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August 30, 2006
Nickel Creek hiatus
Monday's press release begins like this: "After seven years of extensive touring in support of three records (seventeen years as a band), we've decided to take a break of indefinite length at the end of 2007 to preserve the environment we've sought so hard to create and to pursue other interests. It has been a pleasure to write, record, and perform for you through the years and we'd like to heartily thank you for your invaluable contribution to our musical lives."
And it ends here: The members of Nickel Creek plan to continue developing as solo artists and despite their indefinite hiatus, emphasize that the band is not permanently breaking up. Nickel Creek will tour nationally in 2007, a full itinerary will be announced at a later date.
I'm going to take them at their words and read absolutely nothing into that.
But I'll add this: No act of their stature has been easier to deal with, less affected by the trappings of success, nor more in love with the simple joy of making music.
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August 28, 2006
Listening Habits
Nearly twenty years ago I read an interview with a high-profile Los Angeles A&R guy (they were all guys twenty years ago) who said he knew within thirty seconds of dropping a needle whether he was interested in an artist. That stuck with me because, for any number of years, I couldn't believe the man's arrogance.
I have come to think thirty seconds is generous.
Over the weekend one of the gals at the bookstore asked what I listened to for pleasure, and the truth is that's an increasingly difficult question to answer because I rarely have time simply to play an album for the pleasure of listening to it. But the answer I gave her is true enough: I've got the new (and last) Ali Farka Toure album spinning in my truck as I run errands because there is, alas, little danger I'll have occasion to write about it.
It comes down to guilt.
Last week Kurt Reighley and I were talking, and he asked what I did about all the CDs that came in the mail, how I sorted them, how I possibly kept up, how I got over the fear that within all that unknown music something wonderful lurked. It's a conversation I've had with any number of fellow critics, and none of us is happy with the available solutions.
It also comes down to glut.
Chris Morris, who's now at the Hollywood Reporter but has been one of the good guys writing for the Billboard empire for any number of years, ran off some frightening numbers last year. Twenty years ago, when I stumbled back into this business, maybe 20,000 albums were released. Now it's 60,000. A year. (And never mind how few of them make money.)
I don't get near that many in the mail but I do get somewhere between 25 and 100 each week, and there's no keeping up.
For no particularly good reason I ended up reading Malcolm Gladwell's BLINK a few weeks back. He's a pretty able synthesist and writes tolerably well. BLINK covers current research on our instincts, and though it's skewed to the needs of the business community, it also gave me permission to do approach these tumbling stacks of CDs in the only way I really can.
Quickly.
No two writers do this the same way; our wants and needs are inevitably different (and there's nothing like a child in the house to turn the volume down!). But my habit, when opening the mail, is to split the incoming CDs into two rough piles. The first and greater stack consists of artists I've never heard of, or who I've vaguely heard of and listened to but never been interested in. The second pile consists of music I know we'll consider for some kind of coverage. (There's a third pile, into which I pitch things I know I'll never listen to: jazz guitar, metal, punk, and rap. I detest jazz guitar and simply cannot keep up with the rest, nor will I have occasion to write about them. Every once in a while somebody will recommend a rap album to me and I'll play it. Punk is old enough to vote and I was around in 1977. Metal...)
I have tried, all these years, to listen to everything. It's not possible. It's not physically possible. So every once in a while, simply to clear the office out, I'm obliged to go through stacks and shelves of CDs and simply toss hundreds of discs that have been here too long and about whom none of my colleagues have expressed the slightest bit of interest. (Toss...sell. Waste not, want not. If you don't want me to sell your CD, send a SASE with it and I'll happily return the thing. Otherwise, I figure you're better off in the hands of somebody who might be interested and I'm not going to add to landfill any more than I have to. Bubble rap dosn't recycle either, by the way.) But even that is frustrating because I know to an absolute certainty that one out of every hundred CDs on that shelf is going to be fascinating.
Now...I don't freelance hardly at all any more, and I don't handle ND's new review section (I get the reissues, which is a whole other stack of fun). So I'm listening to all these great unknowns with an ear to finding artists we might cover in our short section of Town & Country profiles, or, sometimes, just taking note of an act whose next album might be worth attending to. There was one song on the first Avett Brothers album I heard, for example, which argued (to me) that they might grow into being pretty good songwriters, and not just a rave-up live act. And in almost every issue over the last little while I can point to one Town & Country story that we assigned because I stumbled across an artist on that shelf. (In the new issue it's the Diana Jones profile.) And sometimes even finding something interesting (to me) isn't enough to get an artist covered in our pages. Valorie Miller has a new record, for example, and while I think she's a terrific talent we haven't had occasion to review it yet (we did a short T&C on her last album); I loved a couple songs from a Toronto group (I think it's Toronto; writing from memory is always dangerous) called the Backstabbers who cut a gorgeous version of Connie Smith's hit "Cincinnati, Ohio," but this is the first occasion I've had to mention them.
The flip side of that is that I went through at least 300 albums during last issue's production and heard NOTHING, to the point that I began to question my hearing. (Insert joke here.)
But there's no keeping up, not if I try to listen to two or three songs from every album .And heaven help the publicist who tells me to go back and play an album two or three times because then I'll really get it. If I could figure out how to insert images in this blog I'd take a picture of my office, and you'd know why that's impossible.
BLINK argues it's unnecessary, and I think Gladwell (and the research he summarizes) is right. I've been listening to music all my life, and doing it seriously since I got my first job at the Hudson Oil Company's self-service gas station on Bothell Way and began to be able to buy music. (Like every other one of my former employers, except the Fuller Brush Company, they no longer exist.)
The truth is, I know in the first ten seconds whether I'm interested in a record. BLINK has given me permission to do what I should have been doing for years: To turn the darn thing off and try another. I know that sounds cruel and I remember what a jerk I thought that A&R guy was twenty years ago. But I've been doing this for a long time and I know what interests me in music, and it's either in those first ten seconds of a song or it's not. (Another time I'll try to explain what that is.)
Now, there's plenty I don't hear. Peter's tastes (and listening habits, I presume) are quite different from mine, and we do pay attention to at least some of our contributors when they're enthusiastic about an artist. But, for the moment, this is the best I can do. And, anyway, do you really WANT me to like your record?
Of course, I'm not following the new rules just now. I've been playing the new Grascals album all morning, when I should be, um, working. Ah, well.
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August 20, 2006
Four Quick Thoughts
(1) The hard right wing has a well-documented desire to eliminate moderates from the Grand Old Party: Republicans In Name Only, they're called (RINO).Watching the liberal wing -- my wing, in theory -- of the Democratic Party do the same to Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman makes me extremely uncomfortable. Perhaps this is because I was raised in the Washington State of Senator "Scoop" Jackson, a conservative Democrat, and Republican Governor Dan Evans, who stood largely to the left of Jackson on any number of substantive issues. Almost certainly it's because I was shaped and moved by the statesmanship displayed by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Watergate Hearings, which I happened to watch because I'd had an unfortunate encounter with a chainsaw that summer. (Nobody was more surprised than I to see the name Alexander Butterfield crop up in the 9/11 report.) The right has, it seems to me, given up on ideology and is the death grip of its own power and prestige. Which is a pity because, in the free marketplace of ideas, their solutions are sometimes better than ours (or were, once upon a time); and all our ideas are better when talked through and studied and contemplated with an eye toward what might make good public policy, not just electoral strategy. We cannot drum people out of our party, out of politics, or out of our hearing simply because we disagree with them. We cannot mirror the strategies and excesses of our electoral opponents simply because we imagine that path leads to victory.
(2) I have been reading about the Middle East off and on since the mid-1970s, when one of my father's colleagues (the first Jewish historian allowed in Egypt, as I understand it; he's settled there, part-time, in semi-retirement now) handed me a bundle of PLO literature. All of which made better sense when I finally read the Old Testament during my last quarter at the University of Washington. In all that time I have never seen anybody articulate a workable solution to the ongoing conflict between Israel and its neighbors.
(3) It is a mistake -- and horribly immoral -- for the liberal wing of the Democratic party to seize upon Administration failures in Iraq and offer only the solution of bringing our troops home. It does not matter that the pretext upon which we entered that land was a flimsy fabric of lies. We are there. We have behaved well and badly, and we have torn (or caused to be torn) the fabric of Iraqi society to ruins. We have conducted our occupation foolishly, premised (it seems here) on an absolute unwillingness to adapt and to understand the culture of the land and people we presume to shape. It is a huge and bloody mess. The proper question is how do we fix it? for it's a mess of our making. Simply walking away from a country in civil war under these circumstances is reprehensible. And, yes, I remain a pacifist.
(4) I should like very much to draw attention to Charles Bowden's article "Exodus" in the current Mother Jones. Clearly Hispanic immigration is going to be one of the major domestic issues of our time, and at this stage I have no position, save ignorance and common sense. Bowden has written 21 books, their contributor's notes indicate, most of them on this subject. He addresses immigration fromMexico drawing from a deep well of knowledge, with careful, thoughtful, and gorgeous prose. It is also, I might add to those readers who would inherently shun Mother Jones for its liberal purpose, a descriptive piece, not an argument for any particular political, social, or economic solution to the quandry. But more than all that, it is beautifully written.
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August 5, 2006
Cranberry Pecan Pancakes
With the advantage of an advanced reader's copy, I can report that there is a fair bit of cooking in Mike Perry's new book, Truck: A Love Story. Along with some manly use of hand tools, the hunting of game, and the finding of love. And that, as usual, I'm jealous.
We've actually met a few times, Mike and I, though he's not yet slept on my couch, and so I know him a bit better than I know many of the writers who contribute occasionally to ND. Besides, you can't read his books and not feel some kind of intimacy, which is a double-edged sword, I suspect, if you're Mike.
Anyhow, I sent him a note when I finished reading Truck, suggesting that he was going to get a lot of recipes in the mail from this one, and that he'd made me once again regret selling my 1961 Ford F150, the one with the Volkswagen linkage. And I had a recipe in mind.
See, growing up, we didn't have church, and I still don't. But most Sundays mom would make some kind of special breakfast, which tradition, I guess, goes back to when she had church growing up in the San Joaquin Valley. The women in my life go to church most Sundays, and so we've changed the tradition: I make pancakes most Saturdays, and my mother-in-law will often stop by in time to share. It is a good thing.
And so, this morning, as I stood over the griddle, doing about the only thing I will do with my family this weekend because there's a magazine to be finished, I was reminded of Mike's book (sitting on the coffee table in the kitchen) and of the beginnings of No Depression. In the early days, when most of us congregated in an AOL discussion room and our numbers were as small as our sense of community was tight, the ND crowd (mostly Linda Ray, as I recall) published a cookbook.
it's been a long, long time since I was a participant in any kind of online discussion group.
But I like these pancackes, and so does our three-year-old.
And so, stolen from an old Nashville Yoga Society newsletter, and modified to my particular tastes:
Cranberry Pecan Pancakes
2 cups whole wheat flour (the original calls for a cup of white and a cup of wheat, but I prefer the nutty flavor of coarse-ground whole wheat)
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons brown sugar (or the sweetner of your choice)
Mix that lot together. In another bowl...
2 egg whites, beaten
2 tablespoons of oil
2 cups milk or soy milk (the soy milk is sweeter, and arguably better for you, and so that's what I tend to use)
1/4 cup of chopped pecans (who measures these things?)
1/2 cup chopped dried cranberries, or other dried fruit (and, again, who measures?)
It's a good baseline recipe; we left out the nuts and put in fresh blueberries last weekend (instead of the dried fruit), and they were good cold, too.
Serve with real maple syrup (accept no substitutes), or with honey, or with pear honey, or with...
Now, back to that deadline.
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