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A billboard over the New Jersey turnpike seems to be teasing something through a new website, but is it related to Lorna Shore? Continue reading…
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Adam Duritz: ‘It’s My World and I Love It’
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“Connection is a hell of a thing…it’s the life jacket we all need,” says Adam Duritz, frontman of Counting Crows, a band that’s built their 30-year career through heartfelt live performances, emotional lyrics, and recurring, world-building themes in their songs.
Ironic, then, that growing up, Duritz says he didn’t know how to make connections with other people. “When I was younger, I was so stuck inside myself,” he tells me from his New York City home. A bunch of movie posters plaster the wall behind him—Seven Samurai and Smokey and the Bandit among them. He’s wearing a black Raspberries T-shirt, and sports a full black beard and a head full of dark brown hair, albeit thinner and shorter than the dreadlocks he was known for back in the ’90s.
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- The Who Announce Farewell Tour … Again
- Weezer, Janelle Monáe, Bright Eyes Bound For Bumbershoot
“I had all this stuff I felt, and no way to express it or no way to connect with people because I didn’t talk to people very well, and I didn’t have any way to make connections. I felt so bound up inside myself.”
It wasn’t until later in life that he discovered he was suffering from depersonalization disorder, a condition that makes him feel emotionally detached from his surroundings, and even himself, which can last from minutes to sometimes months. Imagine feeling like you are seeing yourself from outside of your own body, or that everything around you is not real, and you don’t know how to stop it; that’s how Duritz feels a lot of the time. It can be a lonely existence
Duritz’s father served in the military during the Vietnam War and later became a doctor, which meant the family moved around a lot, only adding to his sense of isolation.
“It really separates you from the world in a lot of bad ways,” Duritz says. “I was always a new kid. I didn’t know people. I really had a lot of questions when I was younger, and I knew something was wrong with me. How am I going to take care of myself? How am I going to live a life? I didn’t really know how any of this was going to work.”
While he was in college, Duritz discovered, rather spontaneously, that he could write songs and play them. “Good Morning, Little Sister” was the first song he ever wrote, about his younger sister who was going through a difficult time as a teenager. For the first time in his life, he says he had a sense of self, of who he was: He was a songwriter.
“I had a feeling there was all this stuff inside me that mattered, that was important, but it just was there, like a big ball of feeling,” he says. “And then I write songs, and suddenly it’s this way that connects me to the whole world, and all the things inside me that were stuck because the mental illness had a purpose.”
Then, in 1993, two years after forming the Counting Crows with producer-guitarist David Bryson, the band—which by then consisted of Matt Malley on bass, drummer Steve Bowman, and on keyboards, Charlie Gillingham—exploded onto the music scene with its multi-platinum breakout album, August and Everything After. Then, in 1996, the group’s sophomore album, Recovering the Satellites, debuted at No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard 200 album chart, going double platinum.
The Counting Crows has released a number of live albums and compilations over the years, as well as five studio records, including its latest, Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!, the band’s first in seven years.
As Duritz describes it, the new record is “so rock and roll.”
Not to be confused with the band’s 2021 EP, Butter Miracle: Suite One, Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets! is a sequel of sorts to its predecessor. Duritz tells me he wrote Suite One as a challenge to himself, to see if he could write one long-playing, continuous piece of music. The result was, well, a suite of four songs: “The Tall Grass,” “Elevator Boots,” “Angel of 14th Street,” and “Bobby and the Rat-Kings.” But it was also his answer to how people listen to music now.
“I don’t know if anyone’s listening to whole records,” says Duritz. “People are digesting music in different ways anyway, so to me, it felt like since I was moved to challenge myself to make this 20-minute piece of music where the songs all flow together, it was just that, you know? But I really loved how it turned out. I thought well, it does make sense to make another half to this, though.”
The Complete Sweets includes remixed versions of the songs on Suite One, along with five new songs, including the band’s latest singles, “Spaceman in Tulsa” and “Under the Aurora.”
But the road to get there wasn’t so easy. Going back to his friend’s farm in West England, where he wrote Suite One, Duritz composed the other half of the album and on his way home, he stopped in London to sing backing vocals on the Gang of Youths’ album, Angel in Realtime. When the band sent him the finished product, he thought it was one of the best records he had heard in a long time.
“I was so blown away listening to it, and I had this realization that these songs on their record were significantly better than the stuff I’d written,” he says. “The stuff lacked a sort of passion that these songs had and they were missing something, and I needed to go back to the drawing board.”
So, that’s what he did. And through the process of reworking his new songs, Duritz pushed himself like he’d never done before.
“I’d never really had this experience before of thinking I’d finished something and then realizing it wasn’t good enough,” he tells me. “They were a little more ambitious musically, to the point where I couldn’t play them myself. Usually, I can tell a song is good because I can just play it for myself. But these were really difficult for me to play. I had them in my head, but I couldn’t recreate them.”
As much as he loved his new material, he lacked the confidence to share it with the rest of the band.
So he sat on it for two years.
Then a breakthrough happened. He wrote “With Love, from A-Z.”
“I knew that was great. I loved that song,” he says. “And it felt like, in a way, an updating of ‘Round Here.’ Whereas that’s a real statement of a person and where they are in life, just as a kid getting ready to go out into the world and make something. And to me, ‘With Love, from A-Z’ was a statement of where I am today. And I really felt it worked and it was very powerful.”
With a renewed sense of confidence, Duritz invited band members David Immerglück (guitar), Jim Bogios (drums), and Millard Powers (bass) to his house to play his new songs.
Two weeks later, along with the rest of the group, Duritz ripped through the tracks in the studio in 11 days. Then, together with Chad Blake, the Counting Crows mixed the new songs, combining them with the remixed Suite One tracks, making a complete, nine-track LP.
“So the Suite [One] sounds different now than it did originally because we remade it to match the first half,” he says. “The two pieces fit together really well. It was a different experience…”
While the title of the album, Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!, has a bit of a nonsensical tone to it, the themes that run through it are quite serious and incredibly relevant to what’s going on in America now.
“Boxcars,” for instance, is about the deportation of immigrants. “Under the Aurora” was inspired by the murder of George Floyd during the pandemic. Other songs cover the objectification of women and trans kids in sports.
“A lot of the stuff on this record is about people in isolation and people on the outside looking in, finding ways to get through life. Sometimes it works out because we can pick up a guitar,” says Duritz, referring to himself.
Duritz says that after more than 30 years together, he and the band are still fascinated with the process of making music, exploring new ways to perform older songs live, never replicating the same old playlists during their shows, and, as with the group’s new album, finding new ways to write songs.
“We enjoy playing music,” he says. “I love being in a band. I don’t want to be a solo artist. I like the jazz of being in a band. I think we matter to each other. I’ve watched my friends fuck up great bands. I don’t want to do that. There are a million ways to justify why things should fall apart. You just have to decide whether that’s okay to let it happen.”
The musical landscape is a lot different than when August and Everything After debuted, when the only option to hear it was to buy the album at the record store or borrow (or copy) it from a friend. Exposure meant getting a single played on the radio or creating a music video for MTV. The rise of streaming music, of course, has changed all of that; it’s all the music you want, anytime you want, making it more difficult for artists to stay relevant, to build a fanbase, to connect with an audience. The Counting Crows are still passionate about being in a rock ‘n roll band.
“I’m 30-some-odd years into a career here; a career that lasts five minutes for most people, if it even happens,” Duritz says. “And we’re still a band and we’re still going on tour. And it’s still cool. There are bands that are bigger and, it’s not effortless, but it’s still happening. That thing that saved me when I was a kid is still saving me now. It’s my world, and I love it.”
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
Salif Keita – So Kono
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Mali might be one of Africa’s poorest nations, but it remains a musical superpower. The centre of the medieval Mande empire has been the breeding ground for dozens of global success stories, including the likes of Toumani Diabate, Ali Farka Toure, Rokia Traore, Oumou Sangare, Fatoumata Diawara, Boubacar Traore, Afel Bocoum, Bassekou Kouyate and Amadou & Mariam – not to mention Tuareg rockers like Tinariwen, Tamikrest and Songhoy Blues.
Mali might be one of Africa’s poorest nations, but it remains a musical superpower. The centre of the medieval Mande empire has been the breeding ground for dozens of global success stories, including the likes of Toumani Diabate, Ali Farka Toure, Rokia Traore, Oumou Sangare, Fatoumata Diawara, Boubacar Traore, Afel Bocoum, Bassekou Kouyate and Amadou & Mariam – not to mention Tuareg rockers like Tinariwen, Tamikrest and Songhoy Blues.
Salif Keita might be the most famous of them all, but he was always the odd one out. Not only was he an albino in a society that regarded albinos as cursed, but he was an outcast from a minor royal family, competing with storytelling griots who tended to come from an ancestral lineage of musicians. It helped that he was blessed with an extraordinary voice. Keita can turn a jerky, conversational, arhythmic lyric into something that flows perfectly; making any amount of syllables fit into whatever space he has, improvising like a jazz singer, adding bluesy flourishes and grace notes, often leaping up an octave or more into a spine-tingling register.
It’s a voice that has worked across multiple genres. He started out in 1970, singing Afro-Cuban son and Congolese soukous with the Rail Band; a few years later he was performing rumbas, foxtrots, French ballads and Senegalese wolof songs with Les Ambassadeurs. In 1987 his breakthrough solo album Soro heralded the birth of the digital griot, setting Keita’s voice against a Peter Gabriel-ish backdrop of sampled koras and digi-drums. Since then he’s collaborated extensively – albums produced by Joe Zawinul, Vernon Reid and Wally Badarou; duets with the likes of Carlos Santana, Wayne Shorter, Grace Jones, Esperanza Spalding, Bobby McFerrin, Roots Manuva, Richard Bona and Cesaria Evora. In 2018 he released Un Autre Blanc – a heavily synthesized, elaborately orchestrated studio album featuring Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Angelique Kidjo and Alpha Blondy – and announced in interviews that, approaching his 70th birthday, it would be his last LP.
That was until 2023, when he was invited to play an unplugged set at a festival in Japan: just voice and acoustic guitar, with occasional accompaniment on the ngoni (a kind of harp-like banjo) and percussion. Keita loved the setting, realising that it brought out a side of him that had been hidden across his five-decade career, and he transformed his hotel suite into an impromptu studio to record this album.
So Kono – which translates as “inside the chamber” in the Mande language – is Keita’s most spartan LP yet. He has always said that he feels self-conscious about his guitar playing, seeing it purely as a tool for songwriting, but here it takes centre stage – hypnotic, complex, repetitive patterns, played clawhammer style, plucked with the flesh at the tips of his fingers, like a medieval lute player, usually with a capo high on the fretboard.
Some of these songs rework older compositions. “Laban”, a piece of desert rock on his 2005 album M’Bemba, is turned into a wonderfully baroque miniature, featuring a Martin Carthy-like guitar pattern. The already quite spartan “Tu Vas Me Manquer” (‘I will miss you’) sounds even more beautifully heartbroken, while “Tassi”, a piece of bubblegum Latin pop from his 2012 LP Talé, is turned into a hypnotic meditation. Occasionally, Keita’s metrical, minimalist guitar patterns are set against the florid, tumbling ngoni flourishes of Badié Tounkara, like on the gentle minor-key waltz “Awa”, which translates as Eve, and serves as Keita’s tribute to womankind; the yearning declaration of love “Cherie”, which also features accompaniment on cello and talking drum; or “Soundiata”, a mesmeric tribute to his royal ancestors.
There are tributes to friends. “Kanté Manfila” is dedicated to a late bandmate of the same name who was in Les Ambassadeurs, while “Aboubakrin” is named after a successful politician. One is a eulogy, the other a joyful song of praise, but both have the same mood – trance-like guitar patterns and soaring vocals that sound a muezzin’s call to prayer.
Most startling of all is the final track “Proud”. Here, instead of playing acoustic guitar, Keita switches to a simbi, a Malian harp-lute, with a bulbous calabash body. He plays a metallic, jangling riff while howling the lyrics – partly in English – at the upper end of his vocal register, half ancient bluesman, half Pakistani qawaali singer. “I’m African, I’m proud,” he howls. “I’m albino, I’m proud/ I’m different, I’m proud.” It’s a fitting summation of a remarkable career.
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One To One: John & Yoko
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“I just like TV,” says John Lennon to an interviewer, somewhere at the heart of Kevin Macdonald’s scintillating, crackling, livewire documentary about John and Yoko Ono’s first year in New York. “It replaced the fireplace when I was a child. They took the fire away, they put a TV in and I got hooked.”
“I just like TV,” says John Lennon to an interviewer, somewhere at the heart of Kevin Macdonald’s scintillating, crackling, livewire documentary about John and Yoko Ono’s first year in New York. “It replaced the fireplace when I was a child. They took the fire away, they put a TV in and I got hooked.”
Half a century after their demise we are certainly hooked on Beatles content. After all this time you might rightfully wonder if we need another John Lennon documentary. Particularly one that revisits a period already exhaustively covered in the 2006 The US vs John Lennon. But Macdonald and his team don’t just meticulously recreate the couple’s tiny West Village bedsit on Bank Street – a few guitars, a typewriter and a black and white TV set at foot of the small double bed. They also vividly recreate the electronic maelstrom that they plugged and plunged into, like Alice through the Looking Glass, via the TV and the telephone.
While the 2006 film was an overfamiliar, lionising grind of 21st century talking heads self-righteously proclaiming the wisdom of hindsight, Macdonald brings 1971 to vivid, lurid life. Adam Curtis is an obvious comparison, but Macdonald works some of his hallucinatory cathode alchemy, cutting together news reports from Attica and Vietnam, TV commercials for Clorox, the campaign trails of Nixon, George Wallace and Shirley Chisholm, gameshows, chat shows and the chaotic counterforce of Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg and John Sinclair, watching the sparks fly.
Perhaps even more revelatory are the audio of the phone calls John and Yoko carefully recorded, quite rightly anticipating some future bust and deportation. You hear the enthusiasm of John on the phone to Allen Klein, trying to convince him of his plans for some righteous Jesse James tour through America, freeing the prisoners. You hear Yoko and her assistants’ laborious attempts to secure a supply of 200 flies for her MoMA exhibition. Eventually, you hear John’s growing disillusionment with Rubin’s plan to call half a million a kids to face the cops at the 1972 Republican convention in Miami.
The film is centred around beautifully restored footage from the benefit show John and Yoko performed for the Willowbrook special needs school at Madison Square Gardens in August 1972 – what would turn out to be John’s only full-length post-Beatles concert. But though there’s a fab performance of “Come Together”, an almost unbearable rendition of “Mother” and a version of “Imagine” – cut to footage of Willowbrook kids playing in Central Park, that redeems the song – the real revelation of this film is hearing John’s voice, at the absolute dark heart of 20th century celebrity, madness and violence, sounding suddenly like the sanest man in New York, saying he’s not going to call children to a riot. “They’re all men,” he says, despairing of the would be heroes of the counterculture. “Where are the women? Where’s Mrs Hoffman?”
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Terry Reid announces tour dates
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Terry Reid will play his first Irish, Scottish and Welsh shows in more than six years this autumn, alongside new UK dates that include a return to London’s Jazz Café.
Terry Reid will play his first Irish, Scottish and Welsh shows in more than six years this autumn, alongside new UK dates that include a return to London’s Jazz Café.
Reid was recently featured in the Becoming Led Zeppelin documentary, with Robert Plant and Jimmy Page discussing him being considered as the first singer in the band before turning them down as he just signed a solo deal. It was Reid who suggested to Page that he try and check out another young singer who had just supported him named Robert Plant…
Tickets are available here.
September 11 WOLVERHAMPTON The Robin
September 13 DUBLIN (IE) Arthur’s Blues & Jazz
September 14 DUBLIN (IE) Arthur’s Blues & Jazz
September 16 HASTINGS White Rock Theatre
September 17 PORTSMOUTH Guildhall
September 18 ST IVES Theatre
September 19 CARDIFF The Gate
September 21 HEBDEN BRIDGE Trades Club
September 22 SHEFFIELD Greystones
September 24 NEWCASTLE The Cluny
September 25 GLASGOW Cottiers
September 26 POCKLINGTON Arts Centre
September 28 MALVERN Cube
September 30 LONDON Half Moon, Putney
September 1 LONDON The Jazz Cafe
September 3 CAMBRIDGE Portland Arms
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Listen to Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke’s new single, “The Spirit”
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Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke have shared a new single, “The Spirit”, taken from their upcoming collaborative album, Tall Tales – which is released on May 9 from Warp Records.
Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke have shared a new single, “The Spirit”, taken from their upcoming collaborative album, Tall Tales – which is released on May 9 from Warp Records.
The video for “The Spirit” has been directed by visual artist Jonathan Zawada.
“The Spirit” arrives the same day as a special global cinema event, in which fans will be able to hear Tall Tales alongside its accompanying feature film, directed by Zawada, a day ahead of release – although dates may vary for certain locations.
More info and tickets are available from here.
The album is released tomorrow. As well as digitally, the album will be available in a standard black vinyl 2LP gatefold edition and as a limited special black vinyl 2LP edition including a 36-page booklet featuring images from the project and lyrics to all the tracks, designed by Jonathan Zawada.
There will also be both a standard CD edition and a limited special CD accompanied by the 36-page booklet.
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The Who Announce Farewell Tour … Again
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The Who announced their first farewell tour in 1982, but the rock legends are saying goodbye for good on a North American jaunt cleverly dubbed The Song Is Over. Anchored by 81-year-old vocalist Roger Daltrey and nearly 80-year-old guitarist Pete Townshend, the tour will run from Aug. 16 in Sunrise, Fl., through Sept. 28 in Las Vegas; for now, no international dates have been confirmed.
“Every musician’s dream in the early ’60s was to make it big in the U.S. charts. For The Who, that dream came true in 1967 and our lives were changed forever,” Daltrey said today (May 8) at a London press event. “The warmth of the American audiences over the years have been inspirational to me, and reflect the feeling I remember getting after hearing the first rock records coming across the radio. Musical freedom! Rock gave us a feeling of generational rebellion. To me, America has always been great. The cultural differences had a huge impact on me. This was the land of the possible. It’s not easy to end the big part of my life that touring with The Who has been. Thanks for being there for us and look forward to seeing you one last time.”
More from Spin:
- A Day in the Life of…Maddox Batson
- Adam Duritz: ‘It’s My World and I Love It’
- The Songs That Made Me a Songwriter: Dan Wilson’s Sunday Night Ritual
“Well, all good things must come to an end,” Townshend added. “It is a poignant time. For me, playing to American audiences and those in Canada has always been incredible. The warmth and engagement of those audiences began back in 1967 with hippies smoking dope, sitting on their blankets and listening deeply and intensely. Music was everywhere. We all felt equal. Today, Roger and I still carry the banner for the late Keith Moon and John Entwistle and of course, all of our longtime Who fans. I must say that although the road has not always been enjoyable for me, it is usually easy: the best job I could ever have had. I keep coming back. Every time I do, I meet new fans and feel new energy. Roger and I are in a good place, despite our age, eager to throw our weight behind this fond farewell to all our faithful fans, and hopefully to new ones who might jump in to see what they have been missing for the last 57 years. This tour will be about fond memories, love and laughter. Make sure you join in.”
The news follows the band’s two late March London shows in support of Teenage Cancer Trust, after which longtime drummer Zak Starkey was fired and then quickly rehired.
During the press conference, Townshend said, “This wasn’t a career that I chose. It chose me. Creativity has been what sustained me, rather than performing. It has been about the relationship between the audience and us. What’s so interesting is that the fans have patiently waited. The longevity has been something that just happened. When we look at artists like the Stones, like Bruce Springsteen and other, much older artists like,Bob Dylan, one is inspired in a sense to think, what could we do that would be new and different? Whatever we play, the chances are, I will have written it. There’s that sense of closing a circle and having one last grab of trying to bring that thing to life.”
Here are The Who’s tour dates:
Aug 16 – Sunrise, FL – Amerant Bank Arena
Aug 19 – Newark, NJ – Prudential Center
Aug 21 – Philadelphia, PA – Wells Fargo Center
Aug 23 – Atlantic City, NJ – Jim Whelan Boardwalk Hall
Aug 26 – Boston, MA – Fenway Park
Aug 28 – Wantagh, NY – Northwell at Jones Beach Theater
Aug 30 – New York, NY – Madison Square Garden
Sep 2, 4 – Toronto, ON – Budweiser Stage
Sep 7 – Chicago, IL – United Center
Sep 17, 19 – Los Angeles, CA – Hollywood Bowl
Sep 21 – Mountain View, CA – Shoreline Amphitheatre
Sep 23 – Vancouver, BC – Rogers Arena
Sep 25 – Seattle, WA – Climate Pledge Arena
Sep 28 – Las Vegas, NV – MGM Grand Garden Arena
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
10 Most Essential French Rock + Metal Bands, Chosen by Novelists
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Bassist Nicolas Delestrade of French progressive metalcore band Novelists names the country’s most essential rock and metal bands. Continue reading…
Weezer, Janelle Monáe, Bright Eyes Bound For Bumbershoot
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Weezer, Bright Eyes, Janelle Monáe, Sylvan Esso, Aurora and Car Seat Headrest will make some noise at the 52nd edition of the Bumbershoot Arts & Music Festival, which will be held Aug. 30-31 on the campus of the 74-acre Seattle Center.
Also set to perform are Indigo De Souza, the Linda Lindas, hometown punk favorites the Murder City Devils, Tennis, Real Estate, Digable Planets, Frankie and the Witch Fingers, Quasi, Scowl, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Tank and the Bangas, Bob the Drag Queen, Petra Haden, Madison McFerrin and Saba.
More from Spin:
- A Day in the Life of…Maddox Batson
- Adam Duritz: ‘It’s My World and I Love It’
- The Who Announce Farewell Tour … Again
As always, Bumbershoot will shine a light on the Pacific Northwest’s robust food and drink scene through its Culinary Arts programming, with dozens of local restaurants and wineries represented. In addition, the festival’s Visual Arts and adjunct programming slate includes the sculpture-focused Century 21 District at the Pacific Science Center, the Recess District with roller-skating, gymnastics, breakdancing, double-dutch jump rope and cheerleading and several installations within the Geodesic Domes.
Tickets are available by clicking here. For the first time, fans have the option to bundle Bumbershoot access with tickets to fellow Seattle festival Capitol Hill Block Party, which takes place July 19-20 with a lineup including Thundercat, Porter Robinson, the Dare and 100 gecs.
Bumbershoot returned in 2023 after a five-year hiatus. Pavement, James Blake, Kim Gordon, Kurt Vile, Courtney Barnett, Aly & AJ and Freddie Gibbs performed at the festival last year.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
The Songs That Made Me a Songwriter: Dan Wilson’s Sunday Night Ritual
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You can’t judge a songwriter by their first hit. That’s certainly true for Dan Wilson, who topped the charts and earned his first Grammy nomination with Semisonic’s 1998 earworm “Closing Time.”
In the 27 years since that song’s release, Wilson has written for a wide range of artists, including Adele, LeAnn Rimes, John Legend, Panic! at the Disco, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and Taylor Swift. He’s collected four Grammys and last year won the CMA Award for Song of the Year for Chris Stapleton’s “White Horse.” He also received an Academy Award nomination for co-writing Jon Batiste’s “It Never Went Away” from American Symphony.
More from Spin:
- A Day in the Life of…Maddox Batson
- Adam Duritz: ‘It’s My World and I Love It’
- The Who Announce Farewell Tour … Again
The prolific songwriter’s talents stretch across genres. “I try to think of songs as ‘just songs,’ without genre,” he says. “I grew up listening to and playing jazz, and so many jazz classics are songs that originally came from other genres, like Broadway musicals or Top 40 radio or Brazilian dance music. I’ve always liked the idea that songs could travel from one genre to another. Really good songs are portable.”
While much of his time is spent in songwriting sessions, Wilson has a Sunday night ritual: sitting at his restored 1918 upright piano to “end the week on a gentle note.”
“It always comes back to the piano for me,” he says. “My musical beginnings were at my parents’ piano in Minneapolis. When I was 10 or 11, I started figuring out how to make up simple songs. In my early teens, I taught myself to improvise on the piano. Throughout high school, I would deal with my emotions and anger and blues by expressing them on the piano. I can’t imagine what that was like for my family! At this point, playing the piano at night is a lifelong habit of mine. Either a habit or a lifeline.”
Wilson began posting short pieces from these evenings to Instagram as a way of saying good night to his adopted hometown of Los Angeles, naming each piece after streets tied to significant moments in his life: “mulholland,” “beverly glen,” “moorpark,” “coldwater,” or as Wilson puts it, a map of his time living in the city. Eighteen of those pieces now appear on good night, los angeles, an album that captures the quietude of Wilson’s Sunday nights and makes it transportable.
It’s revealing to see the five (plus one) songs Wilson credits with making him a songwriter, and the context in which they made a lasting impact on him. Nearly half come from artists who were his contemporaries during the Semisonic years, or even earlier, during his time with the band Trip Shakespeare.
“At every stage of finding myself as an artist I’ve taken a lot of cues from the music that was happening at the time,” says Wilson. “This is probably because since I was 11, I knew that I was going to be a musician. I saw new records as half enjoyment and half learning ways to make music. Songs have always had deep connections to the times of my life when I first heard them. When I was a kid, I discovered that songs are a time machine that can bring you back to an earlier chapter of your life.”
Reconnecting to the Semisonic time in his life, Wilson joins the band this summer for tour dates, including stops on the “Good Intentions Tour” co-headlining with Toad the Wet Sprocket and Sixpence None the Richer.
“Coyote,” Joni Mitchell
“Coyote” on Hejira [1976] was my first introduction to Joni Mitchell, probably my most revered and most-listened-to songwriter. It has no chorus, just a quick tag at the end of each verse: “You just picked up a hitcher, a prisoner of the white lines of the freeway.” The song indoctrinated me into the life of a touring musician before I even knew what it was.
“Coyote” was also my first introduction to Jaco Pastorius, the amazing bassist whose melodies are like a second voice on Hejira. This was what made me want to learn to play the electric bass, and play it exactly like Jaco. Before I switched to guitar, I played bass in my high school’s big band, and in all my bands until I joined Trip Shakespeare.
“Purple Haze,” Jimi Hendrix
This song definitely changed my life. It was the first song I learned to play on the electric guitar. I was 13. A guitar teacher at our local music shop taught me how to play the major-minor 9th chord in the verses. So dissonant! So rebellious! So distorted! Most of my guitar riffs owe something to “Purple Haze,” even now.
“Let Down,” Radiohead
OK Computer ruled my listening life throughout the time I was recording Feeling Strangely Fine with Semisonic. When the band was recording part of the album out in the countryside at Pachyderm Studio, we’d listen to that Radiohead record all the way out there and then all the way back at the end of the day.
There were other, splashier songs on the album, but “Let Down” was the one that moved me the most. The strange arpeggiated orchestra bells and guitar in a different time signature from the song created a dissonance that I couldn’t get enough of. It was like an itch that could only be scratched by listening again. What an amazing thing to do with a piece of music.
“Live Forever,” Oasis
I was waiting to pick up a friend at the Minneapolis airport when this song came on the radio. I can still remember how thunderstruck I was. It was equal parts Beatles-y psychedelia, nasty distorted metal, nursery rhyme melodies, and Sex Pistols punk rock vocals. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. When it was over the DJ announced it was by a British band called. Oasis. What a terrible name! I thought. Now of course I love the name and everything else about the band between Definitely Maybe and Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.
“A Remark You Made,” Weather Report
I loved Heavy Weather by Weather Report. I was just getting into jazz and blues music, and this record had both pop breakthrough hits and gnarly light-speed jams. Plus, it was crammed with beautiful bass melodies by the greatest electric bassist of all time, Jaco Pastorius. But the song I kept coming back to was “A Remark You Made,” a gorgeous ballad featuring saxophonist Wayne Shorter scaling heartbreaking lyrical heights on the horn. The final coda with its relentlessly repeated rising melody—such tension—only to suddenly stop, and end in a state of harmonic suspension. OMG.
“Purple Rain,” Prince
What can I say, he’s Prince. He is funky. But in this case, he’s a diva and a balladeer too. This song should be ridiculous. It’s over-the-top dramatic, no apologies. Meanwhile, the song’s title is a pun on Prince’s favorite color purple and his royal name (Purple Reign). Even sillier, the title is a lyric stolen from “Ventura Highway,” the stoner classic by the band America. And yet we all sang along and cried and screamed until the final endless guitar solo finally came to an end.
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