Tony Bennett and Amy Winehouse recording Body and Soul. The first time I&160;met [Tony Bennett was when] I&160;took my dad, my stepmother, and my boyfriend to see him at Royal Albert Hall. And we went both nights. Amy Winehouses eyes glowed with a natural, infectious excitement as sheshared this memory with an interviewer earlier this year.
Today, the full music video for Winehouses collaboration with Bennett — on Body and Soul, which Winehouse said is her thers vorite song — has been released. You can watch it here:
The track will feature on Bennetts upcoming album, Duets II, available later this month. It is also available on iTunes now; according to Winehouseswebsite, all proceeds from iTunes sales will go to the newly-launched Amy Winehouse Foundation.
Bennett spoke tenderly of Winehouse (who would have turned 28 today) in a video interview recorded before the younger singer passed away this July, saying: Amy Winehouse was my vorite to perform with on the whole album. … Everybody just said, Ooh, I dont know how youre going to handle her,&160;but I felt completely different; I said, boy, she really loves to perform. Watch his interview here, viaThe Guardian:
As their much-awaited CD arrives, Wild Flags bad-ass alt-rock superheroes discuss lling in love with music again
Joh Clark &8220;We love the sound, the sound is what found us / Sound is the love between me and you.&8221; Thats a lyric from &8220;Romance,&8221; the new single from Wild Flag, the Portland, Ore./Washington, D.C.-based quartet featuring four ultra-talented musicians: drummer Janet Weiss (Sleater-Kinney, Quasi, Jicks), keyboardist Rebecca Cole (the Minders), guitarist Carrie Brownstein (Sleater-Kinney), and guitarist Mary Timony (Helium, Autoclave). In their &8220;free time,&8221; Brownstein works at the Humane Society and stars in and writes the IFC comedy show Portlandia. Timony teaches guitar to kids. Weiss and Cole can be seen playing tons of shows with other bands.
In the Romancevideo, Brownstein knocks an Arcade Fire record off the counter at Jackpot Records. This is an omen. In a just world, this is how it will go down: Wild Flag drops the self-titled album on Tuesday and it shoots up to No. 1. They tour the U.S., and when they hit the U.K. in December (Japan and Australia up next), they blow up. Teenagers start copping their look. As it&160; did with Arcade Fire, Merge will celebrate another round of Grammys — via Wild Flag — and by this time next year Wild Flag will sweep the VMAs, leaving yesterday&8217;s es (with all due respect, Gaga, Beyonc&233;, etc.) in the past. We asked these inspiring women some questions.
How has Wild Flag changed since forming last year?
Brownstein: We&8217;ve become a band. It definitely took months for all the disparate parts to cohere and congeal, and we weren&8217;t even sure that they would. We had a chemistry where the sum was greater than the parts. No amount of experience can force chemistry between people, so even though we all had many years of touring and recording under our belts, it did not guarantee any kind of uniqueness. We&8217;re a better band now.
How have you changed as a live band?
Weiss: We&8217;re more confident now, and there seem to be certain roles that are playing out. We&8217;re daring each other to go further and push ourselves into the exciting unhinged zone. We definitely haven&8217;t reached the ceiling in that department. There is a sense that we don&8217;t know what&8217;s going to happen. Those moments have become a little crazier.
Is Wild Flag a continuation of what Carrie and Mary did with the Spells?
Brownstein: The miliarity and ease with which I work with Mary stems from our friendship that we&8217;ve had since the mid-&8217;90s and also working together in the Spells. We already knew that we had musical chemistry, but it certainly is not a continuation of it. It definitely feels like its own band and a much more intentional dynamic. Wild Flag really started when Janet, Rebecca and I were working on a film score, and realizing how fun and good it felt to play together. We called Mary in to do some vocals and it just planted the seed that this potentially could be something worthwhile.
Mary is really coming out of her shell as a live performer. And we thought you had a lot of energy in Sleater-Kinney, but now you&8217;ve kind of raised the bar.
Brownstein: I don&8217;t take anything for granted anymore. After not playing music for a couple years, you realize what a sacred space live performance is. There&8217;s so many things that are allowed in that moment that are disallowed in other aspects of life. Extreme emotions and a level of chaos and danger that you would never even want to go to in your regular life, and I don&8217;t go to that place in my everyday life. When I&8217;m performing, I&8217;m trying to explore all of the parameters and boundaries while I&8217;m onstage and then I can return to my teetotaling, dog-walking life. I get so frustrated when I see people onstage who aren&8217;t enjoying it or aren&8217;t taking advantage of it, so I really just take advantage of that moment. It&8217;s very spontaneous and it can be magical. I&8217;m pushing it further than I did in Sleater-Kinney, and certainly I&8217;ve seen Mary start to really enjoy herself onstage and express herself in a way that I hadn&8217;t seen. Part of that is just feeling so confident with the other players in the band and knowing that they&8217;ll back you up. There&8217;s less pressure. In a three-piece, each element has to be firing at once. When you add more people, you can play with the dynamic more. I can put my guitar down and do something. I can not play for a second or Mary can not play or she can just play chords instead of having a solo. There&8217;s just a lot of freedom that both of us feel.
Timony:&160;Wild Flag is really fun because it&8217;s much more of a live band than anything I&8217;ve ever played in. My biggest weakness as a musician is that I&8217;m not good at playing live. I&8217;d never gotten it until I played with Wild Flag, and now it&8217;s a whole new world. I&8217;m like, Oh, live shows can be really fun. It&8217;s just a different dynamic. Focusing on playing guitar is so awesome. It&8217;s so nice to not have to hold down all the vocals and guitar and try to play keyboards. It&8217;s fun to just play guitar and sing some of the songs.
Did taking time off from music give you more pent-up energy?
Brownstein: Perhaps. I definitely turned to endeavors that were much more cerebral and introspective, like writing. I carry a lot of energy and frustration and angst &8212; if I don&8217;t have an outlet for those things I kind of turn on myself and become manic or even depressed. When music came around again for me, I really needed it. I don&8217;t really know how to relate to music in a way that&8217;s not urgent. It&8217;s much more controlled now, but there is a certain kind of catharsis that I still get from music.
Weiss: On that first tour, Carrie just got up there and blasted it out. She&8217;s born to perform. She so ballsy and so forward — she is fearless onstage. And then there&8217;s Mary, who&8217;s so mysterious and you&8217;re not sure what&8217;s going on in her head. Those first shows, the two of them were figuring out their places and how to work together. It was surprising to Mary at first — like, Wow, Carrie&8217;s just really going for it every second. By the time that second tour rolled around, Mary just turned it up in such an incredible way. Now Mary&8217;s just firing on all cylinders and dancing and playing the guitar behind her head — she&8217;s just a superhero — so fun to watch. It&8217;s been a pleasure to see her blossom into this performer. She&8217;s always had everything that it takes to be this amazing performer, and now it&8217;s just incredible to watch her work a stage.
It&8217;s so great to hear Mary with a full band.
Weiss: This is her first real collaborative band. She&8217;s learning how to do her thing within the context of these other people, and it&8217;s just us so strong &8212; we&8217;re all sort of clean-up batters in a way. In all of our bands in the past we&8217;ve been in a driver&8217;s seat at some point. It&8217;s fun to have four drivers just driving off the cliff.
What does it feel like onstage?
Cole: Great, edgy. I&8217;m comfortable in the sense that I know the song and I know how the part&8217;s going to go, but there&8217;s an edge to it, an element of unknown that I really love, every time we go into a song. I&8217;m still really enjoying checking out my bandmates and figuring out all the ways we can make the energy move through the music.
Seeing a band with so much energy and fun seems ideal for the times.
Weiss: Yeah, there&8217;s a joyousness for sure. A lot of music is so subdued. Our personalities are not like that. We&8217;re expressing ourselves but it&8217;s not the norm at this current time. In another time we&8217;d be like the pop band among the more punk-influenced bands but now we&8217;re the rowdiest band. A lot of bands are real folkie or quiet, singing real soft and playing accordions and violins and traditional instruments in a subdued manner. The sound of Portland these days is real mainstream, and I never liked the mainstream and I never will. There&8217;s a lot of nostalgia for the past and the mainstream of the past, but I don&8217;t want to play music like that. It needs to be rowdier for me. Although we do stick out a little bit with what&8217;s going on here in Portland, people are really responding to it, they&8217;re thirsty for some rowdiness.
A lot of Pacific Northwest bands sound like the Fleet Foxes…
Brownstein: …who I love by the way. I just can&8217;t write music like that… without it seeming like a joke. I don&8217;t have a pretty voice, but if I even tried to write guitar like that, I would think I was emulating my dad&8217;s Dan Fogelberg records.
Weiss: Real subdued, gentle music. Music isn&8217;t meant to give you hugs. I&8217;m not here to give you a hug. I&8217;m just not. This is meant to inspire you, to wake people up, and engage people and make people feel alive. I don&8217;t want to make people feel like they want to go to sleep. I would feel like a ilure if that happened.
Where do you see this band fitting in? It doesn&8217;t seem like there are any other bands doing anything like what you&8217;re doing.
Brownstein: I mean, I just don&8217;t care. Sometimes I look online and there&8217;s all these bands that make sense together. We definitely don&8217;t fit into that but I&8217;m fine. To me, music is not about fitting in. It&8217;s about pulling things in a new direction. It&8217;s not a club. I&8217;m fine with any kind of outsider status. &8232;
You have described your relationship with Carrie as telepathic.
Weiss: It&8217;s intense how over 10 years you&8217;re put into so many different situations onstage — especially Sleater-Kinney because we got these opportunities to do these crazy shows like playing at Madison Square Garden or opening for Pearl Jam for 20,000 people — these shows that take you completely out of your context, where you&8217;re just in a life raft hanging on to your bandmates. The only thing I know here, the only thing that&8217;s miliar, are these two people standing in front of me. So we really did some exploring together and we kind of got pushed out on the plank together to the point where we can really count on each other onstage. It takes years to develop that kind of trust. That&8217;s something that you build over time. &8232;That is part of the reason that this band can go so r out right away because Carrie and I already have that. I always know if things are getting real wild, that she&8217;s listening, that she&8217;s there, I can kind of tell where she&8217;s going and I can go there with her. With the other two, we&8217;re figuring all of this out. They surprise me all the time. When you see a band that&8217;s been together for so long, they kind of have that cohesiveness because they really know each other, even if they don&8217;t like each other anymore. But there still is that telepathy onstage that&8217;s kind of utakable. I look forward to getting there with the other two. It&8217;s actually interesting to have the combination and tension and friction and electricity onstage that makes this band pretty exciting.
Mary and Carrie are so different…
Weiss: They could not be more different! The band revolves around those two and how different they are. That is the core of this band, the spark. It comes from the tension, the back and forth, and the pulling in different directions that they provide.
Are you surprised to be evolving at this stage in your career?
Timony: I didn&8217;t expect to ever be in a band that people were interested in again. I did try to stop playing music for a year or two and that was kind of depressing. I just figured I&8217;d be a teacher. I had no expectations of ever being in a project people were interested in. I wasn&8217;t expecting this band to happen, but that&8217;s what makes it even more fun. It&8217;s not like I desperately needed it — it just fell in my lap. I was like, Oh my god, this is awesome. My dream band! I really feel that way. This can&8217;t be real.
Do you feel freer and looser having another frontman up there?
Timony: Yeah, totally. It takes a lot of pressure off. And Carrie&8217;s such a great performer so you never have to worry about her not connecting with the audience because she always does.
What&8217;s the most shocking thing you&8217;ve seen Carrie do onstage?
Timony: Oh, swinging from the ceiling in Asheville, N.C. It was crazy. I was really worried she was going to ll actually, but it was awesome.
Does Mary have any signature moves?
Cole: She does do a few things a lot. She has a cool dance that she does. I can&8217;t really explain it. I can always tell when she&8217;s in the zone.
The sequencing starts out like Carrie, Mary, Carrie, Mary… How do you make it cohesive with two frontmen?
Timony: The songs that came from stuff Carrie and I had brought in definitely have that feeling. The songs we all wrote together feel more cohesive. We&8217;re more on that page now. We had to experiment a lot and try different ways of writing songs.
Brownstein: A big difference between the band at the beginning and the band now is just that everybody is writing. It&8217;s not just Mary and me bringing in songs. Janet thinks like a producer — an arranger — so our songs are pretty much produced before we go into the studio because of her. She really thinks about things and edits. We&8217;re all part of the process. Mary and I don&8217;t sing a lot together or even over the same song — so that kind of leaves us a place to go. On the next record, I would want potentially us to be singing on the same song. But on the other hand, we&8217;re both enjoying not singing. When Mary sings, I don&8217;t have to sing. I can play guitar. That leaves a distinction between the songs. Our -s aren&8217;t that disparate. She&8217;s cooler and more mysterious and her songs have this different kind of attitude. It&8217;s the music that brings them together.
Cole: Wild Flag is different from any other project I&8217;ve been in. Some of the songs really did come out of a jam or a riff that someone had and we&8217;ll just sit there and work it until we have something that sounds good. We&8217;ll build from there and it&8217;s all in the room. We&8217;re all very active. I haven&8217;t had that before, where I&8217;m writing the part as the song takes shape. And listening to what everyone else is doing and having ideas for other parts.
Are you happy with the record?
Cole: Yes. We wanted to make a live record and capture some of the energy we were feeling at our live shows. We did the best job we could with that.
Brownstein: I am. It&8217;s so rare that you get to make a first album. I&8217;m very happy with it as a first album. It&8217;s a very raw document of where we are right now. It feels like a statement. It has a lot of energy. It&8217;s loud, it&8217;s unrefined, and that&8217;s where we are right now. We didn&8217;t want to overthink it and we didn&8217;t, but it still sounds good.
Was there a lot of discussion before you recorded?
Cole: We wanted to sound like ourselves, so we knew we wanted the drums to be big and we wanted all the tones to be good. We worked on a lot of that playing shows, so we knew how the songs would fit together. It&8217;s our first record, and we just wanted a document of what we sounded like, a starting point. We recorded on tape, which is great, I&8217;m a huge n of recording on tape.
&8232;Weiss: We wanted it to be and direct and clear.
The expectations are high.
Cole: I&8217;ve never had this experience before where people were this excited. I&8217;ve only started a band and put out a first record once before, but it certainly wasn&8217;t like this, where everyone&8217;s waiting to hear it. Even though people know about us, there&8217;s still a sense that we&8217;re a new band.
Weiss: Don&8217;t limit us, just let us play music for you, and we&8217;ll surprise you. Have some things maybe you don&8217;t understand, things that are revealed to you through the music, things that you feel. We don&8217;t want to just tell everyone everything about the band and the music and what it&8217;s about. There needs to be some mystery there so that people can use their own imagination and fill in the -s. Imagination is such a key component to listening to music. Putting your headphones on and letting your mind wander. Letting it mean something to you that the band maybe didn&8217;t even intend.
It&8217;s a challenge to capture that live energy in the studio.
Timony: That was the idea behind how we recorded it. We tried to make it like an album that a band would make for their first record. We really wanted to just record what we sound like when we play. We just wanted to practice a lot, get really tight, and then record the band.
The lyrics are kind of joyous and positive.
Timony: We noticed that. In a weird way a lot of the lyrics are about being in the band. Having fun playing music. At least mine are, and I see that in Carrie&8217;s too. Not all the songs. Just having lost music and coming back to it — a few songs are about that.
Brownstein: It&8217;s about that, but it&8217;s also about coming to terms with nontraditional decisions. How to accept that your lot in life is to be a creative person and what that means as other people make decisions that take them away from that into more traditional roles or safe places. There is a certain amount of insecurity and uncertainty and risk that comes with kind of marrying yourself to music or art, and it&8217;s figuring out a way to find acceptance and gratification in what you&8217;re doing and to not judge yourself for it. And to just feel like: This is what I have and hopefully it&8217;s enough.
Some ladybands have heartbroken/victim– lyrics, but not Wild Flag. Did you and Carrie talk about lyrical content?
Timony: We didn&8217;t. We talked about how we didn&8217;t really have enough lyrics! We were like, &8220;I hope nobody notices we&8217;re singing the same thing over and over.&8221;
Brownstein: The album is very celebratory and the songs overtook the subject matter. The songs were moving at such a st pace. I don&8217;t know how there could have been a self-pitying moment in the context of the music. Sometimes when I was trying to write lyrics, the music was just pinning me against the wall. The lyrics have to go along with that and fight with the song, so there wasn&8217;t a moment to be self-pitying. It&8217;s not a crybaby record.
Cole: We haven&8217;t written our heartbreak songs yet. Maybe that&8217;s on the next album. It&8217;s a real revelation to find music this way in a new way again and have it be fun again. For us all to come back into it and realize how much we loved it and have missed it and how much we needed to be doing it again. That&8217;s certainly a theme for all of us. We&8217;re stoked.
Wild Flag has been described as &8220;ballsy.&8221;
Brownstein: That term always seems derisive about a woman. It&8217;s so off-putting.
There&8217;s probably a better word.
Brownstein: Yeah. There&8217;s always a better word.
Cole: There isn&8217;t much that&8217;s timid about this project. It is pretty &8220;ballsy,&8221; I guess. I don&8217;t think we&8217;re — here we go with another one — cocky about it. We&8217;ve all been playing for a long time and we&8217;re all pretty comfortable with our instruments. That comes across. We&8217;re all confident people in general as well. Putting the four of us together in that way, we&8217;re not hesitant about the ct that we&8217;re there to play music and move some sound waves through the air. There is this trend in music right now where people aren&8217;t really ripping it up. A lot of bands are doing this softer, gentler side of rocking. I like quieter stuff. But the combination of the four of us, we&8217;re just not going to put out a gentle record. We don&8217;t feel gently, we feel very strongly about music and the power of music and being powerful because of music. Anytime the four of us get together, that&8217;s probably going to not be gentle, the opposite of ballsy.
How does Wild Flag feel compared to Sleater-Kinney?
Brownstein: I was in Sleater-Kinney when I was in college and I was in my 20s, and obviously every experience with Sleater-Kinney was new. Sleater-Kinney opened up my world and granted me opportunities I never would have had otherwise. What an amazing way to spend my 20s. Traveling all over the world and performing. Sleater-Kinney was specific to a time and a place and playing with three people has an intensity to it that&8217;s hard to match. Wild Flag, from the beginning, feels like a more intentional band. Even though we still are trying to be fearless and push ourselves musically, there is a certain amount of experience that we bring to the band that Sleater-Kinney just didn&8217;t have at the beginning.
The biggest difference is just playing with four people. For me in Sleater-Kinney, I really relied on Corin [Tucker]. She had the voice, and if I was writing a song and needed to go somewhere in a chorus, vocally I could hand that off to Corin. In this band I don&8217;t really have that, so it&8217;s pushed me as a songwriter and singer to try to figure out where I need to get in a song by myself. There&8217;s a lot of differences, but neither are good or bad. I loved Sleater-Kinney so much, and it was so important at a specific time in my life, it&8217;s hard to compare. There&8217;s things that feel very different, and that&8217;s good. When Sleater-Kinney ended Nike Air force, part of the reason I didn&8217;t want to play music again was because I couldn&8217;t imagine anything being as good or as satisfying as that. It was such a rare chemistry to have. I could not imagine being able to find that again. I&8217;m really aware of that. At least I feel that Wild Flag is worth it.
Who&8217;s the comedian in the band?
Timony: Obviously Carrie. She&8217;s really good at stage banter and knowing how to connect with people.
Weiss: It&8217;s funny, [Carrie] never was a comedian but now she is a comedian. She is surprisingly, out of the blue… I never would have picked her to be the comedian. She&8217;s a pretty serious girl and she&8217;s lightening up. All the good comedians are dark and real smart and cutting in a way. They cut through. The things they find are funny are so true. They tap into these true things, especially on Portlandia. Carrie is now technically the comedian of the group, yes.
What goes on backstage? Hookahs? Groupies?
Timony: A lot of singalongs. We kind of sing. Before we go on, we usually sing Bryan Adams or Toto or something to warm up — and a shot of tequila. No hookahs!
Do you guys have a stylist?
Timony: Not yet. We&8217;re going to get one of those airbrush makeup stations in the bus.
Do you feel like role models?
Timony: No, I don&8217;t feel like a role model.
Weiss: A little bit, musically especially. &8220;Role model&8221; is a heavy term but I&8217;ve sort of stuck at something all these years and made my own decisions and charted my own path and worked real hard at being good at something and being useful. I think that&8217;s a good example for anyone,Nike mercurial vapor superfly especially girls. A lot of women choose to have milies, and music is not a priority for them so much after that happens, and that&8217;s not my path. I could be an example for people who maybe feel like they don&8217;t want to have a mily and want to focus on another endeavor that would give them a sense of belonging.
Are you taking the dogs on tour?
Weiss: We wish, but no. You have to get up too early and take them out. It would be really fun, but it would be too exhausting. Maybe we can get a dog nanny.
Gail OHara is a photographer, writer, founding editor ofchickctor nzine, former music editor at Time Out NY and filmmaker (Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields). More:Gail OHara
Hlne Grimaud. Cerebral and passionate. Words often used by critics to describe pianist H&233;l&232;ne Grimaud and her interpretations of Mozart, Liszt and Bart&243;k. Having met her, we would now add enchanting. Grimaud looks like a French actress and speaks about her art with an almost childlike wonder. But theres a fierce intelligence at work, and her performances provide a glimpse of the transcendental, as one London reviewer put it.
During a stopover in New York on her current world tour, Grimaud spoke with Alexis Bloom, who notes that the concert pianist has battled back from illness to play like a titan. Grimaud also took us to visit her Wolf Conservation Center, the other passion in her life.
Watch thefull episode. See moreSound Tracks.
Born in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France in 1969, H&233;l&232;ne Grimaud describes herself as an agitated and unpredictable child who found her salvation in music. At 13 she was the youngest student at the National Conservatory of Music in Paris and made her first recording, a Rachmaninov sonata, when she was only 15. Now on her latest album, Resonances, Grimaud takes on the challenge of playing Liszts Sonata in B minor, what she calls a monumental quest. In New York, at Steinway Hall, Grimaud performed this excerpt for Quick Hits.
Watch thefull episode. See moreSound Tracks.
H&233;l&232;ne Grimaud describes her new album, Resonances, as a musical tour through the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, from Mozart to Lizst to Bart&243;k. In this concise, moving piece, performed for Quick Hits, she captures the spirit of Romanian folk music that inspired Bart&243;k.
Watch thefull episode. See moreSound Tracks.
H&233;l&232;ne Grimaud is a risk-taker. She may appear ethereal, even fragile, but she has the will of a tiger, or should we say, wolf, the species she has chosen to protect at a sanctuary she founded in 1999 in South Salem, N.Y., about two hours north of Manhattan. In her Quick Hits interview, Grimaud describes her love of wolves, her recent illness, the magic of performing, and her synesthesia — experiencing sound as color.
Some of the stirring, totally non-cliched imagery from the video for Joe Scarboroughs 9/11 song Joe Scarborough — the former Republican congressman who now hosts a basic cable morning show — wrote a 9/11 song. Why? I dont know. I really dont. Its called Reason to Believe, and it comes with an insane, Americana-drenched video that also doubles as a parody of horrible Americana-drenched country music videos.
&160;
How tasteful, that Scarborough did not appear in this video. That wouldve drawn attention away from the message of the song, which is that Joe Scarborough loves America and also wants to be a country singer.
Im sure this was all meant with the best possible intentions, or at least done without the intention of actively harming anyone, but there are few things on this earth grosser than the vanity projects of millionaires. It is sort of immediately apparent to anyone not living in a bubble of celebrity that commemorating the tenth anniversary of a national tragedy by releasing a crappy charity country single is incredibly narcissistic and gross behavior. At some point, probably before Scarborough shelled out money for studio time, someone should have stopped this from happening. No one besides Joe Scarborough has any interest in Joe Scarboroughs dabbling in country music. There was no demand for it. The only awareness it raises is awareness of Joe Scarboroughs desire to branch out a little.
And why on earth is MSNBC promoting this? If Chris Matthews wrote a 9/11 screenplay would MSNBC film it? Its just weird.
Even weirder (viaThe Awl) isthe Huffington Posts lengthy, worshipful write-up of the song and video. According to HuffPo this assortment of 9/11-related banalities has a stirring anti-war message!
Seriously, read some of this:
The host of MSNBCs Morning Joe and former Florida congressman, Scarborough is no John Mellencamp and hes certainly not the Dixie Chicks — hes a Republican, after all. Yet the host, also a songwriter and Beatles n, told The Huffington Post that his new song, Reason to Believe, has a purpose that would have resonated with earlier critics of Vietnam.
Its critical that we remember the heroes of 9/11 and those who are still fighting in an endless war, Scarborough said. They need to come home. Its time.
[...]
The catchy tune and Americana visuals cant hide the searing lyrics as Scarborough laments the bloodshed of the last 10 years: In an endless war / Tell me please how many more have to die / Before my sweet boy comes home.
Though his ce never appears in the video, Scarboroughs song resonates partly because hes the one sending the message. It says something about the antiwar canon of this generation that a conservative has been one of the most vocal critics of Americas wars.
As art tends to require the passage of time, it could also be that Scarboroughs song is just the first in a series of more reflective cultural examinations of the last 10 years. Such works cannot change the last decade, cannot bring back brave soldiers, but they can offer hope that the years will bring greater understanding. As Scarborough concludes: At the end of the hour / When Im drained of all power / I still find the reason to believe.
What? Is this just the press release Scarborough sent over? Did a human who isnt specifically paid to praise Joe Scarborough write those sentences? The searing lyrics! Im seared. This song is like Eve of Destruction and Fortunate Son had a baby.
You can purchase the song at iTunes. Or you could give that 99 cents to Doctors Without Borders or something and listen to something else. (How about this? Its a song with the same name but written by a talented songwriter whose message is slightly more complex than I like America and wars make people sad.) (Oh wait heresanother better song with the same name.)
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareenesalon- and follow him on Twitter pareene More:Alex Pareene
In a wide-ranging interview, the Phish frontman discusses the lifelong art and craft of improvisation
Phishs Trey Anastasio In a time when jazz is barely a smudge on the cultural radar, the marriage of improvisation and popular music continues nowhere more apparent than with the Vermont rock band Phish. Other artists may be touring and improvising — and they are — but they dont sell out Madison Square Garden for three nights in a row and continue to host a series of annual, one-band festivals that draw upward of 70,000 people, all for the adventure of musical improvisation.
A highly divisive band, known best for its obsessive, vagabond following, Phish remains a baffling success in the music industry. Since it began, the groups musical – has continued to be a fluid spate of genres, most of which have very little in common with contemporary music, and some of which are laughably silly. A typical live show will include streaks of calypso, 70s hard rock, jazz fusion, salsa, labyrinthine prog-rock, old-timey music, new wave and barbershop quartet, and at any moment, one of these genres might be stretched out to 45 minutes of wordless improvisation. Unlike many equally successful rock bands, Phish is relatively ignored (or dismissed) by the media, and does little to engage with the publicity cycles that dictate the peaks and valleys of most bands careers.
Trey Anastasio, the singer, guitarist and sometimes composer for the band, is one of the revered, old-shioned rock guitarists from the last two decades, playing the type of soaring, lyrical guitar melodies that have been all but banished from pop music since the early 90s. Phish — and Anastasio in particular — is often cited as the musical heir to the Grateful Dead and leader of the new generation of so-called jam bands, but while the audiences may overlap, the bands music bears little similarity to the bluegrass rock of the Dead or the electro-psychedelic livetronica – that dominates the current jam-band culture.
Over the last decade, Phish has gone on hiatus, disbanded, dispersed into solo projects, and reunited. During breaks, Anastasio performed solo acoustic sets, founded a new band with a full horn section, and composed a lengthy composition, Time Turns Elastic, which has been performed by the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. Currently, Phish is finishing its summer tour; Anastasio and his band will tour starting in October.
I met with Anastasio in New York at Soho House for a conversation over soup. He talked about his long-standing interest in the art of improvisation, playing seven-hour-long shows, set lists and the problems of conjoining art with daily life. After we spoke, I attended a Phish show at Madison Square Garden at which the audience was at full, standing applause for 45 minutes before the band even stepped onstage.
I. ANYTHING BUT YOURSELF
Do you remember when you first cared about improvisation as an art form?
I started listening to improvisational music when I was in high school. Before that, I was more interested in composition. I listened to West Side Story and Sly & the Family Stone — really listening to their arrangements and how they laid all the melodies. But, in that way, good improvisation has a structure. It has a form. I remember, like many guitarists, being obsessed with Hendrixs Band of Gypsys. It was the record.
I listened to that solo on Machine Gun a million times.
With that one amazing note.
Yeah, the note! And I started noticing that, in his playing, it was almost like he was speaking in paragraphs. His solo has a thinking, or vocal, quality to it. It starts off thin, and then he rolls off the tone, pauses and starts another paragraph. Maybe Im thinking about it too hard, but, you know, from everything Ive read, Hendrix used to sleep with his guitar and practice 20,000 hours a day. So I think thats what it takes. It doesnt just happen. Theres a certain level of elegance that I only hear in a great improviser like that.
Would you say that with improvisation youre trying to get to a place where its as fluent as speech?
More fluent. I feel a lot more bound up in a conversation than when Im playing the guitar. I dont necessarily sit there and practice scales every day, but I do get up and start some form of music from the second I wake up.
Who were the important improvisers for you?
I liked Clapton, Jimmy Page. But there was this one year that changed me. It was when I saw Pat Metheny. He came to Richardson Auditorium, and he was playing with a jazz, harmonic vocabulary but with a pop sensibility. I saw King Crimson around that time, too. Robert Fripp was playing these crazy mathematical patterns. Hed be playing in a time signature of 7/4 while the other guy, Adrian Belew, played in 5/4, and theyd meet up 35 notes later. This kind of thing. But you have to put yourself in 1978. I was born in 64. So I was 14. I saw Stanley Jordan in that same place. And Wynton Marsalis. All those concerts were in one year, and thats the year I got into improvisation. That was the year before I left Princeton, N.J.
In what ways do you work with Phish on improvisation? Like, improvising as a full band, rather than as four individual soloists.
We had this series of exercises that we developed, called Including Your Own Hey. It sounds weird, but we did them a lot. They start off with a pulse. [Snaps in time] The first level is, I play a four-note phrase [sings do-do-do-do]; Page [McConnell] is on my right, and he imitates it on the piano; Fish [Jon Fishman] does his best to play it on the drums; then Mike [Gordon] does it on the bass. Now everyone goes around the room in a circle and everyone starts one.
Its a copycat listening exercise.
Yeah, and then there were more levels. The next level is, I start a pattern and then Page harmonizes with it. We make a jigsaw-puzzle pattern. Then Mike finds his place in the pattern, and Fish finds his place in it. And were all listening to each other. Now, only when you hear that all the other musicians have stopped searching, once you hear theyve locked in with what youre playing, you say, Hey! So, since were still listening so intently to each other, we should all say Hey at the same time, but if we dont — if someone says Hey when youre still searching, theyve basically just told you, Im not listening to you. So we found, very quickly that it meant you had to always be listening to three people other than yourself. And the music, we found, improved immensely by not navel-gazing. So now the idea is, Im not paying any attention to myself at all. Im just responding to what theyre playing.
Then there were other levels, where youd leave a hole in a musical phrase, and the other person could only play in that hole. That was called Including Your Own Hey Hole. [Laughs] So the bass lands, then the cymbal, then the guitar. [Sings, Ba-bo-da-bing, ba-bo-da-bing.]
And this helped solidify you as a band?
Oh, yeah. We should do it again, though. We havent done that stuff in years. Then, in the early 90s, we started realizing we were having tempo battles onstage. Fish would decide hed lay back, and Id want to rush. Every band whos ever improvised goes through this. Then someone gives the angry glare. What are you doing? Oh my god! The gig is lling aparmusic videost because youre rushing! So one day we went into the practice room and we decided Nike soccer shoes, were never doing that again. We did Tempo Heys for a week. So wed play one note. Id slow down. Everyone follows me. Id speed up. Everyone follows me. I cant lose them. And theres no fear. Thats the important thing. Slowing down is cool. Speeding up is cool. Then we say, Hey. Now its Pages turn. Page is speeding up and slowing down. Within two days, it stopped being a problem. When we were onstage and someone sped up or slowed down, instead of glaring, we all looked over at each other and followed them.
This is all a pretty analytical approach to improvisation, where I think a lot of people consider Phishs music to be just made up on the spot.
Were the most analytical band, in some ways. Wed talk and talk for hours about this stuff. I see improvisation as a craft and as an art. The craft part is important. Theres a lot of preparation and discipline that goes into it just so that, when youre in the moment, youre not supposed to be thinking at all.
Ive heard you guys had a no-analyzing rule for a while. You wouldnt talk to each other about how the show went.
That was for about a year. You come offstage and no one can say anything. At all. At all. Because everyones got their own perspective.
Someone might think its a horrible show and another person could think its a great show.
Today what I do is — I do this every night we play — I have a little quiet moment where I picture some guy having a fight with his girlfriend, getting into his car — the batterys dead — then he gets to the parking lot and its full. Meets up with his friends. Comes into the show. I try to picture this one person having their own experience, and I picture them way in the back of the room. And I try to remember how insignificant my experience is, and how peoples experiences with music are their own thing. We put it out there, and if its of service to someone, great, but I try to get away from the idea that its even starting from us. And when you do that listening-exercise stuff, when I actually get into a moment where Im only listening, I find that the music gets so much &226;&8364;&166; beyond us. And I can tell that from the reaction I hear from the audience. It always feels more resonant if I can get my hands off it. If all four of us were here, theyd all be saying the same thing. Its great as long as you listen to anybody but yourself. Anything but yourself.
Seems to be true of life, just walking around.
Right. Its when I start applying my own ed-up perspective to a show — so I had a bad day, whatever — that I start adding judgment to it. Or I play something and start judging what Im playing. Its just like that, walking around in life, thats true! How often do I find myself walking around and being aware of my surroundings and not having some ed-up internal dialogue in my head that never ends?
II. FREE
You put out a free-improvisation record [Surrender to the Air] a while back. What does free mean to you in that context?
Id been studying with a composer and writing a lot of fugues. Fugues are very disciplined. Its one theme and all development. Youre never allowed to bring in fresh ideas. So there may have been an element of rebellion to that record for me, because I knew my teacher absolutely loathed that kind of music. During the recording, people were just walking in and out of the room, picking up instruments. It was great.
Did you ever learn anything about improvisation through a book?
A lot. A lot. I studied with a guy named Ted Dunbar at the UMass jazz summer workshop. He taught me the system of tonal convergence. When I give guitar lessons, I recommend his book. There are 28 scales that converge or bombard the tonal center. They are all tension scales, and they all come with a series of chords. If you listen to the great improvisers — Pat Martino, Sonny Rollins, someone on that level — these guys all studied this stuff. Yusef Lateef. All those 60s jazz guys. Theyre not playing the diatonic notes of the chord. Theyre playing outside the chord, but its a very natural thing to do.
Natural how?
Let me see if I can explain this. There are only three chords in music, period. Minor, major and dominant. A dominant chord wants to go somewhere because it has a tritone in it. A G dominant chord wants to go to C. That principle is physics. Thats not something that was assigned to music by theorists. When two strings are vibrating together a tritone apart, there are so many overtones that all you feel is tense, and the notes want to squish together into the home chord.
Stewie sings about it on Family Guy. [Sings, Youve got your G chord right here / Its like your cozy house where you live / Thats where you start your journey / Here I am in my house nice and cozy / and then you poke your head out the door with a C chord / And everything looks OK out here / Maybe Ill take a walk outside to the D chord / Walkin around outside, look at all the stuff out here / And then we go to an A-minor, gettin a little cloudy out here / lookin like we might get some weather / Then we go to E-minor, oh definitely got some weather / Things are a little more complicated than they seemed at first / And then we go back to my house.] Its great. The 12-bar blues are based on this, too. But the jazz guys from the 60s took this concept to Mars. They came up with 28 scales, all of which were basically substitutions for that dominant chord. The music is still : Major is happy. Minor is sad. Dominant is tense. Thats all there is. It never goes further than that with chords.
And youre working with these sorts of tonal convergence theories when you improv onstage?
If youre going to be doing a long improvisation, its boring to sit on one scale and just go up and down. Theres a lot of jam music like this, and thats why people dont like it. It never goes beyond that. Sonny Rollins isnt doing that, even though hes playing over a G-major chord for 18 minutes. Its not just a G-major when Sonny Rollins plays it.
Herbie Hancock has this thing about an informed vocabulary but a childlike approach. He plays , , catchy melodies, but all his chord voicings have 40 or 50 years of this theory in them. So when he gets onstage it can be all childlike. Not childish. But if you ever stopped a Hancock recording and looked at a few measures of what hes playing, youd be floored. The voice leadings are filled with all these ideas. It doesnt sound complicated, but its a more mature, elegant palette of emotions. These guys can hit an emotional chord that a lesser player couldnt. Its the same way a great writer with a great vocabulary can bring out subtler emotions.
And youre still practicing this type of thing at home?
Yesterday. It takes forever, because once I learn one of these scales, I can just play it from my brain. It doesnt sound right — if Im playing it from my brain. I have to play it so much — until it sounds tossed off, until it is tossed off.
Theres that Charlie Parker quote: Youve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.
Thats what he did. It sounds like water when you hear him play.
Its impossible to think that st.
You couldnt. They were all doing this. Coltrane. All those jazz guys. I heard that Ted Dunbars theory of convergence is like the Holy Grail. Theres stories about this legendary dinner these guys had where they wrote it on a tablecloth, and nobody knows where.
Theres actually a Coltrane quote I wanted to ask you about. He says, Id like to get to the point where I can capture the essence of a precise moment in a given place, compose the work, and perform it immediately in a natural way.
I love that. I love that he said compose the work.
Right. And I wanted to ask you, do you think composition and improvisation are the same thing? Or are they inherently different?
I think theyre the same thing. The struggle is not giving up the best element of composition, which is the time to figure out that its all right, and also to not give up the best element of improvisation, which is that its happening in real time, so you cant stop to ruin it. You dont have any time to screw up.
So you think in the best instances, improvisation and composition would produce the same results?
Yes. Yes. Ill give you an example. On the song Billy Breathes air max shoes, theres a guitar solo I like a lot. Thats a composed solo. I didnt labor over it. What I did is, I walked around the kitchen — my daughter had just been born and we were living out in the woods in Vermont. I was in my union suit, chopping wood. I was not thinking about anything, and then I just started singing [sings melody] the first four notes of the solo. I had a cassette player and Id run over and get it recorded. Then Id forget about it. And then the next part came. It was a lot of wearing headphones while walking around. Cassette player in my pocket. Change a diaper, go to the store, and whenever I can disconnect from whoever Im talking to in the room, Id put on my headphones. So the point Im is that it still felt like improv.
You were just capturing moments out of your daily life.
I would just wait for the moment to come. It didnt feel any different than what happens on stages. I was busying myself with other things. I wasnt sitting there working, like capital-W work, but, in the end, it took days and days.
You write a lot that way?
Yeah. And since youre feeding the cat and youre not paying attention and then you listen to what you just recorded, you can really hear when its wrong. If its wrong, its like when you put on bad music in the background. But going back to Coltrane, it sounds like he just wants to be doing that in an immediate way when hes onstage. Im starting to think that patience is the biggest part of the whole thing. And, you know, another thing that just popped into my head, and Im not sure if this answers your question, but like a week ago, I was writing this thing. Single lines and chords moving and blah, blah.
I was going for about four days, and I wasnt really thinking about it. I had six minutes worth of music, and then all of a sudden it just stopped. And I didnt really realize that it stopped until I put all the pieces together. Its everywhere: on my cassette recorder, on my phone, on a 4-track recorder, on the laptop. It just stopped. All of a sudden. Its the concept of being a channel.
Youve said that before.
A lot of people end up saying it.
Otherwise you point at yourself and it becomes an ego-y thing. Thats dangerous.
I mean, its still craft. Its still work. I got to play with these orchestras recently, at Carnegie Hall. One of the best musical experiences of my life. You go in, and there are all the walls covered in photos of great conductors. A picture of Mark Twain standing on the stage. This is what you walk by before you go onstage, in case anyone ever wants to try and have an ego in that room. But so I get a two-hour rehearsal with these musicians, with the New York Philharmonic — maybe the top orchestra in the world — and every single musician on the stage is so r beyond anyone Ive ever played with. All 90 of them. They were the top in their school and then the top at Juilliard and now theyre playing second cello. And the humility is as high as the musicianship. Lets say youre playing a Beethoven piece in a room where the same piece was played 100 years ago. Theyre sitting in the same chairs, wearing the same shoes and suits, playing instruments that are 100 years old, playing the same sounds with the best conductor of their time, who is standing under photos of 20 of the greatest conductors. And when the music started playing, I had this idea that the music was coming through this little channel — for lack of a better word — for years and years. Musicians come and go and theyre stewards of the music for a brief period of time. But once the music plays — its really between Beethoven and the listener at that point. The musicians are there to get their goddamn hands off of it. All that training! Thousands of hours! Sight-reading every day! All so they can get the hell out of the way because nobody gives a crap about them at all. The less you notice them, the better it sounds. I mean, it was the highest level of art in music that Id ever seen, and it was performed by people who had spent countless hours of work just to be invisible.
In music, you never notice that quality anywhere more than in the orchestra.
And the challenge of getting 90 people to play together! Try getting four people to play together.
III. TALKING TO COPS
Your early music sounds orchestral in a way, or at least compositional. But youve since moved further toward the tradition of songwriting.
Im starting to go back to the compositional side a little more. Recently, I just wanted to sing more songs. Thats a answer. But Tom [Marshall, Anastasios co-writer] and I went through a period in the 90s where we started going on these songwriting junkets. They were just a lot of fun because we would turn off the world. Its been a long time since weve done that, what with cell phones and everything. We would lock ourselves in a rmhouse. A lot of the songs off of Undermind and The Story of the Ghost and Farmhouse were written during that period.
And a piece like Time Turns Elastic, the one you played at Carnegie Hall: how does that get written?
I wrote that over the period of a year. It was supposed to be an orchestral piece, and it was first recorded and released that way. But then Phish got back together and our producer, Steve Lillywhite, said, You know, this wouldnt be a Phish record without a big, long thing, so we put it together and played it. There was a lot of process skipped when it went to the Phish version. The orchestral version is the real version, to me. It took a real long time for a piece like You Enjoy Myself to work. It needed tender love and care. This one didnt get that. If you want to hear what that piece is supposed to sound like, listen to the orchestral version.
How did that process work?
I wrote the form. Don [Hart] did the orchestration. But thats a bit of an oversimplification, because the guy who did the orchestration is a close friend of mine, and we were on the phone for a year, working on it. He would fly up, and wed spend three days on it, sketching it out.
I orchestrated a couple of Phish pieces, like Guyute, and basically found out that Im a crappy orchestrator, but I knew enough to know it would be cool if, say, the brass took off in this spot. We would have conversations like, How are we going to keep the rhythm going here? And wed go online and listen to some Afro-Cuban bands — because an orchestra has three percussionists. So wed try to comp that kind of a vibe and then go home and work on it.
And thats pretty different from the way the song-y music is created.
Yeah. Tom and I just have a blast writing the songs. Its our social life. We go out and by the end of the night we have three new songs. We basically talk to each other in song. This is how its been since eighth grade. I text him songs.
You guys have interwoven music into social life.
I have. I think thats the truest thing that has been said in this interview so r.
Theres no off and on switch.
Yeah, but that can be dangerous. People in my immediate mily think Im losing my mind, because I dont know how to turn it off. I really dont. As a matter of ct, Ive been encouraged by my wife and those around me to, on New Years Eve, hand over my phone for a month. This is actually something Ive never talked about before. This is what Ive done to my life. Anybody who comes into my life, I start collaborating with. Its not just Tom. Its Steve, the Dude of Life, who wrote Fluffhead and Suzy Greenberg– a lot of good songs. And then its my first pal [Suzannah Goodman], who wrote Bathtub Gin with me, and then my friend Dave [Abrahams], who wrote Runaway Jim with me. Its my daughter, who I wrote Goodbye Head with. Its like its always happening. The only problem became when we started employing all our friends. That kind of thinking got out of control. I didnt know where life began and music ended.
Is that bad?
There shouldnt have to be a separation, but sometimes reality sets in. So Im writing songs with friends all the time, and then you start getting phone calls, years later, like I need more money to write songs. I mean, anybody in the room gets a songwriting credit. Thats how I do it. You open up this door, and all of sudden people are calling and saying, Lets do more. What starts out as a sort of gift turns into a situation where youre on the phone all day, fielding these kinds of issues, and youre not walking down the street, looking at architecture, thinking about music. I just say yes too much. Im working on a Broadway musical and a Phish record and a solo record and a quintet thing.
My mily recently made me change my phone ringer to a barking dog so it sounds like no. No no no. The problem is, if I dont learn to have boundaries, which, historically, I dont, then a lot of moments become, well, talking to cops or whatever. You can get a little crazy. Its a blessing, but theres a certain point at which you have to go to bed.
Right. You have to stay healthy, I guess.
Ill sleep when I die!
IV. MUSIC AND ENDURANCE
Your set lists are analyzed by ns and published in books. What is your thinking about the art of the set list?
In the mid-90s I was incredibly obsessed with it. Id always be thinking about key changes between songs. So youd put one song in D,Nike soccer cleats and then the next one in E, and then rise up to it. Then there was an attempt to make everyone onstage sing. Much of the songwriting was written to the set list, not the album. Wed say, We need a set-closer. We need a big whopping set-closer. Or wed need a song for Page to sing. Or wed write a song for a piano solo. But then later in the 90s it became more organic, spur-of-the-moment. Wed just let it rip. The problem is, there are so many songs now.
I heard you dont use set lists at all, sometimes.
Yeah, since Phish came back, Ill just walk around backstage and ask everybody, What do you want to play? and people will say, Oh, I want to sing this or that, until I have 30 or 40 songs on a piece of . Its like the writing. The set lists are all over the place. A mess. Then we go out onstage and just forget about it. We give a set list to Chris every night and he just laughs and rips it up. We never even play the first song.
Do you call it out?
Ill lean over and ask Mike or Page. Its kind of like a big therapy group up there. Ill yell out, Is everyone cool with this? But, yeah, usually, I just scream something out.
For every song?
Yeah, you never know until you get up there. Its a sort of controlled chaos. Meaning, theres a lot of walking around and asking questions. Like, Ill walk into the venue and — I remember at Alpine Valley there was a girl standing by the fence, and I asked her, What should we play tonight? and she yelled, Play Whats the Use? And so Ill write that down. The problem is that some of the songs are so complicated that, if we dont run it beforehand, then it sucks and theres lots of self-flagellation. Like, Oh my god, I messed up Peaches en Regalia. You know? Which is exactly what happened when we played it last time. I felt terrible.
You guys have played some seven-hour shows, right?
We played on New Years Eve 99 all night. We played from 11 that night till about 7:30 a.m.
What thoughts are you having at 7:29 a.m., when youve been playing all night long?
Oh, that was one of the best nights of my life.
Does the music get better or worse when you play that long?
I dont know. That night felt like a big dream. Have you ever stood in a field with a buddy and hung around until the sun came up? Well, it was that, times 80,000 people. It was winter and we were outside. It was at Big Cypress. It wasnt even a venue. We built it. It was a small city. One of the great nights on earth, for me. But Ive never listened to it or anything. I dont want to. The sun came up. It was all pink.
Ive heard you want to play even longer shows.
We want to do the LG, which is some random gig, in the middle of some tour, in some random venue in Ohio. Wed shut the doors and say, The only rule is, if you leave you cant come back in. And all your cell phones have to be handed over, and if you have to make a phone call, theres a pay phone, and youre only allowed to say, Im not going to be there. Theres a big burly guard by the phone and hes got his finger on the thing. Thered be food and everything. And then wed play for two days, at least. So youd go in when the sun was setting, and then youd come out two mornings later. So itd feel like you were up all night, but really you were in there for two days. I wonder how many people would stay? Ten?
Whats the interest in music and endurance about?
We used to do long practices. Really long. Its another way to get away from the ego. You stop thinking. All this stuff all sounds so silly when you talk about it. But it happens. It also happens over the course of a tour. The first show, you walk onstage and youre thinking about the shirt youre wearing. By the end, its completely different.
You have such a large community of people surrounding Phish, and I wonder what your thinking is about music as a social tool. Can music change society?
That sounds like which came first, the chicken or the egg. Because I always think society changes music. In a big way. Think about the 40s. My teacher was 15 when Woody Herman was touring around the country. It was one of those ripping big bands, with four trombones. If you were there, it was like the rock n roll of the time. People were dancing and sneaking drinks in flasks and going out to the parking lots with their girlfriends. And then World War II came, and all those guys got drafted, there was rationing on rubber. Overnight, it ended, as soon as World War II hit. So society changed music there.
That was a time when improvisation was actually a form of pop music.
Yeah. If you look at the 40s, it was the last time when rock — for lack of a better word — and high art and pop music were all one thing. They had the best singers and arrangers and drummers all in a three-and-a-half-minute song. My teacher would always talk about this. Hed go with his girlfriend, ditch her, and then run up with his guy friends to the front row. They all knew who the best trumpet player was. This was at Roseland. Same place were playing. So then World War II comes and then everyones sad for a while — a simplification of history — and then everyone wants to be cheered up, so along came the Beatles, just in time. Whooo! Lets have a party. Im sick of these grownups talking about war all the time.
So you never consider your music to be a tool? Youre in a position where you have such a large community mobilized around you. And yet, you never seem to try to use your music to directly shape the community.
No, but I feel like were a part of something thats bigger than ourselves. When those first four Phish festivals happened, there were 70,000 people in Maine. It was crazy. Its like 10 hours north of Portland. We didnt know what the hell was going on. But then, look at whats going on in culture. The Internet wasnt quite invented yet. MTV was still huge. Pop music had become, in the 80s, this horrible plastic thing where you had to make a video before you made music. It was a terrible time in music, for me, other than some of the great punk bands like Bad Brains. I mean, theres always good stuff going on — Prince, Talking Heads — but in pop culture, it was horrendous. And when we started doing these festivals, it just exploded. This whole community popped up. It was weird. Today, you couldnt do a festival in Maine with every band in the world playing and get 70,000 people to go up there. Think about it. A lot of these new festivals draw just 8 or 10 thousand people. Its almost in Canada. Its really r away. But was that us? I dont think so. Again, if World War II didnt end, you wouldnt have the Beatles. You need a cultural landscape. Something just happened with those festivals — for about four years there, everyone wanted to be gathering.
Ross Simonini is the interviews editor of The Believer, where this article first appeared.&160; To read more from The Believer, or to subscribe, visit
Our Saturday music series rolls on with a groove-happy singer well known in the U.S. for his David Bowie covers
Seu Jorge. Seu Jorge has got to be one of the coolest cats on the planet — a Brazilian samba singer with a rich baritone and an easy groove. You may know him from his popular Portuguese covers of David Bowie songs featured in the Wes Anderson movie The Life Aquatic, or, from his role as a street hood in the great Brazilian film City of God.
We caught up with this international music star and his new band, Almaz, at a recent concert at the Royale in Boston. On our latest Quick Hits, you can see Seu Jorge onstage, singing a song for us outside on the theaters fire escape, and talking with Marco Werman about his music and his rough early life in a Rio de Janeiro vela.
Watch thefull episode. See moreSound Tracks.
Just before his Boston concert, with the sun setting over the Charles River, and street traffic below, Seu Jorge pulled out his guitar and sang a song for us on the fire escape outside the Royale theater. It&8217;s called Oluan, a term from the Yoruba culture and religion in northeast Brazil.
Conjuring up the goddess Jemanja, and praising this mother queen of the sea, Seu Jorge sings, I will dive in the waters and purify myself at the bottom of the ocean.
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Watch Seu Jorge and his band Almaz perform Cirandar, a beautiful, swaying song that we cant get out of our heads. It&8217;s utakably Brazilian, but it also has the undertow of that 60s surf guitar sound. Definitely some hip beach music. The word cirandar refers to an old Portuguese dance. Think of this as Seu Jorges serenade to the sea in which he asks an ocean goddess to protect the fisherman and give the singers a good voice. We couldnt resist adding some nostalgic images of fishermen at work.
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Sound Tracks Quick Hits reporter Marco Werman interviews Brazilian singer and actor Seu Jorge before his summer concert at the Royale in Boston. Seu Jorge talks about his new surf and beach-inspired ocean music, his interpretations of rock classics, and a mily tragedy that has shaped his life and his music. His English may be limited, but its way better than our Portuguese, and his natural expressiveness makes him easy to understand.
Beiruts Zach Condon is still coming to terms with success — and those weird Brazilian tribute bands
Zach Condon Zach Condon is an unlikely heartthrob. The band he fronts, Beirut, features neither dance beats nor electric guitars, and sells neither nor rebellion; its main influences are French chanson and Balkan and Mexican folk music. Onstage, he moves little, playing trumpet and ukulele and singing in the theatrically melancholic baritone of a pre-rock n roll crooner. And yet, when he steps up to the mic, young girls scream, white-haired folks beam and everyone thrusts their arms into the air.
Speaking over the phone from his hometown of Santa Fe, N.M., the tousle-haired 25-year-old Condon admits this kind of crowd reaction is common around the world — and it leaves him happily baffled.
Its crazy, he says. When I started this project, I assumed that I always would have a lot of trouble at shows — I never went to them or played them growing up. Its strange how important [theyve] become for us &226;&8364;&166; I go through phases [of] self-doubt and self-assuredness. Id say Im 80 percent of where I want to be.
And what could give him that extra 20 percent? Maybe a more fully realized persona. But I dunno — maybe people like the honesty. You want to change something, but you know in the back of your head that that might just take away from something else.
Having been catapulted to me five years ago after releasing his first album, Gulag Orkestar, Condon is still figuring out how to be comfortable as a star. His debut was essentially a solo project, recorded in his bedroom in his parents house and named after a city hed only ntasized about visiting. Inspired by Eastern European folk music he heard while traveling in France, he simulated the sound of a brass band by overdubbing his trumpet, and sang decadent, romantic lyrics. Taste- website Pitchfork called &8220;Gulag&8221; an&8220;impressive and precocious debut,&8221; there was a bidding war for it in the U.K., and Condon found himself unexpectedly popular, especially in Europe.
As a 19-year-old kid with a first album out, I was like, Fuck it. Ill tell them anything they want to hear. And so all these myths developed. In Poland, theyre convinced that [jazz guitarist] Eddie Condon is my grandther. In France they believe that I lived there for seven years when I dropped out of school at the age of 13.
But Condons life is full of so many surprising left turns, he doesnt really need to make up stories. When he was 14, he fell off a bridge onto a dry riverbed and broke his left arm; the resulting lack of mobility makes it tough for him to play the guitar — hence the ukulele that helps define Beiruts sound. For his 2009 EP, March of the Zapotec, he traveled to southwestern Mexico and hired a 17-piece funeral band to back him up. In Brazil, in the same year, he encountered a number ofBeirutando cover bands that sprang up after his songElephant Gun became the theme of a popular TV show there; some substitute the traditional cavaquinho for the ukulele. (Condon says he wouldnt be against the idea of collaborating with them, although, admittedly, thats getting a little meta.)
It was while touring Brazil that the catalyst moment for his new album, The Rip Tide, occurred: an accident on the beach left him with a punctured eardrum. Hed also developed a vocal polyp, but he kept playing live to positive reception, even though the music sounded detuned and messed up to him. It was simultaneously ecstatic and super-depressing, and a lot to work through mentally … I was like, Holy ! Ive been taken for the biggest ride of my life over the past five years, and its time to get some control over this situation.
Condon decided to settle down: He bought a house in Brooklyn, got married, acquired a dog and wrote songs that dealt with the concept of home. He also shut himself off from constant media attention and the prodding of music writers who, he says, expected his album to be a reaction to what they had written about his last — as if his career arc were a critic party and Im not invited.
The Rip Tide is short, focused, full of hooks, and occasionally humorous in a deadpan way, with a song like Vagabond poking fun at the prevalent perception of Condon — which he himself has encouraged — as a romantic wanderer. The new songs pull back more than his earlier work, often in order to swell up again, like the tide that gives the album its name. For inspiration, Condon looked back at work hed done in the pre-Beirut years, looking for his original na&239;ve energy; the standout song East Harlem emerges from this time before his every musical move was scrutinized intently by an army of bloggers — or cover bands in Brazil.
Growing up artistically in public, says Condon, can be difficult. Theres a lot of precautions you should probably take if youre going to go down that route. I was a lonely kid, and I think that [success] is very affirming in a lot of ways, but it can make you a little oversensitive, and I never Google myself … Still a lot to learn, but its gotten better.
For now, hes looking forward to the challenge of playing Santa Fe next month — a town that at first supported him and then, he says, imagined wed gotten very big heads. That was kind of a sad sensation because I wanted so much for the approval of my hometown. Its like a mildly disapproving parent. Keeps you in line — probably a good thing.
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