Nels Cline Singers and Daniel Lanois

Saturday afternoon - Trevor Dunn, Daniel Lanois and Nels Cline

Sunday afternoon show in the tent at Hillside

Nels Cline

Wilco and Solid Sound 2015

Wow, I have been terrible about blogging my musical thoughts and journeys. Part of the reason might be that music had dropped off from it's lofty position of interest during a very personal struggle over the past months. I am hopeful that attending Solid Sound 2015 will play a part in the journey back to a happy part of my life.

Solid Sound from the back of Joe's Field, close to the food (behind camera)

Solid Sound has taken place in 2010, 2011, 2013 and now 2015. It is a music festival that takes place in North Adams, Massachusetts on the ground of MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts museum of contemporary art). MASS MoCA is a fantastic place, a reconditioned huge factory that sprawls along the Hoosic River through this old, former industrial, town.
Solid Sound was created and continues to be curated by the band Wilco. They are a band that mostly hails from Chicago. They have made some fantastic recordings, written a ton of great songs and have been a part of my and my family's life for years and years. Our fandom began with the recording Mermaid Avenue (June 1998) which was a project that saw Wilco and the English folk singer Billy Bragg take lyrics of Woody Guthrie's that had never been set to music in Woody's life and create songs from them. The Mermaid Avenue project has been only one of the things that Woody's daughter Nora has pursued to keep the musical legacy of Woody Guthrie alive and flourishing.
If you do not know who Woody Guthrie was, well, American folk musical legend is understating it...

I have always been a searcher when exploring the world of music. If you find a band or a singer happy to explore a particular genre, I can appreciate, but get restless. I can drop by for a taste, but will resist regular visits. I don't want the music to just be a form of wallpaper.
To me the beauty of radio is that a great DJ can construct a tour of music that is firmly in the "drop by for a taste" category. However the tragedy of radio is that they completely miss a band such as Wilco. The more you taste them the more you understand they are not appetizers to sample but the whole meal.
 My deep affection for Wilco and Jeff Tweedy could be their "shape-shifter' approach to music. They can explore roots music such as classic country and folk (they don't simply revive Woody Guthrie, they bring him beautifully into the modern) and they are the kings of alt-country. Jeff Tweedy can write and sings songs of stunning elegance and simplicity.  Some Wilco songs have more than a touch of gospel, sometimes they have delved deeply into experimental sounds with a rock format, sometimes they make you laugh and sometimes they make you cry. I have always found them worth listening to and their concerts never let you down. Hell, they raise you up and float you away.

If you don't want to take my word for it...
The Guardian

The New York Times   wrote recently about Solid Sound

And The Atlantic wrote a few years back, claiming that Wilco's album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" was the best of recent times......now who am I to argue?

The War on Drugs - Under the Pressure

Sorry, I missed my Monday target for my musical blogging contribution. Circumstances forced me into Milton for a four hour wait around. I was able to read while waiting (which helps tomorrow's blob, but no promises). The Main and Thompson area of Milton is car based territory. If you are spending time there on foot, it is a horrible, bleak landscape.

Why was I on foot in Milton? It is an embarrassing story, but I best get it off my chest. Saturday I was determined to get our 90's model "weighs a ton" big screen Sony tv off to the special electronic recycling event in Georgetown. It took three of us to wrestle and roll the thing into the Santa Fe. I was just up the road from my destination when the cursed thing shifted as I turned and smashed the back window of our SUV. It was not my finest hour.

Back to music. The beginning of this song has a wonderful hissing rhythm. It sounds like a combo of a computer beat machine and one of those lawn sprinklers that rotate and send water over a large area. It is a sound of summer. Hazy guitar strums and shimmering sounds soon flow over this lawn sprinkler as the song kicks in. It all put me in mind of those summer months hopefully on the horizon. Don't let the song opening put you in mind of beach and beer summer fun, this is no Beach Boys bop. Adam Granduciel of "The War on Drugs" sings of searching, struggling and trying to understand both direction of one's life and the obstacles that send you astray. I have found this song to be haunting and very repeatable.

That opening puts me in mind of two classic songs. It is the idea of music being detected in the aural environment, that what seems to be noise can be observed and twisted into a warm or heartfelt human expression.

Warren Zevon in Desperadoes Under The Eaves sings of listening to the air conditioner hum and then attributes the end of his song, with it's sense of both rising spirits and vanishing into despair, to the sound that the air conditioner makes. It remains one of my favourite songs all-time.

Joni Mitchell's song The Hissing of Summer Lawns touches on this notion, more lyrically than aurally. Her song strikes me as more aware of detachment rather than contemplation. 

"Under the Pressure" is now officially the first song of my Summer 14 playlist. I hope you enjoy and stay tuned.

The Both: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert or the modern music media menu

We live in a golden age. I get to say this now and then (with a minimum of sarcasm) when I examine the potential in a modern media menu. Of course, I am an old-timer and can remember having to stay up late to watch Midnight Special or Don Kirshner's Rock Concert just hoping that somebody interesting was on that week. Today I have to make an effort to plan my time to benefit from the luxury of music entertainment that comes barrelling my way every day.

So my weekly music blog is meant to reflect what has hit my ears of late. It is bound to reflect where those ears travel to in my media menu. This week's music is a happy connection between eMusic and NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts.

I have had a subscription to eMusic for many a year now (I must check, I think I started March 2006). There have been times when labels deserted eMusic and I thought of doing it too. It appeals to my sense of ethics that I have a monthly paid subscription for music. Of late I have had a backlog of albums waiting for me on eMusic when my subscription money shows up. I even bought a $50 bonus booster option recently to get the backlog whittled down. Oh joy, Oh joy when I checked my eMusic on the weekend and found that they had the debut recording of The Both.

The Both are a new band arrived at by a collaboration of two established artists, Ted Leo and Aimee Mann. I have been a long time fan of Aimee Mann, I would probably rave over a recording of her ordering pizza. I am not anywhere near as aware of Ted Leo. I have heard him on the radio (SiriusXM - The Loft) from time to time. If I check my iTunes I probably have a few of his songs. The combination of the two is fantastic. It is less the blend of their voices, which is fine enough. It is more the tone established by Leo's chunky electric guitar and gruff singing that absorbs you and sends you down a musical road where I actually forget about Aimee Mann. Then her voice comes back into the song and off into the stratosphere we go.
The joy that is the NPR Tiny Desk Concert series deserves another blog post of it's own. If it is not a part of your media music menu, consider yourself gifted to have me inform you of it. You're welcome.




My download was delayed by a few busy days on the Easter weekend and a lingering illness. Hopefully better late than never. Now click on the Tiny Desk Concert again and enjoy.

Where Will I Be - Emmylou Harris - Daniel Lanois - Live TV performance BBC

I admit that I have a tendency to seek the new when on my musical jaunts.* I believe that popular music genres work best with an element of freshness to them. Music from back in the day works best for me when it has had time to almost be out of my brain. To me a version of Hell would be always hearing music that you have heard before, as recently as yesterday. I think I have experienced this slightly by hearing an oldies radio station in Los Angeles drifting from a neighbour's yard. Yikes and horrors...

And then there is "Wrecking Ball" by Emmylou Harris and Daniel Lanois. I don't think it's possible for these songs to ever be out of my brain. Recorded and released in 1995 it had such a delicious, transcendent mixture of emotion, tradition and brave new directions wrapped into song, it struck us with a force that has never left us. 19 years on, the newly remastered reissue arrived in my mailbox on it's release date last week. It sounds still fresh and still powerful
My wife had developed a fierce bond with Daniel Lanois's "Acadie" recording as it became the soundtrack to her first pregnancy. Wrecking Ball had the same magic with the incredible addition of Emmylou Harris' voice.





Tomorrow night at Massey Hall in Toronto Emmylou and Daniel are performing this recording onstage. We are fortunate enough to have tickets and simply can't wait.

Gillian Welch, a songwriter and singer I have long admired and who swims in these same waters (her song "Orphan Girl" is on the recording), writes a beautiful appreciation in the liner notes of the new version.
"But visiting again with Wrecking Ball - this magnificently recorded document of Emmylou Harris's voice - I find myself marvelling at that which soars and crashes, breaks, and takes flight again. There is something wind-whipped about it. It has the paradoxical intimacy of the lone figure of the heath, the affinity one feels in wilderness, no matter how vast, for all violence and tenderness, all the ravages and salvations inherent in any breathtaking landscape. It is what holds us and feeds us as no table can. Perhaps there are hungers that only Art and Nature and Spirit can fill. On the day that Wrecking Ball came out we all had a feast. "

I can only add that feasts are best when attached to a spirit of celebration. Otherwise how could a feast just go on and on? This will be the first Passover Seder that Hindy and I have missed since travelling in Europe in 1988. Passover is not something that we would pass up just for a night of entertainment. We expect a powerful concert tomorrow. If you are not familiar with the recording, I hope it finds you.





* Musical jaunts used to be actual jaunts. Record store journies meant transportation with the time spent anticipating and then hauling purchases home. Now it is computer clicks, downloads and when I rarely purchase an actual recording it is from a record company who has me on their email list and it arrives in the mail. So replace jaunt with short walk to the mailbox or a series of mouse clicks. I am now in search of a suitable digital replacement for "jaunt". Stay tuned.

My high tech future is based on a clock radio...

My weekday morning radio favourite is often Mike Marrone's show on The Loft on SiriusXM. This morning I drove HK to the GO station and caught the following song.

Gomez is not a new band, but a fairly obscure one. I don't think I have ever heard them except on The Loft. They are an English band (Brighton area, I think) but they have a distinctly American sound to them. IMHO

Notice by Gomez








Mondays often inspire me to poke around with my computer, I tend to download apps and don't always find the time to try them out. My search seems to be for the app that will take direction but will also run on automatic. This dream app would assign me time for projects in a predictable way and also operate my media diet to my liking without me having to pick and choose.

I am on the verge of buying an app that will operate my iTunes. Look for a review next Monday.

It is strange how memory and news of an unexpected death can spark a rush of thoughtful reflections. Is this a meme?

Davy Jones, singer in the 60’s band The Monkees, died yesterday of a heart attack at age 66.

Here is my contribution to the meme…. I think that it was the year I was in grade 4 that The Monkees first hit prime time television. This was in pre-cable days and if your house had a tall antenna attached you could pick up the American channels. If you had the American channels you watched shows like The Monkees. My house had a television that had the antenna on top of the set. Rabbit ears they were called . We only watched the local shows. That meant Canadian shows, like Don Messer, Elwood Glover and Juliette after the hockey game. They were dull shows meant for adults.

There was a girl in my class. I think her name was Diane and she just loved this new show called “The Monkees”. She was always talking the day after a new episode about the show. I must have been green with envy. I don’t recall how I managed to see my first episode. Perhaps it was visiting friends or family, maybe we even got a tall antenna. I do remember going to school the next day feeling that I had to share the news with Diane. Our class was in a portable. I can remember telling her when we were at our desks (probably with way too much enthusiasm) that I had watched The Monkees the night before. She did not care, shrugged me off and I remember being stunned.

I think she taught me there and then that mass culture was not for me. I was destined to be a floundering hipster. If you listened to obscure music, watched oddball TV and weird movies, you never had to fall victim to the shrug of falling behind.

I loved the show despite her reaction. I can remember going out with my mother to a restaurant and encountering a jukebox. I made the choice of “Pleasant Valley Sunday” by The Monkees. She helped me understand the lyrics, especially the “status symbol land” part.

Now my second meme tale turns darker. If I was ten in my first memory, it was probably four or five years later that The Monkees make another contribution to my life. My father encountered medical difficulties, mental health troubles. He had manic episodes and had long stays in psychiatric hospitals. In one of his long visits he encountered an album by The Monkees. He was convinced that the meaning to life and the universe was contained in the lyrics to that album. He scribbled nonsensical notes in pen on the album cover. I can’t tell you the name of the album, but I can picture it. 

* I looked it up, it was Headquarters.

I can also recall the sinking feeling that I used to encounter when I was faced with a father who was illogical and insane. Now we would describe his condition in health terms, but to my mind “insane” was the term of the time. The implication of that word, to my teenaged mind, was that although he was there, in profound ways he was lost forever. Being of a sensitive nature, I also feared that I was somehow destined to become lost one day too.

I am afraid that somewhere at home, in a gathering of old vinyl, that Monkees album is still in my possession. It haunts me still.

So it was a shock to think of a member of The Monkees dying unexpectedly. I read the articles and web contributions of first crushes and sunny memories. I do not begrudge anyone a baby boomer moment or the need to pay tribute to someone who seemed to be a pleasant person. I enjoyed their show and their music too. If I were to meet one of them, I would smile and tell them long ago I was a fan. Perhaps it is the story of my life that I supplied even The Monkees with a dark side.