LOST IN THE TREES

SONIC SACTUARY: Lost in the Trees master the art of sadness

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: March 28, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/mar/28/sonic-sanctuary-lost-trees-master-art-sadness-ar-1799387/

Lost in the Trees, A Church that Fits Our Needs (Anti-)

There are confessional songwriters, plenty of them. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. There is value and a compelling kind of art in crafting something universal out of what would otherwise be mere journal entries, even if too often there's a certain narcissism involved in turning the vicissitudes of one's life into an open book, regardless of how uniquely painful or elevating the raw materials may be. Rarer is the songwriter who travels beyond the confessional, to an often remote place where putting words to music is a kind of therapy, where easy answers are hard to find and what otherwise might be mere mirror gazing leads beyond the looking glass.

       Ari Picker, a North Carolina singer-songwriter who also happens to be a trained composer and adventurous multi-instrumentalist, can count himself as one of the few who truly fits the latter description. Born and raised outside of Chapel Hill, he was first drawn to indie-rock before decamping for Boston's Berklee School of Music, a jazz-heavy institution where he studied the more obscure and sometimes seemingly lost art of classically based film scoring. Out of this meeting of two very different musical approaches emerged the odd yet oddly natural amalgam that is Lost in the Trees, a loose affiliation of musicians helmed by Picker, that serves as a vehicle for both his deeply personal — at times downright harrowing — poetics, and his penchant for embellishing simple strummed acoustic guitar with a symphony of violins, violas, and cellos, as well as tuba, harp, and the occasional field recording.

       Picker isn't the first singer-songwriter to deploy orchestral strings and the like. The late Elliott Smith earned an Oscar nomination for the indie chamber-pop that characterized his contributions to the Good Will Hunting soundtrack, to name just one relatively recent example. And plenty of rockers, dating back to the Beatles, have retained the services of entire symphony orchestras. But Picker, for all his similarities to a fellow outsider artist like Smith, is an entirely different breed. For starters, he wrote his own charts and he put together his own ensembles for Lost in the Trees’ 2008 debut full-length, All Alone in an Empty House, and the new A Church that Fits Our Needs. And, unlike Smith, an unabashed pop omnivore with a well developed ear for Beatlesque hooks and equal enthusiasm for hushed, fingerpicked acoustic guitars, and well distorted electric powerchords, Picker has a single-minded vision that brings to mind a subdued rural campfire session with string quartet in tow.

       That vision extends to the core of his songwriting. When All Alone in an Empty House was picked up by the LA-based Anti- label in 2010, and Lost in the Trees began reaching a national and then international audience, Picker was remarkably blunt about the subject of his songs. In interviews, he referred openly to the "extreme loneliness" he'd witnessed him mom, artist Karen Shelton, endure, as well as to "domestic abuse kind of stuff," concluding, "My family is really broken.”

       The tone of that album, somber and weighty but never heavy-handed, carries over to A Church that Fits Our Needs, a plaintive song cycle inspired by passing of Picker's mother, who took her own life three years ago. It begins with "Moment One," a short montage of fractured piano chords punctuated by the crumple of paper and typewriter keystrokes that lead directly into the mechanical, click-clack rhythm track and sharp string bowing that alternate with Picker's softly strummed acoustic guitar and his fragile, unyielding whisper of a falsetto on "Neither Here Nor There." It's an elliptical yet visceral remembrance of things past, a Radiohead-style tone poem that conjures the confusion of loss with crafty allusion in verses like, "Swept up by the sea/Birds fly into my room/When you sat with me/We're neither here nor there."

       The disc carries on in much the same fashion for 12 tracks, including a second sound collage ("Moment Two") that, with little more than footsteps crunching leaves on a walk through the woods, reinforces the contemplative nature of A Church that Fits Our Needs. As he works his way through the various stages of grief, Picker maintains an artful balance between the ebb and flow of mellifluous strings and spare acoustic soundscapes, and deploys the operatic, wordless vocals of Emma Nadeau as a beautifully haunting visage that breezes like the ghost of his mother through tracks like the slowly surging "Red" and the drum-less dreamscape "This Dead Bird Is Beautiful," an eerily airy composition that shares a certain ethereal quality with the productions of Bon Iver. "A golden glow that glowed at night/Don't you say she was weak/I'll carry her/Because she breathed I breathe," he affirms with quiet, Thom Yorke-ian force.

       Like Radiohead and Bon Iver, Lost in the Trees are more about subtle seduction and small, telling details than brash hooks and anthemic choruses. A Church that Fits Our Needs is a sonic sanctuary you go to, not one that comes to you. Once you open the door into Picker's world, it's hard not to marvel at how elegantly he brings country to the conservatory without forcing it, without it ever feeling the least bit contrived, and how gracefully he approaches sadness without succumbing to despair.   

THE MAGNETIC FIELDS

THE MAGNETIC FIELDS: The merits of being Stephin Merritt

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: March 13, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/mar/13/magnetic-fields-merits-being-stephin-merritt-ar-1763614/

The Magnetic Fields, Love At the Bottom of the Sea (Merge)

Stephin Merritt is arguably the greatest, or at least most prolifically constant songwriter of his generation. There are others — Ryan Adams comes to mind — who have inundated fervent fans with more than the average bear's worth of tossed off material under various monikers. But rarely has Merritt sacrificed quality for mere quantity. He has, however, crafted dozens upon dozens of songs over the past two decades, recorded and released on albums under a number of different guises. He may have began his career as the humble frontman of The Magnetic Fields, but that's only the most readily recognizable nom-de-pop under which he's plied his craft, a craft that's included the acclaimed, ambitious 1999 three-disc set 69 Love Songs, which delivers exactly what it promises: three baker's dozens worth of songs about love of all sorts set to music that touches on nearly as many genres.

       He followed that up with i, an album of 14 tracks that begin with the letter "i"; the fittingly titled, noisy guitar-driven collection Distortion; and the largely unplugged Realism, completing a double trilogy of sorts that seemed to prove he and The Magnetic Fields could be comfortable working in just about any medium or mode. As if that weren't enough, he's found time outside of the band to write tunes for indie luminaries like Sebedoh's Lou Barlow, Cibo Matto's Miho Hatori, and Yo La Tengo's Georgia Hubley, to sing on two discs credited to The 6ths, to offer his bubblegum-pop take on goth in a spinoff group called the Gothic Archies, and to toy with electronic dance grooves in Future Bible Heroes. Oh, and he's also dabbled in Chinese musical theater with director Chen Shi-Zheng and provided music for the Lemony Snicket children's books A Series of Unfortunate Events.

       Let's just say that it would be mighty difficult to find anyone, outside of a guy like Randy Newman, with a more impressive resume. But if there's a drawback to being a kind of one-man Brill Building, it's that it can reduce songwriting to a scientifically mechanical process. And, that's pretty much the only problem with Love at the Bottom of the Sea, the new 15-songs-in-under-40-minutes salvo from The Magnetic Fields.

       The disc marks a return to the synth-heavy productions of the albums the band recorded leading up to 69 Love Songs. Meritt is still working with a crew that includes drummer/singer/all-around enabler Claudia Gonson, cellist Sam Davol, and guitarist John Woo, along with sweet-voiced chanteuse Shirley Simms. And his pointedly dry wit and wry disposition — let’s just say he's exceptionally drwry — remain very much intact.

       “Your Girlfriend’s Face,” for example, finds Simms singing rather dispassionately about taking out an ex-boyfriend and injuring his new love interest. Against a bleating backdrop of playful synths and an up-tempo dance beat, she innocently intones, “I’ve taken a contract out on you/I have hired a hitman to do what they do/He will do his best to do his worst/After he’s messed up your girlfriend first.”

       It’s certainly funny, in a morbid sort of way. And the rhymes are clever. But, like the spurned lover’s plan to have her ex buried alive on crystal meth, there’s something a little too cold and calculated here. The hooks are all perfectly positioned; the melody is nothing if not infectious; and the meter of the lines is spot on. And, yet, for all its appealing attributes, in the end it feels more like a genre exercise — a Gothic Archies novelty number — than anything else.

       It’s no accident that every track here clocks in at under three minutes — apparently, that was one of the parameters Merritt set for himself when he got to work on the disc. As the album unfolds, with Merritt himself delivering a sad yet never quite moving ode to unrequited infatuation (“Andrew In Drag”) in his affectless baritone, Simms tossing off the punny punchlines in “I’d Go Anywhere with Hugh,” and a chorus of voices “thumping to the pumping” in the robotically discofied “Infatuation (with Your Gyration),” a theme of sorts emerges. What we’ve got here is essentially a short sequel to “69 Love Songs,” replete a vaguely rootsy excursion (“Goin’ Back to the Country”) that includes zingers like “Let Laramie take care of me ’til they bury me,” the new wave-y “The Machine In Your Hand,” and a Latin-tinged ballad titled “All She Cares About Is Mariachi” that rhymes “hibachi” and “Liberace” with, yes, “mariachi.”

       Apparently, Merritt is still a firm believer in working within self-imposed constraints, even though he’s already acquitted himself quite well in that regard. When it pays off, on a song like the genuinely affecting break-up tune “Quick!,” there’s more than just method to this madness. But too many of Merritt’s feats of compositional prowess are beginning to ring hollow. It's as if, having nothing left to prove to the world, he’s got no one left to amuse but himself. If so, that's our loss, not his.

IOTA PACHYDERM

Heady or not?

The sonic ambitions of Iota Pachyderm

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: March 13, 2012

http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/mar/13/lynchburg-based-instrumental-band-talks-sonic-ambi-ar-1763636/ 

WHO: Iota Pachyderm with Circles and Waves

WHEN: March 17 at 9 p.m.

WHERE: Manga, 2496 Rivermont Avenue

INFO: (434) 846-2585

The guys in Iota Pachyderm are serious players with serious chops and serious ambitions. Check out either of the two live full-concert recordings the Lynchburg-based five-piece instrumental band have up on Soundcloud and you'll quickly appreciate the range of their sonic vision, which incorporates complex polyrhythms, funkified grooves, improvisational jazz, rock-hard guitar riffs, and heady psychedelic explorations. But try to get a straight answer about something as simple as how the group — guitarist Will Diefenderfer and Zac Cox, keyboardist Andy Poindexter, bassist Charlie Boyd, and drummer Ken Brand — first formed, and their general demeanor takes a decided turn in the direction of comic relief.

       "I was shooting speedballs outside of school," riffs Boyd, the band's resident humorist and a familiar face to anyone who's spent any time in the general vicinity of Mangia. "Then, a couple of guys who were up to no good in the neighborhood starting making trouble. I got in a conversation with Will Dief and my mom got scared and said, 'You join Iota Pachyderm for a change.'"

       Okay, sure. But, really? Poindexter picks up the slack: "I spent eight years in Newport News, came back here, and was hanging out at Rivermont Pizza when this bouncer with long hair and a beard who looked like a Norse god took an interest in the fact that I played keyboards," he recalls, referring to the tall, blond, bearded Diefenderfer, a ubiquitous RP presence who’s Iota Pachyderm's de-facto voice of reason. "He invited me to come out and play some music with these guys, last August and we took it from there."

       Diefenderfer, whose imposing presence is offset by his soft-spoken manner and, on this particular occasion, a t-shirt emblazoned with the progressive quip, "The Voice of Change," steps in to clarify: "I started running sound for Bigfoot County," he explains, referencing the local Grateful Dead cover band, "and they had a practice spot downtown. So, I just asked all these guys to come down there and start jamming with me. It was just us just jamming for a while with another drummer. . . And then we started writing."

       "We wrote our first song within five minutes of Ken sitting down behind the drums," Cox chimes in. "It's called 'Diddlelogue.’"

       The eight-minute epic that is "Diddlelogue" came together in much the same way Iota Pachyderm's other songs are "written," which is to say that it's more about a process of the entire band working through riffs, grooves, and melodies until something good happens, than one person delivering a finished verse-chorus-verse composition to the group. "We record and listen back and then we take what we like after we've gone and listened back to the track," Diefenderfer explains. "For the sake of naming the files I try to come up with something. And on the day we made that song Charlie did this little monologue in a Bill Cosby accent that was totally hilarious. What did you say Charlie?"

       "If I was a kind of Diddlelogue," he begins in his best marble mouthed Jello Brand Pudding voice, "what kind of Diddlelogue would I be?" Then, after a short pause, he delivers the random punchline: "Raspberries.”

       As for the band’s somewhat obscure name, Diefenderfer chose it because, like “jumbo shrimp,” it’s essentially an oxymoron. “Iota is a very a small thing,” he explains. “And a pachyderm is a very large creature with extremely tough skin. So it means something like ‘tiny giant.’”

       It may be a mouthful, but the name also accurately captures something essential about the band’s more brainy prog-rock excursions. But if there’s one thing there’s not total agreement about among the Iota Pachyderm five, it’s how to easily characterize their sound or even the mix of genres that goes into the music they create together.

       “It has an element of jam to it,” Cox offers, before Boyd quickly cuts him off at the pass. “We are not a jam band,” he retorts tersely.

       “Zac and I are probably the only ones here who are okay with us being a jam band,” Diefenderfer, the peacemaker, says. “I think what's happening when we all get together and play is that, because we don't have a vocalist, it gives us a chance to all put a little of ourselves into the music. And we all have various different backgrounds, and various things that we like to listen to. And all of that comes together and into what we do.”

       “But what keeps it from being too jammy,” Boyd interjects, “is that we've got all these explorative sounds and all of this psychedelic stuff going on in the melody side with the guitars and the keyboards, but the rhythm section and even the melodies are not what you'd expect from a jam band. I mean, we have a lot of funk and hip-hop on the rhythm side. It's like if you had a post-rock band that played psychedelic classic rock.”

       Everyone seems reasonably pleased with Boyd’s summation. But as the band prepare to head back into their cavernous practice room, which used to be a Virginia School for the Arts dance rehearsal space, Diefenderfer mentions another element Iota Pachyderm are hoping to add to their mix as they move forward.

       “One of the directions I want to go with this is using samples of some of the world's greatest thinkers and incorporating that into our music. People like Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, and Stephen Hawking, talking about consciousness and the universe and scientific ideas. The audience we want to go after are kids at festivals — kids who want to just daze out and listen to music. But I want to inspire them to think. We want those people to enjoy our music, but to also have 'Aha' moments. Those are the things that impact you heavily. And those are the things that you end up remembering.”

       Of course, there’s also Boyd’s rather memorable “Diddlelogue” spiel, which is generally how the band, however serious their intentions may be, tend to introduce the song. . .

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

The Boss gets back to work

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: March 07, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/mar/07/bruce-springsteen-gets-back-work-wrecking-ball-ar-1745822/

Bruce Springsteen, Wrecking Ball (Columbia)

WORKING IT: Springsteen take up the populist cause once again

It's not easy being Bruce Springsteen. Sure, by almost any measure, he's one of the most massively and persistently successful musicians of our time, a bona fide household name who can count himself as one of the few performers capable of filling stadiums. He’s got an enviable legacy that's afforded him the artistic license to do more or less as he pleases, from chasing the ghost of Steinbeck's Tom Joad, as he did on a critically acclaimed 1995 solo album, to celebrating the legacy of folksinger Pete Seeger, a project he undertook in 2006. Those are just a few of the perks that come with being The Boss.

       And yet, Springsteen has toiled diligently to retain his status as a working man's rock star — a populist progressive in standard-cut Levi's with an abiding respect for our servicemen, our service sector, and the regular folks who make the factories run. He's a prophet of the crumbling American dream, a true believer in the humble virtues of a job well done and the value of a hard day's labor, even if his portfolio probably looks more like Mitt Romney's than Joe the Plumber's.

       Springsteen cannily addressed this conundrum early in his career by treating rock stardom as something akin to a blue-collar job, sweating his way through epic performances until his buddies in the E Street Band would literally have to pick him up off the stage for a final encore. Then, with 1982’s pared-down Nebraska, he stumbled upon strategy for longevity that has allowed him to remain true to his populist ethos without forsaking his stake in anthemic, E Street theatrics. He’s kept critics happy by revisiting the anguished Americana of Nebraska on The Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils & Dust, while reuniting regularly with the E Street crew to please his core constituency, as he has once again with the new Wrecking Ball.

       To his credit, Springsteen's never articulated a clear line between stardom and social activism. But that has created problems, most notably when Ronald Reagan co-opted "Born In the U.S.A.," a damning fist-pumping anthem that details the dismal plight of Vietnam War vets, for stump speeches without fully vetting the lyrics.

       That episode may have given Springsteen pause; for a time, at least, he seemed somewhat gun shy when it came to bringing politics to the E Street party. But a righteous anger has been simmering in Springsteen’s heart. And he comes out shooting from the hip on Wrecking Ball, an album that takes aim at Wall Street “fat cats,” predatory bankers, and modern-day “robber barons.”

       There’s more to Wrecking Ball than just calling out bad guys. As was the case on “Born In the U.S.A.” — the song and the album — Springsteen is walking a fine line here between a kind of stoic patriotism and gut feeling that things just ain’t right. That’s where it all gets a bit tricky. Against an imposing wall of thundering drums, massing guitars, surging synths, Springsteen takes stock of “hearts turned to stone full of good intentions,” while wearily celebrating the solidarity of the American people on the disc’s first single, “We Take Care of Our Own.” The song also cops a line from “America the Beautiful” and finds Bruce waving the flag “from Chicago to New Orleans/From the muscle to the bone/From the shotgun shack to the Superdome,” until it’s not entirely clear where he’s headed, except, perhaps, to the Superdome for a big gig.

       Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just that, unless you listen super carefully to the lyrics, the song has a rather jingoistic veneer. Add to that the super big-budget studio production and, well, let’s just say that one could very easily imagine a triumphant Mitt Romney bounding to the stage to accept the Republican nomination to a bombastic tune like this.

       Subtlety has never been an E Street staple. Heavy handed is their dominant mode. That’s just fine for the stadium rockers here. But it gets a little weird when they crash in on a rootsier number like “Easy Money,” a tune that begins as an acoustic foot-stomper before the band amp it up to something resembling a hi-tech hoedown. And there’s something a little off about the gloss they apply to the grit of “Shackled and Drawn,” an ode to the old world virtues of a sweaty shirt and a hard day’s work filled with lots of whooping, hollering, and an oddly synthetic sounding fiddle. “Up on banker’s hill the party’s going strong,” Springsteen growls, “Down here below we’re shackled and drawn.”

       Songs are fictions set to music. And it’s every singer’s prerogative to inhabit any character he or she chooses. Indeed, from the freewheeling desperado in “Born to Run” to the conflicted cop in the Nebraska tune “Highway Patrolman,” Springsteen’s has had a great track record when it comes to bringing such fictions to life. But on Wrecking Ball he overreaches. He may empathize or even identify with the downtrodden denizens of “Shackled and Drawn.” But, let’s face it: even if he’s not part of the “party,” these days he lives a lot closer to “banker’s hill” than a “shotgun shack.”

       That’s not to suggest that Springsteen’s disingenuous, only that he’s not as believable playing the role of the workingman as he once was. And, he needn’t force it. On “Jack of All Trades,” a stolid ballad built around lovely piano arpeggios and anchored by mournful organ tones, he delivers a moving meditation on the state of the world (“The banker man grows fat/The working man grows thin/It’s all happened before/And it’ll happen again”) from his own perspective, and it works.

       In fact, Springsteen’s at his best here when he gets personal. “This is my confession/I need your heart in this depression,” he sings tenderly in the halting “This Depression.” It’s a simple sentiment that gives way to a searing guitar solo that just feels right. Similarly, “You’ve Got It,” another track that steers clear of redressing grievances, captures Springsteen at his most affecting, soulfully serenading a lover as he contemplates his own mortality.

       Mostly, though, Wrecking Ball is about weathering through hard times, finding redemption in the process, and maybe even getting a little taste of transcendence in the end. Springsteen does he best to squeeze all of that into the 7-minute epic “Land of Hope and Dreams,” a huge production that echoes “Born to Run” and then moves beyond it, with a full gospel choir, looped beats, banjo, and a Sam Cooke sample joining an uplifting solo by late E Street Band sax player Clarence Clemons. Springsteen even manages to squeeze in a Civil Rights-era Curtis Mayfield allusion as he breathlessly races toward the finish line.

No, it’s not easy being Bruce. But maybe it doesn’t have to be as hard as he makes it sound on Wrecking Ball.

COWBOY JUNKIES

Cowboy Junkies take the long way home to their folky comfort zone

By: MATT ASHARE | http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/feb/29/torontos-cowboy-junkies-take-long-way-home-their-f-ar-1730295/
Published: February 29, 2012

Who: Cowboy Junkies

When: March 3, 7 p.m.

Where: The Jefferson Theater, 110 East Main St., Charlottesville

Tickets: $35 in advance, $37 at the door

FOUR x FOUR : Cowboy Junkies are touring on not one but 4 new CDs

The typical routine for a successful songwriter has, for decades, looked something like this: Spend about a year writing a dozen or so tunes; record the pick of the litter with or without accompaniment; release them on an album; and then, if all goes well, head out on the road to promote the new material. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. . .

       It's really not bad work if you can get it. And Michael Timmins, resident songwriter/guitarist in the Toronto-based folk-rock group Cowboy Junkies, had been getting it for a solid two decades before hit something of a wall in 2008. In league with his sister Margo (vocals), his brother Peter (drums), and bassist Alan Anton, he'd delivered a dozen albums in just over 20 years when, as he explained over the phone from Toronto just a few weeks before embarking on tour that brings them to the Jefferson in Charlottesville on March 3, he just didn't feel ready to jump back in.

       "I started working on songs for a new album," he recalls, "just going through the cycle where you write, put out a record, record it, and then you have to live with it for two years. We were also in the middle of touring, and I just wasn't hearing an album there. It wasn't so much the songs as it was my feelings about having to do the whole cycle again. I just wasn't ready, so I was having trouble of getting into the right headspace."

       Fate intervened: Timmins, who'd adopted two Chinese orphans with his wife, found himself jolted out of the bandlife, living in a small town outside of Shanghai for three months. "My wife was offered a job teaching English over there," he says. "And we thought it would be a great opportunity for our kids to go back and emmerse themselves in the culture."

       Timmins also experienced a cultural emersion of sorts; he returned to Toronto, and to Cowboy Junkies reinvigorated as a songwriter and determined to incorporate the sounds of the Far East into his own music. The result wasn't just one new album, but a collection of four diverging discs released as "The Nomad Series" over the course of 18 months, culminating recently with the release of The Wilderness, a spare and wistful album that features half a dozen of the tunes Timmins started writing before the China trip.

       With its gently restrained arrangements, contemplative tone, and an organic feel that places Margo's nuanced vocals front and center, The Wilderness is the one that sounds, well, pretty much the way you'd expect a Cowboy Junkies album to sound. In contrast, Remnin Park, the first in the series, is the quirkiest, blending samples of music and chatter from the streets of China into country-tinged acoustic ballads, electric rockers, and even a tasteful little electronica excursion. The band dedicated the second "Nomad" recording, Demons, to covering the late Vic Chesnutt, re-imagining the Georgia-bred singer's often skeletal songs with bold guitar riffs, muscular backbeats, a heap of Highway 61 Revisited organ embellishments, and, of course, Margo's sultry yet stern voice. And on the series' third disc, Sing In My Meadows, the Brothers Timmins are fully plugged in, as they rock their way through 8 extended blue-based jams outfitted with serrated slide guitars, crashing cymbals, and plenty of extended soloing.

       It's a lot of music to take in, and a lot of songs to sort through as the band prepare to hit the road. But Timmins isn't worried. Here's more of what he had to say about genesis of "The Nomad Series," the impact of his China trip, and the general state of Cowboy Junkies affairs. . .

Q: I get that your time in China inspired you to take your songwriting in a new direction, but how did that lead to a series of albums that are so very different, and that essentially took right back to where you began in 2009?

       When I went off to China, my whole perspective changed. I had all this music from China and I just felt that it had to influence the next thing we did. I couldn't just ignore it. So that's really when we began to think in terms of how do we do this? There was lots of stuff happening, and we just had to figure out how to incorporate all of that into an album project. The Wilderness songs just weren't feeling right to me at the time. There was just too much other input coming in. So we came up with the idea of the "Nomad" project. We started with an album based on my China experiences. That allowed me to put the songs I'd been working on for The Wilderness away for a almost two years. After that, I was able to hear them with fresh ears, and get more of a direction for them. And, also, with the four albums, it just made sense to me that this was going to be an album about the songs — about songwriting and about singing. It's more folk driven, and it's more of a nod to our older style, which is fine in the context of four albums. Now I like The Wilderness. But first, there were other things we wanted to express and get out musically as a band. 

Q: I know you were close with Vic Chesnutt and had even collaborated with him, but was Demons a way for you to take a break from songwriting?

       Maybe a little bit. The other aspect of it is that we've done a ton of covers. And our best known song, "Sweet Jane," is a cover. We're kind of known for that — taking songs and transforming them into something different and that's ours. We don't play them note-for-note. We try to get inside them and turn them around and figure out how to do the song in our own style. It was the same with Vic's songs. It just made sense for us to play into the side of the band that is about doing cover songs. We knew we were taking on something that could blow up in our faces. But it was a really good challenge, and we thought that if we could pull it off it might bring more people to Vic's stuff, which was a big part of it too.

Q: Sing In My Meadows sounds like something you and your brother — and Alan — just needed to get out of your system. Am I right?

       That was the intention. There's an aspect to our live performances that is encompassed in that record. As you were saying, when people hear our name, most of them probably think of an album like The Wilderness. And live, we certainly have that vibe — that spacey or spacious vibe. But, over the years, we've also developed more of an acid-blues or psychedelic side, where we'll we'll take off on certain tangents and do a lot of jamming and get a bit noisy. That's where the musicians get a chance to get their ya-yas out. With the "Nomad Series," we finally had an opportunity to really focus on that side of the band's personality. In the past, we might include a couple of songs like that on an album, but never for an entire album.

Q: So how are you planning to do all of this live?

       When we toured Europe in November, we experimented with how to present it, because there is so much new material and we also want to play catalog stuff as well, not just for ourselves, but for the audience especially. So we've been doing two hour-long sets. The first is all "Nomad" material. And then we do a second set of all catalog stuff. Margo announces up front that that's what we're doing, so people can focus on the newer material without hearing songs from twenty years ago. And they're not listening to the new songs hoping that the next one is going to be one of their old favorites.

Q: Things don't always go all that well when siblings play music together. I'm thinking of the Everly Brothers, the Kinks, CCR, Dire Straits, Oasis. What's Cowboy Junkies secret for keeping the peace?

       I don't know: Good parenting, I guess. It's all just speculation. Maybe one difference is that there's a sister in there. There are six kids in the family, and Margo's role has always been that of the mediator. That's maybe part of her role in the band as well. But I guess I can't really tell you why it works.

NEW MULTITUDES

Jay Farrar, Jim James, Anders Parker, and Will Johnson celebrate Woody Guthrie’s centennial

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: February 29, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/feb/29/jay-farrar-jim-james-anders-parker-will-johnson-ce-ar-1728985/

New Multitudes, New Multitudes (Rounder)

ALT-COUNTRY ALL-STARS

It’s hard to imagine that Son Volt singer/guitarist Jay Farrar and My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James (a/k/a Yim Yames) weren’t at least thinking about the current state of affairs in this country when they were invited, along with Anders Parker (Varnaline) and Will Johnson (Centro-matic), to cull through the vast archive of unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics by his daughter Nora. The idea was for the four alt-country fellow travelers to join forces on an album that would bring those lyrics to musical life to mark the centennial celebration of Woody’s birth year.

         That year has come. And the album, New Multitudes, has arrived with fairly minimal hype at a time when Occupy Wall Street is still going strong, during a week that began with seemingly tone-deaf Republican presidential hopeful making news with a rather bone-headed remark at the Daytona 500. In case you haven’t heard, when asked if he followed auto racing, Mitt Romney responded, “Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans. But I have some great friends that are NASCAR team owners.” Maybe he was just kidding. But given the size of his bank account, not to mention his Super PAC, it’s not all that funny.

         So whether or not Farrar, James, Parker, and Johnson, who are touring under the moniker New Multitudes, meant to drop a populist smartbomb in the midst of a our on-going recession and one of the nastiest political climates in recent memory, they’ve succeeded. Because, while the real Woody Guthrie was a complicated artist who wrote all kinds of songs, the mythical Woody Guthrie lives on as the activist Dust Bowl Troubadour who penned “This Land Is Our Land,” scrawled “This machine kills fascists” on his guitar, and, in contemporary parlance, trumpeted the cause of the 99%.

         Farrar and his crew aren’t the first songwriters to be given access to the Guthrie archives. Jeff Tweedy, Farrar’s former bandmate in Uncle Tupelo, and his band Wilco, joined forces with British punk-folkster Billy Bragg on two albums that set unpublished Guthrie lyrics to music, 1998’s Mermaid Avenue and 2000’s Mermaid Avenue Vol. II. And Guthrie’s been a major influence on socially conscious artist since Bob Dylan first coopted the Dust Bowl Troubadour mantle back in his freewheeling folk days. Clash rabble-rouser Joe Strummer originally dubbed himself Woody Mellor in Guthrie’s honor. And Bruce Springsteen, an avowed Guthrie acolyte, has been known to pull out “This Land Is Your Land” from time to time, most memorably on his album Live 1975-1985.

         But New Multitudes, through no fault of their own, have arrived at a time when simply invoking the legacy of Woody Guthrie carries a moral weight that would be difficult to quantify. To their credit, though, they don’t get mired in anything too heavy handedly dogmatic or overtly preachy. Farrar kicks off the album with the meditative “Hoping Machine,” a slow building rocker he delivers with characteristic world-weariness as he winds his way through lyrics like “Word is the music and the people are the song” until his fellow singers join in on the open-ended punch line “Out of order,” a sentiment that could apply to just about anything in the broken-down world the song inhabits.

         Elsewhere, Parker, who played with Farrar in the band Gob Iron, takes the lead on the acoustic “Fly High,” a straightforwardly folky, poetic rumination on a troubled romance sung from the window seat of cross-country flight. And, Johnson is at the helm for the album’s hardest hitting number, the unmistakably Springsteen-styled “V.D. City,” a place populated by skid row denizens where “nobody knows you by name,” harmonicas blare, and overdriven guitars tangle a friendly fight to an anthemic finish.

It’s James who tackles what might be the album’s most outwardly partisan tune, the spare, fragile, and bluesy “My Revolutionary Mind,” a forlorn love ballad or sorts that culminates around a gently sung, if somewhat bemusing chorus: “I need a progressive woman/I need an awfully liberal woman/I need a socially conscious woman/To ease my revolutionary mind.” And Farrar manages with relative ease to invest the disc’s simple title track with a solemnity of a secular prayer. Against a backdrop of strummed acoustic guitars, he intones “Gonna win my battle for peace,” “Gonna build my world over,” “Gonna build my world with love,” turning what sound like scribbled thoughts into a coherent and powerful statement of purpose.

That said, the real strength of New Multitudes is the balance Farrar, James, Parker, and Johnson bring to the project, both in terms of the music they’ve set Guthrie’s words to, and the glimpses we’re given into Guthrie’s world. There are deep thoughts, dark images, and serious moments here. But there are also bright spots like R.E.M.-ish jangle of “Old L.A.,” an ode to an oft maligned city sung by Parker in a manner that brings to mind Michael Stipe. And just having the opportunity to hear Farrar and James spar on guitar should be enough to bring a smile to the face of contemporary Americana fans.

It’s hard to know exactly what Farrar, James, Parker, and Johnson went digging for when Guthrie’s notebooks were open to them. But they appear to have found it.      

LAMBCHOP

Kurt Wagner’s moving meditation on the late Vic Chesnutt

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: February 22, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/feb/22/lambchop-kurt-wagners-moving-meditation-late-vic-c-ar-1707275/

Lambchop, Mr. M (Merge)

It had to be fairly early in the ’90s — definitely no later than 1995. I was in Manhattan for a music convention and I wandered mid-day from my Midtown hotel to a mid-sized theater space at Lincoln Center just in time to grab a seat before Kris Kristofferson, the outlaw country star-turned-Hollywood actor, walked on stage as the main attraction for one of those songwriters' workshops where four or five artists play a tune or two and then talk about their process, dropping enlightening and/or amusing anecdotes along the way. I don't remember much who else was on that stage or about what transpired, although I'm pretty sure Kristofferson, tall and ruggedly regal in cowboy boots and jeans, may or may not have done "Me and Bobby McGee," the song for which I knew him best. But I wasn't there for that. I was much more interested in a lesser-known singer-songwriter on the bill, a guy in a wheelchair who called himself Vic Chesnutt.

       Chesnutt, the victim of a car accident in his late teens, was an outsider's outsider artist who'd been "discovered" by Michael Stipe playing around Athens, GA, in the late ’80s. The R.E.M. frontman would go on to produce Chesnutt's first two remarkable albums, 1990's Little and the one that initially caught my ear, ’91's West of Rome. Seven years later, R.E.M. joined the likes of Smashing Pumpkins, Indigo Girls, and, yes, Madonna covering Chesnutt's songs on the benefit album Sweet Relief II: The Gravity of the Situation. But what I remember best about that day at Lincoln Center was both how shabby and diminutive Chesnutt looked next to the imposing Kristofferson, and how genuinely moved — "blown away" is probably more accurate — Kristofferson seemed as Chesnutt strummed his way through the mini-set.      

       On his best days, Vic could do that. On his worst, he wrestled with the demons that were muses of sorts — demons that finally got the better of him in December of 2009, when, shortly after his 45th birthday, he took his own life. But not before recording and releasing a dozen and a half albums on his own and in collaboration with bands as diverse as the jammy Widespread Panic, lo-fi popsters Elf Power, and, most notably, a strange Nashville-based outfit called Lambchop, a group led by Chesnutt's friend/kindred spirit Kurt Wagner.

       Wagner and Chesnutt were essentially fellow travelers, exploring fertile yet mostly forgotten backroads of Americana, when they hooked up on Chesnutt's 1998 album The Salesman and the Bernadette. And they charted similarly skewed, if somewhat diverging paths in the decade that followed — two unique voices in a landscape often cluttered with too much of the same. So it's no surprise that the first new Lambchop album since Chesnutt's death, the curiously titled Mr. M, is both dedicated to the late singer-songwriter's memory and suffused with what might best be described as peaceful, uneasy feelings.

       The mysterious Mr. M — shorthand, I'm guessing, for "Mr. Met," the softly set, seven minute-plus, ruminative centerpiece of the album, as if that clears up anything — is the 11th album Wagner's recorded with a rotating cast of players under the Lambchop moniker since 1994. Although the "band" has more or less always been a vehicle for Wagner's abstract musings on life, love, and loneliness, it’s never been quite as straightforwardly hear-on-torn-sleeve as that may suggest. In 2000, for example, Wagner released a Lambchop disc titled Nixon that was, indeed, meant to be inspired by the troubled rise and fall of the 37th President of the United States. But good luck finding any direct reference the Watergate scandal or anything else overtly political in any of the lyrics on that album. Similarly, while Lambchop have generally fallen under the "alt-county" heading, Lambchop's brand of roots music has grown to be expansive enough to incorporate loungey jazz undertones, classically arranged orchestrations, soul music, and a touch of the avant garde.

       The dominant mode on Mr. M is orchestral, as in the string quartet that opens the disc’s first track, “If Not I’ll Just Die” — the “strings” and “crazy flutes” Wagner references in the song’s pointillistic lyrics. There’s no linear narrative here, just snapshots of “grandpa coughing in the kitchen” and open-ended sentiments like, “Oh, gonna miss you,” as well as this twist on the famous Springsteen line: “We were born to rule.” Cocktail drums, muted piano, and stand-up bass (but none of the “harps and electric guitar” that are also part of the lyric) underscore Wagner’s understated delivery, as the measured mood is set.

       Wagner drops the strings on the reflective “2B2,” deploying some minimal electric guitar and droning organ to accompany minor-key piano chordings and amusingly absurd observations like, “Took the Christmas lights off the front porch/On February 31^st,” a line one could easily imagine Chesnutt singing. And the more briskly paced “Gone Tomorrow,” with its picked and strummed acoustic guitars, brings him closer to something Johnny Cash might have considered covering in his later years, until midway through its nearly seven minutes, the strings return, and Wagner takes the rest of the band off on an ambient excursion.

       But the show-stealer here is the de-facto title track. “Mr. Met” may be rooted in Nashville, but it echoes a lavish production style Music Row hasn’t much favored since the’70s. Wagner sounds like Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” stripped of all glitz, as he reflects, almost randomly, “Fear makes us visual/Life made you beautiful/Fate makes us powerless/Turn on your radio.” Yes, the song is heavily orchestrated, replete with an angelic chorus of female voices that accompany the rising tide of strings and fingerpicked guitars. But the effect is somber, not gaudy. And, even if Wagner never mentions Vic Chesnutt by name, it’s fairly easy to read between lines like, "Friends make you sensitive/Loss makes us idiots/Fear makes us critical/Knowledge is difficult." Vic almost certainly would’ve gotten the point.