Posted on 07 July 2010
‘Tis the season for summer mixes. I made mine, the morning benders’ Chris Chu put one together for L.A.-based site Say Mayday. Plenty to love in there, like the Avalanches, Twin Sister, Bibio, Arthur Russell. One thing you get when Chu makes you a mix that you don’t get with someone like me, though, is the ability to cover Joanna Newsom over a J Dilla beat as a tossed-off mid-mix easter egg. It’s a pretty casual affair, this sorta-cover, but what I love most about it is Chris’s choice of J Dilla sample to sing Newsom over — “U-Love” from the endlessly rewarding Jay Dee beat-pastiche LP Donuts, slowed to a molasses drip. (Also I love that he decided to use a J Dilla beat in the first place.)
Grab it at Say Mayday (the benders/Newsom/Dilla moment starts at 17:38). But more importantly, let’s take the occasion to fall back in love with J Dilla? Here’s “U-Love,” and the song it sampled — Jerry Butler’s 1968 track “Just Because I Really Love You” — and, to complete the anatomy lesson, I’m including “Have One On Me,” too.
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Posted on 05 May 2010
Joanna Newsom in on tour in the UK right now, and she stopped by Later With Jools Holland last night to do “‘81″ from Have One On Me (she did “Soft As Chalk” for Late Night With Jimmy Fallon in March). As with the studio version, Newsom handled the performance with just her harp and her voice, and both were in fine form, though she did look slightly nervous at the start. More songs from her Jools set will air Friday night.
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Posted on 23 April 2010
The Roots’ forthcoming How I Got Over will feature John Legend and Jim James, as well as a sample of The Milk-Eyed Mender’s “Book OF Right-On.” Newsom didn’t re-record it — she appears in sampled form. For his part, Jim James re-made Monsters Of Folk’s “Dear God” without his fellow Monsters. There’s still no release date for the collection, but it is expected in 2010. Billboard has more info. That, and Questlove has posted a video of himself “recording the joanna newsome jawn….“
Posted on 02 April 2010
Shaky YouTube video of Sufjan Stevens performing a haunting “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” at MusicNOW in Cincinnati is what first put the festival in the back of my mind. (That and the city’s historic Memorial Hall as an unmistakable backdrop.) The take is from 2007. Bryce Dessner, who sits in with Stevens in that clip, started the festival in 2006. (Right, it’s now in its fifth year.) Unlike most multi-day music happenings that attempt to roll quickly through abridged sets like well-oiled nostalgia machines, MusicNOW encourages collaboration and risk. This year’s three-day installment included a lot of that. It took place Tuesday (3/30) until last night (4/1) and included performances from Joanna Newsom, Robin Pecknold, St. Vincent, yMusic (performing a commission written by Annie Clark), the amazing saxophonist Colin Stetson (he gets weirdly black metal with his tones), and a solo Justin Vernon. Well, Vernon wasn’t exactly solo — he was joined by Bryce and Aaron Dessner. And Annie Clark. We couldn’t make it, but Chris Glass could. He has the beautiful photos to prove it. We’ve also video of Pecknold performing what sounds like a new song.
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Posted on 25 March 2010
If you didn’t know, Fred Armisen lets his hair down and records music/instructs drumming for Drag City as epic skinsman Jens Hannemann. He’s in the midst of opening a couple of shows with his labelmate Joanna Newsom. One of those shows took place last night at the Jefferson Theatre in Charlottesville, Virginia where Armisen took to the stage during Newsom’s set to play cowbell dog bowl on Have One On Me’s “Good Intentions Paving Company.” Armisen’s not always easy to see in this fan-shot video, but his presence is deeply felt. (Thanks for the tip, Gary.)
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Posted on 22 March 2010
Over the weekend Jónsi visited the Jo Whiley Show on BBC Radio 1, where he performed the title track from his EP Go Do and a cover of MGMT’s “Time To Pretend.” The cover is a good reminder of two things: How great “Time To Pretend” is (some people need to be reminded today), and how delicately gorgeous Jónsi Birgisson’s falsetto can sound. It’s just him and a piano, so you might notice that he purposely skips over some of the words, touching down lightly on the nouns.
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Posted on 21 March 2010
It’s easy to discount Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden. The well-coiffed twosome’s rise from Wesleyan dorm room to opening slots with Radiohead, a Grammy nomination, the beds of models and starlets, and the love of Rolling Stone (who named Oracular Spectacular the 18th best album of the decade), NME (best album of ‘08), and Paul McCartney (who’s mentioned wanting to make “dancey stuff” with them) is exactly the kind of thing that makes haters wake up in the morning. (Hell, they even got to sue Nicolas Sarkozy and terrorize children with Joanna Newsom.) But when a band becomes a full-on phenomenon there’s a reason (or, more interestingly, reasons), so it’s worthwhile disengaging your mind from the hype (positive or negative), resetting the frequency, and focusing on the actual music. If they’ll let you: Before you can dig into MGMT’s Congratulations (streaming now in full here) there’s that zany scratch-off Ausgang art (and custom metal coin) as well as an indulgent video dedicated to explaining that 32-page album booklet/coin.
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Posted on 15 March 2010
The Have One On Me support shows started back in Australia, migrating Friday night to our end of the world for a North American kick off show at Calvin College. The set was just ten songs, but of course that spanned 90 minutes because roughly nine-minutes per song is about right for Joanna Newsom’s labyrinth pop madrigals. Mlive.com describes the set as a hushed and sweeping affair, dropping a few tidbits from the 25-minute Q&A with Newsom that followed. For example: she doesn’t like to listen to music while writing and recording, unless that music is Dirty Projectors — clever girl. That’s a fact framed in her recent NYTimes profile that is long, but if you’ve made it through the knotty depths of her recent triple-disc triumph, you can make it through the piece. (An interesting note: Milk-Eyed Mender and Ys sold 200K and 250K albums, respectively. Have One’s week one was somewhere around 7,000. That’s gotta be drag city.) Of course Joanna gives good photo, and so we sent Graeme Flegenheimer to document the night opened by fellow forest-dwellers Bowerbirds. Here’s the evening’s setlist, along with some so-so video if you’re into that sorta thing:
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Posted on 15 March 2010
It’s fun anytime Vampire Weekend plays late night TV, if only because we know it means you guys are going to get lively in the comments. And because it’s a band we enjoy playing late night TV. But after last weekend’s killer “Giving Up The Gun” dudes had little to prove by way of late […]
Posted on 07 March 2010
Late last night Rolling Stone confirmed the sad news that Sparkhorse’s Mark Linkous has committed suicide. A statement from his family:
It is with great sadness that we share the news that our dear friend and family member, Mark Linkous, took his own life today. We are thankful for his time with us and will hold […]
