I began by thinking of this post as a “best of” or “top of
2013” list, but that just seems too inaccurate. I know how much I don’t know
about all the music that came out this year; so I’d be leaving off
music/artists that would manifest themselves as dope-slaps later (see
“how-the-hell-did-I-miss-them?” category). I also don’t want to get into noting
music or artists from this year that “Yeah, I do know, but for me—ehhh, not so much.” Also, if all politics is
local, certainly all music is local, too. So my perceptions are skewed both by
concerts available to me here and the musicians based here.
So here instead are my “Totally Biased, Only Moderately Informed, By No Means Comprehensive, Completely Capricious Personal Favorites” of the year 2013.
Favorite New (more or less) Artists of 2013
Jake Bugg
What can I say—I’m getting nostalgic for some good old
British punk. And he delivers it fresh, 2013 style, not frozen in some 1980s
cryogenically preserved rehash. Two fingers and two thumbs up.
Valerie June
A voice like nothing else. If Valerie June
met the devil and Robert Johnson at the crossroads, they’d be so darn charmed,
one would offer to play backup and the other would happily just hand her
success—no strings attached. And bake her
a pie.
Favorite How-the-Hell-Did-I-Miss-Them-Until-Now Artists of 2013
Frank Turner
This is the humiliating “what rock have you
been hiding under?” category, but still it does seem like you’da thunk I would
have run across Frank Turner’s name by now. At the ripe old age of 32, he’s
practically an elder statesman. Or, as he might put it “God
dammit Amy, we’re not kids any more.” Sorry,
Frank.
Charlie Parr
Seriously, the man lives in my own state, has
been a fixture for more than a decade, and literally I only seem to notice his
name this year? There were teenagers at a recent performance who knew every word
of this rootys blues artist’s songs. Teenagers.
They didn’t even have iPods to listen
to him on yet when he first started recording, for god’s sake. Wakey
wakey.
The National
Ok, they were on my mind with High Velvet, but even that was so far
from their first rodeo that I’m thinking maybe I fell off my own bronco and
suffered some sort of memory loss that I’m only now really paying attention. Trouble Will Find Me much more quickly
than this blogger found The National. Hel-LOOOO—oooh.
Favorite Singles
Good and Gone (Frank Turner)
I frankly (ha!) could have picked any one of a number of
titles off Tape Deck Heart, but
there’s something about the wheels-on-road guitar strum and refrain
“Sometimes the things you need are right back where you started from” that has
you suddenly bursting out singing it at strange moments.
So fuck you Hollywood
For raising us on dreams of happy endings
In postcards of the prom kings and the prom queens
For teaching us that love was free and easy
No One Knows Nothing Anymore (Billy Bragg)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xDd-BvClH8
Bragg’s strengths are in poetry not pottery, he says, although
both build something artistic and useful out of lumps of nothing. Ah, Nothing
and Nothingness: cue quavering bass. I can’t get the simple yet well-krafted
visual of a Zen Buddhist finding humanity frustratingly unfathomable from No One Knows Nothing out of my head—no
matter how hard I bang said head against a wall. It’s been that kind of a
political and personal year. But, of course, being Billy Bragg, he still turns
“nothingness” into “hopeful new beginning.” I guess he just can’t help himself.
High up on a mountain top, somebody with a skinhead crop
Is thinking deep thoughts for us all.
Serenity is all around, but if you listen you can hear the sound
Of one head being banged against the wall.
But what if our ancestors had stayed up in the trees
Would we still be weighed down by these worries?
No one knows nothing anymore
Nobody really knows the score
Since nobody knows anything
Let’s break it down and start again
What Doesn’t Kill You (Jake Bugg)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxjZbFpBpbESomething on this “Favorite Songs” list needs to be able to be cranked up to 11 and danced to hard, and this one certainly allows you to do that. It’s a simple lyric in some ways, yet a perfect, “well, welcome to the school of hard knocks” anthem that’s needed when you enter your 20s… and 30s…and 40s... and—you get the picture. (In that way, it’s similar to Turner’s Good and Gone, which sums it all up in one particularly tired “Oh, fuck you.”)
What doesn’t kill ya?
What doesn’t hurt?
Sometimes you feel you’re up against the world
What doesn’t kill ya?
What doesn’t break?
This life it seems can bring you to your knees
You try you bleed, then finally you breathe.
Line of Fire (Junip)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omb4zzbvEeY
One word: haunting. From the first time you heard it to the last time you heard it: haunting. I’m sure 20 years from now it will haunt us again, resurfacing on some film soundtrack or unearthed by some kid from the old folk’s record collection. Turns out not everything they listened to was total shite after all, eh kid?
One word: haunting. From the first time you heard it to the last time you heard it: haunting. I’m sure 20 years from now it will haunt us again, resurfacing on some film soundtrack or unearthed by some kid from the old folk’s record collection. Turns out not everything they listened to was total shite after all, eh kid?
If put to the test
Would you step back from the line of fire
Hold everything back
All emotions and desires
Convince yourself to be someone else
And hold back from the world
Your lack of confidence
What you choose to believe in
Dictates your rise or your fall
Good Friend (Cloud Cult)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07pDgNMJbDo
“All
I need is a good, good friend.” I can get behind that sentiment, and at this
point we need something cheerful, don’t we? That said, there’s certainly still
sadness to this song, but the chorus soars and lifts you up with it. I could
have instead suggested as this song’s more melancholy twin the kidney punch
that is Elephant by Jason Isbell. But
since I’ve already got none of us knowing anything and the rest of us good and
gone and in the line of fire and almost killed—well, I don’t want any potential
readers too depressed to read on, so I’m sticking with Good Friend.
Some of us are laughing, while some of us are choking
Some of us can’t change til every bone has been broken.
All the while the maker just sits there joking, “You never really were alone.”
All I need is a good good friend
To get me through this….
With the exception of the Mermaid Avenue records, this is hands
down Bragg’s best album since Don’t Try
This at Home. Between then and now, he put out some solid music, positioned
himself as much as a political writer at home as a musician, put on the mantle
of godfather to a younger, up-and-coming pool of musicians (now referring to
himself as “Uncle Billy” and “Folkie-wan Kenobi”). He’s also at this point a
fully adopted member of the Americana
clan. But for all that aging and evolving he sounds quite fundamentally and
quintessentially Bill Bragg on Tooth and
Nail. He jangles, he croons, he rocks, he twangs, he fist-pumps, he holds toes
to the fire, he continues to unite us all.
From the itching-to-begin opening of January Song
I’m so tightly wound and tensionedFeel just like a guitar stringWaiting to reveal emotionsTouch me and you’ll hear me sing
To the authority-challenging verses of No One Knows Nothing
Let’s stop pretending
We can manage our way out of here.
Let’s stop defending the indefensible.
Let’s stop relying on
The lecturing of the experts
Whose spin just makes our plight incomprehensible.
To the
equal parts flawed, faithful, and infuriating lover in several songs, including
Swallow My Pride:
How can a man be strongIf he can’t even lift a telephone and say he’s wrong?
And
of course the inspirational Bragg in Tomorrow’s
Gonna Be a Better Day:
To the misanthropic, misbegotten merchants of gloomWho look into their crystal balls and prophesize our doom,Let the death knell chime, it’s the end of timeLet the cynics put their blinkers on and toast our declineDon’t become demoralized by this chorus of complaintIt’s a sure sign that the old world is terminally quaintTomorrow’s going to be a better dayNo matter what the siren voices sayTomorrow’s gong to be a better dayWe’re going to make it that way.
Let’s
hope Mr. Bragg forgets the brutal tour schedule he’s given himself in 2013 and
instead just remembers delivering a satisfying album in only 5 days (thanks to
the clearly magical Joe Henry) and so (the hard part of the labor forgotten) delivers
another bouncing baby bragg in 2014 or at least 2015. Five years is too long to
wait. We’re not getting any younger, Uncle Billy.
I mean fuck, god damn, this album
is good! Quite literally, “fuck” and “god damn” as Turner does use those words
liberally on the album. My English major mind did at first make me want to say, “Come on, Frank, use your big boy words,” but FUCK GOD DAMN he DOES.
O joy to find lyrics that are poetic and yet something you’d shout and dance
to. English major mind satisfied.
There are so many gems on here,
whether in the stories told through the lyrics or the poetry of the lyrics, it’s
hard to not just scan the whole booklet and link to it, but here are a few:
Plain Sailing Weather [extra points
for referencing a favorite movie of mine]
Amelie lied to me: This was supposed to be easy. I foundThe one damn person to help me fall asleep in the night.But sleeping gets tiring, and dark reminds me of dyingAnd as long as this feeble heart is still beating, you willFind me rushing through every room, switching on all the lights.
Tell Tale Signs
You know you kind of remind me of scars on my armsThat I hid as best I could, that I covered with ink, but inThe right kind of light they still bleed through,Showing that there are some things I just can’t changeNo matter what I do: the tell-tale signs of being used,Of being trapped inside of you.
The Fisher King Blues
We were born without meaning, we will die without reason,and the world will not shrug all that much at our passing.Yes you can try and try and try.But no one ever makes it out alive.
Broken Piano
I found the hulk, the rusting bulkOf a shattered old piano.Someone had torn out some of the keysWith cruel care, not thoughtlessly,In such a way that one could only playMinor melodies.So I sat down in my sadness, beneath your window,And played sad songs on the minor keys of a broken piano.
And he’s willing to take risks
musically, as he does in Broken Piano
(whether due to hubris or hutzpah, but I’ll shortly establish I appreciate
hutzpah). I don’t think I’ve heard something like Broken Piano dropped into what is essentially a rock album (for all his labeling by “real
critics” as some sort of folk offshoot) since Jeff
Buckley dropped a little something called Corpus
Christi Carol smack between Lover,
You Should Have Come Over and Eternal
Life.
The imagery and lyricism of the
song deserve the “unusual” vocal treatment. And kudos as well for
making Broken Piano remind me of two
other favorites Way Over Yonder in
a Minor Key and (oh, how things can be tied together) Hallelujah (“It goes like
this, the fourth the fifth; the minor chord, the major lift...the baffled king
composing hallelujah.”)
I have long used the guide that if
you like at least 3 songs off an album, you should get the album. That’s my
tipping point. Invariably, I find on the album more great songs that haven’t
made it into radio rotation. Of course, in these days of streaming, this is an
old-fashioned notion all the way around. But my point here is that I don’t just
like 3 or so songs off this album, I like all 12. Wait—who am I kidding?—I pretty
much love all the songs on this
album, and since mine is the one with bonus tracks, technically that number is 16.
The only thing missing from this
album is a guarantee in writing—for instance, in a tattoo on his person—that Frank
Turner will be putting out another such in 2014. Pretty please, Frank?
Pushin’ Against a Stone (Valerie June)
Elsewhere I gave a rundown of some issues I had had with this album, but when your criticism is that you love the person’s voice so much that you want to hear it even more front-and-center that’s not much of a criticism, now, is it?
Where to begin? I guess with Workin’ Woman’s Blues, since it starts the collection. I just love that this is that old blues style and yet so fresh—and coming from a woman. About time! Hey, if anybody knows the blues, it’s women. Step aside, boys, Valerie June is here. Tennessee Time and you’re in another place, a little further north and more country, but also still in another time (Tennessee time, of course). You Can’t Be Told yet another “like nothing else / crank up the radio” tune. And then the dark Shotgun—like I said, boys, step aside.
I skipped over several songs, as I’ve already reached my “more than 3 songs” threshold, but with the full intention of coming back to Somebody to Love, which you can hear not one but two ways on this collection. I think what would have been perfect would have been the arrangement of the original track two, but with the main vocal brought more forward as on the “hidden” (or twelfth) track. Not quite the same thing, as this is just a shared song title not the same song as Jefferson Airplane, but as Otis Redding purportedly said of Aretha’s Respect “That girl stole my song.
If you need somebody (musically) to love, let me recommend Valerie June.
Where to begin? I guess with Workin’ Woman’s Blues, since it starts the collection. I just love that this is that old blues style and yet so fresh—and coming from a woman. About time! Hey, if anybody knows the blues, it’s women. Step aside, boys, Valerie June is here. Tennessee Time and you’re in another place, a little further north and more country, but also still in another time (Tennessee time, of course). You Can’t Be Told yet another “like nothing else / crank up the radio” tune. And then the dark Shotgun—like I said, boys, step aside.
I skipped over several songs, as I’ve already reached my “more than 3 songs” threshold, but with the full intention of coming back to Somebody to Love, which you can hear not one but two ways on this collection. I think what would have been perfect would have been the arrangement of the original track two, but with the main vocal brought more forward as on the “hidden” (or twelfth) track. Not quite the same thing, as this is just a shared song title not the same song as Jefferson Airplane, but as Otis Redding purportedly said of Aretha’s Respect “That girl stole my song.
If you need somebody (musically) to love, let me recommend Valerie June.
Very Honorable Mention: The Avett Brothers, The Magpie and the Dandelion
But perhaps what blows everything away is bassist Bob Crawford and his family’s circumstances, as their little girl Hallie fights brain cancer. If you think you’re having a rough day, check out this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9fK-sMm7ys#t=537. On the lighter side of Avett Brothers band parenting experiences, there’s this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAtFqDhV6As.
Three words that just get easier and easier to say about The Avett Brothers: I and Love and You.
Favorite Performances
Billy Bragg – Cedar Cultural Center (Sept)
Oh, yeah, big surprise there. I am unapologetically a big Billy Bragg fan, so of course that was my favorite show. I’ve already elsewhere noted that Bragg is to his fans as lembas are to hobbits traveling through Mordor: enheartening, delivering the strength to get up and live another day. And it’s not that he’s relentlessly cheerful. It’s more like he’s just … relentless. He’s a wide-eyed optimist but in a twist of that meaning “Eyes open wide, knows what he’s looking at, and yet still an optimist.” When he sang “Tomorrow’s gonna be a better day, we’re gonna make it that way” by golly everyone at the Cedar believed him. Still do, months later.
Bragg gets flack from various social media trolls that claim
he’s now a sell-out and “champagne socialist,” living in a fancy house—but the
man said clearly more than 30 years ago “I like toast as much as anyone, but
not for breakfast, dinner, and tea.” Apparently, they weren’t listening then,
either, to what he’s trying to say. Apparently some people’s interpretation of
all people having a decent standard of living means…people aren’t supposed to
have a decent standard of living??? Ok—that makes no sense, trolls. If the
trolls did as much pro bono and sheer advocacy work in their entire lives as he
does in a single week (including, as he had done that day, appear at a union
rally at the U of M), the world would be a better place and we’d all be washing
down our toast with champagne. Prost, Uncle Billy.
Anyway, he writes good songs, he tells good stories, and he
gives you hope. There you have it—end of Rhapsody
in Bill: Favorite Performance. Period.
Trip Shakespeare Reunion – New Standards Holiday Show (Dec)
http://www.thecurrent.org/listen/minnesota/the_current/performances/2013/12/23/new_standards_holiday_show_2013_20131223 (beginning at about 1:09:15)
I’m sure Elaine Harris’s family and friends love her, but I
still bet not so many have yelled so loud just because she walked into a room
as what happened at that first New Standards Twin Cities show this year. The
guys have played together before, but it wasn’t a true reunion without Elaine
as well—after a 20-year hiatus. And a lovely twist on the perennial performance
of Snow Days at this show to have the
originating band play it (although also fun to have Chan Poling guest-sing the
bridge and lyric-drop his own recently
reunited (although we don’t know for how long) ‘80s band The Suburbs in
the middle of it.
This “Favorite” is very much personal, as I was one of those people listening to Trip Shakespeare in the backs of tiny bars with crowds of perhaps 30-40 people, back in the late 80s. Substitute your own reunion memory you hopefully had yourself this year, and we’ll just smile nostalgically at each other as we each take our own “TripS” down memory lane.
This “Favorite” is very much personal, as I was one of those people listening to Trip Shakespeare in the backs of tiny bars with crowds of perhaps 30-40 people, back in the late 80s. Substitute your own reunion memory you hopefully had yourself this year, and we’ll just smile nostalgically at each other as we each take our own “TripS” down memory lane.
Low – Rock the Garden (June)
I will admit I was at first disappointed when I realized
that all Low was intending to play was Do
You Know How to Waltz turned into one long drone (yes, literally, just what
would be normally described as drone, played by the 3 players, for their entire
set), resulting in a big social media and local music scene brouhaha. I had heard Sparhawk’s Retribution Gospel
Choir several times but I had yet to actually hear Low perform (I know, I know—this blog is just one humiliating
revelation after another), and I had been looking forward to it.
But it struck me while they were still droning on stage that
perhaps I was actually seeing the most Low-like concert anyone was ever going
to see: That this was perhaps the penultimate,
what-better-captures-the-unique-entity-that-is-Low performance than this
political statement. Plus, it looked like something of a performance feat to
me. It had the feel of a jazz improvisation piece, sustained over about 20
minutes (as I can see from the video—I didn’t clock it myself at the time; I
was busy staring and tilting my head from side to side like dogs do in TV commercials).
Honorable Mention: Valerie June – Cedar Cultural Center (Dec)
Did I already mention she is charming? And her voice is like nothing else? Yep, I guess I did. Catch her at a small venue while you still can.
Favorite Touching Concert Moment:
Joe Henry (yep, guy who produced Billy Bragg’s album) performing a stripped-down Taken on the Chin, dedicated to Slim Dunlap’s wife. Somebody hand me a hankie. (The Dakota, 12/3)Favorite Humorous Concert Moment:
Benson Ramsey’s (The Pines) journey to the center of the earth. Read the video setup I put in another blog post and play the video. What makes this so funny to me? Is it what he’s saying? Or how he’s saying it? Or how little it has to do with anything he was doing before or did after? No, it’s the indulgent reaction of his fellow band members; that’s what really makes it for me. Goof ball. (Cedar Cultural Center 11/22)
Favorite Ironic Concert Moment:
Father John Misty, having just chastised the audience about being present in the moment rather than filming it and so got people to put away their cell phones, then turning around and asking if anybody had caught on their cell phone the freak boomerang shot to his forehead made by a demo CD flung on the stage by someone in the audience. Nope. Sorry, dude. Don’t worry, no Father John Mistys were harmed in the not-making of this film. (First Avenue 10/11)Favorite Classy Concert Moment:
Father John Misty not being mad about getting hit in the forehead as noted above. Of course the collective gasp of horror from the audience would have had some ameliorating effect; but still, he had the right to make at least a little fuss and chose instead to absolve the (probably also horrified) guy, and undoubtedly saved him from getting escorted from the building.
#1 Overall Favorite Concert Moment
(Technically, After-Concert-in-Autograph-Line Moment):
Getting a hug from Billy Bragg (a very
kind man; have I mentioned he’s a favorite of mine?). Technically a hug has
nothing to do with music, except as a tangible, physical manifestation of how
good music can make you feel.
And on that note, bring on 2014.
