Leftover Cheese

The Oregonian is reporting on The Dandy Warhol’s latest effort called Breathe Easy, which will be released on October 21, with all the profits going to the Three Rivers Land Conservancy.

Breathe Easy Trailer from World's Fair on Vimeo.

Breathe Easy is a collective effort that features multi-layered tracks laid down by friends of the band at their famed Odditorium studio in Portland. According to the press release, the Dandy’s have always striven to build and promote a community for musicians, and in 2007, they took a very purposeful step in making this a definitive part of their ethos.

For more, see Breathe Easy on MySpace.

In the video above, Elizabeth Cook, who Nanci Griffith calls “this generation’s Loretta Lynn,” tears it up holler-style with her husband Tim Carroll.

But don’t be fooled by her footwork, this is a complicated and modern woman.

She grew up the daughter of musician/moonshiner parents, but Elizabeth also graduated from Georgia Southern University in 1996 with dual degrees in Accounting and Computer Information Systems, and accepted a job offer from Price Waterhouse’s Nashville office. But her gift for music proved inescapable and the young accountant signed a publishing deal within a year.

Cook’s 2007 release, Balls, was produced by Rodney Crowell. “This is a very ‘indie’ album,”Crowell says. “In order to get it made, we all had to pull together and pitch in. But, Elizabeth brings out the best in people. Most of the record was performed live. There’s very little overdubbing and no layering. What I wanted was a snapshot of Elizabeth’s sensibilities. In the end, it was almost as if we filmed these songs.”

MP3 Offering: “Times are Tough in Rock and Roll” off of Balls

I enjoyed seeing Anders Parker play solo last Thursday afternoon at The Beast House in downtown Portland. It was also nice to sit outside on a bench and rap with the troubadour. This is what we talked about:

Q. How do you feel about Iron & Wine stealing your look?

A. (laughs) Only the few and the proud can grow beards like this.

Q. Where do you live?

A. I’m in Burlington, Vermont now.

Q. Does that have an impact on your music?

A. We just moved. My girlfriend and I just moved up there (from Queens, NY) in July. Since we moved up there, I’ve been in the studio. I have a studio in the house and I’ve been working on a new recordings, so in the fact that I have the space to do it, yeah.

Q. Do you mostly play solo, like today?

A. I’ve done everything from duos to trios to bigger bands, but lately it’s been mostly solo stuff with an occasional band tour.

Q. I noticed that you were recording your own riffs and then using a loop. What does that bring to your show?

A. In my formative years, I used to play a lot of open mics. I came out of that singer-songrwiter/folk/pop/songcraft school. It’s sort of a murky thing to define. I started out playing acoustic guitar in coffee shops and bars. I liked doing that, but I guess for more of an interesting experience for me and hopefully for the people listening I like to do a little bit more. There’s spontaneity to it. A lot of improv involed in it. Covering all those bases on an acoustic guitar, you can do it to a certain extent, but it’s another flavor, another tool.

Q. What drives you to create? What inspires you to write and perform?

A. I just find music endlessly interesting. There are a lot of metaphors, but it’s kind of a river. There’s always something to learn. As a writer, there’s something about that spark of writing a tune. It’s hard to define. There’s a mystery to it. There are certain skills you can learn and techniques and what have you, but that actual spark of a song coming or showing up at your door is a pretty wild thing.

Q. Is there anything else you’d like us to know about your work and what you’re up to?

A. I’ve got a bunch of records I’m recording, right now. That’s what I’ve been doing the past two months. Finishing all these records that have been half-fininshed. I’ve used this year to write and record.

Anders Parker’s “14th & Division (Live)” was released by Portland label, Bladen County Records on August 14th. Parker is also a member of Gob Iron with Jay Farrar.

Last Saturday night we made the wise decision to attend the early show at Doug Fir Lounge. Portland band Blue Skies for Black Hearts played an acoustic set, followed by another acoustic set from Oakland’s Rogue Wave. I’ve been listening to Rogue Wave’s Out of the Shadow for some time, but I’d never heard Blue Skies before. Both bands appealed to me, particularly in the intimate confines of Doug Fir’s basement.

Recently, PerformerMag wrote a cover piece on Blue Skies and provided some insight into their new album, Serenades and Hand Grenades, released on Portland label King of Hearts Records.

(It’s) an album that’s thick with nods to the punchy beat of the British Invasion bands and the rootsy rock of Tom Petty, but doesn’t feel out of place next to likeminded indie pop bands like The New Pornographers. Though the album was recorded digitally in ProTools, Serenades has the warmth of an analog, direct to tape session — something the band pulled off by recording everything live, using a real plate reverb rather than touching up the tracks after the fact, and finally being able to afford the technology necessary to help get the sound they wanted to hear.

Speaking of sound, singer/guitarist Pat Kearns served a brief stint as a live sound engineer for bands like Spoon and Death Cab for Cutie, and has worked as a producer and engineer for bands from all over the Northwest, including The Soda Pop Kids, Exploding Hearts, and The Very Foundation.

Colorado’s acoustic jam scene will have a massive audience tonight as Yonder Mountain String Band takes the stage at Mile High Stadium just prior to Barack Obama’s acceptance speech.

Also scheduled to perform at the event are will.i.am, Stevie Wonder and Dave Matthews Band.

The convention anticipates 75,000 people in attendance, and a huge international and national media audience, for the acceptance event. 

This 2008 Democratic National Convention is the first convention to be held in Denver in one hundred years.

I hope the band plays “Two Hits and the Joint Turned Brown.” Although “Finally Saw the Light” would also do nicely.

Feast on this. DocuTunes.tv is new site featuring an amazing series of videos shot in Martha’s Vineyard, with musicians Ben Taylor, Kate Taylor, Carly Simon and others.

These are exceptionally well done videos from the documentarians at Film-Truth Productions, also in Martha’s Vineyard.

“Got to make it somehow on the dreams you still believe” -Robert Hunter

Jerry in 1974, with Wall of Sound

Jerry Garcia was born on this day in 1942.

For the next nine days Nugs.net is streaming “All Jerry all the time.” At this moment, they’re sharing music from deep in the second set of 7/21/72, Seattle. The music is working to bring me back, not to that time (I was seven), but back to my old self, a self I think of as better in many ways.

I miss Jerry, a man I learned so much from.

Tony Furtado was one of my favorite performers in Boulder, and now he’s going to be one of my favorite performers in Portland. Can’t wait to catch up with him when we get to Pacific Wonderland.

I’ve been a fan of Jerry Joseph almost as long as he’s been a touring musician. Today, I clicked on his site as was pleased to see a link to this short doc by Jason Scianno.

I’d love to see a feature length doc on Jerry someday. So much so, I might have to produce one (with his blessing, of course).

Troubling times came silverlined
…Found a diamond in the rough now I’m gonna make it mine

Donna the Buffalo’s new album, Silverlined is out today. Unlike their last record, Life’s a Ride, which was recorded in DTB’s home studio, (The Tracking Shack, in Perry City, New York) Silverlined went many miles, and has many hands in its making. Only one track was recorded in their home studio; two were recorded at Yes Master studio in Nashville, Tennessee, ten at Echo Mountain in Asheville, North Carolina, and several vocal tracks were laid down at Sound Cell Studio in Huntsville, Alabama.

Guest artists Béla Fleck, Claire Lynch, David Hidalgo and Amy Helm appear on the record.

James McMurtry, son of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and Oscar-winning screenwriter Larry McMurtry, is a brave writer in his own right. One listen to “Cheney’s Toy” off his latest album, Just Us Kids, is proof enough.

You’re the man
Show ‘em what you’re made of
You’re no longer daddy’s boy
You’re the man
That they’re all afraid of
But you’re only Cheney’s toy

Washington Post reporter J. Freedom du Lac says McMurtry is a “famously caustic observer of Americana.” Freedom du Lac also says McMurtry, 46, has crafted one of the year’s best albums in Just Us Kids, which artfully mixes provocative portraits with political screeds.

McMurtry’s dad is justifiably proud of his son’s work and achievements. “One element of music is poetry, and poetry is a lot harder than fiction,” his father says. “A lyric is the hardest form. You have to concentrate and squeeze those words. I respect James a lot for having found his own art and done it so well.”

When McMurtry is at home in Austin, he performs a midnight set every Wednesday night at the Continental Club on South Congress. He’s almost always preceded onstage by singer-songwriter Jon Dee Graham.

Graham says, “He’s pretty fucking precise; I think he’s always looking for the right words. And as a songwriter, I respect the hell out of him. He’s able to create, whole cloth, out of thin air, things that never happened to people who don’t exist, and to make them funny, witty, insightful and a general comment on the world. How do you do that?”

MP3: “Cheney’s Toy by James McMurtry

Courtesy of Flickr user, Mike Bouchard

Jim DeRogatis, music critic for Chicago Sun Times likes Alejandro Escovedo’s new album, “Real Animal.” Not as much as I do, but that’s okay.

Blame a midlife crisis or a fury prompted of any number of dramas in Alejandro Escovedo’s life, from divorce to a near-fatal bout with Hepatitis C—but at age 57, the veteran Texas roots-rocker has returned for the first time in his long solo career to the aggressive, at-times punk-rock sounds of his earliest band, the Nuns, with a few hints of pioneering alternative-country combos Rank & File and the True Believers thrown in for good measure.

Co-written with Chuck Prophet, produced by the legendary Tony Visconti (David Bowie, T. Rex) and propelled by a crack band that includes Chicago-based violinst Susan Voelz, “Real Animal” is rife with borrowed licks from Bowie and one of Escovedo’s biggest heroes, Lou Reed.

I’m still listening for the best track on a record full of contenders. Andrew Dansby of The Houston Chronicle likes the opening track, “Always a Friend.” He says it “as infectious a pop song as Escovedo has written.” I like track four, “Smoke.”

[MP3] “Smoke” by Alejandro Escovedo

In February, The Panderers released their debut EP entitled “Hotshot’s Boy” on Snack Bar, a label created by Mike Doughty.

According to the band’s MySpace, the EP was produced by Dave Wilder and Pete McNeal, who came together on the deep belief in a trove of songs authored by singer/songwriter Scott Wynn. Scott’s roots stem from deep east Kentucky coal country where his father and uncles worked coal as did their father before them. Scott is the first of his family not to work coal and to attend college. Scott borrows much from the baseness and humility of coal country, but you have to remember that coal can also be fire. So, the music pretty much reflects that….very base, bare, rootsy…and/or pure fire.

Silver Jews’ new album, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea was released on Tuesday.

Here’s some of what Paste has to say:

Though chief semite David Berman sounds less electrified—and more gentrified—than usual on Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, he’s the rare songwriter who’s better for it.

As a vehicle for Berman’s words, just as much as a follow-up to his 1999 poetry collection Actual Air would be, Lookout Mountain is a volume to be consumed in one’s own time, filed on the shelf, and eventually taught in seminars as an example of form and poise.

In other words, this one’s a must have. But I wouldn’t file it on a shelf. Put it into listening rotation, straight away.

[MP3] “San Francisco, BC” by Silver Jews

Rolling Stone reporters are soaking up the music in rural Tennessee this weekend. Kevin O’Donnell has this to say about Battles, a band I’ve never heard of until now.

Battles were a solid choice to perform on the first night of the fest. The New York-based four-piece — fronted by Tyondai Braxton, the son of jazz musician Anthony Braxton — turned out a killer hour long set of tricked-out, prog-rock grooves, which ranged from avant-garde electro-jazz to freaked-out space funk. The clear highlight of the group’s set was “Atlas,” a fantastic piece of robo-rock that mixes Daft Punk-style electro-grooves with industrial atmospherics.

Here’s a video that helps introduce the band:

[MP3] “Race In” by Battles