The Music Tapes, the wonderful current project of Julian Koster whose multi-instrument work you know from Neutral Milk Hotel, made a stop in my living room in East Nashville to play some Christmas songs as part of their surprise Caroling tour. It was fantastic, and there's video proof of such below. The Music Tapes - Levitating Bow / Oh Christmas Tree from Hard to Find a Friend on Vimeo . [...]
Hello friends. I'm on tour with David Bazan selling things. I'm also tour blogging. Check in here . love. Caleb
The end of summer is a beautiful thing - the most mild and easy to enjoy days of the lazy season. The sunsets begin to come earlier, it's already happening, and the leaves start to fade from a brilliant green to a duller, paler, shade. Then to yellow, then to orange, finally to brown. The pools close, you have a final cookout, and dig your jackets out of the untouched end of your closet. The school zones show up on your morning commute again. The end of summer will soon be here. [mp3] [...]
The almost robotic, staccato eighth notes, the undercover disco beat, the mid-verse noise loop wherein someone hits the body of their jazzmaster with a fierce force, throwing their input switch to and fro as quickly as they know how. It's funny how musical the most robotic song from one of the most truly minimal bands of our time is. On minute and fifty-six seconds of hinting. Gesturing shyly at a coming release of purposeful, steam-rolling, polite tension. Soft-rock in the truest, unpasteurized, un-bastardized sense of the word. Thank you for the American Analog Set, Lord. [mp3] [...]
Get in your car and head for the interstate. Pick up your friends and go somewhere. Strum furiously at the conditioned air. Dive bomb on the imaginary tremolo arm with reckless abandon. Stop for coffee at a time-loop, ghostly shell of a gas station. Get back in your car. [mp3] It Hugs Back - Unaware
I am going to the beach tomorrow - fear not, this is not a "see you in eight days," sort of thing a mere two days after my return to form. I'll still be around - but I'm going to the beach tomorrow, and while at the beach, one finds it difficult to listen to music that does not possess that certain sunny quality. Things with a lot of room, lots of fresh air and sunshine, plenty of opportunities to play nonexistent instruments. You know the type. I'll be posting some of these songs throughout the [...]
From time to time I get the desire to really listen to Yo La Tengo . These phases can range from as short as a few hours to as long as a few weeks, but sometimes I get an insatiable urge to jam on some mathy, chilled-out, art-school hipster, noise rock. The unquenchable urge to put And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out or I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One on and wish I had saved my money as a teenager and bought myself a Fender Jaguar [...]
I vanished for 43 days. A whole bunch of you emailed and commented with pretty much two standard responses: either wondering where I was, and asking that I return to blogging, or being curiously angry and calling me an asshole. While I'm honored that you felt strongly enough about HTFAF to call me an asshole, I'd ask you to say you're sorry. Blogging is hard - harder than people realize. Quite frankly, I just didn't feel like doing it anymore. In the almost three years I've maintained HTFAF, I've done it alone, editorially, with the exception of less [...]
In one of the more excited moments of my week, I came across this video from one Mr. Andrew Bird's in-store performance at our local record store here in Nashville, Grimey's, which happened earlier this week. I didn't attend the event, due to prior commitments, and now I'm really wishing I would have, as he covered one of my favorite songs in recent memory, Smog's Cold Blooded Old Times . Video of the cover, and an mp3 of the original below. [mp3] Smog - Cold Blooded Old Times
Good news for me, freshly back from vacation: In case you care about anything other than Snow Leopard and the new Macbooks, I thought you might like to know that AA Bondy will be releasing the follow-up to his spectacular American Hearts . It's called When The Devil's Loose , and it will come out September 1 of this year. The track titles and location of recording (Water Valley, Mississippi) suggest that it will be another decidedly dust-bowl affair. HTFAF is excited to see that the song Mightiest of [...]
Jay Walter Bennett died late Sunday night / early Monday morning in his Urbana, IL home. I've often very loudly made my case that Jay Bennett's presence was the bet thing, and his absence the worst thing, to ever happen to Wilco. Jay was a huge part of the band's production, songwriting, and instrumentation from Being There to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot . He also released several solo albums in the past 7 years, as well as recently completing and operating his own Pieholden Studios in Urbana. His production work on the seminal Yankee Hotel Foxtrot [...]
Owen Ashworth, the tall quiet dude behind Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, knows a thing or two about playing music for people in rock clubs - he does it a lot, both on this continent as well as Europe, and he's going to be doing it for a very extended period of time this summer. Some of June, and all of July will find CFTPA in a sweaty van, drinking gas station water, and sitting around doing nothing while waiting to soundcheck - that is to say, living the dream. You don't want to miss it. [...]
Well, well, well. It seems those clever dudes in Menomena are constantly coming up with ways to take your hard-earned money for some songs, not that you're complaining, and this time it's in the form of a solo album. No, not from Danny Seim, or Lackthereof as you may know him, who released a solo album last year on Barsuk (and many before that on his own). No, this time it's Brent Knopf - the one pictured above looking like Jim Halpert at Menomena's 2007 Halloween show in Nashville. The album is [...]
Judee Sill is a cult-hero of sorts - dead, incredibly talented, and maybe slightly unwell mentally, her music contains all the proper ingredients to make me swoon, and swoon I do. I only pretty recently got into Judee's legacy and have been trying to get the melody Jesus Was a Crossmaker out of my head ever since - un-succesfully, I might add. So imagine my glee when I found out that there is a Judee Sill tribute album in the works - and on it would be Bill Callahan, Daniel Rossen, Ron Sexsmith, and a bunch [...]
The Decemberists - friends of Barack Obama, talk good with words, excellent and advanced readers, and tonight's guests on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno - make sure you tune in as Jay's days are numbered until Conan takes over - coup style. I don't think anyone's complaining about that one. The D's also ahve some touring to do if you'd like to go pretend you're being eaten by a whale, watch John Moen chase a floor tom around the stage, or marvel at how well-starched Colin Meloy's pinstripe linen pants are - it's all there for you, [...]
Remember when we told you about the Shins frontman James Mercer firing his longtime drummer and bassist ? Well, as it turns out the drummer side of that equation - one mr. Jesse Sandoval, has already filled far more satisfying ways to fill his time - namely opening a taco truck in Portland. I'm not sure what the taco truck scene is like in Portland - the Pac. NW is not exactly a haven for south-of-the-border activities, but Portland seems to be a pretty hipster-filled town, and if there's one thing I learned at SXSW it's that [...]
Well - slow music day, but luckily I have an exciting tale to recall for you: on the way to get a nice Tuesday brunch this morning at our favorite eatery , we noticed a building had collapsed. Exposed steel beams and all, and half the building was now resting on an SUV and a pickup truck. Turns out it was a wreck gone awry that lead to the partial collapse of the Gallatin Rd. Hair World and Beauty Supply - you will be missed, Hair World. This building happens to be on [...]
Centro-matic is arguably the hardest working band in Indie Rock. They routinely spend half the year in a van, and half the year in a studio as if it's nothing, but eventually everyone needs a little downtime, so the boys will be taking some this year for various reasons. Those reasons include having babies, making records for side-projects, recording other bands, and hopefully some sleeping in there. But before they do, they're making one short, sweet swoop through the Midwestern United States of America with labelmates Monahans to play rock shows for you and I. These will be [...]
Say bye-bye to #2 and #4 In what I would imagine is a pretty messy situation, despite James Mercer's insistence otherwise, the Shins frontman decided to replace long-time (like before the Shins were the Shins) drummer Jesse Sandoval and keyboard/auxiliary man Marty Crandall. In their sted, the Shins now feature Ron Lewis of Grand Archives, and the Fruit Bats on Bass, and Joe Plummer of Modest Mouse fame on drums. According to Mercer, "It's an aesthetic decision. It's kind of hard to talk abut stuff [...]
Athens, Georgia's newest example of excellent Indie Pop, Casper & The Cookies are here just in time for summer to usher in the month of May with some new tracks. I have a huge, unashamed soft spot for bands who write sugary pop songs - SSLYBY, Beulah, The Little Ones, The Long Winters, etc, etc, I'm just a fan of feeling happy sometimes, you see, and that's never more true then when the sun starts shining for the first time. Unfortunately, the rain came along and ruined the first day of May [...]
It's hard to Find a Friend
Miike Snow – Paddling Out (Jacques Lu Cont Remix)
Lana Del Rey covers Lovecat magazine!
