It’s been 15 years since The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” appeared in the film Benny & Joon and became a U.S. smash — which, incidentally, was five years after it had already been a smash everywhere else. Though some are quick to write off this band as a one-hit wonder, they’ve been churning out delightful releases for decades, and all have been marked by their quirky sense of humor, their palpable politics and passions, and their effervescent joy. The new one, Life With You, is no different, and boasts a terrific self-titled first single. Hear snippets in this Songlines podcast.
Monday March 24th 2008, 10:57 am
Filed under: Livewire
Posted by: Julia
Wearing a simple blue cotton dress, Yael Naim flits waiflike onto the stage at the Bowery Ballroom around 9:45pm, grabbing her acoustic guitar and nimbly hopping onto a stool where she sits bathed in a warm yellow spotlight that might as well be the adoration of her audience. To call them “fans” might be a tad premature at this stage, it being one of her first ever US shows, and her self-titled collaboration with David Donatien having been released only on Tuesday.
Indeed, waiting outside the Bowery before the show, I overhear more than one conversation that indicates many of these concertgoers came tonight because they heard that one song. One twenty-something student-type says he checked out a few of her songs on MySpace, while his companion appears to be here based on buzz alone. They agree that the song “from the Apple commercial” is “really great.”
Inside, the sold-out crowd is similarly young, mixed-race, and slightly female-heavy. I note a solid showing of Eastern Europeans, which might be the Regina Spektor factor. Yet to call these people merely curious scenesters would also be an understatement. They have been locked in place for a while, standing firm to make sure they don’t lose their precious sliver of unobstructed view. There is an unmitigated air of excitement when Yael does make her ethereal entrance. “Oh, she’s so cute!” a few people squawk; having never set eyes on her before, there is something gratifying about seeing the enchanting voice physically manifest.
At the opening chords of “Paris,” the first track on her album, there are some delighted gasps of recognition at the song, which is sung in two of Naim’s native tongues, French and Hebrew (the latter, endearingly, with a French accent). Then, half way through, as she is nearing the French part of the refrain, she leans away from the mic — boldly, I think, for someone who has never played this city before — and invites the audience to finish the verse. They do.
“Thank you so much for coming!” she gasps afterwards, explaining in her heavy French accent how especially glad she is to be here after spending so many months holed up in the living room of her tiny Paris apartment with Donatien working on these songs “for an album we didn’t even know if it was going to be released.” With that, she launches into “Far Far,” an autobiographical account of a girl with music inside her that’s bursting to get out:
“How can you stay inside? / There’s a beautiful mess inside.”
This beautiful mess is what she and Donatien made in that Paris apartment. After a personally disappointing stab at recording with 2001’s In a Man’s Womb, Naim retreated from music, disheartened. Meeting Donatien has been the inspiration she needed. Listed as “Artistic Director” on the album, the multi-instrumentalist took her exquisitely simple compositions and added strings, horns, choirs, effects, even encouraging her to sing in Hebrew for the first time. When they were finished, they put it all back together, and what they have is a complicated, beautiful mess that sounds effortless.
Donatien, for his part, remains an invisible force in the music even in a live setting. He stays far behind her on stage, easy to miss physically, but he is there with every swell, twist and turn of the music.
Naim is no fool; she knows what brought the crowd here in the first place, and she takes great pleasure in teasing us, seated at her piano now and playfully tapping out the first three (now almost universally recognizable) notes of “New Soul,” then stopping as cheers erupt. “What is that song?” she asks gleefully. “I used to think I was an old soul,” Naim explains, adding “which means you’re really smart. But then, real life begins…”
Real life for Naim has changed irrevocably these past months. With “New Soul” being featured in Apple’s MacBook Air ad campaign before her name had ever been whispered in the US, it became her first top 40 US hit long before the album was released. The song tiptoes into your head before breaking into a whimsical waltz that subsides but never leaves.
In observing Naim in the flesh, you get all the proof you need that she is more than just one song. For one thing, her album doesn’t illustrate quite how powerful her voice is. At times boasting a soaring aria and others a bluesy roar, I’m reminded of Alanis Morrissette in her role as God in the movie Ðogma, with her earth-shattering voice (minus the exploding human heads). Also in her favor for staying power, Naim is delectably funny — whether she’s doing her “Dance du Canard” (duck dance, literally) or rhyming “mon coeur” and “fleur” with “for sure” — and charismatic, as she manages to keep wholly engaged a crowd that until this instant undoubtedly have had no real connection with her beyond a commercial and the internet.
She ends the set in this way, connected, having her now adoring fans take the place of her missing cellist by becoming her choir. After teaching the females in the room the aria, she instructs the males to take a lower pitch and we gladly oblige as her string section while she stands in the center of the stage again, leading us like a tiny fairy-conductor. Afterwards, those more-than-just-curious-scenesters and not-quite-fans-yet float out, probably deeply in love.
For her third release, The Orchard, Lizz Wright has explored new musical ground, putting forth her richest (and most AAA-friendly) record to date. Her supple, powerful voice disguises her tender age — she’s just 28 — and is indicative of her firm rooting in the gospel and jazz traditions of her Georgia upbringing. But she rises to new heights here with the driving rhythm of the album’s lead single, “My Heart,” as well as covers of Led Zeppelin’s “Thank You” and Ike & Tina Turner’s “I Idolize You.” Julia Clarke will tell you more in this edition of the Songlines podcast.
You might also check out the beautiful video for “My Heart”:
The Songlines crew had the good fortune to see Lizz live last night at the Highline Ballroom in New York. If you haven’t seen her, you should. The live show adds another dimension to her music, and her band is stellar. But unless you see her tonight in Philadelphia, you won’t get a chance for a little while, because she’s touring Europe for the next month. So for now, get a taste with this interview/performance from NPR’s Tell Me More.
Australian trio the Waifs are back with their fifth studio effort, sundirtwater. They’ve gained more fans in the U.S. with each subsequent release and tour, and they’ll be back in the States in April and May. Check out the podcast and tour dates to find out more.
Ever wonder what makes WFUV’s “Take Five” podcast and “Words and Music from Studio A” feature sound so terrific? No doubt Rita Houston’s great voice is key, but the production work of Sarah Wardrop is a big part of the equation. Sarah recently celebrated a birthday, and we found out that a little Amstel helps, too:
Tuesday March 11th 2008, 1:14 pm
Filed under: Livewire
Posted by: Julia
Caryl Churchill’s Drunk Enough To Say I Love You? debuted off-Broadway in New York last week after a critically acclaimed run in London. A 45-minute piece in which the political relationship between Britain and America is played out as a lustful yet wholly unhealthy homosexual affair between a whiny Brit with dependency issues and an arrogant, domineering American, it sounded right up my metaphorical alley! Apparently I wasn’t drunk enough.
I’d say a lot of the general populous of the New York theater-going crowd likely shares some of my lefty liberalism when it comes to the perversely poisonous relationship between Bush and Blair, but Churchill’s manifestation of this perspective as a series of rapid-fire unfinished sentences was, ultimately, more irritating than politically affirming.
“Drunk enough to say I love you?” is America’s pickup line when we first meet the pair (Britain and America, Bush and Blair, whatever…) sharing a drink together on a couch. It is on this couch they stay, alternately luxuriously lounging, sprawling exhaustedly, caressing and bickering as their love blossoms along with their plans for global annihilation. Their plans include, but are not limited to: bombing Iraq, Iran, Korea, Israel; star wars; bioterrorism; waterboarding. At the beginning of each scene, the couch is suspended ever higher in the air, as the men get figuratively high on power, their plans taking them further and further away from reality. (The bitter truth here us that all these plans to bomb, maim, torture, kill, and conquer space have largely been laid in reality.)
This aspect of the play is great, and is exaggerated once in a while as one of the men drops a glass off the side of the couch and it slips silently away into darkness. In addition, the dysfunctional relationship does produce more than a few laughs as the men unravel, the Brit being reduced to a sniveling wreck at times when he provokes the American’s wrath by bringing into question the harshness of a biological warfare act on innocents civilians. The American, meanwhile, has gone from a charming smooth talker in a bar to a frothing, attention-seeking child who screeches: “You must love me! You MUST love me!” at the play’s end.
Nonetheless, the stylistic scripting of unfinished sentences was tiresome within minutes. Perhaps Churchill was attempting to create an illusion to Watergate-style recordings that cut in and out, or maybe her metaphor was simpler: The U.S. and England are so co-dependent they finish each other’s sentences. In any case, it was enough to drive one couple out of the theater withing ten minutes, leaving the rest to collectively whisper: “This is so weird!” between every scene (which is irksome in and of itself).
So, just in case you were considering paying $40 to see this play, I have generously compiled the following list of eight ways to better spend that money:
1) Donate it to Amnesty International so the good folks there can continue to aid the victims of people like the two men in this play.
2) Buy yourself a medium-priced single malt Scottish whiskey, say Bowmore, and drink it until you are intoxicated enough to tell someone you love them. Then tell them. It will be more satisfying.
3) Enjoy a couple of $15 martinis with a friend on one of the comfortable couches at the Algonquin Hotel. Speak to each other about politics in complete sentences. It will be more satisfying.
4) Buy a copy of the script from the box office, then have fun with your friends filling in the blanks at the end of every sentence.
5) Buy a ticket to George Packer’s Betrayed, also playing off-Broadway, which makes a much more genuine political statement and boasts complete sentences.
7) Keep the money and just watch The Colbert Report. The writer’s strike is over!
8) If you’ve already arrived in New York with the intention of seeing the show, try putting to test Rachel Ray’s theory that you can eat anywhere for $40 a day.
The BoDeans decided to title their new record Still because it’s a word that reaches into the past and maintains a continuum to the present. It’s been 25 years since the Wisconsin band formed, and they’ve stuck with the blueprint that keeps fans coming back to their expertly crafted pop. Here, they work once again with producer T Bone Burnett, who helmed their debut, as well as Go Slow Down, the album that yielded their biggest hit “Closer to Free.”
Are you going to be at SXSW this week? The BoDeans have two sets there. They’re performing Thursday night at 1am at Bourbon Rocks, and at Auditorium Shores on Friday night at 8pm.
Count Billy Bragg among fans of Kate Nash! Bragg joined the 20-year-old onstage during her performance at Australia’s NME Awards in January to play guitar on her hit “Foundations” before they segued into a duet of Bragg’s “A New England.”
In 1985, a 26-year-old Kirsty MacColl had a U.K. top ten hit with “A New England.” Her version included an extra verse and since her death, Bragg has always sung that verse in her honor. MacColl left some pretty big shoes that are impossible to truly fill, but his chemistry with another rising young star is as poignant and bittersweet as it is charming and fun.
Grammy award-winning blues and jazz guitarist and trumpeter Jeff Healey lost his lifelong battle with cancer Sunday at age 41. The Toronto native lost his sight as a baby, but a new gift befell him just a few years later; at three years old he picked up the guitar, becoming a child prodigy noted for his distinctive playing style where he held the guitar in his lap. Songlines’ own Sean Coakley was fortunate enough to have worked with Healey, and here he shares a few memories:
I got to work with Jeff at Arista in the ‘80s. I was given a cassette and video by one of our regional promoters and he begged me to listen so he could “get his brother off his back.” A few days later I watched the video and honestly thought someone was pulling a sleight of hand. No one plays that way. I gave the package to A&R man Mitchell Cohen. He hopped on a plane to Toronto and was floored. Six months later we had the debut, See the Light, which eventually went platinum based on the strength of its two John Hiatt covers, “Confidence Man” and “Angel Eyes.”
But the best part of promoting Jeff wasn’t the chart success. It was watching people react to his live performance for the first time. I stood next to Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top in Memphis and watched the bearded one bob his head up and down until his mouth erupted into a huge smile. I watched Little Feat do it the night Jeff joined them on stage for “Apolitical Blues.” (I had to sing him the song in advance of the encore, because he’d lied to Paul Barrere about knowing it!) I saw Bobby Whitlock introduce himself to Jeff following a show and offer to take him out on the town. We all piled into the van and drove to a bar. Healey, Whitlock and Co. asked the local band if they might play a song or two and then took over the stage for two hours. They played Hendrix, Muddy Waters, and, best of all, Derek & the Dominos. I was in heaven. Nobody had ever seen anyone play lead guitar that way before; I know I never have since. Jeff, your adventurous spirit and talent will be missed.
–Sean Coakley
Healey’s death comes just a month before the scheduled release of his first rock album in eight years, Mess of Blues.
