May 15, 2012

The Gaslight Anthem’s new single is some convincing major-label fanfare.  It sounds too loud, it sounds tailored to a format (radio) that will probably ignore it, and it sounds like it’s coming from a band that, like the song’s wonderfully self-conscious narrator, “can’t move on and can’t stay the same.”

I’m of the opinion that Brian Fallon is some sort of master at second verses, that’s where he always gets me. I don’t know why. Here, the second verse, the one about the “tick, ticking” away of time, the one that uses an alarm clock as relationship time-bomb, alarm clock as Alarm, is already lodged in my brain and scratched into my soul, like so many of this band’s greatest songs.  

(Source: Spotify!)

2:01pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZwWiYyLXa9ks
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: gaslight anthem handwritten 45 
April 12, 2012

Here’s my review of Bruce Springsteen’s incredible show this past Monday night at Madison Square Garden.  I think I may have embarrassed myself during “Thundercrack.” 

12:06pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZwWiYyJXnp3L
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: bruce springsteen wrecking ball thundercrack madison square garden american songwriter 
March 27, 2012
Uncles:The Interview

I once spent an hour driving around Queens with Uncles.  An interview ensued:

How did Uncles form?

Dan: Uncles first started out as Will and I’s songwriting project in High School.  We recorded at home, and it wasn’t really a band at first.  It was just the songs and those were the centerpoint, at first the people playing on the recordings were just adding background sounds.  

And with the new record, m4w, the band now plays a much bigger part.

Will: Our new record is really lush, there’s synthesizers and guitars and things, and we really just wanted to develop the songs this time in the studio, because the whole idea on our first record was to strip everything back where it was just the songs with very light backing arrangements, and we really didn’t want to do that again.  But at first, we were pretty reluctant to add electric guitars and drums into the mix.

So would you say the production and arrangements are the main differences between the first and second record?

Will: The songwriting is also much more developed this time around, because we got more interested in writing choruses with real hooks on this record.  There’s tighter songwriting and tighter composition on this record, it definitely has more of a pop feel to it.

I listened to “Turkey Water” on headphones for the first time recently and I started hearing all these things I hadn’t heard on speakers.

Will: I think it’s definitely a headphone record.

What strikes me most in the new record is this conflicted relationship with the idea of the hometown, of returning home.  There’s a lot of bitterness towards the hometown, but there’s also a lot of pride, I was struck by the line “it’s the kind of town you don’t mind coming from” on “Ballad of Lehigh Valley.”   

Will: That’s a dual line, because you come from there, you don’t stay, you’ve definitely left home for a reason, but you don’t mind coming from there.  Living in New York, most people here aren’t from here, and I think it’s a city of homesickness in a lot of ways, and that definitely found its way onto the record.  

Dan: A lot of the characters are all sort of homesick in one way or another, but that’s also a reflection of Will and I being together; we grew up together, so when we write songs together it’s always sort of a reflection of turning back to where we grew up in some sense.  

In my mind m4w takes places at a sort of crossroads between the city and the country, in a way.  It’s a very geographic record.  

Will: Definitely, and I think American music is often very geographic music.  People like to stress where they come from.  

Dan: There’s a Midwestern feel to a lot of the song I wrote, I spent a lot of time there growing up.

I think both of your songwriting styles really complement each other, but the’re also very distinct.  You can always tell who wrote which song.  But you do both share a lot.  For one, you both pay a ton of attention to detail.  Danny, I think one thing you’re great is getting at little specifics, especially with proper nouns and brand names.  There aren’t too many folk songs about Gristedes.

Dan: That vernacular isn’t really part of the folk tradition, but it’s a huge part of the hip hop tradition.  It’s a big part of all of our lives, so I relate to it, and I think singing about it is a way to get people to lift up their ears and listen.

Will: The everyday references, the local references, Danny does that all really well.  There’s so much room for new stuff in folk songwriting, still.

Danny: You have to try to reinvigorate the old way of doing things in a modern way.  That’s a huge part of what we try to do, all of our songs are set somewhere that’s very relatable to the present moment.

You’re not trying to sing about the Dust Bowl. 

Will: No, not at all!

Dan: Maybe the Dust Bowl of the future.

WIll: The songs are all focused on the now, definitely.

I think that comes across.  I don’ think anyone could listen to this record and say this is a bunch of folk revivalists.

Dan: To some degree we are, we are working with traditional forms, but we’re trying to do something new.

Will: Right, we disappoint folk and country fans for not being traditional enough, and we disappoint indie rock fans for being too traditional.

10:15pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZwWiYyIgfr4S
(Notes: 5)
  
Filed under: uncles interview 
March 23, 2012
GQ Is Streaming Justin Townes Earle's New Record In Its Entirety

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(Notes: 1)
  
March 18, 2012
Uncles: m4w

m4w  is the second album from Uncles, a Queens-based band comprised of Will Schwartz, Dan Bateman, Tom White, and Graham Watson.Uncles started as the songwriting duo between Schwartz and Bateman when the two were still in high school, and their first album, Replacing Words With Other Words, is just that: an exercise in words, in songwriting, in playing songs with three chords and a story.  

m4w, the band’s second LP, and their best yet, has a much more carefully arranged, orchestrated folk-pop sound, but the primary focus here is still the song.  As its title might suggest, m4w is a solitary record, Bateman and Schwartz gravitate towards stories about loners and roamers who are often lost, or at least a little homesick.  

Many of the stories in m4w takes place when its downtrodden characters, unsure where to go or maybe just lacking a better idea, decide to take a trip back home. But when the singer in the album opener “This Old Town” finally gets home, he no longer even recognizes his hometown, and, even more upsetting, his hometown no longer even recognizes him.  ”Have I changed?” is the underlying question in the song, and in much of the revistiting, literal or not, of small town America on m4w, ”or has the town?”      

m4w proves that one need not lean on retro tendencies and influences in order to make a traditional song-based record, but the album does seem to be saying that one’s past is never just that: something that happened, something that once was and is now not, something you’ve gotten over.  And so, if in m4w you’re not literally taking the train out of the city and heading home, then you may be wandering around the streets, and maybe you’re a young adult with a new, exciting life, but what you’re thinking about is what it would be like to be home, or what it used to be like, or maybe just what you wished it used to be like.  

“It don’t belong to me,” Bateman sings over and over on “Bayberry Lane,” a sardonic, wistful take on some sort of imaginary hometown that wouldn’t have sounded at all out of place on a later Elliott Smith record. As the song progresses and the singer gets more desperate, more affected by the fake town he’s singing about, it becomes all the more clear that all this stuff very much does still bother him even if he wishes it didn’t, that these singers all have some things from their past they’re trying to disavow, get over, or at least forget.  Maybe the singer in “Turkey Water” lived on, or near, a street like Bayberry Lane, but the narrator this time knows everything that happened on his Bayberry Lane belongs to him, owns him in some way, and so “Turkey Water” is an outpouring, the narrator fitting in as much detail and story as he can, and towards the end of the song we found out why.

Bateman and Schwartz’s songwriting styles are distinct, but what they share, above all, is an intense, persistent focus on detail.  Both of their default modes as songwriters are as the observer, the transparent eyeball, the man walking down the street who can’t keep his mind still for a second, taking in his surroundings and wondering what they mean, and what they used to be, and what they will become one day, all while replaying a vivid story in his mind at the same time, a story from where he may have grown up, or where he imagines someone like himself once grew up.  

As such, m4w is a record of the senses, its stories almost always gain narrative weight and tension through from the smallest of sources, whether it’s the sound of a book on tape in a minivan, or the smell of some old chewing tobacco, or the dreaded sight of a 3/5 full bottle of Coke, or some antiquated handmade advertisements on a city street.  For a record about memory, or remembering memories, it makes good sense that sights and smells and sounds play such a large role in m4w.  

But growing up in small towns isn’t always such a bad thing. “It’s the kind of town you don’t mind coming from,” Schwartz sings early on in “Ballad of Lehigh Valley,” a risky sentiment in Rock ‘N’ Roll, and he’s willing to go even further, “I was younger there, I still stayed my summers there.”  Maybe the singer of “Ballad of Lehigh Valley” had it better than some of others on m4w, or maybe he’s just a bit less willing to pretend all that stuff doesn’t matter anymore.

Key Tracks: “This Old Town,” “Turkey Water,” “m4w”

.  

12:58pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZwWiYyIBREuY
(Notes: 3)
  
Filed under: uncles m4w album review 
March 7, 2012
Some Scattered Thoughts on Wrecking Ball

The way I’m understanding the new Springsteen record right now isn’t as a follow up to Nebraska, but through the lens of 2007’s “Girls In Their Summer Clothes.” What if Wrecking Ball isn’t really an album about the financial meltdown, or O.W.S., or the wealth gap, but a record about Viagra.  About wrinkles. About trying to provide for your spouse when you’re not so sure if you can still properly provide for your spouse.  About what it’s like to get up every morning and go to work each day when, in a fair world, you might have retired ten years ago.  What if “You’ve Got It” isn’t the throwaway track on the record that it’s being made out to be, but the album’s central focus, the faithful,desperately sensual cry of a man on his last legs of virility.  Doesn’t this record gets a whole lot more interesting if “this depression” isn’t economic, but sexual? 

The more I listen to Wrecking Ball, the less difference I hear between it and Working on a Dream, it’s maligned predecessor.  There’s a whole lot of old age and death on both, though the stakes now seem much higher. There’s less love and more sex this time, less play and more work, less acceptance and more (Springsteenian, hopeful) defiance.  

“We’ll be alright” is the great false promise in “Jack of All Trades.”  I hear this song, and several other on the new record, as the tale of an old man still trying to convince his family, and himself, that he’s still on top of things, that things will be alright, that he can still take care of his own.  The singer in “Jack of All Trades” sounds like your typical Springsteen protagonist, only now mixed with a healthy dose of Alfred Lambert.  

We’re being told to read the album, specifically “We Take Care of Our Own,” as being about our national illusions, “the distance between the American reality and the American dream,” as Bruce often likes to say, but the characters on Wrecking Ball may very well be facing the same exact types of illusions about themselves: the notion that we can still get our family together for Christmas, that we can still be self-reliant homeowners without any help.  What happens when the jack of all trades falls and breaks a leg while he’s mending the roof?  

When, in “Jack of All Trades,” the singer threatens with a gun at the end of the song, it doesn’t come across as angry, or irreverent, but sad, a bit insane, the cry of a man past his prime.  ”Death to My Hometown,” though, is a pissed-off song,  but it’s built around a very specific type of stubborn anger, a very cranky, obnoxiously didactic “us vs. them” anger that sounds very much like it’s  coming from a grandfather, shouting and pointing his cane in the air. 

Could there be a reason an album allegedly about THE BIG ISSUES is named after a song about…Giants Stadium?  ”Bring on your wrecking ball,” shouts the narrator in “Jack of All Trades,” shouts the narrator in most all of these songs, daring anyone to tell them they can no longer take care of their own.  But all these characters can take a look at their clock, they know what time it is, they know that tonight all the dead are here, that it’s maybe even time to get a bit religious, as old people sometimes do, and as the last third of Wrecking Ball does too, unabashedly. 

The last song on the record is called “We Are Alive,” and what Wrecking Ball is telling me right now, more than anything, is not that the Boss is mad at Wall Street, but that that little three word declaration should never be taken for granted, that in these tough,rocky,hard times, it’s never been less of a sin to be glad you’re alive. 

9:34pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZwWiYyHeKCKq
(Notes: 9)
  
Filed under: springsteen wrecking ball you've got it death to my hometown jack of all trades we are alive rocky ground 
March 5, 2012

It serves me right that the first time I ever leave a show before the encore (it was at least 12:30 on a Sunday Night, but really, there’s no excuse) Sharon Van Etten decides to play “Loving Her Was Easier.” There’s nothing revelatory in the performance other than the fact that she’s playing the song in the first place.  The Kristofferson tune serves as a brave counterargument to the tight collection of songs on Tramp, an album that suggests that “loving her” can and should always be anything but easy.

If there’s any song, though, to lead into “Loving Her Was Easier” it would be “All I Can,” which Van Etten played to lead off the encore (the other main reason I’ll never again leave a show before it’s over).  Loving wasn’t easy for the singer in “All I Can,” but that’s the point.  It’s a song about looking back and wishing it had been easier, wishing it had been even possible, and trying to move on but also trying to understand why the “love overdue” is still just that: overdue.  

Both “All I Can” and “Loving Her Was Easier” are mostly about time.  Both songs are about someone clearly unable to look forward and “free the size of the past,” though the singer in “All I Can” seems to be trying an awful lot harder than in “Loving Her Was Easier.”  Instead, in Kristofferson’s song, the only way to access the future is to look back to a time when you didn’t have to look back anymore.  

And that’s why “Loving Her Was Easier,” which should really be called “Remembering Her Was Easier,” is such a perverse song to play after “All I Can,” as if all those good intentions to start anew are some sort of silly joke, because to remember that time when you didn’t have to remember a time, when you were wiped “of the traces of the people and the places that you’ve been,” is what “All I Can” is fighting so hard against, it’s what the singer hopes she won’t end up doing in the end, though she knows it may be inevitable.  She does say, after all, that we all make mistakes. 

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(Notes: 4)
  
Filed under: sharon van etten lover her was easier kris kristofferson all i can bowery ballroom 
February 17, 2012

oneweekoneband:

“One of These Days” make a fine title for a pop song, but no one’s ever written one that sets me off like this.  The singer in Cooley’s song may be the son of whoever’s singing all the others, the ones that use “one of these days” as a catchphrase, an excuse for why old men are still daydreaming about the future.  The singer’s dad in this song is an old man too, and the singer understands the catchphrase’s importance, but it also kind of pisses him off:

If I had a dime for every time I heard my old man say One of These Days

I wouldn’t be like my old man today

Talking about the places that he’d been back in his younger days

That he was gonna go back to again, One of These Days

One of Cooley’s greatest gift as a songwriter is the effortlessness in which he switches from the intensely personal 1st person to a wide-angled, omniscient third-person narration.  In “One Of These Days,” the omniscient verse does most of the work, telling us why exactly this song is being sung in the first place:  

It’s no wonder everybody’s scared of downtown Birmingham, it’s just a little too close to home

There’s just more crooks down there and the cops don’t care and white man wearing ties can do anything they want

And then the band kicks in:

Once a country boy seen the way steam rises off a man’s insides on the sidewalk

Tends to change the way he thinks, the way he sees everything, and he goes back to where he came from

If there’s any reason to care about the Drive By Truckers, it’s this verse, near the end of “One Of These Days,” the one that makes you understand what Hood really means by that Southern Thing, the one that makes you feel the heat rising off that city’s sidewalk as personally as anything you’ve ever felt, the one that describes that feeling in everyone’s life where you’re just starting to set out on your own life, just starting to realize your unique freedom to reinvent yourself however you’d like, become whoever you’d like to be, until you realize that you’ll always come from where you came from, that your past will always be this terribly necessary thing, that one day you’ll be sitting around your living room telling your kids that yes, you’d like to get back in touch with your ex-wife and your old friends from high school, that you’d like to go back to see who lives in your childhood home now, that you’re going to sit down and tell your kids that you really are going to try to do those things, one of these days.  

1:47pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZwWiYyGZUEIs
(Notes: 11)
  
Filed under: Drive By Truckers One of These Days 
February 13, 2012
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

oneweekoneband:

If Patterson Hood is the heart and soul of the Drive By Truckers, then Mike Cooley is the slacker genius standing off on the side, content to play second fiddle if it means doing a little less work.  Cooley is quality over quantity: his songs are almost never throwaways, which means they’re almost always classics.  I must confess: I’m a Cooley guy, I wholeheartedly agree with whomever Rob Harvilla’s dear friend is when he says that “one day Cooley will be hailed a Great American Songwriter.”  If by the end of the week I haven’t sickened you with my adoration of this guy’s songwriting, I’ve probably done something wrong.  

I choose “Marry Me” as my way of introducing Cooley not because it’s his best song, though it’s up there, but because of that last line in the bridge, that one that explains Mike Cooley better than I’ll ever be able to:

“And just cause I don’t run my mouth don’t mean I got nothing to say”

Cooley could be just as well singing that line right at Patterson Hood, the band’s great maximalist.  Stroker Ace, as Hood likes to call him, never forces the big picture.  He shows when Hood tells, reveals when Hood confesses.  “Rock and roll means well but it can’t help telling young boys lies” though, is a jab at himself as much as Hood, the two kids dumb enough to carry on that lie well into their middle-aged adulthood.

The real payoff comes in the chorus: “well this old town’s alright with me, there’s nowhere I’d rather be,” Cooley sings, holding onto that word “rather” as long as he can, just in case you don’t believe him.  And how could you really?  “Marry Me” is on the Truckers’ arguably bleakest record, sandwiched between “My Sweet Annette,” in which a young man elopes with his future wife’s best friend, and a song whose title does all its explaining: “Hell No, I Ain’t Happy.” 

That’s what makes that conceit in “Marry Me” so damn moving: this old town’s messed up beyond belief, but the singer in “Marry Me” has been to other places, he’s been to the city, he’s tried leaving town but those days are over, he’d rather find “a fool nowhere than go somewhere and be no one’s,” and he never wants to leave this stupid old town ever again. 

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(Notes: 27)
  
February 12, 2012
Coming up: Drive-By Truckers

oneweekoneband:

Thank you, Dave!

Next week, we’ll take a look at the long-standing career of Southern rockers/alt-country act Drive-By Truckers, and to do so we’ve recruited Jonathan Bernstein.

Jonathan is a music writer whose work has been published in Rolling Stone, American Songwriter and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. He’s also writing on his personal tumblr.

Till tomorrow!

— Hendrik

Hey everyone, I’m real excited to tell you all about One Week One Band, one of the very best Music Tumblrs out there.  This coming week, I’ll be taking over and writing more than you would ever want to read about the Drive By Truckers, a band that’s always gotten a decent amount of coverage here on The Pretender, but never enough.  Anyways, I’ll probably reblog a post or two over here, but head over to One Week One Band to follow along all week and beyond.  

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(Notes: 11)
  
February 6, 2012

Hey Tumblr Country Music People, I’m looking for some feedback here:

Is “Beaumont” by Hayes Carll the sequel to “The Night’s Too Long” by Lucinda Williams/Patty Loveless?  Is the singer in “Beaumont” one of those “small town boys that don’t move fast enough” in Lucinda’s song, only now he’s gathered up some courage, or at least tried to, and so he chases that waitress who fled town years ago all the way to Houston? Is this theory of mine ludicrous? Obvious?  Plausible?

First, listen to “The Night’s Too Long,” then give “Beaumont” a spin, then let me know what you think…

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(Notes: 13)
  
Filed under: hayes carll lucinda williams the night's too long songs about Beaumont 
January 20, 2012
"There’s a line in Scripture that says a grain of wheat doesn’t bear fruit until it dies and takes seed. Buddy Holly and the Crickets created the form—guitars, bass and drums—that every rock band after him, the Beatles, Stones and all the rest, followed. They wrote and performed their own songs like he did and his music is still being played today. And that tour, it gave seed to a new generation. Bobby Vee was a 16-year-old kid who filled in for Buddy at the next gig in Moorhead, Minn. We got to know each other and we always kept in touch after that. When Bob Dylan broke big, Bobby Vee told me that his piano player that night was Dylan, who was 18 and still known as Bob Zimmerman. [Mr. Dylan’s spokesman said: “Bob says it’s so.”] He had been in the audience for one or two of the Winter Dance Party shows and now he was on the stage with Bobby Vee, standing in for Buddy Holly. Bobby told me Dylan played so loud he couldn’t hear himself sing; he said you couldn’t control the guy; it was like someone let him out of a cage."

—

Everyone’s heard the story about Buddy Holly looking the teenage Bob Dylan straight in the eye a few days before the plane crash, but this? 

Click through for the rest of this great Dion Dimucci interview.

2:14pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZwWiYyF4Siti
(Notes: 22)
  
Filed under: buddy holly bob dylan winter dance party dion bobby vee 
January 20, 2012

This one should be in the Youtube Hall of Fame.

(Source: redeyednblue)

11:46am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZwWiYyF47JWL
(Notes: 3)
  
Filed under: etta james i'd rather go blind rip 
January 19, 2012
The Ronald Reagan Disaster Hasn't Gone Away

zachbaron:

“Just heard (half of) the new Bruce song as I entered the parking lot—“we take care of our own/wherever our flag is flown,” or something like that anyway. Huh? Mr. Question Authority? Now sounds as reflexively patriotic as the most predictable country songwriter. Have you heard it? [Me: Yes, equal parts boring and vaguely jingoistic. But I dunno—hasn’t that been his thing for a while? He is deep in his mindless heartland phase…] Well, I thought he just had a passing fancy thing with all those “heroic” police and firefighters on 9/11. And they were brave … . I wonder if Bruce is burning his bridges with the boomer generation that made him famous. We can be sentimental for bravery, but we (I) have mixed feelings about chest-thumping and flag-flying. We protest wars, don’t celebrate them. Who will buy these songs?”  
“My mother is (still) a better music critic than I am.”

—


—Almost thirty years after “Born In The USA” became one of the most misappropriated songs in pop history, some still don’t want to hear Bruce’s chorus flag waving as anything but sincere, never sarcastic, never with a biting sense of irony, and never in any relation to the harshly contradictory verses. I’m far from being in love with the new Springsteen single, I think it’s way too predictable, but my first reaction when I heard the song last night wasn’t “I like this” or “I don’t like this,” but rather: “I’m worried that this ludicrous ‘Bruce is a chest-thumping American apologist’ conversation is going to start up again.”  Have some fans been thoroughly sold on this idea of the “reflexively patriotic, heartland” Bruce for quite a while, and will they buy this new record and bring flags to his shows and just not get it?  Of course, though I think, and hope, they’re in the minority.  

12:02pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZwWiYyF0rK21
(Notes: 27)
  
Filed under: springsteen we take care of our own 
January 18, 2012

The Pretender has been quiet for a little while now, I’ve been too busy not-making best of 2011 lists, but there should be some exciting things happening here in the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, some links, in question form:

Is Justin Vernon’s work on the new Kathleen Edwards record the best thing he’s ever done?

Has there been a more heartbreaking moment in this very young year of music than the bridge of the new Justin Townes Earle single, “Nothing’s Gonna Change The Way You Feel About Me Now?”

How much longer are they going to make me wait for U.S. tour dates?

Lastly, I hope you enjoy Buck Owens and his band, in all their sparkly-suited glory, teaching a class on songwriting 101 with “Waitin’ In Your Welfare Line.” 


12:22pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZwWiYyEzg9dR