Mumford & Sons, Foo Fighters, The Flaming Lips, Jenny Lewis, Dawes, The Vaccines, James Vincent McMorrow, tUne-YaRdS, Blake Mills, JEFF the Brotherhood
Whitman College Athletic Fields
08/14/2015 07:00 PM PDT
$199.00 (Camping & parking included)
buy tickets
Mumford & Sons
Mumford & Sons are pleased to announce the details of their
forthcoming Gentlemen of the Road Stopover in Walla Walla, WA on August 14th and 15th. The Stopover includes numerous internationally acclaimed artists, including Foo Fighters, The Flaming Lips, The Vaccines, Dawes, Jenny Lewis, TuneYards, James Vincent McMorrow, JEFF The Brotherhood, Blake Mills and more to be announced.
Each Stopover is a two-day event that combines the intimacy of a community celebration with the excitement of a world-class music festival. Mumford & Sons will headline the Saturday shows, alongside an eclectic and energetic roster of artists
curated by the band themselves. A series of smaller events involving local businesses, venues, and, most importantly, local people will happen in and around the town.
Foo Fighters
The Foo Fighters are an American rock band from Seattle, Washington, formed in 1994. Drummer Dave Grohl formed the group as a one-man project after the dissolution of his previous band, Nirvana, in 1994. Prior to the release of the band's debut album Foo Fighters in 1995, Grohl drafted two members from the former band Sunny Day Real Estate, Nate Mendel as bassist and William Goldsmith as drummer, as well as fellow Nirvana touring bandmate Pat Smear as guitarist to complete the group. The band began with performances in Portland, Oregon, before gaining popularity. Goldsmith left during the recording of the group's second album, The Colour and the Shape (1997), and Smear's departure followed soon afterward. They were replaced by Taylor Hawkins and Franz Stahl, respectively, although Stahl left before the recording of the group's third album, There Is Nothing Left to Lose (1999).
Chris Shiflett joined as the band's third guitarist after the completion of There Is Nothing Left to Lose. The band released its fourth album, One by One, in 2002. The group followed that release with the two-disc In Your Honor (2005), which was split between acoustic songs and harder-rocking material. Foo Fighters released its sixth album, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, in 2007. In 2010, it was confirmed that Smear had officially rejoined the band.
Over the course of the band's existence, three of its albums have won Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album, and all six have been nominated for Grammys. These guys rock
Jenny Lewis
Jenny Lewis returns with her new album, The Voyager. The Los Angeles artist's first solo LP since 2008's Acid Tongue, The Voyager is Lewis's most deeply personal, and her most musically robust. Featuring production work from Ryan Adams, Beck, as well as Lewis and her longtime collaborator Johnathan Rice, The Voyager finds Lewis at her sharp-witted best, singing about her recent life with honesty and incisiveness. And then there's her voice, which was already a force to be reckoned with, but sounds even richer, more nuanced, more powerful. Lewis says The Voyager was the hardest album she has ever made, documenting her struggle to cope following the death of her estranged father in 2010 and the subsequent break-up of her band, Rilo Kiley. In the three years she worked on it, there were moments she thought she'd never finish. But, more than ever before, she knew she had to. The story is best told in Lewis's own words:
Making The Voyager got me through one of the most difficult periods of my life. After Rilo Kiley broke up and a few really intense personal things happened, I completely melted down. It nearly destroyed me. I had such severe insomnia that, at one point, I didn't sleep for 5 straight nights. Many of the songs on The Voyager came out of the need to occupy my mind in the moments when I just couldn't shut down.
I asked for help from a lot of places. The first song on the album, "Head Under Water," is about some of that. I really did get hypnotized. I tried everything. I got acupuncture. I did neurofeedback. I did massage therapy. I looked in the phonebook for a healer in Studio City and I met this woman who barely touched me for an hour and then wrote on index cards about what I was going through. All this just to try and get to sleep! I was ready to call the psychic hotline, "Tell me when this fucking thing is gonna be over."
I recorded through my father's death and terrible insomnia and all of the related fall-out. I just kept recording. Some of it was good and some of it wasn't, but it took my mind off what was going on. Over the course of a couple years, I recorded dozens of demos, often trying multiple versions of the same song. I knew I had to finish it. And every single one of my friends helped me get there. This record took an entire village of musicians, including Ryan Adams, Beck, Johnathan Rice, Farmer Dave Scher, Blake Mills, Benmont Tench, Jason Boesel, Nathaniel Walcott, Alex Greenwald, Lou Barlow, First Aid Kit, the Watson Twins, Z. Berg, and Becky Stark, among others.
"Just One Of The Guys" was one of the tunes I'd tried a few different ways before I finally recorded it with Beck, at his home studio in Malibu. He ended up producing the song and contributing backing vocals. The whole experience was super laid-back — walking on the beach, talking about movies and the Rolling Stones and French pop music. It was just very mellow and lovely. But that was on the eve of my meltdown, and I didn't go back again for a year.
I took a break from recording last spring and summer to tour with The Postal Service, for the tenth anniversary of our album, Give Up. It felt so good to play those songs. Every night I got crazy chills. I'd look down and the hair on my arm would be standing on end during "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight." After having been a front-person for most of my career, it was an amazing time to just be there on the side, to support Ben and Jimmy. It was a great path back to myself, in a way. But the whole time I was out there, I was thinking, "This is wonderful, but I need to be playing my songs. I need to finish up this album once and for all."
I was searching for a spirit guide. With everything that was going on in my life these past few years, I wanted to try ceding control. It can be a relief, at a certain point in your creative life. You let in a bit of criticism and it frees you up. And Ryan Adams and his partner Mike Viola were the final piece of the puzzle. Ryan and I didn't know each other very well before this album — we had hardly even listened to one another's music, to be honest. But I'd heard he built this awesome studio, Pax Am, at Sunset Sound, so I hit him up and asked if I could come in and record something. We put together a band — Ryan on guitar, Griffin Goldsmith from Dawes on drums, Gus Seyffert on bass, Mike on guitar and piano — and booked time for the very next day after I got back from the Postal Service tour.
I had this song, "She's Not Me," and I wasn't really happy with any of the versions of it I'd tried. We ended up doing it in a different key, with a different tempo, with a part cut out. The biggest change was doing it live. There's just something palpable about a group of people playing music live in a room together. The session was so fluid: I taught the band the changes, we did two takes, and that was it. I thought, "Well, that was awesome," but Ryan wouldn't let us listen back to it. The entire two weeks we were in the studio, we never listened to playback of anything, we just moved onto the next song.
Some of his methods infuriated me at the time, but I thrive in that environment — having some conflict to resolve, or having to prove myself. I was showing Ryan that I had something to say, and he knew how to annoy me into that perfect spot. We would get into these philosophical arguments about how to make records. Every time I wanted to put a harmony on a song, Ryan would ask me, "Do you come from a musical theater background?" His argument was that great songs, with great stories, don't need background vocals. He would say, "Morrissey doesn't use background vocals." And I would yell: "Well, I do!"
I trusted the vision, and Ryan ended up being the person to get me over the fear of finishing something I'd been working on for so long. He found me when I was in a weird, tough spot, and he really helped me. And then we got to know each other as friends: You're singing these songs and you're weeping in front of your new bro who's producing your record, and it's heavy.
While I was in it, I couldn't see my way out. But eventually, I started feeling better and the insomnia passed. I can sleep again, but I'm certainly a different person now. This record was the hardest one I've ever made. I truly thought I was never going to finish it, but I did. The Voyager tells that story: the longest night of my life and the journey to finally getting some rest.
Dawes
While the city of Los Angeles has been both an inspiration and a home to the four members of Dawes, they found themselves traveling East last fall to record their third album in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina with newly enlisted producer Jacquire King. It was a chance to hunker down and work each day for a month away from familiar landmarks and routines. The tracks they laid down at Asheville's Echo Mountain Studio have yielded a 12-song disc of tremendous sonic and narrative clarity, book-ended in classic album fashion by two very different versions of the wistful "Just Beneath The Surface" – a misleading title, really, since the songs stacked in between dig so deep. Stories Don't End is not so much a departure from the quartet's previous efforts as a distillation of them. It spotlights the group's maturing skills as arrangers, performers and interpreters who shape the raw material supplied by chief songwriter and lead vocalist Taylor Goldsmith into an artfully concise and increasingly soulful sound.
Once again, Goldsmith displays a particular gift for tunes that balance tough and tender, hardboiled and heartbroken. As a writer, he prowls his psyche like a forties detective, looking for clues to the mysteries of life and love. "Just My Luck" has the irresistible pull of a vintage country tune, though the arrangement is understated and contemporary. If Goldsmith's vocal delivery weren't plaintive enough, the band ups the emotional ante with a beautiful wordless coda that intertwines Tay Strathairn's piano and Goldsmith's lead guitar. Similarly "Something In Common" is a morning-after shuffle that builds into a bigger and more dramatic track before dropping back to a quiet melancholic finish. Goldsmith takes a few simple words, like "something in common," and uses them like chapter headings to develop a compelling story, full of unexpected twists, from verse to verse. "Someone Will" includes the same kind of word play while boasting a little more swagger. "Hey Lover," a cover of a tongue-in-cheek tune by Dawes' good buddy Blake Mills, is a playful mid-album break with Taylor Goldsmith and his young brother, drummer Griffin Goldsmith, trading off lead vocals.
Before he started composing for the album, says Taylor, "I went through a Joan Didion tear." It was right after he read the legendary author's Democracy that he found the title, Stories Don't End, in her work. Though Didion is currently a New Yorker, she is most associated with Southern California, its culture of the sixties and seventies, a subject she examined in gimlet-eyed prose. When Goldsmith started penning new songs after several months on the road in support of Dawes' 2011 disc, Nothing Is Wrong, his writing was even more keenly observant. "From a Window Seat" was the first he completed and, he admits, "It's a very singular song. A lot of the songs on the record can be a little more broad, about a period in someone's life or trying to explore a certain feeling. This song is about a specific experience of being on an airplane and that's not a very poetic or lyrical idea." Yet Goldsmith, employing an accumulation of small details, once again finds the bigger picture, about the narrator's past and his (and our) uncertain future, about the history lurking beneath the swimming pool-dotted landscape below him. Just as important is the track itself -- lean, propulsive and guitar-driven – lending urgency to Goldsmith's in-flight musings. Similarly, "Bear Witness," a last-minute addition to the lineup that the band arranged during the Asheville sessions, is an almost cinematically vivid rendering of a man having a conversation with his child from his hospital bed.
Nothing Is Wrong had garnered considerable acclaim, with London's Independent declaring, "It's as close to a perfect Americana album as there's been this year." Up to then, the band had relied on good friend Jonathan Wilson as producer, cutting its 2009 debut disc, North Hills, at Wilson's Laurel Canyon studio and its follow-up with Wilson at a larger room in Echo Park. But Wilson's own career as a solo artist was taking off following the release of his Gentle Spirit disc, and the band began a search for a new collaborator. King boasted an impressive and unusual resume, having produced an eclectic range of artists, including Kings of Leon, Modest Mouse, Norah Jones and the Punch Brothers. Says keyboardist Strathairn, "He's really easy to work with. As a producer he doesn't want to be the artist, he simply tries to make the band sound the best that the band can be. And the work speaks for itself."
Recording with King and foregoing the quickly cut, straight-to-analog tape approach of its first two recordings was a way, says Taylor, for Dawes "to push the boundaries of what might be expected of us, or feel like a comfort zone for us, while trying to be the same band we always are. That was important to us. We didn't want to abandon anybody's sense of who we were and, more importantly, our sense of ourselves. We wanted to stay true to this thing that we had while starting to widen the spectrum a little bit."
The reprise of "Just Beneath the Surface" at the end of the disc, however, is a first-take document of the band figuring out the tune together, and it was too good not to keep. As bassist Wylie Gelber recalls, "We knew the vibe we were going for and we were running through it while Jacquire was setting up. But we were completely unaware that he was recording us. We were fooling around and towards the end of it, we stopped for a minute and Jacquire said, Hey man, I think we've got it. We tried to beat that take but we couldn't. You can hear it there, you can feel that it's the first time it's being played, it's a simple song and there's a subtle art to doing it. It ebbs and flows."
"With Jacquire," explains Taylor, "we were able to hold on to an essence of what we had been, but I feel now, more than with our first two records, that this makes a case that we're a band from 2013. There a lot of bands that harken back to a period or style of a different time and that can be really limiting. That was never our intention."
"The album is very honest," concludes Strathairn. "It's us."
The Vaccines
Soon after the release of the debut album, "What Did You Expect From The Vaccines?," Justin Young and his band-mates wrote a track named Teenage Icon. "I'm no teenage icon/I'm no Frankie Avalon," it says. "I'm not magnetic or mythical/I'm suburban and typical."
The song is now the centrepiece of The Vaccines' second album, set for release just 18 months after that March 2011 debut. But if Justin and co still feel "suburban and typical", they certainly don't seem it. To look at them in their latest incarnation; longhaired, denim-clad, more confident than before, is to see a proper gang of four: Young plus bassist Arni Arnason, guitarist Freddie Cowan and drummer Pete Robertson. Teenage icons -- whether they like it or not.
"The biggest headfuck of all is the fact that people have an opinion of me as a human being -- not as a singer or songwriter, but as a human being," says Young, musing on the point. "It's so weird to think of people talking negatively about me or even hero-worshipping. A year ago I could have met said people in the pub and become friends with them but they'll already have an opinion of me now before we meet..."
But a lot can happen in a year. Formed in West London in 2010, The Vaccines were selling out venues nationwide by December. They released their debut the following spring and have since released two standalone singles, three EPs, a live album and the forthcoming follow-up album "The Vaccines Come Of Age."
"What Did You Expect From The Vaccines?" propelled the band into the spotlight -- going platinum by the end of the year -- and saw them end 2011 with two headline shows at London's Brixton Academy. By the spring of 2012 the band had amassed awards (including an NME award for 'Best New Artist'), nominations (including at the Brits), 3 NME covers, 6 straight Radio 1 A-list singles and a sold-out a run of U.K. seaside arena shows.
It's a rocket-fuelled rise that's left critics and cynics eating their words, even if those words have stuck with the band. "When we first started talking to the press, I think we were quite timid," says Young. "We were being forced to defend ourselves because it was happening so quickly for us. I think people were suspicious. We're so confident in what we do though. And we turned the hypothetical situation into something real. We won."
The attitude shift came at 2011's summer festivals. "We'd done festivals all around the world and not really at home. 46 I think," says Young. "I remember saying to our tour manager backstage at our first UK festival, is there anyone out there? He just said, Listen! And I could hear about 20,000 people chanting our name. It felt bigger than anything anyone could say."
While everything was falling into place, however, Justin's future as a singer was in jeopardy. He developed hemorrhaging on his vocal chords, requiring surgery three times last year. "It was cruel, but life is like that," says Young, who was left unable to speak for three weeks and sing for five after each operation, resorting to using flash cards saying 'yes', 'no' and 'I can't speak'. "Emotionally and socially, that was quite an interesting experiment. I spent my first date with my girlfriend communicating with a notepad. It still scares the shit out of me though -- if I take it too far on a night out or I get a bit too overexcited in a show, I know it may be my last. The silver lining is my voice has more character as a result. I think that's where the softness on the new record comes from."
If anything, the experience has put even more wind in the band's sails. Young and his band mates collected over 150 songs during 2011, written in hotel rooms from Tokyo to New York and Sydney. If The Vaccines's work rate seems unusually high, note that they don't judge themselves against their contemporaries; they judge themselves against the prolific pop groups of the past. It's one reason why they found themselves recording "...Come Of Age" live. Some tracks were cut in just one take. "You think back to when people were paying for two or three hours in the studio. It was, OK -- go!" says Young. ''Bands make records and then work out how to play them. We wanted to do it the other way round. It feels purer.''
Producer Ethan Johns was the man charged with capturing lightning in a bottle. "He felt like an old-fashioned producer -- an instiller of confidence," says Young. "He only cares that it sounds exciting. The songs were only ever finished when he said the hairs on his arms were standing up."
They recorded in Belgium and Bath, stopping to play in Brazil, at Coachella and in New York. In Belgium they worked solidly, breaking only for one night out (they went to a gay bowling night, FYI). At the studio, there were banks of guitars and amps available but Young chose to use his own axe -- a cheap Danelectro he bought on Denmark Street for £180. Like his songs, it's honest, sturdy and deceptively simple.
The album shows the band's songwriting and performance entering a new phase. If the debut was them finding a sound somewhere between The Ramones, Jesus & Mary Chain and The Strokes, the latest, says Young, is them striving to "sound like The Vaccines. We needed to work out which characteristics are going to make people compare bands to The Vaccines in five or ten years time. It's quite a searching record in that sense." It means there's a spotlight thrown on Cowan's 50s influenced guitars, Robertson's pounding drums and Arnason's pulsing basslines.
Highlights include the groove-driven "Bad Mood," the timeless "Lonely World" and the new wave-influenced "Aftershave Ocean," one of the more recent tracks that hint at where The Vaccines may head in the future.
The title -- "The Vaccines Come Of Age" -- is tongue-in-cheek, but only a little. "It's a lyric from the album's first single, which is how we named 'What Did You Expect...,' and it continues the theme of having the band's name in the title," explains Young. "Then there's the whole coming of age thing. The lyric is "it's hard to come of age," and that thought ties together the record. I'm bang in the middle of my 20s and I'm finding it to be quite a difficult place to be. You're expected to know what you want to do and who you want to be at this point, but I don't know who I am yet. Everyone I know is in a different place -- some have it all figured out, some have bad problems, some are parents, some are living with their parents, some are earning money, some are broke. I guess I still feel like I'm a kid. Recently I've found myself realising that a lot of my favourite music is no longer talking to me, but people younger than me. And that is a strange realisation."
On the album sleeve, The Vaccines really are kids: it sees the four band members replaced by four androgynous, teenage girls. "People said The Vaccines don't look like rock stars, so we thought, OK, have these girls instead. I wanted them to look androgynous. You can't tell who they are. They're at a time in their lives when they probably don't know either. And of course they're a gang," says Young. One of the four stand-ins, who have appeared in The Vaccines' videos too, will appear on the cover of each of the singles from "...Come Of Age," and the B-side will be written and sung by the individual band member represented on the sleeve.
Though they may claim not be teenage icons, The Vaccines have reset their expectations for this album. "I want to mean something to somebody," says Young. "I want to keep getting better and better, and if bigger and bigger is a by-product of that, then that's fucking awesome. Quite simply, I want us to be your favourite band."
James Vincent McMorrow
On a pecan farm half a mile from the Mexican border, 'Post Tropical' was born – a collection of sounds and ideas brought to life in rooms where the low frequencies of passing freight trains vibrated in the studio, briefly disturbing the birds in the rafters. And like most new ideas, 'Post Tropical' is hard to describe. It requires attention and engagement. It seduces you towards hidden depths.
McMorrow's acclaimed debut album, 'Early in the Morning', reached number 1, went platinum and picked up a Choice Music Prize nomination upon its release in 2010. Along the way, there were shows everywhere from the Royal Festival Hall to Later…with Jools Holland, and a breakout hit in the charity cover of Steve Winwood's 'Higher Love'. McMorrow's first record was the formative sounds of a songwriter who suddenly found people giving a damn. "I'm so proud of that album, but I never longed to be a guy with a guitar. You play these songs live as best you can, and suddenly you're a Folk musician. But the texture of this record is completely different. This is the kind of stuff I actually listen to."
Wiping the palate of 'Early in the Morning' clean, Post Tropical' is a stunning piece of work. Its broadened horizons may come as a surprise to everyone but James and the people who know him best. "I found a zip drive recently, which dates back to before I made my first record, and I'd re-recorded every single part of the N.E.R.D album – apart from the vocals – just for the joy of it. I wanted to give this record the feel and movement of the hip-hop records that I love."
It's a step forward that is immediately apparent on album opener and first single 'Cavalier' – a brooding twist on the Slow-Jam, which builds quietly from hushed keys and hand-claps to soaring brass, drums and McMorrow's idiosyncratic falsetto. Across the album, new sounds and textures are explored: 808s on the haunting 'Red Dust', looped piano on 'Look Out', and the waterfall-effect of 12 mandolins on 'The Lakes'. McMorrow's sometimes-surreal songwriting holds each element in place, on album which he wrote, produced, and played virtually every instrument.
The framework of 'Post Tropical' was constructed over eight months. Coming home from tour, James had hundreds of sound files, none categorised. Pages and pages of lyrics were crossed out and edited. Nothing was written on guitar, and nothing was linear. Yet the recording itself took place on a pecan farm half a mile from the Mexican border – which the likes of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Beach House, Animal Collective and At The Drive In have all called home at one point. The constraints of three and a half weeks here offered McMorrow a surprising amount of freedom. Sounds were created and changed and painstakingly poured over. The process was up for grabs, right up to the mixing stage.
What emerged was 'Post Tropical' – complete with the paradoxical, 'wish-you-were-here postcard' artwork (juxtaposing a palm tree with a polar bear). "It's so exhausting trying to keep up with styles of music that pop up one week, and disappear the next," says James. "For me, 'Post Tropical' evokes a style of music without you having a clue what it sounds like. It's warm and familiar, but there's something there that's maybe not quite what you think it is. I just wanted to make the most beautiful thing that I could imagine. And that was it."
tUne-YaRdS
Merrill Garbus has performed as tUnE-yArDs since 2009, and that band name has always been synonymous with forward movement—whether because of her explosive performance style or the always-surprising way in which her songs unfold. First gaining notice with the debut BiRd-BrAiNs, which The New York Times called "a confident do-it-yourselfer's opening salvo: a staticky, low-fi, abrasive attention-getter," Garbus forged a reputation as a formidable live presence through relentless touring. In 2011, tUnE-yArDs released its second album, w h o k i l l, a startling and sonically adventurous statement that led to a whirlwind period where Garbus and bassist Nate Brenner accrued accolades from critics (including the #1 spot on the Village Voice's 2011 Pazz and Jop poll), performed in front of increasing numbers of rapturous crowds around the world, and collaborated with the likes of Yoko Ono and ?uestlove. It was a thrilling ride, but it was one that needed a little bit of recovery afterward.
"I took the Fall [of 2012] off and started taking both Haitian dance and drum lessons," says Garbus of the post-w h o k i l l period. "It was nice; I was trying to be healthy and have a good time. And then, in January [2013], I was like, 'I have nothing.' I've never had nothing before—I've always had some songs that I'm planning on recording; I've always been working live with the looping pedal and writing that way. And I thought, 'OK, if I'm going to grow as an artist, I need to do this differently.'
"So I went to my studio five days a week and told myself I would be doing two demos a day. I also had rules: 'This week I'm only going to write using drum machines'; 'This week I'm going to write using vocal melodies first, and build something around that.' At the end of that, I had about 30 demos."
Those demos would eventually gel into Nikki Nack, the stunning third album by the Oakland-based band. A complex, textured statement that opens with a clarion call to 'Find A New Way' and spends its 13 tracks getting there, it's a showcase of how Garbus's songwriting has blossomed, and a testament to how current technologies can combine with themes from the past—Saturday mornings spent watching Pee-Wee's Playhouse, puppet shows based on Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, hard days made less so by the refuge provided by top-40 radio—to create something utterly original.
"It was weird what stuck," Garbus says of the writing process. "The first song that felt finished is not on the album, and I almost scrapped 'Water Fountain.'" That pulsing track's post-apocalyptic vision is presented as a sing-along, a tale of streets where once-useful structures have been rendered into disintegrating husks with Brenner's bass playing providing an increasingly concerned counterpoint. "I almost threw it away," she recalls, "because it sounded like a kids' song. But I really liked the theme, which mirrored what I was seeing in Oakland—people don't want to pay taxes, but the taxes are paying for the water fountain, and for the trash to be picked up, all these bare essentials."
Having studied both Haitian dance and drumming during her downtime, Garbus also visited the island nation in the spring of 2013 (she penned a piece about her time there for the online magazine The Talkhouse). The trip informed the record both spiritually and practically, and led to Garbus adding another instrument into tUnE-yArDs' musical arsenal (which, as she documented online, includes items like a bag of rice and a stool this go-round). "There's this drum called the boula; it sets the tempo for all the other drums," she says. "It's the smallest drum, and it's played with two sticks, flat to the skin. That element of Haitian drumming acts as the hi-hat, or the metronome, for a lot of the songs on the album."
Callbacks to the past are all over Nikki Nack, as befitting its jump-rope-chant title. Garbus's vocal performance on 'Wait For A Minute' recalls Quiet Storm balladry, and the song also contains a direct callback to her own past: A wobbly keyboard line provided by a Casio she received as a gift when she was nine years old. 'Left Behind' is underscored by a jittery nostalgia, the playground chant from which the album's title is taken eventually giving way to a chorus where Garbus's voice is masked by glossy-yet tarnished production that brings to mind the radio reigns of Lisa Lisa and En Vogue. "On the chorus," she says, "I sang those three parts and we put the recording through some crazy tape to make it sound like it was old and warped and distorted." Instead of weighing the music down, though, the heaviness of the past defiantly animates the track, which culminates in a cacophonous "Holiday, holiday"/"Let's Go Crazy" call-and-response.
"That song may be the epicenter of the album for me," says Garbus. "There's a sense of people not being okay with change, and how uncomfortable change is. I have a great amount of nostalgia for times past, and I feel extremely uncomfortable with that because I think it's so misdirected and misguided to think that things were 'better back then.'"
Nikki Nack has uncertainty about both the past and the future, but that's in keeping with Garbus's overall aesthetic of constantly questioning and burrowing for a "new way," tempered by the joy that goes hand in hand with new discoveries. "We worked with other producers for the first time this time around, which required that I humble myself quite a bit. We've worked with other collaborators, of course, like Eli Crews as a recording and mixing engineer again, but to ask Malay (Alicia Keys, Frank Ocean, Big Boi) and John Hill (Rihanna, Shakira, M.I.A.) for input on the tracks I had to let go of tUnE-yArDs being rigidly my production. I have a very specific vision for the sound of the band and I don't think women producers get enough credit for doing their own stuff, so I was resistant – but we grew, Nate and I both, and the songs grew. And it turns out that's what's most important: the songs, not my ego."
"Every single composer, artist, writer—anyone that I respect, there is crazy shit that's happened in all these art forms," she says. "When the shit started changing, people were like, 'Ugh, I don't want that, what is that?' And it's kind of painful sometimes being on the front line of whatever I'm doing—I'm pushing myself, so I am going to rub up against my audience's expectations, and there is going to be some friction and tension there. My job is to get comfortable with that and accept it rather than kowtow to it."
Maura Johnston, 2014
Blake Mills
When asked what he's been doing lately, Blake Mills says he's been "listening, writing, playing, and watching my social life wither away like the ice caps."
Since quietly making his debut album, Break Mirrors, which critics hailed as one of the best albums of 2010, Mills has been consistently busy. He's producing the highly anticipated sophomore album for The Alabama Shakes, and has worked as a producer with a wide variety of others as well, including ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, Sara Watkins, Conor Oberst, Sky Ferreira, and Fiona Apple, with whom he toured extensively in 2013 and 2014. As a session player and sideman he has worked with Beck, Cass McCombs, Jackson Brown, Lucinda Williams, Moses Sumney and Neil Diamond, among others. Rick Rubin and T Bone Burnett frequently call upon his services as a guitarist, and equally enamored is Eric Clapton who recently told Rolling Stone magazine "Blake Mills is the last guitarist I heard that I thought was phenomenal." Though perhaps his most significant endeavor has been creating the highly anticipated second solo album, HEIGH HO.
"The goals for Heigh Ho were songs, sonics, and capturing performance," Mills said. "I love my first album and how it sounds, but since making Break Mirrors I feel like I've heard a lot of records that strike me as overtly 'lo-fi' or reverb-saturated; so I was interested in finding a combination of sounds that I hadn't heard used together before. So I was very fortunate to be able to call on this group of people to help me map some new terrain."
To that end, Mills asked several of his musical heroes − including Jim Keltner, Don Was, Jon Brion, Benmont Tench, Rob Moose, Mike Elizondo, and Fiona Apple (who duets on the slow-burning "Seven" and timeless sounding "Don't Tell Our Friends About Me") − to collaborate on what would become HEIGH HO.
"Different songs feature slightly different bands," said Mills. "These guys are world class musicians, and also some world class record producers. That combination produced something rare; a wide open way of playing that consitantly delivers the spirit of a song. It reflects the spontaneity, maturity, and tastefulness of my all-time favorite records."
"Blake arranged the music the way that Cézanne would've filled a canvas," Don Was notes of his experience playing in Blake's band. "He's a mind-blowingly great artist with the type of deep vision that is the hallmark of true genius. It's so inspiring for musicians to play with a cat like that! If he asked us to play in orange, we wanted to give him a shade that burned so brightly as to blind the unsuspecting."
Recorded at the legendary Ocean Way studios in a room built for Frank Sinatra and used by everyone from Bob Dylan to Ray Charles, Mills created an album that references a range of genres without really belonging to any. "Sometimes it's just necessary to make music that is without genre," he says. "Fiona Apple once said that music can be categorized either as honest or dishonest. That honesty is what draws me in. It's what I always hope is guiding me through my own work."
Lyrically inspired by "situational awareness, an under casted weakness for clarity, and the impossible dream of being understood," HEIGH HO opens with "If I'm Unworthy," a stark, heartfelt track that takes on the weight of love with humbling grace and concludes with "Curable Disease".
"When I first started writing what was to become this record, I was trying to be a little less personal - more topical, or character-based. But I can't do that very well. Nothing I wrote felt real to me. That inability has really forced me to try and find a way to write about my own experiences without feeling self absorbed."
JEFF the Brotherhood
The best rock 'n' roll, the kind that gets under your skin and makes all your senses heighten, is simple and comprised of hard work and unrelenting passion—all of which JEFF The Brotherhood. JEFF The Brotherhood embody and exemplify on their Warner Bros. Records debut LP, Hypnotic Nights. Brothers Jake and Jamin Orrall have been playing together since they were little kids and formed the group when they were in high school. The boys grew up with a voracious appetite for any music they could get their hands on.
The band incorporates a DIY ethos in everything they do, including their raucous live shows. JEFF have been touring tirelessly for the past 10 years, playing any and all conceivable venues—from basements and backyard sheds to Bonnaroo and The Bowery Ballroom. The duo clocked in over 400 shows in the past two years alone and have shared bills with Best Coast, Fucked Up, Pentagram, The Kills, The Greenhornes and more.
When it comes to creating their desired sound, JEFF believes that less is more. This idea is reflected in Jake's decision to play a guitar with only three strings. Jake explains, "When we started the band, I didn't know how to play guitar," he remembers, "I thought, in order to teach myself, it would be easier to play if I simplified it. I started with two strings, but you can't really play any chords that way, so I added a third string [which added] this interesting limitation that forced me to create my own style and approach to the instrument."
These musical intricacies all come together on Hypnotic Nights, which was co-produced by Jake, Jamin and musician/producer Dan Auerbach (Dr. John, The Ettes). The album was recorded in Nashville at Dan's Easy Eye Sound Studio in early 2012. JEFF entered the studio focused and prepared with a clear vision for the album they wanted to make, completing Hypnotic Nights in only one week. For any other band, completing an album in seven days would seem like a challenging feat, but for JEFF those seven days felt like a luxury when compared to the amount of time spent on making 2009's Heavy Days and 2011's We are The Champions, which were released on the band's own label Infinity Cat Recordings. Each took only three days to make.
"We've never worked with a producer before, so this was the first time we'd ever had any outside input," says Jamin. "It was Dan's first co-production, too, and it really worked. He just hung out, let us do our thing and helped when we needed it." Adds Jake, "We write songs without anyone else in mind, so Dan brought in this idea of, 'Well, you guys do what you do and I'll present it so everyone else will understand.'"
The result is Hypnotic Nights, an album that uniquely blends elements of indie, punk, garage, and psychedelic rock. The first single, "Sixpack," is a fuzzed-out rocker driven by reverb-heavy riffs and propulsive drumbeats. Songs like "Leave Me Out" and "Dark Energy" venture into new musical territory for JEFF, but the band isn't afraid of experimentation. After all, it's this imagination and ingenuity that makes Dan Auerbach plainly say, "JEFF The Brotherhood are the next big name in showbiz."
In the end, Jake and Jamin just want to write great songs, play great shows and inspire fans to rock along with them. For JEFF The Brotherhood, blood is thicker than water—and music runs through the band's veins.
Venue Information
Whitman College Athletic Fields
345 Boyer Ave.
Walla Walla, WA 99362
http://athletics.whitman.edu/sports/2013/9/27/GEN_0927133226.aspx?tab=athleticfields