Miss the broadcast? Take a listen here.

I Love You More Than Words Can Say (Ottis Redding) – Karen Dalton
Living Life (Daniel Johnston) – The Eels
Rocket Man (Elton John) – My Morning Jacket
Let’s Dance (David Bowie) – M. Ward
Dreams (Fleetwood Mac) – The Morning Benders
Thirteen (Big Star) – Elliott Smith
Dead Flowers (Rolling Stones) – Townes Van Zandt
It Ain’t Me Babe (Bob Dylan) – White Antelope (Robin Pecknold of the Fleet Foxes)
Sweet Jane (Velvet Underground) – The Cowboy Junkies
To Baby (Biff Rose) – Vetiver
Paths of Victory (Bob Dylan) – Cat Power
Mushaboom (Feist) – Bright Eyes
Down In Hole (Alice in Chains) – Ryan Adams & the Cardinals
Between the Bars (Elliott Smith) – Madeleine Peyroux
Helpless (Neil Young) – Buffy Saint-Marie
Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen) – Jeff Buckley
Love and Mercy (Brian Wilson) – Jeff Tweedy

My Morning Jacket never fails to impress in a live setting. Their concerts are two to three hour juggernauts of raw emotional power driven by flawless musicianship and the soulful croon of front man Jim James. James came out wearing duel holsters, one of which contained an orange tipped silver cap gun, the second a super Nintendo “duck hunt” light gun, both of which he spiraled between his fingers at various rocking points in the show.

The crowd was eating it up from the start. About four songs in Jim James commented on the incredible energy at Merriweather, saying: “AAHHHHHH! Now that’s what the fuck I’m talking about! It’s good to hear a crowd with some life, God bless you guys!”

The set list pulled largely from the albums It Still Moves, and Z. All the classics like “Gideon” and “Steamroller” were played to their spiraling spiritual potential, complete with transcendent crescendos and cosmic guitar solos. There were also two newer songs played, the wonderful “Wonderful (The Way I Feel)” and a show stopping number called “Carried Away.” The latter of which was reminiscent of The Band; a slow and heavy piece sung by guitarist Carl Broemel and, for me, a true standout of the entire night.

The four song encore included three songs with the entire Preservation Hall Jazz Band sitting in. The Curtis Mayfield song “Move On Up” closed the show and sent the crowd into the streets of Columbia, MD dancing (and damning the 11 o’clock curfew that prevented the band from playing a longer show).

It’s great to see a band when they aren’t pushing anything. It’s been two years since Evil Urges was released and the boys seemed simply happy to be playing. Much of their early, and darker material, was conspicuously absent. As much as I would have loved to hear some of those songs I can’t help but think that this band is in a happier place than perhaps they have ever been. Saturday was a performance by a band that loves what they do, that is completely sincere in every note they play, and that, with any luck, will be around for many years to come.

My Morning Jacket
May 1rst, 2010. Merriweather Post Pavilion
Get the live audience recording (amazing quality!)
download for free: http://www.archive.org/details/mmj2010-05-01

Disc One
01. Kentucky Derby call > intro >
02. One Big Holiday
03. Gideon
04. Off The Record
05. I’m Amazed
06. Mahgeetah
07. Tonight I Want to Celebrate With You
08. Golden
09. What a Wonderful Man
10. Lay Low
11. The Way That He Sings
12. Wonderful (The Way I Feel)
13. Carried Away

Disc Two

01. Steam Engine
02. Smokin From Shootin >
03. Run Thru >
04. Touch Me I’m Going To Scream Pt. 2
05. Anytime
06. crowd
Encore:
07. Wordless
08. Carnival Time *
09. Dancefloors*
10. Move On Up (Curtis Mayfield cover)*

*with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band

$15. Get tickets: www.oddsac.com

8pm & 10pm. Will-call pickup and walk-up ticket sales (cash only) will begin at 7pm at the theater.

This is going to be unreal!

Follow the link to download the complete Beatles Acoustic Compilation:

http://www.mediafire.com/?jxjr1w3m1mz

Happiness is a Warm Gun
Just a Band
A Beginning
Ram On
Great Day
Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)
Across the Universe
Yesterday
Here Comes the Moon
Watching the Wheels
Strawberry Fields Forever
Love
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Mother Nature’s Son
Beware of Darkness
Dear Yoko
Calico Skies
I’m Stepping Out
Let It Down
Julia
Look At Me
Heart of the Country
Blow Away
Junk
Real Love
Singalong Junk
Ram On (Reprise)
I’m Only Sleeping

www.930.com

http://steelpulse.com/news.php

http://www.myspace.com/giantpandadub

The other day I got to thinking. The weather is beautiful. It’s spring time, coming on summer. We have a Black president, and nationwide decriminalization of the herb seems immanent. So I says to Paige: “Audiocandy needs a reggae radio show!” This weather always accompanies a heavy influx of reggae into my music rotation anyhow, so I figured now is as good a time as ever.

I have also been eager, for some time now, to really expand my knowledge of reggae music, so audiocandy+radio seemed a good motivator for me to seek out those artists that I wasn’t so familiar with, and to dig deeper in to the entire world of reggae (from dancehall, dub, and ska, to roots and rocksteady). I would love for you to join me on my search for artists old and new, anything vital. Let me know what you think about this first show. I have tried to skim the surface of popular reggae from the sixties onward, if I’ve left out one of your favorite artists or tunes, let me hear about! Are you feelin’ irie? Dig it: every Wednesday from 4-6pm!

Sizzla – Give them a Ride
The Abyssinians – Forward Unto Zion
Eek-A-Mouse – Wa Do Dem
Marcia Griffiths – Just Don’t Want to Be Lonely
Gregory Isaacs – Cool Down the Place
Yellowman – Natty Sat Upon the Rock
Israel Vibration – What’s the Use?
Bob Marley – Guava Jelly
Derrick Harriott – The Loser
Don Carlos – I’m Not Crazy
Toots & the Maytals – Revolution
Culture – Riverside
Barrington Levy – Here I Come
Burning Spear – Marcus Garvey
Jimmy Cliff – You Can Get It If You Really Want
Sister Nancy – Bam Bam
Peter Tosh – Why Must I Cry
The Slickers – Johnny Too Bad
Junior Murvin – Police & Thieves
Bunny Wailor – Blackheart Man
The Gayletts – Silent River (Runs Deep)
Buju Banton – Untold Stories
Desmond Dekker & the Aces -A It Mek
Augustus Pablo – Memories of the Ghetto
Damion “Jr. Gong” Marley – We’re Gonna Make It
Pat Kelly – Somebody’s Baby
Errol Dunkly – You’re Gonna Need Me
Althea & Donna – Uptown Top Ranking
Easy Star All-stars (featuring Toots & the Maytals) – Let Down
Alton Ellis – Rocksteady

For the past two nights Joanna Newsom played the Historic 6th and I Synagogue in Washington, D.C. The Synagogue provided a stunningly serene and intimate atmosphere for the shows and fans that were able to snag tickets to one or two of Newsom’s sold out nights should feel quite lucky.

Earlier this month the beautiful Joanna Newsom, 28 years old, released her first album in four years. That album, titled “Have One on Me,” clocks in at two hours and spans three discs. The majority of the tracks on the album average about seven and a half minutes in length. Sitting down to listen to “Have One on Me” is no different than starring down a major work of literature. It involves sacrifice, hard work, and requires dedication on part of the listener.

Hearing this music live is a similar experience, requiring almost meditative concentration in order to grasp the fullness and variety of sounds produced by the musicians on stage. Newsom was accompanied by a drummer (really a guy adding percussive expression rather than formal drums, but doing this incredibly well), a trombone player, a violinist, and multi-instrumentalist Ryan Francesconi who tinseled the music with banjo, electric guitar, and recorder. Francesconi is really the second star of the performance, along with the new album, having arranged all of the songs on the album, and reworking them for live renditions on Newsome’s tour.

The room was completely silent for every song, providing for an intensity and atmosphere that is ever fading in the modern concert going experience. (Perhaps that this was a synagogue and did not serve alcohol helped, but Newsom’s music surely induced a collective stupor.) Like the music Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks created on the Beach Boys’ lost masterpiece “Smile,” the songs span the diverse landscape of all American music. There is the influence of early 1900’s saloon jazz, along with dustbowl banjo melodies, and simple folk balladry, but the world of classical and Italian Renaissance music creeps in as well, beaming with operatic crescendos and moving subtlety alike. The music was simultaneously sparse and full, like a smoke that fills the room and dances in different places, revealing its nature discreetly between piercing rays of light, and befell the space of the synagogue as if it would remain after the band had packed up to go home.

Along with the arrangements of her music, Newsom’s voice has matured. While it is almost certain that it is not for everyone, it has grown to compliment her arrangements and lyrics very well. In previous years her voice could detract from a song, at times sounding contrived or for its own sake. She has retained her unique vocal style but refined it, using it to further the sentiment of her songs rather than the atmosphere of her music.

That Newsom can remember the intricate and poetic lines in each of these mini-epics that are her most recent songs is impressive to say the least. She sang each song with conviction and unwavering sincerity; bringing to mind the dedication of a young Bob Dylan, singing each of her incredibly long songs with a natural and relaxed intensity.

It was an evening of refreshingly steadfast creative energy. If you have the time to check out something completely different, to offer yourself to an artist with perhaps the amount of dedication an artist must resign to their own music, Joanna Newsom can prove to be an extremely rewarding listen, on record or in the flesh. She is a remarkable new talent, not always easy to comprehend or settle into, but an artist prepared to challenge her listeners; a rare innovator who believes in the emotional and intellectual capacity of her audience, we just have to be willing to let her take the wheel and open ourselves to the sights along her highway.

For more about the show (pictures, and streaming audio of the entire concert) visit:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124711752

For more about the 6th and I Historic Synagogue:

http://www.sixthandi.org

I have stated on various occasions that the true test of a song writer is the ability to convey everyday emotions in a way that showcases the artist as an individual without distancing the listener from their own experience that has led them to similar meditations expressed by the artists they enjoy listening to. In this sense, the artist must be intensely personal and overtly universal at the same time. This week I would like to showcase the songs of Jamaica’s Rocksteady music, a precursor to Reggae, and the United State’s own blend of soul, pop, and rhythm and blues, Motown.

Both the Rocksteady and Motown sounds lend themselves to an aesthetic quality that is subtle and ultimately democratic. The songs are subtle in that many of them sound quite similar from one to the next; this is perhaps the result of popular demand for songs that were short, sweet, danceable, and radio friendly. These were songs by artists that were trying to make it and they felt a pressure to conform to a sound that was “in” at the present time. And these songs are democratic because so many are the product of a group of musicians, songwriters, producers, and production companies that worked together like assembly lines, cranking out music of indelible soul. This is a fundamental difference between the songs of someone like Bob Dylan and those of a group like the Supremes.

The names of many great Motown and Rocksteady artists are today household names, but lost are the artists behind their songs. Lyrics to many of these songs are as close to the previously stated ideal of good songwriting as we have yet to see. These are songs that everyone understands because they reflect the deeply personal experiences of love, loss, happiness and sadness, in ways that everyone has felt at one time or another. But often these lyrics are given the once over in the face of the brilliant musicianship that has brought them to life. We reflect on the voice of a Marvin Gaye, or the exuberance of a group like the Uniques, often without wondering, or even realizing, that somewhere someone else may have written our favorite song.

The names of these writers are too numerous to mention, and some of the fine artists that have become famous for performing these songs are in fact the original song writers, but in any case, this show is for those songwriters who have gone unnamed and underappreciated, and to recognize the wonderful songwriting that exists outside the common, and often cliché, singer/songwriter medium.

Cheers to your screen door dancing in the front porch weather. This is Buckets of Rain – Rocksteady.

Tonight’s show is brought to you by a beautiful day and a tall glass of Guinness. Sláinte!

Fleet Foxes – Sun Giant
The Beatles – Here Comes the Sun
Elliott Smith – Baby Britain
Simon & Garfunkel – Blues Run the Game
Van Morrison – There Stands the Glass
Tom Waits – The Piano Has Been Drinking
Devendra Banhart – Koreandogwood
Fruit Bats – The Ruminant Band
Bob Dylan – Moonlight
My Morning Jacket – Mageetah
The Doors – Alabama Whiskey Song
John Lee Hooker – One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer
Joni Mitchell – A Case Of You
M. Ward – Here Comes the Sun Again
Ryan Adams & The Cardinals – A Kiss Before I Go
The Grateful Dead – Brown Eyed Women
The Felice Brothers – Whiskey In My Whiskey
Wilco – Not For the Season
Paul Simon – Born at the Right Time
Real Estate – Green River
Traffic – John Barley Corn
Dr. Dog – The Breeze
The Beatles – Mother Nature’s Son
Nina Simone – Gin House Blues
Stevie Ray Vaughan – Life By the Drop
Ray LaMontagne – Barfly
The Swinging Melodians – Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman – Whiskey in the Jar
The Velvet Underground – After Hours

And, just for shits and giggles, here is the origin of sláinte:

The word is an abstract noun derived from the Old Irish adjective slán “whole, healthy” plus the Old Irish suffix tu, resulting in slántu “health” and eventually Middle Irish sláinte. The root slán is derived from the Indo-European root *slā- “advantageous” and linked to words like German selig “blessed” (from wikipedia).

And here is a poem for your emerging Spring time consciousness:

Sunflower Sutra

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
sat down under the huge shade of a Southern
Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,
surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
machinery.

The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves
rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
on the riverbank, tired and wily.

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust–

–I rushed up enchanted–it was my first sunflower,
memories of Blake–my visions–Harlem

and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
past–

and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,
crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye–

corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like
a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy head like a dried
wire spiderweb,

leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O
my soul, I loved you then!

The grime was no man’s grime but death and human
locomotives,

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black
mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance
of artificial worse-than-dirt–industrial–
modern–all that civilization spotting your
crazy golden crown–

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless
eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the
home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar
bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards
of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what
more could I name, the smoked ashes of some
cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the
milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs
& sphincters of dynamos–all these

entangled in your mummied roots–and you there
standing before me in the sunset, all your glory
in your form!

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye
to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited
grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden
monthly breeze!

How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your
grime, while you cursed the heavens of the
railroad and your flower soul?

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
flower? when did you look at your skin and
decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a
sunflower!

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me
not!

So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
it at my side like a scepter,

and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul
too, and anyone who’ll listen,

–We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening
sitdown vision.

Allen Ginsberg

Berkeley, 1955

With the ever emerging prominence of the singer-songwriter, it seems that critics are constantly searching for someone they can call “the next Bob Dylan.” Certainly there are some incredible song writers out there now, many of whom have had the now cliché expectation cast upon their music; Jeff Tweedy, Ryan Adams, Connor Oberst, James Mercer, Joe Pug, the Tallest Man on Earth, Sam Beam and Jim James all come to mind, and I’m certain that I’m forgetting a few others. But where critics most often fail in their eagerness to adorn some new or established talent with the “new Dylan” moniker is in their assumption that an acoustic guitar, a harmonica, and self involved or politically motivated lyrics are tantamount to the achievements of Bob Dylan. What they don’t seem to understand is that Dylan was not Dylan for aesthetic reasons, he was Dylan because of who he was as a person and because he was open to being that person, no matter the repercussions in the world he was living in, no matter what the social climate or musical conventions of the time might have called for otherwise. It is for this reason that we remember Bob Dylan, not as the young man once deemed the next Woody Guthrie, but simply as Bob Dylan. This is his greatest achievement as an artist.

If any songwriter today is deserving of the comparison it is most certainly Jeff Tweedy. His music always seems an extension of his personality, beyond the expectations of his audience, and beyond the expectations he may even hold for himself. His lyrics are open enough to represent any number of ideas; from happy go lucky drinking songs, to sad love songs that are deeply personal, he renders his experience in a way that allows us to re-imagine our own. This is the hardest test of a song writer and few have passed it so well and so consistently.

As far as influences go, I know that Jeff Tweedy is influenced by Bob Dylan, by Neil Young, by Nick Drake, John Prine and John Lennon, amongst others, but I don’t think about or hear these influences when I hear his music the way I do when I listen to other singer-songwriters, many of whom have written songs that equal Jeff’s genius but far less frequently. I will now submit that, like those critics I don’t like, I believe Jeff Tweedy is our generation’s Bob Dylan. Not because he can turn off the mic and belt out a folk song on a beat up Martin twelve string, not because he sounds like Bob Dylan, not because he is political, or poetic, or sings in a nasally voice. Jeff Tweedy is our generation’s Bob Dylan because he can’t help but be Jeff Tweedy.

Tonight’s show is from a benefit show that Tweedy has done several times throughout the years called “Letters to Santa.” The show was recorded live in a living room. It is insanely intimate and wonderful. Unfortunantly, I can not make this available for download as I have noticed that it has been requested taken down from other sites. But, if you search for Jeff Tweedy “Letters to Santa” you should be able to find it.

Stranded

These Dreams of You

Warm Love

Bright Side of the Road

Madame George

Saint Dominic’s Preview

Caravan

Old Old Woodstock

Come Here My Love

Starting a New life

You Make Me Feel So Free

Bulbs

Astral Weeks

And It Stoned Me

Moondance

Moonshine Whiskey

Fair Play

Sweet Thing

Into the Mystic

Celtic New Year

Everyone

Tupelo Honey

Cyprus Avenue

Glad Tidings

10726125-d58]DivShare File – Buckets of Rain – Songs of Desperation_Ur.wma

Songs of Desperation & Urgency IIThis show is essentially a companion piece to Buckets of Rain episode 10, Songs of Desperation & Urgency. I hope you enjoy these songs as much as I have. As I said earlier this week, these are songs to be young by, no matter how old you are. I also said that the feeling I hope to instill in listeners with these shows was first revealed to me while listening to Bruce Springsteen’s album Born to Run, the lyrics to the song of the same name specifically hone the tone of these two playlists:

In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages out on highway 9,
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected
and steppin’ out over the line
Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we’re young
‘Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

Wendy let me in I wanna be your friend
I want to guard your dreams and visions
Just wrap your legs ’round these velvet rims
and strap your hands across my engines
Together we could break this trap
We’ll run till we drop, baby we’ll never go back
Will you walk with me out on the wire
‘Cause baby I’m just a scared and lonely rider
But I gotta find out how it feels
I want to know if love is wild
girl I want to know if love is real

Beyond the Palace hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard
The girls comb their hair in rearview mirrors
And the boys try to look so hard
The amusement park rises bold and stark
Kids are huddled on the beach in a mist
I wanna die with you Wendy on the streets tonight
In an everlasting kiss

The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive
Everybody’s out on the run tonight
but there’s no place left to hide
Together Wendy we’ll live with the sadness
I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul
Someday girl I don’t know when
we’re gonna get to that place
Where we really want to go
and we’ll walk in the sun
But till then tramps like us
baby we were born to run

The Band – Tears of Rage

The Fairest of the Seasons – Nico

Ray LaMontange – Jolene

The Eels – Living Life (Daniel Johnston cover!)

Real Estate – Beach Comber

George Harrison – Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)

Beck – The Golden Age

Animal Collective – For Reverend Green

Bright Eyes – We Are Nowhere & It’s Now

The Beach Boys – Wouldn’t It Be Nice

Neil Young – Tell Me Why

Joan Baez – Love is Just a Four Letter Word (Bob Dylan cover)

Fleet Foxes – Tiger Mountain Peasant Song

Mazzy Star – I’ve Been Let Down

The Cure – Inbetween Days

Cat Stevens – Father & Son

The Rolling Stones – No Expectations

My Morning Jacket – I Will Be There When You Die

The Flaming Lips – Suddenly Everything Has Changed

Radiohead – Let Down

Bon Iver – Skinny Love

The Kinks – Strangers

Ryan Adams & the Cardinals – Peaceful Valley

Bob Dylan – To Ramona

Jackson Browne – These Days

Lissie – Little Lovin’

Creedence Clearwater Revival – Long As I Can See The Light

Some songs make it hard to breathe. They tighten our heart strings and put us over the edge; they inspire runaway daydreams and make it easy late at night, maybe even five minutes from home, to think, if only for a moment, “What if I just keep on going?” For a long time I have admired bands and songwriters that can instill such a feeling of urgency into their music. It is this sense of desperation that forces us to confront our present situation, to question our own motives, and to stand for a moment in observance of time as we strive to better understand the decisions we’ve made as well as those at hand. This is a very personal playlist. Each of these songs has figured quite heavily in my life at one time or another, and most still do.

The Counting Crowes – Round Here

Joni Mitchell – All I Want

Van Morrison – Sweet Thing

The Shins – New Slang

Animal Collective – Fireworks

The Rolling Stones – Angie

Janis Joplis – Me & My Bobby McGee

Bruce Sprinsteen – Thunder Road

Band of Horses – Lamb on the Lam (In the City)

Dr. Dog – My Old Ways

Radiohead – 15 Step

Wilco – Hummingbird

Talking Heads – This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)

Rickie Lee Jones – The Horses

My Morning Jacket – Anytime

Simon & Garfunkel – America

Jimmy Cliff – Many Rivers To Cross

The Velvet Underground – Oh! Sweet Nuthin’

Ryan Adams & the Cardinals – Let It Ride

The Strokes – Someday

Blind Melon – Walk

Tom Petty – To Find A Friend

Arcade Fire – Wake Up

Toots & the Maytals – Love Gonna Walk Out On Me

Eddie Vedder – Rise

Concrete & Clay – Unit 4 + 2 – Rushmore

Where Do You Go To (My Lovely) – Peter Starstedt – The Darjeeling Limited

Me & Julio Down By the Schoolyard – Paul Simon – The Royal Tenenbaums

Rebel Rebel – Seu Jorge – The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Stephanie Says – The Velvet Underground – The Royal Tenenbaums

I am Waiting – The Rolling Stones – Rushmore

The Fairest of the Seasons – Nico – The Royal Tenenbaums

The Way I Feel Inside – The Zombies – The Darjeeling Limited

Oh Yoko! – John Lennon – The Royal Tenenbaums

Everyone – Van Morrison – The Royal Tenenbaums

Here Comes My Baby – Cat Stevens – Rushmore

Making Time – The Creation – Rushmore

Police & Thieves – The Clash – The Royal Tenenbaums

Nothing in this World Can Stop Me Worrying About That Girl – The Kinks – Rushmore

Look At Me – John Lennon – The Royal Tenenbaums

Jersey Thursday – Donovan – Rushmore

Alone Again Or – Love – Bottle rocket

Fly – Nick Drake – The Royal Tenenbaums

This Time Tomorrow – The Kinks – The Darjeeling Limited

Needle in the Hay – Elliott Smith – The Royal Tenenbaums

Heroes and Villains – The Beach Boys – The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Ooh La La – The Faces – Rushmore

The Wind – Cat Stevens – Rushmore

2000 Man – The Rolling Stones – Bottlerocket

Life on Mars? – Seu Jorge – The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Life on Mars? – David Bowie – The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

A Summer Song – Chad & Jeremy – Rushmore

Play With Fire – The Rolling Stones – The Darjeeling Limited

These Days – Nico – The Royal Tenenbaums

Strangers – The Kinks – The Darjeeling Limited

Lullaby – Emitt Rhodes – The Royal Tenenbaums

Now here is a chicken or the egg scenario to consider— love or the love song? The modern understanding of love, well, romantic, passionate love, has not been around from the time we learned to walk upright. In fact, it was the work of the troubadours: you might call them the original singer/songwriters.

The troubadours were French poets and songsmiths writing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At the time, marriage was almost exclusively a social and family concern. Parents married off their daughters as political pawns, giving little, if any, concern to the young hearts they often crushed in the process. The idea of love was merely an expression of domestic comfort, merry sensuality, or madness (believed to drive women to villainous behaviors).

The troubadours paid no attention to the social climate of their times. They were the first to honor love as a motion of the heart and openly advocated the expression of human sexuality. Often they traveled from town to town, lived their lives on the road, and sang for aristocratic circles songs of adulterous love affairs and explicit sexual encounters.  Here, and for the first time, love was expressed without regard for feudal social standings between men and women. Love and sexuality were expressed in spite of religious morals and without marriage as necessity. C.S. Lewis writes that for the troubadours love became “an extension of religion, an escape from religion, [and] a rival religion.” The most common troubadour lyric was about an idealized and unrequited love, it was a pervasive melancholy that has influenced songwriters ever since.

Today, the idea, or ideal, of love is still heavily influenced by poets and song writers. Our hopes and worries, in moments of sorrow as well as ecstasy, are often best expressed and better understood through song. Along with their predecessors the troubadours, these songs and writers have helped to shape our very experience of love. Haven’t you heard? The word is LOVE. Here’s a sample of their collective vibrations.

Ryan Adams is prolific. From 2000-2010 he released, and released is the key word, 11 albums. Three of these albums, Cold Roses (a double album), Jacksonville City Nights and 29 were all recorded and released in 2005. I say that released is a key word because, like that other famous song writer before him, Bob Dylan, Adams is known for having albums upon albums of unreleased material. This only accounts for his solo career.

Prior to 2000, Adams had fronted in the seminal alt-country band Whiskeytown, in which he was the primary song writer. The band formed when Adams was 20 years old and contributed several genre defining albums, too often over shadowed both by Adams’ solo output and the work of Wilco, another band that came to prominence with the resurgent interest in alt-country music in the early to mid 90′s.

Adams is the penultimate singer/songwriter. Destined to be the name next to “influenced by” written in music reviews when someone has produced an album full of acoustic guitar songs, drenched in wine and thick with broken hearted head trips. He has produced songs that speak to every age, both men and women, and across many genres. Despite his foundations in Gram Parsons style country/folk rock, Adams has channeled everyone from Willie Nelson to the Grateful Dead, even showing an affinity for groups like the Velvet Underground and the Strokes.
Tonight’s show will focus on Adams’ solo output.

Here is an incredible live recording of Ryan Adams and the Cardinals. It is an all acoustic show preformed a few days before the release of Easy Tiger. Enjoy! http://www.archive.org/details/radams2007-06-29.sbd.flac

Hey everyone! Hope you all are faring well out there in the snow. With the snow as inspiration, I decided to put together a winter themed playlist. Most of these songs tap into a nostalgic and universal state of melancholy to which we seem more susceptible in the cool cold months. It’s also a pleasant reminder that seasonal music doesn’t have to sell sweaters or fade away after December 25. Enjoy!

In August of 1991 Paul Simon played a concert in New York City’s Central Park. The show was broadcast on television and released as a double live album later that year. At the time I was five years old. I remember wandering into the living room one night where my dad had the stereo hooked up to the television. He had a VCR set to record the concert on VHS and a stereo set to capture the performance live on cassette tape. (We had a ton of these living room concert bootlegs but no tape was in such heavy rotation as Paul Simon’s Central Park concert: I still have the tape and listened to it from time to time until the passing of my Subaru Forester, a car just old enough to possess a tape deck). The concert began with “The Obvious Child,” the opening track from Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints, the follow up to Graceland. I remember being entranced by the magnitude of sound that his band produced. I had never heard anything so rhythmic, so charged, and so beautiful.

This is one of my earliest memories. It was the first time I had experienced music, which is more than recognizing a pleasant melody: it’s connecting, registering, allowing the sounds to resonate in your soul for a time, it’s spiritual. As a result, Paul Simon is the first artist I ever identified with. It is a beautiful feeling when you can connect to a song, an album, and with any luck an artist, on this level.

Along with providing me my first real experience of music, Paul Simon’s music has been the soundtrack to some meaningful events in my life. I remember listening to Simon and Garfunkel with my high school girlfriend, my first love, hearing her sing a harmony on “The Boxer” and finding her angelic. I remember seeing The Graduate (my favorite movie of all time) and feeling such a kinship with Dustin Hoffman’s character, mainly because I felt so close to the lyrics of songs featured in the movie: “The Sounds of Silence,” “Scarborough Fair,” “April Come She Will,” and “Kathy’s Song.” To this day I have never been so affected by a movie.

Present in much of Paul Simon’s best work is a beautifully restrained sense of melancholy. It is restrained because he rarely, if ever, seems on the brink of tears like Neil Young or Nick Drake might. Instead, there is the recognition that life contains sorrow, but it is essentially more beautiful as a result; he doesn’t wallow, he accepts and is moved to sing. I think this is why so many people identify with Paul Simon’s lyrics. His music reflects an overwhelming world but rarely leaves us overwhelmed.

In his poem “Burnt Norton,” T.S. Eliot writes: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.” It seems to me that the greatest works of art, in their capacity to capture or rouse the most fundamental of human emotions, prove this most humbling of observations to be true. The possibility that a work of art can withstand the changes of time, thus proving how little time changes anything, is motivation enough for many artists and it is an experience that folk music, and the singer/songwriter niche in general, particularly prides itself on. The greatest songwriters know the songs of past generations and recognize that no matter how badly they wish to say something new the chances are it has already been said. Bands and songwriters heralded for their originality have simply changed the language, not the message. The song remains the same.

So what makes a great song? Why do we flock to one songwriter more than another if they all are essentially saying the same things in different ways? I believe it has to do with our ability to hear ourselves in the voices of others and in the artist’s ability to express their emotions without first isolating themselves. Thus the hardest lyric to write is at once deeply personal and highly universal. The experience of such songs I do not think we could live without, audience or artist. It happens in such a personal way that you almost feel like you know someone intimately because they share a love for a single verse, a line, or a breath taken too close to the microphone.

The songs on the playlist tonight are from those kinds of voices for me. Some were written in my time, others before, but all of them have affected me in similar ways, which is the point, really. Because the greatest song is not a product of time but of the heart, which, so long as people are people and present on earth, is a product eternal and blissfully unchanged- time present and time past, here now and in time future. If you’re listening, it’s all there always.

-ZL

Bruce Springsteen – The River
Nick Drake – Time Has Told Me
Devendra Banhart – Little Yellow Spider
Bob Dylan – To Ramona
Bon Iver – Skinny Love
John Prine – Spanish Pipe Dream
My Morning Jacket – Where to Begin
Townes Van Zandt – If I Needed You
Bright Eyes – First Day of My Life
Wilco – When You Wake Up Feeling Old
Elliott Smith – In The Lost And Found (Honky Bach)
Ottis Redding – I’ve Been Loving You Too Long
Neil Young – Oh, Lonesome Me
Sufjan Stevens – Casmir Pulaski Day
Stephen Stills – Sp Begins the Task
James Taylor – Something in the Way
Ryan Adams – Wild Flowers
Rickie Lee Jones – The Horses
Ray LaMontagne – Jolene
Arlo Guthrie – City of New Orleans
Joni Mitchell – Carey
Van Morrison – Bulbs
Gram Parsons – A Song For You
Simon & Garfunkle – Kathy’s Song
Tom Waits – Long Way Home
Belle & Sebastian – Piazza, New York Catcher
Jorma Kaukonen – Genesis
Ben Kweller – On My Way

You’re listening to the first installment of “Buckets of Rain.” Due to technical difficulties, I’m unable to do my Bob-Dylan themed show as planned. So if you’re listening, 1. thanks and 2. I’m sorry. Instead, here’s a bunch of songs I like. Enjoy.

Arms Like Boulders – The War on Drugs
Tomorrow Goes Away – Delta Spirit
Angelika – Devendra Banhart
Feeling All the Saturday – Roy Harper
Cecilia Amanda – Elliott Smith
Temazcal – Monsters of Folk
Wizard Flury Home – Mariee Sioux
Uncovering the Old – Dr. Dog
Dirty Dishes – Deer Tick
Warm Love – Van Morrison
What Would I Want Sky? – Animal Collective
To Be Still – Alela Diane
Rider on the Wheel – Nick Drake
Could We – Cat Power
Walking the Cow – Daniel Johnston
To Baby – Vetiver (Biff Rose cover)
Nothing Up My Sleeve – Wilco
Magic Marker – Monsters of Folk
If You Let Me Be Your Anchor – The Dawes
40 Day Dream – Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros
Not Your Lover – Blitzen Trapper
Lamb on the Lam(In The City) – Band of Horses
Comfy in Nautica – Panda Bear
In the Evening(It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You the Best) – Karen Dalton
The Sandman, the Brakeman, and Me – Monsters of Folk
Wonderful Life – The Felice Brothers
English House – The Fleet Foxes
For Emma – Bon Iver
That Feel – Tom Waits
Sitting in Limbo – Jerry Garcia & David Grisman

Tuesday Feb. 9 – Trey Anastasio Band @ 930 Club

Wednesday Feb. 10 – Delta Spirit @ DC9

Saturday Feb. 13- Furthur (Phil Lesh & Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead) @ GMU Patriot Center

Saturday Feb. 20- Fruit Bats @ the Black Cat

Monday March 22-Joanna Newsome @ The 6th and I Historic Synagogue

Tuesday March 23- The Dawes @ The Iota

Tuesday March 30- Wilco @ Strathmore

Thursday May 13 – Dr. Dog with Deer Tick(opening) @ The Electric Factory

Friday May 14 – Dr. Dog with Deer Tick(opening) @ 930 Club