Songs to Learn and Sing: Recent Episodes
Paul McDermott
“PT Barnan meets John Waters with women Sumo wrestling and Mexican transvestite wrestling… It’s thrills, chills and doctor pills, a ticket’s good for a seat but you will only use the edge, it’s high flying bone-jarring excitement, not since Christians were fed to the lions has there been a show this dangerous.” Jim Rose, Dublin 1999 In July 1999 Jim Rose performed in Dublin's Vicar Street with his Secrets of the Strange tour. I spent an afternoon in Vicar Street as local performers auditioned for the show. In this feature I chat to Rose and a 19 year old Dubliner hoping to become part of Rose's touring troupe. The young Dubliner was Preacher Muad'dib, now an internationally successful fire breathing specialist with several Guinness World Records under his belt. In the feature he talks about his aspirations of touring with his hero, let's just say, it all worked out for the guy. He and Jim Rose now refer to each other as 'my hero' and they're both continued to tour even working together opening for Alice Cooper.
Last week Willy Vlautin was in Dublin on his way to the Galway Arts Festival to do a reading with Roddy Doyle and play a gig. We had a quick chat about The High Country, the forthcoming Richmond Fontaine album. The High Country is described as "a song-novel, in which a gripping tale is spun with fully fleshed-out characters, changing scenes, snippets of radio and spoken word passages." The album is a gothic love story, "between a mechanic and an auto parts store counter girl, whose secret love inspires an effort to escape the darkness of the world that surrounds them - drugs, violence, madness, loneliness, and desperation set against a backdrop of endless logging roads and the remains of a forest brutalised by logging."
Willy explained the concept of the record for me: "It is kinda like a concept record, its a linear story about a woman who lives in a small town, is married to a really rough guy and falls in love with another guy. It's very gothic, there's light versus dark, the romantic songs I think are really over-the-top romantic, and then there's a really twisted dark side to the record. So those live next to each other and it gets to the point where one song will be kinda romantic and then the next song is really dark, but I think it makes sense. It's probably our most ambitous record, I guess, our wildest record and probably the most fun to make... The woman lives in a gully of this logging town under these huge trees. I live next to a bunch of logging areas and you just get lost under the trees. Her dream is to just get out of there, everynight when she goes to bed she dreams of "the High Country," dreams that she's not stuck in the gully of some small dying town."
Richmond Fontaine will return to Ireland in November for a full tour. In other related news Willy's first novel The Motel Life has been filmed by the Polsky Brothers and starring Dakota Fanning, Stephen Dorff, Emile Hirschand and Kris Kristofferson and will be released next year.
Omertá the debut album by The belles was released in March 2004 and I interviewed Chris Tolle, the band’s singer and guitarist, for Songs To Learn And Sing when they were gigging in Ireland that year. Chris chatted about growing up in a small University town in the U.S. Midwest, American novelist Wally Lamb's influence on the album's name, The Pernice Brothers and songwriting.
Chris also enthused about his love of The Replacements. “I probably got Let it Be when I was maybe 13 or 14 years old,” he said. “It was definitely a huge, huge influence seeing bands like the Replacements. It made me realise that to be in a rock band and write songs you didn’t have to be Kiss or have a big gimmick, just be regular people making music and it really kind of helped to shape that idea in my head. Minneapolis was six hours drive away from where we were from (Lawrence, Kansas) so there were a lot of things that they were singing about which connected with us.” Omertá is a lovely Americana record: laidback acoustic arrangements, no-frills, great harmonies, sweet melodies and still sounds totally brilliant. http://songstolearnandsing.blogspot.com/
I've just finished reading It's lovely to be Here: the Touring Diaries of a Scottish Gent by James Yorkston. It's a great read and is up there with recent excellent music memoirs by Dean Wareham and Luke Haines. This tour diary is made even more enjoyable because James describes towns and venues in Ireland that I'm very familiar with from years of gig-going. The best praise I can give this book though, is that it made me want to go back and listen to a couple of James's albums. I hadn't played James's second full length album, 2004's Just Beyond the River, in years and had forgotten how beautiful it is, a gorgeous stripped-down classic.
I interviewed James when he played in Whelan's, Dublin around the time of the album's release and asked him how he came to get labelmate Kieran Hebden (aka Four Tet) to produce the record: "We went with Kieran because when he heard that we had an album ready to record he said that he was interested. I was a bit shocked and I thought that I don’t really want to do an electronica album but he said, ‘nah don’t be daft James, I don’t want to do one either, I want to do a really stripped down raw album.’"
James continued, "That’s exactly want I wanted to do so I went to his house and we played each other some music and I just thought that if we could get along with each other in a working way. He played me some demos he had dome for somebody else and they just sounded very raw, there were no effects, there was no reverb or anything like that, it had just been recorded really well with good microphones. So that was exactly what I was after. I wasn’t after a producer who was going to stamp his personality on the record, I just wanted somebody who would let the instruments and the songs speak for themselves and I think that’s what we got with Kieran."
James was a really great man to chat to and over the course of the interview we also touched upon, signing with Domino Records, the success of Franz Ferdinand and what it meant to the rest of the roster on the label, King Creosote, Lone Pigeon and the Fence Collective and the landscape and weather of Fife and West Cork.
I was at the Music, CD and Record Fair last Saturday and picked up a few gems. The record fair is staged in Dublin a few times a year and is a mecca for vinyl enthusiasts. Back in 2004 I produced a feature on the record fair for Segments, a radio show I co-produced for Dublin City FM. Segments was a weekly series of documentary shorts reflecting different aspects of Dublin life. This particular feature was recorded at the record fair when it was staged at the Marine Hotel in Dún Laoghaire. It's a simple audio collage of interviews with record dealers and collecters, chatting about what records they're after and what sells well. It gives a unique glimpse into the mind's of vinyl collecters. Brian O'Kelly the organiser, also chats about what records people always ask for. 1973's Early One Morning by Mushroom (Aonghus McAnally's prog/Celtic rock outfit), that a few of the dealers mention in the feature was reissued on CD by Radioactive Records in 2006. I wonder has the reissue somewhat deflated the £300 asking price that vinyl copies of the record were going for back in 2004? http://songstolearnandsing.blogspot.com/
Mazarin played the Sugar Club, Dublin on April 5, 2006 in support of their amazing third album We’re Already There. Before the gig I interviewed Mazarin’s principal member and songwriter, Quentin Stoltzfus. We chatted about Quentin’s background, his work with other bands in Philadelphia, his approach to songwriting and collaboration, the Mazarin open door policy of band membership and his mother’s time in a Gospel trio with her sisters. “They used to sing a lot of traditional songs Cater Family songs and traditional gospel songs and a lot of that stuff has been popping up in the last five years,” explained Quentin. “When I started getting into that stuff I got one disc in particular called American Primitive which was put out on the Revenant label. When I bought that record I was amazed by how many of the songs I knew, because my Grandmother used to sing to me as a kid also.” Quentin was a real gent, you couldn't hope to meet a nicer interviewee and Mazarin went on to play a great gig later that night in the Sugar Club. It was a really memorable gig not least for the fact that I even got to meet Kevin Shields at the bar! Mazarin would eventually play their final show later that year on December 2, 2006. Bizarrely another band called Mazarin had formally issued a cease and desist. Quentin’s Mazarin didn’t have the resources to retaliate so suggested both bands should simply co-exist but the other Mazarin and their attorney decided: either cease and desist, or we go to court. Eventually Quentin’s Mazarin and their management concluded “the whole predicament was so sad and despairing that instead of dragging out a lengthy litigation, which they had neither the time nor money to commit to - f**k it.” Quentin currently resides in Philadelphia, where he is working as a recording engineer and producer in addition to still creating his own new music. http://songstolearnandsing.blogspot.com/
The Trashcan Sinatras played an instore gig in Tower Records, Dublin on June 2, 2005. I spoke to the band's guitarist John Douglas after the performance about their fourth album, Weightlifting and the long gap between its release and A Happy Pocket in 1996. "We were way off the radar," said John, "we didn’t really do anything for a good five or six years except sit at home and write and get back to a bit of normal life," The band had spent the previous ten years on the Go! Discs label touring and recording. In 1996 Polygram acquired a majority stake in the label, and the label folded not too long afterwards. John explained what the band got up to in the intervening years: "About 1997-1998 when Go! Discs folded we found ourselves with a lot of time on our hands and not a lot of money so we just went back to normal life and struggled to pay the bills, made friends. We started going out into town and being local people rather then these guys who would show up every three months and disappear again. That was the nice aspect of it; we got really grounded in reality again and got back to being normal human beings." The interview can be heard below. http://songstolearnandsing.blogspot.com/
A number of months ago I played The Dream Academy's version of Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want on the show but an even better version of the song can be found on Clayhill's 2005 Acoustic record. Clayhill's cover also plays over the final scene of Shane Meadows' This Is England. Clayhill are a 3-piece folk band featuring Ali Friend, Ted Barnes and Gavin Clark. Ali had been in Red Snapper and written and played with Ted on a number of Beth Orton albums before teaming up with former Sunhouse vocalist Gavin. The band's EP Cuban Green was released in early 2004 and was followed by Small Circle, the brilliant debut album in September of that year. This interview with the band was first broadcast in September 2004 on Episode 2 of the programme. Clayhill were in Ireland doing a few gigs and had just come off stage having opened for Paddy Casey in Dublin's Olympia Theatre. "It's weird doing gigs like that when there's a lot of chatter going on, but we really enjoyed it, in some ways it makes you play better," admitted Gavin. Shane Meadows had also directed a short film for the band and Gavin explained how the colaboration with the director came about; "Years ago we met at Alton Towers, when we were both working there, I worked in a chip van and he was a face painter and we started writing songs together but he went away to college and started making these really mad films, one thing lead to another and I started putting music to his short films. When we got this record together we thought it would be a really good thing if he could do a short film for us." The resulting 2005 film, Northern Soul was screened at a number of cinemas in the UK followed by a Clayhill performance. Clayhill's second album, Mine at Last was released in 2006 and currently they seem to be on a hiatus. The band members are working on other musical projects. Gavin has contributed vocals to a number of UNKLE tracks and with Ted has also continued to collborate with Meadows, writing music for his 2008 feature Somers Town.
Birdstuff: "It's the opposite of Milli Vanilli – we're a live, loud, rowdy, rock band that is trying to make people think that the music is being controlled by a computer."
Man or Astroman? played Dublin on 23 January 2000. I spoke with Birdstuff, the band’s drummer and spokesperson before their show and he told me it would also probably be their one and only gig in Dublin. The band's ultimate plan was to stop touring and get people to come and visit them. “There’s this place called Branson, Missouri in the United Sates where they have all these general run of the mill country acts that perform in a theatre there seven months of the year and people come to them,” Birdstuff explained, “We’re thinking of setting up a venue in Atlanta, Georgia where the Man or Astroman? headquarters are located and we’d just play there three or four months out of the year. If anyone wants to come and see us they can come there, because we are going to quit coming to see people. I think that it’s going to start working the other way around.”
This interview with the National's Matt Berninger is from November 19, 2005. The band had just released their third album, Alligator and were back in Ireland for the first time in three years. In late 2005 the band were on a bit of a role. Having signed to Beggars Banquet they had a recording budget for the first time and as the quotes on the flyer below show, Alligator was picking up some great reviews. It would go on to be voted one of the albums of 2005 by most music magazines.
Three years of hard touring had finally paid off and when the band got to Dublin for this show they were pretty surprised to see a sold out sign at Whelan's door. In late December 2002 the band had played in the Cobblestone in Dublin and the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork at the tail end of a UK and Irish tour. The Triskel gig on December 17 was attended by about 10 people, but I think all of us that night were completely blown away by the band's performance. It was the last night of a long tour and even though there were only a few people present the band gave it their all. I think we all bought something from the merch stand that night. The stickers below are from that tour.
In the interview Matt discusses the formation of the band, how he ended up singing, the band's career to date, recording Alligator, touring and he had this to say about one of may favourite tracks off the Cherry Tree EP, Murder me Rachael: "Rachael's actually my sister, It was written at a point where she had given me a lot of advice on how to hold on to someone that I was sort of odsessed with. I did not heed her advice and the relationship did fall apart, so Murder Me Rachael is about - I didn't do what she told me to do and it ruined everything. It's one of our more angry songs, an absurd anger, there's a death involved at the end and it's all fantasy."
Next up from the archives is an interview with Dan Snaith, aka Caribou which was recorded in 2005 around time his The Milk of Human Kindness album was released.
We are huge fans of The Free Design here at Songs To Learn And Sing so it was really sad to hear of the recent death of Chris Dedrick. We had played a few tracks from his 1972 solo album, Wishes back on Episode 289 of the radio show and I remembered that when I interviewed Dan from Caribou we had chatted about The Free Design and Dan's remix for Light In The Attic's Redesigned project. Dan had this to say about The Free Design: "I remember hearing Kites Are Fun and both the sound of their voices and the production, the Enoch Light production, with all sorts of instrumentation and stuff just immediately appealed to me, an interesting combination of sounds. I bought all their old records, old vinyl copies of their records. Somebody from Domino Records in the US told me that there was a guy who was reissuing all of them and doing remixes and I asked to put him in touch with me. I begged to do a remix. It’s on a little label, the guy wasn’t offering big money to do remixes but bands like Stereolab, Super Furry Animals, Mars Volta and Bell & Sebastian were obviously all fans of the band."
Dan also explained how he got into music: "I played piano from a really young age and got into music that way, but it wasn’t until my early teenage years when I got a really crappy kinda keyboard and used my Dad’s computer, an early Mac. The whole reason I started recording on a computer is because when you’re that age, or even my age now, you can’t afford to go and record in a studio. I’ve been working in the same way since then, a sort of DIY aesthetic. I’ve always been as much into the production of music as in the song writing."
I chatted to Byran Hollon aka Boom Bip when he played in the Temple Bar Music Centre in Dublin back in April 2005. Blue Eyed in the Red Room was just out and we chatted about the music that Byran was introduced to as a child. “The music that was in our house was actually a lot of old country music, a lot of Willy Nelson, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn. My parents were really into old country. I had two older sisters who brought Black Sabbath and Journey and more sort of metal bands as well as Wham and Madonna so there was lot of different stuff in the house. My grandfather had a vinyl collection of all old country, he had original Hank Williams and stuff like that and every Sunday our family all had dinner together and he would put that on while we ate. I heard Jimmy Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love when I was 14 and it blew me away. A friend of mine, his father was an old stoner and he had all the Blue Oyster Cult, The Moody Blues, Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Hendrix and that was the tuff that I really wasn’t introduced to in my house so through his house I got to hear all that old acid rock. I was taking drum lessons from 10 up until 14 and once I started to be introduced to that stuff, I wanted a guitar. I got a guitar and it all just seemed to connect. 3 Feet High and Rising, Paul’s Boutique by Beastie Boys and People’s Instinctive Tavels by A Tribe Called Quest. Those three records were huge for me. I think I was 15, those records were massive. Paul’s Boutique really was a huge one for me.” Blue Eyed in the Red Room features The Matter of Our Discussion an amazing track featuring Nina Nastasia on vocals, Bryan explained how the collaboration came about: “With Nina, I was a huge fan of her music, what happened was a friend of mine gave me Nina’s first two records, I remember listening to them thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing’. I started talking to Nina, but it seemed a very daunting idea for us to work together because she comes from the folk singer-songwriter perspective and I’m coming from an electronic sort of thing. Kind of polar opposites yet they can work really well together at the same time. It was me just being a fan asking her, ‘can you please do something with me.’”
I chatted to Bianca and Sierra Casady in 2005 before their debut Dublin show. Noah’s Ark, the band’s second album, had just been released and the gig that night was truly memorable for the band’s incredibly original performance. You simply didn’t know what was coming next. Earlier in the day when I asked the sisters to chat about the writers and musicians that had influenced them growing the duo gave brilliant answers: Bianca: I watched a lot of Wayne’s World, Wayne’s World 1 and 2, and my sister was really into Gospel Music, Gymnastics and exercise. Sierra: For me, honestly my main inspiration in my younger life, and where I spent most of my time thinking and feeling out myself as an artist was while I was running. I was like a really hardcore runner. I would run whenever I had the chance and at the weekends I was able to run five hours freely without anyone bothering me. I would run five hours straight along these train tracks that would go up and down the coast of California. Just five hours straight, my mind spinning, spinning, spinning.
Al supported Damien Jurado on his On My Way To Absence tour in 2005. Prior to playing in Whelans I spoke to Al about Dolorean's Violence In The Snowy Fields album. The gig was spellbinding and included a fantastic version of Dolorean's Hannibal, MO, the standout track from the band's first album Not Exotic.
Al explained the different approach he took to the songwriting process between records one and two: "Not Exotic maintained a mood throughout and everything stayed pretty restrained, pulled back the songs were fairly narrative, and so with Violence In The Snowy Fields lyrically I wanted to speak a little bit more generally, not as specific with the narratives and I wanted the songs to be a little bit more upbeat and stand on their own. There's a little bit more of a country influence, maybe a Buffalo Springfield or Byrds kinda feel to some of the songs."
The inlay card of Violence In The Snowy Fields mentioned both Levon Helm and Dennis Wilson, Al explains why: "The Byrds, I like their stuff, I like what they do but not nearly as much as say, The Band, who I think make about as soulful a music, as is possible in the genre. The same with The Beach Boys, In my opinion it's mainly when Dennis, Carl or Brian is singing, sorry Mike. I'm probably not alone in that. Especially Dennis, it's weird to hear those Beach Boys records and then you hear a song like Forever that just sticks out like a blue-eyed soul song in the middle of a record. Dennis was one of those crash and burn characters but his solo work is some of my favourite that I've ever discovered. It really changed me and I don't think that we draw too much of it arrangement wise, but the spirit of it, the passion and genuineness of it is hopefully something which I aspire to. Pacific Ocean Blue holds up surprisingly well, song for song, the arrangements, the melodies, the rawness of his voice totally transcends time - it's beautiful. To me it's on par with Chris Bell's solo record. Dolorean are based in Portland, Oregon and to date have released three albums, their fourth, The Unfazed is due this autumn on Partisan Records in the US and Fargo Records in Europe.
Boa Morte have just released their second album, The Dial Waltz, so it was great when Cormac Gahan from the band came in for an interview a few weeks ago to chat about the record. Cormac picked some great music to play on the episode, including tracks by Icelanders Jóhann Jóhannsson and Hildur Guðnadóttir. When asked if this is representative of what he's currently listening to Cormac answers: "Post classical or neo-classical type of stuff, a lot of it is coming out of Iceland, Jóhann Jóhannsson but even people like Max Reichter, soundtrack music, heavy strings, heavy orchestration, I think it's great especially the stuff coming out of Iceland, music that's so lush and full." Cormac's not sure if this music has an influence on Boa Morte's sound, "I wonder does it somehow influence the string sections that we put on the ends of some of the songs." Daniel Presley produced both The Dial Waltz and Boa Morte's debut album Soon It Will Come Time to Face the World Outside. When asked what type of sound Boa Morte were looking for producer Daniel Presley to capture Cormac explaines: "A warm, live sound, the funny thing about Daniel is that he had actually produced an album by a band called Spain, The Blue Moods of Spain, and that album was the sound we were looking for. It probably would have been one of the things we would have played a producer, to give them an idea of the sound we were after, and it just so happened that he had produced and done the string arrangements on that album.
Adrian came up to the studio in Dublin City FM last year, upon the release of his fifth album Season of the Sparks, to chat and play some records. Since then he's won the Choice Music Award for Irish Album of the Year 2009, rereleased the album on Chemical Underground Records and played some great gigs all over the place, most recently to a packed out Whelan's in April. We chatted about his career to date, his first gigs, James Yorkston, the Fence Collective, touring, recording and other stuff. Adrian played tracks by Boa Morte, Jeremy Enick, Smog and Gareth Dickson.
When I interviewed Ken Stringfellow we chatted about Ken's work with John Roderick and The Long Winters on their second album When I Pretend to Fall (2003, Munich Records). Ken told me all about producing one of my favourite tracks off that album, Cinnamon. When I interviewed John Roderick I asked him to explain what the song Cinnamon was all about. His reply made me love the song even more: "A lovestory set in a Red Brigade, Badder Meinhof Gang era Europe, where the two protagonists of the story are revolutionary anarchists whose gang hideout is being closed in upon by Interpol. There's an explosion and the girl gets away. The guy is captured and they're pressing him for information about her, but he won't give her up all he'll say is that her skin is like cinnamon." John was in Dublin to promote Putting the Days to Bed the 2006 album by his band The Long Winters. The band hail from Seattle and John chatted about the influence that living that city has had on him as a musician: "Looking out from the stage when you're starting out and there'll be only thirty people at your show but twenty of them will be other musicians, I remember playing a show to an empty room but the audience contained Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey, and that's a real shot-in-the-arm for any band starting out. I credit the city of Seattle with making me want to be a musician." John also talked about growing up in Alaska and the possibility of touring Europe with a huge British band. The band turned out to be Keane.
Damien Jurado has a great new album out called Saint Bartlett (Secretly Canadian). A few years ago I interviewed him when he was in Dublin in support of his sixth album, On My Way To Absence. He was a really gracious interviewee and happily revealed how he got into music: "I stole my first bass at 13 from school and taught myself how to play an entire Black Flag record, that's pretty much how it all started, I then started writing my own songs." Damien started getting into folk and country music in the early 90s when Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirt was crossing over. "I felt a little bit betrayed - because when your enemies at school start wearing Nirvana t-shirts, dying their hair and wearing boots, you look for another alternative and for me I discovered Simon & Garfunkel records and Phil Ochs and people like that." Damien is a great storyteller and draws huge inspiration from the idea of people escaping the humdrum everyday existence in Middle America: "The bored teenager, the bored adult who has nothing going on for them, they'll pretty musc work themselves to death until they're about seventy, not much happens so they have to make things happen."
Patrick Kelleher came up to the studio a few weeks a go to chat about his new remix album, You Look Colder and to play some tunes on the show. The album is out now on Osaka Records and features Thread Pulls, Jape, Hulk, Hunter Gatherer, David Kitt and others remixing tracks from last year's You Look Cold album. The Youtube clips below feature some of the selection that Patrick played and chatted about on the programme. Patrick has a new 7'' out now on Skinny Wolves.
This interview is from January 2009. Colin Blunstone chats about his career with The Zombies and his solo records. We talked about his Neil MacArthur recordings and his trio of early 70s solo records: One Year, Ennismore and Journey. Colin was a great interviewee and I must admit that I was absolutely thrilled to be talking to him about his records because I'm such a huge fan. He was really gracious with his time and was happy to chat about the recording of Odessey and Oracle, working with arranger Chris Dunning, his working relationship with Rod Argent and his latest record The Ghost of You And Me.
"Underground pop - punk music, French chanson, 80s German electronic music and disco music sung in French, German, English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Turkish," was how Françoise Cactus described the sound of her band when I interviewed her in 2005. Stereo Total played in Whelan's Dublin on 23 April 2005 as part of the Berlin Anticonformiste Festival with Jeans Team and Cobra Killer. This has to be one of the best gigs I've ever attended in the city. An amazing night and three amazing bands. I spoke to Françoise earlier in the day about Stereo Total's then latest album Do the Bambi. The band had previously played Dublin supporting The Strokes in the Olympia and had received a great reaction but were really looking forward to this their own headlining show. Françoise chatted about moving to Berlin in the 80s and forming a garage band Les Loitas. She also recalled that a Dubliner called Valerie McClean was the original bass player with Les Lolitas.
I Interviewed Dave for the show upon the publication of The Fallen. We'd a great chat about his quest to track down all the ex-members of The Fall. I regaled Dave with my own MES encounter, which involved operating a slide projector for a Fall gig in 1997.
Willy chatted about Richmond Fontaine's latest album We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River. We also chatted about Northline, Willy's second novel and Willy and Dan played Alison Johnson, a lovesong named after Nothline's main character. Lean on Pete, Willy's third novel has just been published by Fabor and Fabor. Willy talked about the novel's setting, Portland Meadows Racetrack, where he likes to people watch and write. A lot of literary critics tend to class all Willy's characters as white trash no-hopers, Willy sees them as regular people, the people he knows and understands. On the way back into town, Taxi drivers were demonstrating and blocking traffic, so apart from getting stuck on the quays for 90 minutes it was a nice evening.
From the Archives: A Hawk and a Hacksaw were supposed to play their debut Dublin concert in October 2005 but the gig was cancelled. Jeremy and Heather were hanging around town so we went to Neary's pub and over a few scoops had a good chat about their travels in Eastern Europe and the album Darkness at Noon. The Dublin gig may have been pulled but both Jeremy and Heather still couldn't believe their luck, travelling around the world bringing their music to a new audience. "I sometimes feel like we’re the freaks who’ve been accepted," laughed Jeremy. We chatted about the beginnings of AHAAH, their home town of Albuquerque, Jeremy's old band Neutral Milk Hotel and European folk music. Dublin fans would have to wait until November 2008 to finally witness AHAAH live. They returned to the city on a bill with Beirut and Calexico for a gig in the Olympia. It was worth the wait.
From the Archives: The Posies played Whelans, Dublin on July 21, 2005. It was a great show and the new tracks from Every Kind of Light sounded fantastic. Earlier that day I chatted to Ken Stringfellow about his relationship with bandmate Jon Auer and the writing and recording of Every Kind of Light. We also chatted about Ken's contribution to The Long Winters' album When I Pretend to Fall, playing live with REM and the pleasure of singing harmonies with Mike Mills. The recording sessions for Every Kind of Light were interspersed with sessions for both REM's Around the Sun and Big Star's In Space. Ken admits that it all got a bit crazy, "It was insane, I was in Seattle working on my thing one day, and then I'd go to the Bahamas to work with REM and Memphis to work with Big Star. I went to South by Southwest to play with Big Star and then back to Seattle. It was quite an amazing few months." I asked Ken had the guys from REM been interested to know how the Big Star sessions were coming along and he told me that the weird thing was that Terry Manning who runs Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas where REM were recording, had been a recording engineer at Ardent on all the early Big Star records. Things had come full circle. Ken was an absolute gentleman.
From the Archives: Calla played The Sugar Club in Dublin on 29 April 2003 in support of their third album, Televise. I chatted to the band before the gig about how the sound of Televise had changed in a live context over the course of a few months on the road. The Texas band also talked about how a collective love of Television and The Velvet Underground had influenced a move to New York. A funny moment occured towards the end of the interview when I asked the band to tell me something about the track Pete the Killer. 'This is Pete,' Sean said, pointing to Pete Gannon, the fourth member of the group. Pete, who hadn't opened his mouth for the whole interview, attempted to start an explaination but clammed up and couldn't talk, so Sean and Aurelio had to jump in. The guys were really friendly and later on played an amazing gig to small but appreciative audience. Nina Simone had passed away a few days before the gig and the band played tribute to her on the night, as far as I can recall they also played a cover version of a Can track. Live the tracks from Televise sounded brilliant. Since then Calla have released two more albums, Sean has departed the band and Pete has became a fulltime member. These two records, Collisions and Strength in Numbers, are both fantastic but it's Televise, my entry point to this great band, that I always go back to. It's a slowburning sonic masterpiece.
Calla - Televised Calla - Interview Calla - Pete the Killer
From the Archives: I interviewed Sufjan in 2004 prior to his gig at the Douglas Hyde Gallery. Seven Swans was just out and Sufjan chats about recording the album with Daniel Smith of The Danielson Famile. Sufjan had moved to New York to complete a creative writing class but met Daniel and started focusing more on his music. Sufjan admits that he was a little scared and insecure about the release of Seven Swans. These feelings stemmed from the personal nature of the record and the relaxed atmosphere of their recording in Daniel's house in south Jersey. Sufjan described the recording process as being 'very sacred'. He also chated about his Christian vision, a vision he said that he shared with both Daniel and labelmate David Eugene Edwards (16 Horsepower and Wovenhand). At the time of this interview, The Transfiguration was all I was listening to so I was thrilled when Sufjan introduced it on the show but I missed his gig due to a prior commitment, something I really regret.
Songs to Learn and Sing Thursdays @ Midnight 103.2 Dublin City FM
From the Archives: Willy Vlautin interviewed on the show from Episode 90, 24/05/06
Richmond Fontaine - Black Road Willy Vlautin interview Part 1 Richmond Fontaine - The Warehouse Life Willy Vlautin interview Part 2 Richmond Fontaine – Polaroid Willy Vlautin interview Part 3 Richmond Fontaine - Laramie, Wyoming
Photo: Boys and Girls in America by the Hold Steady
Songs to Learn and Sing Thursdays @ Midnight 103.2 Dublin City FM
From the Archives: The Hold Steady's Craig Finn interviewed for Songs To Learn And Sing in February 2007 before the band's performance in the Temple Bar Music Centre. Craig chats about the band's third album Boys and Girls in America and two of his big influences: The Clash and The Replacements.
Photo: Jenny Lewis with The Watson Twins
Songs to Learn and Sing Thursdays @ Midnight 103.2 Dublin City FM
From the Archives: Jenny Lewis interviewed for Songs To Learn And Sing in 2006 just before the release of her debut solo album Rabbit Fur Coat. Jenny chats about songs from Rabbit Fur Coat, recording without her Rilo Kiley bandmates and why Laura Nyro's Gonna Take a Miracle is one of her favourite albums.