scaffolding feels frail / just remember God loves mostly those who fail.” The lines that follow those ones are also just as staggering. This song came on shuffle for me in November, when I was wandering the National Gallery in London alone at night. I love to wander alone at night in museums, soundtracking with songs that take on new meanings through the hybrid. Across the room, my eyes landed on a Michelangelo painting, an unfinished Michelangelo. It was the beginnings and the middles of his attempt to paint Christ’s entombment. In the lower right-hand corner, Mary was slated but missing. Like all of Michelangelo’s work, it spoke to me like seeing an old friend across the crowded room. I sat on a bench in front of that picture and thought for a long time about omissions, changes in directions, Mary, art, and what we call failure.
Fill Me With Your Light
The only already-released song from our session, this sweetly unnerving song is off of the 2005 Clem Snide record End of Love. I believe Eef said it was about a guy he used to work with at a record store in Boston who said he was being visited by aliens in his room at night, and that the song was about a different kind of dark.
All Good Hearts Go Astray
Another wide-open, penetrating song to Mary that confronts myriad failures (burning the barns that we’ve raised) with a simple plea for the forgiveness that we all, really, need so much. All good hearts go astray, sometimes. There is so much grace woven throughout this chapel session, the real, crushingly difficult kind. And for that I am grateful.
Red Baraat melds Indian dohl drumming with a nine-piece brass band, and whoa – that’s a whole lot of fun to pack into the NPR Tiny Desk space. They’re from Brooklyn and are playing the weekend I am in NYC. Count me in.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Sometimes an album pops in your mailbox at midnight on a Sunday when you stop into the harshly-lit post office, and you find yourself wishing there was anyone else in the building to excitedly bubble over to: “Sweet jesus, did you see who is on this record?!”
Advance warning of the incredible New Multitudes record escaped me until this weekend: a dream-team collaboration between Yim Yames (My Morning Jacket), Will Johnson (Centro-Matic), Jay Farrar (Uncle Tupelo/Son Volt), and Anders Parker. Right!?
I listened straightaway, late into that night, and my first thought was how much it reminded me of the rambling, haunting joy found in the Kerouac-sourced (and also California-focused) record that Farrar made with Ben Gibbard, and also of course of Wilco’s collaborations with Billy Bragg on the Mermaid Avenue records. This July would have been Woody’s 100th birthday, so the record was intended as part of the celebration of the immeasurable mark he left on American songwriting.
As she did to jumpstart Mermaid Avenue, Woody’s daughter Nora chose these four musicians to pore through more than 3,000 of her father’s unrecorded lyrics (many from his earliest songwriting days in Los Angeles), and use them as fodder to create new songs. After diving into boxes of diaries, notebook, handwritten scraps, typed and coffee-stained pages, Farrar decided to focus the songwriting on Woody’s California period. That sounds like an amenable decision to this California girl.
Stylistically, there’s all sorts of wonderful stuff happening on this record, but that lack of coherence adamantly doesn’t work to the album’s detriment. We’ve got the African-inspired/Graceland feel of Yim Yames’ “Changing World,” the slow-burn Texas desert sadness of Johnson’s “Careless Reckless Love” (always the hardest way to do it), or the bouyancy of Farrar’s “Hoping Machine” (reference #19 on this fantastic meme). There is an intuitive chemistry and threads of collaboration all throughout this record, regardless of who sings lead vocals, or who wrote the music.
“No Fear” sounds just like something you’d want to sing at the end of a Sunday southern church service, an old spiritual with all four of their voices rising. “Chorine My Sheba Queen” by Johnson will, I promise, break your heart (and the provenance story will make your pulse race a little).
I’m still absorbing this record, but so far it couldn’t be more fantastic.
LISTEN NOW: You can stream the entire record thanks to Conan, and order it immediately here. It’s out next week on Rounder Records; the bonus disc version will have 24 songs total, and the artwork is also by Woody.
THE “I’M TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET TO ONE OF THESE CITIES” MINI-TOUR
March 6 – The Fillmore – San Francisco, CA
March 7 – Music Box – Los Angeles, CA
March 9 – Crystal Ballroom – Portland, OR
March 10 – Showbox – Seattle, WA
March 12 – The Birchmere – Alexandria, VA
March 13 – Union Transfer – Philadelphia, PA
March 14 – Webster Hall – New York, NY
March 16 – Paradise – Boston, MA
PS: In Jay Farrar/Colorado news: Did you see that Son Volt is headlining the Meadowgrass Festival in Colorado Springs/Black Forest this Memorial Day Weekend? Damien Jurado last year, Son Volt this year — way to go organizers!
The wild, celestial scale of musical largesse has tipped off its fulcrum in my favor, and we are currently splashing around in a sparkly, melodic deluge of fantastic upcoming Fuel/Friends concerts that I am hosting in the coming weeks. I feel truly awed and thrilled; all four of these special headliners have been listed in my year-end tops lists before.
You’re invited to all four warm wonderful nights, or if you have friends in Colorado, please let them know. Whoever comes from the farthest will get a song dedication and a hug.
On their way to open for some Blind Pilot tour dates, Cataldo is stopping by my house to fill an evening with music. Eric Anderson crafts plaintive, thoughtful, catchy pop that I have been head-over-heels for since I first heard it. His bio tells you all you need to know, I think: “I want to make beautiful things using people and tools around me. I believe in circuitous, round-about methods, trying as hard as you can, and fucking up as much as is necessary before you get things right. I believe in counter-melodies, gang vocals, and the banjo. Most of all I believe in singing things that are important to me and might be important to you.”
Drew Grow is a name you’ve heard me talk a lot about, because I believe in their brand of potent musical gospel. DGPW performed at the very first house concert I did, and the four of them have become my good friends, because they have beautiful hearts that create impassioned music. Their songs are soulful, varied, and incendiary live.
I’m presenting their Friday night show at Moe’s BBQ, before they head out for the month of March with The Head and The Heart; come stand underneath their torrent, feel and believe things, oh — and we can bowl and get BBQ. Nothing could go wrong with this plan.
From the first time I clicked play on a Tyler Lyle song, it was musical exhilaration, and I’ve only gotten deeper and deeper into this wonderful record. His debut album was all recorded in one day, just before he moved away from Atlanta for good. Because of that, more than anything this album feels like one exceedingly honest and humble snapshot of a moment of change and loss, without artifice, in the best possible way.
After he plays San Francisco’s Noise Pop this weekend, and after his Daytrotter session recording, Tyler is stopping by to spend the evening with us (joined by Portland’s John Heart Jackie). I can’t wait to see this fresh new voice for myself.
This is a huge one, folks. Typhoon wowed everyone at SXSW last year, with their approximately three hundred members (okay, thirteen) and their heads-thrown-back jubilance and shimmery, multicolored songs.
After their Letterman appearance and before they head out to play some big summer festivals in 2012, I’ve set them up to play a cool art gallery in town for us, all bedecked in twinkly white lights and with a sound system that can do them justice. I am co-presenting this show with our local NPR affiliate/college radio station, KRCC, and we both love Typhoon’s cavalcade of instruments and voices, and the way it feels truly overwhelming. There’s some of the redemptive waves of orchestral joy and colossal thumping force that we find to love in Fanfarlo. When they all throw their heads back and sing “alleluia, it will be gone soon,” I get chills, every time.
I am also thrilled to get to see Seattle’s Motopony, who I hear off-kilter great things about.
TICKETS:on-sale now at the KRCC studios, and at Venue 515 in Manitou Springs for $10.
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.
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This is my favorite song on the new Cataldo album, 
PS: In Jay Farrar/Colorado news: Did you see that Son Volt is headlining the 
Next Wed., Feb 29 (LEAP DAY!): 
Next Friday, March 2: 
Next Saturday, March 3:
Tuesday, March 20:
Name: Heather Browne
