Lovedrug is playing a pebble in the slingshot these days, building hefty momentum as they prepare to play a four-week residency in Nashville, release their fourth full-length album, then tour it ‘til it bleeds—a compendium two long years in the making.

Lovedrug doesn’t go platinum, they don’t sell out arenas, and they don’t necessarily get a lot of radio play, but their fan base is one that any band who can boast such things would envy—they’re social-media-savvy and willing to make long drives to see a show. They’re the kind who stick around for years, they know the songs and actually buy the records, and it’s Lovedrug’s proximity to these fans that’s always been a scientifically proven blood well to their energy.

It’s called gravity assist and it affects planets and celestial orbs and satellites and space shuttles and the like. Essentially, as a smaller, orbiting body nears a larger one controlling its orbit (because of its gravitational pull), the smaller of the two gains orbital energy. So, what would have been an elliptical traveling path of the smaller body instead gains (outward) angular momentum. NASA has teams of geniuses who operate spacecraft and carry out exploratory missions based on this principle alone. It’s how the Cassini spacecraft orbits Saturn, it’s how Voyagers 1 and 2 were able to tour the four giant gas planets and then build enough momentum to slingshot out of our solar system. Sayonara, kids.

But back to Earth.

In 2009, after having played together for seven years, Lovedrug, a band whose sound ranges from gritty, speaker-bursting, social statements to richly-toned lullabies, had reached a crossroads: It was either fold or keep playing, so the band took an indefinite break following the release of and tour with their third album, The Sucker Punch Show, in order to reevaluate their hand. “I don’t know if was so much an evolution as it was a complete reconstruction—or should I say, deconstruction—and then totally rebuilding everything from the ground up,” says front man, Michael Shepard, of their hiatus.

The Militia Group had gone under with the recession that year and left Lovedrug without a record label, but Shepard saw it as an opportunity rather than an omen. With a few solid records under their belts and a dedicated fan base, it was time for a breather, but truthfully, it didn’t necessarily mean Lovedrug would be back. It became clear that some kind of distance had to be established in order to rediscover their direction. “It was trying to figure out if we could still do this, or if I could still do this. We had gone through such a long trial period of hardships, it was either start over, so to speak, or if we can’t find our way, call it quits. It was really a pivotal time and it’s never easy to make decisions like this.”

—————-

NASA, as a way of conserving energy during flight, uses this naturally occurring gravity assist—or slingshot effect—in conjunction with man-made operations. When they want to make the most of physics, they turn on rockets (yes, ROCKETS) at the moment of greatest achieved velocity. To put it into even more stilted terms, it’s like when you know the cheat for mini-turbo slide in Mario Kart for N64.

—————-

“We started doing some writing and fumbling around and then we came about writing the song “Pink Champagne,” which is on the first EP,” says Shepard. “That song sparked the whole rebirth—a rediscovery of who we wanted to be as a band, how we wanted to sound. So, we took the next year and a half and wrote songs and rediscovered our sound.”

Though there’s been some member turnover, Lovedrug—a band who records hard and tours even harder—as an institution has been releasing albums since 2004. Their evolution from Pretend You’re Alive to their most recent series of EPs, simply named Parts I, II, and III, shows a band growing as fast as their fans—in sound, in writing, in reach, and in reception.

The last time we talked to Michael Shepard was March of 2010. He was living the finale of a darker chapter and thumbing pages of a new, hopefully brighter one. Since then, Lovedrug has reevaluated their longevity as a band; relocated from Alliance, Ohio to Nashville, Tennessee; and released three EPs and a record of covers.

The latter was a result of a PledgeMusic campaign to support the release of what would eventually become their forthcoming album, Wild Blood. Campaign sites like PledgeMusic and Kickstarter offer musicians and other artists a place for their fans to pledge money to projects in exchange for something, anything.

These projects aren’t easy. They operate on deadlines and if they aren’t 100% funded by the set date, then the artist doesn’t get any of the funding already pledged. It means that the artist must be diligent, persistent, and available. It doesn’t hurt to have a sizeable following, either.

The “I Am Lovedrug” Campaign promised a recorded cover of “almost any song in the universe” in exchange for a $150 pledge. They compiled the best (like Stevie Nicks’ “You Can Talk To Me,” Def Leppard’s “Hysteria,” and “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory), called it The Best of I Am Lovedrug, and put it on Bandcamp. Other goodies given in gratitude for pledging (as little as fifteen dollars to as much as 3K) towards the campaign were personal thank-you phone calls, autographed records, original paintings by Michael Shepard, guest list spots, house shows, and T-shirts. For the next year, they released video updates, offered exclusive pledger downloads, sold Lovedrug merchandise, and corresponded with fans on their progress. Whew.

Meanwhile, in Outer Space.

In order for the slingshot effect to work, conditions have to be just right. In 1989, NASA sent the Galileo spacecraft for a ride aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis. It’s goal was Jupiter, but thanks to some equipment limitations, it ended up taking an unplanned detour once by Venus and twice by Earth.

A year later, The Ulysses probe came close. As it neared Jupiter on a similar mission, the probe unexpectedly fell through the planet’s gravity field and the two bodies exchanged momentum. What resulted was a bent trajectory that sent Ulysses into a new orbit, passing over the Sun’s poles. The new path, however, ended up being within its target. Employing the gravity assist maneuver meant that Ulysses, while in a different planetary plane than originally planned, was able to function as intended and gather the necessary information, and the mission was a success. (You got the Starman just in time to pass Bowser in the last turn of the Time Trial race.)

—————-

March sixth marks the drop of Wild Blood. It’s a release two years coming, or maybe more than that, if you consider it’s been nearly eight since their first album, Pretend You’re Alive, was released. Two years isn’t exactly a significant gap between records, but it’s been twenty-four months spent raising the funds, writing the material, recording it, mixing it , mastering it, planning a tour, and promoting the record on a grassroots level.

Shepard is counting the new album as their best work to date. “It’s the most time I’ve ever devoted to anything creative in my life. Taking two years to make an album is a bit of a mountain to climb. It feels like a weight’s being lifted in a lot of ways because I’m so excited about the material—it’s the best stuff we’ve ever written. Lyrically, it’s coming from a place within me that I feel is very positive, and I’m very, very proud of it.”

And there it is. Gravity assisted.

“It really was a collaborative effort between us and the fans—them appreciating us for what we do and us giving something back to them. There’s a mutual reward there on both ends, but it’s not easy.”

Wild Blood fizzles with an optimistic spirit we’ve only seen since the EP trilogy. Sure, we saw traces peppered throughout their current catalog with tracks like “Castling” and “Rocknroll,” but it’s with Wild Blood that the impetus has shifted. The record opens with the title track: a bright, steady, call to living free. Songs like “We Were Owls” and the rejuvenating “Pink Champagne” nod to the sweet madness of youth.

“In a lot of ways it’s really like our first record,” says Shepard. “It’s just coming from a place of four of us coming together and putting our hearts on the table and writing a bunch of material that feels good.  There’s no agenda. We were able to take enough time off to where we could really step away from the timelines and the labels and the booking agencies—we just weren’t thinking of that.”

Lovedrug is currently playing a four-week residency at Nashville’s 12th and Porter. Working chronologically each Tuesday night, they’ll play each of their records cover-to-cover, leading up to the March sixth release of Wild Blood. The final week serving as a long-awaited celebration, no doubt, but also a kickoff for their U.S. tour.

“It feels like we’re about to be slung out of the slingshot,” says Shepard. “We’ve been dormant for about two years, so we’re excited to be back.”

Dormant? Hardly.

Wild Blood is out March 6th. Until then, you can catch a preview of the album on Spotify, check out their playlists, or see them on Tuesday nights at 12th and Porter. 

I hosted a Grammy Awards viewing party at my house last night, which just means that I gathered a handful of my snarkiest friends to make smart comments and stalk Witstream.

Each of us came armed with our own brand of witticism—pop culture awards ceremonies are to comedically inclined music writers as GOP debates are to HuffPost bloggers. We have palpable dreams about fodder this rich. Fellow red thinker, Jesse McCarl, and I were blindly firing with both barrels into the interwebs last night. You’re welcome, Twitter feeds everywhere!

Mollifying the night’s celebratory tone was, of course, somberness in the wake of Whitney Houston’s death on Saturday. Host LL Cool J (which, I learned, is the diminutive for Laura Lynn Cool Johnson) opened the night with a prayer for Whitney’s family, and later, Stevie Wonder gave what I like to believe was a heartfelt testament to Miss Houston’s gift, but it’s hard to tell when that guy’s being sincere and when he’s just reading off the teleprompter.

The night’s most notable performances were Bonnie Raitt’s and Alicia Keys’ paying homage to the late Etta James with “Sunday Kind of Love,” and Jennifer Hudson’s rendition of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” Call us dramatic, but after Hudson’s performance, the room fell silent—there’s not a joke we could have or should have made at that moment. The country tribute to Glen Campbell was also memorable. I wanted him to sing “Galveston” so badly so I could join in and really feel alive, but we can’t have everything in this life, now can we? Airtime was essentially filled with latex stage tricks and cinematics from high-production-cost, top forty poppers, which slighted performers like Alicia Keys & Bonnie Raitt, and The Civil Wars.

Several RTM favorites walked away decorated last night. The Civil Wars landed both Best Country Duo/ Group Performance and Best Folk Album, Alison Krauss and Union Station took home Best Bluegrass Album for Paper Airplane, beating out Steve Martin & the Steep Canyon Rangers, The Del McCoury Band, Ralph Stanley, and Chris Thile & Michael Daves. Foo Fighters wiped the floors with their unwashed hair in the Rock category, beating out heavy hitters like Kings of Leon, Radiohead, and Mumford & Sons.

Chris Brown would not stop performing, and at one point dance-climbed what appeared to be the Aggro Crag from GUTS. I think Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys has been moonlighting as someone named David Guetta, and I have a theory that this Banksy fellow hipsters are hunting is also this Deadmau5 character. It’s either him or Michelle Duggar with an electronic mouse face. We may never know the truth.

Stay with us throughout All Music Month. We’re not done being clever.

Photo by Eva Rinaldi

Pop star Katy Perry recently tied Michael Jackson for the most number one singles from the same album. Katy and her team, however, refuse to leave well enough alone. They pulled out all the stops for yet another megahit, but eventually fell short. This has divided people into three main camps: Those who support Katy, those who think its too soon to set out on a vendetta against the late Michael, and those who read Red Thought Media and have no idea what a Katy Perry is.

While Katy has simply matched MJ’s record, she is the first female artist to have five singles from a single album reach the top of the Billboard Hot 100 charts. The only other album to accomplish that is 1987’s Bad by the King of Pop himself. Katy’s megahits were “California Gurls,” which actually has as many letter as ‘California Girls;’ “Teenage Dream,” the title track; “Firework,” proof she didn’t have to talk about penises every time; “E.T.;” and finally, “Last Friday Night.”

Team Katy initially responded to the success by continuing to ride the wave and potentially break their own record. They dropped “The One That Got Away,” a mid-tempo ode to lost love. It performed well, but just wasn’t hitting #1. For the video, they made an eerie looking 80-year-old Katy in the hopes of earning a lot of hits and thus boosting radio play, but it wasn’t quite enough. Next came a remix by–who else?–B.o.B. This just pissed fans off, wondering why she would put a silly rap verse over an otherwise emotional song. To recover from that misstep, the team released an acoustic version to emphasize Katy’s vocal talent. Now I don’t know if this version actually did anything to help the charts situation, but it did teach me that the word “acoustic” has become grossly misused.

It may finally be time to give it up, guys. This track is the one that got away from topping the charts. (For more puns regarding the song’s title, e-mail me at jesse.mccarl@gmail.com.) It’s time to analyze your options regarding the future of Teenage Dream. 

Try and Try Again

Most of Teenage Dream is incredibly radio friendly. There’s got to be something else on there with #1 potential. “Pearl” is another slow jam that’s all about some women’s empowerment. Just saying, works for Beyoncé. The ballad “Not Like the Movies” was performed at the Grammy’s last year, but never officially dropped. “Peacock,” has pretty risqué lyrics, but already reached #1 for Billboard’s Dance/Club charts.  Personally, I see the most potential in “Hummingbird Heartbeat,” which is summer-radio fodder and still raunchy enough to please her sexually-hyperactive fan base.

A Rose By Any Other Name?

It has become very popular in mainstream music to milk an album by rereleasing it with a few more tracks and calling it deluxe. Rihanna did this with Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded and Lady Gaga turned The Fame into The Fame Monster. All Katy needs to do is release The Teenage Dream Monster and throw in a few sure-fire hits.  This allows her to technically break the record, but all the MJ loyalists will feel better about the situation by insisting any further #1’s aren’t really from the same album.

If You Love Something, Let It Go

It’s okay, Katy. You’re young, talented, and clearly not leaving the airwaves anytime soon. You can set your own records instead of scrambling now to make a name for yourself. Don’t discount a strong album with ill-fitting remixes for the sake of a silly record. Michael Jackson never resorted to that.  Your career will have more longevity if you don’t get so hung up on the sophomore effort.

But now I realize how hung up on your sophomore album I have become, and will detox with a folk-heavy playlist until I feel better about myself. 

Nothing goes together like Taco Bell and proximity to a restroom. I don’t think that’s the axiom, but it’s also not wrong. Everyone’s familiar with those famous pairings like Romulus and Remus, mint and chocolate, or trying to spell “queue,” pouring ash on your head, tearing your clothes, and praying for dawn. I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s like hot tea on a cool Sunday afternoon, which is where I am right now.

The music we hear scores our lives and kicks our memories one way or another—lobbing them into a swing—be it positively or negatively—simply through the power of sound. The following are a few ways these sounds can track our lives–some cartographic metronome. The formula is simple: pair the activity with the music and you’ve got something that glimpses the human experience.

Spoon’s “Fitted Shirt” and “Anything You Want”: Loading your belongings into a mobile storage unit.

Just imagine loading all of your things into liquor boxes, stacking them into one of those moveable PODs, and moving yourself back into your folks’ house in your mid- to late twenties. It’ll get better, sure. But for now, you’re left to think about your life against the backdrop of your parents’ accomplishments and shortcomings, none of them looking quite so pale in comparison to your own. Girls Can Tell could actually serve as a soundtrack for such an occasion—a bittersweet look back at what you almost were, but these two make me feel particularly nostalgic. I mean, “Fitted Shirt”? It’s a young man’s struggle to fit into his father’s world. Beautiful.

Foster the People: Reading GQ and sweating.

Get your sweat on at the gym to hormonally (and SYNTHetically) affected radio dance pop. It layers nicely behind glossy pages of sartorially inclined men with facial hair and too-nice fingernails and a forty-five minute recumbent bike ride. Warning: Think of this band as dry-clean-clean only: it wears out quickly and starts to fit a little funky if you drop diligence. So, handle with care and get that heart rate up, chief.

Jessie Baylin’s Little Spark: Road-tripping across the South.

Baylin’s latest release is perfectly lovely. Seal the deal on your love affair with all that is America with this swooning, romancing record. Pop in Little Spark around the North Carolina/Tennessee border and drive it through the mountains. Wax nostalgic during “Yuma” and fall in love with the imaginary man in your passenger seat during “Dancer.”

Wilco’s “Sunken Treasure”: Staring at the phone and waiting for Jason Schwartzman to call.

I’m not ready to talk about this one yet.

Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe”: Cleaning the serratia marcescens out of your tub.

Bobbie Gentry’s 1967 ballad is one of the greatest of the decade—of the entire American folk cannon, really. Gentry was one of the first female artists to write and produce her own material, so as you’re channeling independent Gentry and purging the serratia (the pink stuff that collects in the shower or toilet or the like), hypothesize about what exactly she and Billie Joe threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge. Then call me and we’ll argue it out.

Kings Of Leon’s “Happy Alone”: Trying on Shoes.

Not necessarily in public, though. I like to hear this one while I’m getting ready to go out for a night on the town–crank it to 120 decibels and let the neighbors beg for mercy. As you try on different pairs of shoes for your night out, see how they dance with this gem from the Kings’ first record.

Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me”: See “Wilco’s ‘Sunken Treasure’” above.

Too soon.

Kimbra’s Settle Down EP: Blogging and Wine.

I love pop music. I don’t know as much about it as our newest contributor, Jesse McCarl, but I do know that America has dropped the ball when it comes to the caliber of our radio output. It’s better to go with imports these days. This little Kiwi is sexy, talented, and fresh, and her work ethic is hands-on and dirty. She plays well with a glass of red (pinot noir, specifically) and a blog.

“Name your three favorite philosophers. It’ll be cute way to begin the article, what with your getting arrested and all.”

“I really like reading Hegel,” Tyler Lyle tells me.

He’s a singer-songwriter. A particularly good one who has recorded two regenerative albums and written with the Dixie Chicks and is self-aware enough to tell me, “I know how I get fed. My base is still good old Christian WASP-y college kids. Church people don’t boo.”

Let’s unpack the key word in the previous sentence: Type the word “synonym” into a search engine and the first auto-completion is “synonyms for beauty.” That’s everyone’s problem with singer-songwriters. They’re lookingto mine the world of its beauty, utilize and craft it– comodify it, sure–into something the human brain can carry around like a pocket watch. But typically they’re hobbyists. Lazy hobbyists that want to find beauty in”synonyms for beauty.”

Singer-songwriters are people (most likely a dude) who necrostare directly into your pupils or cast their gaze onto the carpet and do music to you.They afflict campfires and common rooms and, best-case scenario, they’llplay “Hotel California” or “Two Princes” and, if you’ve slipped across their event horizon, they have an original for you.

They’re socially armored events wearing human camouflage.

Until a singer-songwriter hands you a pocket watch and inside you find all of the issues you wad under your car seat just to get through the day and be a person– I’m going to die, most of my material pleasure derives from others’ toil and pain–neatly pictured opposite the clock face. And youwant to put it down but it looks fetching and it’s fun to pull it from your pocket and people ask, “Hey what’s that pocket watch you’re humming?”

The point is: Tyler Lyle has produced such a timepiece. Listen to “On Parry Sound (Onward Goldmund!)” and you’ll keep in the pocket next to your heart. Sorry if that makes Lyle seem twee. He’s not attuned to pleasure in a way that makes him capable of twee (in a pleasure for pleasure’s sake sort ofway, I mean). It’s more of a cartographer’s pleasure, describing precisely where he is, pointing out that you’re not too far away.

Stylistically, he’s a more agile Todd Snider without the growl, and his voice is similar Damien Rice if Damien Rice weren’t so fragile sounding. He pivots his tone between ache, aw-shucks, and overwhelmed, from shitkicking numbers like “One Legged Woman”(from Inland Islands/Bad Things and Collard Greens) to the warm panacea of “When I Say That I Love You…” off Lyle’smost recent effort, The Golden Age & The Silver Girl.

His musical chops aren’t lacking and there are only so many adjectives I can piledrive you with before I lose the ferrule of credibility I have as a”music journalist” (I’m laughing too) and you don’t check out Tyler Lyle due to spite. So here’s the reason you’ll finish the article: philosophy.

Tyler Lyle was recently arrested as a result of the police’s cull of Occupy LA (he writes a thorough account of it here). To be crystal: Lyle is not associated with the movement in any official capacity. He attended the way that UN Observers watch elections in politically mired nation sates.

“I wanted to attend to watch for police brutality,” Lyle says. “I know that’s something I’m against–even if I’m not sure about the rest of it,the diffuse motivations of the Occupy movement. I couldn’t care less about bailouts, but I can witness police brutality. Peaceful protests need to happen, and I get to vote for what the future looks like with my body.”

That’s why I wanted to ask about Tyler Lyle’s philosophy. Everyone I know who has gotten arrested has been over the limit or they crashed into a fishmarket (actually far more tragic than it sounds). Regardless of the legacy, the Occupy movement sheds what needs to be realized, and what Lyle documented using his life as film, was the instantiation of principle.

“What?” is how I respond to the Hegel answer. Hegel’s notoriously divisive because he couches some of the most influential ideas in the history of the Western world in Battle Earth-bad writing. Tommy Wiseau would adapt Hegel’s Critique of Pure Reason for the screen.

“‘Everything real is rational,’” Lyle quotes. “‘Every rational is real.’ That’s beautiful.”

I tell him to stop joking around and answer the question.

“My three favorite philosophers? Rilke, Rumi, and Henry Miller,” Lyle says.

Yeah, I looked those guys up on Wikipedia. They’re not actually philosophers as much as they are poets and novelists.

“Art gets at a higher truth than philosophy, than rationalism,” Lyle says.

Nietzsche said, ‘In order to birth a dancing star you must have chaos inside you.” So what if I dated a girl with that tattooed on her arm? It applies. If anything art kindles or cages that chaos. Sometimes art is justliving and sometimes art gets you arrested.

“I’m a songwriter,” Lyle says. “I sit at my computer and write songs all day, and [the Occupy movement] is what I saw. This is what I was living. I couldn’t not look into it. I would describe myself as a humanist. A bad humanist maybe, but you can’t look at someone and say they don’t have value.”

The Golden Age & The Silver Girl drops in a form that you can actually touch and throw and slobber on February 7th. Or, if you’re into the virtual thing, you can get it on bandcamp.

They’ve grown a woman from the ground, delivered a mean punch, and played the generous medical bartender. Now the Punch Brothers are back with a new record, Who’s Feeling Young Now? We caught up with bassist Paul Kowert on collaboration, punctuation, and marriage.

You joined the Punch Brothers on their third record, Antifogmatic. Was it is difficult coming into the mix later on?

Paul Kowert// It wasn’t difficult to fit into the dynamic at all. We all get along really well; it’s kind of a natural fit as far as relationships go. It was tough learning all the material I needed to. They were still playing “The Blind Leaving the Blind” and other stuff from Punch and How to Grow a Woman From the Ground, so I had to learn most of that material in a couple of weeks, which was kind of a crunch for me. I was a fan of the band before I joined it and I had been following Chris Thile for a long time. I was familiar with their music and it had really shaped my musical sights.

How did you get involved?

PK// Things weren’t working out with their old bass player [Greg Garrison]. He just couldn’t tour as much as they needed him to. I had met Thile at a Carnegie Hall workshop that Edgar Meyer had put on. I was studying with Edgar at the Curtis Institute of Music at the time and he recommended a couple of guys to go up for an audition, and it worked out.

You’re not only the newest, but you’re also the youngest. Do you like to rub it in their faces that you’re youthful and spry?

PK// I don’t get to work that angle as much as they get to work me for being green.

You made widely read, international headlines in 2009 for your unconventional wedding. Are you still married to your bass?

PK// Yes, I am happily married. You know, it’s easy to keep a relationship with your bass when you take it on the road. [The Punch Brothers] want to call her Molly, but I prefer something a little less affectionate, like Number Twenty-Eight.

What can we expect with Who’s Feeling Young Now?

PK// Well, we’re really proud of the record. It’s nice to have finished it and feel really good about what we’ve done, which is tough when you’re as critical of your own music as we are. There are a couple of instrumentals on it, and it’s definitely a collaboration like Antifogmatic was in that I think we really hit our stride. We’ve had more practice writing together and seeing what works for us; we’ve just gotten better at it.

The writing of this record was influenced our experiences having made Antifogmatic and then touring it, but even more specifically, the music is really influenced by the audiences we’ve been playing for, and the sound of our live show—what we’ve found is powerful and what feels good to play live.

What’s the atmosphere like during a Punch Brother’s writing session?

PK// We do it in one of our apartments, so we try to cut off by nine for the sake of our neighbors. We’ll say ‘we have this many days and we’d love to finish this song within the next two.’ It’s pretty goal-oriented, but also pretty silly.

What was the writing process like for the new record?

PK// There’s no set formula, of course. Thile has the most creative contribution. He’s such a forceful musician, and he’s had so much experience. He has the most contribution of any individual members, but everybody chimes in and has a say in everything that gets done. The hope is that we end up with something that we all took part in the creation of and that we can all individually identify.

Is there a track that you’re most proud of?

PK// I’m just always excited to see a song become as good as it possibly can. We’ve said it all along the way—and I still believe that it’s true—that being in a band is being a part of something bigger than yourself and creating something that you couldn’t on your own. I will say that I’m pretty proud of “Kid A.” I took a solo voice on that song, but more important than that, I just think the whole thing turned out really beautifully. The sound that our producer, Jaquire, came out with is beautiful. There’s a very different sound for every song on the record.

What was it like working with Producer Jaquire King?

PK// He was great. He was the most involved in the whole process as any producer we’ve had, even the ones before Antifogmatic. He came to New York and helped us write and arrange some of the songs we had put together for the record. Then, he was in the studio every minute that we were, and more. He was doing rough mixes in the morning before we would get there, and was working really hard in the studio with us, and it shows in a really positive way. Jacquire got really amazing sounds on our instruments. But even as far as writing and arranging the music, he leant a different ear than any of us have: on one hand just being a third—or sixth—party, but also the way he approaches music is a little less ‘music talkie’ than ours. He has great instincts and our music hits him in a very different way than it hits us, and that’s a good thing.

Two of these tracks were written with Josh Ritter.

PK// Yes. Two of the tracks are lyrical collaborations between Thile and Josh—“New York City” and “Hundred Dollars.” I didn’t have anything to do with that, but I really like what he introduced.

Where does the title from this record come from?

PK// It’s the name of one of the songs. It came when we were searching for a title, trying out a few names and passing them by people who were involved. I’ll leave the meaning of the lyrics to Thile; I feel like he’d have some ideas about how it relates to the overall meaning—a lot of the lyrics involve time—but we all liked the way it sounded. I like the question mark.

What can we expect with the upcoming tour? You guys are famous for your covers, but now that “Kid A” is on the record, what are you going to be bringing to your live shows?

PK// We will be playing some stuff from our last records, but we’re really loving the sound we’ve found with the new one. It’s always about making the best show possible for our audience and for ourselves. At this point, we have quite a lot of material to create a set list from, but we’ll definitely be playing a handful of songs off the new record, and every one we’ve made in the past is sure to be represented.

Who’s Feeling Young Now drops February 14th, and the Punch Brothers’ U.S. tour kicks off February 17th in Boone, NC.

Catch them in our hometown of Wilmington on February 18th at the Brooklyn Arts Center. Get tickets here.

By Emily McCrary 

Meeting artists is a dangerous business. Every interview is pregnant with that ugly baby named arrogance or attitude—the possibility that the person seated in front of you, while knackful, will wreck their own artistic persona in one fell swoop. But sometimes, the baby comes out crying and screaming and red in the cheeks and it’s the greatest single thing you’ve ever laid eyes on, and suddenly that poem or that song or that painting is alive. The artist is sitting right in front of you and pulling back the curtain—and this time she’s the man behind it and she’s fielding questions. 

Melissa Range loves swimming. She likes to have coffee every morning and thinks that hotels can be depressing. She loves the South and looks forward to a day when she can move back to her home soil from her current location in Missouri. She has trouble finishing a narrative, but sees no reason that poets today can’t write epics, and she loves the playful quality of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ work. Melissa Range possesses the intellectual austerity of a doctoral candidate, yet simultaneously bubbles with the adolescent enthusiasm of someone who has just learned for the first time what a poem is, or found out how to manipulate the sound of a palatalized stop, or discovered slant rhyme, or uncovered how to make a reader feel, well, present in the work.

It’s obvious that Range is from the South, from Tennessee even. Her accent is pronounced but her tone is gentle, and she punctuates her sentences with giggles and drawn out vowels. She drops g’s and she uses the word “like,” but you’d never doubt her education. It’s almost as if she makes saying it okay.

Rtm spent the morning sipping coffee with Melissa Range and talking about what it means to be a writer in the South. We asked Range if she considers herself thus—that is, a Southern writer—and braced ourselves for the worst. It’s not uncommon to resent a label like that, but the more we talked to her, Range surprised us again and again.

“I do consider myself a Southern writer,” she says, smiling. “I specifically consider myself an Appalachian poet because I’m from East Tennessee and I’m from Appalachia, and that’s a different Southern experience. The geography’s different. The economics. It’s definitely a poorer region of the south. There’s a history of a lot of denigration of the region—I think there’s a lot of history of denigration of the South overall.”

And Range is no stranger to said denigration. She’s been told that it’s in her best interest to enroll in speech therapy to lose her accent if she ever hopes to be taken seriously. She tells the story of being in a writers’ colony in New York early in her writing career: A composer from New York criticized her for continuing to live and write in the South, because, as he claimed, all the great art is made in New York. Range didn’t miss a beat in reminding him that William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty all hail from below the Mason-Dixon line, just like herself.

Labels don’t seem to bother Range. There’s a strength about her that is no doubt rooted in that tradition of self-assured Southern women—that strange coexistence of stubborn and sweet, gentle and fervid. Her headstrong sense of identity bolsters the power of her writing. Much of her first book of poems, Horse and Rider, personifies weapons, deals with violence, and explores battlefield mentality. It’s far from gentle, yet it’s vulgar in the most appealing of ways. It’s sound driven, as is much of Range’s work, and commands language as deftly as Maurice Ravel did his ivories.

Range is a student of language, especially in its archaic forms—saturating her poems with words like “berserker” and “yeoman.” Her poem, “The Battle-Axe,” first published in New South, reads:

But let’s dial up some double-digit centuries. After all, Melissa Range lives here too. During her reading at the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Writers’ Week, Range stops mid-poem. “Now, do you y’all know the phrase ‘flat as a flitter’?” she says. “No? Well, my Grandma used to say it, and I just love the way it sounds, so I decided it needed to go into a poem.” And Ranges rolls back into an ode to her Southern upbringing. That’s how Melissa Range does things—with self-assured resolve.

“I feel really committed to preserving the language [of the South],” says Range. “That’s one reason I use a lot of archaic words in my poems, and it’s also a reason that I want to continue to explore Southern slang and Southern construction, specifically the words and speech patterns of my grandmother’s generation. When I left my hometown, I immediately saw what people thought of where I’m from. They would hear my Southern accent and I heard the way they talked about hillbillies or poor people—it really instilled in me a commitment to always being on the side of the oppressed, the underdog. To me, that seems very tied to where I’m from.”

And that’s just it—It’s not a North-South border war. It’s not a dust-kicking or a pot-stirring. It’s just reaching into her knapsack and pulling out some of the pieces we’ve been looking for, even if we couldn’t give them a name. How easy it is to forget when advocacy is not limited the abrasive or the political or the pitiful, but can simply be holding a microphone to a tradition, a place–even a language–that often gets marginalized for the sake of ethnocentricity or some unnecessary guilt.

“I have a protagonist in my head,” Range says, “who’s about seventy-years-old. He’s seen more than I’ve seen, so I’m not sure how to flesh him out yet. He’s a character who goes wandering, but why does he do that? I can see him in all these places and the way he acts and the way he interacts with people, but until I figure out what make him leave and never come back, I don’t know how to pursue him.”

She takes a few sips of coffee and thinks a little bit more. “I’m just not wise enough to write it yet,” she says, resigning, allowing herself to not know the answers right now. Letting fall that green curtain and going back to work.

Melissa Range’s first book, Horse and Rider, won the 2010 Walt McDonald First Book Award. The Believer called it “exciting, disturbing, [and] promising.” Melissa Range also has a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award under her belt, a Discovery/ The Nation Prize, a scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and residencies at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She boasts publication in the Hudson Review, Image, and The Paris Review, to name a few. She’s currently working on her PhD in English at the University of Missouri.

The Paris Review Daily published a piece last month by John Jeremiah Sullivan titled, “There is a Gold Light in Certain Old Paintings.” It’s not exactly in my nature to be critical (That’s a lie–it is!), but I would like to call your attention here in order to identify and error.

But before I do so, you need to know that Mr. Sullivan is one of my favorite writers whom I have followed for many years. He wrote a piece for GQ back in 2004 that completely ploughed the way I read features. Around this same time, he was writing a music review for New York magazine in which he covered Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, two of my favorite songwriters. (He also reviewed Nirvana, for whom I still possess a tremendous feeling of un-showered, denim-donning, Doc Marten-wearing, revelrous nostalgia.) In fact, a nonfiction professor of mine exceptionally embarrassed me one day by informing Sullivan, who had walked into a workshop of mine, that I was a self-proclaimed groupie of his (Sullivan teaches at my alma mater).

That being said, Mr. Sullivan, we need to talk about this North Carolina barbecue business you bring up.

In this lovely story, Sullivan, Denis Johnson, and Ben George go to a BBQ joint on the coast of North Carolina. Johnson is thrilled to find that the sandwich he eats at Parchies is one that he has been searching for since childhood. That’s wonderful. I’m glad you enjoyed this, Mr. Johnson, but there is something you need to know.

Sullivan writes, “In the Cape Fear country, and throughout the piedmont of the state, we have this unusual kind of barbecue [sic], which uses a light vinegar sauce instead of the red stuff and tastes totally different than what you expect if you grew up west of here.” True, true, JJS, it is a lot different than what you might find elsewhere in the States or even the South, but it is not so homogenous. I hail from said piedmont of North Carolina and it is here that we are producing something very unlike a Parchies pig: Lexington style barbecue.

Lexington style (sometimes called Western style) differs from Eastern style in that ketchup is added to the vinegar-based “sauce” which is actually referred to as dip, and while Eastern roasters cook the whole pig, you’ll only find the dark, fatty(er), shoulder meat in Lexington style. The subjective difference is that Eastern is less flavorful and its sauce more sour. When you cook the whole shoulder (unbasted) over hickory, like we do in the western part of the state, you’re going to get something that is dimensionally flavorful versus flat.

Now, here I will make my concessions: Mr. Sullivan’s mistake was an understandable one, considering none of the parties involved in the meal at Parchies that day are North Carolina natives. And there is even a whole other breed of barbecue being made west of Lexington in our mountain counties that some refer to as Asheville barbecue, about which I concede that I know very little.

I remember the first time I tried Eastern style barbecue. I was in high school, and my parents and I were driving to Wilmington to visit my older brother in college. About two hours shy of our destination, we decided we were hungry. We pulled off at exit 312-Garner, Clayton, Fuquay-Varina, which is just east of Raleigh. Without warning, my father pulled into the “SCNB” (Smithfield’s Chicken ‘n Barbecue) parking lot.

“We have to do this,” he said, “if we want to defend Lexington.”

We dined with the devil that day. The meat wasn’t terrible, but it was not Lexington style. It was unexciting and alien. We ate most of the meal in silence, afraid that conversation might reveal our identities and someone would report back to the west that we had eaten with the enemy. “We tell no one about this,” he said as we got back into the car. Until just now, I’ve never talked about that day.

The lines are unclear, though. Somewhere between Burlington and Raleigh, there is a dubious, invisible line that separates dip from sauce and whole hog from shoulder. As an editor, I am inclined to be impartial to the question of superiority, but I am going to ignore that inclination and say that Lexington style barbecue is better. Period. I’ve had both in numerous forms and from numerous purveyors, but I can honestly say that there is nothing quite like a fatty hog shoulder slow roasted over hickory. Nothing in this world.

I write this not to pick some puerile fight with Mr. Sullivan or with The Paris Review. I write this to spread the gospel of Lexington style barbecue to Sullivan and to anyone who might read this and be lead to believe that Western and Eastern practitioners of hog roasting are kin to one another. And also to say that if you and I ever find ourselves in the piedmont of North Carolina at the same time, Mr. Sullivan, I will gladly buy you a large chopped tray with slaw and hush puppies.

[Wipes mouth of barbecue stains, takes a swig of pale ale, and clears throat.]

That being said, you’re looking at some new goodies here on rtm. We’re expanding our horizons and talking to more than just musicians. We’ve also opened submissions for our newest domain: words.redthoughtmedia.com. This is where you’ll be able to submit creative works for publication; it functions like a literary journal.

I’m not really one for “themes,” but this month it looks like we’ve found ourself exploring place–be it metaphorical or physical–and how that doesn’t always agree with ourselves or the ones around us. Not a bad thing to think about here at the kickoff of the year as you’re taking a good look at where you are and how you got there, and deciding how you’re going to eat your barbecue.

This month, hear from visual artist Anna Reser as she writes about her own work in terms of thievery, and I speak with collage artist Brandon Spence about how to get friendly with Elmer’s glue. Writer/Visual Artist Rod McClain presents a pretty convincing argument for how horrible it is to be a writer and an artist, but why it’s impossible to stop. You’ll also find more music from the East as rtm talks to Israeli band, Acollectíve. Later this month, you’ll hear poet Melissa Range‘s take on being a Southern writer, and also hear from Yael Warach on that art oh, so foreign to me–the ballet. And there’s still more to come, but I can’t dish just yet–February is music month and we’ll be talking to some of my favorites.

Happy New Year. May it be full of great blessing and new discoveries. And as always, thanks to all our readers and for your love and support. Keep up the freakness.

Cheers,

em

 “You just have that moment when you realize what you want to do, and when you start actually doing it, it begins to inform everything else,”

says Brandon Spence about the art of collage, one that fell into his lap partly out of happenstance, partly out of necessity. After leaving the New Hampshire Institute of Art (where he spent two years), Spence found a shocking lack of access to printing presses or thousand-dollar equipment, but magazines aplenty. He’s a master of Fiskars and Elmer’s, and he’s got stacks upon stacks of mid-twentieth century issues of Good Housekeeping, The Farmer’s Journal, and National Geographic. Spence likes a good hunt for the right clip, but he’s not averse to letting the images do most of the work.

Most of Spence’s work of late has been influenced by conversations he’s had with a friend about existential philosophy or the various theories on earth’s origin; his friend is a theist, Spence an atheist. “It’s really an exercise for the brain. A lot of my collages take place in an alternate sort of dimension of space time where the universe is in some sort of flux—it’s either collapsing or expanding.”

“A big problem I always had was with concept. I find that if I go to draw or paint without a concept in mind or something I know I want to do, the blank canvas is that much more intimidating because I have no idea where to start. If I have stacks of reference images and I just start cutting, the ideas come a little more organically, and the ideas finally gel and take shape.”

]]> http://redthoughtmedia.com/brandon-spence-ctrl-x-and-ctrl-v/feed/ 0 http://redthoughtmedia.com/acollective-and-then-there-were-seven-monkeys-jumping-on-the-bed/ http://redthoughtmedia.com/acollective-and-then-there-were-seven-monkeys-jumping-on-the-bed/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:49:20 +0000 admin http://redthoughtmedia.com/?p=2447 January 4, 2012

It’s two o’clock in Wilmington, North Carolina. It’s nine o’clock in Tel Aviv, Israel. Thanks to free international calling on the Internet, I’m having a faceless conversation with a stranger. On the other side is a man with a sexy accent. This isn’t what happens if you click on one of those junk e-mails promising a larger something-or-other or a Russian bride, or even a virtual escort service, but I do have to resist the urge to ask him what he’s wearing//

I’m talking to Idan Rabinovici. Idan has lived all over the world—anywhere from California to London to Israel, where he was born and currently lives—and so has this sort of internationally ambiguous accent. It’s tough to tell where he’s from (you might even say Scotland from his rounded, non-palatalized “r’s”), but chances are, anywhere he goes would immediately pin him both an alien and a native in one swift blow.

Idan Rabinovici is one of seven who make up the band Acollectíve (that’s a soft “a”)—their name lends itself more accurately to a description of what they do than the word “band.” If you threw any of the seven guys any musical instrument, it’s likely that they already play it or even teach it. Rabinovici is a classically trained pianist and he taught himself a few others like the melodica, the guitar, and the harmonica, but each of the guys play at least a dozen or so apiece. Having instruments thrown at them is probably not all that foreign to them either, that’s kind of what a live performance looks like. In one of of their song,“Whisky Eyes” (notice the European spelling), Rabinovici bounces back and forth between a mic and a keyboard that his brother and fellow band member, Roy, is already playing. There’s plenty of hearty brass and they aren’t shy of the harmonica.

Idan Rabinovici, Roy Rabinovici, Roy Rieck, Daniel Shoham, Chef Luzia, Emanuel Slonin, and Joseph E-shine grew up in Tel Aviv, all going to different art schools or music schools and got involved in music at a young age. By early high school, they had met but were no more than messing around with sound. Military enlistment in Israel is mandatory for all citizens over eighteen, so music was suspended for the boys at least for a time. When they returned from military service, they would meet in a friend’s rehearsal room and play with no agenda other than to make noise. “It took us a while to understand that we were a band, in the common sense. I think, at first, we tried to be a group of musicians that were involved in various projects and who didn’t have one dedicated project that they work under. We started living together [in London (he likens it to living with monkeys)], we started touring together [in the UK and France], and we started writing a lot of the material together. It started making more sense,” says Rabinovici. “We were just stubborn and naïve enough to keep doing it as we grew older.”

Stubborn isn’t a bad word, either. Acollectíve is not only self-managed, but they’re also on their own label, and each of the seven fulfills administrative duties. This self-sufficiency is a mark of youthful hubris, sure, but also a hard and fast rule for excellence and painstaking attention to detail—sometimes outsourcing tastes room temperature. What they landed on is their own brand of “construction yard folk.” At least that’s what he calls it, but some things are getting lost in translation.

Their first album, Onwards, released in March of 2011, is a result of a year and a half of the band putting themselves together in some conventional fashion. “A lot of Onwards was written while we were touring, while we were looking for somewhere to be based, while we were becoming a band and deciding what it is we want to do with our lives.” Understandable for such a young band—all of them fall between the ages of twenty and twenty-seven. Such is the message that Onwards sends, though Rabinovici was reluctant to distill the record to a proverbial “message.” “A lot of it is about how important it is to be in constant motion in your life and your surroundings,” he says. “Not even in the sense of having something to look forward to, but being a part of an ongoing process.”

Their first album did well in the UK and Israel, and Acollectíve has been working on new material, too, but it won’t necessarily be ready for a 2012 release. Like I said, painstaking attention to detail—they like to polish, but they also leave room for spontaneity. “This album is been different [from Onwards], but I don’t even understand it yet.”

Rabinovici tries to relate an Israeli idiom: “leechiot beh seret” (phonetic), but it doesn’t really translate (“living a movie” is the closest we can get). “The idea is that one is fully dedicated to whatever idea they may have at that moment,” he explains. “The good thing about music or art or film is that it is what you want to say, but once you put it into words, it can lose the context you want it to be appreciated in.”

But this is the risk with any attempt at language, no? Be it artistic or otherwise, everyone (creator and appreciator alike) is subject to the influence of his or her own Weltanschauung. That’s why art is just a shot in the dark sometimes. Its exhibition requests an audience while its conception necessitates solitude—relative solitude, at least. And here are seven guys collectively inventing while an international audience listens and receives. It’s a miracle that it even works—the experiences of seven translating to thousands—not for lack of talent, but for lack of the natural logic of demographics. You might as well flash the Bat-Signal in the sky or wait for Commissioner Gordon to ring the Bat-Phone.

“Use your ears,” Idan says when I ask him what the world needs to know about Acollectíve. “No problem, sexy voice,” is what I would like to say, but don’t, and it’s then that he says music is ultimately a form of escapism. But it’s not always so cut and dry: It’s not even an escape from the terrible or painful, but from the good too, the unbelievable–a chance for something different that maybe we don’t even understand yet.

 Emily McCrary