- Andrew Bird
- Neon Indian
- Sleigh Bells
- Joshua Radin
- Tokyo Police Club
- Metric
- Freelance Whales
- An Horse
- Tired Pony
- Sleeper Agent
- Ingrid Michaelson
- The Jezabels
Andrew Bird
Andrew Bird first picked up a violin at age four and proceeded to spend his formative years soaking up classical repertoire completely by ear. As a teen, Bird mastered the sounds of early jazz, country blues and gypsy music. All these influences still percolate within Bird’s brand of pop, but he has established a sound that is distinctly his own.
Since 1997 the Chicago-based composer and multi-instrumentalist has released 11 albums, garnering a devoted following with his early band Bowl of Fire before venturing out with his first solo record, 2003’s Weather Systems. It was with this release that Bird began using a looping pedal to combine densely-layered symphonies onstage and revealed his unearthly talent for whistling. He has since played such prestigious venues as New York’s Beacon Theater and Carnegie Hall, Coachella, the Austin City Limits Festival, the Hollywood Bowl and Bumbershoot; in 2008 Bird had 15,000 fans overflowing from Chicago’s Millennium Park for his largest-ever headlining performance.
Bird has gone on to record with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band as well as collaborate with inventor Ian Schneller on the Sonic Arboretum installation at New York’s Guggenheim Museum and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. He has documented his creative process for The New York Times, contributed music to the new Muppets movie and composed his first-ever film score for the movie Norman.
Neon Indian
Neon Indian’s new album Era Extraña is slated for a September 13th release on Mom + Pop.
Neon Indian is the brainchild of Alan Palomo, who's 2009 debut record Psychic Chasms not only earned the 20 year-old a spot on numerous year-end lists, but assisted the forming of a genre that, though known by a few names now (hypnagogic pop, glo-fi, chillwave), summoned a very unique and specific electro-mangled sound. Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and SPIN all praised Palomo for his adventurous new sound, and he was tapped to perform at top festivals like South by Southwest, Bonnaroo, and Sasquatch and also scored opening slots for bands ranging from Massive Attack and The Flaming Lips to Phoenix and Chromeo.
After nearly two years on the road off the success of his debut, Palomo returns this fall with his proper follow-up LP, Era Extraña. This time around, we see a darker shaded sound document that tosses somewhere between an 8-bit shoegaze record and peering through the fence of a teenage apocalypse drive-in flick.
Written and recorded last winter in an efficiency apartment in Helsinki, Finland during its short solstice days, Era Extraña was ice sculpted from arpeggiated synth-scapes and scribbled journal entries made during his stint there alone in constant solitude. "It's the closest you can get to feeling like you're at the edge of the earth," he says. "And there were moments where I lost sight of what I was really there to do."
The sample-happy stylings of his previous efforts have been traded in for acid-stained commodore 64 jams (See 'Polish Girl, 'Future Sick') and bit-pulped guitar sludge ballads (see 'Hex Girlfriend', 'The Blindside Kiss'). All throughout, the undulating moods of the record are guided by a haunted three-part instrumental titled Heart: Attack, Heart: Decay, and Heart: Release. Once completed, the layers were then thawed and reassembled by Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips, MGMT), who mixed the album and did additional production with Palomo at his upstate Tarbox Studios. The album sessions there were briefly taken on a scenic detour by a drop-in for-song EP collaboration with The Flaming Lips which was released earlier this year.
The album’s Spanish title plays with the loose-hinges of the word extraña, which not only directly translates into 'strange', but also means to 'command the act of longing'. These themes of feeling an eerie absence in new strange times are explored throughout the album as a whole in his teenage ethos peppered lyrical musings in an end-days obsessed climate. Many of this is inspired by an ongoing love affair with the notion of what cyberpunk means in a year like 2011. The feeling can best be described in a recent interview where he noted, "We're now living in the era mysticized by a lot of future-geared 70s and 80s cinema, but it’s definitely not quite how they imagined it."
Sleigh Bells
The New York City duo known as Sleigh Bells emerged in the Fall of 2009 with rhythmic pop songs that combine overdriven guitar riffs and sugary female vocal melodies. Derek Miller, who played in the popular Florida hardcore outfit Poison the Well, teamed up with singer Alexis Krauss after he happened to serve her and her mother at a Brazilian restaurant in Brooklyn. As proof of their winning formula, Sleigh Bells quickly earned the adoration of critics at the New Yorker, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice. They are celebrated by both their hometown's outer-borough lo-fi rock scene and international pop acts like Major Lazer and M.I.A., who collaborated with Derek on her forthcoming third LP.
Sleigh Bells spent the first two months of 2010 at Treefort Studios in Brooklyn re-recording the demo tracks that had generated so much excitement in the previous year. They've also added a handful of new songs to round out their debut record, due out Spring/Summer 2010. Tours with Yeasayer and Major Lazer, including dates at South By Southwest, Coachella, Pitchfork, and Primavera Festivals, have been announced for the first half of 2010.
Joshua Radin
Though Joshua Radin enjoyed singing during his childhood, the Cleveland native never intended to be a professional musician. Instead, he studied drawing and painting at Northwestern University, following his college years with stints as an art teacher, screenwriter, and art gallery employee. Eventually, Radin took a stab at songwriting and played one of his earliest compositions, "Winter," for his friend Zach Braff. The burgeoning actor/director took an immediate liking to the song, and "Winter" soon found its way onto Braff's hit television show Scrubs in early 2004. After fans began to request more of his music, Radin decided to pursue a songwriting career and signed with Columbia Records, which issued his debut album, We Were Here, in 2006. Radin relocated to Los Angeles and aligned himself with the Hotel Cafe, a unique Hollywood venue specializing in performances by singer/songwriters. He soon found himself playing national tour dates with a number of Hotel Cafe regulars, including Ingrid Michaelson, Sara Bareilles, and Meiko. Meanwhile, he issued a pair of digital EPs (via iTunes) while readying the release of his sophomore album, Simple Times, which arrived in late 2008.
Tokyo Police Club
Tokyo Police Club, the Newmarket Ontario quartet hailed by Rolling Stone as "poised to become the biggest Canadian export since Molson," have signed an exclusive U.S. recording deal with mom+pop. The band is currently recording its second full-length album, with an expected release projected for early 2010.
Tokyo Police Club is made up of Greg Alsop (drums), Josh Hook (guitar), David Monks (vocals, bass) and Graham Wright (keys/percussion). The band formed in 2005 and released its debut EP A Lesson In Crime the following year to instant and universal acclaim, with Entertainment Weekly raving "we can hardly wait for the full length." One more EP, a digital-only single and a few laps around the world later, Tokyo Police Club's debut album, Elephant Shell was released in April 2008. Elephant Shell's release was preceded by multiple sold out shows in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Toronto, and followed by appearances on The Late Show With David Letterman, The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson and, oddly enough, Desperate Housewives. Critical response to the full length was even more enthusiastic and diverse, with the likes of GQ ("Strokes-caliber catchiness"), Elle ("a smart, furiously played sugar-rush debut") and Men's Health ("an aural adrenaline rush all the way") all lavishing praise. The band toured relentlessly to support Elephant Shell, appearing in the U.S. as recently as the August 2009 All points West Festival.
Metric
When you hand over your money for a concert ticket, what are you really paying for: some idea of the performer you've gleaned from gazing longingly at album covers and compulsively clicking YouTube videos, or the performer as they choose to express themselves on that given day? Is the consumer entitled to a certain expectation of the performance — a satisfaction-guaranteed procession of "the hits"— or should the artist interpret the fan's investment as a vote of confidence, that the fan is willing to follow their every whim? In other words, is the customer really king, relegating the artist to the role of a court jester whose sole purpose is to entertain on demand? Or does the artist, elevated up on the stage and paid for the privilege, still dictate the terms of the contract?
For Metric frontwoman Emily Haines, all these questions came to a head on the evening of March 30, 2008 at the Phoenix Concert Theatre in Toronto. She was all set to perform the sombre piano-based ballads that comprised the two releases from her solo venture, The Soft Skeleton: Knives Don't Have Your Back and What Is Free To a Good Home? — much of which were written following a time of great sadness and personal loss. But having performed those songs so many times since Knives' September 2006 release, Haines had an epiphany during that Phoenix show — she didn't want to be sad anymore. And she didn't want to play those songs. So, about 40 minutes into the show, she stopped "Dr. Blind" mid-verse and said just that: "I don't want to play these songs anymore." Instead, she spent the next half hour talking to her fans, encouraging them to join her at the piano on stage and, for the grand finale, pulling a kid from the audience for an impromptu duet on Metric's "Live It Out." She was up for anything — except playing those songs. Some disappointed Soft Skeleton fans in the crowd probably thought the show was a trainwreck. But for Haines herself, it was about getting her mind back on track — to the business of completing Metric's long-awaited fourth album, Fantasies.
"Writing for me comes from a process of trying to piece things together," says Haines. "The function of music in my life is to help me understand what the hell is happening. This new record was about ending the fragmentation of my existence. Everything in the world right now — all the technology, the way we listen to music or watch films — everything has changed so much in my lifetime. People are allowed to have multiple identities — you're somebody online, you're somebody else in public — in multiple dimensions, scattered across the world... I wanted to bring all that into one place, one band, one record... I want to be one person."
But in order to come together, Metric first had to drift apart. After touring non-stop between 2003's breakthrough release Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? and 2005's frenzied follow-up Live It Out, the four members of Metric sought sanctuary in sideline pursuits — Haines threw herself into the Soft Skeleton and took a soul-cleansing sojourn to Argentina; guitarist/co-founder Jimmy Shaw built a neighborhood recording facility, Giant Studio, on Toronto's burgeoning Ossington Avenue strip with his neighbor Sebastian Grainger; while the Oakland, California-based rhythm section of bassist Joshua Winstead and drummer Joules Scott-Key toured their own garage-rock offshoot, Bang Lime.
"We didn't have a moment where we stopped," says Haines. "When I look back at the touring, it really was like 300 days a year for those three years [between 2003 and 2006]. After that, I thought if we went straight into recording the next album right away we would end up just writing about being in a band on the road because that's all we had experienced. We had to reconnect with our humanity first."
Says Shaw: "We allowed this record to take a year and a half whereas for Live It Out we didn't let it take more than 10 weeks. We just allowed it to take its own process, and whatever that process was going to be, it was going to be, and we were relaxed about it. We wrote when we could — we would get together for a month and then take a couple months to do our own personal shit again."
Formed in Toronto but, at various times, based in Montreal, London, New York and L.A., Metric boasts the sort of history that requires one of those connect-the-dots redlined maps you see in an Indiana Jones movie — and the story of Fantasies is no different. First stop: Bear Creek, located outside Seattle, Washington.
"The four us went out into the woods as a band with no expectations and did whatever we wanted" Haines recalls. "We were coming from London so it was a serious contrast - it felt like we had left civilization and all that mattered was music again. We wrote a lot of songs there including 'Gimme Sympathy', 'Collect Call'... and 'Black Sheep', which isn't on the album 'cause it has a life of its own. When I listen to the finished record, I feel like all its warmth comes from that place in the woods."
In their recent episode of the Bruce McDonald-produced IFC documentary series, The Rawside Of..., Metric can be seen performing these songs in stripped-down, acoustic versions, and following the taut, barb-wired rock of Live It Out, it would've made total sense for the band to pursue a simple, back-to-basics approach further. But as the scene shifted over the course of 2007 and 2008 — back to Toronto and then New York, with Haines' Argentina retreat in between — so too did the shape of the album. And through rigorous road-testing of the new songs, the mercurial material gradually solidified into a singular sound.
"We toured the new songs a lot," Shaw says, "because you might play something 30 times live before you start to realize, 'Why did I get bored every single time I got to the second verse?' and 'Why does the ending always suck?' The songs went through a lot of surgery, and we really feel like we sculpted them and got the best out of them. I felt like I could hear the sound of the whole thing in my head — it was really big and really dreamy. There were images of chasing invisible butterflies and pterodactyls coming out of their shells and flying off prehistoric cliffs. The sound of the record was more based on the idea of soaring pterodactyls than on that of another band, or some '70s sound."
Adds Haines, "For me, the major influences on the record were the places we wrote it: Bear Creek, this utopian farmhouse studio, and then our own studio in Toronto, which definitely brought in the electro, dance and rock elements because the city feels so good right now and so many of our musician friends were around. And then for me, being in Buenos Aires, most of the songs I brought to this record came out of being in exile with just a piano and a guitar. And then in the final stages, mixing at Electric Lady in NYC brought everything around to where we first met Josh and Joules."
But Fantasies is not so much about where Metric has been as where it takes you. While Haines' missives from inside the VIP room (as cutting as ever on motorik rockers "Gold Guns Girls" and "Front Row") would suggest the titular Fantasies are of the unattainable (or even undesirable) variety, the album's gilded surfaces and textural density — a heady amalgam of psychedelia, disco, electronic and rock — supports Shaw's assertion that the title is meant to evoke a certain "dream state" quality. And no song better encapsulates the utter surreality of dreaming — that peculiar combination of bliss and terror — than Fantasies' massive glam-rockin' closer "Stadium Love," a song meant to be heard in the building it's named after, but whose candy-coated "ooh-ooh-ie-ooh" chorus just might distract you from all the crazy shit happening during the verses in between.
Haines explains: "I had just gotten back from Coachella, and I walked into the studio and noticed on the bulletin board that Joules had written 'spider vs bat,' i think he had been obsessively watching all these National Geographic animals-fighting-each-other-videos in his hotel room. For me, that phrase triggered an entire narrative that was about a gladiator-style enormo-dome where everything turns in on itself, with every form of aggression on display for spectators: monster trucks ramming into each other, bull fighting, sweaty men wrestling. And then you have these animals completely disconnected from the logic of their natural habitat, so you have a swan pecking the shit out of an elephant and pigs biting the necks out of tigers, and bats attacking spiders. And then in the seats, the spectators are kicking the shit out of each other too. There's this completely blurred line between spectator and participant, and we're all trapped in this fucked up Noah's Ark. The images came to me all at once, and I wrote the lyrics on the spot."
And so an album that began its life as an acoustic jam session in the bucolic woods outside Seattle ends in a cartoon orgy of bloodshed in some mythical arena that exists in the darkest recesses of Emily Haines' mind. Each extreme represents a fantasy in their own right: the ideal of hermetic artistic purity versus the spectacle of excess and decadence. Being yourself versus being what they want you to be. Emily Haines stared down these very polarities on her own that night at the Phoenix, but with Fantasies, Metric are now free to define their reality on their own terms. So when, amid the daydream electro of "Gimme Sympathy," Haines invokes that age-old existential dilemma — "Who would you rather be: The Beatles or The Rolling Stones?" — it's only because she already knows the answer: neither.
Freelance Whales
To call them multi-instrumentalists might be a little overdone. The kids in Freelance whales are really just collectors, at heart. They don't really fancy buffalo nickels or Victorian furniture, but over the past two years, they've been collecting instruments, ghost stories, and dream-logs. Somehow, from this strange compost heap of little sounds and quiet thoughts, songs started to rise up like steam from the ground.
The first performance of these songs took place in January of 2009, in Staten Island's abandoned farm colony, a dilapidated geriatric ward, in one of New York's lesser visited boroughs. A seemingly never-ending jigsaw of small rooms, the farm colony ate them whole and threatened to never regurgitate them. And even though the onlookers were only spiritual presences, the group was still palpably nervous and visibly cold. After a bit of singing, strumming and stomping asbestos, they realized that they'd found a good crowd. They heard a bit of clapping from an adjacent room, also some laughing, but not a single soul asked about their record.
Weathervanes, the groups debut LP, finished tracking just a few nights earlier. Swirling with organic and synthetic textures, interlocking rhythmic patterns, and light harmonic vocals, the record works to tell a simple, pre-adolescent love story: a young male falls in love with the spectral young femme who haunts his childhood home. He chases her in his dreams but finds her to be mostly elusive. He imagines her alive, and wonders if someday he'll take on her responsibilities of ghosting, or if maybe he'll join her, elsewhere.
Since their brief residency at the Farm Colony, Freelance whales have taken to city streets, subway platforms, and stages with their swirling nostalgia. Many people who found them playing in those public spaces, managed to forget what train they were supposed to take; some of them forgot what language they originally spoke. And so, after playing in New York City, almost exclusively, for about a year, they embarked on their first tour of the United States, and Canada. They saw buffalos posted on hilltops, armies of windmills, and lots of lovely people who let the music run their blood in reverse.
An Horse
Anyone who's ever punched a clock has a work buddy. If you're lucky, they might be a true friend; someone you spend more time talking with than you do with your family, maybe even your partner. Imagine if the two of you had the chance to leave your jobs behind and go on a crazy, incredibly fun, sometimes stressful but ultimately mind-blowing two-and-a- half-year musical adventure across continents and time zones, racking up accolades from the likes of Rolling Stone, Spin, People and Pitchfork.
To the Australian indie-rock duo of Kate Cooper (singer/guitarist) and Damon Cox (drummer/singer), An Horse — who went from rehearsing after hours in a Brisbane record store to playing "Camp Out," the single from their 2009 debut, Rearrange Beds, on Late Show With David Letterman — making their second album, Walls, isn't just a chance to set the agenda for their next phase. It's also an opportunity to reflect on the fantastical journey that has carried them here, a pipe dream made thrillingly real.
"We'd worked in the record store together for a couple of years and talked every day — even on days off — mostly about music and film, which we continue to do every day now." says Damon. "After listening to music all day together at work for two years, we had a really clear idea of what we liked and disliked musically." That bond was the backbone of Rearrange Beds; after two years of relentless touring, though, including stints out on the road with Tegan & Sara, Death Cab For Cutie, Cage the Elephant, Silversun Pickups and The Big Pink, An Horse had become a different animal altogether.
Cooper, like Cox, is frank in her assessment of their earlier album. "With Rearrange Beds, we made a record of two people learning how to play together. I don't think you can hear that on the album per se, but that's what it was." This time, the pair decided to make a record that reflected their bond not just as music aficionados, but as musical collaborators. "Walls was really deliberate," Kate explains. "We had hundreds of shows under our belt and we had figured out how to play off each other."
Regrouping in Vancouver after recharging their batteries in their respective homes — Cooper in Montreal, Cox in Melbourne — An Horse brought in Howard Redekopp (who has lent his sonic wizardry to The New Pornographers and Tegan and Sara as well as An Horse — Redekopp mixed Rearrange Beds) to produce the album. Now the duo would figure out how to play off the studio, too.
"We had many lengthy discussions with Howard before we arrived in Vancouver to record," says Damon, "and did five days of pre-production — pulling the songs apart, putting them back together, throwing some songs away and even creating new ones — which is something we'd never had the luxury of doing."
The atmosphere was comfortable and creative, which was just what they needed. "During the recording, Howard brought his old dog Fanny into the studio," Kate explains with a wry chuckle. "One day I was getting up in Fanny's face while Damon was recording with a video camera. I was talking to her, telling her she was such a lovely dog, but Howard quickly intervened when he found us. He told us that Fanny had personal space issues and, had I gotten any closer, Fanny would have had my nose! A few weeks earlier, Fanny had bitten our assistant engineer Jaret's face and he had to be rushed to the hospital with Fanny sitting beside him in the car."
Walls has plenty of the whip-smart, energetic rock that propelled An Horse half-way across the world. The album's opening track, "Dressed Sharply," is as fizzy and explosive as a shook-up bottle of champagne, spraying the listener with showers of melody and noise. It's no surprise that the tune is a fan favorite already, thanks to having been previewed in their recent shows. But on the song that follows it, "Not Mine," the craft and care that went into Walls' making becomes even clearer. Kate and Damon's passionate vocals, weave into a pattern with Kate's chiming guitar, building the intensity slowly and deliberately as Damon's drums nudge the momentum along.
It's a powerful tension, one that marks the separation between Rearrange Beds and Walls, where the duo frequently return to that place where anything can shrink into a whisper or explode into a howl. "They're my favorite songs on the record; songs like '100 Whales,' where the mood fits in the middle. We wanted to make a record that sounded way bigger and more powerful, but not so big and crazy that it didn't sound like two people," Damon says.
The result is a towering sound that doesn't buckle when it gets quiet, or for that matter, serious. Walls' songs span a wide spectrum of emotions, which came to the surface after Kate had moved to Montreal. "I was really stoked because I had met a girl and was having a good time, but there were also a lot of really terrible things that had happened."
More specifically, the lyrics deal with the wrenching angst of being stuck on tour while a family member falls ill. Plenty of songwriters have observed the monotony of endless hours logged on the interstate, but when your mom phones you to tell you that she has to have major surgery and you can't run to her side all the way in Australia, suddenly you've got bigger problems than the lack of roadside scenery between Buffalo and Pittsburgh.
"No one in my family told me about my mom's condition because they didn't want me to come home," Kate explains. "They said, 'we didn't want to worry you.' So eventually I had this conversation with my mum where she said, 'Alright, well, I'm gonna go in now and get this done,' and I was, like, 'Alright, bye...' it was crazy. I was struck with this sense that I would have to spend as much time with everyone I care about now because they could die, but I'm going to be on tour, so I can't."
There's a disarming intimacy in Kate's lyrics, whether she's relating the experience of waiting for her mom's results in "Brain on a Table," or the less dramatic but vividly observed "Windows in the City," where she describes games people make up on the phone when things like geography or work come between them. Both a sense of playfulness and feelings of longing are never far from the surface.
Kate: "I think most of the songs for Walls were written in December 2009 to January 2010, when I was in Montreal. I was discovering a new city but I was missing everyone back home. And I was definitely getting frustrated with feeling lost.
"When it's minus 30 degrees out and my girlfriend's working and my friends are away, and it's like, what do I do in this apartment? I just wrote songs. Which was cool, I was really productive.
"In the apartment, there was a bird that wouldn't shut up. His name was Uncle Pete and his painful 'cheep cheep' is all over the demos. I had to send them to Damon with notes like 'at 2:23, TURN DOWN' because Uncle Pete's chirps were so loud," Kate recalls.
When all was said and done, the album had become every bit as rich and varied as the time in their lives that it capped the end of.
"It was a really rewarding and emotional process making Walls," Damon says. "We could kind of reflect on what a crazy two and a half years we'd had. When we finished up I felt like I could breathe again, like a massive weight had been lifted. The warm Vancouver summer felt like an old friend guiding us though it all. It was a really exciting time." — Dave Morris
Tired Pony
While some people have imaginary friends, Gary Lightbody has imaginary bands. He gives them names and song titles. Just occasionally, they become real.
Already the singer and guitarist in Snow Patrol, one night at a Lou Barlow show in Glasgow, Gary imagined The Reindeer Section. The next day he refused to let any of the 20-odd people he’d drunkenly approached forget that they’d promised to join. The circumstances of Tired Pony’s formation were different, but conceptually it’s the same: another of Gary’s dreams that happened to come true.
It was during idle moments on Snow Patrol’s year-long tour cycle for their last album, A Hundred Million Suns, that Gary could be found in dressing rooms or at the back of the tour bus, strumming away at songs he already knew wouldn’t fit on a Snow Patrol album. Seven of the songs that we now find on The Place We Ran From were written during this period. Having earlier in the year hinted at his ambition to form a country band, Gary unveiled a Tired Pony song to the wider world when Snow Patrol visited Portland in October 2009, saying he’d written it the previous day and that it was “inspired by Portland”. Called I Finally Love This Town, even in solo acoustic form the song had a spectral quality quite distinct from Snow Patrol. And it would be to Portland where Gary returned in January of this year, barely three weeks after the end of Snow Patrol’s retrospective Reworked tour, to record an album.
The cast of characters who assembled at Portland’s Type Foundry studio on January 4, 201o reflected the roots that Gary Lightbody’s maintained from musical adolescence in Northern Ireland, through relocating to Scotland, and up to his subsequent mainstream rock success. From the extended Snow Patrol family there was Troy Stewart, the band’s guitar technician, whose contributions exemplified the project’s keynote features of freedom and surprise. Then Iain Archer, long-time Snow Patrol associate and collaborator, and a singer-songwriter in his own right. Richard Colburn is renowned as the drummer with Belle & Sebastian, but he’s known Gary since playing for Polarbear, an embryonic version of Snow Patrol. Richard has been playing percussion and keys live with Snow Patrol ever since whenever he can. Next, Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee, in many ways the pivotal figure in the whole Tired Pony escapade. A close confidant of Gary’s since becoming Snow Patrol’s producer from the commercial breakthrough of 2003’s album Final Straw onwards, it was Garret who brought in the Tired Pony band’s final two members: Peter Buck from R.E.M. and Scott McCaughey, the Seattle musical polymath who’s been R.E.M.’s full-time auxiliary member since 1994.
By the time the collective began work, it was clear Gary’s initial hunch that he might make a country record had been superseded by something far less simple and much more mysterious.
“I wanted to make a very American record,” he says. “It’s inspired by my love of Wilco, Calexico, Lambchop, Palace, Smog, these bands that look at the darkness in America. I wanted to write a twisted love-letter to the States. This is the first record I’ve written that isn’t about me and my love-life, primarily. These are all stories, told in the first person I guess, but not necessarily with me in the central role, just me talking through various characters. I don’t do that ever. I just wanted to approach this record totally differently. It’s certainly different to Snow Patrol that’s for sure. It’s a very natural record. It was recorded with everybody sitting around a few microphones, all first or second takes, warts and all. There’s a kind of haphazard tenderness to the record that I really enjoyed.”
In practical terms Buck and McCaughey’s presence helped dictate the Tired Pony ethos. First up, they found the studio, and tapped their vast reservoir of local contacts for guest contributors: perhaps most notably, M. Ward, whose woozy guitar on Held In The Arms Of Your Words Gary considers his favourite performance of the entire record (Ward’s She & Him partner Zooey Deschanel also sings harmony on Get On The Road); there’s pedal steel guitar player Paul Brainard and stand-up bassist Fred Chalenor (with whom Buck had played alongside Robert Fripp); and by no means least, the She Bee Gees, a local female Bee Gees covers band. Then there’s the simple fact that it’s easier to do an album of loose, near-improvised live recordings when two of the musicians are of such calibre.
Peter Buck believes the circumstances of the album’s creation greatly contributed to its awestruck, widescreen quality. “The Type Foundry is one big loft, it used to be a printing firm, and it’s really long and really spacious. So we all just set up in the room, didn’t worry much about separation, did a lot of ambient miking, and then performed it all live. And the songs were so new to Gary and totally new to us, that there’s that kind of feel of not really directing, it’s playing and the song is occurring as you play and you’re not really knowing what you’re doing. Essentially, Gary would go, ‘This is the verse and this is the chorus,’ and then we’d go, OK let’s go. Structurally they’re not super-complicated, it’s really just a matter of us feeling what the songs needed. I don’t think we ever did three takes. We did a whole lot of them in one.”
In the context of Gary Lightbody’s previous work, everything about this beguiling, beautifully low-key, yet still quite intense album validates the opening line of the opening song Northwestern Skies: “It’s not like it was before”. Were this a mere rock star vanity project, The Place We Ran From would have shaped up far differently. For a start, arguably its best song was actually written and sung by someone else: Iain Archer’s I Am A Landslide. Then there’s The Good Book, which although a Gary Lightbody song, was sung by Tom Smith of Editors, who’s a perfect fit for the narrative’s gothic weave of guilt and redemption. By the very nature of the beast, all Tired Pony’s members have other things to do. But there are plans to take to the road this summer as and when their schedules permit. Peter Buck would be the first to admit he’s played in a lot of one-off projects which have made records in a week or less, and not all of them have ended up this good.
“It felt really powerful and emotional, and also real free,” he says. “I don’t know if Gary went into it planning it to be something that was to last longer than the week of recording, but it certainly felt at the end of the week like it was a band, and that this was a good place to start. It would be crazy not to pursue this.”
It’s a record that begins quietly, and ends with a four-minute feedback storm. There are any number of peak moments within. Anyone who thinks they know what the singer from Snow Patrol’s extra-curricular activity will sound like is going to be surprised. Not least because Gary Lightbody himself is surprised too.
“We were just a bunch of guys making a record for fun. There was nothing really to shoot for except what we want to do. Nobody’s looking over our shoulder. We were making a record in our own little bubble. And it was so much fun.”
Sleeper Agent
There are many markers of success in the first-year career of Sleeper Agent, the overachieving Little Garage-Pop Act That Could from Bowling Green, Kentucky. Drummer Justin Wilson, however, prefers to recall the one that best captures the goofy joie de vivre of his group.
The date was March 2, 2011, the final day of the first leg of their grueling tour with local buddies Cage the Elephant. This was their first real tour, so Wilson and his bandmates—female singer Alex Kandel, singer-guitarist Tony Smith, bassist Lee Williams, guitarist Josh Martin, and keyboardist Scott Gardner—wanted to commemorate the occasion. They dispatched Gardener, dolled him up in a cheerleader’s outfit—doughy gut and all! —and unleashed him onto the stage to crash their giggling friends’ set. “He’s already got this huge mane of curly hair,” Wilson, 24, enthuses. “He looked like a pom-pom already!” This tour, in all its agony and ecstasy, embodied Sleeper Agents’ rock & roll dream—and that night, they realized they were living it.
The key to Sleeper Agent’s steady ascent, recently punctuated by their rollicking shows at SXSW, is disarmingly simple: the band members know how to laugh at themselves, and their songs are joyously melodic. (Possible motto, according to Smith: “Live faster, don’t die” —admittedly a work in progress.) You can hear this in particular on tracks such as the blogger-touted “Get It Daddy,” a dizzying school’s-out anthem about growing up, “Love Blood,” a jerky WTF about commitment, and “Get Burned,” the giddiest love-sucks tale you’ve ever heard that sounds like the Strokes doing the nasty with the Arcade Fire.
“My previous band was very introspective and complicated,” explains Smith, 24, who pens all the music and lyrics. (A sucker for tight rock-pop hooks, he cites T. Rex, the Beatles, and Jay Reatard as influences—though to his bewilderment, his voice has earned countless rhapsodic comparisons to Jack White’s.) “So we under-thought everything, and just went for it.” Their compositions back in the day were pretty straightforward, oscillating between the subjects of booze and chicks. But Smith is proud to report that his talking points have since evolved. Most of the tracks on their self-titled album—out August on Mom + Pop Records (Sleigh Bells, Metric)—are studies in relationships, both familial and romantic. And many of them, he adds, “I write from Alex’s perspective, how I think she’s feeling.” This shift in perspective is key to Sleeper Agent’s appeal: While the playful tug of war between the male and female vocals coolly recalls everyone from X to The XX, the immediate warmth they emit is entirely their own.
The group—its name a Battlestar Galactica reference, courtesy of sci-fi geek Smith—first formed in 2008, as the drums-and-guitar duo of Wilson and Smith. Vets of hardcore and rock bands, the two hit it off while working together in a movie theater. “We were both fans of Rush,” Smith explains. The pair stood out by being the only act in town with songs that boasted dueling vocals. No one seemed to mind that Wilson couldn’t really sing, especially not the duo who were pocketing $500 a show at the local college hangout.
The rest of Sleeper Agent assembled serendipitously. “Lee was a fanboy of ours. He’d come to all our shows,” Wilson says, giggling. “And he was friends with Scott.” Kandel, meanwhile, had opened for Sleeper Agent as part of a rock group she formed with a local buddy. “Tony swears he can’t remember what I sounded like,” she notes. Oh, but he certainly does remember that day in 2009 he, then 22, met up with the 16 year old over lunch about possibly joining the band. “I picked her up from high school,” he says. Long pause. “That was weird.”
Deciding she was too young, he blew her off thereafter. “But I was pretty persistent,” says Kandel. “I would message Tony on Facebook saying, ‘Hey, don’t forget about me. You still have to make me famous.’” Three months later, she finally broke him down. Smith attempted to teach her bass, but when she proved to have butter fingers, he switched her over to vocals. Today, “it’s definitely a brother-sister kind of thing,” says the 18-year old Kandel. (You can hear their declaration of siblinghood on the ballady “That’s My Baby.”) “I feel like an equal, but they’re really protective.” Scoundrels, you’ve been warned!
The rest of Sleeper Agent’s story has transpired at a feverish pace. After the six piece played their first show together in 2010, they decided to put together an eight-song demo. That recording caught the attention of friends Matt & Brad Shultz of Cage the Elephant, and their producer Jay Joyce (Emmylou Harris, The Whigs), who’d go on to produce Sleeper Agent in July 2010 in his Nashville studio. While laying down the tracks for Celabrasion the group teamed up with the Shultz’s and Ryan Zumwalt’s Death Panda imprint leading to a deal with Mom + Pop. All of the above happened in just NINE months.
Since then, Sleeper Agent has been opening for with Cage across America, building a swelling fanbase. “We’ve been giving autographs and pictures every night after we play,” marvels Justin. He’s sincerely flattered by this, but it’s also freaking him out. “Once 400 people came into this tiny room! I couldn’t breathe! I couldn’t see a way to get out.” One day, he jokes, the band will “hire somebody who can, like, push through and clear a path for me,” hip-hop style. But for now, the members of Sleeper Agent have been expertly plowing their way through the masses the only way they know how: one town at a time.
Ingrid Michaelson
When she walks into a store in her Brooklyn neighborhood, Ingrid Michaelson is rarely recognized. But once she hands over her credit card to pay, the clerk often pauses, brightens up, and enthusiastically offers a bit of trivia: “Did you know that there’s a singer named Ingrid Michaelson?” This reaction is fitting because Michaelson has earned both acclaim and a loyal following due to her knack for crafting beautiful, idiosyncratic songs (“The Way I Am,” “Maybe,” “Keep Breathing”) that just nestle in your head. Her new single “Parachute” is a perfect example of that, showcasing a seamless stylistic growth in melody and beat while nurturing the sound that Ingrid’s fans have come to know and love. Image has never been her priority, but let the record show that her librarian-chic style has nonetheless received a shout-out in The New York Times.
Michaelson’s grassroots sensibility has worked like gangbusters: Her music, often about love and relationships, has been steadily wafting out of your television set for roughly four years now, be it in an Old Navy ad or in handfuls of Grey’s Anatomy episodes (not to mention countless other series such as One Tree Hill, Ugly Betty, and Scrubs) or on VH1 as an artist You Outta Know. The New York Times marveled at how she was “singing her way from obscurity to fame.” Billboard trumpeted her as the face of the new music business. NPR declared, “Ingrid Michaelson is everywhere.”
The release of the soaring, blissful “Parachute”—a one-off track available only as a download—is milestone of sorts for Michaelson. After turning 30, she found herself itching to grow as a songwriter. “I feel like I’ve exhausted so many possibilities of writing, as a female singer-songwriter,” she says. For a year and a half, Michaelson had a big, hook-laden song playing out in her mind, so she recruited writer-producer Marshall Altman to help her hash out what would become “Parachute.” Its fantastical video, directed by Adria Petty (Beyoncé, Regina Spektor, Duffy), features the singer as latter-day Amelia Earhart who flies through space rescuing dying planets—a nod to her lyrics’ increasingly optimistic bent.
“It didn’t feel like something I could put out because it was so poppy,” Michaelson says, happy to give it to another artist. “We shipped it off for people to take a gander and see who would pick it up.” It took producer, Dan Romer, who worked with Michaelson on her second full-length, 2009’s Everybody, to convince her to record it herself. Says Michaelson: “He kind of jumped on the project, did this really interesting, funky production, and sent it to me. It was rad and cool and different. We put some new vocals on it, and I was like, ‘I love it!’”
Such serendipity has graced the singer throughout her whirlwind career. The Staten Island-raised daughter of classical-music composer Carl Michaelson, she took piano lessons from the age of five and starred in plays during her grade-school years. Michaelson went on to study musical theater at Binghamton University in upstate New York, where she sang in an a cappella group. After graduating, she cultivated her interest in music by performing at a coffee house where she worked as a barista. She was teaching theater to kids when she got a fateful call in 2006 from a music manager named Lynn Grossman who discovered Michaelson’s homegrown music on her MySpace page.
Within a few months, Michaelson’s music could be found sound-tracking the romantic-surgical debauchery Grey’s Anatomy with songs such as the cascading “Breakable” and the melancholic lullaby “Keep Breathing.” A music supervisor for Old Navy just happened to catch the episode featuring the latter and snapped up the cooing, calypso-inflected “The Way I Am” for one of the company’s commercials. (The song ultimately went platinum.) Radio play followed, just in time for the release of her 2007 full-length debut, Girls and Boys (out on Cabin 24, her own imprint). This all happened in about a year. “We really had a lot of luck, and then we worked really hard to be in the position we’re in nowadays,” says Michaelson, who has since released an EP, 2008’s Be OK, and a follow-up album, Everybody (both via the Cabin 24 label)—each proving fertile resources for music licensors.
Michaelson has spent the past three years on the road and will head out again this October and November on headlining jaunts through the U.S. and Australia. Upon her return, she’ll work on her third full-length—due in 2011 on Ingrid’s own Cabin 24 in partnership with Mom+Pop—which will explore the themes of life and death. (One song is tentatively titled “The Battle of Brooklyn,” about a Revolutionary War skirmish.) Sonically, the upcoming album will fall “somewhere between Judy Garland’s music and Beyoncé and St. Vincent,” the adventurous Michaelson says excitedly, before adding, “not that I’m gonna come out and have an alter ego!”
The Jezabels
Revelation is part of The Jezabels' art. Three EPs have led us this far. The Man Is Dead. She's So Hard. Dark Storm. Strange jewels dropped along their winding path to who knows where, each more lustrous than the last.
Did you see how they caught the light? Hurt Me broke the US charts, made iTunes' single of the week. Easy To Love and Mace Spray were indie radio staples; Dark Storm an iTunes #1. AIR and APRA nominations were lavished for records and songwriting.
Meanwhile in the live arena, maybe you've been shaken by The Jezabels' cocktail of power and elegance, at one of their sold out headline shows around the world, or at any number of festivals that left critics gasping, from Oz inkies to UK glossies to Austin's SXSW:
"Commanding…epic…brilliant…menacing…purring, roaring, soaring… intellectual ferocity…pyromaniac intensity…imagination and emotional rawness…thundering…threatening…exuberant rock'n'roll swagger…"
So much for peeking through the keyhole. With Prisoner, their debut album, The Jezabels are released at last.
"We love a bit of drama," firebrand singer Hayley Mary makes clear from the outset. "The EP trilogy was practical as well as conceptual on our part. It helped shaped us internally, as well as how we were perceived.
"The themes we got to develop, the aesthetic of the design... they helped establish our world, our business, our creative realm. It was nice to feel like we were protected within the force field of the trilogy."
In the force field of their hearts and minds, Hayley Mary and keyboard player Heather Shannon were The Jezabels long before they left the coastal paradise of Byron Bay for the bright lights and dark shadows of Sydney in 2006.
Guitarist Sam Lockwood recognised them in the corridors of learning. History. English. Gender. Rock. He signed them up for a band competition, conjured drummer Nik Kaloper from the mist. The battle was won. The first of many.
"It was a combination of four individual desires to play music and taking whatever opportunities we could find — which happened to be each other," says Hayley. "From there the process has pretty much been one of reconciling musical differences. But we're getting closer."
Prisoner is a panoramic study of tension and emancipation, from the echoing stone cathedral of the title track to the sun-blasted morning of the first single, Endless Summer; from the cloistered atmospherics of the instrumental interlude, Austerlitz, to the chiming and climbing pop of Deep Wide Ocean and the quiet reflecting pool of Peace of Mind.
Like the EP trilogy, Prisoner was recorded during stolen hours by Sydney producer Lachlan Mitchell, whose passion for glittering pop divas and his nocturnal gig in blood-guzzling black metal band Nazxul helped define The Jezabels' polarities of grandiose theatrics and gothic intensity.
"I was always obsessed with that whole Brontë-esque gothic melodramatic thing Kate Bush did," Hayley says. "I love the performance aspect of people like Freddie Mercury, David Bowie and Cyndi Lauper.
"Nik is obsessed with metal. He's a perpetual ball of rhythm. He needs to drum so he doesn't flip out. Heather is a classical pianist who has the advantage of not really knowing the rules of rock. Sam is the earthing element. He likes organic country-folk so he balances that theatrical, over-the-top, almost '80s thing we have…
"Between us it gets very intense but also very dynamic and awesome. There's always someone with a great idea that you would never think of yourself."
Between big ideas and spectacular hooks, dynamic and awesome is about right. The ecstatically swelling melody of Long Highway and stately grace and sky bound chorus of Rosebud bring immediate rewards, but between layers of sound and meaning, Prisoner takes time to fully reveal itself.
"The lyrics are set out as a letter to a prisoner," Hayley says. "I'm interested in the idea of your personal role in your own oppression. To a certain extent the album explores the idea of looking at yourself as a prisoner and asking about the reasons for that. Are they external or are they internal?"
Perhaps related is the fact that The Jezabels have chosen to remain an independent entity for their debut album — in spite of a virtual stampede of label interests.
"The team we've worked with showed faith in us from the first show, from management to production to design," says Hayley. "That's a valuable thing, to have this internal strength of knowing it's us against the world."
World be warned. Prisoner is loose.