The Black Keys are teaming up with Damon Dash yet again to bring an interesting project: Black Roc 2. These types of genre melds always intrigue me. Usually not enough to rave about them or listen to an album of this nature ad nausea, but I like the idea behind it. I heart The Black Keys and I greatly appreciate Talib Kweli, so, I’ll give it a once over when it comes out.
Also, smoking in the studio is a big deal.
Wow! I didn’t know that
a concert could be like that. Attending a U2 concert is everything it’s cracked up to be.
My wife and I were smart and parked at the State Fair ground, then took a shuttle to TCF stadium for 1/2 price parking. Arrived at the stadium at 6:45ish and went directly into the t-shirt lines, which btw were ridiculous. It’s like people haven’t bought a t-shirt before. Huge lines and the people at the front wanted to touch all the different shirts and try them on. I mean, do people really not know what size t-shirt they wear. Side note…not many great t-shirts, just a cool gray one and a cool vintage Achtung Baby t-shirt.
The crowd was very unique….at least for my concert experiences. I’m used to crowds full of super emo dudes with studded earings, dyed black hair and a style that says “I took 4 hours to look this good, but I don’t care” or the super hippy look. This crowd was generationally diverse. I saw lots of kids, lots of old people and lots of people in between. When you walk into the stadium, you are in awe of this giant stage they put together for this tour (the claw). It looks like one of those claws from the claw game where you drop it to almost win a stuffed creature, usally found at Chuckie Cheese or gas stations in Wisconsin. It was huge, green and looked like it had giant yellow junior mints holding it all together.
Interpol started playing at about 7pm and they did exactly what a openning act is supposed to do and warm up the audience for the main event. I’m not a huge Interpol guy; I have one of their albums. Something about them seemed may me think “This must be what it was like to see Duran Duran in the 80’s”. They sounded good, were sort of energetic and entertaining to watch. Nothing extra special to watch and that’s what I expect out of the opening act. If it was an Interpol concert, I’d expect them to be going much more crazy.
After that, more people filled in, the weather started to brew a little, the sky turned dark, all prep for U2 to begin. U2 walks to the stage to Bowie’s “Major Tom” and I got chills. The stadium was pumped; they hit the stage and opened up with Even Better Than the Real Thing. This was the moment where I realized that U2 concerts are super awesome. The lights were awesome, the sound was amazing, the performance was incredible. Bono has every rock star thing mastered. If he was in Madden game he’s probably be 99’s across the board. I’m starting to realize that my words aren’t going to do this concert justice at all.
Moving on… The wind seemed to pick up on all the heavier songs like Until the End of the World and Get on Your Boots. At one point the wind was destroying me, there were fireworks launching from Minneapolis and U2 was making my skin melt off from all the rocking. I’m not one to sing with the band at a concert and I sung. Then the rain came….and I didn’t care. I actually thought it was more awesome. I was soaked and watching U2 rock out in the rain. Lightning is flashing in the distance, Bono is making all sorts of rain references between songs like singing Purple Rain, Rain Drops keep falling on my Head and We’re singing in the Rain. Bono embraced the rain, so did I, and I’m thinking 90% of the people there felt the same way. They played a good mix of hits and rarities.
Bono referenced the fact that at one point, Minneapolis was set to be the final show of the 360 tour, and declared that tonight is the start of the ‘end of tour party’. Somali pop star K’naan, whom Bono spoke with before the show about the famine in Somalia, joined the band on stage to sing Stand By Me for the people suffering in Somalia. Bono dedicates Stuck In A Moment to Amy Winehouse, who died earlier in the day.
This review is getting too long and that should tell you that I really enjoyed this concert. If you’ve never seen U2 live before, you should do all that you can to make it happen, no matter if you are 70 years or 7. If they go on tour again, you must take advantage and go.
-FFTB
Went to the Fleet Foxes show last night at the State Theater in 
Minneapolis. Overall I’d give the show a B-. Let me explain…
First off, this is the 2nd time I’ve seen Fleet Foxes in concert. I saw them a year or two ago at the Cedar Cultural center. That experience tainted this one because:
A. The Cedar is much more intimate
2. It was the 1st time I saw them
III. I could see everyone super well, and soak in the uncanny harmonies.
Don’t get me wrong, the State theater is cool, but everyone always prefers seeing the bands they love in smaller places.
The audience at the show last night was super weird. The Fleet Foxes allow for some down time between songs to tune etc. During some of these down times some audience member yelled some stupid idiot stuff. Like “Turn down the treble” and “The mix sucks”. I think I have a pretty good ear, I’ve been a sound engineer and musician for a long time and the mix sounded great to me. (Ir)regardless, what the f&* do these guys think the Fleet Foxes are going to do, say “Hey Gary, I think this guys yelling stuff is on to some good feedback, can you throw him at the sound board.” Anyway, that made stuff pretty awkward and made some other audience member want to remedy the situation by yelling stuff like “I want to have your babies” and “we love you”. Fleet Foxes are a pretty chill band, folky indie music, so everyone was sitting down enjoying the music. Everyone except for 4 dudes about 20 rows up from me. I think that these guys missed the turn for the DMB concert. I seemed like they wanted a mosh pit. They kept yelling, “Get up, Stand up!”. I could understand that for a rock concert, but not Fleet Foxes. Come on guys, embarrassing! The last weird thing was the applause after the 3, 4, and 5th songs. The audience went nuts after these songs. They were screaming and standing, applauding like they were watching Babe Ruth hit a grand slams to win the world series. The rest of the concert consisted of normal applause.
The good stuff..
-They played almost every song that they have in their collection.
-They have the best harmonies you’ll ever hear live
-Robin Pecknold
-Visually you can tell that every member has an important role in contributing to the song.
-Mykonos was played and sounded awesome
love
FFTB
It’s nerve-racking sharing what you’ve created with other people who you respect. I spent last weekend recording the drums and bass for an album of my own. I had signed up Matt Patrick(bass/engineer) and Steve Goold(drums/etc..)
to do this work. Coming up to this event I was pretty nervous and excited for the whole thing because of the possibility of Matt or Steve saying “This song just isn’t very good”. The plan was to bring in 10 scratch tracks of the songs I would like them to play on, then take out the bass and drum parts and replace/change them with what we decide. With the way I write music it’s usually the case that having the musical insight of more people contributing to the song makes the song much better then when it is 100% me. I tend to make most of my drum parts very drumAndBass or just sort of lame. Same goes for about half of the bass parts I come up with.
As things stand I need to:
-Rerecord guitars parts (as needed)
-Rerecord vox parts (as needed)
-Rerecord keyboard (as needed)
-Mix all the songs-Master the album
Not really sure rerecord is a word. I’m currently on the Rerecord guitars parts phase because it’s super fun and needs to happen. I’m sort of nervous about mixing though. I can’t mix this album and I don’t want to spend $2000 bucks on mixing because I’d be lucky to make $200 back from this album in the end. I’m sure I’ll just have the person mixing the album also master it just to save on money.
FFTB news – Minnesota Album coming within 2 weeks, get your songs in if you haven’t yet
Dan: I’m not sure what Semisonic is going to release, but I’ve got a batch of songs that I think could make a great Semisonic album. I’d be really happy if we could make a record, or at least some tracks to release in some way. We’ve done sessions of various kinds together over the past few years and some of it sure sounds like Semisonic. I know that’s not quite an answer, but from the start the band was based
on doing music when it felt right, so that’s how we do it.
FFTB: What are your non-musical influences?
Dan: I am very influenced by the values of my family. My parents were devoted to me and my brother and sister.We always knew they were there for us, and although I didn’t like it at the time, they were pretty strict about household rules and a code of conduct outside the house. My siblings and I got in trouble with them a lot, put it that way, but we ended up okay.
Also, they put in a lot of time fostering an artistic and creative life for us. My parents forced me to take piano lessons for years even though I complained and tried to give them up. I’m so glad they prevailed. My mother in particular was constantly doing little creative projects with my siblings and I when we were growing up.
Two other big non-musical influences on me are visual art and neuroscience. I studied art in college, and was convinced for a long time that I was going to be a painter, rather than a musician. My visual art studies were both art history, and the classic, practical art school approach to making art. This approach focusses on the
basics of art, like figure drawing, color theory, etc. But more importantly, in art school you learn ways to create and keep inspiration. So where lots of songwriters have to wait for inspiration to come to them, I have my art-school training which takes the mystery out of inspiration and makes it available from day to day.
My interest in neuroscience leads me to read a lot of amazing books, from more technical brain studies books like “Phantoms in the Brain,” by VS Ramachandran, to more spiritual works like “The Snow Leopard,” by Peter Mathiesson. I’m convinced that science and spirituality are on a wonderful collision course, and that in a hundred years, the “opposition” of religion and science will seem like a relic of a lost
time.
Dan: The last song I finished is called, “Too Much.” I recorded it recently and it’ll probably appear on my next album. I thought of the melody about three years ago, but I forgot all about it for a long time. I would play the melody on the piano over and over, not being able to think of words for it. The “step” I took to finish the song was to realize that the piano melody was too symmetrical and classical-sounging for voice. That melody was only for the piano, and once I realized that I decided to write a different vocal melody and lyrics to intertwine with the piano melody. I’m really happy with how it turned out.
Dan: I’m decent at many instruments and it’s worked fine for me. The secret is maybe to use your limitations to your own advantage. My piano playing is very simple, but I’ve learned how to create almost a sense of breathing and emotion for a song using just a few simple chords.
Semisonic recently played a few gigs in Minneapolis and Denver, and I was amazed at how easy my guitar parts are to play! That was a good reminder to me – you don’t need to do anything particularly fancy to make something great.
Dan: I usually need to have the lyrics and melody come at the same time. If the melody is too “finished” sounding, I can never squeeze words into it. On the other hand, if I have just a few good lines of lyrics for a melody, then I have a way in, a key to the song. Once I have those couple of lines I’m always confident I can come up with more.
Dan: Piano and acoustic guitar. Sometimes no instrument, walking down the street or driving.
Dan: I like to treat the live performance as a different animal than the recording. It’s nice when the live version can seem like the recording, but I’ve decided you don’t need to include everything from the record to make a great live version. That makes it fun to do very different versions, like when I play concerts with just Brad Gordon on piano and me on guitar. I can re-arrange my band songs and my solo
songs into a whole new vibe just for those shows.
Dan: Z. Vex “Box of Rock” is by far my most used pedal. It’s a great way to make amps sound bigger and more rocking, but it’s subtle – it sounds like amp overdrive rather than pedal distortion. Z. Vex “Fuzz Factory” is really important for Semisonic shows – that pedal is the buzzy, fuzzy distortion on the guitar solo of “Closing Time,” and I love it.
MXR Super Comp (a Dyna Comp with one more knob) is really valuable in the studio, it makes clean sounds sound more bell-like and somehow cleaner. Those three for sure.
Joni Mitchell, The Sherman Brothers, Paul McCartney.
Songwriters: finish a lot of songs. A bad finished song is infinitely more valuable than ten great unfinished songs. Musicians and songwriters: play shows, lots of shows. Get your stuff out in front of people even before it’s ready. Just jump up onstage and play.
Musicians: make sure your songs are great, and do whatever it takes to have a great repertoire of songs. That, a great voice, and a great drummer are the factors that make or break bands. Drums are still key.
Dan: I have no idea how I continue to find melodies. I look for them a lot, maybe that’s the only thing you have to do, is look for them all the time.
I have a friend that is obsessed with a band called Halloween, Alaska. This friend of mine, let’s call him Barry, is not a musician and the other day he emailed me to ask me “how difficult that is (hot pink) musically on a scale of 1-10 in your opinion”. “Hot Pink” is a song on Halloween, Alaska’s latest record (see review). This got me thinking (small bubbles spawn from head).
From what I can tell, Barry’s question carries 2 assumptions:
1. He is asking me because I am a musician and he respects my opinion on the topic
2. He is assuming that we have the definition of what makes something difficult musically
Assumption number one is logical. I’m not a studio musician and I do not make a career playing music. However, I have been paid to play music, I have studied music theory/composition and consider it a huge part of my identity. As with anything, the opinion on a topic given from someone who knows more than you carries value. I’d love to hear what the Edge thinks of my guitar tones or talk to David Bazan about lyric’s because they are people who are masters at what they do. I’m not master, but at tier up from Barry. I think we can all agree that this is sound logic.
Assumption number two is where the confusion gets heavy. At first glance I quantify “difficult musically” as something that strictly deals with speed and accuracy. Can the musician play something that sounds like only a robot could play? Stong examples of something like this are Steve Vai and Dream Theater. I can also assume that most of their concerts are full of dudes that spend 60% of their life playing hot licks at Guitar Center on guitars shaped like spiders. Halloween, Alaska does not fit into that category. Outside of some of the things that the drummer, Dave King, does most of the parts are actually pretty simple. Although, the parts sound simple, I don’t believe that just any musician could show up and play them and this is the reason that I believe Halloween, Alaska is musically difficult. Here is a list of th attributes that make me want to believe this:
1. Use of silence – to be a musician in this band you have to understand that silence is a powerful weapon to have in your arsenal.
2. Dynamic’s – the arrangements all bring the listener through an adventure via musical dynamic’s
3. Feel using syncopation – sometime having a rhythmic pattern (tonal or not) that lines up on the downbeat every 3 or 4 measure will create the deepest groove earthly possible (check out Steve Reich).
4. TONES – fullest bass tones ever, have you ever heard another bass player make these tones?
5. More tones – Guitar tones, pads, vocal effects are all so unique in this band that it must be considered when taking about musically difficult.
6. Feel (groove) – HA has the ability to synch up with the listeners heart beat – this is difficult to do.
The point that I’m trying to make is more to the non-musician. I’d rather people not rate music difficulty at all, however if they do rate it please take into account some of the things listed above. There are other things to account for also, like arrangement and voicing. When making music you have near infinite why to approach what is being played and I believe that awareness and ability are the two things we should consider when looking at Barry’s question; typically people take awareness out of the equation.
A friend of mine shared this video with me and I think that all you drummers out there can learn a thing or 2 from it. Oh, and you are welcome…
I know that most of you have probably already seen this, but just in case you haven’t here it is. Yesterday, I was told about a band called ‘Self’. Here is Matt Mahaffey doing Back in Black solo. He’s done a ton of work with people like Beck, Pink and Liz Phair.
For some reason this video reminds me of the classic film “The Labyrinth”
Ok, I’ve been working on two songs and I need your input and/or wav files. Here they are, I think Lars is going to grab them and then send me some vocal additions and also give me some suggestions. I believe that I will be replacing the keyboard bass with a real bass in the song “Another Way To Get Around”.
Food for the Beloved 