There’s something sorta obvious about using Christopher Columbus as a metaphor for pushing your life into new and exciting directions, despite that however, this song never comes off as hokey. It’s got fantastic guit work, a nice tight structure and Grace sings this as if she means every single word. That sultry voice and the twang in the opening verse and the way the song just explodes in the chorus and pulls itself back in for verse two. If more songs were like this one, the world would be a much more enjoyable place. It always impresses me when performers can take the basic strictures of song writing and craft something listenable, hummable, toe-tappin’ and not have it sound like anything resembling Michael McDonald or adult alternative.
One of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life is walk away from playing the trumpet. It was sophomore year of high school and after seven years of playing I just lost the passion for it. I don’t think it helped that I was a very ordinary trumpet player and the myriad of activities prevented me from putting in the time to be truly great. It also hurt that the school band always played classical music, the kind of music that can’t possibly excite a young teenager. So I quit and picked up the trumpet sporadically over the intervening years.
Saturday mornings in college were all about waking up from a hangover and football at Syracuse. For me though, the draw was always the marching band. Now that was the kind of music I wanted to play. Passionate, exciting, upbeat, boisterous and funky.
Every high school should be required to give their students in the band a copy of the March Fourth Marching Band. If they weren’t excited about playing music they certainly will after listening. And if you want to remember how much fun music can and should be, well you can’t do much better than this ginormous ensemble. Check it: 10 drummers, 12-piece horn section, one electric bass and 11 members who might best be described as the baton twirlers, dancers and whatnot.
Omit needless words, wrote the greatest writer of the past century. E.B. White could construct a sentence like no other. Every part of each sentence was essential, nothing was messy or out of place. If he were reading this, I’m sure he would have already made several corrections. Such is his genius.
John Vanderslice writes nothing like E.B. White, at least thematically, but his music feels as if everything about it is essential. When so many musicians write compositions that wander and feel structurally wobbly, Vanderslice is tight and well-heeled. There is nothing masturbatory about either E.B. White or John Vanderslice.
“Time to Go” is epic and clocks in at just 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Though it’s his shortest composition on the foreboding Emerald City, it’s by far one of his best. Every instrument is playing the same beat, the same melody, the same 1-2 rythme. Vanderslice’s voice just haunts the song, repeating in a manner the shear necessity of leaving and surviving a horrible situation. There’s something foreboding coming over the hill, but I don’t want to stick around to find out what.
See the video for the song over at MOKB, which was recorded as part of a blogging world tour. Essentially Vanderslice recorded every song from Emerald City live and sent them to various blogs. Kind of a cool idea.
This is perhaps my favorite rendition of one of my favorite songs. It’s pure and raw and emotional in a way that can only happen when performed by someone who’s seen some shit. Never has so much beauty come from just an acoustic guitar and a harp. Buddy Guy and Junior Wells pull something deep from inside them, bending the song and twisting it, taking it on tangents that Ray Charles could only dream of. Every note sounds as it’s a struggle, especially from Buddy Guy. If some interstellar alien were to ask me about American music, this might just be one of the songs I play for him, you don’t have to understand the words to understand what the guys are singing about.
This cut comes from the Live at Legends album and should be purchased here at Amazon. In fact you should purchase just about every collaboration available between these two. This concert marks the last live recording of these two legends playing together as Junior Wells died of lymphoma in January of 1998.
I’m not sure I buy the whole “freak folk” label placed on Devendra Banhart. I mean I guess I reluctantly do. In a way it’s an apt description, but really how do you label someone who clearly floats through life to their own ethereal frequency? Nowhere is the freak flag flying higher than on the songwriters latest album Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon. It’s, well, it’s a difficult album to process. Musical it is one of the more enjoyable and adventurous albums to be released this year, but it’s almost too difficult to take Banhart seriously.
The baggage of his personality, the adopted role of mystical shaman poet (not to be confused with Jim Morrison’s dark take on this same personality, his was merely rock star posturing, but to look at Banhart you have to wonder if he actually believes this is who he thinks he is or should be) almost outweighs the heights he soars here.
I say almost, because at the end of the day the music is all that matters. Lots of songs standout but we love the 70’s disco sunshiney dance funk of “Lover”(Mp3).
It takes you back to a mythological age of roller skates, bubblegum, eight tracks and that feeling of disposable good times. How could it not with lyrics like “I wanna be your cow / give ya all the milk around.” Still, that’s one damn groovy bass line and guitar hook. One of the best this year. It doesn’t get much better than the initial excitement of summertime love and wanting something so bad, looking from afar across the pool.
You can purchase Devendra Banhart’sSmokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon at Amazon.
Believe me, it’s worth it to own and listen to many many times. This is one album that sounds off-putting at first, but truly is a gem with repeat listens. Give it a shot if you can. Sonically gorgeous but lyrically goofy.
This isn’t even my favorite song on Portland songwriter Laura Veirs latest record. There are too many amazing one’s to choose from. I love the programmable beats in the first verse with the heavy guitar strumming before giving way to a gorgeous piano. Even Veirs’s voice sounds like it’s about to disappear as it wavers through the verses. The chorus: “don’t lose yourself/don’t let yourself be lost” could pretty much apply to anything even to the song itself. It doesn’t however, but we’ve all been to a place of questionable ethics or decisions. Like I said, this isn’t the most enjoyable song of her new record, but maybe it’s just the most important one.
Laura Veirs’s new record Saltbreakers(Nonesuch Records) will almost certainly be on my list of yearend albums. It’s just so accomplished and wonderful and full of unexpected delights and pleasures. It’s constructed like all great albums should be as it ebbs and flows through slow-tempo contemplative tracks and upbeat tempo rockers, it makes you enjoy life and think and feel in ways that only exceptional music can. Big kudos to her.
When it gets down to it, this song doesn’t make a lick of sense on a lyrical level. But it’s got this tropical, breezy disco vibe. Sand underneath toes, cocktails served in coconuts with umbrellas, women in skirts and bikini tops, men wearing cream colored suits and rose colored shirts, a reggae band playing just behind some dudes twirling fire. There’s a sense of urgency and carefreeness with which the narrator sings. If this song had come out six years ago it almost certainly would have been featured in a Pierce Brosnan tropical espionage or bank robbering flick, in which our hero wins over the girl by dancy the sexy dance with a half unbuttoned shirt on.
There is much to be said of the human condition more profoundly than I could.Lyrically this song isn’t profound with the gist being, “don’t stop, now, just keep on going until I come.”But it evokes those rare moments which exists between people, one of those fleeting moments of such ethereal beauty that is the crux of life.There is no greater high than the shared experience between random strangers, of being in that experience and not thinking beyond or behind it.Because, silliness aside, sometimes that’s all we’ve got and it happens so rarely. Not necessarily sex either, could be any moment.
Elsewhere: For those that care, Brazilian Girls are one of the best bands going. Their lives shows are a thing of amazement and lead singer Sabina Sciubba is an empirically beautiful human. I hate to be shallow but it’s true. I don’t know why I felt the need to point out the obvious. I guess it’s the John Madden in me.
This has everything a great song should have for a CW soundtrack: youthful energy, a propulsive rhythm, several “whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh-whoa-oh-oh’s,” and that great line “he’s not impressed.” It conveys a scenester ennui, both commenting on the rich kid slacker type and the iconoclast - apart of, yet detached from that scene. But who knows? When I hear this song I crank my speakers to 13, jumping up until exhaustion sets in and letting my balls hang out. Then sadness creeps in at the thought of this playing during a climactic showdown between Supes and Lex on Smallville. It’d be a hell of a showdown though, yeah?
By the by, if you are saying to yourself “young folks? What the hell is he talking about? Maybe this will help. It was featured in like seven Fall television premieres.
By James Furbush | September 28th, 2007 | 3:40 pm PDT
JJ Grey & Mofro - “Country Ghetto”(M4a) I spent about a month and half of my life living in Fort Myers, FL, building houses for Habitat for Humanity. It was all part of Americorps. Despite being November, most days were hot as balls gliding around tresses, putting up facia, banging plywood roofs. There isn’t much to do in Fort Myers except cruise around with the windows down. Streets end in waterways or trailer parks and alligators often times come right up to the property lines. Country ghetto indeed. About a year later, no lie, Erik Estrada was pimping the affordable houses I built on a late night television commercial. Mofro’s weird swamp rock meets Sly and the Family Stone grooves make me want to wear a wife beater and kick the crap out of Ponch.
By James Furbush | September 27th, 2007 | 3:28 pm PDT
Ace Frehley - “Back in a New York Groove” (Mp3) This song is pure stoop. Sitting on the front steps outside a brownstone, baking from the sun above and concrete below. Playing stick ball, drinking tallboys, crashing a shopping cart into telephone poles. Some people are just wired for the mania of a city — noise, congestion, ambling nowhere, getting into trouble, making the most with what you’ve got. I wasn’t around in the 70’s, but this song makes me wish I had been.
By James Furbush | September 26th, 2007 | 1:15 pm PDT
This is something new we’re trying out here in Oyster land. Not sure how the format is going to evolve… It may just be titled song of the day, regardless what we’re trying to do is write about any song that moves us, grooves us and just gets plain stuck in our brain.
They’ll be available to download for a bit, but chances are some of you may already have these songs. The idea is to be able to write about the music we love, in 75 words or less, not so much in a clinical sense [instruments used, song structure, lyrics, melody], but in an abstract sort of way. Old songs, new songs, pop songs, whatever. Some days there just isn’t any good music news out there but hopefully, this will keep our ears and writing chops sharp. And expose you dear reader to new tastes. We’re hoping this becomes recipricol, where you let us know the songs you’ve been listening to, and turn us onto new sounds.
The Hold Steady - “You Can Make Him Like You”(Mp3) Craig Finn writes about a lot of familiar characters - downtroddens, drunks, wanderers, emotionally trainwrecked teenagers - but never is that more identifiable then here. With lines as lazer sharp as “you can wear those sweatshirts and cover yourself like a bruise,” this track is about a fragile optimism. You can always find other friends, or other scenes to fit into when things get bad. In under three-minutes Craig Finn wraps you in warm blanket and lets you feel like everything is gonna be a-okay.
Also: Craig Finn was recently at Boston College for a sit down interview, in the style of Inside the Actors Studio. Basically, BC invites alumni back to talk about their art, etc. Didn’t know Finn went to Boston College, but it all makes so much more sense now that I know he went to the Jesuit institution.
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