2008 Music and Book Favorites

Favorite Records 2008

Dennis Wilson - Pacific Ocean Blue (reissue) - This is by far my favorite record this year. It's incredibly infectious and wounded, and I've recently grown a soft spot in my heart for the coked-up morning-after glories of 70's Los Angeles sound. And this is its soundtrack, I imagine. And totally, TOTALLY over the top production, some may say "sappy" but I love it.

Graham Nash - Songs For Beginners (reissue) - A lot of reissues on my list this year; goes a long way in revealing my current opinion of new music. I had not discovered this album until this year and it's reissue. A beautiful, beautiful record. I always under estimated Graham Nash, and I always thought Stephen Stills would be my favorite non-Neil Young member of C.S.N.Y. But no more. This record is short in that way that records aren't short anymore (something around 35 minutes) and incredibly sentimental with jaw-dropping hooks and harmonies. A Sunday evening record if there ever was one.

Warren Zevon - Warren Zevon (Rhino expanded reissue) - Really got into Zevon this year, as my exceedingly tolerant girlfriend/fiancée can begrudgingly attest. Neil Young will always be my favorite songwriter, but Zevon's writing just amazes me. "Desperados Under The Eaves" just completely floors me.

Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes - I don't know why bands got away from singing intricate three and four part harmonies. Oh, that's right -they don't know how. I'm glad Fleet Foxes is bringing it back. A really beautiful record.

Centro-Matic/South San Gabriel - Dual Hawks - Another winner from Will Johnson and co. And we get the added bonus of a double albums from his main band and side-project. Centro-Matic has got to be thee most underrated band in America.

Sun Kil Moon - April - Mark Kozelek gets better and better and although if pressed I would say this is a slight letdown from his previous, "Ghosts of the Great Highway" this is still one of my most played records this year.

Cat Power - Jukebox - An awesome set from Chan Marshall and like "The Greatest" sees her working with some top notch soul and rock musicians. Some may say she's getting away from her "indie" roots but making a sultry soul album like this nowadays will always prove a good move in my book.

Oasis - Dig Out Your Soul - I know, I know, a favorite/best of list of mine would never be complete in an Oasis release year without an Oasis release. It's a different record for them, a kind of psychedelic turn, but I think it really works because it allows Noel to not have to produce the kind of bloated stadium ballad, that when it fails, really drag down an album. Surprisingly, Liam writes the best song on this record ("I'm Outta Time").




Favorite Books 2008


Lush Life by Richard Price - My favorite book this year. I came to it because Price was one of the writers on The Wire. At first I thought this book was going to be a "cop drama", or a "crime-drama", but it's really a victim drama, and the best character sketch of the Lower East Side in NYC that I have ever read. Thankfully, I've been lucky to haunt that neighborhood on a few occasions and his descriptions of its inhabitants and storefronts really came to alive.


Wolf by Jim Harrison - My first Harrison book. A mighty enjoyable tale of camping, drying out, and bitter remembrance of women done him wrong. I look forward to reading a lot more Jim Harrison books.

Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri - I was drawn to this book after seeing the author and director of the subsequent film adaptation on Charlie Rose. A remarkable story, and as good as it is, the film adaptation may even exceed it. Highly recommend both, but have some tissues nearby.




The Wild Sheep Chase - Haruki Murakami
After Dark - Haruki Murakami
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami - 2008 was thee Murakami year for me. He fast became one of my favorite authors a couple of years ago and this year I devoured him. Mix the wonderful Japanese storytelling tradition with a kind of Garcia-Marquez metaphysicism. You really get lost in each book, wrapped up in the journey of the characters and it's an enjoyable trip. The "Running" book was a memoir of sorts, drawing parallels between marathon running and writing in the author's life. A great non-fiction read.

The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Richard Wright - A fascinating read on the history of Islamic fundamentalism and how we got to where we are now in that part of the world.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon by Crystal Zevon - I usually hate narrative biographies because they lack any kind of real flow, but Crystal does a good job of seamlessly patching together Zevon's peers accounts. Boy, what a son of a bitch he was, too! Always making for a good read.

Sometimes, Always

We all have them (hopefully); those fond memories that are tied directly to a piece of music. You hear that one refrain and you are immediately transported back to that one summer or that one car ride. My fondest one takes place in the back of a school bus; diesel fumes may or may not have played a part in the following nostalgia.

One of my all-time favorite bands is Jesus and Mary Chain. At Fetch practice a few weeks ago, I boasted that I think I am the youngest person in the world who listens to JAMC, at the ripe age of 27. Their prime was long before my time; they released their first album Psychocandy when I was 7. But I got into them retroactively somewhere during my freshman year in high school when they had maybe their biggest radio hit (and not even really that big), “Sometimes Always” from Stoned and Dethroned.

Back in my formative music listening years before I had to take a 20 minute ferry and drive twenty miles into Seattle to be able to buy CDs, I used to order cassettes from the local library. Once I found the album I was looking for in their database, I would usually have to wait 3 or 4 weeks for it to come in. Let’s just say that the librarians knew me extremely well because I probably ordered anywhere from 30-40 albums a month. After I checked them out, I would dub the album on cassette by putting duct tape over the two holes in the top of the library cassette (a trick my dad taught me). And I would photocopy the album art and liner notes, producing my own little bootlegged copy. This was my racket.

As adolescent as it seems, it was a pretty good racket, so I continued it well into my teenage years. And it was in my sophomore year when my class took a field trip to Everett Community College for a ‘College Day’; one of those events where college reps show up and have tables and hand out pamphlets to the young and aspiring.

I don’t specifically remember the College Day – what schools I talked to, or who I walked around with. But I do remember how much I hated field trips. Don’t laugh, but field trips always made me sad and depressed and I’ll tell you why. I’ve always been kind of a loner and was always the kid in the class who’d rather talk to the teacher or parent than another kid. Seemingly every year, our class went to the fucking Woodland Park Zoo. Every year. Wonderful imagination from your public school. And every year, as everyone buddied up in groups with one of their friends parents (who would always, without fail, buy their kids and kids friends lunch), I would always get stuck with either the teacher or the one parents of the weird kid and I would be stuck talking to the adult about news of the day or Tom Wolfe books as I ate my humble sack lunch and watched everyone else eat elaborate lunches of hot dogs, potato chips and pop.

Don’t cry for me, Sally, just giving you my back-story here. But to this day, I refuse to go to the Zoo.

Anyway, at the end of the day everyone all piled on the bus and I took my customary position on the field trip return home: in the back of the bus, alone, with my Walkman. On my Walkman that day was the library copy I had dubbed of Jesus and Mary Chain’s Stoned and Dethroned. I had become obsessed with the album. Ironically, it is the black sheep of the band’s albums; radically different from their discography of white noise, Phil Spector-inspired new wave anthems, Stoned and Dethroned is mostly acoustic. As tame as it seemed, the album still retained the sugar-sweet pop sensibilities that had prevailed throughout their other albums and had made JAMC the darlings of England in the 1980s.

I remember sitting in the back of that bus, listening to that album, probably the song “Sometimes Always” and thinking this is how I want my band to sound like. I had just begun writing my own songs and I responded immediately to the simplicity, but utter genius of JAMC’s melodies. And it wasn’t that I wanted to copy them, copy their sound, but I wanted to capture the same aesthetic. The music of JAMC is undeniably cool. You feel cooler listening to it. And I wanted that; I recognized its subtle genius, even then.

Now, some 12 years later, I’m lucky enough to find myself in a band with guys who were actually old enough to see Jesus and Mary Chain in concert (sorry to age you guys!). And that band is one of our main influences.

Our first show with me as a member of the band is tonight, and we are covering a Jesus and Mary Chain song, “Between Planets” off Automatic. And I swear, there are moments when we play that song as a band, that I am perhaps the happiest I’ve ever been. And maybe its because that 15 year old in the back of the bus, lonely and grumpy and hiding under a pair of headphones, grew up to actually play music the way he, then, could only dream of.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you “Sometimes Always” by Jesus and Mary Chain (w/ the enchanting Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star on vocals!)

*press the green note to play

Get Stickam for Free.

Stagger and Swoon

Besides my beloved Neil, Canada has contributed some real gems to the music world in the past 30 years. Joni Mitchell, Sloan, Bachman-Turner Overdrive just to name a few. No doubt you've heard you've heard of these folks, and you probably own some of their records (c'mon, you love "Takin' Care of Business"...). But I bet you've never heard of Joel Plaskett, and Sally - in a country of musical giants, he stands on their shoulders.

I remember as clear as Pepsi Clear the first time I heard Joel Plaskett: it was in the summer of 2003 and I was at a BBQ at my good friends Brent and Amy's place in Bellingham. That summer was a pretty epic one for me. I had just lost the first girl I had truly loved; I worked graveyard shift at a shit job that spilled me everynight in a heap of hunger and exhaustion into a booth at the all-night diner the Ranch Room, reading Dave Eggers and eating grilled cheese sandwhiches until daybreak. At the conclusion of summer, I'd be moving to Chicago, leaving all that behind.

My friend Brent had been telling me about Joel Plaskett for awhile, but it hadn't quite stuck. But at his BBQ, he put on "Down at the Kybhar", Joel's second solo record. I don't remember paying all that close of attention to the record; I was in a social mood and talking up Dave Crider about Chicago and what bars to go to (for the record: Delilah's and the Empty Bottle). But it was with the first notes of the album's closing track, "Light Of The Moon" that I finally perked up and took notice. It was one of those "what the fuck is this?!!!" moments. From across the lawn, I asked Brent who this was. "It's Joel Plaskett", he said.

The song is a monster, beginning with a quiet, haunting acoustic guitar and Joel's piercing croon, and then erupts into a volcano of distortion and drum fills as epic and powerful as any song I've ever heard. It was everything about music that I loved: fragile, beautiful, haunting, and it, well...kicked serious ass. And as I soon came to find out, it concluded an entire album full of these kind of moments.

The "Down at the Kyhber" album completely changed how I thought about and played music. It's fair to put it in the terms of Before Joel and After Joel. Here was a guy with a voice a lot like mine - kind of nasally and whiney, writing songs I wished to fucking hell I wrote. I bonded it with it immediatly, like a girl you fall in love with the moment you see her and it seems like you've known her forever and that you're life was just some strange dream before.

And what was also so great is that he was completely unknown. I had never seen his picture in a magazine or seen one of his music videos. It was one of those rare, almost unheard of moments when you connect with the music, purely on the music's merit. You aren't corrupted with how cool they looked in that Spin spread or buzz you'd heard from hipster friends. In this ultra saturized times we live in, I don't think this happens anymore. You can never quite seperate the look from the music, even subconsciously (the Strokes music is pretty good, but goddamn don't they always look so cool doing it!).

Now perhaps it's not an accident that that day at the BBQ I got the most drunk I'd ever been and have been since, drinking the majority of a bottle of Beam I had brought as a gift, and ended up passing out in my car...at about 6 in the evening. Maybe that rosey blur adds to the nostalgia of the day and of the recollection hearing Joel Plaskett for the first time, I don't know. But, all cheesiness and cliche aside - and among many mornings and evenings I've long since forgotten - it's a day I'll never forget.

And now, 3 years later, Joel's music, and especially "Light of the Moon", has reached that pinnacle in my conscious that seperates it from being just a piece of music I love, but one that frames a moment in time when everything was changing, and nothing would ever be the same. It became the soundtrack for the end of one part of my life, and the beginning of another.

After all this time, I had never seen Joel live. He's very well regarded in Canada, but has absolutely no presence in the US, so he never tours stateside. But about a month ago, he came to Chicago, to the Empty Bottle, on a Sunday night. And it maybe wasn't an accident that I was going through a extremely rough spot at the time, and perhaps it was Joel coming through to save me again.

There was no one at the show; maybe 20 people. Maybe. I sat on the risers to the left of the stage and took in the moment. I was a fucking wreck before I went to the show, but seeing Joel sing those songs I'd loved so much for so long and that meant so much to me, was something I just can't put into words. He was playing for me; it didn't matter that there was no one there. And in fact, it only encouraged me to treat it like my own private concert, yelling out song requests to which Joel kindly obligied.

I tried not to sound like a tool yelling out songs, but i didn't care. After playing the two songs I kindly requested, I was still waiting for "Light of the Moon" when he ended his set. It went something like this:

Joel: Thanks, goodnig...
Kegan: Light of the Moon!

Joel kind of laughed and said, "alright, we can do one more". I mean, you have to imagine, there was no one there. The few that were there were on their way out, no one was calling for an encore, except my dumbass. So he played "Light of the Moon", for me and probably me alone, and it was transcendiary.

Summer Songs

A few years back, I mentioned to my friend that I was reading "Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath, and he said: "in the dead of Chicago winter? be careful..." I hadn't considered the consequences of reading such a tempered book in such a vindictive climate, and then after about 50 pages I understood. I had to put it on the shelf for fear of ending up with the same fate as the author (although I figure I was safe since I had shut off my cooking gas a few months earlier).

But it got me thinking about how much the seasons have to do with the art that we experience; how we experience; and when we experience it. The 'Bell Jar' episode was a few seasons ago at this point and I have yet to revisit it. Not that it wasn't good book or Plath is a excellent writer (i actually prefer her prose to her poetry...and saying that, prefer her husband Ted Hughes work above both), but my friend was right: there are certain times for certain books. Of course, it's not like you're gonna read 'Bell Jar' sitting on the beach in Hawaii, so it seems there presents itself somewhat of a reader conundrum.

But alas, it's summer. And it seems like while everyone is compiling their summer reading list (why don't you people have a 'winter reading list' or an 'autumn reading list [which would no doubt include Whitman]?), I got to thinking about a seasonal treat that, I think, is much more profound than a few Oprah book club titles: the Summer Record.

We all have them. Those 'summer songs' or 'summer records' that just seem sunnier than the rest. They're the ones that remind of you of driving around in your car with the windows down and the volume up. Making out with a certain brunette on the public beach that closes at dusk. Getting drunk on drinks with wedges of lime. Ah, summer nights...

I'm lucky enough to have chosen a profession where I can pretty much hear anything I want to hear. If it's a record on an indie label; i can get my hands on an advanced copy. I know, I'm a bastard. Go ahead and say it. I just make and keep the right friends, that's all.

So several months ago I inquired to a certain friend about Band of Horses because I had been a HUGE fan of Carissa's Wierd(http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/artsentertainment/2002088364_nite12.html), a group sadly disbanded, but whose core members went on to form Band of Horses (i once proudly drove from Bellingham to Seattle in the spur of the moment to see Carissa's Wierd play an in-store at Sonic Boom one evening, and then turn right around and drove back after the set was over).

I liked the Band of Horses record a lot. It didn't blow me away, it wasn't revolutionary. They were not re-inventing the wheel. It was definitely derivitive of Built To Spill, The Shins, and My Morning Jacket. But the sentiments on the record were very cool and I responded to the somewhat antiquated notion of soft/loud dynamics that have sadly seem to have gone the way of healthy stock portfolios, doc martins, Hum, and other relics of the '90s.

It stayed in good rotation, but it didn't knock me out. But then somewhere along the line it made that jump that most "favorite records" seem to make. All of sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, you get it. You GET IT. Like a safe falling on your head in a Looney Tunes cartoon. Its what happens when a record exists in your head for awhile, but then somehow, at some moment, touches you. You're not quite sure how, or when it happened. Maybe before you weren't ready for it. Maybe you were ready for it now, as if it sat patiently in the waiting-room of your brain, reading a two-month old copy of Newsweek, waiting for its name to be called.

For me, this seemed to happen when the weather turned sweet and warm. All of a sudden, the Band of Horses record ("Everything All The Time", by the way) seemed fucking monumental. The songs are so beautiful; the arrangements so steeped in grandeur; the chiming, churning guitars seem to steam engine the songs, crescendoing them down the tracks. The songs are sad and lovely and full of possibility, and the album is perfectly timed (10 songs, 36 minutes) that you miss it even before its over, and want to repeat as soon as possible. Come to think of it, kind of like summer itself.

The Roadhouse

Happy Friday,

I found this picture I took last November in NYC when the Pilots were on tour. This is a view from our pal Seth's apartment in Midtown, where some of us stayed. To this day, the best television show I've ever seen was sitting on Seth's balcony and watching peoples lives through a pair of binoculars and open shades. Reality TV ain't got nothing on the live's of anonomous New Yorkers in their apartments.

Today, I wanted to share with you two of my loves: Country and Soul music. For anyone who has ever spent a lot of time with Gram Parsons, Ray Charles, Johnny Paycheck or Nina Simone, you might recognize the intersection of these two seemingly unrelated genres. You can actually trace them both back to gospel, and see that those sentiments still very much exist in modern interpretations of these genres. Listen to Elvis, and you will hear all these ingrediants: gospel, soul and country. What is fascinating about them, is actually how similar they are. The best way to appriciate this is listening to them back to back.

My hometown college radio station (which also happens to be the best radio station in the friggin' world) KEXP, has a show every Wednesday night called The Roadhouse, with Greg Vandy. This may be the best radio program i've ever heard. I've never heard someone so seemlessly transition between soul and country music. Roots, music - as it were. There is something extremely thrilling in hearing Nina Simone and Fred Neil played back-to-back. It sounds so right...

Luckily, KEXP archives its weekly programming, so you can check out Greg's show this week: http://www.kexp.org/programming/progpage.asp?showID=4&1413=38875.75-1&96=38875.75-1&20=38875.75-1&256=38875.75-2

The inaugural post

Guten Tag,

"Ask Me About My Other Band" will be a home for my many rants, raves, bitching, crying, moaning and what records, books and film I am, at the moment, completely engrossed in.

Many of you have enjoyed my little emails where I spit and froth like a doberman with ADD, so why not give it a url!

I also like to pretend that I'm a semi-functional musician, and so this will also be a place where I can talk about my many musical projects and why you should care, or maybe most importantly, at least entertain me. What shows I have coming up; what songs I'm writting; who I'm stealing from this week; what bands I dreamed up while hopped up on coffee and cigarettes; where I'm playing/touring; blah blah blah.