Survival Mode

Sometimes coincidences are hard to ignore. This morning I heard from one of my best friends that he and his wife may be divorcing. It was a hard email to read because his family and ours, though we live a state apart, are close, and we've shared some great times together. The coincidence came when my teenage daughter came into the den singing "I Will Survive" just when I was just reading my friend's email. I was surprised she knew the song, and when I asked her who sang it (just testing her, since I knew), she said "some woman." I was even more surprised because she had heard the 1970s Gloria Gaynor version, and not the newer version by the band Cake, who I know very little about. It's also an interesting note that I remember my mom using Gaynor's version as her strength during the time of her divorce from my dad.
Anyway, as I played the Cake version of the song for my daughter, I came to a very solid conclusion: The band did something pretty miraculous. They turned a '70s disco anthem about a woman's survival into a pretty great rocking tune. Not only does it sound good but it also keeps the survival message strong. I'm really impressed that it works so well. In comparison, take Eric Clapton's own reworking of his emotion-drenched "Layla" into an acoustic waltz. While it may sound OK, it totally lost all of the angst in the song. If the idea of covering a song is to give a new perspective without losing the meaning of the original, Cake's version of "I Will Survive" is damn-near perfect.
To my friends Karen and Jeff, this song's for you.
Listen to Cake's version HERE.
Below, YouTube videos: Gloria Gaynor's original, followed by Cake's.

Jackie Greene rocks

He bounds onstage, and you think to yourself: Can this tiny wisp of kid with the crazy hair really deliver the goods? Well, I'm here to tell you, yes. (The picture above doesn't do him justice, but the one to the left is really what you see most of the night.) Jackie Greene can do it all: He plays a mean guitar (see clips below), also plays keys, harmonica, and has an amazingly soulful voice. Who is he? For those who don't know his story it goes something like this. He's from the Sacramento area and has built a name there on his guitar-playing. His new album, "Giving up the Ghost," is more singer-songwriter than guitar monster, but categorizing him doesn't do him justice. He's recently found success and a new following as a guitarist for Phil Lesh (yes, Deadheads, that Phil Lesh), which gives him new cred among jam-banders.
As for the show last night, Greene moved easily between guitar and keys, and his songs were built on great guitar solos that were thankfully precise, to the point and not overbloated jam-band affairs. His own tunes "Ball & Chain" and "I Don't Live in a Dream," to name a few, really came off well. He did a couple of Dead tunes -- "Sugaree," as an encore -- but he did them his way, turning them into rockers with little Dead influence. In all, it was an eye- and ear-opening experience.
A clip of one of his guitar solos is below. For other clips, click HERE and HERE.

Rumors, remixed

Hey, here's a cool remix of Josh Ritter's "Rumors" by John Dragonetti of the Submarines. Totally fun. The link to the "Rumors" remix is HERE.
By the way, check out the Submarines new album "Honeysuckle Weeks." It's also really great. Below is the short review I wrote in the latest issue of Modern Acoustic (click HERE to for free download of the magazine.)

Blake Hazard and John Dragonetti, known as the Submarines, are an interesting pair. Their last album, “Declare a New State,’’ was written separately during their breakup and recorded when they got back together. They have since married and have a new album, “Honeysuckle Weeks,’’ due in May. The album, which explores the ins and outs of love (naturally!), is full of playful beats, electronic accents and chiming guitars. Tracks worth hearing include “You, Me and the Bourgeoisie” (she sings “Love can free us from all excess, from our deepest debt/ ’cause when our hearts are full, we need much less), and “Swimming Pool,” in which Hazard’s voice just pops out of the speakers.

Mesmerizing Night

I've been blogging a lot lately about Kris Delmhorst, but she deserves it. A couple of nights ago, I caught her and Winterpills at Johnny D's in Somerville, and once again she stunned me with her beautiful voice and songs. She was debuting many of the new songs of her album "Shotgun Singer," a mesmerizing group of tunes. The band Winterpills (below), out of Northampton, opened the show. They have a great sound, though it is very low-key. They came to life when they rocked out though it wasn't often enough to my liking.
They joined Kris as her backing band (top) for her set. If you read the interview I posted earlier with Kris you know that she wrote and created many of the songs herself in solitude. So the addition of a band really brought these songs to life. And speaking of life, Kris, as you may see in these pictures, was quite pregnant. I was impressed that she stood and played the guitar the entire time she was onstage, probably an hour and a half or more!
Anyway, it was a wonderful show. My wife and parents were with me and we got to move down front for Kris' set when they brought the tables back. Kris said she wanted a more intimate show and figured there wouldn't be much dancing during her set.
I shot two crummy videos (new camera woes). You can find them HERE and HERE. I also had to use a nightshot setting so I could see out of the viewfinder (not good) so that's why some of the photos have a weird black and white thing going on.
For more pics, click HERE.

My Orchestra Is Gigantic

I can now talk about what I've been dying to tell everyone. It is now official that Josh Ritter will be playing the Boston Pops on June 27th at Symphony Hall. There, I said it. It's out. Phew! What an awesome event this is going to be. Josh and the whole band will be backed by one of the coolest orchestras ever. I can't wait to hear songs from the new album backed by that horn section.
"My orchestra is gigantic
This thing could sink the Titanic
And the string section's screaming
Like horses in a barn burning up"

This should be totally cool. For tickets, click HERE.
I can't think of a better way to get summer started. Now if only I could pin down if the band is playing the Newport Folk Festival...

An interview with Kris Delmhorst

Reprinted from Issue No. 20 of my magazine Modern Acoustic. Download the full magazine for free HERE.

In the days leading up to when her new album, “Shotgun Singer,” hits the stores, Kris Delmhorst is in the middle of a tour of France, the Netherlands, and the US Midwest. If that’s not enough, she is also more than 7 months pregnant and “pretty much in survival mode,” as she puts it. Yet, she was still more than willing to answer a few of Modern Acoustic’s essay questions:

Modern Acoustic: What does the term “Shotgun Singer” mean to you? You use the lyric in “Midnight Ringer,” but I couldn’t find a definition or reference to it.

Kris Delmhorst: Well, literally in the context of that song it’s referring to the shotgun seat of the car … someone sitting there singing. But it’s just kind of an open phrase that sounds nice to me and suggests different things in different contexts.

MA: Your last album, “Strange Conversation,” and even “Songs for a Hurricane,” had pretty strong themes to them. Does “Shotgun Singer” have an overall theme?

KD: Nothing I set out for consciously. I never really know what a record is about until after it’s done and I have a little perspective. But I do notice that there are a lot of songs that touch on some kind of universality of human experience. That, and there also seems to be quite a bit about love as an agent of change, either in an individual person’s life or in the larger world.

MA: The new album has a wintry, intimate feel but an exuberance as well. How does it feel to you?

KD: I guess a record will always feel different to the person (or people) who made it, because listening to it brings back the whole experience of working on it. But to me it does have a certain mood. Reflective, a little solitary maybe, but not sad. With “Strange Conversation” I was really hoping to make an album that would be nice company to have on in the house, maybe even with people around, making dinner or whatever. But I think this one is more of something you’d want to listen to alone in the car or on a walk.

MA: The music on “Shotgun Singer,” the actual sound, has lots of electronic backing beats, vocals effects and other cool sounds are integrated into it. Was this planned or more spontaneous?

KD: Well, as for the drum machine sounds, that was born of necessity because of the way I made the record. For some of the songs I knew it would be easier to add parts on later if the rhythm was steady, but I hate playing to a click track, so I would dial up a cool beat on this ancient analog drum machine I have and play to that. It actually doesn’t keep time, so I’d have to grab one bar from it and then loop it, but it has this crazy little sound that I’m really fond of. It helped set a mood right away for the recordings. I didn’t necessarily think it would show up on any of the final tracks but it turned out that when we tried to remove it from some songs we really missed its personality, so it stayed. The actual drummer (Makaya McCraven) did an amazing job of playing with and off of the machine, so on some songs they’re really a little team.
All the samples and things were something I really wanted to play with on this album, just because I love the way non-instrumental sounds change the space of a song. I always like to hear things on records that I can’t identify. And I happen to have this friend (Barry Rothman) who is a mad genius with old turntables and shortwave radios! As for the vocal sounds, I wanted to treat the voice like one of the instruments in a way. It’s a little strange to get really exploratory with all the instrumental sounds on a record and then leave the vocal just sounding the same naturalistic way the whole time. Plus, I just love the sound of vocals through an amp.

MA: You’ve said that, with this album, you wanted to “break some habits, both musically and lyrically.” What were you were trying to break away from, and did you succeed?

KD: Well, it’s hard to really describe exactly what habits I was trying to break, but I can say that the more time pressure there is, the harder it is to take risks, and the greater the temptation to just revert to what you know how to do. The stuff I wanted to explore had to do with song structure and the relationship between the vocals, the primary instrument (guitar or whatever), and the other layers in a song. It’s a lifelong process of course but I do feel like I succeeded in doing some things that I never would have been able to do if I had made the record in a normal timeframe, and that’s very satisfying to me.

MA: You played many of the instruments on the album yourself. How did this influence the album? What made you choose this over playing with a group of musicians?

KD: This relates to the previous question – I love playing live with a group of musicians in the studio, but I wanted to try something really different to see what would happen. In a way, my real dream would be to make a slow record with a band someday, to have tons of time to percolate ideas and try completely different approaches to songs. But my situation at the moment doesn’t really allow for it – for one thing, not having a consistent band that I play with all the time kind of makes it impossible. For instance, a band like Wilco can spend months and years in their studio really tinkering and developing things, but when you’re just hiring people to play on a record there’s not that kind of time – unless you have unlimited money, which I don’t, to say the least! So the only way to go as slowly as I wanted to, and to have the space to take enough risks, was to work by myself. That said, I also often love the vibe of records made in solitude, and there’s something to be said for giving yourself such heavy limitations in terms of instrumentation and technical skills, and just using your imagination to make something out of it.

MA: Tell me about the process involved in writing these songs: I saw you perform at the Somerville Theatre last year and you said you had just returned from being holed up writing new songs. Is that a typical writing process for you? I know some artists write on busses, in cafes, in their sleep, etc.

KD: I start songs anywhere and everywhere, but rarely get more than a few lines in. To finish stuff I definitely need to have some time and space to myself, either at home or somewhere else. It’s often a long process, some of them sit around half done for years before they finally come together.

MA: As for the recording, what brought you to record with Sam Kassirer (who produced the album)? Did you have completed songs or was it more of an organic collaborative/ spontaneous thing?

KD: I got to a point where I had worked by myself long enough and really felt like I needed a partner for the last stages of the record. I chose to work with Sam more or less completely on a hunch. We went up to his studio in Maine with the whole record already written and recorded, although we added a good bunch of stuff while we were there – often it was amplifying and accompanying parts that already existed on the tracks, but we created some new parts that were exciting too. And we spent a lot of time on arranging – since I had accumulated a lot of tracks and sounds on the songs, a big part of the process with Sam was subtracting and sculpting. We had a great time and it was a huge relief to have someone to collaborate with at that point in the process.

MA: I have a great fondness for Signature Sounds artists, and you obviously have a lot of friends (and your husband!) on that label. Were you friends before joining the label or did the label “bring” you together?

KD: The label is a nice loose family of good people. It’s more or less a coincidence that a number of close friends (and relations) are on Signature as well, but it’s a happy coincidence.

Issue 20, April 2008

On Target: On her new album "Shotgun Singer," Kris Delmhorst looks inward
We’ve been spending a lot of our ample free time between issues reading and thinking about folk music – its origins and its future.
Why? Well, for starters, we’ve been staying up late with our nose firmly planted in the book “Turn! Turn! Turn!: The ’60s Folk-Rock Revolution” by Richie Unterberger, which vividly captures the spirit and excitement of how folkies turned to rock because of the Beatles and Dylan. It’s a fun read filled with interviews that takes music through ’50s folk heyday, the Byrds, the Lovin’ Spoonful, and Crosby, Stills and Nash.
We’ve also been contemplating folk’s future. Last year, Boston college station WERS eliminated its traditional folk and jazz shows and combined them into a more contemporary and more varied sound. And this year, another local station, WUMB, announced that its all-folk programming is getting a sprucing up, adding more “electric” music to its mix.
We are all for these changes, having thought in the past that sometimes those shows dragged a bit and could use some modernization.
Does it mean that traditional folk and jazz are dead? It’s hard to say. We think real music fans don’t mind a good mix of music and are willing to listen to anything of quality.
Folk has, in fact, given way to a much broader range of music that still provides the personal experiences of the songwriter. It could be a single musician playing a guitar, or a singer-songwriter accompanied by a backing band, or a full-on band with a diverse set of instruments or voices.
In that vein, we talk to Kris Delmhorst, one of our favorites. Her new album, “Shotgun Singer,” encompasses all of the above. Her voice is amazing, she plays a multitude of instruments, and she’s got great musical friends, who are always there for each other.
We also review Kathleen Edwards’ “Asking for Flowers” and the Waifs’ “Sundirtwater,” two albums that offer unique views of the world.
The old adage is that all music – blues, rock, jazz, etc. – is folk music. Maybe the times aren’t changing that much.
To download the interview with Kris in the new issue, click HERE.
To read the CD reviews of Kris Delmhorst, Kathleen Edwards and the Waifs, click HERE.

MA5 - Albums
Albums that helped us survive this issue.
1. “Shotgun Singer,’’ Kris Delmhorst. We just love her voice.
2. “Mutations,” Beck. So slinky, so good.
3. “Letters From Sinners and Strangers,” Eilen Jewell. A great bar band with a classic old-time sound.
4. “Children Running Through,” Patty Griffin. We really liked the album when it came out, we really love it now.
5. “Sing You Sinners,” Erin McKeown. Every song is like a blast of spring.