Archives For LarryKloess

A black wave is comin’/A black wave will fall

LarryKloess —  March 6, 2012 — 3 Comments

It is always a bit intimidating to be asked to write on a favorite artist, to try to bring to light to brilliance of an artist who seems to escape definition, who balances on the edge of heartbreak and hope so precariously, who is able to pen songs that seem to sprout legs and create a life all their own. But when asked to write on the criminally underrated Doug Burr, I had to hide my gleeful enthusiasm to bring such an unique talent to light.

The more I listen to Doug Burr, the more everything else around his music seems to fade to black. His songs give the sense of being tethered to this world, of having something substantial tying you down to the world spinning madly around you, of somehow bringing peace in a moment where the storm is brewing right outside your window. Simply put, his music is such that it demands your attention. It requires you to switch the shuffle button to the off position and be completely immersed in the narratives that his songs bring to life so eloquently.

I have thought a lot about the dichotomy of hope and despair and of joy and sorrow lately, in many ways spurred on by Damien Jurado’s heartbreakingly gorgeous Maraqopa, and in most ways influenced by my own personal quest to more fully understand my relationship to the world. Burr’s music straddles that line as well, allowing just enough darkness to creep in before the light answers back, offering a glimmer of hope in the midst of the unknown. I can’t help but shake the feeling that Burr isn’t just concerned about telling the stories in his songs, but that he’s also asking the listener to start asking themselves the key questions that help make sense of their own stories. Just try listening to his Trembling Lips and Pale Fingertips 7″ (released today on vinyl and as a 4-song download card via Velvet Blue Music/Spune), and not be affected. Both of these songs have the capacity to chill you to your core, but provide just enough warmth to keep you coming back for more.

The first track, an alternate version of “A Black Wave is Comin'”, the lead track from his critically-acclaimed 2010 release O Ye Devastator, sounds like a song Burr would sing if he was told he only had one song left to sing again. It is immediate, and it feels like Burr himself is sitting in the same room with you from the first few notes of the piano. The “black wave” that is comin’ in the song nearly swallows the listener whole with just Burr’s voice and the piano to provide comfort. Throughout it all, his voice disguises the bleakness of the lyrics with a reassuring, even optimistic, tone. By the time the guitar enters in halfway through the song, you’re left with the feeling that come what way, it will all turn out all right in the end. The black wave may be coming, but we will not be overcome as somewhat alluded to in his last repeated refrain of “I can’t sing, but I hear a little hymn“. Everything about this version of the song feels intimate, like Burr is telling the listener, “come in close, I am about to bear my soul to you.” It is gorgeous, and it gets better with each repeated listen.

The B-side of the 7″, “Chief of Police in Chicago”, resonates in much the same way as the first, with the piano being much more prevalent in the alternate version than the original, and its sparseness pushes Burr’s voice and lyrics to the forefront. It tells the story of a police officer in Chicago, speaking apparently to the mother of a young murderer. The instrumentation on this version balances out the dark, bleak future that is pervasive throughout the lyrics (“Oh I have seen the thing you cannot see/And my team and I are just a little shaken/We’ve discovered  the gene“). The listener has to use his or her own imagination to figure out exactly what has left the team distraught about the future, but you get the sense that the chief of police is not shying away from combatting the impending darkness.

Everything about the “Trembling Lips and Pale Fingertips 7″” is worth listening to over and over again, and these new, stripped-down versions, for me, are full of wide-eyed wonder and hope despite their gloom. I highly recommend buying or downloading the 7″, and for anyone who is just hearing about Doug Burr for the first time, I would encourage you to buy the rest of Burr’s music immediately. The purchase will be worth every penny.

In Album Reviews, Causing A Scene ,
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A Brand New Tradition

LarryKloess —  March 2, 2012 — 1 Comment

One of my goals, if you will, of 2011 was to travel to a city I had never been to before. Naturally, my inclinations were to go to a place that had a killer music scene so Austin, Boston and Seattle all made the list of possible destinations. Turns out that I didn’t end up in any of those wonderful cities, but accomplished my goal in a way that I hadn’t anticipated at the start of the year, by going to Newport, Rhode Island, to experience the legendary Newport Folk Festival.

Originally conceived as a trip with my dad to head up to Newport (we’re both quite smitten with Emmylou Harris, after all) for the festival and then a couple days in Boston to see the Red Sox at Fenway, my sister and I ended up making it a bro-sis road trip to experience two days of every variation of folk music under the sun. It was an experience like no other, getting to see the aforementioned Emmylou, Gillian Welch, The Decemberists, The Civil Wars, The Head and the Heart, Typhoon, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Freelance Whales and many, many more.

Newport Folk Fest 2011 was my first festival experience despite living within two hours of Bonnaroo and there were several times over the course of that July weekend where I thought to myself “I’m coming back here every year if I can.” From the gorgeous port city of Newport to the water taxi ride each morning to get to the festival at Fort Adams State Park, from the super laid back, perfectly friendly crowd to the dozens of boats pulled up to the harbor to catch the music for themselves, it was hard not to fall completely in love with George Wein and Pete Seeger’s brainchild.

So now it’s 2012 and just yesterday the lineup was released for the festival, taking place July 28 and 29, and the folks in Newport have made it waaaay too easy to honor my words from last summer and make this an annual pilgrimage. Headlining the festival are My Morning Jacket and Jackson Browne, who are both playing NFF for the first time ever. Conor Oberst, Iron & Wine, Patty Griffin and Guthrie Family Reunion (Arlo Guthrie, Sarah Lee Guthrie, Johnny Irion, etc.) also received top billing for the festival, but that’s just scratching the surface.

Highlights for me are The Head and the Heart playing for the second year in a row (the only band returning this year, I think), and a plethora of bands on my “Bucket List” that I will be writing more about in the coming weeks. 2012 buzz bands, Of Monsters and Men and Alabama Shakes will be performing, along with Blind Pilot, Preservation Jazz Hall Band, Gary Clark Jr, Deep Dark Woods, New Multitudes (Jay Farrar, Will Johnson, Anders Parker and Yim Yames), and The Tallest Man on Earth, who I’ve been dying(!) to see perform for years. It’s going to be an absolute pleasure getting to cross them all of my list. And I’d be remiss to share how ecstatic I am to see Nashville’s own The Apache Relay take to the Newport stage. There’s honestly not enough space in this post to do justice to all the wonderful acts playing at the festival this year.

So, dear readers, what’s your festival experience been like? Anyone else been to Newport before? Who wants to join in on this brand new tradition of mine?

In Causing A Scene , , , , ,
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Never run away a boy When you can walk away a man

LarryKloess —  February 28, 2012 — 2 Comments

It’s an interesting paradox when you feel like you’ve been a fan of a band since their inception. When they finally get their big break and make it into the “mainstream”, do you remain an adamant fan or jump ship, wishing to go back to the “good ole days” where you felt like knowledge of the band was a shared secret amongst a select few people. Maybe it’s just me, but when those bands come into their own and get the recognition they are so deserving of, I imagine it’s like the feeling a dad has when their kid rides away on down the sidewalk on their bicycle for the first time without their training wheels on. It’s one of those rites of passage in life that I imagine are ingrained in the minds of a countless number of people.

This past Thursday night I had that kind of engrossing experience when I witnessed Needtobreathe’s first of two nights playing at Nashville’s famed “Mother Church”, the Ryman Auditorium, in what can only be described as what rock and roll was meant to be. Displaying some of the strongest musical chops to grace the newly refurbished stage, the boys from Possum Kingdom, South Carolina, left every member of the packed-into-pews audience spellbound, seamlessly moving from heart-pounding, foot-stomping rock and roll to hear-the-pin-drop-quiet ballads.

The night’s opener, Ben Rector, probably deserves a post all his own after captivating the audience as the opener, with his up tempo brand of piano-driven pop rock. It’s been said that going to the Ryman for a show can be a worship experience all its own, and with Rector as the worship leader for the evening, you might as well have been in a church in the Deep South, swaying to-and-fro, hands clapping and toes tapping along to every ebb and flow of the music. There may or may not have been hands raised from some of the more charismatic of the night’s patrons. Rector along with his backing band mixed in some of his best songs from his two albums, but probably brought the most joy to the audience with his superbly original take on Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”. The video he recorded of the song was actually made back in January, prior to the queen of soul’s untimely death, and his version at the Ryman could not have seemed any more apropos.

So much could be said about any one of Needtobreathe’s songs on that uncommonly warm February night, and every song seemed like a highlight in and of itself. Their opening rendition of “Oohs and Aahs” could not have been any stronger, with the typewriter lighting in the background spelling out “The Reckoning”. My comment to my friend Josh who was at the concert helping run lighting for the band was “now THAT is how you start a rock concert!”

Perhaps the highlight of the night was Needtobreathe bringing out a string quartet and playing an all acoustic version of “More Time” midway through their set. It was another wrinkle to the live repetoire that they have developed over the last eight years, and for the fans who had been with them since the very beginning, it was a poignant tribute to the band’s past and a signal of just how far they have come in a short period of time.

Discussing the February 23 show would be incomplete without mentioning the near-perfect encore of the 1-2-3 punch of “Something Beautiful”, “The Reckoning” and “Slumber”. The crowd favorite “Something Beautiful” brought any late adopters to their feet before the band put forth  a convincingly gritty rendition of “The Reckoning”. Transitioning from that to “Slumber” showcased both Needtobreathe’s range and their famous propensity for bringing crowds to a hushed silence at the end of a show, as they unplugged their instruments and all gathered at the front of the teakwood stage to put their stamp on what was the best show of theirs I have seen out of the 15 or so I have seen in the past.

By the time they reached the climactic conclusion of “I wanna sing like we used to / I wanna dance like we want to / Come on darlin’ open up your eyes” the crowd had responded in kind, with eyes open wide to the wonder of the way live music can transform you. And in a lot of ways, Needtobreathe had undergone the same transformation that night, going from the boys they had been playing at fraternity parties throughout the Southeast to men with a commanding presence on one of music’s grandest stages.

In Show Reviews , ,
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Turn My Swag On

LarryKloess —  February 17, 2012 — Leave a comment

One of my favorite musical discoveries of late 2009/early 2010 was the fantastic Irish troubadour James Vincent McMorrow. A few short notes into “If I Had a Boat” and I was hooked with his unique falsetto that was somewhat reminiscent of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. I still remember opening up the package shipped to me from Ireland like an expectant child on Christmas morning, overjoyed to dive headfirst into the album once I laid the ornate packaging to the side. Pretty sure that album became the soundtrack of an entire season of my life.

So despite being an early adopter of sorts with JVM’s music, I had never heard his cover of this song made famous by Willow Smith. It’s a true manifestation of the phrase “being able to sing the phone book.” I think this is proof that ole James could sing just about anything and his audience would be transfixed.

And this version from Jimmy Fallon as Neil Young and The Boss is equally fantastic:

In Causing A Scene , , ,
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The Avett Brothers’ “Murder in the City”

LarryKloess —  February 16, 2012 — Leave a comment

My good friend, Jonathan Snyder, of the soon-to-be-famous bow tie company Brier & Moss, asked me recently if I ever write about the classics on the blog, or if it’s just “new” music all the time. My initial thought process went back to the jazz greats of Miles, Coltrane, Monk and the Duke then gravitated to the soundtrack of my childhood playing billiards with my dad: Zeppelin, The Who, CSN(Y), and some John Hiatt sprinkled in for good measure. More than anything, the short conversation brought on a wave of nostalgia for those times gone by where those classic songs were present in my life. At the same time, it made me reflect on where I’m at now and how far that journey seems to be some days and the songs that have guided me along the way.

One of those songs that I feel a longing toward like a long-lost friend is The Avett Brothers‘ beautiful love letter to their family, “Murder in the City.” I hope I speak for everybody when I say that the brothers Avett can fashion one heck of a song through lyrics that seem pulled straight from a Faulkner novel, at once having a gorgeousness and a near Gothic quality to them.

Each time I hear the words two and a half minutes in of “always remember there was nothing worth sharing like the love that let us share our name” I feel a sense of joy over my own family. I am sure I am far from the only person who has experienced the chilling effect those words can have on you when they come sauntering in through your speakers, sneaking in like a ghost before wrapping you up like a warm blanket.

There is such a strength in family, in that sharing of a name. I think what this song teaches me the most now, years and easily a hundred or two plays after I first heard it, is the incredible joy of growing into adulthood with your family around, and the way our relationships with our parents and our siblings and our extended families change and evolve and come out more fully formed as you settle into your groove in life. The Avetts’ words remain truer each time they are recalled to mind, trusting full well that there is no earthly love like the one you give to and receive from your family.

And on a less sentimental note, a show of hands of all of those who are dying to catch wind of any news of an upcoming album release from these guys? Seriously, it’s time, fellahs. The world is waiting to be blessed once again by these wordsmiths.

In Revisiting the Classics ,
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