My goal for 2019 is to write at least a little something about every show I see, preferably by the next day, we’ll see how it goes. I will compile weekly and post here as-is.
So, in that spirit, this is the thirtieth of hopefully 52 posts…
30th week of 2019! Man, how time flies when you’re hardcore livemusicin’.
Two great shows last night…
Madison Cunningham (Mima Good opened) @ Standard Hotel Penthouse
I am all in for free shows in non-standard venues and was also very into checking out Madison Cunningham do her own set after catching her with Andrew Bird a couple times and watching some of her very cool monthly videos doing different cover songs (definitely check these out, they’re all over the place stylistically and uniformly awesome).
The space was the penthouse in the Standard Hotel in the East Village. It was weird because if you had asked me earlier in the day yesterday if I had ever been there, I definitely would have said “NO,” but when the doors of the elevator opened, I immediately remembered being there once before for a very cool, intimate set of music from Elvis Perkins. It’s a great space for a show like this, a small, private-feeling, intimate open space with windows wrapped around so that you can get views of both the Freedom Tower on one side and the Empire State Building on the other. Last night was very cloudy/rainy, but the views were still great. I love spaces like this in the city. The music was just set up on the floor in the corner and there were maybe 50 people in there, a crowd, but not crowded in any uncomfortable way. They didn’t even bother checking names/RSVP’s for this, so they obviously weren’t too concerned about too many people being there.
The opener was this woman named Mima Good, and when she introduced herself she said “that’s my birth name,” which I found amusing and weird and turns out is also a lie, her name is Rachel Rosen. I went to summer camp with someone named Rachel Rosen and Mima Good definitely has that went-to-summer-camp-with-her look/vibe. Her set was very interesting/weird/good, I really enjoyed it. She played in a duo format and the two women changed instruments at times, so Mima played guitar, synth, bass and her duomate played bass and a couple drums (I wouldn’t call it a drum kit, but parts of one). MG used electronics to augment her voice, or to sample different bits of movies or recordings as well as some rhythms and horn parts. She did a real nice job with this, it all fit into the music nicely. At one point she described herself as a “jazz singer” which was true, but also elements of Bjork and others. Her songwriting was very fun, a little goofy, if not dark at other times, but kind of smart pop with some jazz-inflection and some electroweirdness. You get the impression that she just wrote all these songs in her bedroom and put them altogether and just brought in a couple musicians to flesh it out live. There was a guest saxophonist who played on two songs, which both also featured horn samples, so that he was like this live accompaniment to the recording and it sounds dumb, but it actually was pretty cool. I was definitely into the music, some sad, some groovy, nothing crazy complex, but plenty to chew on. Would definitely check her out again.
The changeover was very quick, so before long Madison Cunningham and her trio (bass/drums joining her playing guitar and singing) were ready to go. For some reason based on what I’d seen of her and her videos, I was expecting something more artsy/folksy/acoustic-y, but that’s not what this was at all. The first song she played sounded like something Anders Osborne could have written, but maybe even better, and with a sweet, soulful female vocal. I was expecting to be impressed with the set, but frankly, she bowled me over: amazing songs, great guitarwork — delicate picking and then blasts of hot furnace rock and roll — and that certain something that some people gots and some people donts. She’s gots it bigtime, she’s young and has a firm grasp on what she’s doing. she can write a song with breadth and depth, mutlipronged compositions and elaborate imagery, and a phenomenal voice. I walked into the elevator going back down afterwards thinking it was only a matter of time before we’d be saying “remember when we saw her for free in a penthouse?!?!?!” as she collects an armful of Grammy’s. If you didn’t already know, you heard it here first. But, I mean, she’s already got the vote-of-confidence of Chris Thile and Andrew Bird, so don’t take my word for it…
Sidenote: speaking of Thile/Live From Here — — Cunningham is a regular “duet partner” on the Live From Here show which means in the past couple of weeks I’ve seen almost all the regulars for that slot: Cunningham, Gaby Moreno and I’m With Her covers just about all of them save Rachael Price. Not bad.
Jesca Hoop @ Rough Trade
As great as that set was, it ended up being on my second favorite of my Monday night. We went from one great parking spot to literally in front of the venue and made our way into Rough Trade to a set that had just started.
Jesca Hoop is an artist I’ve been kind of smitten with since first hearing her however many years ago. Pretty much all of her last 4 or 5 albums are phenomenal and feature some great guests (she did an entire record with Sam Beam a few years back). Her newest one is really great, This is the Kit sings on one song and Lucius sings on another. Hoop is a Californian but lives in England now and so doesn’t come play here all that often. The only other time I saw her was the last time she was here which was at Mercury Lounge a few years back. I remember loving the show and also that she was funny and wore some sort of big, elaborate dress that seemed slightly at odds with her personality.
Well, last night I loved the show, she was funny and wore some sort of dress that seemed slightly at odds with her personality, so I guess those remembered details were right on the money. And when I say I loved the show, I was kind of floored by it.
Jesca played solo, just her and her electric guitar(s). But in many ways, it felt like she was playing a duet with her own songs, songs that are so good they seem to have their own brains and hearts and souls and she’s somehow the unlikely person to channel these songs into existence. Because when she talks she doesn’t strike you as the person who writes these deep, penetrating, gorgeous songs. She seems kind of, well, normal. She’s funny as hell, but not in a jokey kind of way, like in a very natural way, like she’s not telling jokes, she’s just funny. She’s singing these songs and somehow she sounds British when she sings and she has this dress on like she’s shooting an album cover for an old classic Britfolk record, and then in between she’s talking and it’s like a different person, a person I felt like I’d love to be friends with.
But man, those songs, the lyrics and the melodies. Dense imagery and so much depth of meaning. Each one had my mind painting pictures of place and time, who/what/where/when/why, always that why, the motivations, the meanings, the focus of each one, so much to think about, to wrap your head around, to enjoy. And the words themselve, pure poetry, the words are coming out of her mouth and almost immediately you picture them appearing in the air, like cartoon word clouds coming out of her mouth, poetry written down in real time.
At one point I looked down at the time and realized that somehow 45 minutes had already gone by. It’s not the easiest thing to make just you and a guitar totally compelling for long stretches of time, but the whole set felt like it flew by. She split the set in two pieces, playing older material for the first half and then stuff off the new album second. If there was any notable shift, it was that the second half was a bit angrier/more political, but not in an overt way… like if she hadn’t said “this is a protest song” (and that’s all she said) I would have imagined it was someone else she was drowning in the river and (maybe) have enjoyed it just as much. I can’t imagine a set being so simultaneously sparse — just a woman and her guitar, the stage bathed in the same lavender-blue the whole night, which either matched the color of her dress, or her dress just reflected the lights perfectly; she went barefoot the whole time — and so dense — the imagery, her simple-but-complex guitar fingering, the wordsmithing, the ideas.
She said she’s coming back in the fall with a full band and I think that will be something else. If this sounds at all intriguing to you, you should maybe go… or at least check out her album(s).
23Jul19 Nilüfer Yanya @ MHOW
Caught a nice show at MHOW last night. She’s opening for Broken Social Scene at the Bandshell, she may draw a bigger crowd than the headliner if last night was any indication. Incredibly enthusiastic sold out crowd. Check her out and say you saw her when… Check out my review here: https://thebowerypresents.tumblr.com/post/186517823142/nil%C3%BCferyanyamhow
26–28 July
If you missed my Newport Folk Festival review, it’s long, but pretty good, I think. You can read it here.
I also caught two night/after shows while I was in Newport. Folk Fest is not really a big aftershow scene, but in the past few years, they’ve done a very nice job with 2 or 3 shows a night over the weekend. It’s totally not necessary, but as the lineups of the festival get better, so do the night shows, and so it’s tough to resist catching one or two, even though I’m typically exhausted and totally satisfied by the time I bike home from the fest.
26Jul19 Steal Your Folk @ Jane Pickins Theater
The sort of primary venue for these aftershows is a smallish theater that I believe is mostly a movie theater, with a balcony and moderately comfortable seats. The last couple years I’ve caught a show here of the “and friends” variety, which is usually a curated free-for-all with a ton of guests, many with decent surprises, mostly doing covers and usually awesome. Two years ago I caught Shovels & Rope there with about an hour’s worth of really cool guests doing covers a la their Busted Jukebox album(s). Last year was a Cook Brothers-curated event that was an embarrassment of riches with ridiculous guest after guest taking the stage for a show that vastly exceeded my expectations and went way longer and deeper than the Shovels and Rope show from 2017.
This year in that Friday night slot was a show also curated by the Cook Brothers called Steal Your Folk, quite clearly a Grateful Dead themed night with special guests. As you might imagine, my expectations were quite high, especially after the what-the-fuck awesomeness of Phil and Brad Cook’s show the previous year. The TL;DR on this show is that it was quite good, but not quite the you-had-to-be-there level of the 2018 show.
I walked in after it had already started and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was in the middle of a rambling story. He played a couple of old school cowboy songs and had some great storytelling in between. Elliott is an old timer, pushing 90 and looking every bit like he is, but he’s still sharp and can still play, sing and banter with the best of them. Ostensibly, this had nothing to do with the Dead, but an endearing way to start the night, nonetheless. Next up they brought up Lonnie Holley to play. I don’t know much about this guy, but apparently he’s a visual artist who also does all-improvised music and that’s basically what they did, a sort of ambient jazz thing with Holley singing over the top of it while playing keyboards. Again, not ostensibly a Dead cover, which is what I thought I’d be getting, but it was pretty good, nonetheless, actually one of the highlights of the night. Later in the show, somewhere in the middle, it struck me that this opening section was very much in the spirit of the Dead, two sides of what they were, cowboy songs and jazzy freak-outs were two ends of the long and many-shades-of-grey spectrum of the Grateful Dead. It’s one thing to just play Dead tunes, which they did, but another to capture the spirit in such a way. There’s no right or wrong way to “cover” the Grateful Dead and so as weird as it was to start off this show that way, it totally worked for me.
The thing you need to know about the Cooks, especially Phil Cook, is that he is a master of assembling and putting on these shows. He plays with a lot of people and has endeared himself to many others and so he seems to always find awesome people to play. More than that, though, he has an energy and enthusiasm that’s just suck-you-in high. He plays like a fan of everyone he plays with and never disappoints and has this goofy, lovable, optimistic spirit that makes you truly believe that if we all just share a moment with the music, everything is going to be alright.
Next up he invited Colin Meloy to sing Row Jimmy. I had forgotten that the Decemberists had played this for a while (maybe still do?), so I was surprisingly struck at how perfect a fit this was. I actually tweeted that if this was how the rest of the night was going to go, then it was going to be pretty awesome. I think I got that about half right.
I won’t go into a blow-by-blow of every song they played, but the long and short of it is, they played a lot of great stuff, but the number of guests ended up being small, with Jonathan Wilson coming out and becoming a de facto lead for a large portion of the rest of the show and Nicole Atkins more or less on stage most of the time as well. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking love Jonathan Wilson and he was a perfect fit for this and I fucking love Nicole Atkins and she was awesome as well. So all-in-all, it was very good, just not the wide/deep reach that I had maybe hoped for.
The setlist:
Ramblin Jack section, “Tears on the River” (Lonnie Holley), Row Jimmy (Colin Meloy), Brown Eyed Woman (house band only, crowd sings along), Stella Blue (Atkins), Dancing in the Streets (Atkins), Friend of the Devil (sung by 2 members chosen from audience), Bertha (Wilson, Atkins), New Speedway Boogie (Wilson/Atkins), Days Between (Wilson), Fire on the Mountain (Wilson/Atkins, Cedric Burnside on drums), Let’s Do It Again (Devon Gilfillian), Friendship (Wilson/Atkins/Gillfillian).
Highlights for me were Nicole singing Stella Blue like it was a Nicole Atkins song and Wilson ripping a smoldering Days Between like it was a Jonathan Wilson song. Devon Gilfillian came up and basically did a soul song which really stuck out as why? and then they closed with Pops Staples’ “Friendship” which Phil Cook likes to sing all the time and why not?
Good shit.
28Jul19 Deer Tick @ Newport Blues Cafe
Many years ago there were no aftershows for Newport Folk Festival. You went to the fest and didn’t even think about hitting anything afterwards. 8 years ago that changed… I remember my brother and I hanging out at night and he was looking at Twitter and saw that Deer Tick had announced a couple night shows at Newport Blues Cafe which was right down the street from where we were staying. Well, well, well, this changes everything, now, doesn’t it? Who knew that it would start a tradition that stands up there with the modern-day Folk Fest itself. We ended up hitting that Friday night show, I guess maybe the first Deer Tick Newport Folk aftershow ever? That night was a rollicking, drunken-bar-band night that went way later than I had been expecting and definitely set the tone for 9 years of Deer Tick, adding an element of raucous party to the festival that had been absent. Did the fest need it? Apparently so.
Over the years I’ve gone to a handful of these aftershows which have become legendary for their awesome openers, array of high-profile guests and who-knows-what’s-gonna-happen energy. I was lucky and thankful to get a pair of tickets to the Sunday night, which is really the unofficial end of the Festival weekend. The room was freakin packed, but just before the threshold of being too uncomfortable. We missed the first opener Courtney Marie Andrews, but I had seen her at the festival already. We did catch the second opener which was personal favorite Rayland Baxter. We had first heard Baxter at the festival a few years ago and I’ve seen him about 4 times since then. That time RB had seriously impressed me with a set that was much more expansive and jammy, for lack of a better word, than I had been expecting based on his album back then. Since then I’ve enjoyed the hell out of Rayland in a few different settings, but had still been waiting for that set that I knew he had in him. Well, perhaps improbably, that set was played Sunday night at Newport Bluest. It was only an opening set, maybe 45–50 minutes, but I don’t think he played more than 5 or 6 songs in that time. Everything had a little extra hot sauce on it, with that spice and bite coming in the form of a loose and rocking band that Baxter let wander as much as they wanted. I don’t think the band had 2 keyboardists for their festival set, but they had two for this night show and it really gave them a boost and a wider space to explore. Wow, that was a good fucking set!
The changeover to Deer Tick wasn’t too long and, long story short, they burned the place down. Perhaps one of the best DT shows I’ve ever seen (and they’re always awesome). They came out of the gate strong and if they had just played the Deer Tick originals without any guests, it would have been a great night. The crowd at these shows is like the fireworks all ready to go for the big finale on July 4th, just waiting for the wick to be lit and the band at these shows is in full what-the-fuck-do-we-care mode, pouring gasoline on everything else before striking the match. Combustible is an understatement. The audience and the room reflect the energy of the band and vice verse, laser beams bouncing off two mirrors, hot, hot shit.
The guests pushed things over the top. First came Courtney Marie Andrews for three songs including a rocking take on “You’re the One That I Want” (yes, the song from Grease) and then a duet on “Up Where We Belong” between Andrews and John McCauley. Funny thing here… because if you read my NFF review I mentioned seeing Courtney and being very much like “this sounds very familiar!” but couldn’t remember when I had seen her. And then they do this duet on Up Where We Belong and all of the sudden I’m like who have I heard cover this recently… and then I’m like DUH! because I had heard Courtney Marie Andrews and John McCauley sing it just a couple months ago when she opened for Deer Tick, a set I very much enjoyed but somehow completely forgot about. So, yeah, maybe I’m seeing too much music? (NAHHH!!). Later the entirety of Bonny Light Horseman came out and did a Graham Parsons song with Josh Kaufman and Ian O’Neil going at it guitar-y-guitar. That was awesome. Of course, at that point, the show is about halfway through and very much in just-getting-started zone. Sharon Van Etten came out and — wait a minute, wait a minute, Sharon Van Etten? Hopping out with Deer Tick for one song? This is soooo Newport, because why are these people in town? To sing one song? It’s not an isolated incident, the final set Sunday at the festival featured a few “we just happened to be in the neighborhood” style appearances that is so indicative of what this festival means not just to the crowd, but to the musicians themselves. So, yeah, Van Etten came out and CRUSHED Pat Benetar’s “Heartbreaker.” Deer Tick originals are the epitome of rock and roll and they have never played a ho-hum show that I’ve witnessed in a dozen or so times seeing them, but when they push beyond and play some covers, they always choose the best fucking songs to play. Their shows at Newport Blues are built on that energy and the crowd appropriately freaked out for this one. But, we’re not done yet, because Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith from Dawes came out for a pair of Warren Zevon numbers, including a fuck-yeah version of Lawyers, Guns & Money that was the biggest exclamationpoint on the weekend you could ask for. There is little more rock and roll than a couple guys from a band that can play much, much bigger rooms than Newport Blues playing with a band that can play bigger rooms as well, playing because they want to, because what can make you feel more alive than raging with a room packed with drunken revelers singing Lawyers Guns & Money with you. What a moment!
The Sunday night Deer Tick shows always end with Goodnight, Irene. It’s a tradition unlike any other. They had everyone on stage, including Jay Sweet who had been rocking out in the front row all night. But before they sang that, McCauley announced that next year will be their last, the tradition soon to be coming to an end after 10 years of afterparties to end all afterparties. It’ll be tough to replace, but I know that NFF will do a good job filling those nights will killer shows. And hopefully the Sunday night show will end with Goodnight, Irene, everyone in the room singing as loud as they can. My throat is still a little sore from it, but worth it. Hopefully see you there next year.
