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Tuesday, Nov 7 2017, 6AM
Remembering Leonard Cohen a year after his passing. RIP Cohen wrote this song when staying at the Penn Terminal Hotel on 34th Street in New York City in 1966. He wrote: "The room is too hot. I can't open the windows. I am in the midst of a bitter quarrel with a blonde woman. The song is half-written in pencil but it protects us as we manoeuvre, each of us, for unconditional victory. I am in the wrong room. I am with the wrong woman."
In 1962, Dylan visited England for the first time. Here, he met many local folk artists, including Martin Carthy, who introduced him to many traditional English ballads, including "Scarborough Fair." Dylan borrowed the line "Remember me to one who lives there/She once was a true love of mine" from that ballad for "Girl From The North Country."
The moon is a big deal to Neil Young. It shows up in 28 of his songs, and he uses it to guide him. In a 2005 interview, he explained: "Before there was organized religion, there was the moon. The Indians knew about the moon. Pagans followed the moon. I've followed it for as long as I can remember, and that's just my religion. I'm not a practicing anything, I don't have a book that I have to read. It can be dangerous working in a full moon atmosphere, because if there are things that are going to go wrong, they can really go wrong. But that's great, especially for rock 'n' roll." The next full moon in Seattle is Dec 3 @ 7:48 A.M.
Springsteen has said that Mansion on the Hill is about when he was a kid, and his father used to drive them out to this old house on the outside of town. "My father was always transfixed by money," Bruce explained. "He used to drive out of town and look at this big white house. It became a kind of touchstone for me. Now, when I dream, sometimes I'm on the outside looking in – and sometimes I'm the man on the inside." This was the first song Springsteen finished writing for Nebraska. He recorded it as a demo on a 4-track tape recorder in his house on Jan 3, 1982.
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers performed this on Saturday Night Live when they were the musical guests November 19, 1994. Their drummer, Stan Lynch, had left the band, so Dave Grohl, who had not yet formed Foo Fighters, sat in for the performance. Steve Ferrone got the gig as Heartbreakers' drummer a short time later.
"Baker, a singer-songwriter from Memphis, Tennessee worked with Sorority Noise’s Cameron Boucher on “Turn Out the Lights.” Her shaky voice, plucky guitar and constrained piano embrace the frailty of life while not shying away from the fears of a young 20-something in this day-and-age. Depression, mental health, love, loss, faith, understanding and confusion permeate the 11-song album from the first chords to the last strained lines on 'Claws in Your Back'.” Julien Baker bottles lightning again: bit.ly She's at the Neptune December 8th
SIA has a Christmas album coming November 17th - "Everyday is Christmas" Hear a track from it here: www.siamusic.net
"A Moment Apart is all about taking a moment to step away from all the noise and the things that maybe weigh you down in life. We want to do the same for people coming to see it" Check out episode two of Odesza's Moment Apart Tour videos: bit.ly
HÆLOS stopped by KEXP for an in-studio performance just before Full Circle was released. See the full performance here: blog.kexp.org
Pete Lawrie-Winfield's project and band Until The Ribbon Breaks is aptly named. The "ribbon" in this case is tape, in all its forms: audio, video, on a reel or in a cassette, and it's at the heart of the music. As Pete describes it in a letter I recently received, "As a child, I would tape the radio onto cassette, fanatically watch VHS tapes the adults left out, and play both 'until the ribbon broke,' cementing a life-long obsession with the marriage of sound and image." Here's more on the first single and video from Here Comes The Feeling: n.pr
Depeche Mode singer Dave Gahan provides guest vocals on “Where I Wait,” the latest track from his friend and longtime collaborator Kurt Uenala. Uenala just released Cryosleep on November 3rd, his debut album under the solo moniker Null + Void. Watch the video for "Where I Wait" here: bit.ly
At 17 Dave Gahan was a hard-core David Bowie fan who earned his place in Depeche Mode with a rendition of "Heroes." The singer subsequently moved to New York and found his children attending the same school as his idol's. Bowie and Gahan sometimes saw each other at school plays.
If you cannot possibly wait to see Destroyer at the Neptune on February 8th, you can catch them a month earlier, January 10th at Portland's Wonder Ballroom. You can find all their tour dates here: bit.ly
Elbow are at the Showbox on November 10th and in Portland on the 11th! Back in 1997 Elbow won a battle of the bands, signed a deal with Island Records and recorded an album. Unfortunately, Island was sold to Universal, Elbow was dropped, and the album wasn't released.
"What doesn't kill us makes us stronger," Potter commented to 247 magazine. "We just pick ourselves up, and nothing really matters other than the fact that the five of us still love being in a room together and making music, and that's always what it's always been about, right from the very beginning."
Back in 2013 Foals joined the midday show for an in-studio: bit.ly
Bono's lyrics for "I Will Follow" were inspired by his mother, who died in 1974 when he was 14. Bono calls it "a song about unconditional love," referring to the love between a mother and a child. "No matter what the child does, the mother will still love him."
Frontman Craig Finn discussed this album with Billboard magazine. He said that he was "influenced a lot about getting old. There's less party talk. I don't think anything is a radical departure, but there are things that I wanted to talk about. I was influenced a lot [by] getting old, and attempting to age gracefully. The idea is to not wake up washed up. You want to keep progressing, intellectually."
This single was the Pumpkins' second ever release, and their only, release on Sub Pop. Sub Pop released it as their "Single of the Month". There were about 4,000 of the original 7" single on pink vinyl, while the rest were black.
Just a few days ago, DJ Morgan had the opportunity to interview Beck with the release of Colors, his 13th album. You can read/listen to the interview here: blog.kexp.org
Franz Ferdinand are playing the Showbox at the Market December 4th... tickets still appear to be available!
The video was directed by lead singer Michael Stipe. It features him and three women all dancing topless as a way to satirize videos that objectify women. When MTV asked for a censored version, Stipe superimposed black bars over the chests of all four dancers. He said, "A nipple is a nipple."
The Breeders are playing a sold out show at the Showbox on Thursday! "‘If I could even remember what we were fighting about …” Kim Deal’s memories of the 90s are often incomplete, but she remembers that during one particularly chaotic tour, with her post-Breeders project the Amps, she and drummer Jim Macpherson fell out so badly that the two did not speak for 15 years. “That tour was … Oh, my goodness gracious,” Kim continues. “Wasn’t that the first time I blacked out on stage? First time ever? I blacked out on one song and came out on another?”" The Breeders on kicking drugs, Kurt Cobain and life after Pixies: bit.ly
Three different storylines are at play in this song. In an interview with Pixies frontman Frank Black, he explained the inspirations:
"Girlfriend. Unfaithfulness. Creepy pastor whose intentions I later questioned. In that order."
"Out of all the bands who came from the underground and actually made it in the mainstream, Devo is the most subversive and challenging of all," Kurt said in 1992. "They're just awesome. I love them."
Casale: "We stupidly believed that laser discs were about to happen because we read all the scientific magazines and audiophile mags and they were saying this was on the verge of happening, and certainly the technology existed. We didn't realize that what American business would do, which is typical of American business and human nature in general, was create 3 competing systems to confuse the consumer and make it impossible to buy a unit that would play laser discs except for that person's catalog. You could have 10 titles that you couldn't play on yours but somebody else could play on theirs and vice versa. Obviously, they killed it, but what we were going to do was put out laser discs. Devo would be like The 3 Stooges, you'd watch these film shorts that were music-driven with stories. We were going to put out one a year, we didn't even want a record deal. It all just became a fantasy, there was no such medium and there was no such market and there was no way to get them out there that we knew of. We started investigating putting out VHS cassettes at the time, but even then, it was a fledgling industry with VHS and Beta competing, 2 incompatible formats that people were waiting on to see who won. Nobody understood what we were tying to do, so they weren't offering any distribution deals for us. So we just gave up and signed a record deal."
First Aid Kit are playing The Moore on January 28th! Find all their tour dayes on their site... just scroll down: www.firstaidkitband.com
Boys is the solo project of Stockholm based musician Nora Karlsson, originally from Umeå in the north of Sweden. Find "Rabbits" on her bandcamp page: boysumea.bandcamp.com
Hamilton Leithauser is at the Neptune November 15th. He’s also released a video for this song in which he wanders through Marfa, Texas. Leithauser partnered with director Simonites and creative agency Preacher to achieve the final effect. Rob Baird, Preacher’s Chief Creative Officer, said of the video in a statement, “Nothing gets resolved, nothing really gets easier, but you’ve got to keep going. It’s hard, but beautiful in it’s own way.” Watch it here: youtu.be
Roy Orbison's family and London's Royal Philharmonic teamed for a new album that pairs the singer's classic vocal takes with new orchestral arrangements. It features contributions from Orbison's sons Wesley and Roy Jr. on guitar and Alex on drums. Even Orbison's ten-month-old grandson, Roy III, provided tambourine and guitar.
The Orbison sons recorded their parts at Black River Studios – which their father used to own – in Nashville, Tennessee, while the Royal Philharmonic recorded at Abbey Road.
According to drummer Loz Colbert, the track “reimagines old organ samples, transmissions from space, effects, heavy beats and pulsing chords.” He continued, “The song title tips its head to the ’60s instrumental ‘Telstar’ in name and theme; and the idea was to come up with some kind of ‘space anthem’ about light, existence, travel and return.”
"Lips Like Sugar" is one lead singer Ian McCulloch would rather skip. "It was an OK song, I suppose, but it didn't sound like us," he told Q magazine in 1992. "We just got sucked into a new mentality on that last album, the sound of Radio America."
According to Ride drummer Loz Colbert, Pulsar “reimagines old organ samples, transmissions from space, effects, heavy beats and pulsing chords.” But we think it reimagines Sweet Child O' Mine.
There is a video for this cover which includes Motörhead playing on top of a red double-decker bus driven by the Queen. Yep. bit.ly
"Soon-to-be live scorcher “Emotional Haircut” is ostensibly a lark about an old rocker dude trying to cling onto some youth by-way-of a trendy new ’do—but it doesn’t stop with the easy joke. The song’s intensity comes from Murphy’s identification with this character who absorbs pummelling frequencies at very high volumes in order to quell the anxieties of aging. “You got numbers on your phone of the dead that you can’t delete,” he yelps as the music notches up to a panic. “And you got life-affirming moments in your past that you can’t repeat.” It’s at once funny, terrifying, and strangely reassuring." You can read the pitchfork review of the entire album here: bit.ly
Thirty years after the release of Entertainment!, King recalled the song to Clash Magazine: "Saturday afternoons, we wandered, walleyed, through the sun-bright aisles of Morrison's supermarket in Leeds, looking for a 2-4-1 bargains and generic baked beans. The hopeless in-store slogan at the point of sale was: "The change will do you good" meaning "change" as in money and "change" as in switch store. Someone got paid for this rubbish!. I found this good starter for words about a doomed relationship where legover had become, maybe, too much of a good thing. Or at any rate, a thing. Andy (Gill, guitarist) punctuates the main lyric with a call and response thing and sings the iconic mid section "Damaged goods, send them back" words. The music's cute: alternate the guitar and bass duh duh dink! Duh duh dink! & build the song around this R&B clatter among dynamic drop outs where everyone got to feature. We didn't want a pop structure. We'd had it with dominant, subdominant, tonic chord progressions. So we had none, instead."
Ted Leo will be LIVE on KEXP tomorrow at noon! Sign-up starts at 10:30. Come down and see him! He'll be playing the Crocodile later that night.
"Hawkins's own writing and gritty vocal delivery was regarded as unique, wholly American in its style and approach, although it could not be simply compartmentalised as folk or blues. His producer stated that he saw him closer to an artist like Bill Withers than more traditional folk singers."
From her years as a gospel singer in the ‘70s to her solo albums of the past two decades, Sharon Jones always commanded the stage, dishing out beloved soul and R&B performances with a sense of gravitas and elegance that some have compared to James Brown. Although Jones passed away in 2016, her final opus was revealed on November 17th when Soul of a Woman was released on Daptone Records. "Matter Of Time" was featured as the song of the day October 23rd blog.kexp.org
45th St Brass are playing the Thanksgiving Eve Party at Conor Byrne Wed, November 22nd at 9pm
The Cave Singers have two shows coming up at the Tractor. December 8th with Shelby Earl and December 9th with Ages & Ages. And of course at Timberrr! winter.timbermusicfest.com
On August 23rd, Great Grandpa joined John on The Morning Show for an in-studio. See the full performance including Teen Challenge here: bit.ly Then go see them at the Timberrr! Music Festival winter.timbermusicfest.com
Another good reason to go to Timberrr! Music Festival - Hobosexual! "VHS or Sharon Stone" was featured as the song of the day October 14, 2016. blog.kexp.org
"This war between man and nature is rendered as a power-pop passion play: “I would fight to save you!” Segall sings, all but wrapping his arms around the nearest tree." Pitchfork's review of "Alta": bit.ly
PINS write: "The track is about how sometimes we feel like we only exist to make money for other people, it’s a swizz. We are promised things by saviours, these people who have come to rescue us, but it’s not true. “Serve The Rich” was my opportunity to assert myself. I’m saying that we as PINS, musicians, women, Labour voters, and feminists, are here to save the kids, we’re here to save each other, we’re here to save ourselves."
Blondie guitarist Chris Stein wrote the music for this song and came up with the line "dreaming is free." Lead singer Debbie Harry would often write lyrics after hearing the tracks for the songs, and that's what she did here. Stein has since claimed that the song is "pretty much a copy" of "Dancing Queen" by ABBA.
"Wolf Alice proudly carry the banner for Britrock on their second album, a holy site where dead metaphors and teen clichés can spring magically back to life." Pitchfork's full review can be found here: bit.ly
M83's ambitious double-album Hurry Up, We're Dreaming was inspired by The Smashing Pumpkins' double disc Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Lead singer Anthony Gonzalez says he, "waited weeks for the album to come out" and that when it did, he, "listened to it over and over, like it was a discovery."
Arcadia was formed as a side project by three members of Duran Duran: Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes, and Roger Taylor. So Red The Rose is the only album they released as Arcadia. The trio composed this song.
With Duran Duran, Simon LeBon wrote fairly straightforward lyrics, but here the lyrics are rather dense, and quite open for interpretation. It doesn't seem to be about an actual election, but more of a metaphor for some kind of reckoning. Oh, the narrator? Yep, Grace Jones.
Congrats to Thunderpussy who just signed to Stardog Records! They'll play the Showbox on New Year's Eve. www.thunderpussyusa.com
