The Music Tapes, the wonderful current project of Julian Koster whose multi-instrument work you know from Neutral Milk Hotel, made a stop in my living room in East Nashville to play some Christmas songs as part of their surprise Caroling tour. It was fantastic, and there's video proof of such below.
The Music Tapes - Levitating Bow / Oh Christmas Tree from Hard to Find a Friend on Vimeo.
The Music Tapes - Freeing Song For Reindeer from Hard to Find a Friend on Vimeo.
Hello friends.
I'm on tour with David Bazan selling things. I'm also tour blogging.
Check in here.
love.
Caleb
The end of summer is a beautiful thing - the most mild and easy to enjoy days of the lazy season. The sunsets begin to come earlier, it's already happening, and the leaves start to fade from a brilliant green to a duller, paler, shade. Then to yellow, then to orange, finally to brown. The pools close, you have a final cookout, and dig your jackets out of the untouched end of your closet. The school zones show up on your morning commute again.
The end of summer will soon be here.
[mp3] Belle & Sebastian - There's Too Much To Love
The almost robotic, staccato eighth notes, the undercover disco beat, the mid-verse noise loop wherein someone hits the body of their jazzmaster with a fierce force, throwing their input switch to and fro as quickly as they know how. It's funny how musical the most robotic song from one of the most truly minimal bands of our time is. On minute and fifty-six seconds of hinting. Gesturing shyly at a coming release of purposeful, steam-rolling, polite tension. Soft-rock in the truest, unpasteurized, un-bastardized sense of the word. Thank you for the American Analog Set, Lord.
[mp3] American Analog Set - The Hatist
Get in your car and head for the interstate. Pick up your friends and go somewhere. Strum furiously at the conditioned air. Dive bomb on the imaginary tremolo arm with reckless abandon. Stop for coffee at a time-loop, ghostly shell of a gas station. Get back in your car.
[mp3] It Hugs Back - Unaware
I am going to the beach tomorrow - fear not, this is not a "see you in eight days," sort of thing a mere two days after my return to form. I'll still be around - but I'm going to the beach tomorrow, and while at the beach, one finds it difficult to listen to music that does not possess that certain sunny quality. Things with a lot of room, lots of fresh air and sunshine, plenty of opportunities to play nonexistent instruments. You know the type.
I'll be posting some of these songs throughout the week.
[mp3] Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Beach Song (Wilmington Demo)
From time to time I get the desire to really listen to Yo La Tengo. These phases can range from as short as a few hours to as long as a few weeks, but sometimes I get an insatiable urge to jam on some mathy, chilled-out, art-school hipster, noise rock. The unquenchable urge to put And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out or I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One on and wish I had saved my money as a teenager and bought myself a Fender Jaguar instead of a Squier '74 Telecaster ripoff so I too could be doing everything in my power to physically destory my guitar while assaulting my pedal board.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not insulting the noise-rock guitar solo, but exhaulting it, in fact. There's a real science to making it look like you're just making a bunch of noise and randomly moving fingers across a fretboard. A calculated, mathmatical, methodized approach to picking exactly the right combination of feedback-inducing heavy compression, long bursts of analog delay, and dirty, fuzzy, distortion to form a proper solo.
As the song title states, Yo La Tengo is an American band - they might not make what most would consider American music, certainly there's little folky about "Sugarcube" or "Let's Save Tony Orlando's House," but the beautiful part of every Yo La Tengo song is that there is a ton of stuff hiding in it. For one, a pop song lies beneath the exterior of every one of them, secondly, while the Hobokenites have long been considered a "minimal" band, known for their drums, guitar, bass/organ setup, anyone who has had the pleasure of seeing them kick out the jams live and in person can tell you that there is a lot to making music that is sonically powerful while still retaining a "minimal" feel - a lot of medling, a lot of science, a lot of experimenting, a lot of playing multiple roles.
I would encourage you to not be intimidated - put these songs on way louder than you should. Right to the point where you get sort of nervous that your neighbors are going to be mad, then a little louder. Lock the door, and pretend you're Ira Kaplan, and dig for the gold.
Of course, if you just can't get into these, YLT has a new record out in 2 months that doesn't seem to sound anything like these songs.
[mp3] Yo La Tengo - Cherry Chapstick
[mp3] Yo La Tengo - We're An American Band
I vanished for 43 days. A whole bunch of you emailed and commented with pretty much two standard responses: either wondering where I was, and asking that I return to blogging, or being curiously angry and calling me an asshole. While I'm honored that you felt strongly enough about HTFAF to call me an asshole, I'd ask you to say you're sorry.
Blogging is hard - harder than people realize. Quite frankly, I just didn't feel like doing it anymore. In the almost three years I've maintained HTFAF, I've done it alone, editorially, with the exception of less than 20 guest posts. I've posted at least once, as many as four times a day and really enjoyed it. I made two Christmas records that I'm still totally in love with, with some of my favorite bands, and me and my associates had a really good run at Backstage Sessions, capturing alot of awesome things on tape: performances from Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes right when they were on the cusp of being on everyone's lips, academy award winners at the Ryman, Will Johnson playing in front of a rusted out coal-train at sunset - those felt good. All of this has felt good, but it became overwhelming, and took a backseat to having a personal life and working. It wasn't fun anymore, it was a race to create the best content.
This sounds like a retiring letter - it's not. In fact, it's another "I'm back" letter (I'm for real this time), but I'm not sure what back is going to look like yet. Backstage Sessions, as you've noticed, have been on a bit of a hiatus - this will remain for the time being. I might do one every few months in special circumstances, but for the most part, those are on the shelf. Lots of people have started running with the live performance video (not that we were the first) and doing several a month started to feel like white noise. HD Video cameras are getting really cheap, go get yourself one and start making films and music videos for your friends. There is not going to be a third installment of Peace on Earth this year. I might do one next year, but I'm not sure yet.
HTFAF is not going anywhere, killing it after a month-and-a-half lazy-session wouldn't feel right, but it is changing. I will probably post less frequently - I'm shooting for 3-4 a week total, and I think it will be more editorial. That is to say, more writing, less awesome mp3 mixtapes and video sessions. More interviews, I think, and definitely more random posts featuring lengthy essays about random songs you probably don't know that are 6 years old. If this sounds like your kind of thing, if you're here for the discovery music, and hopefully some creative writing you'll find enjoyable; the original reason music blogging became so popular, then read on. If you were here for reposts of what people said on twitter, Pitchfork has you covered.
Fight the good fight,
Caleb
