"Way Down In The Hole" by Chance Hargrove

Way Down In The Hole

Tom Waits cover by By Chance Hargrove, brother of our friend, Portland-based singer/songwriter/guitarist Chase Hargrove...

check it out!

Photos & Videos: Spiritualized live, Wonder Ballroom, Portland, May 25, 2012

"Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose..."
"Here Today and then We're Gone...."
"Sometimes I wish that I was dead, cuz only the living can feel the pain..."
"Ain't Got Time to Make Mistakes, Ain't Got Time to Waste my Brakes..."
"All I Want in Life's a Little Bit of Love to Take the Pain Away..."

Is there anyone in indie music today that can say more with so little as Jason Pierce of Spiritualized?

Certainly he's the only person I listen to who could get away with the line "I got two little arms to hold on tight..." without laughter erupting.

He is a force of nature - even the drugs couldn't kill him, and he brought his brand of magic to Portland's Wonder Ballroom last night to a sold-out crowd of the faithful... it was a little disconcerting to see a sign on the venue door "Spiritualized SOLD OUT" but I think they really meant "Souled Out" cuz that's what we witnessed... Still, the sign on the door of the Wonder was nothing compared to the bold marquee on Radio City two years ago which boldly declared that New York City was "Spiritualized Tonight...", right across from Time AND Life...

Yes, all this talk of Jesus, drugs, despair, redemption, love lost & found (mostly lost)... would probably be intolerable in the hands of anyone else... but Jason Spaceman somehow makes it work...

He's got a certified masterpiece in Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, and I would put Songs in A&E in the same category... plus there are several classic gems on his other Spiritualized and Spaceman 3 albums. The new Spiritualized album (although Spiritualized is a band, I think of it as essentially a one-man band, a vehicle for the art of Jason Pierce... no disrespect to his great guitarist, wonderful backing vocalists, and the other fine musicians he works with, but it's basically about him...) is utterly fantastic too, featuring the singles "Hey Jane" and "Little Girl"... He played several songs from the new album Sweet Heart, Sweet Light (my only complaint - they didn't play "Little Girl"), but the crowd seemed to respond more enthusiastically to the older material, especially the songs from Ladies and Gentlemen... I suppose many artists feel trapped under the weight of previous masterpieces, but the new album fits in well with the Spiritualized canon.

They opened the show with new single "Hey Jane":

"Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space..."

"Soul on Fire": One of my favorite songs.... (a bit too much of the other guitarist here but he did such a great job all night i can't and won't complain...)

Craig Finn (Hold Steady) in "Esquire" feat new song "Respective Coasts"

April 17, 2012, 12:00 AM

Craig Finn: "Respective Coasts"

The musician's contribution to the 2012 Esquire Songwriting Challenge

VIDEO AND PHOTOS BY DANNY CLINCH /// BY ANDY LANGER

 

Buy the full song and raise money for Big Brothers Big Sisters

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Danny Clinch

FOR THE UNINITIATED:

It's easy to see why everyone from bespectacled indie-rock fetishists to a guy named Bruce Springsteen are so fanatical, even evangelical, about Finn and his Brooklyn-based band the Hold Steady: The spotlessly spun anthems, meditations, and travelogues perfectly catalog the highs and lows of derelicts, dopers, drunks, and, increasingly, couples in various states of love (Sean and Shannon, Dennis and Billy, and, in his original song for Esquire, Kevin and Heather). This year, the forty-year-old frontman will be splitting his time between touring with the Steady and supporting his solo debut, Clear Heart Full Eyes.

ON GOING SOLO:

"It's been the challenge I was seeking. I wanted to create a little discomfort and give myself a new perspective on making music with other people. And it made me confident. With the Hold Steady, it sometimes feels like someone writes a riff and I yell over it. I found myself asking, Am I a songwriter or a guy that yells and throws words down? This lets me do some different things."

ABOUT THE SONG HE WROTE FOR ESQUIRE:

"Kevin and Heather have had a breakup. Heather went back to California and Kevin remained in New York. It's a bad breakup, but they still talk on the phone. She says he's allowed to call up to 3:00 A.M. in New York because she goes to bed at midnight in California. It's the story of how they're holding on to each other despite the anger. And I liked this idea of the couple kind of going back to their corners — like in a boxing match. The phone scenario is the first thing I thought of. I used to have kind of a bad walk home in Brooklyn from the subway to the apartment, and sometimes I'd want a little company, so I'd call my friends out west to have someone to talk to at 2:00 A.M. The three-hour time difference coast-to-coast can make itself useful."

Hear the new song here: http://www.whatstheruckus.com/2012/04/craig-finn-respective-coasts/

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/music/craig-finn-respective-coasts-0512#ixzz1voOmm3Wt

Guardian (UK): Why Pop Music Loves TS Eliot

Scratch any literate songwriter – Win Butler, David Bowie, PJ Harvey – and beneath the surface you will find a debt to TS Eliot

TS Eliot … the inspiration for countless rock musicians

The New Yorker critic Louis Menand, reflecting on TS Eliot's transition from radical modernist to arch-conservative, wrote in a review of the poet's letters: "He tried to shut the door on modern life. It was too late of course. He was the author of Prufrock and The Waste Land. He was already inside."

Eliot would not have loved pop music but pop music loves Eliot. Ninety years after the publication of The Waste Land, he remains the lodestar poet for ambitious songwriters. They rummage through his masterpiece's treasure chest of arresting phrases: the "violet hour" and "bodies naked on the low damp ground" quoted in the Sisters of Mercy'sFloorshow, "April is the cruellest month" kicking off Hot Chip's Playboy or the "red sails" picked up by David Bowie on Lodger (Bowie told William Burroughs in 1974 that he'd "never read" Eliot but I suspect he got around to it).

Likewise 1915's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. "Like a patient etherized on a table" is paraphrased by avowed Eliot fan Win Butler inArcade Fire's We Used to Wait, "Do I dare disturb the universe?" became a song title for Chuck D, and "the Eternal Footman" crops up in Tori Amos's Pretty Good Year. "Alfred J Prufrock would be proud of me," declare Manic Street Preachers on My Guernica. And 1925's The Hollow Men lends its name to songs by Faust, Gravenhurst and Cocteau Twins. And on it goes: Genesis, Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Van Morrison, Rush, EMF, Crash Test Dummies, Okkervil River, the Clientele … "This music crept by me upon the waters."

But why Eliot, above all other poets? One simple reason is that he is widely taught in British and American schools and he impacts on the adolescent imagination with peculiar force. The Waste Land may be unfathomably complex but it is easy to love regardless of whether you understand it. The language is juicy and pungent, full of fire and rain, rivers and dust, birth and death – lots of death. I remember deriving a thrill of pleasurable dread from its sense of crisis and doom when I first read it as a teenager. Lines such as "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" or "This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper" (from The Hollow Men) would be at home on the back of a goth's leather jacket. Eliot offers a vivid grown-up take on a teenager's sense that all is not right with the world. At a difficult age you get the impression he's on to something terribly important, even if you're not sure what it is.

So the message resonates, in sometimes simplistic ways, but the medium also has much to teach songwriters. Just months after his death, on 4 January 1965, Bob Dylan's Desolation Row described "Ezra Pound and TS Eliot/ Fighting in the captain's tower." You can understand the appeal to a man attempting to blast open the language of rock'n'roll in a period of sociopolitical flux. Eliot told Virginia Woolf that Joyce's Ulysses, which he believed did in prose what The Waste Land did in verse, "destroyed the whole of the 19th century". They were twin responses to the shattered postwar world – vast collages of competing voices which declared that the old ways were dead and new language was needed. But that new language was built from the bones of the old: a dizzying mosaic of allusion, quotation, pastiche and impersonation, assembled from ingredients gathered everywhere from the ivory towers to the saloon bars, ancient Greece to modern London, and inviting endless interpretation. It attempted to encompass everything in a way that could mean anything, which is a decent description of Dylan's mission in Desolation Row. When Eliot, traumatised by the strain of composing The Waste Land, later dismissed it, he used a line you could imagine Dylan pitching to an earnest interviewer: "a piece of rhythmical grumbling."

The poem remains a catalyst for jolting songwriters out of their usual approaches because of the relentless ventriloquism referenced in Eliot's Dickens-quoting working title for The Waste Land, He Do the Police in Different Voices. The style enables you to open up a song's meaning by sliding between characters and perspectives: not a single broadcast but a radio impatiently flitting between stations. Neil Tennant applied the technique to 80s London on West End Girls with its "too many shadows, whispering voices" in an unreal city where "we've got no future, we've got no past".

Thom Yorke reached for it to evoke his own sense of dislocation and lurking horror on Paranoid Android's neurotic babble of unidentified voices ("Please would you stop the noise", "That's it sir you're leaving", "Off with his head") talking but not listening – "a heap of broken images", to quote The Waste Land.

Eliot's influence extends across the whole of PJ Harvey's Let England Shake, which pieces together voices and images from multiple decades and countries, and collapses all that history into a single ongoing commentary on war and nationalism. You often can't tell which lines Harvey wrote herself and which she took from existing sources; among other things The Waste Land's collage technique is a licence to borrow without shame. One blogger has pointed out the similarity between On Battleship Hill ("Jagged mountains jutting out/ Cracked like teeth in a rotting mouth") and The Waste Land ("Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit"). The critic Donald Childs believes Eliot was actually referring to Gallipoli (the home of Battleship Hill), where his close friend Jean Verdenal had been killed in action. During the campaign Australian soldiers sang the risque song about Mrs Porter that is quoted in III: The Fire Sermon. Did Harvey know all of this or is it just a case of The Waste Land's world of echoes setting off accidental echoes of its own?

This process is apt considering The Waste Land includes allusions to show tunes, operas, folk ballads and ragtime songs among its linguistic flotsam and jetsam. In one example of cultural baton-passing Eliot took the refrain "goodnight ladies" from a 19th-century folk song and thenLou Reed took it from him.

As Radio 4's recent broadcast of The Waste Land demonstrated, it's a poem that wants to be listened to. The Fire Sermon in particular is full of noise: gramophones and mandolins, throbbing engines and pealing bells, "a clatter and a chatter". Read it aloud and before you begin to thrash out what it might mean you can hear the music humming in the wires of the verse – the "rhythmical grumbling" if you like. It's above all this sensuous, enigmatic quality that continues to inspire songwriters who want to leave all their options open; to bathe in words, and the sound of words, without locking them into a single reading. Eliot once wrote: "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." True enough, many songwriters would say, especially if you can sing it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/may/23/ts-eliot-poetry-pop-music?intcmp=ILCMUSIMG9382

Carrie Brownstein tells stories of Sleater-Kinney partying with the White Stripes-- and Wild Flag partying with furries-- in the animated series "Frames".

Pete Doherty Trailer for Film "Confession of a Child of the Century"

Pete's official acting debut, "Confession of a Child of the Century", co-starring another great singer, Charlotte Gainsbourg (daughter of Serge and Jane Birkin.... and Pete's flame on set?).... shown at Cannes this week....

The Hives live on Jools Holland "1000 Answers"

Spiritualized

from Pitchfork: 

http://pitchfork.com/features/5-10-15-20/8844-j-spaceman/

5-10-15-20

Spiritualized

Jason Pierce on the melodious voices that have stuck in his brain over the years.

By 

Ryan Dombal

 , May 21, 2012

5-10-15-20 features artists talking about the songs and albums that made an impact on them throughout their lives, five years at a time.

"Maybe I'm inventing this for your piece, because I don't remember nothing," saysSpiritualized's Jason Pierce with a laugh, talking about a foggy childhood memory. But, curled up with his knees to his chest in a spacious suite in Manhattan's Ace Hotel earlier this year, the supremely soft-spoken 46 year old talks about the harmonious voices that affected his life most with a far-off reverence that's anything but false. He might not be so hot on exact dates-- and he couldn't quite come up with anything for age 10-- but his brain isn't nearly as shot as he claims. Whether he's recalling the record player he grew up with, or the first time he saw Iggy Pop, or his initial introduction to gospel music, the details are sharp in all the right places. (Listen along with Pierce's picks on Spotify.)

The Seekers: "Morningtown Ride"

There's an English tradition where you watch people miming along to songs on "Top of the Pops" as a kid, and it makes you want to be a pop star. But I never saw that program at all when I was young. We didn't have a TV for long periods of time. Even now, I think, "You watched people fucking mime, and it made you want to become a singer?" It seems odd. 

We didn't have much music or much money in our house growing up. But we had a record by the Seekers, who are essentially a vocal harmony group from Australia; by my definition, there's not a massive difference between the Beach Boys and the Seekers. My father was gone by then, so it was my mum's record. She must have had about four LPs, including one by Barbra Streisand that one of her sons bought her for Christmas because they didn't know what to get her. 

With the Seekers, the harmony appealed to me. It's in the word: "harmonious." You can't distort it. That appreciation is in everybody. You never hear people say, "I've had [free jazz artist] Peter Brötzmann going round and round in my head all day." Now, when you hear music that was made before what we recognize as a modern scale was invented, it sounds fucking odd. But at one time, when people heard that, they must've thought, "This is right. This is what music sounds like." 

I remember our stereo-- it was wooden with a little plastic top on it. But I don't remember a time when somebody put on a record and played it until I got old enough to do that myself. We didn't sing; we didn't have a piano. Until my brother got old enough to buy a Clash or Sex Pistols album, my mum's four records were pretty much it. So I listened to the Seekers from day one, until I left home at 16.

The Stooges: Raw Power

In the 70s, the English pharmacist Boots used to properly sell records. They had A-to-Z racks like you'd find in any record store, alongside hair products, toothpaste, deodorant. And I remember thumbing through those records in there and seeing the Stooges' Raw Power, which had Iggy with this wildcat jacket and leather pants. I bought it. I don't know why. I felt fucked up-- not fucked up like drugs, but just alien. Not like everybody else. I saw this album and thought, "That's for me." 

It's a massive, amphetamine-fueled record-- but I didn't know any of that when I bought it. It was just random chance. I could have quite easily bought Devo or the second Seekers album. But Iggy had silver hair and silver pants, and something clicked. Maybe it was on sale. I got lucky, because my whole life premise and what I do is kind of built around that record.

"Raw Power made me feel fucked up-- not fucked up like drugs,
but just alien. Not like everybody else."

Nobody knew the Stooges then: "Iggy Pop, who the fuck is that?" When you're a teenager, you're possessive over the cut of your clothes or the way you walk, and Raw Power felt like my discovery. I played the album to death. The good thing about records at my house at the time was that there was no competition. [laughs] It was like, "What do you want to listen to? We've got the Stooges and the Seekers." I knew every little noise on that Stooges record-- you play something every day for half a year and it becomes part of your blood.

I realized music was going to be a bigger part of my life when I realized that I had to get a job. And doing music seemed like the best thing you can do that isn't like working. It's an escape from your small town in England. At 16, I moved out on the day I left school and went to college for a year. I wanted to go to art college, but what I wanted more than anything was the grant. At that time in the UK, they would pay for your education-- they'd give you £1,500, and it was like free money. You were supposed to attend the college, but I came to an agreement with them that, if I stuck out the first term, they wouldn't say I wasn't attending and I could keep the cash. So I did a term, bought my guitar, bought my amp. I still own them to this day.

The Cramps

The idea of entertainment in most small towns is to go up to town on a Friday or Saturday night, get drunk, look for girls, fight, get drunk again. And the alternative to that is getting together in a room and playing music, two, three, four times a week. Making noise. It doesn't even have to be good. I don't think any of us were talented. But at this stage we were listening to the Cramps, the Gun Club-- this very primitive sound. As soon as you pick up a guitar, you realize it's not complicated-- it's about hitting that chord over and over with some kind of venom and passion, like it's the most exciting thing in the world. And it is when you're a kid. Most of the greatest music is made by kids, with the stupidity, arrogance, and single-mindedness of youth. It's like throwing stones and messing up your floor. It's the most exciting thing ever. 

The Staple Singers

We had a little club where everybody came together in our town. Maybe it was over a fondness for drugs. Or just a fondness for a similar kind of music. But everybody seemed to be a bit more connected there. I lived with a guy called Natty [Brooker], who was the first and best drummer with Spacemen. When he was a kid, he taped a lot of radio shows by Alexis Korner, who would play a lot of blues and jazz and soul. A lot of it was stuff I'm not interested in-- white English blues players like Eric Clapton-- but amongst all of that, there was a track by the Staple Singers. I'm not talking about Stax-era Staple Singers, but the sacred music they made prior to that. It was the first time I'd heard gospel music. I wasn't even in the room where it was playing on the radio, but I remember the sound coming out of Pops Staples' funny little tremolo guitar. And they had that harmony thing again-- it's like the Seekers for adults.

Around when I heard the Staple Singers, they had just started to reissue a lot of early gospel groups like the Five Blind Boys of Alabama and the Swan Silvertones, and that became really important. It wasn't all about the Stooges or the Velvet Underground for me anymore. But, eventually, you soak it all up and figure out that gospel, country, the blues, rock'n'roll, and rhythm and blues are all connected. It all becomes one music that unlocks the same things inside of you. 

"I've never been and will never be religious, but as soon as you have a conversation about Jesus, you know what you're talking to him about: how it is to be fallible and question yourself and your morals."

I get asked quite often about why I have references to the lord in my music. I've never been and will never be religious, but as soon as you have a conversation about Jesus, you know what you're talking to him about: how it is to be fallible and question yourself and your morals. Like on my new album, with the line, "help me, Jesus"-- you know I'm not asking for help fixing the fucking car. You know there's a certain place you'll get to before you'll ask for that kind of help. It's like an immediate shorthand to the nature of the song. I would maintain that most of the gospel references in music-- aside from gospel music plain and pure-- have got little or nothing to do with the church. The church might say that as soon as you turn it into a popular-music thing, you devalue it. But in an odd way, it becomes so muchmore powerful. How can the church own music anyway?

I always thought my references to the lord and Jesus came from gospel music. But then I realized the other day that, in doo-wop music, the lyrics to those songs tend to be like, "I pray to the lord above, he sent me an angel." All that lyrical content that I've always thought came from the Staple Singers is all in groups like Dion & the Belmonts, the Dixie Nightingales, the Chantels-- the whole thing is built around that. Sometimes you just say things really simply in songs, like the way children write. People are like, "Don't say that, it's too simplistic, it's too embarrassing." Most people try to be more eloquent, or cleverer with language, but it cuts deeper because you've said it simply. 

Junior Kimbrough: Sad Days, Lonely Nights

I always wanted to put out a record with Fat Possum [co-founder] Matthew [Johnson] because it seemed like he's a guy that could find music that it is fucking scary and essential, like Junior Kimbrough, who was in his 60s, and was suddenly like, "I'm going to make a record." I like the fact that blues records like this, which came out in the 90s, still exist, and that they weren't all from the 20s through to the 60s. 

It's really, really essential that you make new music. There's a whole industry now where people leave an album for 10 years and then hail it as a classic and then you can tour that for the rest of your life. When I was a kid, there were like Motown revues and, as much as I like Motown, the idea of going to one of those showcases where they played only old songs is just something I wouldn't do. I'm as guilty as the next man-- I did a few Ladies and Gentlemen shows, and there's a lot of money to be made if you're tempted. Those Ladies and Gentlemen gigs drove me to think, "Well if I'm going to make music now, it better be fucking good." But to be honest, even if it was awful, I'd much rather be making awful music that was new than just churning around old stuff.

Everybody wants a new style of music, but that's like trying to invent a new animal. Like: "Here it is." And you go, "Fuck, what's that?" It's almost impossible to invent something because it evolves so slowly. And quite often what people perceive as radical change in music is just a broad stylistic change or re-appropriation. With that as a given, it's important to go in the right direction and to making new music now. 

"I'd much rather be making awful music that was new
than just churning around old stuff."

Royal Trux: "Stevie"

I've got this list of records that's like the spine of rock'n'roll-- records that are made by people with a bit more wisdom-- and Royal Trux's Accelerator is on there. Neil Hagerty is an absolute fucking genius. I don't think I've got any bad recordings by the guy. Everything he's done since seems like it's just rolls out of him, and that's incredibly difficult to do, and for the songs to be that good. When you meet people like that, you think they've got this hotline where they can roll off another song, but I'm sure it's as difficult being Neil Hagerty as it is being the next man. But sometimes I get envious of that effortlessness because I have to work so fucking long and hard at what I do. "Stevie" is one of the greatest songs ever written. It's produced so fucking weird, like it's all just been squashed. 

Sun Ra

The MC5 always talked about Sun Ra, who introduced me to a whole world into free-form music. There's moments of that on my new album, but it's almost like you're having your hand held and led in there, and you leave a trail of stones so people can get out. It's not like being dropped into this furious abstract world. And I think the same can be said with Sun Ra. It's abstract and free, but also based around melody.

I saw the Arkestra-- admittedly without Sun Ra, but with Marshall Allen-- twice during the last two years, and they were by far the best shows I've been to in the last 10 years. There's a little club near me where there's no stage, so you'd be 10 feet away from this band playing this extraordinary music. Also, it's as strange as Iggy in his silver pants, in a way, like they really have just dropped in from another planet. I like the mythology of rock'n'roll, and the very cornerstone of that myth is that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads. Which is like, "Give me a fucking break." But I'm a sucker for it. So I love how the Sun Ra Arkestra is 3,000 years old, and all the space-traveler stuff. It's the best thing in the world.

The Beach Boys: The Smile Sessions

I haven't been into much new music because I've been making a record, which ruins my enjoyment of music because I can't listen to anything without listening to the production value of it. It's like if you make films, you start admiring the way a scene's lit or edited. When I'm making a record, I start listening to the way people have positioned the snare drum in the mix. So I can't listen to anything. In fact, the only thing I've been known to listen to of late is the The Smile Sessions box set, because it's like the sound of somebody else making a record.

I still feel like I'm hustling, and like I have no great talent. I'm not a great singer. But as long as I can keep the hustle going, and nobody taps me on the shoulder and says, "You're busted," then I can keep doing it.