change the things your heart desires

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.

Changing World – Yim Yames

“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!

Some pretty rad Fuel/Friends concerts coming up

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.

Next Wed., Feb 29 (LEAP DAY!): CATALDO HOUSE CONCERT

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.”

My Heart Is Calling/Following – Cataldo

Next Friday, March 2: DREW GROW AND THE PASTORS’ WIVES
(@ Moe’s BBQ, Fuel/Friends presents)

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.

SNAG THEIR CHAPEL SESSION

Bootstraps – Drew Grow & The Pastors’ Wives

Next Saturday, March 3:
TYLER LYLE HOUSE CONCERT
(with John Heart Jackie)

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.

The Golden Age & The Silver Girl – Tyler Lyle
When U Were Mine (Prince cover) – John Heart Jackie

Tuesday, March 20:
TYPHOON GALLERY CONCERT
(with Motopony)

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.

The Honest Truth – Typhoon
Seer – Motopony

Let’s listen to some good music, drink a good beer, and revel together.

and in your soul they poked a million holes: DeVotchKa with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra tonight

A handful of Colorado’s favorite sons (and daughter), DeVotchKa, took the stage tonight with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra for an immense evening of their mariachi-gypsy laced music made even bigger.

Tonight was an electric, flawless, intuitive pairing. Coupled with the ululating vibrato of Nick Urata, which is an instrument in itself, DeVotchKa writes complex, challenging songs that have been ripe for this sort of reinvention. Songs that are already brilliant to begin with shot into the sky tonight with a thousand colors.

It’s a brilliant phenomenon lately, some of my favorite musicians recording sessions with anything from small string quartets to the sixty-person symphony orchestra I saw tonight. As I sat damp-eyed during the final gorgeous explosion of “How It Ends,” I tried to put my finger on what exactly it is that these songs gain from going through the transformation from guy-on-a-guitar to full-blown-orchestra. Best I can articulate is that I feel like it has something to do with colors, and with size.

Hearing a pop musician play with a symphony makes their songs balloon into ten thousand gradations of hue where there once were five or six. It feels like a chorus of voices (instruments) all swelling with you to agree, yes, this is a terrific song and all eleven of us violins will speak with you on that — as will a half-dozen trumpets, and those plinky wood-box percussion things. It was deeply thrilling to hear these songs get so colossally huge, and tremendously more expressive. I found myself picturing stars coming out into the sky at night during “Dearly Departed” when all the string instruments began a complex plucking pattern, the song so immense that it transcended the hall we were in. It got at that effect I am always longing and looking for in music: an overpowering sense of the vast other, the cresting of the tidal wave, the moment when it knocks you down.

We don’t, as a young-people whole, go to see the Symphony much — at least, I know I don’t. I’m sure you’ve spent many times more money in the past year on live popular music than on the symphony or other forms of “high culture,” even the raddest former band-geeks among us. I wonder if more of these incredible pairings could help remind us all why we sometimes need to sit ourselves beneath the cerulean thunder of the waves of sound that sixty people can create.

I was also watching the joy radiating around the musicians in the symphony as they performed, and from the young ones to the rad ponytailed older dudes on percussion, there was a definite energy created by this merger of forces, and what it teased out of the crowd. I would absolutely love to see more nights like tonight; I think of recordings I cherish that have captured this sort of pairing (Augie March, Josh Ritter, Joe Pug) and then fantasize about ones that would probably kill me dead if I ever were to see them live with a symphony (The National, mostly). This is a good idea with only good effects, as we stretch our musical boundaries and conceptions.

Tonight left me breathless. Musicians, let’s do this again.

and if you return to me

One of my favorite songs off one of the albums I’ve listened to the most in the last year, this new cover of Damien Jurado’s “Beacon Hill” is suffused through the warmed-up, knowing rasp of Jon Russell (of The Head and The Heart). It’s been on constant repeat for me this week, since it was unveiled as part of an extremely cool mini-series of covers over on Andrew Matson’s music column in the Seattle Times.

Beacon Hill (Damien Jurado) – Jon Russell

Jon takes an icy, somber song that originally aches of that echoey sort of desperation, and infuses it with his own glowing embers. The harmonies of Brenna Carlson are enveloping, and perfect.

Beacon Hill – Damien Jurado

Get Saint Bartlett if you never did, and stream Damien’s entire new forthcoming record, Maraqopa, here. Highly recommended — is anyone else also hung up on “Life Away From The Garden” (in addition to “Working Titles,” of course) like I am?

Keep your ears tuned to Matson’s column for the Seattle Times (check out Pickwick’s!). I don’t know what covers are coming next, but they can’t help but be amazing if this is the magnetic songwriting fodder we have to work with.

UPDATE: JUST GET RIGHT ON OUT OF TOWN. Magic will do what magic does.

[photo by Marcelle Davidse]

classy girls don’t kiss in bars like this

Denver’s own Lumineers released a free EP this morning called Tracks From The Attic, nicely showcasing their floor-stomping, instrument-clanging, yell-out-loud goodness that first made me fall in love with them at this Denver house show in 2010.

Download the full EP now for the price of your email address (worth it): it includes this redone version of “Classy Girls,” originally from their old handmade self-released EP that we got back in the day.

Classy Girls (Lost EP version) – The Lumineers


If we recall, Paste Magazine also called them one of the best new bands of last year, and I am excited to hear their forthcoming debut record, out in April on Dualtone Records. You can also still snag my Chapel Session recording with them – so much visceral ebullience.

LUMINEERS “BIG PARADE” TOUR 2012
Fri-Mar-2 – Vail, CO @ Snowball Fest
Tue-Mar-13-18 – Austin, TX @ SXSW
Wed-Mar-21 – San Diego, CA @ The Casbah
Thu-Mar-22 – Los Angeles, CA @ Hotel Café
Sat-Mar-24 – San Francisco, CA @ Café Du Nord
Sun-Mar-25 – Santa Cruz, CA @ The Crepe Place
Thu-Mar-29 – Eugene, OR @ Axe & Fiddle
Fri-Mar-30 – Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios
Sat-Mar-31 – Seattle, WA @ Tractor Tavern
Sun-Apr-01 – Vancouver, BC @ Media Club
Wed-Apr-04 – Boise, ID @ Neurolux
Thu-Apr-05 – Salt Lake City, UT @ The State Room
Fri-Apr-06 – Bellvue, CO @ Misawaka Indoors
Mon-Apr-09 – Ames, IA @ The Maintenance Shop
Wed-Apr-11 – Minneapolis, MN @ 7th Street Entry
Thu-Apr-12 – Madison, WI @ The Frequency
Fri-Apr-13 – Chicago/Evanston, IL @ SPACE
Tue-Apr-17 – Burlington, VT @ Higher Ground Lounge
Wed-Apr-18 – Northampton, MA @ Iron Horse
Thu-Apr-19 – Fairfield, CT @ StageOne
Fri-Apr-20 – Berklee, MA @ Café 939
Sat-Apr-21 – Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg
Sun-Apr-22 – Vienna, VA @ Jammin’ Java
Tue-Apr-24 – Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brendas
Thu-Apr-26 – Chapel Hill, NC @ Local 506
Fri-Apr-27 – Nashville, TN @ The Basement
Sat-Apr-28 – St. Louis, MO @ Blueberry Hill
Sun-Apr-29 – Kansas City, MO @ The Riot Room
Fri-May-11 – Denver, CO @ Bluebird Theatre
Sun-May-20 – Gulf Shores, AL @ Hangout Fest
Sat-Jun-2 – Ozark, AR @ Wakarusa

i undressed someone’s daughter / then complained about her looks

I love the wrenching, tentative beauty in Joe Pug‘s hesitation.
(With a symphony orchestra a few weeks ago)

Freshly Hatched :: A Fuel/Friends Mix For New People

In January, the marvelous website couchsurfing.org brought us a terrific set of houseguests: a couple from the beaches of California asked to stay in my home while they came to Colorado to pick up the due-any-day baby that they had just been chosen to be the adoptive parents of. For two weeks we got to host them and their brand new little guy, all wide eyes and stretching fingers. It was, in a word, magnificent. We forget that they make people that little, that new. Light as air and just about perfect.

As I am wont to do, I made up a mix to send to them back in California (I take seriously my obligation to set the kiddo on the right musical path, since I was the first home he came back to), and thought that you probably know someone in your life who could appreciate it as well. It’s music that little kiddos can love, but also will not drive adults crazy in any way. I tried to throw in some foreign languages for the ole’ neuron connections, and (of course) paid special attention to the lyrics. You could even put it on with no kids around, if you wanted, and I wouldn’t tell. The last half is good for falling asleep to, whatever your age.

I also found myself gravitating towards a lot of self-reflective songs that celebrate and delve into the metamorphosis of welcoming new life into our communities – the breaking up of the earthen crust that hardens over our lives, not even realizing how dry we were until the new green shoot comes pushing up through the cracks. This is a mix about falling in love.

FRESHLY HATCHED: A FUEL/FRIENDS MIX FOR NEW PEOPLE
*the mix fits on one CD, meaning you now have the awesomest (no-cost) present to bring to the next baby shower you get invited to, or for your coworker/cousin/pal. You’re welcome.

The Littlest Birds – The Be Good Tanyas
Iwoya – Angélique Kidjo & Dave Matthews
Nothing I Can Do – Ben Taylor
Wrapped Up In You – Garth Brooks
Mushaboom – Feist
Mahna Mahna (Muppets) – Cake
Like A Star – Corinne Bailey Rae
Dream A Little Dream of Me – Mama Cass
The Rainbow Connection (Muppets) – Sarah McLachlan
When You Are Still (Live on WNRN) – David Wax Museum
This Moment (Victoria Williams) – Matthew Sweet
La Noyee – Carla Bruni
Out Of The Woods – Nickel Creek
Goodnight Moon – Will Kimbrough
Per Te – Jovanotti *my translation here
Didn’t Leave Nobody But The Baby – Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, & Gillian Welch
Godspeed (Sweet Dreams) – Dixie Chicks
Common Thread – Bobby McFerrin
The Sea & The Rhythm – Iron & WIne
Can’t Help Falling In Love (Elvis) – Eels

ZIP: FRESHLY HATCHED MIX

[wonderful artwork from Ryan Hollingsworth, who also has a great new February mix up on his site]

i don’t want love or conquered rome / just your voice and a sleeping pill

I was talking with a friend the other night about songwriting, and this is a great song: evocative, sad, plunging us right into the middle of the life on the road. That slide guitar feels like a train whistle in the dark, somehow, and the title of this post is a perfect lyric. I’ve been listening afresh to The Damnwells‘ 2006 album Air Stereo all day today, because there is never a Sunday afternoon that doesn’t sound better with that record reverberating off the walls.

Louisville – The Damnwells


Everyone should own this album.

[image via]

why spend your only life waiting

From the surprise new EP from Josh Ritter of “immediate” and “small” songs that he is excited to share; I am excited to receive.

“It’s always a fun process, and what you’re trying to do is balance the art form of the recording with the excitement of recording it. I think there’s a certain spark when something’s written and it rolls off the tongue easily, and you can always hear the person’s excitement when it’s happening.”
[Josh, via]

That’s one of the reasons that Josh is one of my favorite musicians. That spark of joy is palpable in the immediacy.

he asked me not to go so fast

Perhaps you, like many other late night denizens, saw Alabama Shakes nearly burn down Conan’s studios with their performance on last night’s show, and sat there on your couch shaking your head and saying “what the hell was that?!” Maybe you’ve caught them live on this tour (LUCKY), or watched some of their immensely dynamic videos online. One thing is, I believe, for certain. Alabama Shakes are a force of nature akin to a hurricane or a tidal wave, and they are conquering something serious.

A few weeks ago they played The Independent in San Francisco, and one of my fabulous readers (“B”) taped it and sent it to me in a simple padded envelope, as he often awesomely does. I was slack-jawed listening in the car on my next long drive up to Denver. Brittany Howard’s tremendous, ferocious wail of a voice is one that has the volcanic potential make a dent on this thing we call musical history.

Enjoy this magnificent show, from a band that is rightfully poised to explode. Their debut album Boys & Girls is out April 10th.

ALABAMA SHAKES
THE INDEPENDENT – SAN FRANCISCO (JAN 26, 2012)

Goin’ to the Party
Hold On
Hang Loose
I Found You
Always Alright
Boys & Girls
Be Mine
Rise to the Sun
Hurricane Strut
Mama
You Ain’t Alone
Heavy Chevy *possibly my favorite
Heat Lightning
I Ain’t the Same
On Your Way
How Many More Times (Led Zeppelin cover)

ZIP: ALABAMA SHAKES IN SF (1/26/12)

Also, pretty much all you need to know about why Brittany Howard is so rad can be heard when she introduces the band during “Hurricane Strut,” with none of their real names, but nevertheless their perfect names:

“Let me introduce you…to the 100% legit…Alabama Shakes. Right over here on this ebony guitar, I got Cobra Snake Jackson. Let him know you love him. This gentleman right here… why this is Mahogany T Jones. What’s up Mahogany. Right back here… you know I got Scooter Johnson. Awww Scooter… keep it on time, keep it on time. Right over here, aha… I got Styrofoam Jones. Let’em know what’s up Styrofoam. Ya know…that’s all there is to it.”

Damn straight.

[top image by Joseph Lanford, second photo (from that SF show) by Pam Torno. Thanks to Adam Sharp for helping me with clerical work - you're hired.]