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Tuesday, Sep 11 2018, 6AM
Okkervil River were in the KEXP studios on June 5th performing songs from In The Rainbow Rain. Watch them here.
Just yesterday Kurt Vile released this track, "Bassackwards" from his upcoming solo album, Bottle It in, out October 12th. We have a theory here on The Morning Show: Kurt Vile makes good songs. He's back in Seattle at The Moore on December 15th!
This is the second track from Phosphorescent's new album C'est La Vie, out October 5th. C’est La Vie is the highly anticipated follow-up to Phosphorescent’s Matthew Houck's 2013 LP Muchacho. It chronicles a life-altering period during which he fell in love, started a family, relocated from New York to Nashville, and built a new studio from the ground up. Phosphorescent will be LIVE ON KEXP at noon on November 21st, then they're playing The Neptune that night!
Check out The War On Drugs performing "Strangest Thing" live on KEXP on August 1st, 2017here.
This was the first music video in which Johnny Depp starred. He was a big deal at the time (it was after Edward Scissorhands but before What's Eating Gilbert Grape), and Petty remarked, "I never met so many women in my life as when we had Johnny Depp in this video."
Depp later featured in videos for Lemonheads ("It's A Shame About Ray"), Johnny Cash ("God's Gonna Cut You Down") and Alice Cooper ("I'll Bite Your Face Off"). He also played guitar on songs by a number of high-profile artists, including Oasis ("Fade In-Out"), Patti Smith ("Banga") and Paul McCartney ("My Valentine").
Israel Nash will be LIVE ON KEXP at noon on October 16th! That night he's playing the Tractor, tickets for that show here.
Mermaid Avenue is an album of previously unheard lyrics written by American folk singer Woody Guthrie, put to music written and performed by Billy Bragg and Wilco. The project was the first of several such projects organized by Guthrie's daughter, Nora Guthrie, original director of the Woody Guthrie Foundation and archives.
Speaking to Billboard magazine about the song in 2011, Adams said: "The song was about a lady. It's a poorly written song, I think, about my supposed time in New York in my early twenties. I always felt like it was going to be misappropriated anyway. I'm not from here, but it was like the 'silly, new New Yorker' thing to do. I just only recently started playing it again, which is pretty cool. But I play it the way I originally played it, which was on piano."
First Aid Kit played "My Silver Lining" in their set live on KEXP with DJ Morgan in 2014. Watch it here and then go get tickets to their Paramount show October 1st
Cat Power will be at The Showbox on Saturday, November 17th! Tickets & info.
Paul Simon wrote this song about Art Garfunkel going to Mexico to act in a movie called Catch-22. Simon was also going to be in the film, but Nichols cut his part, which separated the duo. Garfunkel spent months working on the film while Simon returned to New York, where he toiled away on the Bridge Over Troubled Water album. He expresses his frustration in this song: "Here I am, the only living boy in New York."
Simon sent letters to keep in touch with Garfunkel and update him on the album's progress. Up to that point, the pair had always partnered musically and shared a bond, which was now breaking. Simon & Garfunkel split up after the album was released.
On May 9th of this year, Nada Surf performed their entire 2002 album, "Let Go", live in the KEXP studio. Watch the full performance or specifically Blonde On Blonde.
Anna Calvi:
“I wouldn’t go so far as saying I’m trans, because I’ve found a way of accepting this label that we’re all made to say that we are. But as I’ve got older I’ve felt more and more that it’s actually so ridiculous that we’re given two options. If gender isn’t to do with what bits you have on your body, which it obviously can’t be because a woman can still feel like a woman if she doesn’t have breasts, it just makes less and less sense to me.”
On the album she crosses that divide on this track, Chain, a ""dramatic, swooping song about a sexual encounter with the chorus, “I’ll be the boy you be the girl I’ll be the girl you be the boy I’ll be the girl”.
“I wouldn’t go so far as saying I’m trans, because I’ve found a way of accepting this label that we’re all made to say that we are. But as I’ve got older I’ve felt more and more that it’s actually so ridiculous that we’re given two options. If gender isn’t to do with what bits you have on your body, which it obviously can’t be because a woman can still feel like a woman if she doesn’t have breasts, it just makes less and less sense to me.”
On the album she crosses that divide on this track, Chain, a ""dramatic, swooping song about a sexual encounter with the chorus, “I’ll be the boy you be the girl I’ll be the girl you be the boy I’ll be the girl”.
Black Belt Eagle Scout is the one-woman project of Katherine Paul. The Portland-based musician grew up in the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, a small Indian reservation in Washington. The experience is important to her identity, which she describes as “radical indigenous queer feminist.” Go see Black Belt Eagle Scout November 17th at Real Art Tacoma or the 18th at The Shakedown in Bellingham.
Most great pop songs leave you wanting to know more about the story taking place within their allotted three minutes. About how things came to be, where things went after the outro, what the singer was doing during the guitar solo, that kind of thing. Did Gary Numan ever get out of his car? Did the Michael Jackson character in “Billie Jean” secretly think that, yeah, the kid probably was his son? Did Cyndi Lauper’s fun-loving party girl in “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” ever calm the fuck down? Read all kinds of speculation on what he said to PJ Harvey here.
Interpol was part of the buzz in the New York City indie-music scene that became popular in the early 2000s once The Strokes hit the mainstream. Their bassist, Carlos Dengler, revealed to Pitchfork how they felt about being identified with it. "We were always surprised about how much the New York label was attached to us because we never saw ourselves as a New York-style band," he said. "We saw ourselves as an inspired band."
"New Dawn Fades" is from the 1979 album Unknown Pleasures. It opens with a backwards and heavily modified sample from previous song "Insight", presumably added by producer Martin Hannett, post-production.
Kirsty MacColl recorded this in 1979, but it didn't become a top 10 hit until 1983 with a recording by Tracey Ullman.
This song was inspired by JP Donleavy's 1961 novel of the same title. The author told The Daily Mail December 18, 2009: "Technically I could have taken legal action for piracy but as I know Shane MacGowan - I believe his father is a fan of my work - I decided not to bother."
The Pogues played "Tuesday Morning in Paris as part of their 2012 30th anniversary concert at the Olympia. Here is the video.
David Byrne keeps his personal life closed off, which makes this song unusual in that he's clearly sorting through a genuine relationship, not delivering a work of fiction like he usually does. And true to form, his love song is far from direct, with none of the gooey textures we're used to hearing from smitten songwriters.
In the song, he feels grounded, and he's not sure what to make of it. Being "home" feels comforting, but uncertain. This ambiguity stands out in lines like "I guess I must be having fun" and "If someone asks, this is where I'll be" - he knows this is supposed to be the place, so he'll go with it.
Happy birthday to Richard Ashcroft born 47 years ago today! He has a new album out October 19th called Natural Rebel. More info here.
Noel Gallagher wrote this about The Verve lead singer Richard Ashcroft. He explained to Select magazine:
"He always seemed to me to not be very happy about what was going on around him, almost trying too hard. That's why it goes, 'He was bound with the weight of all the words he tried to say.' I always felt he was born at the wrong place, and in the wrong place, and he was always trying to say the right things, but they came out wrong." "I played him the song, and he nearly started crying," Gallagher continued. "I was like, 'Come on, hold yourself together, son! Easy now!' "In a way, it's about all my friends who were in groups," he concluded. "We are bound with the weight of all the words we have to say. We're always looking for more."
"He always seemed to me to not be very happy about what was going on around him, almost trying too hard. That's why it goes, 'He was bound with the weight of all the words he tried to say.' I always felt he was born at the wrong place, and in the wrong place, and he was always trying to say the right things, but they came out wrong." "I played him the song, and he nearly started crying," Gallagher continued. "I was like, 'Come on, hold yourself together, son! Easy now!' "In a way, it's about all my friends who were in groups," he concluded. "We are bound with the weight of all the words we have to say. We're always looking for more."
Watch this amazing performance of "Bittersweet Symphony" from Glastonbury 2008 here.
"Everything in Its Right Place" was the first song Thom Yorke wrote on the piano. He said: "I'm such a shit piano player. I remember this Tom Waits quote from years ago, that what keeps him going as a songwriter is his complete ignorance of the instruments he's using. So everything's a novelty. That's one of the reasons I wanted to get into computers and synths, because I didn't understand how the fuck they worked. I had no idea what ADSR meant."
Describing the experience of seeing one of his compositions on the silver screen, Moby said, “Yes, I saw Heat in a movie theatre on 19th and Broadway with my friend Damien. It was interesting because Heat was an example of a movie that, when it was released, the critics just didn’t get it. When Heat was released it got really bad reviews and it didn’t do very well, but in the ten years that it’s been out it’s come to be this almost revered iconic movie. So it once again proves to me that I shouldn’t always take critics’ reviews too seriously. But I do remember seeing it at 19th and Broadway with my friend Damien and just thinking that Michael Mann had done a really wonderful job putting the music in there.”
"You're lazy if you play 'Fascination Street.'" Digging into the KEXP library and the notes left by DJs on The Cure's Disintegration here.
Bono has stated that the song is a tribute of sorts to both Frank Sinatra and Lou Reed. "There was a verse about Lou Reed, that didn't make it, and a verse about Frank Sinatra that also didn't make it. And Lou has an album called New York, and he mentions my name on one of the tracks, "Beginning of a Great Adventure". And I just think he is to New York what James Joyce was to Dublin."
Lou Reed often drew inspiration from the streets of New York, but he seldom depicted the city’s poverty as directly as he did on “Dirty Blvd.,” representing the Big Apple through the eyes of a down-and-out character named Pedro. When it was issued as a single, the lyrics were toned down a bit, with the words “piss” and “suck” taken out. “I did the blipping,” Reed told Rolling Stone. “I didn’t want the promo people to feel defeated before they ever went in.” Asked if the compromise bothered him, he replied, “It would bother me if the other version didn’t exist.”
This was not banned by the notoriously conservative BBC or by many US radio stations because censors did not understand phrases like "giving head." Depending on the regional US market, the song was, however, edited for what we now call political correctness. Reed leads into the female vocalists' "Doo, doo-doo" hook with the words, "And the colored girls say," but some stations played a version that replaced the phrase with, "And the girls all say."
In a 2011 interview with Hip Hop DX, A Tribe Called Quest rapper Phife Dawg explained that the group had never received royalties from this song because of the Lou Reed sample. Apparently Reed earned money from the track and though Dawg was thankful he let his group use "Walk on the Wild Side," he was disappointed that Reed hadn't offered to spread the wealth.
B. Dolan's first performances took place at New York City's Nuyorican Poets Cafe, where he gained respect as part of HBO's Def Poetry in 2002 and won numerous slam titles. He has since distanced himself from and criticized slam poetry. In 2011, he told the Boston Phoenix:
"Doing spoken word was the first time I ever tried to present my writing on a stage, and that's what it was good for. It taught me some basic stage tricks that I still use — like how to change my voice and talk to a crowd. But once you've picked up those chops, you need to get the hell out before you become some asshole who wins the poetry slam for the 10th year in a row."
"Doing spoken word was the first time I ever tried to present my writing on a stage, and that's what it was good for. It taught me some basic stage tricks that I still use — like how to change my voice and talk to a crowd. But once you've picked up those chops, you need to get the hell out before you become some asshole who wins the poetry slam for the 10th year in a row."
Guru, quoted in the Jazzmatazz's liner notes, talked about his natural affinity for both jazz and rap. "Jazz's mellow tracks, along with the hard rap beat, go hand-in-glove with my voice"
Digable Planets performing live at Kex Hostel in Reykjavik during 2016 Iceland Airwaves here.
Aretha Franklin's Spanish Harlem hit #2 in the US in 1971. That's Dr. John playing organ.
A song about New York from an album about New York. It even includes a New York sample: a brief bit of "New York's My Home" by Robert Goulet.
Ben Gibbard said on his record label website regarding this song about living in the moment - or at least trying to: "I'm the sort of person that's always dwelling on the destination rather than the journey. Even when I'm in a great situation there's always this moving thought that it all is going to have to end. 'Marching Bands' and the next song, 'Soul Meets Body,' are about me trying not to fall back into old habits."
This song was written by Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello, and recorded in early 2002. The "District" in the song's title is a reference to Washington, D.C. (known colloquially as "The District" by its inhabitants) where Gibbard's girlfriend at the time had moved to.
Elbow frontman Guy Garvey still mainly lives in Bury, England but he also owns an apartment in New York. This was written about the Big Apple. "I'm fascinated by the place," the singer told NME. "It's been good to write out there, because it gives me focus. I've always found that looking through home from a telescope makes it easier to write about."