This clip surfaced yesterday, a preview of a forthcoming solo album from Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas. Bandmates have pursued other side projects (my favorite of which is drummer Fabrizio Moretti’s Little Joy), and apparently Julian went and recorded something on his own, prolonging the moment when the Strokes all get together in the same room to record something new. This clip implies epic-ness and new worlds of wonder; I have high hopes.

Phrazes For The Young is out this fall on Cult Records, and in true ascetic Strokes form, it’s only eight songs long. The album was written and recorded over the last year in LA, NYC and Nebraska. Julian plans to tour in support of it in the coming months.

[via ultra8201]

From the new EP of George Harrison/Beatles covers by My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James (under the clever, throw-them-off-the-scent moniker of Yim Yames), this song feels like a much-needed salve on my rawness today:

All Things Must Pass (George Harrison cover) - Yim Yames

Sometimes I am glad I don’t know the fancy tricks of studio recording, and how they make Jim’s voice sound like it is coming to me from somewhere outside time, like it was created to someday record this song about the temporal nature of the evening, a cloudburst, love, our lives.

I’m sure it has something to do with reverb and certain knobby magic on the console, but the golden-red aura of his voice is truly exceptional here, and it feels like some kind of hope breaking through.

All the tracks are thoroughly gorgeous, and the EP is available now for just a handful of dollars.

Some people can’t get into the mashups that the young people are doing. This is not a problem that afflicts me.

I don’t tire of the Jaydiohead mixes that put Jay-Z in a mythical room with Radiohead, with the result sounding so orchestrally epic and effortlessly cool. I adored using “Fall In Step” from the previous release in my inaugural voyage as a DJ - it sounds extra-good when played over massive club speakers. This one’s ace too:

Song and Cry - Jaydiohead

Download the whole free EP here; Max Tannone (the hands behind the magic) just finished these late last night.

I’ve never heard the Ogden Theatre held so tightly under a blanket of silent reverence as it was last night for the Bon Iver show, with Denver’s marvelous The Wheel opening. Some said you could have heard a pin drop at the sold-out show, on one of the most sweltering nights of the summer so far.

There is pure, unfettered, urgent, honest magic in the music of Bon Iver, there is no denying that. For an album that some think of as hushed acoustic woodland grieving, there is also a lot of potential for a live show that rages like a howling river. First off: the man travels with two drummers. That alone is enough to win my heart completely. The songs grow and explode live, and knock you off your feet. Justin excoriates with his guitar freakouts, and pounds on his keys. It’s a cavalcade of something intensely real.

Taking the stage with fluffy longer hair that grows even more majestic when illuminated by golden spotlight from above, Justin sat down and the crowd was immediately silent, waiting. He started the set the same way the album begins, with the opening strums of “Flume”: I am my mother’s only one. It’s enough. Thirty seconds in and we already have a lump in the throat here — that’s one of my absolute favorite lyrics he’s written, for quiet personal reasons. From there, he led into an extended, experimental intro to “Lump Sum,” and as the meandering faded away, the familiar, pulsing melody drew us back and it felt so right.

Flume (Daytrotter version) - Bon Iver (via)
Lump Sum (MOKB/Laundromatinee version) - Bon Iver (via)

After a jawdropping, electrified ending to “Creature Fear,” someone down front with me yelled, “You’re a genius!” to which Justin quickly shot back, “You’re drunk,” as he smiled. But I would agree with gentleman #1 in the audience — it was an exceptional, gorgeous show. I knew what to expect, I’d been exposed to his music live before, and he still blew me away, absolutely.

With only one album and an EP to draw from, Justin laughingly promised as he tuned his guitar between songs, “We’re gonna play all the songs we know tonight, let’s put it that way.” And they did - as well as “Brackett, WI” from the Dark Was The Night compilation, and a Jayhawks cover, among others.

In a moment of humble and unaffected loveliness, the Jayhawks song they covered was “Tampa to Tulsa” (from their 2003 album Rainy Day Music) during the encore, with the band sitting around a single center microphone. Watch what I saw:

The night ended with  the loudest singalong I’ve ever personally been a part of, of “Wolves (Part I and II)”. By that point I was standing in the back near the fresh air and relief from the sweltering heat inside. Usually, the back of the club is where the talkers and chatty drinkers congregate, but as Justin urged us to sing along to “what might have been lost,” I looked around and every single person I could see was singing their heart out into the humid darkness, many with eyes closed. That song crests like a huge wave, and as both drummers pounded their hardest, each beat shot like an electric jolt into my chest.

It was the most beautiful moment I reckon I’ll see in concert for a while, and everything I want to be a part of.

Openers The Wheel were playing to a hometown crowd, but nonetheless got the loudest prolonged-cheer reception I have heard for any local band in a long time. Their intricate, melancholy songs are steeped in goodness and ready for a larger stage. The band is magnetically led by the wry, exceptional voice of frontman Nathaniel Rateliff (Born In The Flood) who in the oddest coincidence that you ever think could sound good, vocally evokes a young and impassioned Neil Diamond minus the glitter. The technicolor songs pack a punch, yet sounded timeless through a symphony of strings, aching harmonica and guitars, piano, intuitive drumming, and vocal harmonies that cut through the venue and held everyone’s attention.

If I were voting for my favorite Denver bands, say, for a local music festival competition, I might put The Wheel in the top 5. Hypothetically. Check these guys out.

Just For Me, But I Thought Of You - The Wheel (I love this so much)
My Hanging Surrender - The Wheel

[all my photos here]

Last month, I sat down with the marvelous Joe Pug (previous post here) on a park bench in Boulder, and we talked about life while the twilight got deeper.

Joe said things like this:

“I think what a lot of people don’t necessarily realize… I mean, there’s no question that as you get older you get wiser. I’m not wiser than anybody else. But I think with youth there’s a certain greater willingness to say these things I say in my songs, whereas when you get older, you’ve experienced so much and you’ve seen so many contradictions in your life that you rightfully are hesitant to say anything out loud because you’ve seen everything proved wrong, at least once, you know what I mean?

In youth, you can make broader declarations, but also at the same time – there was one artist who said, “The entire job of the artist is to not get beat down by the meanness of the world.”

And I’m not talking about hope, or hopefulness. Art can be about that, but doesn’t necessarily have to be about that. It does have to do with believing things, though, whatever those things are. Whether they are the bleakest thoughts on the face of the earth or the most hopeful, you have to believe in them. And even if it’s temporary – even if you just believe them for those five minutes when you wrote the song, or if you’ve believed it since you were three years old until you pass on. So maybe it’s easier to believe in things when you’re younger.”

Joe makes me believe in things. He has a free EP of new music available, and please go read the rest of my interview with Joe over here.

VIDEO: Hymn #101, live in Boulder
VIDEO: Ol’ 55 (Tom Waits cover), live in Boulder

I’ve been falling into Crooked Fingers with a vengeance lately. Despite their Denver connections, I’d never listened to them before The National and St. Vincent teamed up to cover their glorious “Sleep All Summer” for the Merge Records SCORE! compilation several months back.

Since then, a friend put together a few of their tracks I needed to start with, and this was (wonderfully) one of them. The quiet plucking variation here makes me think of rain falling on the trees over our heads as we quietly inhabit the shore.

The River (Springsteen) - Crooked Fingers

That cover is from the Reservoir Songs EP (Merge Records 2002), and the current album from last year is called Forfeit/Fortune.

The other night I was talking to my friend Mundi about seeing Bon Iver this Saturday in Denver, and as I told her about this moment above (the last time I saw him), I realized that my face was glowing from recalling what felt like magic.

Under the cypress trees of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, I saw Bon Iver for the first time at Outside Lands ‘08, and on “The Wolves (Act I and II)” he invited the crowd to sing along with him — “What might have been lost.” This video is otherwise largely unremarkable but for the way it captures that moment around the 2:30 mark when (almost) everyone in the audience started singing wholeheartedly. For an acoustic song, he gets furiously powerful at the end, and I cannot wait to see it on Saturday. For Emma is still an album I think I will be listening to for, well, maybe the rest of my life.

I’m just newly committed to Outside Lands again this summer as well (thanks Southwest super air sale!) and am excited about many artists in the lineup, including The National, The Avett Brothers, M.I.A., Blind Pilot, The Dead Weather, Lucinda Williams, and The Beastie Boys (I think last time I saw them looked like this). Oh, and…Tom Jones? Bring extra panties, I suppose.

Single day tickets and passes are now available.

I always take you guys’ suggestions to heart when you email me all giddy about a band you’ve just seen or stumbled across. So when three readers in one week emailed me about Silver Lake band Local Natives, I made sure to pay attention.

I haven’t had the privilege of seeing them live yet, but all three who wrote had just done precisely that, and raved about their energy and melody. Me, I love the clattery percussion and the summery sound. They boast “the charisma to tempt even the most despondent hipsters and shy concertgoers into dance machines,” which we can all admit the world needs more of.

Local Natives have been on tour with Blind Pilot (who we love) and will be heading out for a few dates with Of Montreal. They end the summer with a residency at LA’s Spaceland. The Heartbreak Tango blog wrote winningly that “If Arcade Fire and Grizzly Bear consoled their broken hearts in the corner of a dive bar, this is what it might sound like.”

Airplanes - Local Natives

I really super-dig the song “World News,” you can stream that one on their MySpace, and they have the Sun Hands single due out next week (hear that one here).

UPDATE: Holy mackerel. I was already planning to post this today and Matt Picasso just tripled my joy.

This cover is enough to make me immediately want to run away with these guys to faraway lands, or at the very least invite them to my next summer BBQ and give them many implements of percussion:

Ahh, that felt so good.

[photo by the luminous laurie scavo]

I didn’t get to see fireworks this year, so this video from Death Cab’s show last night at the Hollywood Bowl (with the L.A. Philharmonic) will do real well. This is undeniably beautiful and kinda made me get a lump in my throat for some reason. Maybe because the fireworks exhibit what my insides do with especially stinging renditions of great songs, with those swooping strings.

Transatlanticism (at Coachella ‘04) - Death Cab for Cutie

I’ve just walked in from stretching out on the lawn alongside my house, where I finished rapidly devouring of all 400 pages of Nick Hornby’s massively enjoyable new (forthcoming) book Juliet, Naked. My skin is warm from the beginnings of a sunburn, and my insides are glowing from the focused joy I understood in these pages.

One reason I quote Nick on this blog’s sidebar (and one reason I think he and I have something in common) is because I sense that he feels music the way that I do. This book is a pitch-perfect look at the lives of music obsessives (within the first thirty pages we have a British guy on the Berkeley-bound BART, scouting out the house of his favorite reclusive musician’s muse, “Juliet”) — and what that kind of fandom looks like as you get deep into the world of message boards, theories about the epic album versus the just-released demos that preceded them, and what we think that can tell us about the artist on the inside. It underscores emphatically how little we know about our musical idols, and how in dissecting them down to minute detail, on some level we’re truly just hashing out stuff about ourselves. Something in the unfinished narratives of our own lives finds solidification and beauty in the way our favorite musicians write about theirs.

The book follows the fictional story of Tucker Crowe, a lauded singer-songwriter from the Eighties (”Bruce plus Bob plus Leonard equals Tucker” was his press campaign line) who has vanished into deliberate obscurity after his masterpiece album Juliet (read an excerpt from the opening chapter). Duncan is a British man from the seaside town of Gooleness who is a self-proclaimed “Croweologist,” and has started a website to track every bit of news (or lack thereof) and host endless message board discussions about his music. Annie is Duncan’s museum-curator girlfriend who has been listening to Crowe’s music and following after Duncan for 15 years, and something in her is about to crack and shine through. It’s a beautiful thing.

I connected quite frankly with Annie, as she discovers she is capable of so much more than she ever thought through the music of Tucker Crowe — her own worthy opinions about the music so proprietarily beloved by Duncan but never her purview to discuss. It’s Annie who shines to hold this story together, grappling with a raw relationship deal and attempts at mathematical equations to calculate the true cost of fifteen years wasted in a soul-crushing relationship. As she strikes up an unlikely transatlantic email correspondence with Crowe, she gets closer to not holding her breath any more, but engaging life — and how music has changed both of them. She finds that she has more in common with Crowe than she would have thought when he first (shockingly) initiated contact with her.

I was touched by this insightful book, through the lenses of characters that I felt I understood. Hornby writes confidently, crisply, with a distinctly British humor — all traits I find irresistible in my American girl longwindedness. He doesn’t lapse into sappy meanderings to plunge the depths of what music can mean to us, and why relationships fail, and how we open our eyes and decide for something more; rather he slips them cleanly into the engaging narrative out of the blue, with a paragraph that swoops in to punch you in the gut.

Take this passage about Annie, which packs a lot into it: “She was trying to say something else; she was trying to say that the inability to articulate what one feels in any satisfactory way is one of our enduring tragedies. It wouldn’t have been much, and it wouldn’t have been useful, but it would have said something that reflected the gravity and sadness inside her. Instead, she had snapped at him for being a loser. It was as if she were trying to find a handhold on the boulder of her feelings, and had merely ended up with grit under her nails.”

Or this acute observation from when Crowe goes to see a local bar band: “The trouble with going to see bands is that there wasn’t much else to do but think, if you weren’t being swept away on a wave of visceral or intellectual excitement; and Tucker could tell that The Chris Jones Band would never be able to make people forget who they were and how they’d ended up that way, despite their sweaty endeavors. Mediocre loud music penned you in to yourself, made you pace up and down your own mind until you were pretty sure you could see how you might end up going out of it.”

While not as laden with direct pop culture references as some of his previous books like High Fidelity (although to my delight this one does mention Billy Collins, a poet I’ve just fallen in love with these last few months), this book still delves into music as culture, music as lifeblood, music as the glue and then the wedge in a relationship. It’s never dry, even as the characters face heady business — the glue of music that gets all over everything.

My Back Pages (Dylan cover) - Steve Earle

Juliet, Naked is in stores in September (so preorder or add it to your library hold list now!), and when Mr. Hornby comes through on his presumed book tour, I purport to buy that man a drink.