Best Music Books of 2023 (Boulder Weekly 12/18/2023)

Six of the year’s best music books for your last-minute gifting
by Adam Perry for Boulder Weekly 12/18/2023

It was a great year for new books on music. I was able to get through a giant stack of  them in the last few months in order to choose half a dozen that would make great picks as gifts for yourself, your loved ones, or — if you’re that kind of geeky couple — to share with your partner.      

The Bookworm (3175 28th St., Boulder) is my favorite place to find tomes of all kinds, and their music section is fantastic. Boulder Book Store (1107 Pearl St.) is obviously another great option. But when it comes to the best recent literature on music, my pick is the stealthy Boulder zine Sweet Tooth. An anonymous writer and publisher is intermittently putting out this “love letter to music” at locations around Boulder. Filled with poetic, romantic and thoughtful words on how songs make you feel, consider yourself lucky if you find a copy around town.

Read the rest at BoulderWeekly.com here

Joan Osborne Plays Dylan In Nederland (Westword 4/19/2019)

photo by James DeWalt

SHOW REVIEW:
Joan Osborne Covers Dylan at the Caribou Room
by Adam Perry for Westword, 4/19/2019

Wednesday, the deeply respected Joan Osborne – who made it big with “What if God Was One of Us” in 1995 and later attracted the jamband crowd by touring with the surviving members of the Grateful Dead – played an intimate mid-week set at the Caribou Room, flanked by a keyboardist and guitarist.

Osborne is currently writing and recording a new record while promoting her 2017 album of Bob Dylan covers on the road. During her Caribou Room set, Osborne sang strong, sweet and true on heartbreaking Dylan love songs such as “Tangled Up In Blue” and “Buckets of Rain”; her mesmerizing delivery was quite a contrast from what David Bowie famously called Dylan’s “voice like sand and glue” in his immortal “Song for Bob Dylan.”

READ THE REST AT WESTWORD.COM HERE

TUNEFUL DOOM: TORCHE BREAKS THE METAL MOLD (Westword 7/21/2015)

INTERVIEW:
Torche Breaks the Metal Mold
by Adam Perry for Westword 7/21/2015

If you grew up watching Headbanger’s Ball every weekend, it’s impossible not to associate the term “pop metal” with unequivocal shills like Slaughter, Trixter and Firehouse. It says a lot about how crotchety the international metal scene is now — and how heavy the music has become — that a band like Miami sludgester Torche, which plays the Larimer Lounge this Friday, has routinely been dubbed “pop metal” by Stereogum, Consequence of Sound, and even its hometown newspapers.

Adam Perry: Are you just considered pop metal because you don’t sing in the Cookie Monster voice?

Andrew Elstner: I think you sort of hit the nail on the head. It’s wild, I agree. We’re heavy and it’s metal-ish, but we sing; we don’t scream. It’s just the way we do things, a little more tuneful. I’m 39, so when I think of metal I think of older stuff. There are barely new metal bands that I even give a shit about. High on Fire…I can’t think of anything else off the top of my head. Yeah, I think you’re probably on to something.

I went to see Red Fang in Denver last year and posted a photo on social media. A friend in a metal band insisted it was just “hard rock.”

I would consider Red Fang a metal band. A lot of times if you don’t have super long hair; if you don’t have a costume; if you’re not wearing the required outfit, you’re not [considered] a metal band. Heavy metal is so conservative, man. It’s ridiculous. I that’s why, for us, we’re not really into it as a label. Metal fans can be super loyal and they can also be super ridiculous. Growing up as a metalhead I realized there was a lot more to music than just a scene or wearing a costume. I think a lot of it is the aesthetic. You can file us under bands that appeal to non-metalheads, bands that have more sort of crossover potential. We play metal shows—we had a blast playing Tolmin MetalDays in Slovenia; I felt like we were around our people. And we’ll play indie festivals [as] the sort of token heavy band. There are always a lot of curious people; the crowds are always good.

One of the things that makes many people stray from modern heavy music is that it often seems to either be extremely slow, sludge metal—which is enjoyable when it’s every song—or the Cookie Monster voice over indistinguishable laser-fast noise. The tempos and subject matter on Restarter [Relapse, 2015] are so diverse—as a heavy band, how you decide what qualifies?

I think it’s whatever we want it to be, man. There are parameters within which we work, but as far as the lyrics, a lot of it’s more sort of abstract on purpose and tied together loosely with the album title or song title, but there’s a thread. I think a good example is Dio—a killer melody and a memorable hook, even if the lyrics don’t make perfect sense. It’s more about the cool sounding turn of phrase, using your voice as an instrument instead of trying to be Bob Dylan, which I consider to be the total opposite. Rhythmically, too, we’re all into different stuff; I mean, I could listen to “Mississippi Queen” by Mountain all day long. I don’t think we get too complicated. We’re not too into the mathematical side of things. It’s just whatever we feel like doing at the time.

“Blasted,” in particular, is novel in that it’s a metal song that has so much music coming through that clearly isn’t metal. How do you draw from influences far outside heavy music and put them into what you do?

It’s a little like trial and error. I think we’ve all been at it long enough that you sort of know what works. You know where you can get into melody where it still feels heavy but it doesn’t seem to totally clash. We’re all pretty stringent with our criticisms; we all handle it well and we’re pretty tough-skinned, at least when we’re writing in the studio. There’s nobody in the band with some weird angle, who’ll crush somebody’s idea just to crush it. So there are a lot of ideas that get tossed out just because they do sound too one way or another and just don’t feel comfortable, too dark or too crazy or something. We all listen to so much stuff that it’s about pleasing ourselves first, you know?

What do you say to people who only associate heavy music from Florida with Limp Bizkit and nü-metal?

That’s too bad. That would be unfortunate because there’s so much killer stuff coming out of Florida, and the South in general. There’s a lot of sludgy bands; there’s a lot of death metal. But yeah, I guess the meathead quotient it pretty high.

What have your experiences been like playing Colorado over the years?

The shows have always been killer. I’ve had family living in Denver my whole life, so I’ve been in and out of Denver since I was a young kid. Everybody tries to pump up their audiences just to be nice, but we’ve genuinely had awesome shows in Denver.

A Conversation with Luke Redfield: “I Think of the Land First” (Westword 4/3/2015)

Luke Redfield On Being An American Songwriter: “I Think of the Land First”
by Adam Perry for Westword, 4/3/2015

Delicate-voiced Minnesota singer-songwiter Luke Redfield, somewhat of a nomad, has spent a lot of time in Boulder and Denver over the years. January found him headlining Shine and the Walnut Room, with his sometime-backup singer Patrycja Humienik, a University of Colorado graduate who lives in Denver, opening both shows as kismet&dough, with help from local collaborators Shilpi Gupta and Irene Joyce.

Jack Kerouac once wrote, “I pictured myself in a Denver bar, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was ‘Wow!’” Redfield, who draws as much from Kerouac and other classic American writers as he does Bob Dylan and other legendary songwriters, had quite a few more words than “wow” in a Westword conversation earlier this week about his brief upcoming Colorado-only tour. Redfield plays the Walnut Room on April 7 with kismet&dough as support, and opens for Nora Jane Struthers at the Fox Theatre on April 9.

Adam Perry: Is it still winter in Minnesota?

Luke Redfield: The sunshine made me think today is maybe the first day of spring. Our local celebrity, Scott Seekins, this kind of cult hero everybody follows, wears all black in the winter and all white in the summertime, and it’s always a suit. I saw him today in all black, which means it’s technically winter.

How does the change from winter to spring affect you as a writer and performer?

It greatly affects my levels of spontaneity and happiness overall. Whenever it goes from below zero to thirty above and suddenly it’s warm [in Minnesota] I’ll pick up the guitar and write some happy songs; all winter I’ve been singing depressing shit. It’s like the song emerges from the cocoon on the first day of spring. I know as a writer and just a creative person, spring puts a jump in my step.

I just listened to your recent Daytrotter session. Do you think their images of you are getting more accurate or less accurate?

[Laughs] I think this is a pretty decent one. They’re all caricatures, so I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I’m glad the hat is on this one, because I’ve been wearing this one for a while.

Is Jack Kerouac a big reason you feel so connected to Colorado?

Yeah, definitely. I don’t know if that was always a conscious thing on my part. I read On the Roadforever ago, and Dharma Bums and all those other classics but, even though I remember him mentioning Denver a million times, I never even really thought about him. But in the past few months I’ve been kind of noticing that connection, that Kerouac really did enjoy hanging out in Denver. And then Townes Van Zandt, who I also admire, he spent part of his childhood in Boulder, and then he went to high school in Minnesota really close to where I grew up. I didn’t realize until recently that Townes and Kerouac and I have shared some of the same haunts.

You identify so much as an American songwriter; you identify so much with iconic American writers like Mark Twain. What’s it like to identify as an American songwriter right now?

I think of the land first. I kind of gave up on politics six or even years ago. In terms of the state of the country right now, at least socially and politically, I think we’re pretty lost in general. In terms of the natural splendor and diversity that America has in terms of the land and different types of people and ways of life, I think it’s like no place the planet has ever seen. We’re still in the process of seeing what the American experiment really is; it’s still a very young country. I like guys like Whitman because they tend to be microcosms of the greater country. Whitman said, “Because the poet lovingly absorbs virtually all of America’s tastes, he in turn will be absorbed by his country.” All of the great ones absorb all of the taste of the country and are absorbed.

Who’s an example of that right now?

There’s a lot of great ones; some of them we don’t even know who they are. Back in the day, if you were a poet or musician and you had a hot record or book, it got out there because there just weren’t that many. I still like the classic bards that are still living, like Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen or Neil Young, even though those [last two] are Canadian. I can’t think of any current guys that are in that tradition.

And it might be a girl, not a guy.

Absolutely. Can you think of one?

Well, Neko Case, I think…she might not go down in the pantheon of Dylan and Neil Young, but she has one foot in tradition and one being musically and socially progressive. She’s amazing.

Yeah, I love Neko Case. She’s cool. I agree.

Your last time through Colorado was your first time on tour with a backing band. What was that like?

It was interesting. It was a lot of fun and also challenging, because everyone’s on their own schedule. It was super fun to not travel alone, that’s for sure. You get to share some of the good stories with other people. I’ve had a lot of really hilarious things happen to me while I’ve been touring solo, but when someone’s there to experience it with you it’s a whole other story.

Was it easier or harder musically to play with other people?

Just different. I enjoy both for different reasons. Certainly I feed off of other musicians; when there are other musicians on stage and good synergy, then the energy is shared, so I prefer to play with a band for that reason.

What’s it like having Patrycja Humienik singing with you?

It’s cool, man. We actually had her work out some three-part harmonies with a couple other [band members] for some of the shows, so that got really fun. We had four people singing on some of the songs; I’m a big fan of harmonies.

What’s it like seeing a member of your band flowering on stage as the opening act?

I’m a big fan of her solo act [Denver-based kismet&dough] that’s being birthed. It’s really good. There’s a lot of potential there. I love it. I want everybody to flourish and to do the projects they’re compelled to,
that their hearts are telling them to do. I think every one of my bandmates has a solo project. I’m very supportive and encouraging them all.

What’s it like transitioning back to doing solo performances?

Like nothing had ever happened. Like back at home. I’m pretty versatile in that regard, I guess. I like to do both because I like variety, and I think other people do too.

WORDS FROM THE ROAD: Luke Redfield’s Life in Music (Boulder Weekly 1/15/2015)

Words from the Road: Luke Redfield’s Life in Music
by Adam Perry for Boulder Weekly, 1/15/2015

“It’s just like me singing in your living room with a three-piece band, or in some little dive bar,” indie-folk singer-songwriter Luke Redfield told me about his new album, The Cartographer, by phone from Minnesota just after spending Christmas with his family there.

Redfield, 31, grew up a preacher’s son in small, humble and peaceful Minnesota and Nebraska towns, and is quick to quote memes about the morality of work, such as “Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress; working hard for something we love is called passion.”

Redfield consciously recorded The Cartographer in a more stripped-down, expedient fashion than his four previous releases. With a vocal style heavily influenced by Blonde On Blonde-era Dylan and Conor Oberst and lyrics steeped as much in folk and blues tradition as classic American literature, Redfield had been more of a patient perfectionist with past recordings. The Cartographer, the result of isolated woodshedding at a comically tiny house in Austin, is essentially Kerouac-style “first thought, best thought” set to music.

“It was a special time and a magical time, one of those magical moments when it all just comes together,” Redfield says. “And that’s what it was like for me in this little house. I enjoyed it while it lasted. I was working at a food cart while I was writing, and every day I devoted myself to five to 10 hours of playing guitar and writing these songs. I was ‘in it’ for a couple of months, where these songs would just come to me. “

Haunting, spacious tracks like “Frida” give Redfield the chance to muse — along with gentle harmonica, piano and acoustic guitar — on “making love to some actress” and being “just stardust.” Lilting folk-rockers such as “Sweetest Thing” find Redfield, playful like a young Bruce Springsteen, waxing romantic with the spirit of a troubadour: “I’ve been around this country and fucked it up and down / but you’re the sweetest thing I ever found.”

Growing up on Mark Twain, baseball, ice cream and fireworks in the conservative innocence of the Midwest had a deep effect on Redfield, but the wandering tales in his songs aren’t just for style. When he’s not on tour, Redfield (who has lived everywhere from Nashville to Alaska) works in food service — “waiting tables, cooking, working as a barista, whatever I need to do in the moment” — and when he’s traveling around America playing shows, he feels connected not only with his music but also his ancestry.

“My family is musicians as far back as we can trace the family tree,” he says. “That’s something that I always think about when I’m on the road: ‘This is in my lineage.’ My dad actually played folk music and rock ‘n’ roll [before becoming a preacher]. He was a flower child in the ’60s, served in Vietnam. I learned a lot from my dad about music and life and spirituality and work ethic.”

According to Redfield, recording The Cartographer, which was released Jan. 7, included choosing 10 songs out of approximately 100 he’d written in Austin.

“I generally have enough material to record an album every year,” Redfield says. “A lot of my favorite artists don’t make a lot of albums, but then there are singer-songwriters like Dylan or Johnny Cash who always seem like they’ve got more songs that I’ve never even heard of. And I think I’m more in that category. I got to a point where I thought, ‘I gotta just start recording.’ The Cartographer is really down-to-earth in a way that I hadn’t been on previous recordings. Our mind gets in the way so much when we are artists who care about what we do. I think just based on previous experiences, [I was] just spending too much time and too much money in the studio and just sitting with the songs too long. The Cartographer is more of a stream-of-consciousness thing. But I’m happy to have made albums on both sides of the spectrum.”

Redfield, who is also a semi-pro Frisbee-golf player, is on tour with a band for the first time, and is excited about bringing a fuller sound to his live performances. He’s also looking forward to sharing his love for the road with good friends.

“I’m pretty stoked. It’s been a long time coming. They’re musicians I’ve been working with for a while, friends of mine and people I feel comfortable living with or going on the road with, people who are enthused. I’m all about the right enthusiasm, because I have that about traveling and touring and I want people who will have that same sort of mindset and enjoy the adventure of being on the road in what I still think is an amazing country we live in, in terms of its natural beauty.”

Redfield might allude to “a bed of darkness in my soul” in his gentle, sometimes bleak songs, but he’s an optimistic, self-described “nature boy” whose only New Year’s resolutions are to “be kind and loving…eat better and make more money.” And, as evidenced on gorgeous tracks like “Holy Ghost, NM” on his last album, 2013’s East of Santa Fe, Redfield is proud of his Midwestern roots but has a distinct affinity for the West.

“I love it; there’s something about the air and the water and the mountains,” he says. “There’s something about Colorado that just draws me. I feel like I come alive when I’m in those spaces. It’s hard to really articulate. I think because I grew up in farm country, I really do connect with the earth. My soul is just happier; my heart feels happier when I’m in the kind of lush scenery you find in Colorado. I love that drive from Colorado to New Mexico. It’s one of my favorite parts of the country.”

Redfield is self-deprecating when it comes to his poignantly unassuming voice. He says he identifies more as a songwriter than as a singer, and even plans to write a book in the next year or two about his experiences living on the road.

“Probably because I have never been super amazing at playing an instrument or singing, I think my lyrics are definitely my strength,” he says. “And if I don’t want to be just another folk singer I have to think of myself as a writer. For some reason, I decided to write songs.”

Luke Redfield plays Shine in Boulder on Saturday, January 17 at 8pm and the Walnut Room in Denver on Sunday, January 18 at 7pm. Kismet & Dough opens both shows. 

SHOW REVIEW: Mavis Staples in Boulder (6/25/2014)

SHOW REVIEW:
Mavis Staples at Chautauqua Auditorium, Boulder
6/25/2014

Standing just feet from Mavis Staples as she swaggered through Buffalo Springfield’s classic “For What It’s Worth” last night at Boulder’s historic Chautauqua Auditorium, it was obvious – even as she approaches 75 years old – why Bob Dylan famously asked Staples’ father for her hand in marriage so many years ago.

She’s got moxie; she’s got blues; she’s got style; she’s got class; and she’s got taste. That was clear when Staples and her band – three backup singers, including her sister; drums, bass and guitar – launched into a confident, badass version of the Talking Heads’ “Slippery People.” Even Stop Making Sense, one of the great concert films of all time, could’ve used Mavis Staples.

“We bring you greetings from the Windy City…but I can breathe much easier in Chicago,” Staples (who, with the Staples Singers, was once considered the musical voice of the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr.) admitted at one point. “We come to bring you joy, happiness, inspiration and positive vibrations…enough to last you maybe six months.”

Mixing in other classics (like a spot-on “The Weight” and Staples’ signature “I’ll Take You There”), gospel-tinged tunes, freedom rallies and lonesome-yet-hopeful ballads like “You’re Not Alone,” Staples and her band succeeded even where nearly everyone fails: They got the stilted, virtually all-white Boulder crowd to seem even a smidgen like an old-time revival, hollering “positive vibrations” right back.

“We love you, Mavis!” someone shouted between songs.

“I love you more!” the legend responded.

The Yawpers Debut, As Does Shug’s

So I’m involved with a few notable musical projects in Colorado right now, but my longtime friendship with former Ego vs. Id frontman Nate Cook makes my addition, on drums, to a new alt-country rock group The Yawpers especially exciting. To boot, after woodshedding the past few months at an underground bar called The Speakeasy, The Yawpers are about to have a more formal (yet raucous) Boulder debut on Saturday, July 16 at Shug’s Low Country Cuisine, which used to be the b.Side Lounge, and Trilogy before that.

The Yawpers (named after Walt Whitman’s promise to “sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”) recall a grittier version of Wilco, with as much raw country sensibility as twisted indie imagination. Without seeing us live, the rollicking demo of “Heart On a String” on Facebook is the only taste the Yawpers can give you at the moment, but shades of the Yawpers’ down-home rock were previously heard on Nate’s (and guitarist/bassist Jesse Parmet’s) contributions to the now-defunct Ego vs. Id’s 2010 LP Taste, such as “Hey Sarah” and “National Disaster.”

Equally akin to Deer Tick, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan and Elvis, the Yawpers’ fresh blend of alt-country rock ’n’ roll is definitely something you won’t hear elsewhere in Boulder, and hopefully we’ll infecting the rest of the nation soon. Anyway, hope to see you at the Shug’s gig if you’re around, and either way: Please “Like” us on the Yawpers’ Facebook page.

Patti Smith’s “Just Kids”: Anne Waldman Speaks

Patti Smith’s Magical Journey
by Adam Perry for Boulder Weekly, 1/27/2011

Today, Patti Smith—widely considered the godmother of punk—is a Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductee, a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et Des Lettres in France, and an acclaimed author whose fascinating new book, Just Kids, is a recent National Book Award winner and has been atop the New York Times best seller list for paperbacks since last fall. In July of 1967, however, Smith was just another starving 20-year-old hippie sleeping on a stoop in Brooklyn.

Born in Chicago in 1946 and raised in unremarkable slices of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Smith—wearing an old grey raincoat and carrying a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations—had taken a one-way bus from Philadelphia to New York with about $30 in her pocket and no promise of a job or a place to live. One year later, Smith and her new companion in art and love, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe—who she’d met that first day in Brooklyn—fled their New York apartment in the wake of a brutal murder outside their door.

Mapplethorpe’s gums were abscessing and he was showing signs of gonorrhea. The talented but penniless couple checked into a crummy motel on 8th Avenue in Manhattan called the Allerton, the kind of place where—as Smith writes in Just Kids—“half-naked guys [tried] to find a vein in limbs infested with sores” and the pillows were covered in lice. Mapplethorpe and Smith made love just to draw sweat from Robert’s shivering body, and at dawn a toothless junkie—who Smith calls a “morphine angel”—helped the art-obsessed couple flee the Allerton without paying the bill. Portfolios in hand, the artists’ next stop was the Chelsea Hotel, where hotel manager Stanley Bard had a history of giving rooms based on the artistic brilliance of his typically cash-strapped tenants.

Soon Mapplethorpe and Smith were inhabiting Room 1017, the smallest in a now-legendary building that then featured residents including Harry Smith, William Burroughs and Johnny Winter, not to mention constant visits by big-time pop stars such as Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen. The rest, as they say, is history.

Just Kids, beyond its chief role as perhaps the definitive book about young lovers inspiring each other while struggling just to survive, confirms the wisdom in the age-old axiom, “Who you know gets you there; what you do keeps you there.”

“There,” in Smith’s case, was among the most iconic poets, musicians and painters in 20th century America. In New York, she befriended icons like Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Allen Ginsberg and many others, wanting nothing more than connection but slowly becoming a bona fide star herself.

Smith wrote record reviews in Creem Magazine in order to sell the free records for food money—the unfortunate routine of many music critics even today—and wrote intensely passionate poetry energized by Bob Dylan, Rimbaud, William Blake and the darkly sexual mosaics Mapplethorpe was creating. She dined and partied with New York’s elite artists and finally, encouraged by friends who had urged her to read her poems aloud (to considerable success), finally put her words to music in front of an audience on February 10, 1971 at St. Mark’s Church on the Lower East Side.

Lenny Kaye added guitar accompaniment and young poet Anne Waldman—just a few years before co-founding the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder—provided a stirring introduction. Horses, Smith’s game-changing debut album—and #44 on Rolling Stone’s 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time—with its opening line, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins / but not mine,” was not released until 1975. But February 10, 1971 at St. Mark’s Church represented the proverbial “shot heard ‘round the world” for not only punk, and not only women in hard rock music, but also arguably the first earnest juxtaposition of poetry and pop, Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan be damned.

Looking back almost exactly 40 years later, Waldman—still a Naropa stalwart—calls Smith’s musical debut at St. Mark’s Church “a signature blast from a raw talent who even then conveyed both a penetrating orality and palpable vulnerability.”

Waldman, who remembers Smith that night as “being modest and a little nervous, but confident too,” is co-hosting an anniversary benefit of Smith’s legendary 1971 performance next month at St. Mark’s Church. She calls Just Kids “a magical journey, somewhat like a tale by the French novelist Honore de Balzac in scope. The classic story of the young artists coming to the big city to seek their fame and fortune.”

“It’s beautifully written,” Waldman tells Boulder Weekly, “deeply moving, honest and visionary. And it’s a wonderful source of belletristic history including portraits of some of our counter-cultural greats: Ginsberg, Burroughs, Harry Smith—who all have a history, by the way, at Naropa University.”

Before checking into the Chelsea Hotel that night in the summer of 1968, Patti Smith and Mapplethorpe had nothing but passion, talent and grit—and in Mapplethorpe’s case, a venereal disease. Both became internationally renowned artists due to their visionary creativity and unstoppable drive in the early ’70s. Mapplethorpe passed away in 1989 due to complications related to AIDS, but his photographs—such as the iconic cover of Horses—are gaining more admiration by the day. In 2006, a Mapplethorpe print of Andy Warhol sold for $640,000. And without his substantial inspiration, Smith may well have remained another hippie on the streets of New York.

Instead, Smith has released ten albums and over a dozen books of poetry, and paved the way for female rockers such as Exene Cervenka, PJ Harvey, Ani DiFranco, Kathleen Hanna, Karen O and countless others.

“Patti remains relevant because she has a bead on this crazy war-mongering culture and a wisdom eye and voice that is expansive, imaginative and generous—and true,” Waldman concludes. “And she keeps Blake and Rimbaud alive in her psyche. She’s tracked and metabolized the desires and aspirations of several generations of seekers through her poetry and performance, and now this memoir.”

Top Ten Albums of 2010

Top Ten Albums of 2010
by Adam Perry for Boulder Weekly
12/30/10

To quote John Lennon, “Another year over and a new one just begun,” which means we meet again for Boulder Weekly’s annual “Best Albums of the Year.” A lot of truly great new music blessed our ears in 2010, but let me start by admitting 2010 didn’t exactly represent an epochal time for rock ’n’ roll. Several of North America’s most extraordinary musical artists—including Joanna Newsom, Dr. Dog, Broken Social Scene and Midlake—followed landmark releases by serving up uneven, stilted or simply unremarkable disappointments. Several of the notable new releases I ended up listening to most often were retrospectives, such as Neu!’s big and fabulous boxed set and Phil Manzanera’s guitar clinic The Music. And one of the most entertaining new albums was a guilty-pleasure mash-up masterpiece, the seamless All Day from Pittsburgh’s Girl Talk.

Perhaps most telling, near the top of my list of 2010 favorites was our very own Devotchka’s beautiful new gypsy-romance album 100 Lovers, which isn’t even out yet. Mark my words, it’s their best release to date.

Despite those caveats, out of the 1,000-or-so albums sent my way in the past year there were more than enough diversely interesting and exciting releases to fill ten spots. Have fun reading and listening—and please do write us with your own favorites, too.

10. Cee-Lo Green – Lady Killer
Right up until my deadline, I was deciding between Ben Sollee & Daniel Martin Moore’s touching bluegrass/folk project, Dear Companion, and folk-popper Doug Paisely’s Constant Companion (featuring Feist) for the tenth and final spot on this list. Then suddenly I heard the irreverent, giant-voiced Gnarls Barkley singer Cee-Lo Green’s cover of Band of Horses’ “No One’s Gonna Love You More Than I Do” and found myself addicted to the head-bobbing, lust-crazed, belly-laughing world of Cee-Lo’s heroically carnal new album, Lady Killer. If the Reverend Al Green ever chooses to ameliorate his relationship with Satan by collaborating with Ween, it’ll probably sound something like “Fuck You,” which was Cee-Lo’s generous Christmas gift to us all.

9. Los Lobos – Tin Can Trust
One of the most remarkable strengths of Los Lobos over the past thirty-plus years has been its progressive penchant for successfully experimenting with different genres, instruments and production techniques in the studio. Tin Can Trust—a pleasing jaunt through slow, dark psychedelic blues-rock; upbeat cumbia and norteño numbers, and even a rambling instrumental fuzz-guitar rave-up—features wildly different drum sounds on nearly every track, and a profound intensity that’s fluid through even the most drastic changes in tempo and instrumentation. David Hidalgo’s lyrics kick dirt on the past during “Burn It Down,” while a simple, driving acoustic guitar and stand-up bass exercise builds into a Sonic Youth-style distorted-guitar explosion. It’s hard not to be moved by that kind of musical brashness, especially from a bunch of guys in their 50s.

8. Deer Tick – Black Dirt Sessions
Scruffy young Deer Tick frontman John McCauley told me back in October that he has no goals other than wanting to “make albums we can all be happy with and see the world.” The “we” McCauley spoke of was himself and his band, but in another decade—say, the ’70s—an impressive collection of deep, honest and countrified rock ’n’ roll such as Black Dirt Sessions (Deer Tick’s third LP) would’ve been played on major radio stations and appealed to the larger “we” in a big way. For now, Deer Tick our secret, but that’s changing quickly.

7. Foals – Total Life Forever
“Blue Blood,” which kicks off Foals’ second album, Total Life Forever, like an ode to My Morning Jacket, initially sounds like a startling departure from the undeniably danceable post-punk of the English group’s previous work. Truth is, Foals has just grown up. It only takes a while for the Nintendo-meets-Paul Simon guitar duels and pounding Gang of Four drums to kick in, and suddenly singer-guitarist Yannis Philippakis—who most memorably sang about tennis on 2008’s Antidotes—is utilizing Dave Sitek’s (TV On the Radio) more spacious and lush production to get lyrically inventive and emotional. Combined with Foals’ addictive Remain in Light beats, thick bass lines and aforementioned Graceland guitars, Philippakis’ dense poetry about mankind eventually succumbing to the will of machines makes Total Life Forever a must-listen.

6. Cotton Jones – Tall Hours in the Glowstream
After falling in love with the lo-fi Maryland group’s debut LP, Paranoid Cocoon, and then witnessing Cotton Jones perform their positively devotional Southern soul music for 200 lucky souls in the bowels of Red Rocks last fall, I was initially frustrated with Tall Hours in the Glowstream. Its most passionate moments—such as the hymnal refrain of “Come on, baby / let the river roll on” during “Somehow Keep it Going”—aren’t as immediately inviting as Cotton Jones’ more invigorating earlier work. But a closer listen reveals a band now able to wield its soulful powers with a slow and effectual Southern ease that comes on like a gradual flood of sweet sounds one wouldn’t mind dying to. What’s a glowstream? Who cares?

5. Bruce Springsteen – The Promise
As a kid, all I knew of Bruce Springsteen was that my yuppie aunt and uncle loved the Boss and Jimmy Buffett equally, so naturally I equated “Born to Run” with utter bullshit like “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” But now, with big-time indie bands such as Arcade Fire and Dr. Dog unabashedly wearing their substantial Springsteen influence like a badge of honor, it’s well past time to admit that Jersey’s arena-rocker laureate has written and record many, many amazing songs. The stripped-down Dylan-meets-Kerouac LP Darkness On the Edge of Town (1978) is one of Springsteen’s best, and The Promise boasts two discs of previously unreleased material from the Darkness sessions, including an improved “Racing in the Street” and Springsteen’s own take on “Because the Night.”

4. Avi Buffalo – Avi Buffalo
Led by still-under-age singer-guitarist-songwriter Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg, the youthful indie guitar-rock group Avi Buffalo is off to a fast start. Sweetly juxtaposing late-’90s Sonic Youth trippiness and guitar flourishes equally Marquee Moon and Live/Dead, euphoric tracks like “Remember Last Time” quickly go from “pretty good for a 20-year-old” to “holy shit, this kid is amazing” in minutes.

3. Here We Go Magic – Pigeons
I came across Here We Go Magic’s Myspace page back in May, instantly decided the Brooklyn art-rockers’ pleasant, fast-paced, Feelies-esque “Collector” would be the song of 2010, and then certainly didn’t hear anything more thoroughly enjoyable in the following months. In short, this stylistically diverse LP, at its best, sounds like Graham Nash fronting Neu! During tracks like “Vegetable or Native,” Pigeons gets Mothers of Invention-style incoherent—and generally not in a good way—but overall this album effectively presents an eccentric buzz band that’s more than worth the hype.

2. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
At this point, the release of a new Arcade Fire album is practically a cultural event, and on The Suburbs the sprawling Montreal collective does not disappoint. Texas-bred 30-year-old singer-guitarist Win Butler continues to illustrate America’s sociological and developmental sins with startling clarity, pouring out his own demons in the process; this time, however, Arcade Fire mostly take a more tempered approach, with the help of Final Fantasy’s mesmerizing string arrangements and the unrepentant Springsteen influence I previously hinted at. Beyond existential rock, there are also flashes of New Order, SST hardcore and even ABBA here—all perfect weapons for “shouting through the suburbs.” Infallible they’re not, but Butler and Co. arguably represent the most powerful rock band of our time.

1. Mountain Man – Made the Harbor
Out of nowhere—and I mean no disrespect to their home state of Vermont—the three young ladies of Mountain Man stole the hearts of many a music geek in 2010. Made the Harbor is mostly just their heavenly voices and one humble acoustic guitar, and a cappella tracks such as “Mouthwings”—with its stunning lyric “I will grow a baby / oh, he will move so swiftly / to hold me completely”—“Honeybee,” “Babylon” and “How’m I Doin’” invite listeners into a dusty, long-forgotten world of pastoral vocal bliss. Equally haunting and harmonious, Mountain Man nurtures old-style musical integrity like Fleet Foxes collaborating with the Carter Family. They play the Boulder Theater in February.

Editorial: “Talking to Girls About Duran Duran” by Rob Sheffield

Life During Duran Duran
by Adam Perry for Boulder Weekly
12/3/10

For some, the bulk of popular music in the 1980s is looked back upon as a mere punch line. Flock of Seagulls? Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney doing “Say Say Say”? Poison? Bob Dylan hamming it up in a tacky video that found him earnestly singing, “What’s a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this / A woman like you should be at home / that’s where you belong / taking care of somebody nice”?

Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon once said that rock ’n’ roll exists so that people can pay to see other people believe in themselves. In a lot of ways, it’s undeniable that pop music in the ’80s mostly existed so that people could pay to see young musicians make fools of themselves in order to become stars, and established rock stars—think David Bowie’s Never Let Me Down (1987) or Starship’s Knee Deep in the Hoopla (1985)—eagerly embarrass themselves in order to ride the tidal wave of hair-sprayed nonsense.

For many crotchety music geeks – myself included – the ’80s equals epochal LPs like the Clash’s London Calling and Sandanista!, the Talking Heads’ Remain in Light and Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation; the birth of The Pixies, Ween and others; and countless unforgettable hardcore classics such as Black Flag’s “Rise Above” and Bad Brains’ “Sailin’ On.” While the gluttonous mainstream record industry made millions proving Americans are dumb enough to giddily consume anything with a sizeable promotion budget, the argument goes, underground music in the ’80s thrived—and was subsequently responsible for influencing the post-’80s popular music we can be proud of, from Nirvana to Radiohead to Arcade Fire.

However, as Yale-educated Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield states in his new book Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man’s Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut (Dutton), making sense of the ’80s is much more complicated than all that.

Like Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City before it, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran details the suburban (and in Sheffield’s case, Irish Catholic) upbringing of a young man who falls deeply in love with stereotypically ’80s music, never really outgrows it, and never really feels the need to apologize. Sheffield, who turned 14 in 1980, points to troubled Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis’ famous quote, “Fear of pop is an infantile disorder – you should face up to it like a man” in order to justify his never-ending adulation of ostensibly shallow (and wildly successful) ’80s acts like Duran Duran.

“Loving Duran Duran has been one of the constants in my life,” Sheffield writes in the book’s introduction. “They’re Zen masters on the path of intimate sluttiness…and there’s nothing about them that would evoke the dreaded words ‘guilty pleasure.’ As Oscar Wilde said, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man knows what a pleasure is.”

In other words, enjoy it or listen to something else, but don’t waste energy trying to make Sheffield feel ashamed.

Poignantly, Sheffield asserts throughout Talking to Girls About Duran Duran that he “learned about love through pop music.” Unlike Klosterman circa Fargo Rock City, Sheffield doesn’t feel the need to insult fans of punk and what came to be known as “alternative music”—nor does Sheffield make a dolt of himself comparing Guns ’n’ Roses’ lyrics to the Bible—in order to make himself feel OK about remaining a Bon Jovi fan twenty years after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” laid waste to the reign of glam-metal.

Sheffield does have his own moments of fevered, frivolous interpretations of drivel such as his beloved Duran Duran’s “Rio” and Hall & Oates’ “Maneater” (which Sheffield claims is just “sensible advice” in pop-song format). But the Massachusetts-raised writer brilliantly discusses his undying passion for ’80s music as a mere backdrop for eminently readable—and often hilarious—coming-of-age anecdotes set to Madonna and Culture Club.

One chapter finds Sheffield working as a garbage man, and another as an ice cream man, while chapter six details Sheffield’s summer as a teenaged exchange student in Madrid, where he embraced then-revolutionary European techno-pop amid 100% platonic relationships with sexy Spanish girls who took Sheffield to discotheques and welcomed the idea of an American boy “twirling as one of the ladies of the night” while his female friends made out with other guys. Sheffield succeeds in making the music of Depeche Mode and other ’80s euro-pop greats ring in his readers’ ears during the latter passage, but what’s more attention-grabbing is that a teenage male really has to love ’80s music to not only fill a role Sheffield admits in hindsight is usually served by gay dudes who don’t know they’re gay yet but also go on to publish such a memory three decades later.

Joe Strummer was Sheffield’s sincere hero, for inspiring the Clash’s listeners to fight tyranny and injustice, but the outright garishness of Simon LeBon and others was his blatant obsession—and still is.

“Laurie Anderson complained that MTV was all ‘boys playing guitar in the shower, boys playing guitar on the roof,’” Sheffield writes in Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, “but both of those ideas were fairly excellent.” With 30 years of perspective, Sheffield also still thinks Madonna’s ’80s material is “so beautiful it hurts,” and in a recent interview with BarnesandNoble.com the author stated, “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya’ has to be one of the most ridiculous hit singles that any international superstars have given the world…but it sums up everything meaningful and excellent about Culture Club, right?”

In the words of Thom Yorke, “whatever makes you happy.”

For those of us who were born in the ’80s but didn’t become conscious consumers of music—using our own paychecks to buy albums—until after MTV was playing videos for songs like the Screaming Trees’ “I Nearly Lost You” and Rage Against the Machine’s “Freedom” instead of Warrant’s “Cherry Pie,” it’s admittedly easier to look back on popular music from the ’80s with unequivocal contempt. For Rob Sheffield, however, the sound of “Livin’ On a Prayer” and other ’80s swill is now permanently attached to his recollection of becoming Rob Sheffield, for better or worse, and the writer’s apparently ongoing Catholicism is forever attached to gravitating towards decadent pop music.

Sure, I think that’s unfortunate, but I also think believing a man named Jesus rose from the dead and then ascended to heaven is unfortunate. As Lemmy sang, “I’m in love with rock ’n’ roll / it satisfies my soul / and if that’s all there is / it ain’t so bad.” But, along with preferring the ’80s recordings of the Misfits to those of Hall & Oates, that’s just my opinion.

In the end, growing up Christian and remaining so, as long as it’s not your M.O. to convert others, isn’t a condemnable offense. Neither is coming of age in the ’80s and still unabashedly loving Duran Duran when you’re 44, as long as you’re not hurting anyone—and especially if you’re good at making people laugh by telling them about it.