Help Wanted:Needing a Guide for Finding Iris Dement's Voice

I expected more? Too much? Something different? Whatever it was, my expectation didn’t match what I heard in Iris Dement’s performance at the Stoughton Opera House in Wisconsin.

Her song selection—originals and covers—is incredibly rich as it walks through realms of past and present, faith and doubt. As far as where her songs lead, she is definitely challenging a listener with equal parts hymnic Gospel and universalist ponderings.

For me as a Christian trying to allow this philosophy to inform my view of the world, the experience became like the challenge of reading Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian—a postmodern, less-concerned-about-truth approach to the Truth of Jesus. I don’t know that I was up to such a challenge that night, although it was fitting that it occurred during the season of Lent, a time of meditation and contemplation.

Whether or not I was up to the spiritual challenge, I clearly wasn’t up to the musical challenge. Dement’s voice doesn’t country warble as much as stays invariably in the same whine. I know many people really appreciate Dement, the small amount of recordings I’ve heard are nice, but that night, it all failed to capture me. It may take Dement fans to explain it to me—which is okay. Challenging walks—spiritual and musical—often require guides.

If you’re up to the task of guiding, please email me.

Pre-Show Thoughts
They’re in small cities and mid-size towns everywhere—arts series which bring an eclectic season of shows to communities, tapping into Boomer and older nostalgia while periodically gracing them with current gems. It always creates an odd atmosphere of audience members—equal parts season ticket holder and single show attendees. Showing up for a current gem means sitting next to season ticket holders who are here but do not know anything about the performer. They are prepared to be informed but perhaps not thoroughly engrossed; they’re amused and befuddled at the same time with a slight wish that the series director would book Manhattan Transfer more often.

That’s the rockist talking—that rock music snob which is mildly-to-severely offended by ignorance concerning all things in rock, blues, and folk music. The rockist is amused this evening to receive a program at a folk show which I read as if it is a Playbill.

Lest I become too conceited in these moments before the house lights go out, maybe it’s best to remember that friends of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra probably had a similar disdain for me when I only showed up for Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra performance of his 1994 piece, Blood on the Fields. Those symphony supporters knew much more about what they were seeing than I did. They knew what it meant to be in Powell Hall. My lack of understanding was probably very apparent, although I was thoroughly enthralled by the music. It met a rock fan on a common ground.

Perhaps that’s where we find Iris Dement tonight. . .a common ground for people who else while hear Branson artists, barbershop quartets, and the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Besides, she packed the Stoughton Opera House, built in 1901, and restored down to its hard-backed, wooden seats with top hat racks beneath. It’s a gem of a room enlivening the main street of their small city outside of Madison, a main street trying to hold onto its charm as a way to retain a drawing forces for tourists and daytravelers.

Iris Dement
Stoughton Opera House

Pixies on Your iPod?Give Me My Sony Walkman and Pixies on Magnetic Tape Wound Between Two Plastic Reels

There’s talk these days about the iPod generation who only hear their music through headphones—changing the approach to the production albums towards a loudness and mix tuned for headphones and not a perfectly balanced living room of speakers. Yet, is this that much different than the Walkman generation?

A little while ago I finally got Pixies’ Surfer Rosa back into my collection through the used CD stacks at Louisville’s tremendous Ear-x-tacy. Listening to it in the car, I felt like I was missing something. Was a speaker out? Was the EQ off? The little sounds and cues I remembered in the songs weren’t there. . .or were they?

What my car experience couldn’t reproduce was the experience of listening to Surfer Rosa over and over again through my Walkman headphones. I first bough Surfer Rosa on cassette in England as a souvenir from a high school band trip there. (I know, it’s not really a souvenir from the UK to buy an album by a band from Boston, but it was a UK pressed copy).

From the first listen while laying on a bed in a host family’s house to countless others on the school bus, at camp, and elsewhere, my main experience of Surfer Rosa was through those headphones, hearing every little detail, being cued by each detail, knowing each little grunt, strut, fret strike, or hiss.

Listening to Surfer Rosa again in the noise of a car with windows down obliterated many of those details. The album is still a classic in my Top 10 list, but I missed that all enveloping, all encompassing, being inside the music experience.

I’ll have to rip it and put it on my Palm Centro—not as cool as an iPhone but it gets the job done.

4AD – Pixies pages

The top photo is of a Retropod, a product made by John Young which is a Sony Cassette Walkman retrofitted to be an iPod holder. Despite the fact that Sony sent him a cease and desist letter, I still think it’s one of the cooler art/recycling products I’ve seen in a long time. See the Retropod page at: www.retropod.com. You can see more of what John is doing here.

Notebook Series Review:Sleeper Car's Love & Anxiety

The Music Spectrum Notebook Series digs into my handwritten notes and reviews on older releases still getting my attention.

Sleeper Car’s Love & Anxiety (2007) pulls out of the station on a route of New Grass/AltCountry with just enough of Camper van Beethoven’s minor key sound as so as to mean this isn’t just bluegrass or country (“Lay It Down”). “I Won’t Break Down” is a driving down the highway song, sliding out around the dusty corners.

“Anti Climatic Girl” waltzes on a Son Volt vibe. In that same vein, with a harmonica like Jay Farrar, “Caliber Eyes” is a ballad that’s about to jump out of its skin to run. The Blue Mountain-influenced “Hold Me Now” (no, it’s not the Thompson Twins song!) has some great drumming by Russ Mallord, because besides just moving forward the tempo, he adds enough fills to make it song distinctive and catchy.

Sleeper Car

Eavesdropping on Melting Snow:Fiction Family

It’s May in Wisconsin (when a late snowstorm is always possible), so it’s still fine to say that Fiction Family’s opening song, “When She’s Near,” is perfect pop rock for melting snow and spring like XTC’s Skylarking. It’s Rubber Soul-era melding into Paul McCartney’s Wings.

Fiction Family is Jonathan Foreman from Switchfoot and Sean Watkins from Nickel Creek. The self-titled disc doesn’t end up anywhere near Switchfoot’s electric surf blast, and while the acoustic accoutrements of Nickel Creek’s New Grass definitely decorate the scenery, this isn’t a bluegrass disc.

“Not Sure” has a little Jam to it, like Ben Taylor picking guitar on a 70’s folk rock air morphing into country. “Betrayal” sends up a bluegrass-type backing to Foreman’s normal lyrical line; it ends up hitting a worship music like place.

Like Foreman’s series of EPs in 2008, which wandered off rather than following something, Fiction Family’s disc feels unfinished, undeveloped, like demos. However, out of the sketches of sound comes “Elements Combined,” a country-influenced folk rock. Then “War in My Blood” is a foot-tapping song, deep in wonder and struggle.

The disc goes out on a little ragtime ditty, “Look for Me Baby,” which makes me think even more that the whole disc is just a look into what happens when two friends, good musicians and songwriters, get together for awhile. As listeners, we’re eavesdroppers—not necessarily an audience.

Fiction Family
ATO Records
Maple Music

Reawakening the Baseball Dream: The Baseball Project is Truly For the Love of the Game

In the wake of the continually unraveling steroid mess and the pain of last year’s 0-3 divisional series loss for the Chicago Cubs, I am trying to awaken my baseball passion for the 2009 season. But for the love for the history of the game, and perhaps more specifically, a love for the history of the radio broadcasting of the game as currently exemplified by the Cubs booth team of Pat Hughes and Ron Santo, I don’t know if I would be back.

However, I can’t imagine spring/summer nights without the sound of baseball on the radio in the background while driving in the car, working in the garage, or watching the evening settle in around the house.

2008’s The Baseball Project release Volume 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails by Steve Wynn (Dream Syndicate, Steve Wynn and the Miracle 3), Scott McCaughey (Young Fresh Fellows, Minus 5, and R.E.M), Linda Pitmon (Miracle 3), and Peter Buck (R.E.M.) might help as well.

A collection of songs in what I’d call the American Band Rock tradition retells stories from baseball’s history, folklore, and has-been woe-tales. Sounding much like Jonathan Rundman at times, the songs craft these tales in a way that still pulses with the energy of rock ‘n’ roll as evidenced on “Ted F*@&ing Williams” with its pounding, stadium drums.

2008 also saw the release of Pillar’s album, For the Love of the Game, a hard rock Christian album seemingly tailored for a minor league stadium tour circuit. While yielding pulsing exuberance for gameday with a ready-made Jesus analogy, that album evokes more ESPN than baseball history. It’s highlight montage music whereas The Baseball Project could accompany any good baseball historian’s tale and interviews of the greats.

Pillar landed upon the excitement—perhaps even overlooking the little-turned-huge men behind the curtain named Rodriguez, Bonds, Clemens, and McGwire. The Baseball Project looks them square in the eye and wonders why. It’s music for everyone who bemoans the asterisks that have to be added to many personal records.

So as The Baseball Project kicks off with “Past Time” saying, “You can get tangled up in a ball of rubber bands and twine, the cowhide and pine tar, snuff, spit, and chalk dust lines/…So long ago, so long, Pasttime are you past your prime?” I have entered the 2009 Major League Baseball season with hopes only in Pat, Ron, The Baseball Project—along with an incurable just-below-the-surface belief that the Cubs will win it all only to lose it before they can win it.

My enthusiasm for this season was also incredibly pushed along by a recent visit to Milwaukee’s Miller Park where friends on the Brewers staff treated me to a great seat, my name on the billboard, and a step inside the visitor’s dugout. Behind all of the drama and money, there are a lot of great people that make baseball work.

Steve Wynn
Yep Roc Records
Pillar
Essential Records