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Making all the right moves: Josh Ritter at The Orange Peel

Photographer Rich Orris (all photos in this post are his) noted, early in the Josh Ritter show at The Orange Peel, that Ritter is one musician who makes everything instantly better. And it’s kind of true. Not that Ritter has the power to mend a broken heart or heal the sick or anything like that. But the way he takes the stage with a huge grin, the way he looks so genuinely happy to be there, the way he insists it’s going to be such a fun night and the way he seems to get more energetic, more smiley, more raucously happy as the show goes on — if that doesn’t cure what ails you, it’ll at least make you forget for a couple of hours.

Ritter started the show solo with “Idaho.” When he reached the line, “Ain’t no wolf can sing like me,” a girl in the audience shouted “that’s right,” which made Ritter grin through his lyrics. It was also the first of many wolf references. (He later performed “Wolves,” with a long solo howl, and led the audience on a participatory howl in the rocking and percussive “Rattling Locks.”)

The Royal City Band (bassist Zack Hickman, guitarist Austin Nevins, Sam Kassirer on keys and drummer Liam Hurley) came onstage one at a time during “Southern Pacifica” and finally launched as a complete entity with a big drum sound and heavy keys on “Rumors.” Surrounded by smoke machine clouds and a huge all-seeing eye backdrop (the band’s merch booth included a limited-edition glow-in-the-dark poster of the same design), Ritter pushed his voice to a raspy edge on the verse, “The music’s never loud enough.”

That particular song is one that Ritter has been playing — with full bombast — for years. And yet, each time he’s like a kid who just started his first garage band and cranked the volume to 10. Not that he and his band perform like novices. The show is crisply professional from start to finish. Every stop is clean, every nuance is polished. But there’s the energy of newness, of discovery, of the first flush of success.

Which is probably partly why people love Ritter. Because he’s not jaded. He’s cool in his not-trying-to-be-coolness; he’s bolstered by genuine enthusiasm. And people respond. The Orange Peel was nearly packed on a Monday, a fact which Ritter noted several times, thanking the crowd for coming out. (Even though he’d just sold out two nights at the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C. And remember he’s touring a breakup album. But Ritter can pull that off.) He’s also smart and funny, reeling off a crazy pseudo-historical myth about the Orange Peel: “This thousand-year-old venue was build on a much-older temple. We’re not sure what. We’re not even sure oranges were involved.”

Later in the show, during a solo break, Ritter dedicated the song “Galahad” to local bookstore Malaprop’s (where two years ago he gave a reading for his novel, Bright’s Passage). “Galahad” is an interesting choice for Malaprop’s — look up the lyrics for a laugh.

Ritter sang five songs from his just-released album, The Beast in its Tracks. Which is, yes, a breakup album. But there’s also a love story in there, and a lot of hope. (Read more about it here.) The musician (and/or his management) made the interesting choice to give away a free download of the album with each concert ticket, a seemingly dubious move until he played that album’s single, “Joy To You Baby,” and the audience sang along. The room was flooded with such a gorgeously twilit and hopeful feel. Calm anticipation.

That calm was a rare moment in an evening filled with electricity and animation. At times, Ritter pogoed around the stage; he played air drums in “Rattling Locks” and shimmied his way through “Right Moves.” That song’s question, “Am I making all the right moves?” is probably the most rhetorical of the show.

So, calm moments were few but sing-along moments were many — “Folk Bloodbath” brought one, and “Kathleen” another. During the latter, Ritter switched guitars mid-song and launched into a rap interlude of sorts in which he recited a letter from a fictional member of the Lewis and Clark expedition who, sick of the explorers, had made his own discovery of a town filled with vegetarians. A place where, “everybody plays Frisbee golf. Everybody has a dog.”

After a short break, the band returned for an encore. Standing in a slice of orange light, Ritter played the achingly sweet “The Temptation of Adam” and then, for the finale, raised the energy level to a fever pitch with “To the Dogs or Whoever.”

It’s worth noting that the set (see below) covered at least a decade of songs and every one stood up beside the others. As a collection they showcased Ritter’s staggering ability as not just a performer but as a songwriter, too. Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait two more years before he makes it back to Asheville.

Setlist:
1. Idaho (solo), Animal Years
2. Southern Pacifica, So Runs the World Away
3. Rumors, The Historical Conquests Of Josh Ritter
4. A Certain Light, The Beast in its Tracks
5. Hopeful, The Beast in its Tracks
6. Lillian, Egypt, Animal Years
7. The Curse, So Runs the World Away
8. Joy To You Baby, The Beast in its Tracks
9. New Lover, The Beast in its Tracks
10. Folk Bloodbath, So Runs the World Away
11. Galahad (solo), To the Yet Unknowing World (EP)
12. Snow is Gone (solo), Hello Starling
13. Wings, Hello Starling
14. Evil Eye, The Beast in its Tracks
15. Rattling Locks, So Runs the World Away
16. Wolves, Animal Years
17. Right Moves, The Historical Conquests Of Josh Ritter
18. Kathleen, Hello Starling
Encore:
1. The Temptation of Adam, The Historical Conquests Of Josh Ritter
2. To the Dogs or Whoever, The Historical Conquests Of Josh Ritter

Oliver Mtukudzi and the Black Spirits

Zimbabwean musician Oliver “Tuku” Mtujudzi and his band, the Black Spirits, have been on tour in the U.S., playing dates from California to Quebec, including a stop at Lake Eden Arts Festival last weekend.

From the start of the band’s set on the LEAF main stage, it was apparent that they were showcasing a different side of the “traditions” theme of the spring festival. LEAF has a long history of bringing impressive world music acts to the stage — from Japanese taiko drummers to Tibetan singer-songwriter Yungchen Lhamo. But Tuku and the Black Spirits’ sound didn’t seem as far flung as it did instantly recognizable. Okay, maybe “instantly recognizable” isn’t the exact phrase. But instantly comfortable, digestible and, most of all, just easy. The kind of music you dance to without thinking about; the kind of music you relax into.

Tuku is a grandfather but moves lithely across the stage, defying gravity. He bounces along with the percussion, his dance moves another texture in the soft and multi-faceted rhythm of each song. There’s a lot of percussion. A kit drum, congas, a rain stick and other auxiliary instruments. And the percussion builds over a definitive drum and bass downbeat, but in building it adds complexity rather than noise, and the buoyant harmonies lift each song even farther from its rhythmic base.

Each member of the band is long and lean, stork-like and graceful. There’s an economy both of instrumentation and movement — they play fluidly and expressively, but also tastefully. No grandstanding, no solo given a note more than it needs, as if anything extra would weigh down the whole meringue of the song. Instead, beat and melody continually pulse while the vocals add bright strokes of color of the sonic canvas.

Songs tend to morph effortlessly from melody into syncopated breaks. The congas pop; Tuku and vocalist/percussionist Sam Felo fall into a galloping synchronized dance while bassist Enock Piroro grins from ear to ear (very un-bassist-like). (Other band members are drummer Tendai Samson Mataure and percussionist/backing vocalist Strovers Maswobe.)

While most of the Black Spirits’ set list is in the band’s native tongue, one prettily emotive song asks, in English, “What does it take to be a hero? Do you have to die to be a hero?” According to press about the band, Tuku prefers education to political advocacy, but the song certainly nods to charges questions about human rights and freedoms. Its delivery, however, is much closer to a lullaby than a fiery blast, with the congas ringing warmly and the easy, boomerang of the rhythm — out and back, out and back like an audible tide — casting a glow over the darkening evening.

As night fell and colored lights glittered, reflected in Lake Eden’s dark water, it was hard to imagine that Oliver Mtukudzi and the Black Spirits’ songs, traveled all the way from Southern Africa, could belong to any place more completely than they seemed to belong to Black Mountain.

Luella and the Sun at The Orange Peel

Following a very quick set change, Nashville’s Luella and the Sun took the stage and with nothing more than a few bass notes as introduction, launched into “Fly So Free.” The band (drummer John Radford, guitarist Joe McMahan, bassist Adam Bednarik and vocalist Melissa Mathes, aka Luella) is based in gospel and blues. And by based I mean deeply steeped. Steeped to a bitter and pungent brew.

All photos by Rich Orris

“Fly So Free” is a perfect example of exactly how Luella and the Sun deconstructs Gospel, distills its soulful essence and uses that to infuse raw, gritty garage rock with an unholy wildness that feels as righteous as it is dangerous. It’s something about the muscle of the drum, the hypnotic thrum of the bass and the snarl of the guitar. And the auxiliary percussion, rattling and hissing like a basket of serpents.

But mostly it’s Mathes’ voice. At turns girlish and haunting, pure and feral, she doesn’t sing so much as uses her voice like a whip. Or a lasso. Or a spinning top. Hers is a good voice. A great voice. But she doesn’t sing with the care and preciousness of a great singer. She sings, instead, like she’s on fire. Like she’s exorcising demons.

The band moved through a stripped-down number of fast handclaps over which Mathes spat lyrics and danced savagely in her dress of shimmering plastic six-pack rings (McMahan looked formidably handsome in a red and black smoking jacket) and moved on to “Light in the Sky.” That song was even more mesmerizing and voodoo-dark, and textured with feedback and raga-like chord progressions.

Fast songs, like the galloping, shimmying “Train Train,” showcase the barely-contained frenzy that Luella and the Sun holds at its nucleus. But in slower offerings, like the gorgeously agonized “Ruler of My Heart” (an Irma Thomas cover) and the end-of-the-party slow dance, “Universe of My Heart,” the group can stretch out and fully explore each note, each nuance. It was in the latter that, while the range and lithe ability of Mathes’ vocal was lost on the antsy crowd, she really let her voice go to this high and airy place, reaching for artistry and emotion instead of pop polish.
Luella and the Sun closed out its set with a cover of Blind Willie McTell’s “We Got To Meet Death One Day.” A slow opening morphed quickly into heavy stomp played nasty and spooky, building in its fierce swagger until, at the final moments, the instruments fell away leaving only Mathes’ voice floating like a pretty apparition through the air.

Five Questions with Local Natives

L.A.-based Local Natives got their start in Orange County where Taylor Rice (vocals/guitar), Kelcey Ayer (vocals/keys/percussion) and Ryan Hahn (vocals/guitar) went to high school together. These days, they live in the Silver Lake neighborhood, known for its wide range of ethnicities and social classes. And hipsters. All of which probably influenced Local Natives’ (completed by the addition of drummer Matt Frazier) eclectic/artistic/rhythmic/sweet-yet-cool sound.

The band’s sophomore album Hummingbird, debuted at #12 on Billboard’s Top 200; they recently performed on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” and have been selling out shows across the country. Rice took a moment to answer my questions (for mountainx.com) about the band’s visual artwork, the intimidation factor of the second album, and where they’re looking forward to playing overseas.

Pictured: Swiss Alps photo stop, on the drive between Munich and Milan. Courtesy of Local Natives.

Alli Marshall: You all have great photos on your Facebook and Tumblr pages. Is someone in the band (or with the band) a photographer? Do you think about documenting this adventure that you’re on?
Taylor Rice: Everyone’s a photographer with varying degrees of ability or talent. The photos come from all of us. It can be harder, but I think it’s more important to be in the moment and enjoy what is right in front of you than to document it. The opening line from Amok is “look out of the window, what’s passing you by,” which seems poignant from the perspective of a traveling musician. We drove through the Swiss Alps today on our way to Milan on a perfect clear winter day. We did take some photos (which didn’t do much to capture it), but I was aware to take it in without trying to put it in a little digital box.

I’ve read that Silver Lake is ethnically and artistically eclectic — in what ways has that environment impacted your sound?
The culture of Silverlake is creativity. Everyone is making something they want to share. It only strikes me as strange when I’m not in a place like that, [that] actually most people think it’s crazy to be creative rather than productive. 

Was there an intimidation factor to recording your sophomore album? And what allowed you to go deeper with Hummingbird than with your debut, Gorilla Manor?
It was definitely strange to start writing with the subtext that there were people waiting to hear what we came up with. (It isn’t like that on your first record: you make it hoping someone will hear it.) We dealt with that by unplugging, stopping touring, and really isolating ourselves and experimenting. Hummingbird is a more expansive record because our lives expanded over the last two years. We had the so many insanely incredible experiences together, like blinding euphoria, but we also had the hardest two years we’ve ever gone through.

You did your own artwork for Hummingbird. Does someone in the band have a background in visual art? And how did you decide on that particular image?
Matt’s day job was working as a graphic designer for magazines before we started touring full time. We all weigh in, though, and control the design of the band democratically, like how we make the music. The cover image was an accidental capturing of a moment of the four of us. Ryan took the photo, and then Kelcey, Matt and I are in it. We were climbing onto the roof of our practice space to take some photos and Kelcey almost fell off the edge trying to get up. It’s sort of like a metaphor for the record and where we were as a band making Hummingbird. There was a struggle, but we’re smiling through it, and came out feeling closer and happier than we ever have.

You recently announced UK tour dates. Any place that you’re especially looking forward to returning to, or a new place you’re excited about exploring?
Playing Brixton in London is like fulfilling a dream I’ve had since we first came over. London felt like a home away from home when we were touring with Gorilla Manor, so I feel like playing Brixton makes our hypothetical British parents very proud.

Tift Merritt: “Creativity is such a messy drawer”

By way of introduction, let me say that Tift Merritt is probably the nicest person I’ve spoken to ever. I would not only happily bake a batch of cookies for her, I’d make her a layer cake. I’d knit her a sweater. I’d man her merch booth. She’s just that nice in a phone interview. And she’s also smart and insightful, which is no surprise to anyone who’s listened to any of her songs. But still.

Merritt grew up in Raleigh, N.C. and , although her dad encouraged her to play piano and guitar, she headed off to UNC Chapel Hill to study creative writing. It was at college that she met drummer Zeke Hutchins (he’s played with Johnny Irion and Sarah Lee Guthrie, Thad Cockrell, Stillhouse and more). After hearing a tape of her songs, Hutchins encouraged Merritt to start a band with him. The two married in ‘09 and live in an apartment in New York.

Merritt is currently on tour (with Hutchins as her drummer, natch) in support of her fifth studio album, Traveling Alone, which was released in October of last year.

Alli Marshall: I should have looked at your tour schedule before I called you…
Tift Merritt: No you shouldn’t have. I’m in Milwaukee. Don’t worry about it.

So how is this tour going?
It’s going great. We’re having such a great time. I feel really proud of how we’re playing right now.

What about it is making you happy?
Music is one of those things that it’s kind of an endless thing. It’s a bottomless place. The more you’re willing to spend time with it and have the courage to go deeper, there’s always more there. I have a really great group of people around me right now who are really willing to go to that place. Listening is such a huge, fundamental everything part of music. Everybody here really listens and, I think, [we] try to hit that true pitch from the heart.

Do you find that music and songwriting still has the capacity to surprise you?
Good lord! More so over time. I think you become a better instrument for music to give you those surprises because you’re calmer, you’re steadier, your time is better, your pitch is better, your heart is more open, you’re stronger. Music will serve up whatever you are ready for.

It’s been four months since “Traveling Alone” came out — how are you feeling about it? Do the songs evolve for you as you tour them?
I think it’s always an emotional experience as much as anything. In terms of arranging and that kind of thing, that stuff is more for older material. I’m often surprised at what I’m interested in from that. What touches me and what doesn’t from my past work. The new record is so very much the skin that you have lived in and it feels important to play it with a lot of presence.

It seems like it would be an interesting experience to have a record (literally) of where you were emotionally and physically at different points in time, and to be able to go back and revisit those experiences through songs that you wrote. Are there ever times you feel resistant to that?
Nobody wants to look at their yearbook pictures, do they? (Laughs.) It’s kind of the same feeling. Then there are things that you go, “Huh, I wonder how I did that when I was a kid?” That’s what’s surprising. You just make work with your heart and you do the best that you can and try to see clearly. You don’t know what’s going to stand up and last. There’s a natural relationship with your older material. Sometimes you’re tired of a song that you’ve been playing a lot, so you play something different. I’m proud that I have a decent amount of work to choose from right now. Of course you roll your eyes at some younger version of yourself, at whatever illusion you had. But when you find something that still is a good enough song that it sort stands apart from you, and whoever you were at that time, it’s a nice feeling. It’s a worthwhile pursuit.

You’re also a photographer.
No, I’m a hack.

Well, I was going to ask if you were doing much with that these days…
Photography is really something that I turn to when I’m writing. Like a muscle memory to remember to use your eyes and look outside of yourself and see the world. I think it’s a really good visual tool for a writer. That’s the kind of photographer I am. Being the center of attention can be such a weird thing. I want to be sure that, when people give me quality attention, I send something equivalent back out into the world. It’s very important to me to be able to do that. In those two ways I love photography. But I do it in a lot of ways as as a creative balance.

Creativity is such a messy drawer. We live in a time when people put a product out and they say, look at this perfectly formed piece of genius spring forth fully-formed. And that’s just not true. There’s so much collateral work that goes into any major thing. I don’t think that the collateral work is a substitute for that major thing, but I think it’s interesting to remember that that collateral work is there.

On your interview program, The Spark, you asked Andrew Bird about the mental difference between composing and performing — I’d like to ask you the same thing.
My own feelings about that are that they are opposites. I think writing is this amazing time where you are just able to swim in the ocean inside. You just sound time with it and you look around and you kick its tired and you nurture it. It’s the most private thing I do, it’s the most interior thing I do. What a luxury. Performing — there’s so much work leading up to the moment of performance. It’s like this moment where you turn it all inside out and you invite people to come see, to come sit at your table. There are a lot of hours of energy going out into the world to make a connection. Not in an overwrought way, but the energy is directed in two totally different directions.

Since you grew up in North Carolina, do you still identify yourself as a North Carolina musician?
Absolutely. No if, ands or buts.

Are there specific ways in which where you’re from impacts your sound or writing?
The only thing that’s more formative in my life that North Carolina is my family. When I think about North Carolina, I think about a sense of place, I grew up in North Carolina in a time when regionalism was all there was. I grew up in a town where everybody knew your parents and you biked around and you knew the strange characters, the gossip, all the ins and outs and everything. There’s a real beauty in that. Being yourself, in a small town, takes a lot of courage and I like that. I’ve always been accidentally different (laughs). There’s a real beauty in thinking about the emotional life of that kind of community, where there’s a connectedness and there are roots and there’s a sense of a particular point of view and these people who live beside each other and know each others this and thats and ups and downs. Everybody is needed. My grandfather told great stories and sort of knew how to exaggerate for the benefit of the listeners. For truth or for lies. I love North Carolina — it’s so much the fabric of who I am.

Have you found your niche in New York?
You know, I’m really lucky that the people who are my home have the same idea — that you must leave home to find it and home is not something where you’re chained to the fence outback and you’re not able to leave. It’s something that you carry inside you. You constantly grow and change and evolve and see the world, that’s all important. I call my block in New York City “Little North Carolina” because I know everybody. I think that New York is really important to me right now because the artists who live there have to be so super-serious and plugged into who they are what they’re doing and why. I like being around that. I like that washing over me. But I don’t know that New York City will be where I live for ever and ever.

Cloudeater

I saw Cloudeater perform at The Grey Eagle last night. I’d never seen or heard them before. This is not so much a review as a stream of consciousness impression. For what it’s worth.

Photo by Dustin Chambers.

The rangey guyness. Nine Inch Nails, TV on the Radio. Not a reminder of these so much as a confirmation that you’ve grown weary of all the earnest banjo folk-rock and you want to be  pummeled a bit. You’re okay with a darker place, with going there. And whatever gets you there — an angry fist of a song or a weird splinter of angst and nihilism.
 
Girls in the crowd wiggle in place to a song, but the boys on stage throw their new bodies into the sound.

What you loved about Trent Reznor was his rage and his coiled poetry. The potential for poetry perhaps more than any actual verse. But still. Something beautiful but slashed through because beauty is too precious a word. His bruised-knuckle treatment of the music. Knowing that he cleaned up well but you didn’t want him to. That if he kissed you, he would draw blood.

The boy who sings is not at all like Rezor except for in the moments when he lets go and thrashes his head. Only his hand is steady, its own entity on the electronics. He’s also not at like (or perhaps exactly like) a younger, less-beardy Tunde Adebimpe. His rockstar-despite-it-all-ness. His wise-beyond-his-years-ness. And that voice, coming from that body. Eerie pretty thing raising goose pimples. Raising ghosts.

You don’t understand him but you feel him. If you could have a secret language with him, what would it be? Your own complex system of signals and gestures, or just one steady look? When your eyes lock into a telepathic acknowledgement. Knowing, anyway, is not the same as understanding.

The boys shake it out of their limbs. A graceless, unembarrassed dance. Or not a dance so much as a shudder, an electrocution, a personal earthquake because dance is too precious a word. Each note, each syllable. Burnishing the thing — the word, the song. Talking like kids now. The formal edge hewn away, leaving what’s easy and unfinished. What they needed to say, to really say, they left on the stage.

“Music is such a fascinating thing”: a Q+A with Dex Romweber

Originally published at Mountainx.com.

Photo by Judy Woodall

While there have been plenty of documentaries about musicians (enough to coin the phrase “rockumentary”), few happen at the height of said musician’s career. Unless that musician is Chapel Hill-based Dexter Romweber. Romweber’s psychobilly drum-and-guitar duo Flat Duo Jets (started in the mid ’80s with percussionist Chris “Crow” Smith) moved to Athens, Ga. for a year at one point — just long enough to be included on the ‘87 cult documentary, Athens, Ga Inside/Out.

There’s a bonus scene in that film (which also features R.E.M, Kilkenny Cats and Love Tractor, among others), where Smith and Romweber visit a store in Athens looking for a five-legged taxidermy dog. The full version of that clip, in all of its surreal genius, served as the impetus for Two Headed Cow, which follows Romweber over decades, from his beer-sloshed early-20s shenanigans to fiercely visionary present day. The film, finally released a year ago, ends eerily with a split screen showing young Romweber and middle-aged Romweber side-by-side playing the same song on piano.

But the thing about Romweber is that his life is art and, while he admits to Xpress that he’s aware of the passing of time and that his desires and abilities are different now than they were in the mid-’80s, he doesn’t seem haunted by the specter of his fame-seeking man-boy incarnation. Near the end of Two Headed Cow, Exene Cervenka asks, rhetorically, which is better — to be famous or to be legendary? And then answers “legendary,” which is kind of what Romweber has achieved. If he’s not widely known, he’s known by those in the know — Cervenka, Neko Case, Chan Marshall (Cat Power) and Jack White all publicly acknowledge Romweber’s inspiration to their own careers.

White is, at least lately, Romweber’s biggest champion. White’s Third Man label re-issued Flat Duo Jets’ Go Go Harlem Baby. White played Flat Duo Jets’ version of “Froggy Went a Courtin’” for Jimmy Page and The Edge on (yet another) documentary, It Might Get Loud. But really, you only have to watch an early Romweber performance to see the genesis of present-day Jack White.

These days, Romweber fronts The Dex Romweber Duo with his sister Sara Romweber (Let’s Active) on percussion.

Alli Marshall: You’ve been based in the Chapel Hill area for quite awhile. Do you feel like there’s a definitive North Carolina or Triangle sound now, the way there has been in the past?
Dex Romweber: A lot of those bands [from the ’80s and ’90s] aren’t around any more. That’s when I lived in town. I live in the country now. I was around the bars and stuff a lot more, and I was able to see all those bands. There’s a whole other generation of bands happening now, but the scene is not, I feel, as prolific right now as it was back then.

We only lived down in Athens for a year. We were in and out, playing gigs down there. I don’t know if there’s a specific sound of the Triangle. Every band is very different. That’s the cool thing about music is that everyone who plays is coming from a different angle.

Is it a weird experience to have your past career documented in a contemporary documentary?
In a way. I do feel myself getting older within the business and I feel like things that might have worked for me when I was much younger don’t work for me now. It’s hard to say. Especially when you begin, it’s all very unconscious and you’re just rolling along with everything that happens to you. Now we’re a little bit more strategic about what gigs we’ll take. We’re a little bit more picky and choosy. Still desperate [laughs], but a little bit more mindful about what we’re getting into. It’s not an easy kind of a lifestyle to have because it can be very insecure, financially.

Things are a bit different. The Duo Jets started in, I think, ‘84 and lasted for, god, 15 or something years. Playing with different individuals is just a different experience in itself. I think my sister is most professional drummer I’ve played with in that she really spends a lot of time studying percussion. And not only from this country. She studies Middle Eastern rhythms and stuff. She’s really great. Crow, I thought, was a fine drummer, and Sam [Sandler, who replaced Smith], too, had his moments. But it was always sort of just hook up and go. But the Duo Jets rarely held practices. I have to head to my sister’s in an hour for a practice. We’re trying to apply ourselves more than past bands did.

Do you feel like that has changed your approach to creativity — practice versus being more loose?
Every time I had a record due, I would sit down and say, okay, we’ve got to pull together material. I was always doing that. I don’t know if it’s changed my application to creativity. In the past year or so, I’ll sit down and listen to the old records — I call them old now, they’re like 22 years ago! — and think that I’m not going to like them. But usually I come out with something that I do like about them. At the same time I see that we were really crazy youths. There was a certain air of trouble about it, to me. But being where we were at the time and being as young as we were, I guess that makes sense.

Another thing I was wondering about your approach to creativity: In the documentary, you’re really up front about the medications you’re taking —
No, that doesn’t affect anything about it. I’m able to tap into something in myself that will bring forth a creative process. For some reason, that’s not really an issue.

You also talk about the usefulness of doing tasks like washing dishes or mowing loans.
I think that’s really combined with mental health [laughs]. I think practical things are the best thing for anybody, personally.

Have you ever had the experience of being tapped into creativity and feeling afraid that you won’t be able to make your way back to normalcy?
It’s a little overwhelming. It’s a little bit surprising. It’s a bit delightful. I don’t want to get too cosmic here, but I feel like there’s creativity all around us and all we have to do is look out the window into nature. I’m a painter, too, so there’s fantastic images and things in dreams and other artists and stuff. Whenever I write, I tend to just say what I mean. That’s kind of the way I am. I don’t tend to beat around the bush if something’s troubling me or I need to get something off my chest. I’m just going to say it. It doesn’t even matter if it’s not — even my spelling, at 47, can get really weird. Even commas, dashes, capitals, all those. It’s not completely chaos, but I still say what I want to say.

Is there a different process between working on your classical music versus your rock music?
Well, I’ve pretty much stopped playing piano. I wished I’d spent more time in preparing for [13-track classical album, Piano]. I had moved in with a girlfriend and a lot of time was taken up with that and I feel like if I hadn’t moved in with her, I would have had more time to prepare. But, you know, when I learned piano it was all part of some romantic youth-type of thing. I think my relationship to the piano now is sort of studying notes and tones and chords and vibes instead of trying to make some sweeping concerto that might astound people who don’t know anything about piano.

But there’s an incredible power in classical music. It’s the rock ‘n’ roll that came before rock ‘n’ roll.
It was, and it’s my favorite kind of music. When people ask me about this, I always tell them I’m sort of a failed classical pianist. I’d rather have been that, on many levels, than a rock ‘n’ roll singer. The thing with rock ‘n’ roll is it’s so loud. The thing with getting older is I don’t need my nerves to be completely jangled. Even today, going to practice, I’m like, “Do I really want to hear loud music at 12 p.m. today?” You know? So people like Chopin and Bach are way more soothing to me, and way more interesting. I mean, I love rockabilly and rock ‘n’ roll and folk music. I think that has its place, too. But if I were to say my favorite type of music, I think it would be classical.

I wanted to ask you about the history of drum and guitar duos. I don’t imagine you started the Flat Duo Jets with an idea toward historic preservation, but do you feel connected to that piece of Americana?
It was all an accident. Personally, I like groups with more instrumentation. With me and Sara now, it’s back to the financial thing, you know… I have another band in Chapel Hill called The New Romans, and there are 10 of us. There’s saxophones and basses and pianos and background singers. I think with more instruments you can get more tones, more vibes and even more balance. With a duo, one person could be slamming it one night and the other person having an off night or vice versa. With two people up there, there’s not a base to level the two together. It’s a really, really bizarre thing. I’m kind of surprised I’m still doing it. When the Duo Jets started, it was just because there was no one else around. We were young and there weren’t a lot of bass players around who would fit in, anyway.

What you do on the stage is so visceral. When you go into the studio, are you concerned with how to translate that live performance to recording?
Not now. I think that certain artists have a hard time in a studio. At certain times I’ve been no exception. But the older I get and the more gigs I play, it’s a lot less stressful. You go in there and you do what you’re going to do. Some people think it’s very hard to transcribe what happens live. You want to really get it how it sounds on stage, in the studio. That’s the ultimate thing, if you can do it. I think I was always interested in what could happen in the studio, but the early Duo Jets records were just done live. Like a concert, although no one was there. It’s more relaxed now. It’s also something I’ve been through enough so that it’s not such a shock and a drag to get the proper take. At least the last record we made, and even the one before that, it wasn’t that difficult to get what we were shooting for.

Do you think a lot of that does come with age and experience?
Yeah, I do. People ask my who my favorite current artist is. Although he’s been around a long time, one of my favorites is Nick Cave. I always like a lot of what he’s able to do in the studio. People ask me about music and what I often say is that I’m still learning about it. It’s something that’s going to last me the rest of my life. I’m still learning how to do it, even.

Do you still have the capacity to be surprised by things in music?
For sure. And enjoy it, too. Music is such a fascinating thing. At times I’ve thought of it as a brotherhood, whether I’ve liked it or not. In music, as in everything else, there have been quite a lot of unruly characters. Some highly talented by self-destructive musicians. I think, when I was younger, I was drawn to that. But then I woke up and said, “Hold on. I don’t have to do that.” Waylon Jennings called it the “Hank Williams syndrome,” where an artist could be highly creative but totally self-destructive. Hopefully that’s something in your youth you’ll grow out of. Some people don’t; some people die young. I love the artists who have come before me, from the Chopins to the Johnny Cashes to the Benny Joys of the world. It’s quite a cool thing to be involved in.

Q+A with Pearl and the Beard

Originally published by Mountain Xpress.

Pearl and the Beard is Jocelyn Mackenzie, Emily Hope Price and Jeremy Styles. The group formed in ‘08, has released two full-length albums and two EPs, and has opened for Ani DiFranco and Ingrid Michaelson.

Jocelyn and Jeremy spoke to me about knitting projects, fan gifts, the “lather, rinse, repeat” life of tour, and why they heart Perez Hilton.

Alli Marshall: I want to know about the three person sweater
Jocelyn: Well, I have a degree in fiber from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Basically, I went to art school as a back up plan in case the music thing didn’t work out. It actually came true because I was a production knitter for a really long time. I would often bring a personal knitting project in the van with me when we’d go on tour. At one point, Jeremy and Emily were teasing me saying, “I bet you’re knitting a sweater for the three of us to fit in.” We all laughed about it, haha. So, when it was time to make the album art for Killing the Darlings I thought, maybe I’m actually going to make that sweater. So there it is.

And it ended up in the video for “Prodigal daughter.”
Jocelyn: That’s right! That video was actually filmed in Australia so we had to ship [the sweater] there, which took maybe a month.
Jeremy: It had to go there and back.

Were you all in Australia when the video was being made?
Jeremy: No. This woman heard our music and liked our song, “Prodigal Daughter” and was like, “I’d love to film something using our song.” We were like, “Why don’t you film a music video for us?” She was like, “Okay,” and filmed that whole thing with her daughter. She did it for free, for us — she wanted to do a video with that song and with her daughter any way.
Jocelyn: As payment, because she’s a filmmaker, we let her use another one of our songs for another films she’s doing.

Would you like to tour in Australia?
Jeremy: We would love to. We’d love to tour all over the world. Even Antarctica, to the penguin and polar bear contingent. I had a weird idea one time to have a perpetual summer tour where we toured in the U.S. and Europe in the summer months, and then slipped down to South America and Australia during the winter months so we’d never have to wear jackets.
Jocelyn: I would personally not like that, because I hate the heat.

Image from shervinfoto.com

I read about how, when you were at SXSW a couple of years ago, you were all outfitted for glasses. Any other weird or awesome gifts that the band has received?
Jocelyn: The glasses company is called Tortoise & Blonde. They’re an awesome company. They’ve given us more glasses since then, and they gave me a free eye exam.
Jeremy: Free health care!
Jocelyn: And yesterday we got the gift of these really, really beautiful shoes by this designer named Mike Farrell . He’s based out of High Point, N.C. and Argentina. He’s a fabric designer, and just completed this new line of shoes called Lunch. And he just designed a fabric based on Pearl and the Beard’s songs. We really love him.
Jeremy: We’ve had people bring gifts to shows, like somebody who worked for a lotion/cosmetics departments.
Jocelyn: That’s Chagrin Valley Soaps. Sam Friedman. He’s a fantastic soap maker.
Jeremy: And we had this lady who makes soaps, kind of like Tyler Durden in Fight Club, I’d imagine. She made me a specific soap that had coal and some other stuff. It was called Backwoodsman or something. Somebody brought me Double Stuf Oreos because I mentioned them in an interview.

Tell me about the new extended single album. Is it one version of “Prodigal Daughter”?
Jeremy: What we did with the previous EP we did, we remixed our song, “Vessel” and called it “Black Vessel” and totally redid it, but with the same lyrics and basically the same melody. Aas an experiment, we did three songs by [each of] us, individually. This one is Prodicgal Daughter, another EP. We did the same exact thing as far as the individual songs by the three of us. But the “Prodigal Daughter” [track] is exactly the same.
Jocelyn: We did include the video on the download part. You can get the “Prodigal Daughter” single with the video and three songs written by each of us as solo artists.
Jeremy: We were also trying to do something a little different with that album. Since the music industry is moving forward, you’ve got to keep up or try to get a couple of steps ahead. We were thinking, do we want to release a CD? A physical CD? You can’t even put a CD into a MacBook Air. Pretty much everybody’s downloading stuff. What we did was put out these limited edition posters by Jonathan Schoeck from the band Larcenist. We got them screen printed and had the download code on the back. So you have art and music and no plastic.

Have you noticed with selling merch that people are buying more posters and that sort of thing?
Jeremy: People are buying posters, but they’re buying a lot more vinyl.
Jocelyn: A lot more vinyl. We used to go out on tour and bring maybe 30 vinyls for three weeks and sell 10 of them. Now we sell out of 30 vinyls in a couple of days. Which is shocking for us because it happened so quickly. It wasn’t a slow burn. We went from selling three to 30 in six months. We need to look at that information for our next album and decide how we want to release that music.
Jeremy: People are buying physical albums, which is awesome. They’re supporting us there. We don’t have our albums in stores anywhere. That’s a question we’ve been asking — what’s the benefit. If somebody sees is in their town, will they go to their local store? Are there even local stores in their town? I think most people are buying digitally. But for us, when we sell it out of the back of our van, we sell a ton.

Because your band has a hard-to-classify sound, do you think audiences need to see you live in order to really connect with what you do? Or are people coming to shows already familiar with your music?
Jocelyn: I think it’s a mix. Our fans are some of the most incredible, passionate people we’ve met. We’ve been touring for so long. We’ll have our five-year band anniversary in January and we’ve been touring for four of those years. Coming back to the same places and trying to build communities of people in these towns. The first couple of rounds, it’s our friends. And then they bring their friends, and they bring their friends. At a certain point, there are people coming to every show who haven’t heard us before. We feel really grateful that those people always come back, and they generally bring another set of people the next time. People are really excited about our live show, for sure, because it’s really different from the album. There will be some people who gravitate to the album and some people who gravitate to the live show. Because they’re not the same thing, you have to do both. Which, for us, makes a more fulfilling experience and gives us more outlets to share our music. And you can stream all of our music from our website.

I’m a fan of a live show that’s not identical to the album.
Jocelyn: We feel the same way. Because on an album you can put a string section, you can put a horn section, you can do all this fancy stuff. But we can’t travel with a string quartet — that would be completely unsustainable. You have to work with the resources you have on hand and still make the song sound really good. Which is a challenge when you only have three people in the band. We try to pump it up.

Image from teaandbrie.com

I watched some of the videos you did on the Sleepover Shows series. It seems like you doing a bit of improv.
Jocelyn: Absolutely. We loved that series. Aviv [Rubinstien, no longer with the production company] is a great creative dude. What he does at those sleepover shows — we actually sleep at his house. And then we wake up in the morning and he records and we’re half-asleep. But that’s kind of part of the idea, that you’re going to be using a different part of your brain at eight in the morning instead of eight in the evening. It ends up being a little different than we’d normally do it.

I wanted to ask you about where the band name came from.
Jeremy: Basically it’s a series of words that we thought sounded good and sounded like a story that needed to be told.
Jocelyn: Just to make it clear, there is no beard and there is no pearl. It’s just a name. Jeremy just happens to have a beard.

It does sound like a story. Like it could be a fable.
Jocelyn: Exactly. A nautical tale.
Jeremy: I’m imagining a little girl and her traveling companion who’s an enormous axe-wielding Viking. Or it could be something else. A love story. Or, I know there’s been some gay themes brought in. Some people turn it sexual. I welcome it all.
Jocelyn: Whatever it has to be. One of the first things, too, was that we wanted something easy to Google. If your band name is House —
Jeremy: Vestibule —
Jocelyn: Vestibule! It’s hard to pinpoint that on the web. It was important to us to have something people could find easily. But there have been a ton of interpretations people have given us that range from very obvious to very funny. Sometimes sexual, like Jeremy says. We love that, that’s the idea.

Photo from sheilagriffin.org

When I got the press release about your upcoming show, it had that quote from Perez Hilton [“Sweet, indie, folk pop! We love it!”]. I wondered how you felt about getting props from Perez Hilton.
Jocelyn: Oh, that was awesome. We were in Brighton, in the U.K. when we learned about that. Of course we were checking the Facebook and Twitter follow count. We were like, “Oh my god! It just went up by 100 likes!” Unless somebody is really, really cruel or whatever — but even if they are, if they’re listening to your music and spreading the word — they say any press is good press. This also happened to be good press, in addition to being Perez Hilton. And also, he’s kind of kooky. I like him. I think he’s actually really smart.
Jeremy: We tour a lot. We’re just in this van and getting out, loading, waiting around, playing, talking to the fans who are there, going home and staying at the house of somebody you know well or not so well, you’re sleeping on a couch or a weird yoga mat. You’re kind of in this weird bubble of a world and you don’t know what’s going on back at home. You don’t know what’s going on in the news. You don’t even know what your own career trajectory is, which can be really hard and frustrating. One of the things that lets us know how we’re doing is fan turnout, or the things people say like, “I love you guys.” People writing from Brazil or Japan or Portugal or whatever. That’s also another marker — some random dude in Hollywood who comments on things. If he’s noticing it, then it might be a little bit more elevated in the public sphere. So people might be noticing what we’re doing, even if it seems like we’re on a treadmill.

I’ve often thought that the life a touring band must get pretty surreal.
Jocelyn: It’s always a new thing every day, a new city every day. But it’s a lot of the same thing every day, too. If you do it for a long time like we have and a lot of our friends have. you get into this rhythm, like Jeremy said. You wake up on a yoga mat, drive for five hours, load in your stuff, do your sound check, eat a food, play your show, do the merch table, wrap up everything, put it back in the van, go to a friend’s house, sleep on a yoga mat, blah blah blah. It’s like lather, rinse repeat. You have no way of knowing how people are reacting to it. You’re in your own little world. So when something like that happens, it’s like, “Oh! We’re not just doing the same thing everything.” We are growing, and it feels really good that people acknowledge that. And that they’re enjoying the music. Because if people don’t enjoy the music, it’s not like an office job. That’s a similar lather, rinse, repeat situation but you still get your salary, no matter what. But our job is contingent on people liking what we do, and it’s not always easy to tell if people like what we do. That was one of times it was like, “Okay guys! We can still do this! Get back in the van!”

Rock ‘n’ roll forever: The Whigs

The Whigs (from Athens, Ga.) are, perhaps, the current best hope for rock ‘n’ roll. To do what, exactly, I’m not sure. But Enjoy The Company (released two weeks ago) is such a deftly-balanced yet unselfconscious collection of rock songs that it’s hard not to cheer. Headphones on and all.

Opening track “Staying Alive” breaks several rules right out of the gate — it’s eight minutes long. At the beginning of the album. It devolves into first a mellow, quiet amble before the four minute mark, and then a jam session that starts out sort of southern rock-ish and gets increasingly avant-garde noise-rock from there. It’s a risk, and it pays off. Partly because it works but, perhaps more importantly, because it establishes the fact that the Whigs are here to rock and they don’t care about formulas or expectations of how its supposed to be done. When a band knows how to do its thing, that’s sexy.

The rest of the 10 tracks top off around the four-minute mark, with a few coming in under three minutes. Among those is “Tiny Treasures,” a romantic pressure cooker of muscular percussion (Julian Dorio) and sparkling guitars (Parker Gispert and bassist Timothy Deaux). Front man Gispert has an easily-digestible voice with the capability to go in surprising directions. He does that well on this song, at turns hard and vulnerable.

There are a couple of nods to country rock on Enjoy. The pulsing start of “Summer Heat” suggests the more rocked-out direction country artists like, say, Jason Aldeen have taken lately. And then the Whigs quickly crush the country ramble with Gispert’s not-quite-menacing vocal and a full-on drum-and-guitar assault. The songs came out ahead of the album as a single. It premiered on Rolling Stone; Gispert told the magazine that the song was about a friend of his who got hauled off to jail on an expired speeding ticket. But with the sweaty roar of the bridge, “Come sit next to me, let me set you free,” the song takes on a completely different meaning.

The album takes its title from a line in the slinky, slow-burning “After Dark”: “Enjoy the company, now can we take it easy? And if you’re honest, I’ll keep you with me always.” Here Gispert, almost whispers his vocal. The energy is tightly coiled, the power and kick of the song barely contained — and yet it is contained.

The song is a testament both the the band’s skill as musicians and as businessmen. Patience, a rarity among volatile rock stars, is key. The Whigs garnered notice over the last few years, touring with bigger acts like The Black Keys, The Hold Steady, band of Skulls and Kings of Leon. The latter famously imploded last year (though they claim they’ve not disbanded). The thing is, that grit and energy paired with catchy melody and serious punch — the formula that defines Kind of Leon and why that group was (is?) so great — is exactly the foundation upon which the Whigs have built their sound. Patiently, patiently. Enjoy is their fourth album; this year the Whigs hit the decade mark as a band.

Ironically, “Waiting” does anything but. Here is the rock ‘n’ roll buck, the hair flip, the fiery yowl, the churn of guitars. And then, on the other side of that, is the singer-songwriter-y, acoustic guitar-y, heart-on-sleeve-y “Thank You,” which suggests that there’s a romance blossoming off stage.

That tender moment is quickly tempered (wisely) with the smack and bite of “Rock And Roll Forever,” which comes on with all the bravado and swagger that a song of that title should.

Enjoy (which is, indeed, enjoyable) opens with energy and risks, and closes the same way. “Ours” is among the heaviest offerings. Loud, bombastic, growling into stage lights and smoke machine clouds. It’s a stadium rocker in the ’80s sense. But it also contains a facet of finger-style guitar and nocturnal atmosphere complete with violin and cello so sweet that the dichotomy of open-throttle rock is almost humorous. Except that, weird as it sounds, it works.