In the future, we'll all have jetpacks and listen to Robert Harrison

In the mid-90s, Cotton Mather (named after an especially foxy-looking Puritan minister) made a splash with some of the most divinely-arranged power pop I've ever heard. For example:

My Before and After - Cotton Mather (from Kontiki)
Heaven's Helping - Cotton Mather (from the 40 Watt Solution EP)

Yeah, it's that good -- the 1:11 mark in Heaven's Helping is one of my absolute favorite moments in any song ever. It borders on celestially sublime; sixteen seconds of downright musical perfection.

I discovered Harrison's work only after Cotton Mather broke up, and now their albums are often solely the purview of lucky record store cratediggers and used-on-Amazon buyers. So you can imagine how thrilled I was when Austin-based frontman Robert Harrison came back to musical life last year with a cinematic new band, Future Clouds and Radar. The sound is evolving into something a bit more psychedelic and sweeping, but that Lennonesque voice obviously remains the same.

After 2007's self-titled double disc, Future Clouds and Radar is back with their sophomore effort, Peoria. The opening track has a rosy glow that builds and shimmers, as it sings about "an Epcot view of the stars."

The Epcot View - Future Clouds and Radar

Peoria will be out on election day in the U.S. on their own Star Apple Kingdom label, and there are a few rare tour dates on the books.


Also, a flabbergasted thanks (!!) to one of my favorite writers/fellow music lover Nick Hornby for the Fuel/Friends mention today on the New York Times site. He must have known that I have Songbook on my nightstand right now, not even lying.

First drafts of the parables of Jesus

From Dave Eggers' journal McSweeney's:

Jesus said, "Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash."

One of the disciples asked, "What of the man who builds his house inside the house built on the rock? Surely his house will be even less damaged by water and wind. Is this what we should do?"

And Jesus said, "No, don't do that."

I just laughed myself silly.


PS: Look at the CD you can order! I made one myself when I first read this book, but heck -- this is a lot less work.

Nick Hornby and Josh Rouse at Union Square Barnes & Noble in NYC

Other than an exceptionally peppy emcee here who seems almost like a Saturday Night Live character, this is a very cool video segment showing author Nick Hornby (Songbook, High Fidelity, Fever Pitch) discussing and reading from his new book Slam, along with musician Josh Rouse performing some tunes off his new album Country Mouse, City House.

This was for the laudable Barnes & Noble "Upstairs At The Square" series in Manhattan which pairs authors and filmmakers with musicians (other artists have included Craig Finn, Rosie Thomas, Badly Drawn Boy, Sondre Lerche, Duncan Sheik, and Jesse Malin).

The connection between these two guests, as Ms. Pep says in the intro, is that "Nick Hornby is a writer who wants you to read his words like music. Josh Rouse is a musician who wants you to view his songs like chapters out of the book of your life." An enjoyable glance at these two artists that I enjoy.

NICK HORNBY & JOSH ROUSE
UPSTAIRS AT THE SQUARE, NYC

Monday Music Roundup

Today is slushy and grey and cold, and twenty degrees or so. In four days I will be on Kauai and I just keep telling myself that when the wind smacks me in the face and takes my breath away (and not in a Top Gun soundtrack kind of way). I am so very tired of having cold hands all the time.

Here are two links worth a click today:
--I heart Nick Hornby and the way he writes about music, this is a documented fact. Check his list of favorite songs from 2007. I hope he writes another Songbook someday.

--Stereogum posted this Celine Dion video last week, and good heavens I think she's IN-sane, but I laughed relentlessly. Amazing indeed.


Music for the frosty week:

Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution
The Black Crowes
Here's our first listen to the sounds of the brand new Black Crowes album Warpaint (March 4, Silver Arrow Records). You got your down-home noodling on the steel guitar, the emotive wails of Chris Robinson and some stylistically-appropriate Civil War lyrics about daughters of an unnamed revolution. It just feels good, what with them singing about how we can join the jubilee, running for the gates of the city. And when he sings about coming 'round midnight to her back door, some part of me just really doesn't think he's singing about her porch. The Black Crowes will be playing their full new album in seven lucky cities this March, tour dates just announced for those.

Honey Come Home
Murder Mystery
This quartet isn't sinister as they sound; Murder Mystery is a scruffy group of indie kids out of NYC whose debut album Are You Ready For The Heartache Cause Here It Comes was produced by JP Bowersock (Ryan Adams, The Strokes). With the pleasing jangle and reverb of surf guitar and Buddy Holly, with more than a Stroke of Casablancas' croon and edge, this song tells the story of an unsure young man who puts his hands on the small of her back, because "you told me you like that" (but he sure doesn't sound like he ever would have thought to do it himself). Simultaneously evoking school dances and Lower East Side bars, this album charmed me -- plus they have a girl drummer so come on, I'm in.

Aubrey
Jake Troth
First the fabulous Mr. Troth made me kinda wish my name was "Caroline," and now I am thinking maybe Aubrey would be a nice name so that I could claim this song as my own. No such luck. This is a new demo from Jake Troth, I love the way the bluesy opening notes take their time blossoming, hanging sweet in anticipation. And is it just me or do you want to sing the opening lines to Augie March's "One Crowded Hour" when this cues up? Different songs, but both superb. Oh, and you hipster fashionista, here's one musician who can also deck you out in finery since he's studying that business - check out jacob-rogers.com, a collaborative clothing line project that he contributes the artwork to, and each item ordered comes with a free EP of original music.

Balloons
Foals
Their MySpace profile lists Foals as "snotty art school dropouts hungry for the dollar," and okay, sure I can cop that. I mean, they're barely 20 and signed to Sub Pop, and we love art school dropouts from Oxford here. The music coming from this dance-punk 5-piece is aloof and cool, but with with a underlying flashes of multilayered musical originality. There are touches of Talking Heads and Devo, as well as more modern nods like Franz Ferdinand. This song is all herky-jerky with an apocalyptic breakdown halfway through, and splashes of a bright pigment accent the rhythmic chaos. I also like how relentless the tune "Hummer" is, listen over on their MySpace. Their full length album Antidotes is due in Spring 2008.

You Cross My Path
The Charlatans
Does anyone really confuse these guys with The Charlatans from the '60s? Calling them The Charlatans UK seems superfluous to me, the same way my wonderful beloved nubbin of an NYC friend Jenn always says "Airfrenchband" as if it was one breathless word, instead of just Air. ANYWAYS. These Charlatans are winding up their second decade of making music as kings of their own Britpop/alternative fifedom. Managed by Oasis guru/Creation Records head Alan McGee, they've decided to digitally give away their first single from their upcoming 2008 album. Thom says everyone is doing it, and when he speaks, people follow. Good.

Warm sun pours over me :: Badly Drawn Boy live in San Francisco, 3/23/07

Today I am very excited about this fantastic show from Damon Gough, aka the perpetually stocking-capped Badly Drawn Boy, at the Great American Music Hall (love it) in San Francisco from a few weeks ago. I was actually supposed to see BDB a few days prior to this show up in Boulder and I totally goofed it and went out of town that weekend instead. I felt like an absolute dolt when I remembered ex post facto, and after hearing this I am kicking myself anew.

This is a trademark extra-long, gorgeous set from a talented and multifaceted musician. If you haven't become familiar with Badly Drawn Boy (who has this kind of childishly-odd emo moniker, but you can ignore that and just call him Damon if it makes it easier for you to give him the props he deserves) -- this is your chance.

BDB music is complex and literate; finely-woven pop songs that incorporate acoustic guitar, piano, strings, harmonica, even some attempts at whistling. You may also remember that Gough also scored the film adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel About A Boy, and he includes three songs from that album in this set (including the wonderful "Silent Sigh").

He has an impeccable ear for unforgettable melodies that get under my skin and etch themselves in my memory. They are the sort of dense, truthful songs that I could see soundtracking my life if I could play them on a loop to overlay my quotidian activities. I would feel much more meaningful with this stuff scoring my day. But as Damon sings in the bittersweet You Were Right, "songs are never quite the answer, just a soundtrack to a life that is over all too soon."

As likely to insert a snippet of Springsteen ("Thunder Road" at the beginning of the lovely "Walk You Home Tonight") as he is to check Journey (a perfect choice of a closing tune once the bar has closed and everyone really just wants to sing along), Gough's musical influences traverse a wide and rich landscape.

This set is stuffed with gems and engaging conversation with Damon and the audience. Damon says that "this whole tour's been one of the best tours I've ever been involved in," and that he is dedicating his shows lately to his grandfather who passed away in March, as a celebration of his life. A celebration indeed, this is one of the loveliest shows I've listened to in a long time and it makes me wish I could keep my concert dates straight and not be so daft. Grrr.


BADLY DRAWN BOY
Great American Music Hall
San Francisco, March 23, 2007

Time of Times
Journey from A to B
Degrees of Separation
Born in the UK (title track from his new album)
Further I Slide
Nothing's Gonna Change Your Mind
Welcome to the Overground (instrumental)
A Minor Incident
The Shining
Once Around the Block
Don't Ask Me, I'm Only the President
This is That New Song
Above You, Below Me
What is it Now
The Way Things Used to Be
I Love You All
All Possibilities
Without A Kiss
Walk You Home Tonight
Promises
Like a Virgin -> Silent Sigh
You Were Right
One Last Dance

ENCORE
I Want You Back (Jackson 5 cover)
Donna and Blitzen
Don't Stop Believing (Journey cover)


BADLY DRAWN BOY IN SF: ZIP FILE

Damon heads next to Carnegie Hall to play the upcoming Springsteen tribute, a benefit show which just keeps getting more interesting.


Top pic by Anders Jacobsen

God bless Dave Eggers

Thanks to Eric over at Marathonpacks for this link to Dave Eggers' (author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) reflections on the World Cup over on Slate:

"It was, by most accounts, 1986 when the residents of the United States became aware of the thing called the World Cup. Isolated reports came from foreign correspondents, and we were frightened by these reports, worried about domino effects, and wondered aloud if the trend was something we could stop by placing a certain number of military advisers in Cologne or Marseilles. Then, in 1990, we realized that the World Cup might happen every four years, with or without us."

Read the whole thing here.

Plus, Eggers assigns one fictional character in his essay the name of Fakey McChumpland, which alone is reason enough to read it. This piece comes from The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, an anthology edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey and published this month. It also includes a piece from Nick Hornby, so you know it's good.


I LOVE Dave Eggers; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was one of the best books I read last year (and it has gone missing from me, I think I'd best just buy a replacement). I welcome any links that you wish to send me from other Dave Eggers articles on the web that you find funny. The man is comic genius.

By the way, I am still rocking the suburbs on the World Cup bloggers pool, which is surprising even to me. Don't worry guys, I am sure to lose soon! (but in the meantime, call me Prognosticator of Prognosticators)

All the redemption I can offer girl is beneath this dirty hood

I am an admittedly late convert to anything having to do with Springsteen, and I am still far from a hardcore fan, but I do deeply appreciate a well-written lyric and this man practically drowns in well-written lyrics that just make me ache. I had kind of dismissed him from a dim memory growing up from the Dancing in the Dark video (you know, that one with Courteney Cox) and just left it at that.

UNTIL I really listened to this amazing, amazing live version of Born to Run that I accidentally downloaded on iTunes when I meant to get something else. It's stripped down with a haunting harmonica and words sung like he feels every ounce of the sadness and the madness. Man alive, I understood what my friend meant when he said it was a song with funeral playability. Something about the lyrics and the way they capture the passion and the hot-bloodedness of being young and feeling the fire & desperation in your veins.

Born To Run - Bruce Springsteen
(off Chimes of Freedom)
If you've written Springsteen off in the past, please listen to this. Eyes closed is best. And the lyrics? Ridiculously evocative, especially the way he sings them here.

"Wendy let me in I wanna be your friend
I want to guard your dreams and visions
Just wrap your legs 'round these velvet rims
strap your hands across my engines."

or

"The amusement park rises bold and stark
Kids are huddled on the beach in the mist
I wanna die with you Wendy on the streets tonight
In an everlasting kiss."

or how 'bout,

"Together we could live with the sadness
I'll love you with all the madness in my soul."


Nick Hornby says exactly what I want to say when I listen to certain gorgeous Springsteen songs that just focus on the incredible imagery and songwriting and the sense of a shot at redemption. From Hornby's excellent Songbook (required reading):

"…Sometimes, very occasionally, songs and books and films and pictures express who you are, perfectly. And they don't do this in words or images, necessarily; the connection is a lot less direct and more complicated than that. . . . Some time in the early to mid-eighties, I came across another version of [Thunder Road], a bootleg studio recording of Springsteen alone with an acoustic guitar (it's on War And Roses, the Born To Run outtakes bootleg); he reimagines 'Thunder Road' as a haunting, exhausted hymn to the past, to lost love and missed opportunities and self-delusion and bad luck and failure . . . In fact, when I try to hear that last line of the song in my head, it's the acoustic version that comes first. It's slow, and mournful, and utterly convincing: an artist who can persuade you of the truth of what he is singing with either version is an artist who is capable of an awful lot.

. . . One of the great things about the song as it appears on Born To Run is that those first few bars, on wheezy harmonica and achingly pretty piano, actually sound like they refer to something that has already happened before the beginning of the record, something momentous and sad but not destructive of all hope; as 'Thunder Road' is the first track on side one of Born To Run, the album begins, in effect, with its own closing credits. In performance at the end of the seventies, during the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour, Springsteen maximized this effect by segueing into 'Thunder Road' out of one of his bleakest, most desperate songs, 'Racing In The Street', and the harmonica that marks the transformation of one song into the other feels like a sudden and glorious hint of spring after a long, withering winter. On the bootlegs of those seventies shows, 'Thunder Road' can finally provide the salvation that its position on Born To Run denied it.

Maybe the reason 'Thunder Road' has sustained for me is that, despite its energy and volume and fast cars and hair, it somehow manages to sound elegiac, and the older I get the more I can hear that. When it comes down to it, I suppose that I too believe that life is momentous and sad but not destructive of all hope, and maybe that makes me a self-dramatizing depressive, or maybe it makes me a happy idiot, but either way 'Thunder Road' knows how I feel and who I am, and that, in the end, is one of the consolations of art."

Thunder Road - Bruce Springsteen
(acoustic, off War and Roses)

**************************************************************
Anyway, so the impetus for this long and rambling post came from a reader from the lovely campus of Stanford University (the less well-known ugly stepsister to the illustrious Santa Clara University just down the road) who asked me if I had any other good Springsteen covers to post (following the Stars one and the Pete Yorn one).

Why yes, yes I do.

You're Missing - Cowboy Junkies
From their really good 2005 album Early 21st Century Blues out on Zoe Records. This is a collection of reinvented covers from original artists like John Lennon, U2, Springsteen, and George Harrison. I very much like their reinterpretations, with the evocative strings and lazy vocals, which still pack a sadness-drenched punch.

Mansion On A Hill - David Gray
Live from 4/14/2001. Enough said about David Gray - except I love him. But you knew that.

Thunder Road - Matt Nathanson
Live at the Fillmore 11/7/02. The always fabulous-in-concert Mr. Nathanson has a live album coming out April 4th: Live at The Point. But this song isn't on it.

No Surrender - Pearl Jam
Live at the Borgata Casino in Atlantic City 9/30/05
Okay, one of my favorite covers EVER. It is incrediby pure and urgent and wavering -- fantastic. Listen to the crowd start in with the "Bruuuuuuuuce" as soon as Vedder says he wants to play something "appropriate for our location this evening."

Atlantic City - Pearl Jam
Live at the Borgata Casino in Atlantic City 10/1/05

The Promised Land - Pearl Jam with Sleater-Kinney
Live in Philly 10/3/05

Thunder Road - Tortoise and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
From the 2006 album The Brave and The Bold. I don't understand the naming of the musicians here, but I liked this cover a lot more than I thought I would. The intro is a bit jarring, but the meat of it is grooving and bluesy.


In closing, if there is a nicer mental image than these lyrics (that open Thunder Road), I am not sure what it is:

"The screen door slams - Mary's dress waves - Like a vision she dances across the porch - As the radio plays - Roy Orbison singing for the lonely - Hey that's me and I want you only . . ."

Why is the whole world not listening to Marah?

Hey there, Marah. Where've you been all my life? This is a really, really great folk-punk/roots/garage-rock band making some quality tunes, a largely undiscovered gem in the lexicon of rock music today.

Formed in 1993 by brothers Dave (singer-songwriter-banjoist-guitarist) and Serge (harmonica-guitarist-vocalist) Bielanko, this Philly-based band has been compared with early Replacements and a younger and urgent Springsteen, and depending on the song I definitely hear both influences. They've jammed with Springsteen in concert and in the studio, and have shared the bill with the likes of Ryan Adams, Ted Leo, and Jesse Malin live.

Marah writes solid, multi-layered songs and their most recent album If You Didn't Laugh You'd Cry harnesses an immediate and melodic beauty. Since many songs on this album were recorded in no more than three takes in a Brooklyn kitchen, there is a raw and unpolished edge to them.

They are playing tonight in San Francisco at the cozy Cafe du Nord, for all you cats from my homeland. Then they are on the road pretty much through March, including SXSW, so you might want to check them out live. Their shows are rumored to be "sweaty, feel-good rock'n'roll with an urgency that makes you feel alive."

And one interesting thing I noticed from their website was that the March 25th date in Oxford, MS will feature Nick Hornby (the author). I am not sure in what capacity Hornby will be appearing with Marah, but he wrote a really lovely op-ed piece in the New York Times mentioning Marah and is a confessed fan. Hornby, always poetic in his love for good music, says the following about Marah:

"Indeed, in the shows you can often hear their love for the rock canon uninflected - they play covers of the Replacements' "Can't Hardly Wait," or the Jam's "In the City," and they usually end with a riffed-up version of the O'Jays' "Love Train." They play an original called "TheCatfisherman" with a great big Bo Diddley beat, and they quote the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" and the Who's "Magic Bus." And they do this not because they're a bar band and people expect cover versions, but because they are unafraid of showing where their music comes from, and unafraid of the comparisons that will ensue. . ."

From If You Didn't Laugh You'd Cry (2005):

• "Walt Whitman Bridge" - Listen to the harmonica in this one, and the story in the lyrics.
• "City of Dreams" - a little Dylan-esque, rolling folk with a hint of the Beatles.

From Let's Cut the Crap & Hook up Later on Tonight (1998):
great album title. come on

• "Formula, Cola, Dollar Draft" - Folksy with a simple guitar and honest, slightly cracking vocals and a winsome harmonica bridge.

Bonus Live Tracks from 8/12/00 show in Tempe, AZ:

• "Can't Hardly Wait" - Replacements cover, homage to one of their sonic predecessors
• "Reservation Girl" with a superb opener of one of my favorite guitar instrumentals ever, Sleepwalk

I think what I like the best about listening to Marah is that each song is really different from the next. But it's all good - and it might just restore your faith in the pure and heartfelt honesty of rock'n'roll.

I'm glad I ran into them.