Nina
EMMA
Filed under: Emma, Nina, Uncategorized | Tags: american music, folk, future projects, wild at heart
"This is a snakeskin jacket! And for me it's a symbol of my individuality, and my belief... in personal freedom."
Hello, all. It’s been a while.
Loyal followers – all 12 of you – and anyone else who periodically stumbles upon this here blog: After graduating from our good ol’ alma mater of Boston University’s College of Communication with our heads raised high and our eyes glued open to stave off panic-dreams, we sat down and thought.
Well, mostly all we ever do is sit down and think, but this time the thinking was a more directed thinking, a thinking brought on by extreme panic and fear. And excitement! LOTS OF EXCITEMENT TOWARDS THE REAL WORLD.
Post-college is scary these days. I don’t know if you knew this, but there are no jobs, especially not for journalists. And while there are tons and tons of unpaid internships to be had and coffee cups to be filled, we want something more.
So, we’re embarking on a new project. After spending what seems like a lifetime (AND KIND OF IS) thinking about what music means to us, how it effects our lives in subtle and obvious ways, how it punctuates moments and inspires both good and bad ideas, we’re looking outside. We’re looking across America, actually. Or at least, we’re going to try to.
The main thing about American music is that…there is no main thing about it. There are a ton of micro-genres, niche genres, and mixed genres, with more cropping up every day. That’s great. Innovation is great. Yet, there are still a whole lot of people deliberately looking towards folk as their chosen means of expression. We’re gonna go take a look at how that’s going, and we’re gonna make a lot of motherfolkin puns along the way.
Focusing on folk music in America today, we’re setting out to speak to young musicians across the country about what folk music means to them and where they envision the music they play in regards to the large, rich history of folk music in American history. The project will begin in Boston, Massachusetts, and expand as far north and south as we can go with a Zipcar and very, very little money throughout the summer. Then, god, Allah and GaGa willing, we’ll take it on the road, pack up Bertha the Toyota Camry and head to infinity and beyond.
We hope you’ll keep checking back to this blog periodically as we will still try to update it occasionally, but we also encourage you to follow the progress of our folk project – tentatively called “Folk to Folk,” though we’re desperately seeking a better name – on our newly formed Tumblr.
Please feel free to give us recommendations of people to talk to, bands to listen to, books to read and sites to see. We need all the help we can get to make this project see the light of day.
Thank you all. Good night, and good luck.
Filed under: Emma | Tags: 1960s, Dawes, Festivals, folk, Generation gaps, Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, Newport Folk Festival, North Hills, The Morning Benders, Tom Wolfe
You can't really go wrong here
In a recent ruling, three out of three attendees on their way to the 2010 Barcelona Primavera Festival said summer is not complete without at least one music festival. Even 10 hours later, after these three were doused in sweat, beer, and lets face it, probably the urine of others due to the festival’s poorly thought out male-urinal system (which I will not go into here, but you can use your imagination), their ruling remained the same.
That was my first festival of the summer, thousands of miles away, looking out on the Mediterranean Sea. This past weekend, I went to number two. Newport Harbor ain’t no Mediterranean, but the legendary folk festival where Dylan went electric proved to be a calming and nearly perfectly orchestrated event.
Music festivals in the summer always feel like a gathering of the tribes. Maybe this is an after effect of reading and seeing too many Woodstock depictions, or maybe it is my desire to imagine that the “human be-ins” described by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test still exist in some form. While I am not delusional enough to equate the rather tame Newport Folk Festival with the legendary pioneers of music festivals circa 1967 and ’68, the basic tenets of bringing people together to listen to music and appreciate a brief turning down of our turbo-charged lives remain guiding forces in these gatherings. Sure, they get messy – Inevitably by the time the last band comes on, regardless of how long you’ve been waiting to see the famed closer play, all you can think of is sitting in a bath tub of ice while getting a foot massage. But is that a reason not to make it through? No. It is not.
The beautiful Newport Bridge is a lovely backdrop for being serenaded by Andrew Bird in late July
Anyway, I could rant about my best festival moments, wax poetic about how the setting sun and pungent smell of cigarettes and marijuana punctuates a good performance, but I won’t. Instead I’ll skip over the general run down of the festival, which has already been covered by every media outlet with any focus on music this past week. NPR’s All Things Considered did an excellent job of that, as per usual, which you can find here.
Instead I want to highlight a band I hadn’t known of pre-festival whose performance was especially noteworthy and for lack of a better term, special.
Dawes at Newport Folk 2010
Dawes set overlapped Andrew Bird, which left me running to only catch the last half of their show at the smallest of the three Newport stages. Despite my love for Mr. Bird, I ended up repeatedly kicking myself for not getting there sooner. A show like this doesn’t happen too often, especially in the setting of a festival. By the time I got to the stage, the entire audience was on their feet while the band rocked out, literally looking like they may all burst into joyous tears in response to the enthusiasm. Dawes features a set of brothers, lead vocalist Taylor Goldsmith and drummer Griffin, and they even brought their father out on stage with them for their last song.
Family love
I recognize I may be a bit late on jumping aboard the Dawes boat: They’ve already played Bonnaroo, recorded their most catchy and excellent single “When My Time Comes” with The Morning Benders, sold out Webster Hall in New York and will be going to Lollapalooza in a few days. Regardless, they absolutely recruited new followers with their Newport performance. Their first full length LP North Hills, which I promptly obtained as soon as I got back from the festival, has some great tracks, but to see them live is to love them. The foursome is said to have a “Laurel Canyon” sound, reminiscent of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and other folk-rock bands who congregated in Dawes native northern Los Angeles in the 1960s. While their roots are clearly comfortably stuck in that Laurel Canyon and L.A. mud, Dawes remains inventive. Their live show was endearing, and their enthusiasm to play Newport really showed.
Look at the joy on this dude's face
When in the thick of a music festival, it is easy to forget that the true beauty of bringing artists from disparate eras together is introducing different generations of music lovers to newer or older bands they otherwise might never have heard. Newport is especially good at this: Legendary headliners like John Prine, Richie Havens and Levon Helm bring in the baby boomers, while Andrew Bird, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and the Low Anthem bring in youngin’s. At the end of the weekend, everyone goes home having seen at least something they weren’t expecting to love or even care about, and the music community grows and benefits.
When I walked away from the Dawes stage, head shaking in disbelief that I missed the beginning of their show, I heard an older woman ask the musicians while they packed up their gear, “Where are you going next!?!” The entire band, still seemingly seizing with excitement told her they’d be going to Western Massachusetts. The woman told them she was from right around there and that she would be at their next show. If she hadn’t been introduced to them at Newport, would she still be there? I think not.
Filed under: New Music, Nina | Tags: alt-country, folk, Futurebirds, Honeycutters, summer
photo by Ryan McGinley
So it’s almost August again and there’s twangin’ in the air. The beloved New York City concrete jungle (with its skyscraper landscapes, dirty rivers, boiling hellhole subway platforms, and up-all-night rooftop shenanigans) where I spend my summers is worlds away from the sun-soaked, porch-sittin, beer-sippin, slow day south of the folk idyll.
Still, there’s something about summer that makes me gravitate to folk songs and simply strummed alt-country sounds. Maybe it’s an old affinity for Wilco and whiskey. Maybe isolated weeks in Tennessee and North Carolina have lodged themselves permanently under my skin like a deer tick (or like Deer Tick, for that matter). Maybe it’s the heat bleaching my brain to dissociate from city hustle and crave simpler things – a patch of grass, an old guitar, fireflies and lazy nights.
Whatever the cause, these days there are often relaxed Americana tunes keeping me sane throughout frantic urban adventures. Two new bands have stood out in particular.
Futurebirds are a great new band that hail from Athens, GA. They raised stray dogs, raised some hell, graduated college, cruised down to SXSW2010 in a ’98 suburban war wagon where they generated a good amount of positive attention, and put out a debut LP this July that sounds like a soundtrack to a Flannery O’Connor story. Their singalong harmonies and slide guitars are infectious and their twangy lyrics are genuine. Diverse moments on their debut LP Hampton’s Lullaby draw from a wide net of influences (for example, waves of reverb and the melancholy refrain of “the sun ain’t gonna save my life” on “Battle for Rome” recalls the best of My Morning Jacket) but it’s an honest album well worth checking out, full of wide roads, warm moments, and wondrous summer.
The other notable mention is a track by a band called the Honeycutters. From their name to their all-analog approach and near-total lack of self-consciousness, they run the risk of being too sweet. But “Irene,” the title song off their debut album, is completely charming. Lyrics about smoking Marlboros by the railroad tracks, sipping dandelion soup, and being a kid in North Carolina are wrapped in thick nostalgia and vivid imagery. The “Goodnight Irene” refrain references an oft-covered country ballad by the same name – a whiskey-soaked wistful ode to lost love. Lead singer Amanda Anne Platt’s beautiful voice is tinged with a similar longing (in her case, for simpler childhood times), but the Honeycutters’ lullaby leaves you not with a hangover but with a sense that everything just might be okay.
Street cred it ain’t, but what can I say? I’m a sucker for Southern hospitality.
Tom Waits – Goodnight Irene (for comparison and because Tom Waits is a G)
