The Key: At South By Southwest this year, you were playing a lot of More Parts Per Million because it got reissued on Sub Pop, right?

Kathy Foster: Right, it was its ten-year anniversary in March. We thought about doing the album in its entirety, but we had just decided to do sets that were a mix of that record of the new record. We re-learned all the songs from More Parts. I don’t know that there were any shows where we played every single song from that record, but we played a lot of it.

TK: Has that kept up into this tour?

KF: No, now we’re just mixing them all up. But there are a lot of songs from that first record.

TK: When I read that you were doing that, it took me a little bit by surprise. It’s like wow, ten years ago. I kind of still think of The Thermals as that cool band that I just saw at Macrock…in 2003.

KF: Yeah! [laughs] Oh my god…

TK: How has it been for you, does it feel like ten years?

KF: It doesn’t feel like ten years. It’s gone by quick. But then when I think about all the things we’ve done, it’s about ten years’ worth of stuff. But we certainly don’t feel ten years older.

TK: Is it different for you revisiting the material that you wrote earlier on in your bandhood?

KF: Well our new record has kind of the same energy to us, similar to the first few records. So we just noticed how ass-kicking it was playing the first record and the newest record together, it was a really tiring set. Especially for Hutch, ‘cause all the songs on the first record, there’s not a lot of rests in his singing. He’s kind of just shouting the whole time. And the new one, the songs are really fast and energetic, so he’s just like wooaah. He was out of breath a lot.

TK: Desperate Ground does have that feeling, though, it feels more raw. Not Fuckin A raw, but compared to how Now We Can See or Personal Life were polished, this one feels really in the moment and kind of hearkens back to that earlier sound. Is that something you were going for when you recorded it?

KF: Yeah! Its’ funny because they were both done in studios of kind of the same caliber with people who are really good at what they do – Chris Walla and John Agnello. Both are recorded so we can play them live and feel like nothing’s missing, so we don’t do a lot of overdubs or anything. I think it was kind of the nature of the songs on Personal Life that makes them sound more polished. They’re a little more spacious, we purposely wrote some songs where Hutch wasn’t strumming the whole time; he wanted to he wanted to play guitar lines. So I think the space in those songs makes them polished, we didn’t do anything to them to make them fancy. These songs are back to a lot of the simple strumming chords, loud and faster songs. We gave John demos of the songs that we made on four-track, and we feel like he just made a better-sounding lo-fi recording.

TK: That’s a really good way of describing it!

KF: And we were really into that. And kind of the same, he records very simply, not a lot of fancy stuff, and we got to work really quickly. We actually tracked two songs and Hutch sang on them on the first day, which never happens. Usually it takes a while to get set up and get sounds.

TK: Lyrics and themes are a very important part of The Thermals – they feel like they come from a very specific perspective, but they’re also written to be loose and open for interpretation. Are the lyrics a collaborative effort, or is it all Hutch?

KF: Yeah, that’s all Hutch. And we’re such close friends, we work together and have been friends for a long time that I feel comfortable giving him my input on it, and he’s comfortable accepting that. I feel like that helps him, not write the lyrics, but I’ll tell him “I don’t know how I feel about this line,” or “maybe there’s a better way to say this” and he kind of takes that and works harder on it. But also on his own, he works harder on the lyrics, typically he’ll write them over and over. On this record he wrote a whole song’s worth of lyrics and threw them away and started over. He works really hard on getting it down and I’ve always really loved his writing, and I’m always really excited to see what happens. It’s an exciting process.

TK: There’s also the music , which is such a strong compliment to the lyrics. Is there a part of the process where he sits you guys down and is like “Okay, Kathy, Westin, this is what I’m writing a lyrics about, let’s make music that goes to it.” Or do you not need to know exactly what it’s about?

KF: It actually doesn’t even start that way. It starts with us jamming and writing music. And then as we’re shaping up a song or two, he’ll start getting lyrical ideas. Sometimes he’ll start singing as we’re jamming it or practicing it, and then right away we’ll start getting a sense of the melody at least, or the singing. But it’s not like “What are you singing about?” right away; he’ll start getting an idea, start writing lyrics for one song, and he’ll like where that’s going and make it a theme, or he’ll write something else. And as it’s shaping up for first new songs, that’s when we start talking about it. It’s kind of this fun organic process.

TK: You’ve got some great music videos for this new record, most recently “The Sunset” – which, being from Philly, I love because it’s got the whole Rocky homage. In addition to a few other films. Are you fans of Rocky?

KF: Hutch and I had an idea to make a boxing video several years ago. And I had never seen Rocky, so we watched it. So there’s definitely inspiration from the frist Rocky, and Raging Bull, and the opening credits of Do the Right Thing where Rosie Perez is dancing and boxing. So all the training part of it, for sure, was Rocky…and in the ring.

TK: Did you film it just around Portland?

KF: Yeah, Hutch was researching what boxing rings were in Portland. And he found one that just opened a few months ago by this woman Molly McConnell, who’s a professional boxer. She opened her own gym a few months ago, so I got a private lesson from her, like a two-hour lesson. And that’s the first time I ever boxed or anything. And that was super fun, and tiring, and she showed me all the different punches and all the different and blocks. And we went over combos of punching and blocking, and we sparred at the end of it.

TK: Wow.

KF: Yeah, it was awesome. I was so sore for four days at the end of it. And then we talked to her about filming there. She and her wife run the place, and they were super nice. And they had the boxing ring that’s in the video, it was filmed in there for the training part. And the boxing stuff.

TK: Did any of it wear off between the lesson and the shoot? Or did you pretty much retain it?

KF: I feel like I remembered a lot of it. I wanted to do more -she gave fitness classes too, and there was a couple weeks between the lesson and the training – but I didn’t end up getting to train as much as I wanted to. I feel like I retained a lot of it, and I feel like I’m pretty athletic. I kind of get it.

TK: The “Born to Kill” video was also cinematic – it has the Reservoir Dogs thing going on. Do you guys have an interest in film on the side that you decided to bring to these videos?

KF: As we were writing this record, it started feeling very cinematic to us. The imagery we get from Hutch’s lyrics as we started talking about it, it seemed like an action movie as an album. It’s entertaining, it’s violent, it’s about war, but it’s not a statement about anything. It’s like if you watch Die Hard or Predator or something. It’s just kind of this violent entertainment. So we were thinking about that, it’s an action movie and stuff, and we thought we’d do that with the videos too – make little movies for the songs, since we were getting all this imagery in our head as we were writing. We’ve wanted to do that for a long time – we have ideas for videos, we joke around, but we never had the means to make it. If you want to work with a director, they usually want to just do their idea, and if they do your idea, it never turns out the way you pictured. We wanted to do our idea, and we had a friend in Portland who’s making his own film, he’s just getting into film, and we asked him since we knew he’d be willing to just do our idea. So he directed it, shot it with our other friends, and it worked out really well – there’s three of us, three of them, this small little team running around in Portland. We didn’t need to plan anything; “Born to Kill” is in this outdoor hiking park, we went off the trail and into the trees. No one was around, we didn’t ask anyone’s permission or anything, no one bothered us. “Born to Kill” was loose, we had some shots we wanted to get and a loose idea of a plot. That helped us plan more for “The Sunset,” which was more planned out.

TK: At the very end of “The Sunset” you’re running up steps. In Rocky, he runs up the steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art – what are you running up to? It looks like a subway station or an el train station, there’s a sign that says Burnside?

KF: Burnside is a bridge. Portland doesn’t have a subway, but it has five bridges. There’s a river that runs down the center of it that separates east and west. West Side is downtown, East Side is kind of where everybody lives. And Burnside is the center, it separates north and south. So when you come up the stairs, and you’re kind of in the middle of that bridge…so that’s actually the center point of Portland right there. We wanted to find a cool building like in Rocky, but we couldn’t find a place that had that many steps. [laughs] So there’s this esplanade, this long path that goes along the river where people jog and ride their bikes and walk. So where I’m running and doing situps and stuff, that’s right there. And then we went up the stairs, and it’s this straight, steep staircase, and then it’s cool that you can see the Burnside sign. It’s a very Portland thing.

TK: You’ve played drums in another Portland band I like a lot, All Girl Summer Fun Band. Is that band still active?

KF: We’re not super active. I don’t know if we’ll do anything else. When we made the last record, we became a three-piece – Ari [Douangpanya] had a baby, had left the band. The other two girls also had the kids. So everyone’s really busy and can’t really tour. Also, Kim [Baxter] started her own solo band, which also self-released an album that’s great. And I do a lot with The Thermals, so everyone’s busy. But I also started another band in Portland called Hurry Up, and that’s me and Westin who plays drums in the Thermals, and Maggie Vail, who used to work at Kill Rock Stars and used to be in Bangs. She plays bass and sings, Westin plays guitar and sing, and I play drums and sing a bit. It’s fun, super punk.

TK: What’s it like playing drums versus bass? Not only switching between rhythm section instruments, but different types of rhythm section instruments.

KF: It’s fun, drums are my first instrument. They’re the first I started learning when I was 16 until I got a guitar. I also got a four-track early on, so I’d record my own songs – which is where I kind of started playing bass, on the low e string of the guitar. And I’m not left handed, but I play left handed guitar and bass. In All Girl Summer Fun Band, we’d switch instruments around on some songs, and I’d take the bass and just play it upside down. I’d play it here and there, but it was never my main instrument. When The Thermals started up – that first record, Hutch played everything on it, a four-track recording where he made CDs for friends. That’s how it made its way to Sub Pop – our friend Ben is friends with Ben Gibbard, who was doing The Postal Service at the time, so he passed it to the label and they got in touch with us: “What’s up with this band The Thermals?” And it wasn’t a band, it was just Hutch’s recording. So we were like “Uh, yeah, we’re a band!” We made the band because Sub Pop asked about it. I initially thought about playing drums, but didn’t know if I’d have the stamina for it. So our friend Jordan played drums, and I played bass. At first I didn’t want to, because I didn’t want to be the quote-unquote girl bassist. [laughs] And then I decided okay, I’ll get really good at it. But I like the variety of playing multiple instruments, and I missed playing drums often, so I wanted to start another band where I played drums.

TK: One of my favorite Philly bands, Hop Along, is opening for you in Philly and New York. How did you connect?

KF: We didn’t know them, but since we weren’t touring with anyone, we wanted to be involved in who was going to play with us. Cause sometimes we get bands that don’t fit. Sometimes we get paired with these super mellow bands, and it’s like “Why??” [laughs] We want people to get excited about the show, not be put to sleep right before we’re going to play. So Hop Along came highly recommended by multiple people, so we’re excited to play with them and check them out!

TK: Any thing else you’d like to say?

KF: I’m excited to come back to Philly. We always have super fun shows there and this is the first time in a while that we’re not playing at the Church. So I’m excited to check out a new venue and hopefully people will be excited to come there. We’ve had some pretty crazy shows at the Church so hopefully people will bring their energy, cause we’ll be bringing ours!

TK: Awesome! Can’t wait.

The Thermals play Union Transfer Saturday, May 25 with Hop Along and Cayetana. Tickets and information for the all ages show can be found at the venue’s website.

Photo by John Bartol

Wakin’ on a Pretty Daze, the latest from Philadelphia psych-songwriter Kurt Vile, has generated international acclaim since its March release on Matador Records. And rightfully so; it’s an ambitious double album exploring a plethora of ideas, and doing them all masterfully. It’s expressive and expansive, but also tight and poppy. It’s deeply personal – “Too Hard,” Vile’s reaction to experiencing fatherhood, has him promising to “do my duty for god and my country,” a vow Boy Scouts know well – but elsewhere, you’ll find clever wordplay equating codeine with Springsteen in a manner both playful and universal. His backing band the Violators – guitarist Jesse Trbovich, bassist Rob Laakso and drummer Vince Nudo – craft layers of gripping instrumental interplay, stretching near ten minutes on the title track (and over on closer “Goldtone”); but the record also makes use of haunting minimal space and experimental textures. In short, it’s Vile’s strongest work to date, and tomorrow night he headlines a sold-out hometown show at Union Transfer with Angel Olsen and Steve Gunn opening after a lengthy spring tour. I got a chance to sit down with Vile before tour kicked off, and we discussed the record, its monumental artwork, and making music of epic proportions.

The Key: Wakin’ on a Pretty Daze sounds great, there’s so much going on. But song that really jumped out at me from the get-go was “Two Hard,” the one where you incorporate the Scouts Promise into the lyrics. Were you a Boy Scout when you were growing up?

Kurt Vile: Yeah. I mean, barely. My dad bribed me. I said I wasn’t gonna go into Boy Scouts and he said -like later that night, real smooth – he said if I joined Boy Scouts, he’ll get me a Swiss army knife. [laughs] So I don’t know, I was at the impressionable age. But yeah,that’s sort of just like a childhood reference. It’s such a dorky reference in a way too.

TK: Well the way it plays out in the lyrics, it kinda feels like you’re an adult looking back on this thing that you had to recite as a child in Boy Scouts, and seeing how it plays out in adult life.

KV: Yeah totally, that’s basically what it is. And then you basically just brush it off. I’m the king of brushing off exactly what I just said. [ laughs] You say you’re just human, so basically you’re just making an excuse for why you’re gonna screw up.

TK: It’s a great song. I love how expansive it is, and how expansive a lot of the record is.

KV: Yeah it’s definitely expansive.

TK: How did you come to like delve into that side of your songwriting again this time?

KV: I guess just cause that’s a natural thing to do, to just get lost in what you’re playing. Obviously there’s set verses and set, you know, sections, there’s all kinds of meticulous…it’s not jammy but if you can just let something go, the chords are simple enough to have that controlled improv in there. Not improv like jam band music, you know. More like jamming in the Velvet Underground sense.

TK: So with a song like “Wakin’ on a Pretty Day,” or “Goldtone,” the ones that are the longest, did you write them with the other players in the band?

KV: That’s the whole thing. I always need a right hand man and a left hand man. I always say Jesse’s the left hand man – he just does his own sort of, uh, hippie punk thing. Which, you can’t like put him on the spot too much cause he gets nervous. I guess if someone put me on the spot, I might get nervous. But the point is I need another guy like Rob who, like, he’s more like a brainiac. Jesse is too in, like a musical way, but Rob he’s got these different kinds of schooled chops and also knowledge of equipment.

But anyway, so I would like work on [a song], I’d have all the parts and he’d be like programming the drum machine to like speed up and slow down and stuff like that. “And then it goes like this and then it goes like this,” [laughs] We all bounce off of each other. But this album in particular, at first I was like “yeah we’re gonna rehearse a lot!” And Jesse would have appreciated that, and so would have Rob, but at the end of the day, it’s like so many ideas in my head, first of all I can’t always explain them. And then, it’s gotta be fresh for me and I can’t really like sit around and teach every single part, because when it comes down to it, it happens really on tape, you know? It’s like there are parts written but then there’s magic that happens like on the spot and you just happen to be recording. It’s not not all planned, you know.

TK: It’s not just the big instrumental stuff either. There are also songs like “KV Crimes” – that’s a freakin’ rocker, it’s a tight like three-and-a-half-minute rocker. So there’s a lot of variety on the album.

KV: Yeah that was an early one, we recorded that one pretty early on. [laughs]

TK: I guess the question there being, was there anything that you kind of looked at as a model for this series of songs? Or was it just like you wanted to have variety.

KV: I feel like I always go for like variety. And this one…I mean, I had been touring for two years and definitely playing better electric guitar. I got like this Jaguar dream electric guitar early on in the Smoke Ring tour, and I was playing guitar non-stop, so I knew it was gonna be more skilled guitar, whether that’s acoustic or electric. And I knew I was gonna combine the two. Acoustic was always a big part of my sound and I never, I guess, really had “that folk record.” And this is definitely not a rock record, even though that’s what I said at first, but there is a lot of electricity and there are synthesizers. It’s going for more for epic proportions you know, which is kinda the natural progression I feel like from the last record.

TK: I remember reading this great interview you did with Pat Rapa from City Paper after Smoke Ring came out, and you kind of talked about how you wanted that record to highlight your songwriting. How you wanted to be like “yo, look, I can write really good songs too.”

KV: Yeah, yeah.

TK: I feel like this record, it seems like the pressure’s off. Musically it sounds like you’re very at ease and your just like “I’m making a freaking record,” you’re not trying to prove yourself. Compared to the past, where it seemed like you were showcasing this side of yourself, or you showcased that side of yourself.

KV: I just went with it. Like I said, I didn’t know exactly what was going to come out on the other side, but I knew that I was really getting deep into writing the songs on guitar, like more deep than before because I’d be on the road and working on this one song. Before, I feel like I’ve always done this thing where I’d meticulously work on a song, but I have been playing long enough and forced to be on the road and playing that I could go back to whichever song I wanted, and like keep adding stuff to them. I don’t know. But I’m always trying to prove something, you know. I can’t always give it a name, this time I just want to make it as best and as out-there as it can, but not be so out-there that it’s not, you know, listenable. I want it to be just engaging, but also try push the boundaries of that.

TK: Can I ask you about the mural?

KV: Sure

TK: How did that come to be, first of all?

KV: Well, I have a really good manager, Renny, and so [the artist] Steve Powers – I did know who he was but didn’t connect the name yet, I didn’t know him that well – he contacted me and then it just worked out. Cause the last album, that cover was cool, but it wasn’t like…there was a lot of drama and growing pains with making that album cover. So we wanted to go, you know, go for broke and go for art and modern art vibes and we just teamed up in this convenient way. He contacted me when he was working on something down the road and, you know, it just totally worked out. Those kind of things that happen like [snaps], they just fall into your lap and then they happen really fast, are the best, best kind of things.

TK: I’ve started to hear among the Philly scene and Philly fans about people wanting to make pilgrimages up to Master street to see the Kurt Vile mural. Is that like kind of a far-out idea for you?

KV: [laughs] That’s funny. I mean, one day I was like listening to my headphones and there was this kid in the neighborhood, and he was like “yo, It’s really weird to see you here, I’m going to see your mural.” And that was nice, but sometimes I get, uh… when I don’t know someone, I get shy once in a while, and, uh, it was like at the wrong time, it was at the wrong time. [laughs] So I hope he didn’t think I was rude [laughs], but it is just funny, yeah cause like John [Agnello], who did my record, his daughter was just like “I’m in Philly we’re gonna go see the mural!” It’s funny, it is pretty cool.

TK: There’s another track on the record where I love the song, I love the beat that you have on it, but the thing I wonder most about it is the name, “Air Bud.” That’s a Disney movie, right?

KV: [laughs] Is it Disney, yeah. It is loosely…it’s an inside joke with the band loosely associated with that movie. [laughs] We’re gonna leave at that forever and it’s gonna drive people crazy.

TK: You’re playing with Steve Gunn at the Union Transfer show you have coming up. Tell me about that.

KV: Steve has got a new record coming out, and it’s mind-blowing. It’s so good. We grew up in the same town, we both grew up in Lansdowne. We’ve always been acquaintances but Renny turned me on to the newest Steve Gunn record…and I love all his other records, but this tour he’s gonna play in the band, in the Violators. He’s going to be an opener and a Violator. I’d like him to tour with us as much as possible.

Kurt Vile plays Union Transfer this Saturday, May 18th, with Steve Gunn and Angel Olsen.

Olsen has since signed with the Jagjaguwar label. A release date for her upcoming album has not yet been announced. But, she says, “I’m working on some new things. I don’t want to force them, though. I have some vague idea of when I might record, but we’ll see. It will be sooner than later because I don’t want to wait too long. It has to come naturally.”

In the meantime, you can catch Olsen live in Philadelphia as she performs an opening set for Kurt Vile on May 18 at Union Transfer. We recently caught up with Olsen while she was touring the West Coast, and we spoke to her about television shows, books, painters, movies, and some other stuff. Here’s what she said.

The Key: Hi Angel. What’s up?

Angel Olsen: Not much. I just played Phoenix. It was really fun. Now we’re in Tempe, Arizona. We’re looking for a swimming hole. We’re going to a place called Kenyon Lake. And now I’m drinking some coffee. I just woke up like 30 minutes ago, so I feel like I’m going to be very experimental with answering these questions.

TK: Good. It’s Friday, and everyone’s over everything. So I won’t ask you all the dumb questions interviewers usually ask like, “How did you get the name Angel Olsen?” I’ll just ask you some random questions like this one: Do you watch television?

AO: Not really. But I got really into Downton Abbey over the winter. Me and my friends did. It was pretty ridiculous. I don’t know what’s so good about it—I couldn’t tell you. I’ve never been a television person, but I watched a lot of that. And I always go back to Freaks & Geeks. Every episode is so perfect. But I only really watch television in the winter because there’s nothing to do in Chicago and I get tired of going out and forcing myself to do things. But, in the summer, I’m normally out riding my bike, or getting some tacos, or running around outside. You know, living.

TK: Are you saying that watching television is not living?

AO: It’s living, it’s just, yeah. It can suck you in and make you emotional about things that have nothing to do with your life when you should be emotional about living your own life. I don’t know. It’s like when you start watching something and you get really into it, and you have to sit there and watch the whole thing. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want that to happen in my own life. But it does sometimes.

TK: Have you seen any good movies recently?

AO: I saw Rust And Bone. It’s about a woman who is a whale trainer, and she loves to go dancing: she loves to go to the club. And the other main character is really into boxing, and he has a son that he doesn’t take care of, but then he has to. It’s hard to feel empathy for either character in the beginning. There are some really intense plot twists. She eventually loses her legs. They become good friends. I won’t say anymore, but it was amazing.

TK: You almost spoiled it.

AO: Almost, but I didn’t. There’s more, Elliott. You have to watch the whole movie. You still don’t know what happens.

TK: I’ll put it in my queue. Do you like books?

AO: Yeah. Do you know António Lobo Antunes? I went to the bookstore the other day to find one of his book. I’m really into Carlos Ruiz Zafon, too. He writes a lot about love and incest and murder and war. I just finished one of his books called The Prisoner of Heaven. The title is kind of whack, but it was awesome.

TK: “Whack.” Wow. I haven’t heard that word used in a while. Do you have a favorite book that you go back to and reread?

AO: There was this one Paul Auster book that I got really into once. But now I can’t remember the name of it.

TK: I’ve read a lot of his stuff. What’s it about?

AO: It’s about a professor whose family dies in a plane crash…

TK: That sounds like The Book Of Illusions. That’s a good one.

AO: I love that book. He becomes obsessed with some Charlie Chaplin character that disappears in the 1930s, and then he gets a strange letter in the mail, and his life changes. I tried to get more people to read it. The first time I read it, I was like 18 or 19, and I loved it. I really like Paul Auster. He’s hit or miss, but I love his books. I read them even if they are shit and they go nowhere.

TK: I went to a Paul Auster reading at the library here in Philadelphia a few months ago and he signed one of my books. He was a nice guy. When I walked over he said, “Hello, young man.”

AO: Oh, really? He has a really interesting face. He seems like a character in one of his books.

TK: Sometimes he is a character in his books. It seemed like we could’ve been good friends if we’d had more time together.

AO: Maybe he could put you in one of his books.

TK: That would be nice. Do you do any writing outside of songwriting?

AO: I like to write postcards and letters. I love writing letters to friends. I don’t know if I’m good at it, but I enjoy doing it when I have the time. I send letters to close friends who’ve moved away, and other people I don’t see very often.

TK: Interestingly, Paul Auster’s new book is a collection of correspondence between him and a friend.

AO: That’s amazing. I should go through all my old email and check that shit out. There’s probably some good stuff in there. And probably some dumb stuff, too.

TK: Do you write fiction?

AO: Not really, but I’d like to. I’d like to spend more time on it, but I end up getting frustrated. I like trying to write dialogue.

TK: Do you do any other creative stuff that’s not music?

AO: I like making lo-fi music videos. That’s fun. I don’t have fancy equipment, but I’ve been doing stuff like that recently. I have a lot of friends that make noise and experimental music, so I’ve made some videos for them. I used to make that kind of music, too, but I don’t really anymore. Maybe I will in the future. I used to play accordion, and drone it out. It sounded totally crazy. I love hearing that music and being around it.

TK: Are you into visual art?

AO: I was actually just talking about this artist the other day named Remedios Varo. She’s a woman from Spain who moved to Mexico and joined the Surrealist movement, but not in that order. I really got into her work.

TK: Do you paint?

AO: I have, but the paintings look so dumb. If someone sits in a room, and I spend hours working on it, it’s pretty good. But I can’t draw or paint from memory. I did some paintings of women, because I feel like I know the anatomy of women pretty well. But really boring stuff, like people’s faces. Nothing too experimental, really. Maybe in the future you’ll see some Angel Olsen art.

Angel Olsen plays with Kurt Vile and Steve Gunn on Saturday, May 18 at Union Transfer, 1026 Spring Garden Street. More information here.

Bad Braids’ Megan Biscieglia / Photo by Elizabeth Lennox

Trees – “Murdoch”
Megan Boscoeglia (MB): This song is beautiful and a little bit scary. I have an urge to fill this playlist with only Trees, Fairport Convention, and The Incredible String Band, but I will refrain from doing so.

Dara Puspita – “To Love Somebody (Bee Gees cover)”
MB: This is a 60′s girl group from Indonesia who played their own instruments  I found this on a blog once and fell in love with it. Their other song “Lonely Street” is also one of my favorites.

Black Sabbath – “Wizard”
MB: If you put this song on [every] morning, first thing when you wake up, it is guaranteed you will grow a little more badass as each day passes.

TwinSisterMoon – “Spells”
MB: I accidentally downloaded this while trying to download something else. I’ve found a lot of really great music that way. I thought while listening that it was for sure from the 60′s, but it is current and they live in France. This song kind of kills me.

Patti Smith – “Lands”
MB: Patti Smith is intense. I have always liked her music, but never really got into it until I read her book a few years ago.

Terakaft – “Tenere Wer Tat Zincheg”
MB: I like cooking to this song and dancing to it with my cat.

The Incredible String Band – “Banks of Sweet Italy”
MB: I was introduced to this song while driving up to New Hampshire last summer.  The [Black Magic Family Band] and I had been asked to play one show, so we made the trek. We were in my mom’s car which only had bad 90′s country in it. For some reason, none of us thought to bring music for this six hour drive. We had three CDs and The Incredible String band’s Earthspan was one of them. We kept putting this song on repeat, we must have listened to it 20 times. We learned it when we got home.

King Crimson – “Moon Child”
MB: In the Court of the Crimson King is one of my top five favorite records. I could happily listen to this song on repeat for the rest of my life.

Weyes Blood – “Candy Boy”
MB: I met Natalie from Weyes Blood while touring in California. We ended up playing some shows together and hanging out all over the West Coast.  She lived in Philadelphia for a while and is one of my favorite musicians.  She now resides in [New York City].  This song makes my body feel realllyyy weird.  When I saw the video it made sense she was in the ocean.  I want to be there when I am listening to it on a really windy and cold day.

The Everly Brothers – “Down in The Willow Garden”
MB: I had to include this song. It’s one of my favorites to sing and I covered it on my first record with Mike Bruno. I am such a sucker for harmonies, and no one does it better.

Pattern Is Movement | Photo by John Vettese

When Philly experimental rock duo Pattern is Movement went into the studio to record its first album in five years, the pressure was on. Keyboardist-singer Andrew Thiboldeaux and drummer Chris Ward wanted to make sure whatever they did held up to their revered past work. And Ward, who worked on the record as a performer and in post-production, came up with an innovative method to test the music out. On Tuesday the 30th, PiM is throwing what they’re calling an album screening at PhilaMOCA for Cinedelphia’s Tuesday Tune-Out. Basically, the free event will be an album listening party – the guys aren’t actually performing live – where the public can hear PiM’s as-yet untitled new album for the first time, with visuals care of P.T. Anderson’s dark western There Will Be Blood. After the album plays, Thiboldeaux, Ward and producer Dave Downham will take part in a Q&A moderated by Weathervane Music‘s Peter English – to get details. Last week I caught up with Ward over Google Chat – he was on the tail end of his tour drumming for Strand of Oaks and opening for Phosphorescent. Find out more in our interview below, and see what’s in store / hear some brand new Pattern music in this event trailer.

The Key: How did you come to match the album with the film?

Chris Ward: I was part of the mixing team for the record and I wanted to experience the record outside of being a creator of it (as well as an engineer). I had the idea – when we finish a mix, let’s sync scenes of the movie that I choose to songs and see if they emotionally resonate. I wanted some distance, and it fucking worked. I look at it as a tool in the mixing process, and it helped us re-envision the record actually.

TK: So was the idea with that experiment to see if the music carried strong enough emotion or mood that it could change the way you look at There Will Be Blood, which already has a very defined mood?

CW: Not exactly. The idea of the experiment – or exercise as I call it – was to see if the songs could carry their weight against a film of that magnitude. A lot of that film is not speech, but rather landscape and body language / non verbals. That is why, IMO, Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack is so powerful. Because it’s as landscapey as the film. So – to summarize – it was more a test for our songs. And it passed. But it also helped us realize the songs were there, but the production / energy was not. So we scrapped a lot of that first mix.

TK: What did you feel was missing, sound-wise? I feel like the new music has more low end than the previous three Pattern records.

CW: You are right on the money – the new record has low end that we never had before, and that is partly due to this exercise with the film. Bass to me is a non-verbal – something most people don’t think about because of its frequency resonance – but I can bet that when you hear a song and you are crying, the bass is a huge factor in it!

TK: So taking it beyond the mixing exercise and into the full-scale production at PhilaMOCA on the 30th, you’re going to play the studio version of the album through the PA, synced up to scenes from There Will Be Blood?

CW: Yup! It’s a quasi listening party, plus a film screening. We’re calling it an album screening.

TK: How long have you and Andrew been working on this record?

CW: We began working on it in 2009. We did a tour-only EP at Jeff Zeigler’s, and that was the beginning of the album.

TK: With this set of songs, since it’s so electronics-oriented – and the orchestrations in that dept are so complex – how did the songs come together? Did Andrew bring you ideas that you added beats to?

CW: Andrew wrote the songs / lyrics, tracked them from the ground up and then did vocals. I played drums last.
After the drums, he re-did some vocals and then we mixed it once. Then we changed some drums, some arrangements, added that bass, and then we mixed it a second time.

TK: When can we expect it to be released?

CW: It will be released on Hometapes in mid October – home of Matthew E White, Bear in Heaven, Megafaun, etc. It’s un-named at this point.

Pattern is Movement’s album screening party takes place Tuesday, April 30th at PhilaMOCA. The free, all-ages event begins at 7:30, and is sponsored by Pizza Brain – which doubtless means delicious refreshments.

Photo by Seth Klinger

It’s kind of fitting that my voice recorder was (accidentally) on for the full half hour between the time I stepped out of work and the moment I met with Ron Gallo (Toy Soldiers‘ front man) and Seth Klinger (Toy Soldiers’ “intern” and documentarian). The two worked together to film Maybe Trails, a reality film about real people in a real band on a real tour. And, while it was real annoying to have to listen through over 20 minutes of my own trails (which sounded like a horse galloping around town in a pocket), in the end it was fitting.

Maybe Trails is about a bunch of self-proclaimed “maybe” boys on a tour that may be successful playing shows that warrant the same unknown. It’s really all up and down, clippity-clop, going through the motions and taking the steps and seeing where that takes you.

“You know, this is my first interview” says Seth Klinger, the 25-year-old behind the documentary.  He’s sipping a golden beer from a glass outside in the sun with his Ray Ban-ish glasses on looking like a pro, though. It’s Tuesday, three days away from what Klinger expects to be one of the most important nights of his life. This Friday, he’s premiering his first full-length documentary made to show what life is like on the road as a touring band. He followed Philly’s Toy Soldiers, a five-piece folk-soul outfit headed by Ron Gallo, on two almost identical tours (from Philly to Austin for the SXSW Festival) in two years.

But this film really isn’t about the band. “One of my major influences was something Ron showed me, it was a Jonny Corndawg video where it starts out with him stretching and he talks about how he likes to run on tour. It wasn’t really about the music, and that’s one thing I wanted to do was make it less about the music and more about being on the road.”

Stray Dawg from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

It’s about being in a band and all driving, driving, driving that goes with it. It’s about playing a show, driving more, breaking down, and playing another show. It aims to show the truth about touring. As Gallo puts it,this film “will show what it’s really like. [We decided] let’s not make a documentary about our band, let’s make it about doing this and we happen to be the subjects of that. And thank God for the negative, really.” Negative which included speeding tickets picked up so as not to miss a show in Pittsburgh, a sentimental van scrapped for $200 down South after its final breakdown, the general weirdness that is the Midwest and driving eight hours to find out the venue you’re supposed to be playing misspoke and is actually closing in a half hour.

Klinger says, “When the van broke down, that was a joy, because I knew that would be the climax of the movie… there were a lot of negatives but, I think, this is what the film portrays is that [the band]  just moved away from it all and saw the positives in everything.”

“When those things happened, it was completely natural because I wasn’t even thinking about being on film. Especially the scene where [the van] actually does break down and is smoking and all that, I was so beyond that at that point and in shock like, ‘what the fuck are we going to do?’ that I didn’t realize [we were filming],” Gallo admits.

Klinger met Gallo and the rest of the group was an intern at Ropeadope Records years ago while Toy Soldiers was working on its Get Through the Time EP with the label. At the time, Klinger was a Temple University student studying film stuff and he knew wanted to get into the music industry in some form or another. The two became quick friends and decided to continue working together. Now, Klinger is basically the Soldiers’ in house videographer, shooting shows, music videos and other promotional material for the group.

The documentary covers the group’s last two trips to Austin’s South by Southwest festival, as well as periphery shows. Klinger tagged along both years, even choosing to put off getting a job so that he could be on this year. Now, he’s got a gig at a Baltimore radio station and two road trips under his belt. Going on tour and being the only non-band mate in the van and sleeping in bags and watching shows the group’s shows nightly taught Klinger how to “interview people and how to be on the road and how to be social,” he says.

Being the subject of documentary that spanned two years of his life on the road gave Gallo some insight, as well. He says (about touring), “I think a lot of people romanticize it, I know that I did the first time I went, and it’s funny because the first tour I did was all around great. Nothing really bad happened, every night was a magical thing, and I think that was kind of a naive perception of it all.”

And the difference between then and now?

“Going through it and realizing how stupid you [were]. It doesn’t get better, you get better and you just realize how to handle it better,” he says, “That’s where the title comes from, the ‘maybe trails,’ because nothing is ever certain. Maybe it will be good, maybe it will be bad. Everything is a gamble.”

You see, on one tour everything smells like roses and on the next you’re not finding enough “shittable” bathrooms in Austin. It’s an infinite open road the first time around and the second, your beloved van breaks down outside of New Orleans and your friends, The Kid Carsons, have to drive you eight hours to the next venue just so that by the time you get there, the space is closed.

Because it’s all up and down, the road is filled with maybe’s. It may be good and it may be bad and it will probably be a little bit of both and you just have ramble on and see where it takes you.

To see exactly where it took Klinger and Toy Soldiers, check out the video premier at Johnny Brenda’s this Friday, when the group plays with The Holy Ghost Revival. Also, get a sneak peek at Toy Soldiers’ newest album (due out this fall), which spans the soundtrack.

Joseph A. Gervasi has been a mainstay in the Philly DIY scene for more than two and a half decades now, between his work with ’90s punk promotion agency the Cabbage Collective and DIY film companies Exhumed Films and Diabolik DVD (in addition to countless other forays). For his latest project, LOUD! FAST! PHILLY!, he combines his dual loves of music and film to explore and document Philly’s hardcore punk scene from the 1970′s to today. The result is a project presented in two parts: a screening of rare punk footage, which will be supplemented live with commentary from different members of the scene—and a still-growing audio archive of intimate, unedited interviews between Gervasi and myriad interviewees—discussing memorable shows, experiences  and what the punk scene meant to them. Gervasi will post a new interview every day throughout the month of April; each interview will be accompanied by two portraits of the subject by photographer Karen Kirchhoff. The screening and live commentary will take place on Tuesday, April 23 at PhilaMOCA, as part of the Cinedelphia Film Festival.

Though the project is retrospective in nature, Gervasi explains that it is not a documentary—a film that employs interviews and footage to prove a thesis. Rather, LOUD! FAST! PHILLY! aims instead to present simply the facts, while eschewing nostalgia and avoiding revisionist history. I caught up with Gervasi to find out more about the project’s evolution and goals—and where he thinks the Philly punk scene is headed in 2013. In keeping with Gervasi’s own conventions, I present the entire interview unedited. 

Gervasi

The Key: When did you first have the idea for this project?  Did you always conceive it as being in two parts: the screening and live interviews, and also the audio archives—or did this decision arise during the process?

Joseph Gervasi: When Eric Bresler of Cinedelphia told me he was planning to do a film festival some months ago, I knew whatever he came up with would reflect his unique personality. It would be eclectic and unlike any film festival this city has ever hosted. I was invited to present a movie screening with the group I’m a part of, Exhumed Films, and to do a “solo” event. My shows outside Exhumed better represent my personal interests and passions. There were prospective events that didn’t come together, but the one that stuck was assembling a collection of rare footage of Philly hardcore punk bands and having some participants speak during a screening of the footage. When faced with the ephemeral nature of a live event that would be screened to a finite number of individuals in a very particular location, I knew I wanted to contribute something more lasting to the documentation of Philly’s punk scene, which was a scene I’ve had an active engagement with since I was sixteen.

TK: How involved were you personally with the scene you describe? Why did you decide to focus on it?

JG: I was very involved with punk and, to a considerably lesser extent, I’ve always remained involved in the scene. I started going to shows in Philly in 1987 at Club Pizzazz and other venues. It wasn’t long after that that I wanted to become an active member of the scene and try to compel some small part of it to live up to the egalitarian ideals I was voraciously reading on lyric sheets. A couple years later, my brother Bull, Chris Fry, and I were doing shows at the Harwan Theatre in Mt. Ephraim, NJ. By the early 1990s, we created a group called the Cabbage Collective to host DIY shows in Philly that were inclusive of everyone and fun for attendees. The Cabbage Collective hosted shows regularly through the ’90s. Concurrently, I was editing a ‘zine, NO LONGER A FANzine, and traveling around with bands, friends, or solo and visiting different punk scenes in the U.S. and Canada. I saw North America from the perspective of Greyhound buses, filthy couches, dilapidated squats, and balanced precariously between heavy sound equipment in a wheezing van. Punk opened pretty much every door for me and invited me to step in. I’ve always kept that door open. I think at its best the scene nurtures creative people and encourages them to be their best. That aspect of punk is so tremendously important to so many people that I wanted to focus in on it in order to hopefully encourage others to gain inspiration from it even if they have little interest in the music or the scene itself.

TK: What do you hope to achieve with this project, in terms of the legacy of hardcore punk in Philly? 

JG: I want to create a mosaic of voices that, when assembled as a whole, present some of the life experiences and thoughts of a diverse collection of individuals who have spent their lives in active engagement with their times. I want the people who listen to a few or all of the interviews to take away something of the unique perspectives of the folks I had the honor to talk to at length.

TK: How did you decide who to interview? Was it difficult to track anyone down? Is there anyone you wanted to interview but couldn’t?

JG: It was important to me that the interviews, when seen as a whole, reflected the diversity of both the punk scene and the city of Philadelphia as a whole. I interviewed men and women who were my peers when I came into the scene, those who were my contemporaries during the time of my most active involvement, and those who came into the scene after me and continue to uphold its ethos while adapting to the world of the present. There are some people I’ve not been able to track down because they’ve completely fallen off the radar. Some folks proved problematic to interview because they are dead. Some others have left the city but have agreed to sit down with me when they visit Philly or I happen to be wherever-the-hell they live now. A few people I asked to talk to expressed disinterest, but that was—fortunately—rare.

TK: How did you locate the video footage? How much overlap is there between the video footage and the audio archives?

JG: We put out a call for video footage a few months ago and got in a lot of amazing material. Much of what we’ll screen has never been seen by anyone other than the attendees at the shows that were filmed and the folks who shot the footage. Some of what we’ve assembled has been taken from ancient VHS tapes that could easily have been lost forever. In one case Eric [Bresler] had to digitize on-site at the More Fiends’ house while I conducted the interview in another room. We’ve digitized and edited the footage so it’s enjoyable for a seated audience not “blessed” with combat boots to the cranium, stinky human bodies in motion, cigarette smoke, and tinnitus-inducing sound barf. There’s a fair amount of crossover between the live footage and the audio interviews, but the video footage was largely limited to what we could amass in a short time, and what of that we felt would work for an audience. Those who grumble about certain bands missing from the live event will likely find better representation in the ever-expanding audio interviews series.

TK: What’s your favorite interview?

JG: Gah! That’s telling (and there are still so many more to come). A few highlights among the many were: the marvelous Fiends, Elizabeth and Allen, who are truly inspiring Philly eccentrics; the twin scene legends named Chuck (Treece of McRad and Meehan of himself); the Harvard educated and simultaneously cerebral and spiritual Glenn Wallis of Ruin, and so many more.

• Interview with Elizabeth and Allen of Fiendsinterview by Joseph GervasiDownload

TK: Your goal with this project is to present the things unedited, without projecting a thesis. Is there anything you encountered, either in the interviews or the footage, that, looking back, you think might portray the scene in a way that is incongruent with your own personal definition?

JG: I’ve sometimes had a tough time keeping me out of the interviews and while there is no implicitly stated or clearly defined thesis, there is, in effect, something of a constant that I’ve seen in nearly every interview subject. That is, they seem to glow with an abiding enthusiasm and forward-thinking drive. These are the people who’ve done things, not just watched others do things, and it comes through in their daily lives (lives that are often far removed from the punk scene). I had the opportunity to talk to some people who I felt would represent the scene poorly and elected not to speak with them. There are parts of hardcore punk that I personally find uninteresting at best and repellent at worst. I’ve no desire to focus on big dumb dudes who look like they’d rather bench press the PA than read a book, or the lamely sexist trash culture strain of punk, or the drug- and alcohol-addled crusties or chaos punks. I want to talk to those who contribute something of value, not a refection of the more repugnant and destructive facets of our society.

TK: In your opinion, where is the Philly punk scene headed in 2013?   

JG: After talking with some of the younger people I interviewed (the youngest of whom was 20 years old) and seeing the fine and principled work the DIY PHL folks are doing, I think that a certain segment of the scene—the segment that favors the DIY ethos over anachronistic punk fashions, empty sloganeering, or thuggish dudery—is moving ever forward. The one thing that I mentioned over and over again in assembling this project is that I have NO interest in nostalgia. The past was great when it was the present. From the past we in the present should learn. But when it comes to how to live life in the now, we should always be looking and moving ahead while making sure those we care about don’t fall behind.

TK: We couldn’t agree with you more.

The LOUD! FAST! PHILLY! Cinedelphia Film Festival event occurs Tuesday, April 23 and 8:00 and 10:30 p.m. at PhilaMOCA, 531 N. 12 St. The 8:00 showing is sold out, but tickets for the 10:30 showing are available here. The audio archives and portraits are available here.

Last week Christinzio was profiled by the Manchester Evening News in advance of a club gig at The Deaf Institute (a venue that, reportedly, is the Mancs’ equivalent of Johnny Brenda’s) and he was forthcoming about the “dark place” he found himself in towards the end of his Philly stay – “everything was going downhill for me; physically, emotionally, everything was deteriorating… I knew I’d most likely be dead or in jail if I stayed there. I needed a fresh start, so I packed my bag and moved to Manchester.” From the article:

Christinzio, on today’s form, looks like he couldn’t be happier. Not long after moving into his flat on Oxford Road in 2011, Christinzio says he began “writing furiously…all these songs poured out. It’s a cliché to say it, but it did feel very cathartic.”

Awash with the beautiful tenor vocals, sumptuous pop melodies and opulent production that have previously earned him comparisons with Brian Wilson and Todd Rundgren, Christinzio’s new single Thieves In Antigua – released on April 22, with an album to follow in Autumn – makes it abundantly clear that his most recent life gamble has happily paid off: and he’s eager to share those musical riches.

Read the article here. Below, get a taste of the new era of B.C. Camplight in a performance of “Grim Cinema” for Manchester Scenewipe. And, amid the ups and downs he speaks of, Christinzio remains close with Philadelphia scene friends – including the Summer Fiction gang, who are enroute to the UK as we speak to record their new album with Christinzio.

Photo by G.W. Miller III

In the latest issue of JUMP Magazine, writer Beth Ann Downey profiled rising local producer Jonathan Low of Miner Street Studios. Check out the interview below.

Jonathan Low, the more-often-than-not mustached producer and engineer for Miner Street Studios in Fishtown, sips on a Kenzinger at Johnny Brenda’s while waiting for a Weathervane Music benefit show to kick off upstairs. He’ll run sound for Twin Sister, Steven A. Clark and Ava Luna — not a bad way to spend his one night home from a two-month stint in New York, where he’s working with The National on their new record and living in guitarist Aaron Dessner’s house.

Usually, Low can be seen somewhere in Fishtown day in and day out. It’s the place he chose as his professional home, the heart of the now bursting-at-the-seams local music scene.

Those who see him but don’t know the small, quiet and usually smiling Low might not expect him to be responsible for some of the biggest, best and most badass sounds coming out of the city.

“Philly was a really good place to do this because the music community is really supportive,” he says between sips of beer. “Fishtown is a really good environment to collaborate, and just to live. I feel like it was good timing when I started doing this with a lot of Philadelphia bands that were starting to do well, or be a little bit more active. I kind of was lucky jumping into the scene at the right time.”

Jumping into the scene as a producer rather than a performer wasn’t an easy decision for Low. He’s played piano since age 5 and he considered going to college for a degree that would qualify him to work on the other side of the soundboard. But he graduated from Drexel’s music industry program in 2008, and his first big post-college break was working on the first Hoots and Hellmouth record.

“That’s how I ended up kind of working out of Miner Street, working with Brian McTear,” Low recalls. “I was an assistant on the record while they (Hoots and Hellmouth) were on MAD Dragon, and then they finished the record here in Fishtown at the studio. They were kind of one of my first gateways into a lot of Philly music, a lot of Philly bands.”

Most of Low’s career to date has been as an engineer and mixer but he has been producing a lot more in the past year for the likes of Restorations, Bleeding Rainbow and The National Rifle. Low says engineering and mixing is easier than producing because it’s a much more defined role.

The National Rifle – Coke Beat (Official Video) from The National RIfle on Vimeo.

“A producer’s role is always changing depending on the record, the band, the environment,” Low says. “It’s a very broad term, and I feel like that’s something that usually takes a little bit more time and experience to become a really good producer, a really good outside force that’s driving things in the right direction. On stuff that I have produced, I usually am engineering it and mixing it at the same time. I think that’s really interesting too because you kind of see the entire process throughout. It’s just total control of a lot of things and you can either make it amazing because you have all of that total control or it can be incredibly hard.”

Low recognizes that a producer’s role comes with a lot of responsibility. It’s not necessarily pressure that he feels but the desire to arrive at an end result that everyone can be proud of.

“That’s kind of the job of the producer as well — to represent something in a way that it should be represented, and have a similar vision to the artist and where that should go,” he says.

Low engineers and mixes most of the Shaking Through sessions for Weathervane Music, a non-profit organization that provides free recording time for one song and creates videos for new artists over a two-day period. Low produced the episodes that featured Ava Luna and Auctioneer. He says the in-depth documentation and rapid workflow of a Shaking Through session makes for an intense but artistically inspiring environment.

“Having those two days to do this completed song is completely out of context of making a record,” he says. “On a record you could be cutting your basic tracks for, like, a week and you don’t know how even one song is sounding yet.

“I think that’s why Shaking Through songs come out so incredibly. Everything is so fast. Everything works really well.”

Light streams from the enormous windows of Miner Street Studios and that light usually becomes a central character in any Shaking Through video.

That same Fishtown sunshine makes Low eternally grateful for the environment he works in, the musicians and people he’s met and the life he’s built. No wonder he’s so smiley all the time.

“It’s a really positive place, it’s a really positive environment,” Low says. “Everyone that I ever worked with there is just super great as people. Some of the greatest people I’ve ever met are just the bands I end up working with. I rarely ever have a very bad experience.”

A lot of people talk about the music industry as a dark place, especially today in such an uncertain time for the industry. But not Low.

“I feel like I’ve been really lucky in not really seeing all that much of it, not seeing that side of it,” he says.

We Juke Up In Here!

The Key: How does We Juke Up In Here! compare with your last film, M For Mississippi?

Jeff Konkel: They’re both different sides of the same coin; they follow an interrelated, intertwined story. M For Mississippi was a road trip film shot in 2008. The idea was to take viewers through the Delta area and meet these various characters, mostly musicians, in the various places they haunt, including juke joints, front porches, their homes, house parties, and so on. And so we introduced viewers to about a dozen of the old guard—the traditional players in Mississippi playing the traditional style of blues. We Juke Up In Here! tells a similar story, but we focused on the juke joint owners, and those venues, which have been the traditional proving ground for these Delta musicians.

TK: What is a juke joint?

Roger Stolle: A juke joint is a real deal blues club. It’s an African-American owned, quasi-legal blues establishment that probably started out in the cotton plantations. As the music and the people moved into town—normally on the other side of the tracks—these clubs became the proving grounds for blues musicians. And it’s where it became something that would eventually be recorded and would move North, but this is the place where blues is the most natural.

It’s sort of like a “blues club,” but more like a house party, except the proprietor of a juke joint doesn’t really want you at his house. It’s run more like a party than a business, which means it may run all night long, if they can get away with it. Typically juke joints back in the day had a lot of gambling and moonshining happening—some of that still exists in some of the juke joints, but I won’t name names—and a lot of the customers were like family members. It’s like a bunch of friends going to someone’s house to see a band, and when the band finishes, they go and sit and talk with the rest of the audience.

TK: You both have referred to juke joints as proving grounds. What does that mean?

JK: It’s a proving ground for the local community: you better be able to play the songs and play them right. As Roger said, the people there are like family, and so they treat you like family. If you don’t come correct, they’ll let you know. If musicians can’t play the music the way the audience wants it, they’ll get booed off the stage. But then if the audience really likes a song, they’ll ask you to play it all night long. They say “Do it again! Do it again!” and they throw a dollar in the bucket. So the musicians had to be good in order to compete for a finite number of dollars. If you didn’t want to be out in the field doing back breaking labor, then you got good quick.

TK: So, definitions of success are more localized, as opposed to getting a record deal or touring nationally or getting radio time?

JK: Aboslutely. And that’s still the case, and it’s one of the things that keeps Mississippi blues so interesting. Each of the towns here has its own individual flavor of music. We work with an artist named Jimmy “Duck” Holmes from Bentonia, a town that I don’t think has ever had more than a couple hundred people. But Bentonia has a very unusual style—the guitars are tuned a bit differently, the singing style is different—and if you go ten miles away, you’ll hear a different style of music. So musicians were really trying to hit a particular type of music, and appeal to what the local customers wanted. We’re losing that in this culture all over. Pop radio is produced thousands of miles away; trying to appeal to what the people down the street want to hear is a lost art. And that’s why Mississippi juke joints are so vital.

Juke joints now are a snapshot of a time and place that is disappearing. The regional variances here that make it such an interesting tapestry of people and cultures are quickly diminishing as we become more of a homogenized culture. But you can still come experience these local differences that make Mississippi so captivating. Whether the music interests you, or you just want to meet very interesting people, this is a magical place.

TK: Roger, do you remember your first juke joint experience?

RS: Definitely. I was a blues fan long before I came to Mississippi. The music spoke to me, I can’t say why; I grew up in Ohio, but I became obsessed with it. But what changed my life, and the reason I live here today, was that I came here to hear the music and walk where my heroes walked, and I unexpectedly ended going to my first juke joint. That night changed my life; the lights came on for me. I had no clue this culture was still in existence. I didn’t understand then that the music is so connected with the culture. On a good night in a real Mississippi juke joint with a real Mississippi blues act performing, you get that experience. It’s like an Alan Lomax moment; it’s like walking into a history book. You can see the whole culture, and you realize that it’s all connected, and so much more than the music.

I went to this old juke joint that used to be a church, and there were paintings on the wall and moonshine and people brought barbecue and there were many old and young bluesman. It wasn’t like going to a concert or a festival. I was in someone’s living room that happened to have a whole lot of blues in it. To go to Red’s Lounge, in Clarksdale, on a Saturday night and see someone like Jimmy Holmes play, is a deep experience. The Mississippi blues experience is like an onion with so many layers. Everyone should experience it at least once in their lives.

TK: Who are some of the early juke joint musicians that eventually went on to become household names outside of the community?

JK: Many pre-war blues artists like Charley Patton, Robert Johnson and Son House lived and worked in the juke joints. That’s where they made their money; it wasn’t made on records. Then there are the guys who amplified and electrified the music, like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson. When they were living and working in the Delta, they played juke joints; they were raised in the jukes.

TK: Looking back at the history of the juke joints, was there a time when the scene was really thriving? And what factors determined that?

RS: I think they thrived up until the 1980s. Some of the music happening in the last-1970s started changing the flavor of the music, but you could still make a living there. There was still a local black audience, and the juke joints didn’t have to advertise or anything. You just threw the door open on a Saturday night—for instance, at Red’s Lounge, which we extensively profile in We Juke Up In Here!—and the band would start plyaing and the audience would just stroll in. You can’t do that now; now you have to market it more and go after tourists and global blues fans.

The true heyday would’ve been the time Jeff was just talking about, when Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House and the other rural bluesman were playing plantations and small towns. There were so many of them. If you talk to someone like Robert “Wolfman” Belfour, and he talks about playing open house parties, which were essentially juke joints. It was someone’s house that became a juke joint on the weekends, or maybe they had a secondary house on the property that would be used. The juke joints were thriving then.

TK: Can you each name a current musician on today’s juke joint scene whose music you find particularly compelling?

RS: The guy on the cover of our DVD is Anthony “Big A” Sherrod. He’s 29, and to me he’s the future of Clarksdale blues. He came up in all the Clarksdale bands over the past decades, and has played with so many old musicians, but he’s taking it in his own direction. He has the culture and the history behind him, and he’s extremely talented.

JK: There are so many great musicians, but keeping to guys in the film, Louis Arzo “Gearshifter” Youngblood. He’s an absolute delight of a human being and a captivating performer, whether with locals looking for soul blues or tourists looking for deep country blues, he can do it.

TK: What are some of the reasons juke joints have declined in recent years?

JK: There are many, but a lot of it comes down to changing tastes, and changing times. Just as the older, traditional blues performers have died off, so have the customers. There’s a lot of competition for entertainment now—television, movies—and in Mississippi, you have casinos that have really sucked a lot of business away from the juke joints. That theme comes up a lot in the movie: whenever we spoke with club owners or musicians, they pointed to the casinos as a reason why the juke joints have declined.

RS: Today, what’s happened, is that just like the culturally connected Mississippi blues musicians of a particular generation are starting to pass away, and the juke joint owners are passing away, so are the customers. Or mabye as they start getting older, perhaps they move back toward the church and away from the devil music of the juke joints. So these places either close down, or they become more like a bar, or they try to cater to a younger demographic. So now there’s a different kind of blues—Southern soul, R&B, soul blues—and typically that means a DJ instead of a live band. It’s a lot cheaper to have a DJ, and places like casinos have started to pull away the people and their expendable income. But the younger generations prefer to hear a DJ rather than a live interpretation of a song.

TK: Have you noticed the emergence of any hybrid blues musicians somehow integrating the old and the new in an interesting way?

RS: Before I answer that question, it makes me think of an interesting example. Here in Clarksdale, we have Delta Blues Room—which is just one street over from where I’m standing right now—which is basically a juke joint. It’s a cool, African-American owned blues club, and it’s a great place to see a band. But very rarely do they book live music, because they have a local audience that wants DJs. Interestingly, during the Blues Festival this coming weekend, there will be live blues there on Saturday night. And the complaint I get from the musicians that have played there in the past, is that the tourists love them and the locals are just waiting for the DJs to play.

But as far as mixing the old and the new, generalizing, most African-American kids listen to hip-hop now. But what you don’t really see is a mix between blues and hip-hop. I have seen outsiders come in and try to mix it, or make it happen, though. There was a film crew that came in to hire a local rapper playing with a blues band, and they positioned it in the film as if it was something naturally happening. That’s just not true.

JK: What you will see, though, is certain musicians adapting their music according to the audience they are playing for. For instance, an artist we profiled in our last film, the late Wesley Jefferson from Clarksdale, had a group that would typically change their sytle and set for the audience. When bands are playing the juke joints they might play harder blues, but when they play a festival stage, the music leans more toward standards. There’s a lot of adaptibility.

TK: In your opinion, will juke joints find a new way to thrive in the future?

JK: There will be juke joints in 20 years, just as there will be blues music. They won’t be the same as they are now, though. I’m not sure what they’ll look like. But I think juke joints are a lot like blues: they’ll find a way to evolve and thrive no matter what.

We Juke Up In Here! screens as part of the XPN Music Film Festival in conjunction with the Mississippi Blues Project on Saturday, April 13 at World Cafe Live. Admission is free, the event is hosted by XPN’s Johnny Meister, and the film will be followed by a performance by Mississippi blues musician Rory Block.

When Carlin Brown isn’t making sweet beats behind the drum kit of Philly punk band Restorations, he’s making sweet eats inside the kitchen of some of the city’s most popular restaurants and bars.

Currently a cook at The Industry Bar, Brown’s restaurant resume is almost as long the list of serious bands he’s played in. He said these two jobs are also surprisingly quite similar.

“Being in a kitchen, you’re trapped in this weird, strange little environment with this one group of people, and you can only rely on this one group of people. These are the only people you have to do this job with you, so you just figure out strengths and weaknesses and go ‘OK, we’re going to make this work.’ We’re going to figure this out,” Brown said. “The band stuff translates just as well. In music and in food, in the same way, sometimes egos get out of check. You’ll have these [musicians] that think they deserve things and that sort of thing. The same thing with chefs. Every now and then, you’ll see a chef get out of line. He’s drinking too much or doing this sort of thing, and everything fails eventually because they don’t care about what the original purpose was in the first place, which was making good music or food. You’re supposed to take care of your friends and make something good happen.”

Today’s post details Brown’s experiences from working in some of the top-rated bars and restaurants in the city, along with a few of his favorite recipes. Brown figures that many musicians in Philly have also picked up the same trade due to flexibility with taking time off to tour.

“When you’re in Philadelphia, if you walk into a kitchen and the people who are working in the kitchen don’t have tattoos, the food is probably going to suck,” he said.

Photo by Kate McCann | KateMcCannPhotography.com

Royal Tavern – 937 East Passyunk Avenue
Carlin worked here from 2004-2006

“When I was there it was a completely different chef, a completely different staff, and I only worked brunch. I worked three days a week but I worked about 40 hours in those three days. We’d get there at 6 a.m. and just cook and cook and cook and cook. Sometimes I’d be there at 9 or 10 at night, just making sure we had everything. Not only were we prepping everything that we needed for brunch, we would turn over the entire dining room like five times. We were also prepping all of the 10 specials for the week, and prepping the regular menu. … It would be bad. It would get to the point where were having drinks trying to get our work done. Then as soon as we’d get our work done we were all exhausted and the chef would be like ‘Nope, were going out!’ He would take us out and make us drink all night long, we’d get like three hours of sleep and then there you are, back again at 6 a.m. … After a while it was like ‘I can’t do this anymore dude!’ That’s why I had to have five days off or four days off a week.”

North Star Bar – 2639 Poplar St
Carlin worked here from 2006-2008

“North Star Bar was a strange experience because I was essentially the only cook. There was no chef, there was no anything. There was one other cook who worked there like one or two days a week, so it was just this bare-bones sort of bar menu. I looked at the menu with the owner and said like ‘I can redo this whole thing for you.’ I essentially just took over the kitchen and redid it, and he was all about it. That was pretty cool because I was still pretty young then, maybe 23 or 24 around that time, and essentially I was just given a kitchen. … I was the prep cook, the regular cook, the line cook, I did all of it, ordering. It was even to the point that we didn’t have a dish washer, so I was washing dishes and I was running food out to the bartenders.

“It was one of those things where people would come in and be like ‘there’s a kitchen here?’ No one knew there was food and then all of a sudden people knew about it, and he had to start hiring people. He had to start hiring servers, but it was basically still just me in the kitchen doing everything. He took care of me, and it was really fun because it was just me. I had to rely on myself to make sure the kitchen ran appropriately. At the same time I had this army of beautiful bartenders who were constantly just feeding me alcohol. It was like a big, happy family there. We were all having a very, very good time at work. And there’s a lot of cool bands that come through there, so sometimes we’d get to hang out with our friends or see our friends’ bands play. So it was a really cool environment and a cool thing for me at that age. But it did finally get to the point where it was too much, to the point where it wasn’t worth it for me to do it anymore because I couldn’t do anything else. It was fine, it worked, because I was there for like a year and a half or two years doing that. Off and on, he was letting me go on tour. I would just go, in the middle of the summer, just be like ‘Oh, I’m going to be gone for eight and a half weeks. See ya.’ Then I’d go on some horrible tour with whatever terrible band I was in, waste all my money, come back and do it all over again.”

Monk’s Cafe – 264 S 16th St
Carlin worked here from 2008-2010

“I came back from a really long tour. We (Carlin was in the metalcore band Giving Chase) were off and on in Europe for a month or something like that. I quit the band, and I wanted to get a really job. I figured I would do the kitchen thing for real, so I was looking around for restaurants to work in. Monk’s was voted, what, one of the top 10 places in the world to have a beer, or something like that? It seemed to be the cuisine that I was into and wanted to work with, so I went for it. I hate talking about the way it was, but it was just such a disorganized mess when I was there. And the place is so busy, there is no down time, and it seemed like whatever contraption you needed to make whatever food you were making, was broken that day. That was always how it was. … But it was also fun, and it had its moments. It was cool because we’d be in the kitchen all screaming at each other and stressed out and freaking out, then we’d all stay and hang out until 5 a.m. drinking. … What I learned from there is just being able to get things done, no excuses. You have to make the food, it’s got to go out. We were so busy that I just learned how to work in a high-volume situation like that. It was also a bad time for me. I had a girlfriend I was always fighting with. I also wasn’t happy at my job. I was living in a place I couldn’t even afford, working two jobs. I was working seven days a week, 72 hours a week, just killing myself trying to afford this place. My job was making me miserable. And I did that at Monk’s for over a year before I finally got out and went to the Taproom.”

Memphis Taproom – 2331 E Cumberland St
Carlin worked here from February to September in 2010

I worked there for about a year. I basically was filling in for someone, but I really wanted to get out of Monk’s because it was killing me. It was right up the road from where I lived at the time, and just like a smaller, quieter operation. … It went from this meticulous grind [at Monk’s] to just sort of hanging out. Right before I left Monk’s, I started playing drums in Dirty Tactics because I wanted to do something. I was playing drums in another band called El Toro de Oro, but it was basically just friends having fun and wasn’t really serious by any stretch of the imagination. The Dirty Tactics thing started happening, so once again, here I am going on tour and Memphis Taproom was letting me. And every time I came back it was just chilling in this awesome kitchen with awesome guys. It was a nice grounding, coming back to something familiar after [those] strange places.

Photo by Kate McCann | KateMcCannPhotography.com

Swift Half Pub (Now Gunner’s Run) – 224 S 15th St
Carlin worked here from September 2010 to late 2011

This new place had just opened up in a place called The Piazza, which I had never even been to before. One of the bartenders I knew said she knew all the people that worked there. [She to me to] get your resume and come with me. She drags me down there, we go in, get lunch, and I’m like ‘Hey, I’m looking for a job.’ I give my resume to the sous chef and he’s looking at it. He looks up at me and says ‘These are all of my favorite bars in the city.’ I was like alright then. He said they’d give me a call. … They let me come and go because The Piazza dies in the winter. It’s just a complete ghost town. The restaurant eventually went under because we were having a lot of arguments with our landlord. He kept basically kept raising our rent. But Swift Half was one of those places, the same thing as Memphis Taproom, that was like my happy getaway place. So I would go to work and it was just this euphoric little place for me to make food and have fun.

Good Dog Bar – 224 South 15th Street
Carlin worked here from 2010-2012

I met Jess, the chef at Good Dog. She called me and had me come in for an interview. The interview is going real good. We’re hitting it off and she is laughing about stuff. Then she goes alright well I’m not hiring right now. I was like ‘Come on!’ Then a week or two weeks go by, and she calls me and says ‘One of my guys is going into the Army, come on in.’ It was that easy. … While I was there, for maybe about four or five months, I was working at Vintage, but I wasn’t really there for very long. I eventually had to quit because of this whole band thing. I’d be working three days at Good Dog and 40 hours a week at Vintage. I work a lot … When I quit Vintage I was back at Good Dog, but I knew I needed a second job. I had to do something easy that I wouldn’t care about, so I was like screw it I’m just going to go to Chipolte or Qdoba and get some dumb job working a few days a week. The owner of Good Dog heard about it and was like ‘Oh, hell no.’ She pulled me over to Industry to do prep.

The Industry Bar – 1401 E. Moyamensing Ave.
Carlin worked here from 2012-present

I was there the first night of service, the first weekend of service. I was there in the morning for the first brunch we did and, I don’t remember what happened, but basically the chef got mad at everybody. He got mad at all the cooks and kicked them all off the line and into the basement. He said to me, ‘Get up here, you’re cooking with me.’ Within the first hour of cooking, he’s going to [the owners] and being like ‘Can we please have him? Can I take him?’ They were like, ‘no he’s Jess’ employee.’ But one of my good friends came back [to Good Dog] and took my job, so they sent me to Industry to cook. So that’s why I’m there now. But now, when we’re at work and getting all frustrated, my chef will turn and be like, ‘Why did we hire you again?’ I always get to go ‘It was your idea.’ But it’s really exciting for me to be working under my chef Pat, because we both have similar ethics and beliefs about how a kitchen should run. To be able to work under someone who has worked at places like Vetri and The Farm and Fisherman is a daily learning experience. I’m always encouraged to be experimental and creative. ”

Photo by Kate McCann | KateMcCannPhotography.com

Recipes

Banana’s Foster (Royal Tavern)

• 4 eggs
• 1 teaspoon sugar, optional
• dash salt
• 1 cup milk
• 10 to 12 slices white bread
• butter
• maple syrup or other syrup
• Bunch of ripe bananas
• Brown sugar
• Butter
• Goslings black seal Bermuda rum
• Walnuts
• Confectionary sugar

Preparation:
Break eggs into a wide, shallow bowl or pie plate; beat lightly with a fork. Stir in sugar, salt, and milk.

Over medium-low heat, heat griddle or skillet coated with a thin layer of butter or margarine.

Place the bread slices into the bowl or plate, letting slices soak up egg mixture for a few seconds, then carefully turn to coat the other side.

Transfer bread slices to griddle or skillet, heating slowly until bottom is golden brown. Turn and brown the other side

In a smaller pan place a good 2 tablespoons of butter and allow it brown over medium heat.

Cut a banana or two down into 1/2 inch thick circles and “sear” on both sides.

Once you have nice color on them throw in about 2-3 ounces of rum.
CAUTION! This will make fire!!! Allow the alcohol to burn off and the fire to die down and add brown sugar till it gains the consistency of maple syrup.

Cut your French toast in half and stack on top of each other and pour your banana “syrup” on top. Cover then with chopped walnuts and shake powdered sugar on top.

Polenta (Monk’s Café)

• Small dice carrots onions and some raw bacon.
• Sliced Spanish olives.
• Veal cheeks trimmed and cleaned from the fat.
• Fresh herbs, sage rosemary thyme
• demiglace
• salt and pepper to taste.

Preparation:

Throw into a hotel pan all ingrediants with 2 bottles of Val dieu brown ale and enough water to cover the meat.

Cover with foil and throw in oven at 325 degrees for 3 1/2 hours. Then move on to Polenta

• 6 cups water
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 1 3/4 cups yellow cornmeal
• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
• Sharp cheddar cheese grated fine

Preparation:
Bring 6 cups of water to a boil in a heavy large saucepan. Add 2 teaspoons of salt. Gradually whisk in the cornmeal. Reduce the heat to low and cook until the mixture thickens and the cornmeal is tender, stirring often, about 15 minutes. Add cheese to taste and consistency after grating. Turn off the heat. Add the butter, and stir until mixed in. Remove cheeks from your liquid and separate.

In a pan combine 3 cheeks with enough of the liquid and veggies to almost cover them. Cook them hard so the liquid is boiling and reducing. Once it’s starting to get a thicker glazy kind of consistency finish with butter to thicken more and add salt and pepper to taste.

Pour this over top of the polenta.

Marinated Tofu BLT (Memphis Taproom)

1 box of extra firm tofu
1 tomato
Head of lettuce iceberg
1 coconut
Lemon juice
1 head of garlic
Loaf of whole grain bread.

Remove tofu from water and cut the block into 1/2 inch slabs
Place in lemon juice and chopped fresh garlic and allow to marinate.

Bake cocoanut at 350 till it start to spew from the inside and has cracked open. Remove the husk and use a potato peeler to make “bacon strips”

Smoke in a smoker for a good hour

After smoking, drop in a deep fryer till crispy and delicious

Remove your tofu from marinade and throw on a grill and get nice grill marks on both sides.

Now you just assemble the sandwich like you would any other club sandwich!!

Vegan Meatballs

Right now the Taproom also has a vegan spaghetti sandwich that’s pretty out of control. I don’t have a recipe exactly but the secrets I will divulge are for these incredible little vegan meatballs made from scratch. A combination of:
Lentils
Onion
Garlic
Nutritial yeast
Panko
Tomatoes paste
Soy sauce
Oregano
Wheat gluten flour

They are almost the exact texture of the meatballs we all grew up eating. It’s served on a long roll with marinara and spaghetti.

Photo by Kate McCann | KateMcCannPhotography.com

Fried Chicken (The Industry)

Collard greens
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper
3 cups veal broth
1 pinch red pepper flakes
1 pound fresh collard greens, cut into 2-inch pieces

Directions:
Heat oil in a large pot over medium-high heat. Add bacon, and cook until crisp. Add onion, and cook until tender, about 5 minutes. Add garlic, and cook until just fragrant. Add collard greens, and fry until they start to wilt.
Pour in veal broth, and season with salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes. Reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer for 45 minutes, or until greens are tender.

Corn bread
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup yellow cornmeal
1 Tbsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup half and half
¼ cup melted butter or shortening
¼ cup sugar

Directions:
Preheat oven to 400° F.
Sift together the flour, cornmeal, baking powder and salt.
Combine the half and half, eggs, fat, and sugar.
Thoroughly grease and flour a 9″ × 9″ baking pan (or use a nonstick baking pan or a flexible silicone pan).
Add the liquid ingredients to the dry ones and mix just until the flour is moistened
Once the liquid and dry ingredients have been combined, pan and bake the cornbread immediately.
Bake 25-30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cornbread comes out clean and the edge of the bread starts to separate from the pan.

Sambal honey
Mix honey and sambal oelek a ratio of 5 parts honey to one part sambal
Honestly you can use whatever ratio you want.

Chicken breading.
One quart flour
2 cups corn meal
1T garlic powder
Onion powder
Smoked paprika
Sugar
Salt
Red chili flake
2T black pepper

Chicken brine
Ingredients:
1 gallon warm water
3/4 cup kosher salt
2/3 cup sugar
5 Bay leaf
1T red chili flake
2T black peppercorns

Directions:
Pour the warm water into a container that is twice the volume of the water. Pour in the salt, sugar, soy sauce, and olive oil. Stir until the sugar and salt have dissolved, then allow the brine to cool to room temperature.
To use, place chicken in the brine, cover, and refrigerate overnight Drain and pat the chicken dry before cooking.

Ok so now after your chicken has brined for a day remove from liquid and while it is still wet place into your breading mixture. Keep turning it from side to side and pushing the breading onto the chicken. If you want you can dredge the breaded chicken in water or beer or your brine mixture and add a second coating of breading if you are so inclined.

Place in a 350 degree fryer till cook thoroughly.

After cooking drizzle on honey sambal mixture.

Photo by Kate McCann | KateMcCannPhotography.com

Carlin’s band Restorations celebrates the release of its new album, LP2, tonight at the First Unitarian Church. It was is the featured album in this edition of Unlocked; download the spotlighted single “Kind of Comfort” in Monday’s post, read Tuesday’s album review, watch a video chronology in Wednesday’s post, read yesterday’s interview and check back for more Unlocked features from The Key.

When it comes to both highlights and headaches, Philly’s Cold Fronts have experienced it all. The fun-loving foursome might still be up-and-comers on the local scene, but when it comes to hitting the road, they’re quickly becoming masters, having just completed their second, epic, month-long tour (with a stop at SXSW in mid-March), and already looking to book another. So how does an unsigned band with no manager, no PR firm, and no booking agent, manage to make it work?  I caught up with front man Craig Almquist to divulge his secrets—and share some of his most (and least!) fun moments of tour.

Listening to Cold Fronts’ music, one might initially be tempted to underestimate their drive: their debut EP, Pretty American, is filled with easy-going party jammers about crushes and heartache; on Facebook, they list their interests as “partying and pizza.” But just because they play hard doesn’t mean they don’t work hard too.

“We aren’t worried, we love to work,” writes Almquist over email, when I touch base a week before the tour to ask, Doesn’t 25 shows in a month seem overwhelming? “There’s always a turning point when you’re doing a lot of shows where you get into a rhythm and it becomes an exciting routine.”

Exciting if you know what you’re doing, at least. I asked Almquist what advice he’d give to a new band starting out on tour, and he gave me three suggestions…which should practically be required  knowledge for all bands setting out on the road.

Life on the road. Via the band’s Instagram

1.       Get a reliable van.

For Cold Fronts, it’s a standard 15-passenger, Dodge Ram Primetime in dark green—with a built-in divider half-way back, so that “if we crash, we don’t get whacked in the head by guitars…at least in theory.” A reliable van is necessary because of all the time one spends in the van…and because breaking down can mean cancelled or missed shows.

Also necessary is a belief in the van’s inherent magic, which luckily for Cold Fronts, comes naturally. “There’s something really fun about the van slowly becoming your home,” says Almquist, who also notes that all four band members split driving duties, and have been known to sleep in the van on occasion.  “It’s a special bond you form with your friends when you’re riding in the van together all day,” he continues. “And then there are those special trips that last 16 hours…”

On their recently-completed tour, the band drove from Illinois to New Orleans straight—a journey Almquist describes as “a real bitch.”’Sometimes you just have to slap yourself,” he says with a grin. Long journeys can also mean band member bickering (“Imagine you’re really good friends, and you live with someone…you’re bound to fight. So take that, then subtract all the space, and you have van life”) and the inevitable funky smells that arise from four guys sweating and eating Taco Bell regularly, and showering irregularly. And of course, even the most stalwart vehicles break down occasionally—a fate that befell Cold Fronts when leaving SXSW, forcing them to cancel an upcoming gig in New Orleans.

“That was a real low point for us,” says Almquist, who luckily, was able to get the van up-and-running shortly after with some help. “But we came out alive, so that’s what really matters.”

Broken down and calling for help. Via the band’s Instagram

2.       Seek Sponsorships.

Ten years ago, you could argue seeking sponsorships was akin to “selling out” for many indie bands, who were skeptical of forming alliances with corporations they feared would mis-represent their music. These days though, there are countless youth-oriented companies (like Converse, Vitamin Water, or Red Bell) with money set aside specifically for recording, or helping indie bands tour (kind of like unsigned band scholarships), and cashing in on these opportunities can be a great, practical way to manage expenses.

For their just-completed tour, Cold Fronts found sponsorship with Jansport after winning a battle of the bands; for their prize, the company covered tour expenses. The band also scored free Taco Bell through the company’s “Feed the Beat” program…which led to many a Crunch Wrap Supreme run (and unfortunately, Almquist tells me, those aforementioned funky van smells.)

So how does a band like Cold Fronts find sponsorships? “It’s challenging,” admits Almquist, who searches for companies he thinks share similar philosophies. “But it’s worth it not to have to worry—if only three people come out to a show, you’re not gonna lose any money.”

Cold Fronts jamming at Maggie Mae’s during SXSW, in a Jansport-sponsored show. Via Tilly’s Twitter (@Tillys)

3.       Play as many shows as possible.

On their most recent tour, Cold Fronts played 25 shows in 20 different cities: numbers Almquist would like see to climb even higher. Obviously, the more shows a band plays, the more exposure they receive…and the more connections they make with other bands and potential labels.

I ask Almquist about a particular big label executive, who I had heard the band played for at SXSW. Almquist is tight-lipped about the situation, but we’re hoping for an announcement soon. And when I ask him, if surely, the situation caused nerves, he tells me the group was too caught up in the excitement of the festival for it to really register.

“We were running on such little sleep and it was so early in the morning,” he says, admitting soon after that by “early in the morning” he means, in fact, 12 in the afternoon. “So we just treated it as a show in the middle of the night—we all took a shot, grabbed a beer, then headed on stage.”

The band’s fave SXSW moment occurred just hours later, when they were spontaneously added to a Creep Records showcase, courtesy of their friends in Conversations With Enemies.

“It was the last day of the festival, and we actually had another show scheduled for earlier that day,” explains Almquist. “But we ended up cancelling, just because we were exhausted, and because it was going to be so much of a hassle getting there and loading and unloading all our gear. So we thought we had the afternoon off, and were just relaxing—and then we finally ended up playing a set at midnight. But it was such a fun show—we sounded tight, and we kicked ass.” We’re sorry that we missed it!

So how does one go about booking shows in a city they’ve never been to, or know which venues are legit versus lame?

“At this point, it’s really still a guessing game,” says Almquist with a smile. “On this last tour, we definitely played some questionable places. You just never know. Sometimes, you show up at a venue, and it’s packed with people, and the show is awesome; sometimes you’re playing to an empty room with three people, all of whom are in the other band. But as you keep going, you learn what types of venues are good bets. Colleges and basements are usually great; they usually have a solid fan base. But honestly, we’re still figuring it out.”

Sounds like they’re certainly on their way.

Cold Fronts play two shows this weekend: at 2:00 pm on Saturday as part of Pilam’s Human Barbeque (3914 Spruce St., all ages, $15; tickets are the door), and later that evening at 9:00 at the North Star Bar (2639 Poplar St.,21+,  $11–$14.) More information at the venue’s website. 

Empty Air by Kiley’s The Mural and the Mint – completed with collaborators such as Chris Ward of Pattern is Movement, and released to coincide with the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts – is not a track or album but rather an iPhone app. (Download it from the iTunes store here.) After initializing the app, listeners simply put on their earbuds and walk around Rittenhouse Square. The software triggers different music samples in accord with your phone’s GPS. The samples are blended musically and technically to create a streamlined listening experience.

iPhones determine position by triangulating your smartphone’s signal as it transfers information to cell towers and Wi-Fi hotspots. The technology tracks position, but it does so erratically and imprecisely. The error adds indeterminacy and randomness to Empty Air that proved a challenge for Kiley and differentiates the project from mainstream media.

A pickier performer might be driven to the brink of insanity by the lack of artistic control, but Kiley came to embrace it. Hearing the artist talk about the piece was like watching a child skip across a minefield. “As the composer, I’m making some strong suggestions, and what your phone does is simply what it does.” Hearing that from the safe haven of the Barnes and Noble across Walnut Street, I tried to imagine someone like Madonna saying the same thing. Then I realized she would probably choose eternal damnation before ceding that kind of control to wireless signaling.

Kiley’s reaction was more modest. He ceded egotistical self-expression and prioritized the space. “By giving myself this mission of mapping sound out for this specific area, things started to emerge. I just followed them.”

In the way that the tracks of a concept album are all aligned toward a unifying principle, the bubbles of sound dispersed throughout the park are musical renderings of the landscape – its winding walkways, its birds and tall, arching trees. He integrated sound recordings of the Park with music. Ambient noises harmonize with instruments in the recording and serve as artificial feedback for the real-world surroundings.

Moving inward from the perimeter, samples transition from unstructured, oceanic white noise to the golden egg at the park’s center – a full-length 6-minute song that clarifies and ties together aural elements from the periphery. “There are some great moments where you walk through an archway and something shifts. Or a person walks by you, or something happens in real life that goes with what you’re hearing.” For me, the experience was like floating in a dream – disorienting without being jarring and, ultimately, feeling surreal.

Kiley says producing music with built-in randomness was a humbling experience. He makes himself secondary in importance to the space and indeed the listener. He augments our reality, not because he is better, wiser, or more creative than us, but rather like a good friend, who reflects our own viewpoints and leaves us to make the final decision.

When I suggested his fundamental difference from the norm, he laughed and said, “That’s interesting to hear. Yeah, I do. I think that’s more valuable. That’s just where I am. I don’t know that I’ve always felt that or that I always will. But with this work and what I’m interested in doing right now, I’m trying to take myself out of the equation.”

Do not let the seeming innocuousness of this idea fool you. Kiley’s work is challenging convention. If more people join him, they will call it a revolution.

Right across from Miner Street Studios, where the band recorded its last three releases, is their warehouse practice space. A series of doors open into cold, dank space, then to a homier environment with a kitchen and sofas. Someone there has jokingly crossed out part of the “Restroom” sign so that it now bears the band’s name. The five-piece squeezes into a tiny, sealed-off room, sometimes also visited or accompanied on a fourth guitar by their producer, Jon Low.

Tonight, songs like “D” and “Let’s Blow Up the Sun” off the band’s newly released LP2 are blaring – seeping through the walls and wafting out on to the adjacent street. Past favorites like “When You’re Older” join the new ones, as do laughs and the spontaneous 30-second launch into a cover of “Slide” by the Goo Goo Dolls.

This little corner of Fishtown is where the fun and the magic happen, but a far journey from where Restorations started with the project in 2008.

“We had all come in as defeated, resigned musicians being like, ‘Who cares, we’ll play for a couple of beers and gas money,” said frontman Jon Loudon, who started the band with guitarist Dave Klyman after the split of their post-hardcore band, Jena Berlin. “That’s all we really wanted. If we recorded, great! Cool! And that was it, we’d have something to do on Thursday nights. That was the M.O. of the band for the longest time.”

In the beginning, it was never the intention for Restorations to be the band they are today — one with an extensive and constantly maturing discography, a new record deal and the ability and opportunity to soon tour the country. They agree that the August announcement of their signing to SideOneDummy Records — home to bands like Anti-Flag and The Gaslight Anthem — was a “we made it” moment for this collection of musicians who had given up on that dream multiple times before.

“We finally just got the job that we wanted,” said drummer Carlin Brown. “So now, it’s actually time to work.”

“I feel really, kind of little kid-ish about it,” added Loudon. “It’s been so surreal, I guess, because I think getting into it, we thought there were going to be a lot of concessions on our end, and things that they would want us to do and a lot of negotiating things. Basically it just boiled down to, ‘Hey, you guys have fun. Let us know if you need any help.’ … They’ve just been really helpful and really nice. Not that we’ve been jerks about it, but they’ve just stayed out of our way in general. They’ve helped us get all of the stuff that we’ve always wanted, more or less, and it’s been all of the right people, all of the right situations.”

The support from the label allowed Restorations to make LP2 in the best way possible – without worry. Logistics aside, the band was able to focus on writing and recording this faster, tighter, more rhythmic and rockin’ LP.

“You would wake up and it was a nice, beautiful day in Philadelphia,” said Brown of the recording experience. “You’d see the sun and you’d walk in and you’d go (sighs), ‘This is everything I want to do, is just drink coffee and play music all day.”

“And I didn’t play percussion in my bedroom,” added Low, referencing his work mixing the band’s first self-titled full-length record. Low added percussion accents to several songs for the band after they ran out pretty much run out of money for more studio time to do it themselves.

Loudon credits Low for LP2’s cleaner, more edited and more purposeful sound. Gone are the days of the band’s less precise, floaty rhythm section and adding feedback or other elements to a recording without reason.

But lyrically, Loudon said he still followed the same process and drew from the same pools of emotional inspiration for LP2.

“I feel like I’m writing the same song every time we make a song,” Loudon said with a laugh. “A lot of the songs are sort of building off of one basic idea, you know, one riff. There’s a certain way that I think we write songs. I’ve tried to sort of, lyrically, have that happen too. So it just sort of tumbles, and everything that is going to happen in the band is already there and it just sort of comes together in different ways as it goes along. … I like the idea of drone and repetition, and just sort of sticking with things. I like that as a theme.”

“There is a story in there somewhere,” added Klyman. “You don’t have to describe the plot, it just sort of happens.”

Songs on LP2 like album opener “D” took just a week for Restorations to write. Others, including “New/Old,” have been more than two years in the making. That track was a cast-off from the band’s first LP that was then revisited, and finally finished, for this record.

“It’s great that people are like, really into it, because that was a song we thought sucked,” Loudon says. “We sort of have a long history of just being like ‘Nope, it’s not going on the record. Then we swat songs down and never release them.”

The meandering, post-rock influenced and half percussion-less “0.014MPH” didn’t make the cut for LP2. Instead of keeping it in the vault, the band released it on a 7-inch record that preceded the full-length.

“We put it out as a B-side thinking some people would appreciate it, and people that give a shit like that, they could have it.” Loudon said.

Criticism for LP2 has been overwhelmingly shadowed by praise since the album was released Tuesday. Kind words any many other factors have helped Restorations build a vote of confidence in their abilities and place in the punk scene. Loudon said some of this is also due to the band’s unconditionally supportive fan base.

“I look at a lot of bands and I feel like their fans are super demanding and entitled and really picky about what the band is doing,” Loudon said. “For us, I feel like we could put out a smooth jazz record and people would be like ‘Hell yea, that’s great, guys. Nice job.’ People don’t get mad at us about stuff. I don’t know why that is with our band, but in general we don’t seem to get that backlash that most bands seem to get. “

No matter what successes or failures the future holds, Restorations has no intention of becoming complacent. The idea of constantly improving is all but ingrained in the band’s namesake.

“I wasn’t even in the band and I said ‘Well, why are you calling it Restorations?’” bassist Dan Zimmerman recalled. “[Loudon said] ‘You know, we’re always try to make improvements, no matter what.’ That was something that stuck with me when I was not even in the band … and it’s still the same concept. No matter what we write, we’re always going, ‘Oh man wait we could do this! Oh hold on, hold on, stop, you do that now.’”

Let’s hope Restorations keeps doing what they’re doing, especially on that little corner in Fishtown.

LP2 is the featured album in this edition of Unlocked; hear the spotlighted single “Kind of Comfort” in Monday’s post, read Tuesday’s album review, watch a live chronology of the band in yesterday’s post and check back tomorrow as we travel into the kitchen with drummer Carlin Brown.

Photo by Dan Cohoon | amplitude-photography.blogspot.com

Not to be overshadowed by his gig in Philly noisemakers Purling Hiss, singer-guitarist Keil Everett and his band Tin Horses released their second LP, A Life Of Trouble, earlier this month as a free download on their Bandcamp page. Everett started the group as an outlet for his own songwriting style – a mixture of twangy Americana and long, gritty guitar freakouts reminiscent of Neil Young’s work with Crazy Horse (if they were into late-80s’ indie rock like Dinosaur Jr). Despite being busy with the release of Purling Hiss’ new album Water On Mars release last week, Everett took some time out of his hectic schedule to swap emails with The Key about the origin of Tin Horses’, playing guitar versus playing bass, creative influences and more.

The Key: Who is Tin Horses? How did you all meet and start playing music together?

Kiel Everett: Currently, Tin Horses is Kiel Everett, Mike Sobel and Patrick Hickey. I met both these guys working at a job years ago and played music with them individually at random points. When the idea for a band came up, they were the guys that I wanted to play with.

TK: Band names can be difficult to come up with. Was that true for you guys? Where did the name Tin Horses come from?

KE: Before Tin Horses I was doing more of a solo acoustic sound, I had the name Ol’ Balthazar. When we started playing and writing together, it naturally became more of a rock band, so Ol’ Balthazar had to go. Before practice one day I was looking through a notebook and saw that I wrote down the words Tin Horses long before and decided that’s gonna be the name of this band. I don’t like to think too hard about things.

TK: Kiel, I know you’ve been pretty busy lately as the bassist in Purling Hiss. How do you manage doing both bands?

KE: I’m always thinking about Tin Horses, that’s my band and my creative outlet. I was doing Tin Horses long before I started playing with Purling Hiss. Even when The Hiss is on the road I’m writing the new batch of Tin Horses songs. That’s how I wrote A Life of Trouble, on tour.

TK: What have you been playing longer, guitar or bass?
KE: I’m a guitar player, started when I was 16. I never really played bass, never in a band, not until Purling Hiss. Bass is a real tough instrument especially if you want to be good. I still don’t consider myself a bass player.

TK: How does your approach to the song writing process differ between bands/instruments?

KE: Well, in Tin Horses, I write the songs (lyrics, guitar). Pat and Mike write their parts to the music. In Purling Hiss, Mike Polizze writes everything, I just play it.

TK: There is a interesting balance on both Tin Horses between acoustic based songs and longer electric guitar jams. Were the longer songs like “Hitch-Hiker in the Wind”, “Dead Horse,” and “A Life of Trouble” written that way or is there a lot of jamming/improvising on the extended instrumental parts?

KE: When I write songs it all starts on an acoustic guitar, I’ve written all of my songs on this one guitar. I definitely have a hard time with time. When we record and a song turns out to be 7 or 8 minutes long I’m always thinking “holy shit, I didn’t realize this song was so long.” Maybe I need to be a little better at editing but I really like playing loud electric songs with my band.

TK: I can’t help but think of Neil Young and Crazy and Dinosaur Jr. when listening to both American Radiance and your latest album, A Life of Trouble. What is your favorite album by those artists?

KE: We have gotten both those comparisons a lot, I think Polizze was the first to make it. I have to say I love both those bands and I always have, I just don’t really hear it but I will take the compliment anytime, I think it’s a kind one. As for favorite albums: Neil Young and Crazy Horse, I love it all but I’ll pick Rust Never Sleeps. Dinosaur Jr.: Where You Been.

TK: What were some of your other influences for A Life of Trouble…musical and otherwise?

KE: When It comes to this album I think my influences come a lot from bands like Wilco and Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. It always depends on what I’m listening to the most at the time. Lyrically, I would say my influences are Beck, Elliott Smith and Townes Van Zandt. Also I get really inspired by reading so that helps to. These last few Purling Hiss tours I read a lot of Henry Miller and John Fante.

TK: Are there any plans to perform live for the new album?

KE: Right now we are looking for a new drummer. After we recorded the new album our drummer Stephen decided he didn’t want to play drums anymore.

TK: Kiel, how does the live performance differ for you being out in front of the stage on vocals/guitar then your role in Purling Hiss’ live show?

KE: When it comes to playing live in Purling Hiss, there is no stress for me, I just go out and play. It’s great. When I am singing and playing guitar it’s my favorite thing in the world, it just feels natural.

TK: What is your favorite venue to play in the city?

KE: I’ve gotten the chance to play a lot of venues in the past two years but I’m always excited to play Johnny Brenda’s. The people there are the best, they really know how to run a venue.

TK:  What do you guys do when you aren’t playing music?

KE: I don’t really know how to answer this question, I pretty much stare at the wall until it’s time to play more music…. also i like to read.

TK: Are there any future plans for Tin Horses? Live shows, tours, videos, another record?

KE: Until we get a permanent drummer there is no plans for any shows. I have about 7 acoustic songs we are about to start recording, so hopefully that will be done in the next few months.

Kiel Everett, the bassist of Purling Hiss is also the guitarist, main song-writer and singer of local roots rockers Tin Horses. Their first release, 2011’s well-received American Radiance was full down-trodden reflections of days past but not missed. Everett and and the rest of Tin Horses, whose lineup has changed a little over the last several months, released A Life of Trouble at the beginning of this album to his approval.

“A Life of Trouble actually feels like a band’s album,” Everett says. “I recently listened to American Radiance and realized I distanced myself from that album. I’m not a big fan of that one and have never been shy of saying it. We were a band for only a few months and put it together.”

Aside from plans to promote Trouble in 2013, Everett is also looking to release a solo record (he actually plays a solo set at the North Star Bar tonight).

Outside of Purling Hiss, drummer Mike Sneeringer is also a member of Puerto Rico Flowers, a band fronted by former Clockcleaner singer/guitarist John Sharkey. But Sharkey’s been living in Australia. So Sneeringer, who says he’s “very infrequently said no to a gig,” has just been sitting in on whatever he gets approached to sit-in. Traditionally, drummers are always at a premium, allowing Sneeringer to wear many different hats.

“I’ve played in a lot of bands spanning from hardcore to alt-country,” he says. “Every gig I take is to make me a more well-rounded drummer. I really enjoyed playing with John (Sharkey). It was a learning experience, before that I never played six-minute songs with zero fills. It also helped me improve my meter because John liked everything to be so slow and sparse.”

Sneeringer has been playing with D.C. power poppers Title Tracks and even recently filled in for three gigs with Kurt Vile. But there’s nothing like home base. Which, he says, is how he feel about playing with the Hiss.

As for Polizze and the rest of Birds of Maya, a band best known for their live performances of long psych-improv, has some plans for 2013, too.

“We’re hoping to put out an album in the next six months,” Polizze says. “It’s not going to be presented as a live, but the A-side will be one show and the B-side will be another show.”

Polizze continues, explaining he’s unsure what label will be putting it out, so it’s still a tentative release. Regardless, he and the rest of Purling Hiss have their hands full with an upcoming two-week tour of the US before heading to Europe in the summer.

Water on Mars is the featured album in this edition of Unlocked; download the spotlighted single “Mercury Retrograde” in Monday’s post, read Tuesday’s album review, watch the “Mercury Retrograde” video in Wednesday’s post, read yesterday’s interview and check back for more Unlocked features from The Key.

The series focuses on group performances in delicately forgotten places across Oregon, including an old showboat still floating off of the Columbia River. The boat had no apparent owner and was in serious disrepair.

Zac Pennington, PG founder (and only remaining original member), says that the boat was even selling for one dollar on one of the websites they found. “We kind of stumbled upon this ship. Rodrigo Melgarejo, who was the director for this project, was trying to figure out a location that would be interesting and would fit dramatically with this idea of different notions of what privilege means. [Melgarejo] spent some time looking up urban exploration forums on the internet and he was deep in this thread of Portland area abandoned structures. We tried to get a hold of the people who owned it and we couldn’t find anyone.”

The ship shoot is the first installment in the series and features the androgynous front man in crisp white gloves, rainbow scarf and earmuffs bellowing “Curtains” with visible breath. His glamorous, dinner theater-like showmanship is the antithesis of the bleak, crumbling space and maybe the only glimpse of life that the retired vessel has seen since its heyday. It’s a perfect moment in two different times, a perfect contrast.

And then something even more perfect happened.

“About a week after the video came out we got a message on our Facebook page from a woman who had I guess been [searching for] the ship,” Pennington says, kind of still in awe. The woman turned out to be the granddaughter of the ship’s previous owners, who ran it as a restaurant. Pennington was nervous that this woman might be angry that they’d used the ship for the shoot, but she was the opposite.

“She was very excited [about the shoot] and upset about what had happened to the ship [since her grandparents sold it]. She told me she would be sending me photos of the inside of the boat so we could all see what it looked like in it’s prime. It was a very important part of her childhood.”

Favorite Places #3: Parenthetical Girls – “Curtains” from INTOTHEWOODS.TV on Vimeo.

The group is currently touring for Privilege, calling it a “compiled, abridged version” of the five EPs that the group previously released (which were “hand numbered in blood, real fetish pieces” Pennington says).

“These are the 12 songs on the album essentially because it made sense to us to have it be a cohesive album. The other records were so limited that the audience was fairly small for those songs and we felt good enough about these [particular] songs that we wanted to have them next to a larger audience.”

While Parenthetical Girls has been around for over 8 years, the current roster has only played together for a few of the more recent ones. Pennington teamed up with drummer Paul Alcott after, he admits, the previous formation kind of “imploded.”

Amber W. Smith (vocalist) started out as Pennington’s pen pal.

“It’s Portland, you know? Needlessly antiquated forms of communications. She knew about Parenthetical Girls and I sent her a package, she bought a CD online and I realized it was [being shipped] four blocks away. She even wrote me a ‘thank you’ note in response and we sort of got to talking and developed a pen pal-ship.”

Proof that the good ol’ fashioned internet isn’t the only way a search can furnish results.

Parenthetical Girls plays PhilaMOCA, 12th and Spring Garden, with The So So Glos and The Interest Group Saturday March 23rd at 8 p.m. More information can be found at the venue’s website. Be on the lookout for the rest of the Parenthetical Girls’ series to be released at intothewoods.tv, including the third installment, which was filmed on an old fashioned carousel during the off-season at a Portland amusement park, and the final episode that’s inside of a freaking volcano.

Photo by Tiffany Yoon | tiffanyyoon.com

Every Purling Hiss record prior to Water on Mars was recorded exclusively by guitarist and singer, Mike Polizze. He was laying down every drum track, each bass line and every layer of grimey lo-fi guitar on his own. However, it’s now a group effort. Polizze is now accompanied by drummer Mike Sneeringer and bassist Kiel Everett on the new album; it’s a major change in not only the album’s sound but also in song writing.

“Now I’ll have an idea and practice it with the rest of the band,” Polizze says at a table in Fishtown Tavern, just blocks from their practice space. “It’s just an obvious difference for me and how it went from me literally recording everything on my own in my bedroom and now everyone puts a bit of their own spin and personality on it.”

Polizze originally put the power trio together to just be a live band. Although Water on Mars suggests otherwise. It’s a complete album with highs and lows, spot-on sequencing and maturity shown by its players by never over-stepping one another, only playing what’s necessary for each song. It’s clear that they’ve been putting their better foot forward in working together as band. And naturally as they continue to work together as a unit in practice more they’re starting to gel more.

“Now Mike will come in with ideas and they won’t be completely worked out,” Sneeringer says. “But he’s writing all the time, so he’ll just want to share a certain guitar part he came up with. And sometimes he’ll just noodle around on stuff and I’ll subconsciously start playing along.”

Immediately Everett agrees, saying that they’ve been creating music more by “picking up and playing” rather than Polizze teaching him a song or telling Sneeringer how the drums should sound. Even though Polizze is still the primary songwriter, he’s been letting their practices and jamming influence the direction of songs. And he never felt uncomfortable about adjusting their creative process.

“It’s been better in a lot of ways,” Polizze says. “I’ve learned their personalities and it’s helped me know how to bring ideas to start with because I know their playing now and how the others will complement it.”

However, the three personalities in this band are noticeably a bit different. Polizze is a fast-paced guy at times. But he isn’t hyper. It almost just seems like he can’t get all the words out of his mouth fast enough, and can be a bit tangential when he speaks as he sits straight up against the back of his chair. Sneeringer speaks distinctly slower and never without thinking first as if to not waste a word; he casually keeps one leg rested over his other knee. As for Everett, he’s a little more reserved and soft spoken, leaning forward on the table in front of him, often checking his cell phone. But combined musically they’re perfectly complementary, like three long-time friends that have gone through school together, learning a lot along the way.

That education of each other’s playing is on display on Mars. Purling Hiss’ songwriting matured beyond chord-strumming and blasting through guitar solos layered on top of lo-fi riffs as heard on the albums such as Hissteria and Lounge Lizards.

As a trio they excel in more structured songs like the melodic “Mercury Retrograde,” a song Polizze says is about “everything being on the fritz and going wrong.” Which actually seems to be a recurring theme. The mid-tempo track, “The Harrowing Wind,” where Polizze sings “A change in atmosphere/ Rebukes a longing/ And your money no longer pays/ The harrowing wind came today,” shows a side of the songwriter that wasn’t seen on prior releases. Now there’s clearly something inspiring Polizze’s writing, something that’s a little heavier than the simple lyric writing he’d done on song like “Midnight Man,” from Lounge Lizards. The same goes for “Face Down.”

“I had a friend that got mugged in Philly,” he says. “Someone who’s not from Philadelphia might have a totally take and not know it’s about this city. It’s essentially about the darker side of living in an urban atmosphere.”

Sneeringer’s drumming on “Face Down,” twists Philly pretzels around the listener but is never convoluted. That’s how he plays on the entire record actually. Sneeringer’s playing isn’t ever that flashy, but it’s rock solid. And for a driving, fuzz grunge record like Water on Mars, Sneeringer plays exactly what’s necessary and nothing more.

“I really enjoy jamming with these guys,” Sneeringer says. “But I come from a more punk background where everything is just super short songs and everything’s to the point. So drum-wise, my playing is being shaped a little because Mike has great drum instincts to give me ideas. He’s super attentive to the overall sound of the band, which I’ve never experienced.”

The improv they’ve been doing and working into their live shows is of the adventurous variety at times. The album’s title track, “Water on Mars” features five minutes of classic Polizze guitar noise, bending notes beyond recognition and toying with feedback.

“I like making music that’s almost interactive to the listener,” Polizze says. “I don’t want to make anything entirely complete. That’d mean that it’s done. I always love listening to music that I can keep going back to for ideas.”

Water on Mars has also shone a new side of Purling Hiss paying more attention to song lyrics. The simple guitar strumming on “Dead Again,” leaves the listener with little more than the lyrics to pay attention to and try to make sense of what Polizze is singing. He says he was trying to make it psychedelic lyrically rather than sonically.

Lyrics were basically the only part that wasn’t collaborative on Mars. Surprisingly, Everett, who is the main songwriter in his own band, Tin Horses, didn’t work with Polizze on lyrics.

“I didn’t write any [lyrics] because I think lyrics need to come from whoever’s singing them,” Everett says. “They need to be able to feel them. I know I personally wouldn’t be able to sing someone else’s lyrics.”

The Hiss recorded Water on Mars at Uniform Recording in North Philly with Jeff Zeigler at the production helm. They also brought long-time friend, Adam Granduciel of the War on Drugs into the studio with them to give some input on production.

“Adam’s really understands us as a band,” Sneeringer says. “He’s seen us grow and change since the beginning. So it helped to have someone in the studio who’s witnessed that progression so closely.”

But it doesn’t take a close friend to see that Purling Hiss has changed, rather, moved into the next phase of their sound since Sneeringer and Everett began playing with Polizze. The more team-oriented effort in writing has only proven that they truly are a trio and no longer just a one-man recording project.

Water on Mars is the featured album in this edition of Unlocked; hear the spotlighted single “Mercury Retrograde” in Monday’s post, read Tuesday’s album review, watch the “Mercury Retrograde” video in yesterday’s post and check back tomorrow for more on the extracurricular activities of Purling Hiss.

Free Energy | Photo by John Vettese

The SXSW PHL showcase wasn’t the only place to see musicians from the Delaware Valley last week. A wide variety of musicians from the region made the trek, with a wide variety of approaches. For instance, Wilmington’s New Sweden took the barn-burning powerhouse approach, not only playing a packed tour on the way down, but jamming in an impressive (and as yet unquantified) number of SXSW showcases into its itinerary between Monday and Saturday. Other artists took it light, by comparison.

Vacationer | Photo by John Vettese

We caught Kenny Vasoli’s Vacationer in their last show of South By Southwest on Saturday night at the infamous Hype Hotel venue, sponsored by The Hype Machine. It was the breezy electronic pop band’s second of two shows, and the relaxed pace left Vasoli in the most exuberant of exuberant moods during their set.

“This has been the best experience I’ve ever had at South by Southwest,” he reminded the crowd at uber-frequent intervals. Like, seriously, in between every song of their 30-minute set. “It’s been such a great few days, and I’ve got all of you to thank for that.” Back in his old pop-punk band The Starting Line, Vasoli probably got swept awat in the hammering gauntlet that the industry festival can be – hence the easygoing approach this time. He’s not alone.

Grandchildren | Photo by John Vettese

“We’ve come to South By every year for the past five years,” Alex Maryls of Grandchildren told me as he and his bandmates packed up the van after their only official showcase – Thursday night at the Meduse Lounge. “We only did two shows this year. Tomorrow we play a festival in Oklahoma on the drive back to Philly. It’s so much better this way.”

Maryls says he too got caught up in the barnburner, fill-your-day-with-shows approach earlier on, but realized how exhausting it can be – and, as his band grew in complexity (and instrumentally), how logistically tough as well. “This is much more enjoyable,” he says. “We saw our label, we saw our friends, and we played a couple good shows.” The last one of which had Ryan “Honus Honus” Kattner of Man Man cheering them on.

Lantern | Photo by John Vettese

By comparison, Lantern took a more filled approach – at least a show a day – and had a generally positive experience. I caught up with them at a few points (Philly writer and regular Key contributor Elliott Sharp was tagging along with them, working on a long form independent piece on the festival and touring in general), and I finally took in a full Lantern set on Saturday afternoon when they played the Third Man Records Rolling Store showcase.

If you’re not familiar with this oddity of Jack White’s label – it’s a basically big yellow van with a PA built in, microphone inputs on the outside and a mixing console behind a sliding glass window. It pops up at random spots with bands in tow – this time, Lantern was featured along with Pujol performing in an East Austin parking lot.

New Sweden | Photo by John Vettese

“This show and the showcase yesterday for Tiny Mix Tapes were probably our two best,” singer-guitarist Zachary Fairbrother told me. “Or the most positive. We played one showcase for [blog name redacted] and there were maybe 500 people there, but they were just there for the scene, they’re not listening and you can tell. The crowd at these past two have been here for the music. It’s a much better environment.”

Free Energy (pictured up top) played an exhuberant Saturday night set to a packed crowd at The Iron Bear – the scene of Bleeding Rainbow’s equipment carnage of last year, an uncanny coincidence since both bands appeared on a recent show at Arden Gild Hall. (Free Energy did not smash anything, however.)

In another coincidence, on Saturday evening I headed down Austin’s 6th Street – a scene of mayhem and madness that falls somewhere between Mardi Gras and the Philadelphia Folk Festival campground – making my way to a bar / venue called The Lodge to catch TJ Kong and the Atomic Bomb. When I arrived, the stage was still being set up, but I heard a very recognizable blend of acoustic punk fervor and violin in the near-distance. I poked my head next door, and saw New Sweden, wailing away to a packed bar for their final show.

TJ Kong and the Atomic Bomb | Photo by John Vettese

I watched Kong and their gritty folk brethren and thought about their respective tactics: New Sweden playing near-constantly all week, Kong popping in and out at the end of the week. Each has their merits – getting your name out there as much as possible, versus playing it cool and avoiding burnout. Both played to crowds bobbing along to their raucous and enjoyable sound (especially to folks indulging in pre-St. Patrick’s Day whiskey drinks). Both handed out free CDs.

And both are probably in the same predicament in the end – the music may be listened to by people who have been grabbing free CDs all week, the crowd may remember them in a way more specific than “that cool folk band we saw on Saturday,” the band may have a somewhat bigger crowd the next time they play Austin on tour. Or their southwestern fan base may remain at the same level, and this will have just been an exercise in performing live and having fun on the road.

Which is all part of the gamble of the South by Southwest festival, and of a music career in general. When you have name recognition of Vacationer, Free Energy and Grandchildren – and the label support that two out of those three artists have – it’s easier to be relaxed at SXSW. When you’re going it your own, you’re playing by your own rules, and going H.A.M. like is an admirable and respectable option. But in the all-around scheme of things – the knowns, the lesser-knowns, the hectic and relaxed – all of these locals in Austin did Philly proud.

The Key: How did you get into playing guitar?

Mike Lorenz: I had a friend who played guitar, so I wanted to play guitar.  I started playing in 5th grade because I saw him playing, so that was in like 1995, which I always tell people is a great time to start playing guitar because all the stuff on the radio was ‘guitar rock’ – even though some of it sucked. If you wanted to play it, some of it was kind of hard for a kid beginning, so I always credit that stuff for why I am a decent guitar player. (chuckles)

TK: What, in your opinion, is the state of jazz?

ML: I guess if you read jazz stuff on the Internet, it dies every year.  Someone proclaims it dead ever year.  But there is lots of neat stuff. It’s just where the influence comes from.  There are some great Indian-American musicians who use jazz as an influence, there are people who grew up with hip-hop who use that as an influence, and I still think it is all jazz, but then there are people who don’t.  The thing that is kinda constant now is people taking in exterior influences.  There are a lot of people taking what A Tribe Called Quest did, or like J Dilla and playing it on acoustic instruments in an improvised setting.  A big name from last year is a person named Robert Glasper.  He released a record with musicians who do that really, really well, and it is basically an R&B but it is on Blue Note which is a jazz label and there is improvising on it, but they are playing what sounds like Dilla beats and stuff like that.

TK: The hip-hop influence seems like a way to make jazz more accessible. Are more musicians doing that?

ML: There are people with obvious hip-hop or R&B influences, you know, like a lot of them are influenced by that D’Angelo album Voodoo, there is a lot of that. But there are other people, like this piano player Vijay Iyer, on his last two records he has done a cover of a song that A Tribe Called Quest sampled and then done some sort of reconstruction of it, but obviously there is a very conscious cross examination of the song, cross referential. So there is a lot of that, and then there are people who just play jazz, where you’d be like ‘oh, that’s jazz?’ Swingin’, or something like that.

TK: How is important is improvisation to your music?

ML: That’s the essential part of it.  I think that is above all what happens in jazz that makes it unique.  The improvised spaces are what make it different than a jam band. A lot of times the ending is unknown at the beginning.

TK: How important is your setting in your ability to improvise?

ML: Yeah, I have to answer that a couple different ways.  I used to have this friend, we had this joke that we would say during his gig.  He would do this voice, but he’d say ‘Just do the gig.’  Which is sort of like, just do what the room is.  Do what the vibe is.  If you are playing a wedding, you are not going to do Coltrane, or post-Coltrane, like, blow it out.  Sometimes I think about that, just do the gig.  If you want to make it more colorful, assess the room, play the space.  You have heard me play Tired Hands, and there I feel really comfortable and appreciated, everyone is great, the room sounds good, so I just feel comfortable and play, other places they expect a certain kind of thing so I give it to them.

TK: Do you have an ideal place for your improvisation to bloom?

ML: Ideally it would be a listening situation where people are listening and experiencing the music in some appreciative capacity, no yelling or talking over it.  That would be ideal.  It doesn’t have to be a concert hall, it can just be a club where people listen.  You go to clubs in New York and people go and listen because they know it’s anticipated and there is a premium set of music. Ideally, I think jazz happens best in a place where there is movement and people and people are in and out and there is a buzz to the room, like a club setting, but people don’t always listen in those situations, around here, they do in other places.  That would be ideal.

TK: Is making a jazz album challenging given the amount of improvisation involved?

ML: It captures a moment.  It is just a matter of how special that moment is.  It is a really moody music, it’s not like you can just reherse a bunch and your have your arrangement down like a rock band might. They have it all set and they can go in and hit it, and do a bunch of takes and have it be fine. But jazz, you can just not have it that day.  You can have spent time and money and everybody else’s time and you don’t have something you aren’t happy with.  There are special moments, but a lot of times with jazz it’s just that day, like classic albums are recorded in one day.  Miles Davis recorded 4 records in like two or three days. They are called like Cookin’, Relaxin’, Smokin’ and I forget what the fourth one is [it’s Steamin’ – Ed.], but he just wanted to finish his contract with Prestige so he could sign with Columbia, so he recorded four records in two days, and they are all classics, like, everybody should own them that is a jazz fan. Basically they just took what they were doing in clubs and went in and recorded it, and that happened in two days. They captured the quality of what was happening.

Mike Lorenz plays tonight and March 21st at Tired Hands Brewing Company, 16 Ardmore Avenue in Ardmore. The 21+ performance begins at 8 p.m.

Eels | Photo by Michael Bucher

Check out photos and videos of Eels‘ knock-out appearance at World Cafe Live [link]

Local acoustic musician Kyle Swartzwelder recorded a stirring session for Folkadelphia [link]

Download “Joy To You Baby” from Josh Ritter‘s new LP The Beast in its Tracks, which is also XPN’s Featured Album of the Week [link]

XPN’s Gotta Hear Song of Week welcomes the return of Petula Clark with “Cut Copy Me” off of her new album Lost in You [link]

The Lawsuits recorded a rocking, eclectic Key Studio Session this week [link]

Guest VJ Nikki Volpicelli shares Philadelphia Area Music Showcase‘s line-up of local acts for this month’s Tuesday Tune-Out series at PhilaMOCA [link]

Neighboorhood Choir‘s Bennett Daniels talks roadtrips, recording and roughing it in an interview with Brian Wilensky [link]

The Key premiered Wild Belle‘s instantly captivating and mystical debut album Isles [link]

Peter Murphy will perform the music of Bauhaus at The Trocadero on May 9th [link]

Watch a video of Norwegian Arms performing “Wolf Like a Stray Dog” at Brighton Sound Studios; they play an all-ages show at PhilaMOCA tomorrow [link]

Preeminent Philly soul group The Delfonics are put in the spotlight once again with Adrien Younge Presents The Delfonics; stream the new collaborative album via NPR [link]

Steve Earle and the Dukes announce a May 3rd show at Phoenixville’s Colonial Theatre [link]

Spaceship Aloha at Bartram’s Garden | Photo by Inna Spivakova | DataGarden.org

Perhaps it’s because he’s a drummer, or maybe he’s a drummer because of it, but Chris Powell has a knack for juggling multiple things at once. Onstage behind a kit – in present day avant-popsters Man Man and going back a dozen or more years with his formative group Need New Body – it’s rhythms, tempos and even percussion instruments Powell mixes up. In a broader sense, it’s projects: he’s a producer and collaborator with Grant$, a band leader with Adventuredrum, and a cosmic one-man dance-maker in his new-ish electronic project Spaceship Aloha.

Last year, Powell launched the Spaceship with Universe Mahalo: Volume #1, his debut LP on the local experimental label Data Garden. It’s a heady potpourri of body-moving dub beats, exotic tropical instrumentation, futuristic electro-pop textures, and samples of that lean both towards science fiction (humming lasers, pinging radar) and summer vacation (breezy surf and seagulls). The followup, Tropical Information Systems, will be out this summer on Data Garden, and tonight he makes his second-ever live appearance at Johnny Brenda’s, opening for Mouse on Mars – who rang among his electronic music heroes. Powell and I swapped emails to get to the root of Spaceship Aloha.

The Key: The project emerged when you got married in Hawaii a few years ago. Was that trip your first full-on exposure to Polynesian music? What about the music hooked you so much?

Chris Powell: I’ve been obsessed with Hawaii ever since childhood. It’s this beautiful, magical, exotic, tropical destination – I love the vibe of Hawaii generally, and the music is a big part of that. But I’ve been familiar with Polynesian music since I was very young, thanks to growing up in a part of the country with wonderful local radio stations that played music from all over the world.

TK: The sci-fi / spacey electronic element of the band is great, because for the listener, it’s such an unexpected sonic twist. I have a hunch, however, that for you it was a natural fit – of course you’d think to mix the two styles! Is that right – did it come together really that quickly? Or was it more of an evolution?

CP: The sci-fi sonic style comes very naturally to me. I’m a huge science fiction fan – it just makes sense that those sounds would make their way into my music. I love the old sound effects that were used for UFO’s and spaceships. The Jetsons‘ sound design is amazing. And in terms of fantastical and exotic travel, it doesn’t get much more fantastic than outer space.

There was an evolution, to incorporate sci-fi elements into this work – but it was mostly sorting out what instruments, synths, and sequencers worked best for creating these sounds. Working with local synth makers Critter & Guitari has been a huge opportunity – I’m using their synths to take the music to new places.

TK: The incorporation of different instruments really jumps out – the uke, the acoustic guitar, the horns and strings. Is that you playing all that stuff (in addition to the stuff that’s more obviously sampled)?

CP: The instruments on Universe Mahalo: Volume #1 are mostly sampled, though they are chopped up, performed, and played like drums and keyboards. There are multiple layers constantly working together at all times. All sound sources and instruments are resampled and re-contextualized. There’s a lot more acoustic instrumentation in the newer material, though it’s drastically different from song to song.

TK: For the part that is culled from samples, what were you seeking out in source material?

CP: I used some random elements from the older Hawaiian pop songs (kick drums, bass notes, guitar strumming) that were playing on the Maui radio stations in heavy rotation during my visit there. Most of the samples on Universe Mahalo: Volume #1 were chopped up from YouTube clips. YouTube is an absolute goldmine when working on collage-style sound design. I also used old tapes of music I recorded from the radio when I was about ten years old.

TK: With all your other musical projects, how did this fit in? Were you tracking Spaceship Aloha songs on the Man Man Tour Van or between takes during the Grant$ sessions?

CP: I keep getting less and less sleep, though I seem to have worked out getting just enough to maintain and keep sharp enough through the days! I was working on new Spaceship Aloha material all during last month’s Man Man tour, mostly in the van. It takes awhile to figure out what you can do on the road but I now have the perfect tools to work while traveling from city to city.

TK: I saw your set at Bartram’s Garden last year for the Data Garden show. Was that your first show, and have you performed much since then?

CP: The Bartram’s Garden Oct show was my first live set as Spaceship Aloha. This will be my second show on Monday. I’ve been hard at work on the new Spaceship record, as well as the new Man Man and Grant$ records, so I decided to wait a while before taking on any other SA shows. I’m also a big believer in not performing too much in town. It keeps things fresh and exciting.

TK: I loved that your live show is such an audiovisual experience. To what degree does the imagery inspire the music? Do you use songs to score scenes, or do you make music first and then find footage etc. to pair with it?

CP: The Bartram’s show was a great experience, because I always wanted to work with visuals in a live setting. I think of music visually – I was a visual artist first, so it comes naturally to think about how to expand a live show past the music. Data Garden curated the visual performers for the Bartram’s set. I invited Michael Dur to collaborate with me on the visuals for tonight’s set at Johnny Brenda’s.

TK: Tonight, you’re playing with Mouse on Mars, one of your favorite electronic bands. What about them do you dig? Have they influenced your own writing?

CP: Mouse On Mars is the reason I make electronic music. They have always been so far ahead of the curve, it’s dizzying. This last record MOM released is rhythmically compelling, and compositionally adventurous – the sonic landscape shifts though rhythms and melodies so quickly, it always sounds fresh. They have profoundly influenced my writing, performing, and how I approach music overall. Simply put, they’re my musical heroes.

Spaceship Aloha performs tonight with Mouse on Mars at Johnny Brenda’s, 1201 North Frankford Avenue. The 21+ show begins at 9 p.m., tickets and more information can be found at the venue’s website.

All of Neighborhood Choir’s gently rippling lo-fi pop tunes are written by Daniels, at home, layer by layer. What makes them sonically intriguing comes from the reel-to-reel tape machine they’re recorded on: a Tascam 388.

“I like using it because it’s modest,” says Daniels. “What you play is what people hear. Can’t change notes like Pro Tools. And the fidelity is really strange. You only get eight tracks because it uses quarter-inch tape so sometimes things bleed together. But that makes it kind of fun, to see how things will turn out.”

But how Daniels got the Tascam 388 is a better story than how it works.

He took a cross-country road trip to Portland, Oregon, where they answered a Craigslist ad in Seattle for it, in the summer of 2009 with his then Neighborhood Choir bandmates, Parker Cipolle, Daniel Bickart and Paul Sukeena. They lived in Portland for the whole summer, surviving on menial house painting jobs and finagling different housing situations.

“Originally we kind of wanted it to be a tour,” Daniels says, pausing a moment, distracted by something happening out the window on Frankford Avenue. “But we only played in Chicago and maybe once or twice while we were in Portland the whole summer.”

While trekking through Utah in the middle of the desert on a highway that went on straight as far as Daniels could see, they almost got into some serious trouble that could have kept them from getting to Portland at all.

“We were doing about 90 miles per hour and smoking a doob,” says Daniels, “when suddenly there was a cop car coming at us on the opposite side of the road. Suddenly he parked across the road to block us and we had to slam on the breaks and we started freaking out. When the cop came to talk to us he basically had us busted and was about to call for back-up to search the car. And suddenly hail started pelting down and the cop just told us to be careful and get out of there. It was like God said, ‘no, you’re not going to jail today.’”

Daniels may have gotten away by a stroke of luck that time. But he didn’t have the best of luck returning to Philadelphia. He holed up in a warehouse, what’s now known as DIY-space Hong Kong Garden. He was roughing it, heating the whole place by burning scrap wood in a stove from an industrial pallett manufacturer down the street. And occasionally the pallett manufacturer wasn’t reliable.

“One time it was about January or February and they didn’t put any out,” he says. “It got so cold I actually considered hacking up my upright bass and old acoustic guitar to burn for some heat just for the night. I’m really glad I didn’t do that”

Daniels’ ability to write thoughtful pop songs that flow lazily out of your headphones (the best way to listen to his music) isn’t by chance. He’d studied jazz bass performance at Temple’s music school, but dropped out. That explains some of his recordings’ juicy bass licks on tracks such as “Easier.”

“St. Raymond of the Dogs,” a song that glows dimly, was written a long time ago but recorded fairly recently. It came from a time that he was living alone, hot off of a break-up, depressed and drinking too much, he says. Check the pensive lyrics:

“I dug a hole deeper than the eye could see / And buried everything I thought that I would ever need / Because worrying about tomorrow ain’t all it used to be / It’s everything.”

“But the song’s essentially about recovering from being in that awful feeling,” he says. Notice the next verse:

“I climbed a tree higher than the eyes could see / And lived as a leaf floating in the green leaf sea / The seasons changed and I felt too old to be / Part of anything.”

Daniels isn’t shy to admit the rest of Neighborhood Choir’s songs are about girls, “because you can’t kill them.”

The live Neighborhood Choir setting is considerably different than what’s heard on Daniels’ Bandcamp page. He’s joined Paul Sukeena of Spacin’ and Andy Molholt of Laser Background (whom Daniels also plays in) on guitar and drummer Steve Urgo. Right now Daniels is amid recording the first Neighborhood Choir LP. He says it’ll be layed down similarly with him doing all of the writing and recording. But Urgo will likely be doing some of the drum tracks rather than using the Tascam 388’s drum machine. So keep your ears peeled because when it’s ready, Daniels has some plans to catch everyone off guard with it.

“I should be done with it all around September and then shop it around to press it to vinyl,” he says. “But I’m not going to share it with anyone until it’s ready and just drop it on everyone all at once.”

Neighborhood Choir performs with Mac DeMarco tonight at 7 p.m. at Kung Fu Necktie, 1250 North Front Street. Tickets and information on the show can be found at the venue’s website.

The Key: The biggest thing that jumps out about Circe is that death comes up a LOT. That’s what “Life of Mud” is all about, it’s also an undercurrent of “Underground” and “Rivers to Hell.” You focused on dark things on your debut Devil’s Grip, for sure, but why death this time?

Dan Murphy: I think that on Devil’s Grip a lot of the lyrics were written very quickly and focused more on relationship problems or even just simple storytelling. The writing process for Circe took much longer because I wanted to focus on more universal themes through the narrative that the album presents. Nothing is more universal than death, we all gotta go sometime and that very thought scares the hell out of most people.

TK: You work in interesting themes, as far as blues music goes. Very existential, very philosophical, lots of good-versus-evil rather than “woe is me.” What draws you to focus on the bigger things?

DM: It was a few years ago that we really immersed ourselves in and came to love the blues, which is what shaped Devil’s Grip. That being said, the blues is a genre that’s been played for about a hundred years, so if you want to play blues music you have to change it up somehow. I think that guys like Robert Johnson and Skip James were pointing to a lot of these bigger things, but they were doing it with lyrical motifs that would eventually be beaten into the ground. That’s why I think we wanted to get away from the “my baby left me”s and step outside to find something more personal yet more relatable to the human experience.

TK: Between your first record and this one, you performed a lot – between New York, Philly, and the surrounding region, as well as on tour. How did that shape the sound of this album?

Tom Murphy: What really emerges from playing around so much is just trying things out and seeing what does and doesn’t work. If things didn’t come together on stage like we thought they should, we’d go back and work the song out until it did. A great example is “Life of Mud”. Something always felt off about that song and we addressed it in the studio. Some songs just flow after the first take, but that was one that we had to sit down with for weeks until we felt comfortable playing it. So all the rehearsing and playing gave us a clearer idea of what the record should come out like, and I think that made for a more cohesive album.

TK: What was your experience recording with Bill Moriarty like? The record sounds great, so it was obviously positive in the end, but how was the road getting there?

TM: Working with Bill was really great.  When Dan started writing the skeleton of the record last year, Lynne [Krohn, manager] and I started basically “shopping” around for producers to help us with the project.  We met with a lot of great people with some serious backgrounds in music, but Bill really stood out as a guy who seemed to get us and get what we were going for.  We were sold after the first meeting.  I mean, we were probably sold before that.  My iTunes reads like Bill’s resume’, so really we were honored when he reached out to us.  I remember seeing the e-mail and sending a text to Pat and Dan like “THE GUY WHO DID THE MAN MAN RECORDS WANTS TO WORK WITH US!”

The cool thing about working with Bill is that Bill’s a guy who is going to protect you from yourself. We never really had anyone say “no” to us in the studio before Bill, and that’s exactly what we were looking for.  When we were writing this record we knew we had some good ideas but we also knew we couldn’t flesh it out on our own, and that’s where Bill came in.  He was great about nudging us in the right direction when we needed it, without shattering our fragile egos.  We really can’t wait to work with him again.

TK: Okay, time for a quick Wikipedia check – Circe is the Greek godess of magic who turned those who offended her into animals. She also murdered her husband and was well versed in drugs and herbs. How did Circe become the namesake of your record?

DM: It was actually Tom’s idea to name it Circe. Within the narrative of the album, the event that starts the protagonist’s journey is a breakup with a lover, and he can’t help but think about her throughout the entire story. Circe was famous for “turning men to swine”, not to mention that the word “circus” originates from her name, and there’s a couple spots on this record that feature circus music. I also think that by referencing the Odyssey, the title tells the listener a bit about what they’re getting into, as the story is itself a somewhat twisted odyssey towards self-discovery for the narrator.

TK: I’m really glad “Underground” made the cut on the album – I was impressed when you recorded it during your Key Session a couple years back. It’s a long song with lots of twists and turns, but reads almost like a mission statement. Was it a tough decision about whether to include it or not?

DM: It was a while ago, but if memory serves me right, “Underground” was the first song that was actually intended for the record. It served as a good starting point for the very reason you present: it reads like a mission statement. Pretty much all the themes and problems that the record presents are summarized in “Underground,” and I think the album would be incomplete without it.

TM: The way it came together back when it was being written, we had what we termed “the medley” which comprised “Underground,” “The Passing,” and Eulogy which are tracks 9, 10, and 11 on the record.  As you saw on Devil’s Grip, we have a sort of penchant for really long, three part songs a la “Suite for Stack.” This was in a similar vein, but ultimately we decided to cut them into three different tracks.  An important thing for us in the studio though was to have seamless transitions, so that if you were listening to the record straight through, these songs would all kind of mesh.  We decided that was actually a good approach for the whole record, so we tried to record in such a way that someone listening might not always realize where one song ends and another begins.  With this one, we just really love the idea of a cohesive, fluid Album with a capital A.  I think that idea started with “Underground” and the songs right after it.

Pat Murphy: And I think that’s one of the greatest ways Dan’s songwriting has developed. While Devil’s Grip was a collection of similar songs this really is a cohesive Album. Circe starts in one spot and ends in a completely different one, but with a journey in between that takes you there. As we’ve been working on it I’ve been most impressed with how each song moves you to a different point in the journey and that makes the album flow so well.

TK: You’ve knocked out a lot of really strong cover versions and interpretations over the years – “Suite for Stack” being a big one. Anything you’ve been covering lately that we can look forward to at the Underground Arts album release?

TM: I can tell you the answer is yes, but you’ll have to come to the show to find out…

Circe is the featured album in this edition of Unlocked; hear the spotlighted single “Life of Mud” in Monday’s post, read Tuesday’s album review, watch a live version of “Not Fade Away” in yesterday’s post and check back tomorrow for a Penrose-curated Spotify playlist.

1a. Label Disintegration

Aleks Martray: Our original label (Green Owl) ceased to exist. That was a rollercoaster, nightmare scenario. We had finally got this new label on paper and in our heads it was a great thing. You know, Warner imprint label, Ben Bronfman, MIA connection all these name-dropping superficial opportunities. And we were able to tour, put out a record. We were finally able to make to make a little money get a little licensing opportunities and within months it sort of disappeared. And you realize it is smoke and mirror when people are name-dropping that much, so it is all just an illusion.

So the worst thing that happened at the time was we went from feeling like everything was on track, to being back to square one, but the way I look at it now, that was really the moment when I decided to start writing a new record, and I was going to do everything I wanted to do with the first record but didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I had a clear vision for what I wanted to do, so it was real momentum to get back to the drawing board artistically and be like, you know, “all this other industry bullshit aside, what kind of music do I want to make?” So it was a real motivating force. Maybe for a few weeks it was a little disillusioning, but then I got back on the horse and I was like, this will be good, this will ground me again.

Grandchildren performing at The Ox in 2010 | Photo by Justin Roman

1b. Finding A New Home

AM: We had been on the radar of Earnest Jennings for a couple of years now. We had been talking and indirectly crossing path with them. When the record was finally finished they were the first people we connected with and they were really excited about it. We were really looking for a label that didn’t care about how many names you can drop or connections you have. We wanted somebody who is psyched about it who has the experience and track record of putting out good music and it was just the perfect fit.

Roman Salcic: Our contract this time was two pages, last time it was 46.

AM: And the second page of this contract was me making sure nothing happens like it happened last time. And it was never worrying about the label, one you go through something like that you never want to go through it again. That being said, it’s a much clearer relationship much more based on the artistry of what were doing.

2. Band Rebirth

RS: I think another thing that happened to Grandchildren since the last album is that in a sense we died and had a rebirth. Mended. We are better now as a group as we ever were and it is because we’ve gone through like I don’t even know how to explain it, it’s almost like an exorcism, and I’m talking about really private, personal things that we managed to fix, and once we did, we discovered a new beginning. So there is a real sense of everything is new, even though it’s more or less the same. So that’s a big thing, we nearly collapsed and through that process we discovered we were really strong.

AM: I think that affected how the album turned out. It affected the sense of people’s roles were really clear, and what people wanted to get out of the project was really clear. We went through that roller coaster together, so once you have that bottom drop out, you lose that feeling of life is an evolution of upward trajectory. It is all over the place, it is almost non-linear. You do your best and try your hardest and make the music you want to make and take opportunities when they come and you don’t get as discouraged when things don’t work out. So on a personal level, we all weather that storm together. We’ve toured the country numerous times, so we went through all of that together and I think the past 2 years since the last record we really just realized what the priorities were and what it was like to collaborate constructively.

We just got older and wiser. We don’t get hung up on the small insignificant stuff. We realize it is a big world, there are tons of bands, everyone and their brother has a band, we just have to recognize the uniqueness of what we have and run on it. We are a team, if we are butting heads internally we have no chance, so I think we started connecting on a level where the harmony within the band was that we are going to move forward no matter what, and not worry about external forces.

RS: We were born out of real and perceived friendships, that we’re like a family, and we functioned kind of like a family for a while and then the family just stared to break down. And now we are probably more so like a family, but we’re a band, and that’s where the priority of the relationship is.

3. Touring with Man Man

AM: When we toured with Man Man, we all really loved and appreciated their showmanship, their personality, their energy on stage, and we really loved it and saw what we could get out thinking towards that. But also, we’re not Man Man, were not that. So it’s not about emulating or being someone else. That is the great thing about touring with another band, is like, you recognize your learning curve and what you want to aim for but you also see what you are and you embrace it. One thing that has been really great with this record is that I had a draft of the record, I had most of the songs laid out and we figured out some of them live and toured on them. And in touring on them I got to listen to them every night and rethink them and use audience feedback, see how people respond to different parts, and when I came home I finalized the record and that’s when I started working with Chris Powell from Man Man and Bill Moriarty to finalize the record. So a lot of the final decisions came out of touring.

The shuttered Danger Danger Gallery, now Grandchildren HQ

4. Danger Danger Gallery shutting down

AM: Honestly, it was a positive thing, it’s hard to see from the outside perspective, it was a great venue for local bands and bands moving through, but on an internal level, it was a positive thing. I know that Tristan (Palazzolo) and Russell (Brodie), who live there and own the place and basically run the place, they were basically burnt out. Imagine getting over 100 emails a day with everyone and their brother wanting to play there. It is a lot, and it’s not like you are making money off it. You do it because you love it, they did it for about five or six years because the loved it, but our band was being more active and we were going on tour and stuff, so it was just logical to tone it down and not do as many shows.

RS: You can’t stretch yourself too thin, we are the type of band that doesn’t have great popularity that we make our living just off of music. We have to supplement our lives by working, so you have a very active band and another job, and on top of that you are supposed welcome dozens of bands into your home? You just can’t. And we need a place to rehearse, that’s our headquarters now.

5. Making Babies like a Boss.

Multi-Instrumentalist Tristan Palazzolo is having a baby! Big moves. That is one step closer to the band having Grandchildren, at which point a black hole would probably be created.

Grandchildren plays a tour kick-off show at Underground Arts on Friday, March 1 with Son Step and Buried Beds. Tickets and more information on the show can be found at the WXPN Concert Calendar.

In many ways, you could argue, Philadelphia’s Man Man are like the zany heart of the local scene. Throughout the years, we’ve watched them grow: from a ramshackle league of whooping, circus gypsies—to the nuanced and creative band who released 2011’s Life Fantastic. And during this time, the band never failed to disappoint, regaling us with some of the most fun, colorful and memorable shows we’ve seen, and a sense of humor and energy that’s contagious.

Now, the band is getting ready to release its fifth record this summer, which features new Man Man members (Man Men?) Shono Murphy and Adam “Brown Sugar” Schatz, along with vets Ryan Kattner and Chris Powell. But first, they’re completing a month-long tour, which they’ll celebrate with an epic closing show this Saturday at Union Transfer. We caught up with front man Kattner (aka “Honus Honus”) ahead of time—to talk faking death, tea, and what fans can expect when Man Man rolls into town.

The Key: So, you guys have a new record coming out this summer, which you describe as a natural progression from Life Fantastic. Will we get to hear these songs live at Union Transfer?

Ryan Kattner: Yeah! Part of this tour was being able to take these new ditties and road-test them and see how they do.

TK: What has the response been like so far?

RK: It’s been awesome! They’re definitely different [from older material.] But they feel like this band. We’re forever gonna be anchored by my rusty throat (laughs).

TK: If you could describe the new record in one sentence or less, how would you describe it?

RK: I’d say it’s… refreshingly beautiful and strange.

TK: Well you have certainly piqued my interest! (Laughs.) So we all know that Man Man is known for being crazy and wacky on stage—but how do you prepare for a show behind the scenes? Are there any band traditions or rituals you like to partake in?

RK: We do nice, soothing, rosemary-huffing sessions—that’s boiled water with rosemary leaves and a towel over the head. We actually planned on doing this for the whole tour—but then we did it for one show and we realized that the rosemary had gone bad. So we were huffing bad rosemary!

TK: That sounds terrible!  Do you need a special type of rosemary for huffing purposes, or is the regular grocery store type sufficient?

RK: Only organic rosemary. Or the stuff that grows off the side of a highway (laughs). I’ve never been a huge tea drinker, but we’ve been battling a flu epidemic this tour, so my composition now is like 1/3 green tea, and 1/3 broken glass (laughs.)

Actually, in a strange, messed-up way, it is fun. Well…perhaps not fun—but at least interesting—to begin a tour sick. Because then by the end, you feel like the phoenix rising. So that’s why we’re very psyched for this last week of shows—because we’ve hustled through it, and now it’s our triumphant return.

TK: I must admit I’m surprised to hear Man Man are tea-drinkers. I expected you to tell me you all do shots and cartwheels.

RK: (laughs). Well, the rosemary tea is puffed out of the gutted-out gully of a pig. And you know… whiskey is part of our DNA. But we don’t have to tell kids that.

via Kattner’s instagram

TK: So…we’ve been following you on Instagram, and we must admit: we’re a little concerned about all your near-death experiences/ resurrections from the dead. Where did you come up with the idea for the dead guy meme? Is this a hint towards the new record’s theme?

RK: It’s just something I’ve been doing it for years. It doesn’t relate directly to anything in particular. The new record is not about aliens and me dying. (pauses) I’m sure there are about 10 stoners out there who will be really sad to hear that. (laughs) Really, it’s just us finding some levity on tour—especially in the winter, doing the same thing every day, it can feel a little like [Bill Murray's classic flick] Groundhog Day. It’s just a way to blow off steam. Also, I’m all about dying. And the Man Man detractors—if they can get a smile from seeing a picture of me dead—well, that just brings an ET-like glow to my chest.

TK: Aww, how sweet. So Philly is the last night on this tour. What are you looking forward to most about coming home?

RK: Well, we love playing Union Transfer, so we’re definitely psyched about that. I’m glad the tour can end in Philly instead of starting here. We have new players in the band, and this is their maiden voyage with us. So we’re happy that we were able to work out any kinks on the road and get used to playing together, and then share this new band with Philly. Mostly though, we just want kids to come out to our show. Not just to see the new material either—for this tour, we’re digging out songs we haven’t played in years. There will be stuff that spans all of our records. It’s refreshing. We’re really excited about it.

TK: We’re really excited too!  So besides the show, what’s coming up next for you?

RK:  So we have the new record coming up—which Chris [Powell] and I mixed with [famed producer Mike] Mogis in Omaha. It’s actually been kind of hellaciously hectic and not ideal—we had to mix the record while we were on the road. It was definitely not easy, but it helped that we worked with someone as brilliant as Mogis—we knew we could trust him to make sure it worked. But it is really tough to listen to the mixes when you’re in a tour van, or at a rock club, and have to make that call. But now it’s mixed, so we just have to sequence it, and get the art work squared away.  I’m really excited hearing the record, just knowing where my head was at when we recorded, and where my heart was at. There are some really beautiful songs on this record. I’m excited to unleash it on the world.

TK: We’re super pumped to hear it!

Man Man play Union Transfer, 1026 Spring Garden Street, Saturday, March 2 with Murder by Death and Northern Arms. The all-ages show begins at 8 p.m. and admission is $20; more information can be found at the venue’s website.

We kick off a new regular feature XPN’s Gotta Hear Song of the Week with “Do Yourself a Favor” from Jamie Lidell – he’s playing Union Transfer on 4/14 [link]

Sera Cahoone stopped by for a Folkadelphia session, highlighting her knock-out 2012 release Deer Creek Canyon [link]

Check out photos and a review of Conor Oberst’s reunited Desaparecidos at Union Transfer [link]

My Morning Jacket cover “Leaving On a Jet Plane” for The Music is You: A Tribute to John Denver [link]

Local folk project Psalmships contributes a cover of “Before We Retire” to the Long May You Run, J. Tillman tribute album [link]

Morrissey announces a show at the Tower Theater for 4/6 [link]

We highlight local blues-rock trio Penrose and their Circe LP in this week’s Unlocked feature [link]

Mike “Slo Mo” Brenner released Tripti after returning from India, where he studied Indian slide guitar [link]

The Philly Drum Project begins fundraising for their high school workshop DrumPhil [link]

Waxahatchee goes acoustic in her Key Studio Session ahead of a record release party at Golden Tea House on Friday [link]

The TSVG Team: Perry Shall, Yamil Emedan, and Mike Klein

On a recent Thursday morning, I went to the new headquarters of TSVG, the boutique effects pedal company that relocated from West Philadelphia to the Fairmount neighborhood a few weeks ago. “Headquarters” is actually the home of Mike Klein, the pedal designer who founded TSVG in 2011. He has two designated workspaces in his new home, one in a small spare bedroom, and the other in the basement. Making pedals is now Klein’s full-time job, but he claims there aren’t any plans to move TSVG into a larger, separate workshop.

“I really don’t need any more room than I already have,” explains Klein while standing in his kitchen. “It’s not like there are a bunch of people working in here. It’s just me and sometimes one other person. I eat my breakfast, and then I go downstairs and start making pedals. That’s what my days are like now.”

Klein’s living room is doubling as a conference room this morning. On top of his coffee table are the six pedals TSVG is currently pushing: a fuzz box called the Angry Jeff; the Emperor, an overdrive pedal; two boost pedals called Hard Stuff (one designed specifically for basses, the other for guitars); a 1960s/70s-inspired fuzz pedal called Keystone Fuzz; and the Red Eye, an overdrive pedal TSVG’s website describes as “perfect for living out your ‘Arena Rock’ fantasy.”

Sitting around the table with Klein are his high school pal Perry Shall, whose artwork appears on all of the pedals, and Yamil Emedan, a longtime friend who has recently become Klein’s apprentice. All three of them are pedal-junkies who play in local bands. Shall’s in Dry Feet, Emedan is in Can You Canoe and Tortuga, and both Klein and Shall are in Hound. As you might expect, they all use TSVG pedals.

The TSVG Pedals

“I’ve played a million boost pedals before, but these are the first ones that actually work,” says Shall, who admits he’s incredibly biased. “Most boost pedals just don’t boost. I play loud music all the time, and these pedals really explode, man!”

Shall’s not alone. Among the musicians currently using TSVG pedals are Best Coast’s Bobb Bruno, Screaming Females’ Marissa Paternoster, Circa Survive’s Brendan Ekstrom and Philadelphia guitarist Nick Millevoi, of Many Arms. “The Hard Stuff pushes my tone into some seriously aggressive territory,” says Millevoi. “I’ve never used another pedal that’s able to overdrive my amp in this way. The fact that it’s hand-wired point-to-point is a serious bonus. I think it gives them a vintage tone you won’t find on any pedal that was built from a circuit board.”

After graduating from University of Delaware with a degree in economics, Klein got a job working for a big mutual funds company. He began making pedals as a hobby, learning through trial and error, and by tweaking other people’s designs. He gave friends in bands some of his pedals to sample, and all of them had positive things to say. He’d been planning to quit his job (which he hated) to start an online amp and guitar shop, but instead decided to start selling his pedals. Klein is confident he has made the right decision, as TSVG is quickly carving out a niche market for itself.

“The pedal market is saturated with crap,” says Klein. “They’re built on awful circuit boards, and with cheap parts, but they cost $300. A machine can’t make the pedals we build. I make each one with my hands, and I take my time. From start to finish, I have a physical connection to every single pedal. Every pedal is a labor of love… each one is a piece of art.”

The smallsound/bigsound Team: Brian Hamilton

TSVG isn’t the only boutique pedal company in Philadelphia these days. A few miles away, in Fishtown’s Viking Mill building, is the studio headquarters of smallsound/bigsound. The pedal company was founded by Brian Hamilton in 2008, and has been based in Philadelphia for about three years. Like the team at TSVG, Hamilton is also a musician. He studied at Berklee College of Music, and currently plays keyboards in Cymbals Eat Guitars.

Hamilton started making pedals back in college, when he became interested in sound design, and when he discovered that other boutique pedal companies were unable to build exactly what he wanted. So he started making them himself. “At first I was just Frankenstein-ing different circuits together,” says Hamilton.“I still don’t know what everything does, but I learn so much by just tinkering. I took a few to Main Drag, a music store in Brooklyn, and they agreed to sell some. They sold really quickly, so then I realized I was onto something. There was no website or advertising, it was all just word-of-mouth.”

The smallsound/bigsound Pedals

With the exception of the screenprinted graphics that appear on the pedals, Hamilton does all the work himself. Smallsound/bigsound currently has four pedals available: two fuzz pedals named Team Awesome! and the Hawk; a big overdrive pedal called Fuck Overdrive; and a “slimmed-down” version of the Fuck Overdrive called the Mini. Some of the musicians currently using Hamilton’s pedals are Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor, and members of Les Savy Fav and Modest Mouse.

Having worked as a touring musician for many years, Hamilton thinks his pedals will meet the needs of other working musicians. And, as most pedals are designed for guitarists, he feels his experiences as a keyboardist and synth player allow him to approach pedal-making from a unique perspective. “I’m always on the road playing tons of rooms, so I know what works and what doesn’t,” says Hamilton. “I can make pedals that work for many different, unpredictable environments. Also, I’m not a guitarist. I’m coming to sound design from more of a modular synth approach, and synth players think about making sound in a way guitarists do not.”

“But I’m always striving for something more and something new,” says Hamilton about building a pedal that sounds exactly how he wants it to sound. “It’s a lifelong quest.”

Curly Castro is one of my favorite people to interview. We can be chatting about his music and then wind up on a long tangent about Cold War history, or the character dynamics of Wu-Tang Clan, or mass media consolidation. He’s a super insightful character, in addition to being a thought provoking Philadelphia rapper. His new album Fidel is out this week on Man Bites Dog Records, and he celebrates with a show tonight in his native Brooklyn at The Legion. Last week, we sat down talked about the progression the new record took from Castro’s 2011 debut Winston’s Appeal, a certain storied laundromat at 6th and Girard and how his outlook parallels both Marilyn Manson and Johnny Cash. Read more below.

The Key: One thing I like a lot about Fidel is the move from a first person narrative to more satirical, theatrical elements. Like “Starch” and “Colored Water Fountain” – they feel like sketches set to music, with an underlying message. How did this element come to be?

Curly Castro: Well, most of the songs especially on this one were dictated by the beat. I don’t know if its an epiphany or anything but certain things come to mind when I’m listening to a beat. So with “Colored Water Fountain,” that came about because I wanted to sing on my record. I don’t write many songs, I mostly write raps, but I wanted to try it. And so I don’t know what came about, but I started doing the Louis Armstrong voice – that’s me doing that! And once I started doing that voice, the words came for the song. I said allright, what’s the most, like you said, satirical way to get my point across? To symbolize how there are some white extremeists that have very staunch racial views, but they love black culture somehow. So it’s like, okay, come on down to my restaurant, you can have all the black food you want, you can dive in all you want, and then at the end I pull the rug out.

TK: “You’ve all been poisoned…”

CC: Yeah. The song made me think of a juke joint, the song made me think of the Cotton Club. And the dichotomy of the Cotton Club is that some of us were the main performers, but we had to come in through the back door. You could talk to people, they could be fans and come see you on stage, but if they want to see you after, you got to leave out the back and they leave out the front. So I was also thinking of a restaurant like that, but turning Jim Crow and segregation in its tail – making it the Colored Water Fountain. Like Tavern on the Green, there’s the opulunce to it.

TK: And what about “Starch”?

CC: Well, there’s this infamous laundromat at 6th and Girard. It seems like its open all the time, there’s this weird light emanating, there’s not many attendants after 10:00, and there’s all types of seedy activity that goes on there. They sell DVDs there, behind the glass. So I thought what if I was at laundromat one night, what could happen. But then I thought I want it to be a story, I want it to be circular. So I got Boogie Mandela on there, who’s doing really nice things in the city these days. And I got the legendary Has-Lo on there. When people hear it, hopefully they get its not too deep. But I think that those stories would be told best in that vein. And also, there’s the underlying issues – even with “Starch,” it’s about gentrification, enablers being all jacked up. And people in personal space. And people with germophobia. “Colored Water Fountain” has a more concrete point.

TK: With the circular story element, do you think the Wu Tang Pulp project had an effect on that?

CC: Not directly because we were working on it simultaneously. We finished Wu Pulp last year, but I’d been working on it for a couple years. We’d also been working on Fidel for a couple years. But you are keen to notice, because Boogie was on Wu Pulp too. We were just feeling collabroative, going with the spirit of Wu Tang, not that they’re deceased or anything, but the essence of how they would mix and match people. Not that these are posse cuts  or anything, but that’s just how Wu would have done it, with three or four people. So with Fidel, I knew I wasn’t going to have a lot of guest appearances. Winston’s Appeal has twice as many. But in the same vein, I knew that if I had people  on there, I wanted it to be poignant.

TK: I was also struck by “Winter ’87,” with its Vince Guaraldi piano sample. How did you pair up those samples?

CC: I actually have the original Charlie Brown record in my crib, next to my telephone man from New Edition. My mom picked up on my affinity for it so she just bought me the whole record. I picked that beat from an old Small Professor project, he didn’t even know I took it. And it just hit me that I had all these stories. And once I realized that Fidel was becoming more and more autobiographical, these stories I would tell Zilla [Rocca, frequent collaborator and producer] or Has, they would be like yo, why don’t you make a song out  of that? But I’m also a little old school in the sense that – you know, sometimes my mom says “Don’t tell people our business.” So certain stories, I’d call and ask if I can use it on a song. Sometimes she says yes, sometimes she says no. So this song, because Small didn’t even know I took the beat, I just went with the story. It’s an interesting and kind of horriffic story about us getting held up on an elevator on Christmas Eve. And when I heard the song, It hearkened back to Vince Guaraldi Charlie Brown Christmas, and how majestic New York can be in the winter time. The snow falls, light glistens, there’s street lights, sometimes there’s a nice mist going or whatever. But there’s still crime and suffering and terror happening. And it was fast – it was so fast. That song is like two minutes, and it’s longer than the actual event. Zilla told me he was riding in his car, listening to it – he calls it “doing a field test” – and his eyes watered up, ’cause I took him there.

TK: And Charlie Brown is one of those things that the music is so universal, everybody has an association with it. You hear it, and it takes you back to some point in your life. And then, paired with it, you hear this other story that goes with it. That’s part of the reason why that track is so affecting.

CC: You start thinking it’s the one thing, and it starts changing.

TK: So the record is autobiographical. Not like Flatbush and Church, which was very linear, but this is more vignettes.

CC: Zilla and Has sequenced the record, and that’s when I realized how personal it was. It’s laid out in a way where it’s my story in the vein of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Some songs represent certain phases of my life, even though the may not have been written specifically like that. So “Mesrine,” “Fenster & McManus”…they have different themes to them. So they’re indiciative of when I didn’t give a damn, how I was trying to scheme and trying to do anything. To later points in the record, my enlightment, there’s “Kintro.” It was written to be the first song in the record, but the way it is, it’s my retribution, my rebirth. “Colored Water Fountain,” that’s my learning to understand hate and love dealing with race. “Spook” is about parinoia. So it’s me going through all those things, until I get to “Kintro” at almost the end of the album.

TK: So even if it’s not a literal representation of a phase in your life, a story about your life, its something where the underlying message of the story relates back to you.

CC: Yes, exactly. When they gave me back the record, and it was in the order it’s in now, it was like oh – I didn’t have the foresight to see that, but the way it ebbs and flows, of course.

TK: You kind of as an artist you need to step away from your work to see the bigger picture. Do you agree with that?

CC: Yes, and that’s a testament to it. People say you don’t see the forest for the trees. When you’re working on something and dealing with so many minute factors – a kick, a snare, a word, a phrase, alliteration, prepositional phrases. When you get so microscopic, you miss the full picture sometimes. It’s hard to pull back when you’re in there scraping on DNA, digging on caverns, every nook and cranny of what you’re working on. Somebody else can step in with a fresh eye and more importantly fresh ears and say okay, this is what this is. It’s almost impossible to listen to your record like you never did it. But you’ll hear your record and know oh, that was the fourth take, the second take was better. And it eats away at you. But the public never notices. So that’s why I’m glad I have friends and in turn colleagues like Zilla and Has who can take the material and put it in a good fahsion.

TK: Tell me about the Johnny Cash cover. Or the Johnny Cash extrapolation, would it be?

CC: Again, that was an instance where I wanted to sing. And at that time, Zilla and I were doing covers, but flipping them back, changing the cadence, making them rapped lyrics. And we were successful at doing it a few times. So I said this is my opportunity to sing Johnny Cash, I love his spirit, I love what he wrote, I love the message. And I really love the At Folsom Prison album that “Cocaine Blues” is on, I love the nature of why he did it in there for those men. And i know it can seem a little mysogonistic – hah, the song is actually very mysoginistic – but to understand you’re going into a hostile environment with hardened criminals, what do you do? He wrote a song about “I shot my wife.” It’s macabre, but you have to understand the performance, catering to the audience -  and that was perfect for it. And because it’s written as a blues song, the time form made it a perfect rap song. It was nothing to transpose the lyrics. I tried to modernize it here and there, put my little reggae accents that I do, I tried to make it mine.

TK: As an artist, your name is an homage to Castro. calling this album Fidel continues that. As an artist, what draws you to him?

CC: Well, to an extent, Americans are supposed to dislike Castro because Castro was one of the few who stood up to the U.S. government when America was the biggest bully in the world. And when I took the name Castro, it was because I respected that – and I knew not to take everything at face value that was given to me. So there’s a militancy about me, so we’ll take that with the Castro. But there’s also a playful side to me, a humorous side, and so there’s Curly. People call me Curly, I have curly hair. When the name hit me in my head, I said this is my Marilyn Manson. The juxtaposition of those two divergent types of ideas. My tagline is “I’m your friendly neighborhood rebel.” You know, you can come over and kick it, have a beer, but we will be storming the capitol at 0900. So I studied him, I studied Che. I want to be knowledgable, globally. I mean, we have american newspapers, and the Metro is the best international news we have, and it’s like ten pages. It’s strange – I don’t want to be out of the loop.

TK: How about calling the record Fidel – does that come from the fact that its so personal?

CC: At some point I realized that it fit. If you call him Fidel, his parents call him Fidel, Che called him Fidel. What did that mean? Winston’s Appeal was my formal document, I’m submitting it to the government and I’m like here, this is what I don’t like, this is what I think should change. And with Fidel, I’m making my statement at a personal level. You think about revolution, you think about explosions and revolts. But before we even get to the big event, how are all the little pieces being connected? So I thought that by calling it Fidel, it would humanize it, bring it down from it being so sensational and be like let’s get down to the ground, to the soil, and see what’s really happeing.

Fidel is the featured album in this edition of Unlocked; hear the spotlighted single “Coal” in Monday’s post, read Tuesday’s album review, watch a music video for “They Call Me Castro” in yesterday’s post and check back tomorrow for more.