Author Archives: Jennifer Carney

When I first heard Sean Rowe sing, his voice caught me off guard. But it didn’t take long until I melted into “The Lonely Maze,” which is perhaps the signature track on his sophomore album, The Salesman and The Shark. If you’re a “come for the music, stay for the lyrics” kind of person, Sean Rowe is your guy. 

Sean has been compared to Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, both for his unique voice and the depth of his songwriting. It might be more apt to liken him to a songwriting Henry David Thoreau, fully retreating into the wilderness to find inspiration, writing personal lyrics from a poet’s heart, and singing with a haunting baritone that lifts his songs out of the ether and into someplace otherworldly.

Reared on the Beach Boys and the blues, transformed from a metalhead by The Joshua Tree, and committed to making “real music,” Sean talked to TVD about releasing vinyl-only tracks, recording The Salesman and The Shark on the same mixing board that created Exile on Main Street, and how ripping off Columbia House as a teenager changed his musical trajectory forever.

I know you’ve been at this for over a decade, but do you consider yourself a “late bloomer” when it comes to music? Or is it just the case of things taking as long as they’re going to take?

Not really – only insofar as touring goes. I’ve been playing since I was a kid; I’ve been singing since I was young and writing since I was a teenager, but I just haven’t been out there until a few years ago is when it really started rolling. Probably 2009 or so – that’s when I started touring overseas and then it just started snowballing from there.

But if you’ve never heard of somebody and all of a sudden they’re touring nationally, you wonder where the hell they came from. I’ve been around – I just didn’t get out too far.

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There’s a certain, perplexing something that artists from the UK must have to achieve success in America. Paloma Faith seems possessed of this elusive elixir for US success. She’s a smart, sophisticated songwriter with a voice that’s a dramatic, open-hearted, pop-soul amalgam all her own. She’s already a big star in the UK, with her latest album — Fall to Grace — charting at #2 across the pond. This woman is the real deal, and her new US tour aims to bring this country into the Paloma Faith fold. 

We joked that I was Paloma’s millionth interview of the day, but the digital age chanteuse was gracious and funny and had lots to say about her new album, her many influences, and the feeling of “starting over” as a virtual unknown in the US. 

How did growing up in Hackney, so close to a major arts scene in London, influence your decision to pursue music seriously? 

Well, when I was brought up I was encouraged to be creative. I didn’t find that academia lent itself very well to me in my early days. I sort of showed signs of excelling in creative stuff as a kid. Like, I was really good at drawing and I was really shy as a kid. When I was at primary school, my teacher was really concerned that I was so shy so she put me in the school play; I had to play the head dinosaur because she thought I should come out of my shell a bit. And so I did that and it changed me forever because I just loved being on stage so much!

I’d always done ballet as a kid because my mum wanted me to be coordinated, so I was a little bit in ballet and wasn’t very celebrated. But when I was the dinosaur, it made me very confident about my ability to be somebody else on stage and I think that’s how I had the confidence to roar like a dinosaur because I was really shy as a kid – really shy. And I realized then that if I became somebody else that I could do anything.

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It doesn’t matter what you or I think about Steve Vai. There are no statues dedicated to critics, no lifetime achievement awards for music journalists. Vai is an undeniable talent, taught guitar by the likes of Joe Satriani, weaned into the music industry by Frank Zappa, and who found his own way in whatever musical landscape he thought was interesting a particular time. He’s a shredder, sure, but he’s also a keen student of music theory, and has a genuine appreciation for artists from Tom Waits to Skrillex.

This appreciation is very evident on Vai’s latest album, The Story of Light, which brings together proto-blues, Celtic melodies, progressive rock, metal — you name it. But there’s no mistaking that it’s Steve Vai. I caught up with Steve in the midst of his nationwide tour, and got to chat with him about the new album, his unexpected influences, and how his son got him back into vinyl. 

Every person I know who’s even touched a guitar is insanely jealous of me right now.

[Laughs]

So, The Story of Light continues a story arc from your previous album, 2005’s Real Illusions: Reflections. Why concept albums today?

The story has been kicking around years before that. When you’re the kind of artist that I am, you can really do anything that you want. I don’t really have to worry too much about radio airplay and stuff like that, so I can get pretty esoteric. And my music is kind of esoteric as it is, so I thought, “What if I take a story and kind of stretch it out over a series of records and create a concept/story that can unfold through time?”

So when I did Real Illusions, I basically had the story – what I wanted it to be – and I had the characters… the thought was to create the songs based on characters or events in the story and then display them over a series of three records, but not in any proper order – and they just get snippets of the concept of the story through the lyrics or the liner notes so people who are not really interested in following the concept… they don’t really have to. They aren’t getting clobbered over the head with it.

But those who are really interested in fetishing the details, they can start putting pieces together. And then the idea is after the next record – and it’s not going to be the next record I record – just whenever I do the third installment, it will be similar; it will have pieces and will have little story chunks here and there. And then the goal would be at sometime in the future to create a four-CD box set that has all the songs in the proper order, with maybe some melodic songs having lyrics and adding narrative, so it’s a real story you can follow from beginning to end.

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Wally De Backer, or Gotye as you, me, and the rest of the world knows him, is difficult for many to define. Does he sound like an ’80s pop artist, perhaps? An indie rocker? A more melodic Philip Glass? 

Who or whatever you think Gotye sounds like, his oddly catchy “Somebody That I Used to Know” was an inescapable force this summer, spawning so many parodies and tributes and covers that instead of getting litigious, Wally himself mashed them into a spectacular sound collage remix:

But De Backer wouldn’t have it any other way, really. He loves brand-new takes on songs and sounds, and that’s a major focus in his music. Whether he’s pulling an twinkly hook from an obscure, self-released vinyl LP from a thrift store milk crate, or using a musical fence in the outback as a rhythm section, Gotye is all about the collaboration of sounds. When TVD chatted with him just before the West Coast leg of his world tour, the affable Aussie’s thoughts on music came tumbling out. Drawn to the new, obsessed with the obscure, Wally had lots to say to us about his songwriting processes, going “thrifting” for old records, and his “overnight” success. 

You turned your Macbook into a massive digital Mellotron by virtualizing lots of acoustic instruments and sounds. When did you decide that that would be an integral part of the way you were going to record Making Mirrors?

[Laughs] Mellotron! It just sort of happened. I guess every record of this Gotye project has had a fairly heavy element of sampling in the way the songs are written and how the sounds are put together. I’ve just had to self-impose a more rigorous method every time in a way, or at least a method that forces me to work harder and to make sure that more there’s more of my original work. When I was making my first record, Boardface, I guess I was piggybacking more on whole grabs and loops of records.

It’s not that easy to do to weave twenty different samples from different records and periods together and queue them up and make them make sense in a sort of new sonic space. I guess with my current [record] I’ve tried harder to use more micro-elements, but I was still working in a setup that involved me having one hand on a mouse, sitting at a desktop computer in a small room, shifting small colored boxes around on a screen and having them have musical results. Whereas here I wanted there to be a more tactile relationship with some of my performing interests and abilities – like being a drummer and percussionist and keyboard player – to be able to have an impact on how I would make melodies and riffs.

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Last week spent the full week with some of the guys who make up Slumberland Records‘ roster of talented artists. To celebrate our week with the iconic label, we’re giving away two different Slumberland items to two lucky winners.

First up is the new record by first-wave Slumberland artists, Lorelei. Their latest LP, Enterprising Sidewalks, is their first in eighteen years and has been highly anticipated.

We’ve got a copy of the new album on clear vinyl with brown splatter. No really, it’s a must see.

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Slumberland Records isn’t so much an indie label as a labor of love. Known for doggedly defying hipness and focusing on a love for pop music in its purest form, Oakland, CA via Washington, DC-based Slumberland Records has been known for its roster of dreampop artists and genre-bending indie bands since 1989.

Mike Schulman has been there from the beginning and has remained at the helm of Slumberland since 1992, devoting his time to bands who share his love of melodic pop and deference for the 7″ single.

To kick off our focus on the label this week, we chatted with Mike about all things indie: what “pop” means, why vinyl continues to be an important format for the label, how the infamous C86 compilation influenced the destiny of the label, and why having integrity and selling records don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

You’ve been at the helm of Slumberland for twenty years. What’s that been like?

Uhh… It’s been a living hell. [Laughs] The label started out as a collective effort and we kind of did it that way for a couple of years, and then other people who were pitching in got really busy with their bands, and so it kind of wound up all up to me. So, I’ve been doing it myself for about 21 years or something like that.

It’s a lot of work, but it’s something that I… kind of operated as a sideline for a time. I always had a regular job; it’s not the most lucrative hobby to have. You get out of it what you put into it. It’s been pretty crazy!

In 2001, you went on hiatus for five years. What happened?

I don’t really think of it as a hiatus. I mean, we went a few years without putting out any new releases, but I was still working the catalog, filling orders, talking to bands, kind of looking for stuff to put out. It kind of did coincide with me changing day jobs, getting something that was a little more intensive and I needed to buckle down. A bunch of stuff happened at the same time doing that, and then a lot of the bands that I was working with broke up – there just wasn’t a lot of stuff for me to put out. I didn’t want to put records out for the sake of putting them out – that’s not what we’re about. I was just kind of casting around for inspiration, I guess.

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In the days leading up to an artist’s interview, I spend as much time as I can listening to their music. In Al Kooper’s case, I’ve been listening to his music for my entire life. Most of the time, I didn’t even know it.

If you’re not familiar with Kooper, he’s the man who plays that iconic organ on Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” He added in psychedelic whimsy to a Pete Townshend “mini-opera.” He got epic with Lynyrd Skynyrd on “Free Bird.” He kicked in the organ riffs in the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Dig deeper and you’ll find countless gems that he was involved in, including the famous Super Session with Stephen Stills and Mike Bloomfield, and the equally famous Blues Project, to name but two more.

Al Kooper also happened to found Blood, Sweat and Tears; produce both Shuggie Otis and The Tubes; discover Lynrd Skynrd; and has even been sampled by Jay-Z and the Beastie Boys.

But, you know what? I’m probably wrong about all that. You’re wrong, too. In fact, forget everything you think you know about rock and roll, because everything you know is wrong. How do I know? Because Al Kooper told me so, and he was there for most of it.

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Pat Travers was not what I expected. Sure, the guitar legend has played with damn near everyone, and sure he’s revered by anyone who touches a guitar. I expected to hear about Hendrix and his prolific back catalog. And I knew that everyone from Alex Lifeson to Kirk Hammett think the man is an untouchable master of hard rock guitar.

But I didn’t expect to talk about Gino Vanelli or Shawn Colvin. Or to learn that he is forging ahead with three (!!) new albums in the next year alone, among them his thoroughly researched, reverently irreverent hard rock re-imagining of historic blues songs entitled Blues on Fire (released July 31).

Like increasing numbers of his generation of musicians, he has embraced social media, self-promotion, and hand-signing CDs in his kitchen. In fact, it was while listening to a stream of old blues music online that he got the bug to record blues songs from the early 20th century by the likes of Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, and many others.

Pat is a funny, smart, and tirelessly upbeat guy. I caught up with him in brief lull in his US touring schedule to talk about what he’s been up to, some of his favorite records, and how he’s using Facebook to connect with his fans like never before.

You said on your Facebook page the other day that it “seems like I’ve been recording forever…” 

Yeah, especially this year! It really started right at the very beginning of the year. Cleopatra Records – they do a lot of tribute albums and things – so occasionally they’ll toss me what I call “busy work.” They’ll say “Hey, we’re doing a Who tribute album, can you cover ‘Behind Blue Eyes?’” And I’ll say, “Yeah, sure, why not?” because it’s fun to do. I did this Black Keys one for them, which was unusual for me because the guy sings mostly in a higher, falsetto voice. And I had lost my falsetto voice about 30 years ago! [Laughs] It just disappeared. I used to have this incredible… if you listen to my first three albums, all those vocals and backing vocals are all me, I did all of it. It just disappeared, I dunno.

And then it came back Christmas Eve! So, it was the strangest thing. I don’t know why and I even asked one of my doctor friends and he said, “Well, maybe the swelling finally went down.” As strange as that sounds… so I have this new sort of vocal thing going on, and I don’t know if that was what prompted the folks at Cleopatra to ask me if I wanted to do these songs from the 1920’s [for Blues on Fire]. But I did.

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Colin Blunstone has enjoyed a serendipitous career in music. When he met Rod Argent in 1961 and formed what would become The Zombies, he couldn’t have imagined they’d win a Decca recording contract and write some of the most memorable music of the era. Equally surprising to some is that Blunstone and Argent continue to write music as The Zombies, and have released more albums in the last twenty years or so than they did during their ’60s heyday. Their latest LP, 2011’s Breathe Out, Breathe In, has been a critical benchmark, rivaling the praise received for their ’60s psychedelic epic, Odessey and Oracle.

And they continue to move forward, recording in Argent’s home studio, releasing albums on their own label, and booking their own wildly popular tours. Colin is one of the most affable of frontmen, and he took time from The Zombies’ massive touring schedule to talk about his musical inspirations, what it was like to be part of the British Invasion, and the freedom of creating music like an indie band well into his 60s.

It’s cool how your website is divided up into Past, Present and Future. It’s not often that bands that got their start in the ‘60s continue to put out music that fans love AND that’s critically-acclaimed. Are you surprised that you’re still so well-received?

Well, I’ll be absolutely honest with you… We are completely surprised, but of course in a very pleasant way. I think when Rod [Argent] and I got back together again — although, we’ve worked together continually over the years — Rod has produced many of my albums, and I’ve worked in concert with him regularly. But when we got back together again to tour in the year 2000, to start with we didn’t play many Zombies songs. We honestly didn’t know the intensity of the interest in The Zombies records were. But it just came as a very pleasant, total surprise!

Gradually we gauged from the audiences’ reactions that they loved The Zombies’ songs and we introduced more and more songs, and we’re very happy to play as many songs as people want from our back catalog. Perhaps we would always just add that we like to play new songs as well, and that’s been the biggest thrill of all — that the new songs we play get as strong a reaction as the classics from the ‘60s. And that’s been really, really heartening.

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Rockin’ out with the guys from Everest all week has been, well, rockin’. Their brand-new album, Ownerless, has been getting heavy rotation ’round these parts so, naturally, we thought we’d cap off our week of awesome guest pieces with a vinyl giveaway—with a few generous extras we’re tossing in as well!

As Everest frontman Russ Pollard told us on Monday, “It makes me happy to make art and to make music and to put it out, regardless of how that gets to people. I hope that it does and I hope people are into it and hope it makes a difference. That’s really all I can strive for – complete honesty. I’m doing what I do and I’m putting it out to them with this band I really love, and I’m encouraged by it and it keeps me going.

Shopping in record stores and reading good books and seeing good art – all that keeps me going in a world that I think is really geared towards product and consumerism and all that stuff. I just really don’t feel connected to that; I feel very outside of that.”

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It’s difficult to describe Everest in simple terms. The Los Angeles-based band is so much more than your everyday rock and roll band. 

Everest happily defy classification in favor of having the freedom to stretch out musically. Authenticity is everything for them, and it shows. The way they approach their albums – recording on analog tapes, lauding the vinyl record format, committing themselves to “honesty and beauty and vulnerability” – flies in the face of everything that’s popular. But that’s part of the allure of the band. It’s easy to see why Neil Young poached them from a short-sighted big label and signed them to his own Vapor Records.

Their latest album, Ownerless, is the work of a band that’s been through the music industry gauntlet and come out the other side better for it. To kick off TVD’s week with the guys from Everest, we chatted with frontman Russ Pollard about the new album, why vinyl and record stores are so important to the band, and how they inspired them to make music.

You guys have been out on tour for a while now. How’s life on the road?

Things are going good. It’s nice to be out playing this record live. We like to be out in general. It’s been very hot in the middle of the country, but we’re headed out west now and it feels good to be headed out toward California.

Reading your manifesto of sorts, it’s clear that what you’re about as a band is as important as the music. What do you think it is that draws people to Everest?

I don’t know… maybe honesty and an approach that’s genuine. We love records and buying records and we’ve grown up in that culture. It influenced us really heavily in how we feel about what we do – that really heart-felt, honest and unique, artistic music and art. All of that has been a huge influence on us and we wanted to present that in what we do. I think that in a sort of spoon-fed single-oriented iTunes culture it’s nice to know there are bands out there that are still doing their own thing and presenting albums in their complete state and trying to do something that maybe makes a difference.

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We are such big fans of The English Beat that we thought our fellow big fans would love to get their hands on their newest “Best of” album — Keep The Beat: The Very Best of The English Beat — from Shout! Factory, even though it is (sadly) vinyl-deficient. In fact, this is our very first CD-only giveaway!

So here’s the low-down on your shot to win a free copy of this definitive collection.

On Day 2 of The English Beat Week, Dave talked about why he thinks the Keep The Beat: The Very Best of The English Beat sums up The English Beat best:

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For Day 4 of our week with Dave Wakeling of The English Beat, we chatted about some very meaningful moments: getting a phone call from two of his heroes, how he always wanted to use his fame to talk about causes that matter to him, and his gratitude for and devotion to his fans.

Day 1 of our interview can be found here and Day 2 is here. And there’s still time to enter to see the band live on us, right here!

I was thinking about the first time I heard an English Beat song, and realized that it was “Save It for Later” only via Pete Townshend instead of you guys! One thing that stuck with me was that he remarked, “This song has some very interesting chuning...” 

Yes! I was trying to get what turned out to be a traditional old tuning which was called DADGAD. And I was trying to play along with John Martyn records; I like John Martyn and he used this DADGAD tuning, but I didn’t know that. So I tuned it up and ended up with all Ds and As, so I ended up with DADAAD instead of DADGAD.

I was at home in Birmingham, England one Saturday morning when somebody gave me the phone and said, “It’s Pete Townshend.” And I was like, “Yeah, sure it is. Yeah, hey, how ya doin’, Pete?” And it turned out it was! [Laughs.] He says to me, “Look, I’m sitting here with Dave Gilmour and we’re trying to work out the tuning to your song, ‘Save It for Later.’” Well, I nearly fell over! I mean, two of the guitar heroes of your growing up, you know – some of the early Who songs meant the world to me and Dave Gilmour’s guitar on “Careful with That Axe, Eugene” – I mean, really!

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It’s Day 2 of our week with Dave Wakeling of The English Beat! In the wake of today’s big release of the definitive box set, The Complete Beat, we got the low-down on Dave’s influences and why he thinks “best of” albums are the best way to get to know The English Beat.

Day 1 of our interview can be found here.

What records were in your collection at the outset of creating The Beat 33 years ago?

Number one by a long way is Heart of the Congos by The Congos, produced by Lee “Scratch” Perry, which I believe is still the finest reggae album ever produced. And that’s the record where if I feel like I want to play a piece of music, that’s most often what I would go for.

I get a hankering to put a record on, Heart of the Congos is what I normally go for. It just enlivens me. I love the sounds of it, the voices; the musicians in the background are some of the classiest reggae players ever. The production is Lee Perry just about before he spins out of control. It’s absolutely beautiful.

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