the world is such a wonderful place: Band of Horses concert review

There is something exceedingly uplifting and near-transcendent about a Band of Horses show, especially if you can wedge yourself down in the front where the waves of sound crash over you and your feet vibrate throughout the entire show from the bass.

After Kings of Leon canceled the tour where BOH was opening, dates were rescheduled with just the Seattle quintet in smaller venues. I found myself grateful to get to see them in that dark, small Fox Theatre on Monday night instead of the Comfort Dental Amphitheatre or wherever they were scheduled to play before.

It’s been years since I have seen BOH live, and since then they’ve released the newest album, Infinite Arms, and further perfected their excoriating live show. It was a holistic music-enjoyment experience for me, as they project an endless stream of images on the large screen behind them throughout the night.

My brain soared all over the place, as the images of wheatfields and old barns and crowded parties and starry nights swirled and spun into their songs. I loved the way the show tied together the visual with the auditory, because that’s how I hear music. This was especially potent on “Ode to LRC” where the crowd sang along with the line, “The world is such a wonderful place,” as scenes flashed rapid-fire behind the band, or as “Is There a Ghost” was sung in front of stars and a crescent moon. Yes.

Their songs are all universally bigger on-stage, with a greater energy; I found it to be way more Neil Young/expansive-70s-country-rock than I expected. Every song was dazzling, and even the loping dreamy ones on the records took on an urgent, dynamic air.

It’s also clear from watching this band that they all genuinely like each other, and that chemistry crackles back and forth between their music while they are on-stage. This was especially apparent during the encore performance of “Evening Kitchen” (one of my favorite songs on the new album), performed with just Ben Bridwell and guitarist Tyler Ramsey, who wrote the song.

The evening was one of those rare concert experiences where everything comes a little unsewn inside you, and for two blissful hours you are redeemed.

Also: a note about the opener. After recording a Chapel Session with me on Saturday afternoon, BOH guitarist Tyler Ramsey opened the show with his intricately haunting solo material. Watching his fingers fly over the strings again was spell-binding. His new solo album The Valley Wind comes out on Fat Possum later this month, and I can’t wait to share that chapel session with you guys.

ALL PICS ON THE FUEL/FRIENDS FACEBOOK.

win tickets for Gillian Welch. win tickets for David Bazan.

In addition to Band of Horses tonight, Coloradans are blessed this week with a rash of fantastic shows. But this is a rash that you actually want — on Tuesday and Wednesday night, Gillian Welch is bringing her awe-inducing musical talents to Boulder and Arvada (holy heck have you heard that new album?), while David Bazan (of Pedro The Lion) is coming back through for another one of those incredible house shows, this time in Fort Collins and not leaving emotional carnage strewn about my living room.

I have a pair of tickets to give away both to Gillian Welch on Wednesday night at the Arvada Center and to David Bazan on Wednesday at a house in Fort Collins. Both will slay you, so pick just one.

WIN WITH WORDS: Today I am reeling from lack of sleep in lieu of many words shared for many hours last night, so let’s do a wordy type contest here. Sit and think a spell, then in the comments you tell me which pair of tickets you would like to enter for, and then pick your favorite lyrics from that artist and tell me about them, and why they are your favorites.

Sounds easy enough? I’ll pick winners tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon. Go.

don’t keep me like you have me / and don’t kiss me like you don’t

Most nights for the last few weeks, I have fallen asleep listening to this song on giant headphones. “New York” is the closing track on the new Blind Pilot album, and it couldn’t be more somnolent, redolent, or perfect.

Stream the entire new album We Are The Tide over on NPR for a limited time. My heart is glad.

the golden age & the silver girl

Well, this was visceral love at first listen this morning. Tyler Lyle is from Georgia (like my people) and now lives by the ocean in California. I clicked on this song simply because of my affinity for the title and the cover art, and as soon as the music cued up, wow it’s perfect for this Indian summer we’re having. I am completely smitten with the entire album: $6, happily gone.

[via my favorite Some Velvet Blog; if you visit Tyler’s bandcamp site, read those liner notes y’all]

Fuel/Friends Chapel Session #6 :: The Changing Colors

There is a sweet intuition in watching brothers playing or sisters singing together. Some of that familial DNA seems to weave its way through the verses, the octave changes and the rhythm shifts. When my sister and I sing together, it’s like singing with myself but in stereo. Watching Colorado Springs’ Conor and Ian Bourgal of The Changing Colors play together, it’s as if one person splintered into two – a river of fraternal goodness.

I’ve come to know Conor and Ian as some of the finest purveyors of good music in Colorado Springs — our town known for many things but not necessarily that. Originally from New York, this twin superpower finesses the audio behind both my chapel sessions and for local label Blank Tape Records (Haunted Windchimes, Joe Johnson), but they also make beautiful music in their own right. I’ve been wanting to feature The Changing Colors in their own chapel session since the beginning, and finally got my chance on a recent Sunday, together with their cellist Aaron Fanning.

I hesitate to even use the word “autumn” in this still-summer context (don’t go, August, please, I’ll change, come back baby) but true to the innuendo established in their band name, these songs usher in a particular crimson and orange wistfulness, and whisper to us about the season that’s just right on ahead. When I first saw The Changing Colors perform live, I was grabbed by Conor’s husky, rough-hewn voice – try and not be reminded of Ray LaMontagne. You can’t. I’ve been listening to this session all day.

THE CHANGING COLORS
On The Side Of The Light
I’m Going Away
Take Care Of All My Children (Tom Waits)

ZIP: THE CHANGING COLORS – CHAPEL SESSION

The final song is a Tom Waits cover from the “Bawlers” disc of 2006′s Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards collection, and sounded pretty much perfect in a church. And after you enjoy that sweet, sweet slide guitar in “On The Side of the Light,” listen for the perfect timing of the church bells that started singing above our heads with Conor’s final guitar strum. We always try to time the recording in the fifteen-minute windows between chimes and this time our calculations were off, but also wonderfully so. I hope the Bourgal brothers never go back to their native New York; heaven knows our city needs them here.

there has to be a reason

So then Ryan Adams was all, “hey you guys should listen to this,” and I was all, “hell yes.”

There Has To Be A Reason – Pete Roe

[from LocationMusic.tv]

Pete Roe is from London and was playing some dates supporting my friend, Nathaniel Rateliff from Denver. He has one album and one EP out, and is currently working on new material. He is a part of Ben Lovett’s Communion Records label. This is a pure, glittering gem of a song.

let it clutter up your life / the way you cluttered up mine

I was first introduced to Dolorean in 2008 through a song of theirs called “Heather Remind Me How This Ends” that I used to bookend one of the saddest, most bleeding-heart mix CDs I’ve ever made.

Here’s a free relationship tip: Don’t do that.

Not to be confused with the danceable Spanish band from Ibiza named after 1985′s most bitchin time machine, Dolorean is from Portland, has at times served as Damien Jurado’s backing band, and released four records in their own right. I keep track of which band is which by remembering the Spanish word for sadness, dolor, and then listening to the record — and all things flow accordingly.

Out now on Partisan Records, The Unfazed is not a sad record, per se, but it is deeply wistful and bittersweet, and in that richness there is a healthy wash of beauty. Man, listen to this:

Country Clutter – Dolorean

It is a complex, richly gorgeous album of melancholy and ache. Al James’s voice soars with a vulnerable, incisive timbre that cuts right into me. I’ve played it on the stereo for friends when they come over, and the comments I get are often equal parts Ryan Adams/Heartbreaker and Blind Pilot’s smoky, multi-hued, string-laden beauty. This is a marvelous record, front to back.

Just like the album cover marries “high art” with the impassioned graffiti scrawls of our most base desires, this is an album of knowing better, but doing anyways:

I give you tumbleweed nights / I know it ain’t right
to pass through your sheets as I please
It’s just a life of excuse / when you don’t have to choose
the direction, the speed, or the breeze

Even fools have needs.

[from the song "Fools Gold Ring"]

I agree with the Willamette Week review that called 2007′s You Can’t Win “one of the best albums to ever come out of [Portland],” and the new record gives that a fair run for its money. I foresee this being one of my favorite albums of the year.

A Wilco birthday.

I got one of the best birthday presents ever the other night, when I dug through some packing peanuts to pull out the 7″ clear, first-pressing vinyl single of the new Wilco song “I Might” b/w a cover of Nick Lowe’s “I Love My Label,” in a special Solid Sound Festival edition. My dear friend Dainon, who covered the fest for me, sent it on over. “I Might” is muscular and crunchy pop, like no one does quite as well as Wilco. Since we can’t all gather ’round my record player (boo), I wanted to make sure you’d heard the sweet melody of the b-side especially — a charming way to honor the founding of the new Wilco label, dBpm Records.

I Love My Label (Nick Lowe cover) – Wilco

The new Wilco album The Whole Love comes out in one month (9/27), and you can listen to a rad assemblage of preview tracks over at The Wounded Jukebox. Cannot wait.

[Wilco photo by Zoran Orlic]

i know we too are made of all the things that we have lost here

Day After Tomorrow (Tom Waits) – Grand Hallway

In the last few days, I’ve put this song on repeat and just steeped myself in it over and over. Tomo Nakayama of Grand Hallway has a haunting, spectral voice here (reminds me of Thom Yorke) as he covers one of Tom Waits’ saddest sad songs. I very nearly lost someone I love last weekend, and have been reminded this week how incredibly tenuous this life is. You might go ferociously hug someone you love today, and tell them what they mean to you. Just a thought.

Tell me, how does God choose
whose prayers does he refuse
who turns the wheel, who throws the dice
on the day after tomorrow

And the summer, it too will fade
and with it brings the winter’s frost, dear
and I know we too are made
of all the things that we have lost here

This video was recorded a year ago as part of their Sound on The Sound Session. The second song in this video (“I hear music from the next room…”) is called “Roscoe (What A Gift),” and it is the closing track from the new Grand Hallway record. It’s also one of my favorite songs on there.

Winter Creatures is out now, and it is sparkling, and GORGEOUS.

magic will do what magic does :: the 2011 Doe Bay Fest

My friend Nick Hornby once wrote something very true and marvelous about a central challenge of human-ness: “Keeping in touch with the things that help us feel alive – music, books, movies, even the theatre, if, mysteriously, you are that way inclined – becomes a battle, and one that many of us lose, as we get older.”

We won that battle this past weekend, all weekend long, at the Doe Bay Fest 2011: The Full Moon Festival. With a few hundred other folks for 4 days on Orcas Island in the San Juans, I felt deeply, vibrantly alive. It was like summer camp for adults (and many kiddos) who wanted to touch that thrumming coil of deep goodness that crackles and bursts in live music, if you know where to look and are ready to be stunned by what you find.

Cloudy Shoes – Damien Jurado

I found music around every bend in the road. I ascended a dirt trail at midnight and found Damien Jurado and John Vanderslice playing to a silent circle of folks lit only by the flickering fire of tiki torches. I ducked into a humid nighttime yoga studio and found myself linking arms with Kelli Schaefer and her band and The Head and The Heart, singing a rousing golden version of “Stand By Me.” I wandered through an alder grove to a black-pebbled beach under a full rising moon and watched Ravenna Woods pound out a primal set that made all my blood course hot and pure. I sang a gospel chorus of assurance (“know it’s gonna be alright”) on a crisp Saturday morning on a rocky bluff with Elk & Boar and a crowd of hundreds. I walked away saying, “Did that really happen?!”

I got no problem with massive, whirling, impressive music festivals in all shapes and sizes. I have partaken in my fair share. But the difference here was something quieter and more profound.

As my friends and I looked past the sea spray of the wake left by our ferry as we departed Doe Bay, I think we all felt transformed by music. That is not a common universal sentiment, I find, at many music festivals. I think Doe Bay Fest is onto something here, now in its fourth year as a very organic, do-it-yourself community of musicians and music-lovers, getting together to create something beautiful in this world that is all too often hard and cold.

I think we should be finding and creating and pouring ourselves into hundreds of petite music festivals all over the world that feel like this one. As we challenge the norm, maybe there’s something in there that will save us.

Some new discoveries of Doe Bay 2011:
- Sera Cahoone
- Fly Moon Royalty
- Sean Flinn & the Royal We
- Elk & Boar (“all our hearts just look a bloody mess / they keep us alive, and beat us half to death tonight / but I know we’re gonna be alright“)

Favorite moments?
- Pickwick because holyshit
- “Find Me In The Air” with The Builders & The Butchers down amidst the crowd with everyone singing along
- That time I sang my first open mic ever, with Josiah from The Head and The Heart (I am now legit)

The thing I am most sorry I missed:
- Lemolo at the yoga studio (“She sees the world the way she wants…” singalong)

FOR THE EYES: My pictures are over on the Fuel/Friends Facebook Page. The stunningly gorgeous pictures (that capture all the little things of the festival far better than I had patience for) of Sarah Jurado are here.

Only 12 months to go ’til the next one.

Doe Bay Doe Bay!