Earlier this summer, Tim Daoust and I drove up to White Plains, NY to record an appearance for cable TV music talk show Alive With Clive, hosted by the wonderful Clive Swersky. Our segment aired last night on Channel 76 in White Plains and repeats this Wednesday, August 21st, at 7:00pm. It will also be streaming online during that time at http://wpcommunitymedia.org
We had so much fun and the segment came out really well -- I hope you'll get a chance to watch!
If you miss the air time on Wednesday, you can still catch us on the Alive With Clive website from noon on 8/22 until 10pm on 8/28 (you will need to create a login to view it there) at: http://alivewithclive.tv/blog
At Clive's request we performed four songs from the new album -- "Old
Languages", "Practical Magic", "Icarus", and "Dancing Out of the Dark".
Tim used his loop pedal with the electric guitar for the first and last
songs, and in between performing I chatted with Clive about the music. Clive won me over completely when he said that I
reminded him of Ellie Goulding, who is one of my favorite new
artists... I was quite stunned that he would say that! It pretty much
made my day.
I wanted to share a little bit here from our shows last month. If you made it out to either or both of these gigs, thank you again for helping to make these two evenings very special!
First was a duo set with myself and Tim Daoust at the cool little "subterranean music parlor" Zirzamin. It was our second booking there, and at midnight it was also my birthday. I really couldn't have thought of a better way to celebrate than playing music for such a wonderful, appreciative group of people. We debuted Tim's new electric mandolin and cracked open Zirzamin's creaky old piano. The only sad note of the night was finding out mid-gig that Zirzamin would be closing the next day :( So we've lost yet another cool venue frequented by the eclectic and intriguing artists of downtown NYC :( we'll miss you Zirzamin. I'm crossing my fingers that we'll see you reborn in another location soon.
Here's a little bit of video from that night:
Then at the end of the month, we played an amazing venue in Philadelphia -- Jamey's House of Music (formerly known as the PSALM Salon). I'd never heard of this place in all the years that I've lived in Philly... apparently, people mostly find out about it through word of mouth and I just happened to hear about it in a musicians' chat room online, while trading tips with an artist from the west coast. After one night at Jamey's I truly understand why everyone loves it -- amazing acoustics and sound, a great audience, delicious homemade Chinese food and more... all I can say is, check out their website and/or better yet, visit them for a show if you're in the area.
I was so happy to finally be playing another full band show with my friends the Beards :) Despite the limited rehearsal time that we were able to have together, this was definitely our best show yet. Below are a few pics from the weekend and a couple of videos from the show. I'll be uploading more footage soon to the live music playlist on our YouTube channel. Many, many thanks to Jamey's for having us, and to all of the musicians and friends who helped to make this evening a very special one.
behind this tiny door lies our secret rehearsal lair... thanks Alec! pic stolen from Tim D ;)
back with the Beards <3
behind this door... the wonderful Jamey's House!
setting up at Jamey's
I think this may have been my favorite song from the night:
I am so grateful to the following radio stations who have been spinning the new album. If any of them are near you, let me know if you have heard it playing ;) Big thanks to Peter Hay and Sali Z of Twin Vision for helping Circles of Swallows to fly far and wide!
KMUD - Redway, CA
KCSS - Turlock, CA
KDNK - Carbondale, CO
KVNF - Paonia, CO
WPKN - Bridgeport, CT
WESU - Middletown, CT
WWUH - West Hartford, CT
WNHU - West Haven, CT
WMNF - Tampa, FL
KKCR - Hanalei, HI
KTUH - Honolulu, HI
KWLC - Decorah, IA
WEFT - Champaign, IL
WRFL - Lexington, KY
KRVS - Lafayette, LA
WMUA - Amherst, MA
WTCC - Springfield, MA
WERU - E. Orland, ME
WHFR - Dearborn, MI
KFAI - Minneapolis, MN
KOPN - Columbia, MO
KDHX - St. Louis, MO
WLFR - Galloway, NJ
WRRC - Lawrenceville, NJ
WPRB - Princeton, NJ
CHMR - St. John's, NL, Canada
M3 RADIO - New York, NY
WRUR - Rochester, NY
WRPI - Troy, NY
WRUW - Cleveland, OH
WWSU - Dayton, OH
KRSC - Claremore, OK
CFMU - Hamilton, ON , Canada
WXPN - Philadelphia, PA
WSBF - Clemson, SC
KPFT - Houston, TX
Aggie Radio - Logan, UT
KZMU - Moab, UT
KAOS - Olympia, WA
WOJB - Hayward, WI
WORT - Madison, WI
Yesterday I was able to take part in the March Against Monsanto. Here in NYC we rallied in Union Square, then marched around it and down Broadway to Washington Square Park. Fortunately the rain held off til after! It was an amazing experience... sharing a few pics below.
We have another full band show coming up next weekend and I can't wait! ZirZamin is a super cool little venue and they have great Austin TX-inspired food as well.
And I'm very psyched that Tim and I will be joined by Tom Fitzpatrick on bass and Brian Weston on drums. Things sounded great at rehearsal today. For this show we won't be using many of the keyboard atmospherics; the sound will be more stripped down than it is on the albums and it's a lot of fun to hear and perform the songs this way. There is also a piano at ZirZamin that we plan to make use of for a song or two. If you're around NYC next weekend, it's going to be a great show so stop by and see us!
I thought I would tell the story of one of my favorite songs on the new album and how it came to be what it is. Sometimes a song ends up very differently from how you expect, and this was one of those songs.
After I had moved back to Philly a few years ago, I was going up to NYC fairly often for some dance projects and other business and I would sometimes write on the bus. One sunny morning, the lyrics for this song began to emerge on the way there. I thought of how on any given day in the city you were bound to see unpredictable and sometimes amazing things, and I think I decided that day to write down whatever I saw and see if it could be a song. I seem to remember that the children's book "And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street" came across my mind. On this particular day I had two or three meetings with a lot of time in between, so I was writing in a couple of cafes and other places. When I write it's best for me to have a lot of time to be able to just sit and kind of go into a kind of meditative or contemplative state, almost like a trance, where my mind can wander and find things. On this day there was plenty of time for that, and in the course of the day I did see some strange and unexpected things that found their way into the song. I also was hanging out in a few areas of the city where certain things had happened to me in the past, so some of those found their way in as well -- although the song is poetic and not necessarily literal. It's a mix of some real things with some imagined, and the lyrics have been somewhat abstracted. I think that most of it could really be about any city, or anyone's life. On that day I saw and remembered a mix of beautiful and horrible things. That's the intensity of the city, in that it's a microcosm of life itself. There was the awareness that time (and the city) moves on, through the beautiful and the horrible. And that life comes back again in places where death has been. And that death is always there waiting as well. It was a way of looking at the whole thing from outside of time, where any one particular event is just one of billions of events, and also recognizing the intense beauty or horror of each thing that might happen. Once the day was over, I had a long stream of consciousness piece of writing that still needed to be crafted and made into lyrics. And somehow, I had to find a way to write music that would work with these words. I thought, who writes songs like this? And I thought of Bob Dylan's album Time Out of Mind, which I had listened to quite often when it first came out. I thought, he has a lot to say, and so when he tells those long rambling stories like "Highlands" he keeps the music very simple so that the focus will be on the story. The music itself doesn't have to be anything too fancy, and that way it won't distract. So I went back and listened to that song and a few others from that album, and I thought ok, I'll just come up with a simple repetitive kind of bluesy thing kind of like that and see how that goes. I made something that wasn't really working so well for me but it was a start, and then as I usually do when writing, I wanted to find a sound that would represent to me the feeling of the song. I like to add in such sounds when I'm writing because it helps me continue to complete the song, when I can get some kind of atmosphere going. I found this oozy smoky kind of sound, I felt that it was kind of creeping through the song like a sort of sinister threat, it was smoky so the edges were hazy. The way that life bleeds into and across time. Then I also needed to figure out what kind of rhythm to use. Originally I had it in 4/4, like the Dylan stuff I was remembering, but eventually I decided to see what would happen if I tried it on 3s -- and then it somehow started to get jazzy. Which was not at all what I had expected! I've recently started getting more into jazz but I really don't know much about it, and I had never really thought about writing or singing any jazz. But here it was, the song was working better in this rhythm and it really started to feel right. So, jazz! And I knew that I probably wanted a smoky sax on it, and I knew just the sound that I wanted. I'd been going to hear my friend Tom Tallitsch's band and was listening to his album Perspective, and I thought that he would bring just the right kind of sound for the song. And now that it had turned into jazz, all the more reason to bring Tom in. I was so happy that he did end up playing on this track. It was maybe a year or so after I wrote the demo that I found my way to Turtle Studios and began production on the album with Jeff Hiatt. I think that when we started, I didn't quite realize that Jeff had such a strong background in jazz (among other genres). So when we came to lay down the basic tracks for "Today In The City", it was just so exciting for me to hear him on upright bass, with the amazing Charlie Patierno on drums, taking the song to a whole other level. The way they played the rhythm, they took it to a place where it ended up swinging, which my original really didn't. Right away I knew that I would have to take a different approach to the vocal so that was a bit scary for me! I thought, I'm not a jazz singer, I've never done that before, and I'm really not sure if I can pull this off! But I took the tracks home and was able to adjust my phrasing, and even though I don't think I really sound like a jazz singer I think it fits the song. Another wonderful day was the session when Tony Mascara came in to lay down some vibes. I am just a sucker for ambience, so vibes and their vibes... I could listen to them all day. Tony also brought a bunch of fun junkyard-esque items to add on percussion. Having some hubcaps in there kind of made sense, and it was good to add some harder/sharper/more concise sounds to all of the oozy stuff that we had going on.
After we cut the vocal, another thought I had was that maybe I sounded a little too happy singing about some terrible things. But the vocal is more of a survival thing, a looking at things from outside and seeing life as a whole. The vocal kind of moves along, just like the instruments, through time and through all of the experiences. I guess it's just another part of the juxtaposition which runs through the song, distilling the experience of life with good and bad into one song, one city, one moment out of infinite moments.
What an amazing night we had for our album release at Drom. This was the first time that I have played in a larger club, so it was a learning experience but I was so happy with almost everything. The people at Drom were great to work with, and it was fantastic to be there with such stellar musicians and friends. It really meant a lot to me that so many of you came up afterwards to say how much you enjoyed the show. As soon as it was over, all I could think about was doing it again as soon as possible!
Below is some video from the night. The sound quality is not the greatest, it's just from the cameras, but maybe better than cell phone audio at least.
Here is probably my favorite one of the night. My friends the Beards were serving up such a tasty groove that I could not help dancing.
Of the new songs, I think that William probably fared best. We used a mandolin for the parts that are played by flutes on the album.
On Badful B, Tony's frame drum definitely helped to conjure the faeries.
We did some other stuff that rocked out more, but the audio isn't great on those songs so I'm going to hold off posting them for now.
I'll be posting more about our NYC album release show soon, but for now here are lots more great pics from our Philly release show at L'Etage. Thank you again to Lisa Schaffer for doing such a wonderful job of documenting the evening!
After premiering to a great response at our album release shows, the official video for "Old Languages" (the making of which I described here back in May) is now on YouTube. Hope you enjoy ;)
We had such a great time playing for everyone at L'Etage in Philly last weekend. It was soooo cold... many thanks to all who came out, in spite of the weather! It was truly special for me to have so many dear friends, family, fellow artists, and collaborators present. Big thanks to Lisa Schaffer for documenting the evening; there will be more pics on the website soon.
In focusing on the songs and introducing everyone on the stage, I forgot to say much at all about the fact that we were releasing the new album! Duh! I even nearly forgot to announce the video premiere at the end... my brain was just a bit overwhelmed, because of moments like this:
Jim Gallagher, me, Jeff Hiatt, Tim Daoust - thanks for the pic, Jay Levin :)
Here I am with the producers from both of my albums, plus Tim Daoust with whom I've been working for so long on the live stuff now. After spending so much time in the world of my songs with these wonderful people, something like that is just kind of intense.
I am so very grateful to the musicians who are performing these album release shows with me. Rehearsing between Philly and NYC is a bit of a challenge but whatever. I can't wait to bring the show to Drom in NYC this Thursday night.
I'm grateful to have met some supercool fellow artists here in NYC through playing at a few open mics that Tim Daoust and I have been frequenting. Once in a while lately I've been dropping by The National Underground on a Saturday afternoon to hear the wonderful Kelli King and her band play their regular slot there, along with a few other open mic friends who sometimes show up as her guests.
Kelli, Ash & Tom singing us a train track lullaby
Sometimes I help out my real-life magical friend the incredible East Village Magic Man who does a bit of magishing in between Kelli's sets.
Kelli also hands out some magical items of her own once in a while.
Woke up to a sunny, frosted-over day, hearing the crunch of snow shovels outside...
Heading into the city in a little while to play a set at Caffe Vivaldi and help our friend Tania Stavreva raise funds for her debut album. We are planning to kind of rock out more today but we'll have to see what people are in the mood for with their brunch!
It's finally time to announce our two big album release events. I am super psyched to be performing both of these shows with a full band, featuring some wonderful musicians who appear on the Circles of Swallows album. These will be two very special evenings and I really hope that you can make it out to at least one of them!
At both events we will also be premiering the official music video for "Old Languages" -- revealing the top secret story line that we came up with during our two-day video shoot last May. It wasn't so easy to find a venue in Manhattan that could also project video, but we finally found Drom -- an awesome club in the East Village that is a longtime presenter of eclectic music. We're super excited to play there! And it's a large venue -- so please come out if you can and help us to fill it up!
