Jack Antonoff has stayed busy since his last record as Bleachers, 2017’s Gone Now. He formed a new project called Red Hearse alongside Sam Dew and Sounwave and produced albums such as Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! and the Chicks’ Gaslighter. His most fruitful creative partnership continues to be with long time collaborator Taylor Swift—they collaborated on 2019’s Lover and 2020’s folklore and evermore. Recently, Antonoff shared two tracks that foreshadow an upcoming third Bleachers album, “45” and “chinatown,” which features none other than New Jersey hero Bruce Springsteen.
Joined by Bruce Springsteen for ‘Chinatown’, Jack Antonoff said in a statement, “I go to Electric Lady every day to work. I sit on the roof for hours and hours. Probably spent more time on that roof this year than my bed. Kept imagining the band up there on all the different levels playing on 8th street with everything patched into the console of studio D. Was the first time we played these songs and the first time we played together since the pandemic. Was like a dream.”
Guitar and Keys – Mikey Freedom Hart Keys – Sean Hutchinson Percussion and Bells – Mike Riddleberger Sax and Keys – Evan Smith Sax and Keys – Zem Audu Sax – Anna Webber
Hachiku, a.k.a Anika Ostendorf, 26, writes and produces dream pop with an avant garde twist from whichever bedroom she is currently inhabiting. Coming from Australia and on the glorious Milk Records is the one and only Hachiku. I got to see her earlier this year opening for labelmate Courtney Barnett on a brief solo tour in the winter. Right away she gripped my ears with her playing and song writing and it’s on full display here. “I’ll Probably Be Asleep” is an absolute scorcher to start the record off, sounding like it came out of the 80’s with a new wave vibe that ends with a guitar solo that climaxes as the song abruptly ends. From there we get a quieter affair in “Busy Being Boring” and “You’ll Probably Think This Song Is About You”. The former is about destroying everything around you and the later is about how to deal with a new love.
She writes in a way that makes you feel like you’re having a private one on one conversation and I find it refreshing. The sweeping guitar riffs in “Bridging Visa B” feel like she borrowed some ideas from Courtney on that winter tour this year. The production she does on the record is so great. There are backwards loops, dropping her voice down a few octaves (“Dreams of Galapagos”), harmonizing with herself. I love when an artist sits down and makes almost an entire album by themselves. It ends with “Murray’s Lullaby”, a song to the dog, Murray, who was at the farm she was on to get her Australian Visa and it’s a sweeping beautiful ode to the companion.
Its introduction is unlike any other. Silence. Waiting. Turning up the volume to see if anything is coming out, waiting some more. Then those gurgling low notes, followed finally by a catchy piano figure, pristinely captured, perfectly balanced. Just like that, Steely Dan has invited—no, wrangled—you into their world of freaks, creeps, lost love and suspended time.
Steely Dan was three years into their professional career when “Pretzel Logic” hit shelves on February 20th, 1974. They’d made a name for themselves with “Can’t Buy a Thrill”, gone from studio band to touring outfit with Countdown to Ecstasy, and found chart success along the way. For their next move, the band retreated into Village Recorder in L.A. with Gary Katz again presiding over the sessions. There they tracked what might be the most concise album of their career.
Call this a time-travel blues. (How Steely Dan is that?) Becker makes his debut as a guitar soloist, weaving in guttural answer lines to Fagen’s vocals on the second verse. But what’s he talking about? “When it says, ‘I stepped upon the platform, the man gave me the news,’ we conceived the platform as a teleportation device,” Fagen said in Steely Dan: Reelin’ in the Years. “And there are other key lines like, ‘I have never met Napoleon, but I plan to find the time.’ What we’re actually saying is that I plan to find the time that he lived in.” The solo is classic Steely Dan, too: Becker painstakingly pieced it together from a number of earlier takes, searching for the perfect combination of sounds. An engineer later estimated that this process took as long as “one hour per bar” to complete. (They got so far out into the weeds that at one point Becker reportedly asked: “Did I play that?”) Of course, this being Steely Dan, the chorus on “Pretzel Logic” isn’t really bluesy at all. Still, this song provided a signature early showcase for Becker, who’d principally worked before this as a bassist. He was always at his best when Steely Dan took rootsier sideroads.
On Pretzel Logic, Steely Dan honed their wryly humorous lyrics; perfected their luscious arrangements that straddle rock, pop, jazz, blues, carnival music and everything in between; and they’d set aside the lengthy jams. The classic line up was still intact and with backing from L.A.’s best session musicians, there was no way it wouldn’t be sonic perfection. The core duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen had progressed as writers, too. They introduce us to even more beguiling characters—Charlie Freak, Buzz and many that went unnamed. But the world of Pretzel Logic begins with Rikki.
“We hear you’re leaving, that’s okay,” Fagen sings, a certain resignation in his delivery. Our narrator speaks of a romance cut short, but is it really OK? It seems as if he’s faking it. He wryly lists off activities the pair could do in an effort to win her back, followed by a flippant, protective “I don’t know.” But by the middle he lets his true intent show: “You tell yourself you’re not my kind/but you don’t even know your mind/and you could have a change of heart.” Will she? He knows she’s leaving, and it’s not OK, but what can he do, really?. It’s unexpected to see this role reversal in pop storytelling. It wasn’t often that a ’70s pop record would centre around a man’s fight to retrieve lost love, especially with such a “whatever” attitude. It’s a dejected, resigned cousin of those old “how do I make him love me?” pop successes of the previous decade. Here, the solution isn’t in a kiss, in telling him you’re never gonna leave him or in wishing and hoping. Rikki is moving on, though their little wild time had only just begun, and all our narrator can do is leave behind his number and hope she’ll come back around.
“Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” which became Steely Dan’s highest-charting single was more than the opening salvo of the album, it’s a tightly packed, four-minute hit single that demonstrates the band’s shift into bite-sized yet filling song-craft. It also introduces another theme—loneliness and social isolation. The bulk of Pretzel Logic, which itself peaked at #8 on the Billboard LP chart, deals with outcasts. Whether in the rube town in “Night By Night,” or the other side of the tracks in “Barrytown,” we’re dealing with people who know they’re trapped in a certain social or economic status within a disorderly world, wishing to “cash in their 10-cent life for another one.”
Underpinning the story on “Night By Night” is a tight and funky arrangement featuring a young Jeff Porcaro on drums. He’d go on to fame with Toto in the decade to follow, but here he was covering for Jim Gordon, the Wrecking Crew member and one-time Domino who features on the rest of the album. Add to it the syncopated chop of the rhythm guitar courtesy of Denny Dias, the alternately swirling and stabbing horns and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter’s note-perfect shredding solo, and you get all the ingredients that make Steely Dan great band they are.
But while the Dan prove they can rock on “Night By Night,” “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” (released as the B-side to “Rikki”) shows a gentler, more comforting side, supported by a fluid electric guitar riff and bridged with a memorable country-inspired guitar solo. A similar breeziness makes its way to “Barrytown,” with its jangling pedal steel, guitar and tambourine combo.
This commentary on class and social differences is a clear Dylan pastiche, from the “Times They Are A-Changin’” reference to Fagen’s nasally drawl. Yet it’s also a careful meditation on belonging, prejudice and the challenge of adjusting to surroundings. The narrator concedes in the beginning, “I’m not one to look behind, I know that times must change.” Yet, the folks over in Barrytown represent a shifting tide—their hair and their clothes just aren’t proper. For all the acceptance he claims to have at the start, the narrator “likes things like they used to be.” His love interest? More progressive and clearly from Barrytown. She’s got that “special lack of grace,” he says, and she won’t be treated kindly in the world outside of the Barrytown bubble. Whether she represents a societal change he can’t handle or simply a threat to his street cred, he has to break off their relationship.
Sides one and two are bridged by convincing odes to jazz. “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” revamps the old Duke Ellington/Bubber Miley composition. Skunk Baxter’s pedal steel takes the place of the original trombone, Becker’s wah-wah guitar emulates the muted trumpet line and Fagen not only shows off his stride piano chops, but also contributes saxophone.
The jazz nods continue with “Parker’s Band,” a tribute to legendary saxophonist Charlie Parker. The angular backing, weaving chordal movement and the jabbing horns take a page from bebop, while Fagen sings of “Groovin’ High,” a song Parker performed, and “Relaxing at Camarillo,” Parker’s jazz-blues standard inspired by his stay at a Ventura mental hospital.
The time-hopping continues on the title track. With a snarling vocal once again by Fagen, horn jabs galore, a ferocious guitar solo and some of the most abstract lyrics on the album, “Pretzel Logic” remains a fan favourite and a staple of live shows over the decades. While the original recording smokes, recent live performances with Steve Winwood on vocals bring the song to another level.
“Charlie Freak” and “Through With Buzz” see Becker and Fagen returning to character studies, delivering observations on unsavory people. Buzz seems to have no redeeming qualities: “He takes all my money, he’s not very funny,” Fagen declares before switching tenses once again and revealing what’s really bugging him: “I remember when he stole my girl/Drug her all around the world/You know I’m cool, yes I feel alright/’Cept when I’m in my room and it’s late at night.” That sense of paranoia lingers on through the murder ballad “With a Gun” and “Charlie Freak,” a tale about a desolate man with instrumentation so sinister you can almost see him walking alone on a winter’s night.
The album wraps with another highlight, “Monkey in Your Soul” propelled by a slinky horn line and a brief tale of leaving love behind. It might just be the funkiest song on the album.
After Pretzel Logic, Steely Dan would effectively escape the fishbowl of concert touring (at least until 1993) and retire into their playground, the recording studio. They went on to create more examples of slick, jazzy pop that would bring them even more acclaim. But here on Pretzel Logic, the band managed to synthesize all the things that made them great—observant storytelling, humour, inventive instrumental breaks and sleek production—all in a digestible, radio-friendly package that no doubt helped make their later experiments possible.
One of the first releases of 2021 comes from Steve Earle and has a tragic back story: The album, “J.T.,” is a tribute to his son, the singer and songwriter Justin Townes Earle, who died from an accidental drug overdose in August. “I’ve never loved anything in this world more than him,” Steve Earle said. “I was connected to him in ways that, you know he’s my first born, he did the same thing I did and we both had this disease.” On the evening of August. 20th, Steve Earle spoke to his son Justin Townes Earle for the last time.
In a phone call initiated by Justin, they caught up on family business and Steve, the country-rock singer-songwriter, who struggled with addiction for years, told his son a lauded musician in his own right that he would support him if he was ready to begin his own recovery. “I said, ‘Do not make me bury you,’” the elder Earle recalled in an interview. “And he said, ‘I won’t.’”
That night, Justin, 38, died alone in an apartment in Nashville of an accidental drug overdose; an autopsy found evidence in his blood of cocaine laced with fentanyl, a powerful opioid. For Earle, the death of his eldest son set off waves of grief. He had watched Justin grow from a scraggly teenage hip-hop fan intrigued by Kurt Cobain to a rising star of Americana music the fuzzy intersection in the Venn diagram of folk, country and rock, where Earle has long been a looming presence.
Justin, who released eight albums and an EP over 13 years, had a mordant song writing style that bore the influence of Townes Van Zandt, the fatalistic folk oracle who was Earle’s mentor and the man he named his son after. It also had the unmistakable imprint of Earle himself, whose best songs, whether performed in loud bands or alone with an acoustic guitar, have always had a certain rock ’n’ roll sneer.
Justin, like his father, also spent years as an addict, using heroin since his teens. Alcoholism plagued him throughout his career, and took a hard toll in his later years. Justin was hospitalized with pneumonia over the summer, having aspirated vomit in his lungs, and was told by a doctor that he would die if he did not quit drinking, Steve said. But while Steve eventually got clean after spending time in prison in 1994 on drug and weapons charges his son succumbed to the disease. Among Justin’s survivors are his wife, Jennifer, and a 3-year-old daughter, Etta St. James Earle.
Within days of Justin’s death, Earle, 65, began work on what would become “J.T.,” an album of 10 of Justin’s songs, and one new track by his father, that will be released on January 4th, which would have been Justin’s 39th birthday. Proceeds from the LP will go to a trust to benefit Etta.
“His best songs were as good as anybody’s,” said Earle, whose Greenwich Village apartment is crammed with photos of Justin, including one black-and-white shot on the wall showing his 3-year-old son chomping on a candy apple. “He was a way better singer than I am, a way better guitar player, technically, than I am. His fingerpicking could be mind-blowing.” “He was just one of those people,” Earle added, “that never felt like he was enough.”
“J.T.” — Justin’s childhood nickname is the latest entry in what has become a grim specialty for Earle: the tribute album for a departed musical confidant. “Townes” was released in 2009, a dozen years after Van Zandt died; “Guy,” a homage to the songwriter Guy Clark, came out three years after Clark’s death in 2016. But “J.T.” was made while Earle’s pain was still raw. During recording sessions in October, the official cause of Justin’s death had still not been determined.
Recorded with the Dukes, Earle’s longtime backing band — including Chris Masterson on guitar, Eleanor Whitmore on fiddle, Ricky Ray Jackson on pedal steel guitar, Jeff Hill on bass and Brad Pemberton on drums “J.T.” includes some of Justin’s best-known songs, like “Harlem River Blues,” “Champagne Corolla” and “The Saint of Lost Causes,” the title track of Justin’s final album, released in 2019.
Earle’s craggy-voiced performance underscores dark themes that were there all along. “Harlem River Blues” contemplates a drowning death. (“Tell my mama I love her, tell my father I tried,” it goes. “Give my money to my baby to spend.”) “Turn Out My Lights,” about the phantom-limb ache for a former lover, takes on an eerie double meaning when Earle sings:
Even though I know you’re gone, I don’t have to be alone now You’re here with me every night, When I turn out my lights
Recording the album “wasn’t cathartic as much as it was therapeutic,” Earle said. “I made the record because I needed to.”
“J.T.” is, in a sense, a double portrait of father and son. Justin was born in 1982, while Earle was a journeyman songwriter in Nashville. He and Justin’s mother, Carol Ann Hunter, split up when Justin was 3, around the time that Earle’s recording career began to take off. For much of Justin’s youth, Earle was touring or lost in the depths of drug addiction.
By Justin’s teenage years once Earle was clean and out of prison he was living with his father, and they developed a close musical bond. Earle recalled a pivotal moment when Justin, still a guitar novice, was stunned by Cobain’s stark acoustic performance of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” with Nirvana on “MTV Unplugged,” unaware of the song’s provenance from the folk icon Leadbelly. Earle pointed his son to the L section of his record collection, where Leadbelly abutted the bluesmen Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb.
“Next thing I knew,” Earle said, “he was playing Mance songs that I had never been able to figure out.”
Justin played in two bands, the Swindlers and the Distributors, before going solo in his 20s. In 2007, Justin’s debut EP, “Yuma,” introduced him as a stylish traditionalist with a hint of punk-rock attitude. Within a few years, he was building a reputation in New York, appearing frequently (as performer or patron) at a bar near his East Village apartment. He developed an irresistible persona for the media, dressing in retro suits and hats, blithely recounting his struggle with drugs while revelling in the notoriety it brought. “There’s really no such thing as bad press,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2010.
Shooter Jennings, the country-rock singer and son of the outlaw country legend Waylon Jennings — recalled Justin during this period as an almost intimidating talent, albeit one who still lived under the shadow of a famous father. “When you get out there, there’s going to be this built-in audience of people that are curious to see what Steve Earle’s son is like, or what Waylon Jennings’s son is like,” Jennings said. “So there’s this bit of distrust with the audience from the very beginning. Are they here because they like my music, or are they here because they like my dad’s music?”
To record “J.T.,”Earle, with the help of his son Ian, 33, winnowed Justin’s work to a list of 10 songs — two of them, “Turn Out My Lights” and “Far Away in Another Town,” Justin wrote with Scotty Melton and booked a week at Electric Lady Studios in New York. He worked fast, sending his band preparatory notes by text message. By the time they began recording, Justin had been dead for less than two months. (They began sessions before October 20th.) Earle, who had largely avoided speaking publicly about Justin’s death, wanted the album to be his statement.
He was also wary of being roped into anyone else’s memorial. “I did not want to be asked to be on a tribute record with several people that I thought absolutely were enablers and helped kill him,” Earle said, his words flecked with expletives. “So I thought the way to nip that in the bud was to make a record of my own.”
At this point in his career, Earle bespectacled, with a long salt-and-pepper beard is a Renaissance man for whom mortality and addiction have been perennial subject matter. In addition to his many albums, Earle has written a play about a woman on death row and a novel about the spector of Hank Williams, and contributed music to a recent play about a mining disaster in West Virginia. Lately he has been writing a science-fiction story intended for television.
The night before the first session for “J.T.,” Earle gathered the band at his apartment for a sushi meal. Ray Kennedy, Earle’s longtime engineer, recalls the time in Electric Lady as being celebratory but focused. They began each day at 10 a.m. and finished by 4 p.m., so that Earle could take care of his youngest son, John Henry, 10, who has autism. “It felt positive,” Kennedy said. “It felt like we were taking an expression of somebody’s art and creativity and giving it back to the world in a different package.”
Earle, slouching on his sofa with a green bandanna as a face mask, seemed almost bemused by the question of whether recording his dead son’s songs was difficult to get through.
“I inoculated myself to some degree,” he said. “I was prepared for it to be horrific. But the truth is, it was kind of business as usual in a lot of ways.”
Justin’s catalogue, with its frequent themes of the entanglements and disappointments of family, might seem a minefield for Earle. He did not record anything from his son’s albums “Absent Fathers” or “Single Mothers.” He also avoided one of Justin’s best-known songs, “Mama’s Eyes,” which begins: “I am my father’s son/I’ve never known when to shut up.”
Those songs, Earle said, simply didn’t hold up as well as others he chose, which showcase Justin’s economical storytelling voice. The choices also contrast the two men’s styles. “J.T.” opens with “I Don’t Care,” a jaunty, fingerpicked ditty from “Yuma.” The Dukes play it as a rollicking hootenanny, with Earle growling its sardonic twist on a folk cliché: “I don’t know where I’m going no more/I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
Other songs reveal an interplay between the two men and their music. Justin’s “Lone Pine Hill,” a Civil War ballad with a Townes Van Zandt-style guitar part, Earle sees as indebted to his “Ben McCulloch,” about a disillusioned Confederate soldier. For two of Justin’s earliest tunes, “Maria” and “Ain’t Glad I’m Leaving,” Kennedy dug out tapes of Justin’s original arrangements with the Swindlers, which he and Earle recorded in 2001, when Justin was just 19.
Earle said that in writing “John Henry Was a Steel Drivin’ Man,” from his most recent album, “Ghosts of West Virginia” (2020), he “deliberately emulated” Justin’s guitar part on his song “They Killed John Henry.” “It always made me incredibly jealous that Justin had a John Henry song and I didn’t,” he said.
The song that was the most painful to record is also the album’s most powerful: “Last Words,” a heartbreaking synopsis of a father’s journey, from holding his newly born son to speaking to him for the last time. Earle wrote it less than a week after Justin died, and he described it as “maybe the only song I’ve ever written in my life that every single word in it is true.”
“Last thing I said was ‘I love you,’” Earle sings, over acoustic guitar and ominous, droning feedback. “Your last words to me were ‘I love you too.’”
Steve Earle – Guitar, Mandolin, Octave Mandolin, Harmonica and Vocal Chris Masterson – Guitar, Mandolin, 1 Finger Piano and Vocal Eleanor Whitmore – Fiddle, Mandolin, Organ and Vocal Ricky Ray Jackson – Pedal Steel Guitar, Dobro and Vocal Jeff Hill – Acoustic and Electric Bass, Cello and Vocal Brad Pemberton – Drums, Percussion, and Vocal All songs written by Justin Townes Earle
The punk classic finally made available as the artist originally intended • Four complete records under one banner • The release contains new liners for Richard Hell outlining the Destiny Street saga “I’ve finally taken it all the way, and at this late date the album now moves me.
I can feel it rather than just feel frustration about it. the emotions in it are largely fear and desperation and longing, but that’s life, and can even have some kind of majesty.” Richard Hell Destiny Street was the follow-up album to one of the greatest punk albums of all time, 1977’s Blank Generation. the album was originally recorded in 1981 and released in 1982, but not to Richard Hell’s satisfaction. As he says in his new liner notes to destiny street remixed, “the final mix was a morass of trebly multi-guitar sludge.” now, for the 40th anniversary of its creation, the album is at last presented the way Richard Hell originally intended, “the sound of a little combo playing real gone rock and roll.” Richard Hell co-founded his first band, the Neon Boys, with Tom Verlaine in 1973. that band became Television. when Hell left Television in 1975, he formed, with Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan, both formerly of the New York Dolls, the Heartbreakers. after another year, Richard Hell departed the Heartbreakers and created Richard Hell and the Voidoids, which group, along with other CBGB’s bands of the era, such as the Ramones and PattiSmith, formed the template for punk, the effects of which are still being felt.
Apart from Hell on vocals and bass, the original Voidoids comprised Robert Quine (guitar), Ivan Julian (guitar), and Marc Bell (eventually “Marky Ramone”). the Destiny Street era band retained Quine, but otherwise the backing lineup became Naux (Juan Maciel) on guitar and Fred Maher on drums. Richard had wished forever that he could remix the original Destiny Street, but was told by the record company that the original 24-track masters had been lost. in the early 2000s, Hell discovered a cassette from 1981 that contained just the album’s rhythm tracks (drums, bass and two rhythm guitars) and he realized he could add new guitar solos and vocals to that to obtain a cleaner, improved version of the songs.
Molly Burch’s previous records had a distinctly twangy vibe to them that had her compared to Patsy Cline and other ’60s country singers. But starting with last year’s cover of Ariana Grande’s“Needy,” she’s been heading in poppier directions. New single “Emotion,” which she co-wrote and recorded with Wild Nothing’s Jack Tatum, takes her into disco territory with popping bass and sultry vocals. “For me, the theme of the song is about feeling a spectrum of emotions, embracing that sensitivity, and using it as fuel to create something positive,” says Molly. “‘Emotion’ is a celebration of being alive.”
Austin singer and songwriter Molly Burch returns this new year with a fresh sound on “Emotion’’, a disco-tinged, dynamic shot of adrenaline produced by Captured Tracks label-mate Wild Nothing (Jack Tatum).
In January 2020, Burch headed to Tatum’s hometown of Richmond, Virginia, looking to write new material with a distinct pop sound and production in mind. Sharing some of her latest demos and a playlist of her favourite pop bangers with Tatum, they set out to make a heart-pumping dance track of their own. On “Emotion”, Burch’s voice is as strong and masterful as ever, pairing a lighter, polished vocal performance – a surprising, but captivating departure from her signature smoky delivery – with Tatum’s compelling bass lines, beats, and shimmering synths. Burch says, “for me, the theme of the song is about feeling a spectrum of emotions, embracing that sensitivity, and using it as fuel to create something positive. “Emotion” is a celebration of being alive.”
Released January 1st, 2021
Molly Burch “Emotion” feat. Wild Nothing · available on Captured Tracks Released on: 2021-01-01
Nothing ever really disappears,” Cassandra Jenkins says. “It just changes shape.” Over the past few years, she’s seen relationships altered, travelled three continents, wandered through museums and parks, and recorded free-associative guided tours of her New York haunts. Her observations capture the humanity and nature around her, as well as thought patterns, memories, and attempts to be present while dealing with pain and loss. With a singular voice, Jenkins siphons these ideas into the ambient folk of her new album.
“An Overview on Phenomenal Nature” honours flux, detail, and moments of intimacy. Jenkins arrived at engineer Josh Kaufman’s studio with ideas rather than full songs — nevertheless, they finished the album in a week. Jenkins’ voice floats amid sensuous chamber pop arrangements and raw-edged drums, ferrying us through impressionistic portraits of friends and strangers. Her lyrics unfold magical worlds, introducing you to a cast of characters like a local fisherman, a psychic at a birthday party, and driving instructor of a spiritual bent. Jenkins’ last record, 2017’s Play Till You Win, confirmed the veteran artist’s talent. Evident of Jenkins’ experience growing up in a family band in New York City, the album showcased her meticulous song writing and musicianship, earning her comparisons to George Harrison and Emmylou Harris. Jenkins has since played in the bands of Eleanor Friedberger, Craig Finn, and LolaKirke, and rehearsed to tour with Purple Mountains last August before the tour’s cancellation. Her new record departs from her previous work in its openness and flexibility, following her peripatetic lifestyle. “The goal is to be more fluid, to be more like the clouds shifting constantly,” she says. The approach allowed Jenkins to express herself like she never has.
On album opener “Michelangelo,” before the heavy drum beat and fuzz guitars enter, Jenkins sings quietly “I’m a three-legged dog, working with what I’ve got / and part of me will always be looking for what I lost // there’s a fly around my head, waiting for the day I drop dead.” Phenomenal Nature thrives in this dichotomy between ornate sonics and verbal frankness, a calming guided tour to the edge. Later, on “Crosshairs,” amid lush strings, she sings conversationally: “Empty space is my escape / it runs through me like a river / while time spits in my face.”
“Hard Drive,” the third track and album center piece, opens with a voice memo Jenkins recorded at The Met Breuer: a guard muses about Mrinalini Mukherjee’s hybrid textile and sculpture works, which were then on display in a retrospective titled Phenomenal Nature. “When we lose our connection to nature, we lose our spirit, our humanity,” she explains. Stuart Bogie’s saxophone & Josh Kaufman’s glittering guitar make way for Jenkins’ spoken word which constellates scenes from her life, gradually building and blossoming as she recreates a meditation guided by a friend who incants, “One, two, three.”
Sounds of footsteps and bird calls run through the album’s glittering conclusion, “The Ramble.” Meditative and bright, it recalls how Jenkins felt while writing and recording her new material: “Everything else is falling apart, so let’s just enjoy this time,” she said. If Phenomenal Nature has a unifying theme, it’s the power of presence, the joy of walking in a world in constant flux and opening oneself to change. .
Cassandra Jenkins– vocals, guitar Josh Kaufman– guitar, voyager, harmonium, banjo, synth, bass, piano, organ ~and~ JT Bates– drums, auxiliary percussion Eric Biondo– drums Michael Coleman– synth Stuart Bogie– flutes, saxophone Oliver Hill– violin, viola, string arrangement Annie Nero– bass Aaron Roche– synth Ben Seretan– drone Will Stratton– guitar
All songs written and performed NYC singer/songwriter Cassandra Jenkins will release her sophomore album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature in February via Ba Da Bing Records,
With Manassas, Stephen Stills reconciled warring impulses between obsessive control and solid musical partnerships to forge the best band and consistently strongest album of his solo career. Stills’ name loomed over the title, but unlike his studio instrumental dominance on Crosby, Stills and Nash’s debut or the kitchen-sink indulgences that marred the two previous solo albums, his third full-length as band leader showcased a collaborative ensemble flexible enough to cover a broad stylistic palette that ranged from Stills’ folk-rock country, bluegrass, Latin and hard rock elements.
The genesis for the Manassas band stemmed from a chance encounter with fellow folk-rock veteran Chris Hillman as Stills toured behind “Stephen Stills 2″ in June and July of 1971. Hillman, then soldiering on as the surviving founder of the Flying Burrito Brothers, would later recall, “Stills was playing a concert in Cleveland with the Memphis Horns. I was sitting in the audience, going, ‘Jesus Christ. They’re making 25,000 bucks and they’re shitty. The Burritos are better than this.’ I went backstage, and that’s when we renewed our friendship.”
In 1966, Hillman had helped Stills and Buffalo Springfield snare a gig as house band at the Whisky a Go Go that jump-started their career. Beyond that early debt, Stills recognized that the ex-Byrd as a kindred spirit seasoned beyond his years, a former bluegrass prodigy on mandolin and guitar before joining the seminal folk-rock band on bass. His skill at working with volatile partners including the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn and Gram Parsons, with whom Hillman defected to launch the Burritos, contrasted with the internal rivalries that had undermined Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young a year earlier. Encouraged by the reunion, Stills invited Hillman to join him in Miami to jam during studio sessions.
If the band Hillman heard in Cleveland turned in a lackluster set, it included journeyman players: bassist Calvin “Fuzzy” Samuels, veteran keyboard player Paul Harris, vocalist and percussionist Joe Lala and drummer Dallas Taylor, all joining Stills and Hillman for the recording sessions. With some new material leaning toward country, they added three more Burrito alumni, starting with guitarist Al Perkins, who would become a formal member of the Manassas band, and fiddler Byron Berline and acoustic double bassist Roger Bush, who would guest on the set’s bluegrass arrangements. While flexing his multi-instrumental prowess on guitars and keyboards, there was no need (and little room) for Stills to cover all the bases as he had with CSN.
How effectively the band invoked different styles is illustrated by “It Doesn’t Matter,” a graceful mid-tempo ballad, co-written with Hillman, that seamlessly integrates Stills’ concise electric guitar figures, Perkins’ gliding pedal steel, and Lala’s timbales beneath plush vocal harmonies from those four members.
The resulting studio band (abetted in a few sessions by Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman, two additional keyboard players and an uncredited Jerry Garcia) jelled quickly during the sessions at Criteria Studios. Stills brought an already substantial set of new songs, having originally planned his previous album as a double LP. With that bumper crop of originals, he envisioned four thematic album sides: The first would be devoted to songs inspired by his doomed romance with Rita Coolidge, organized as a would-be suite titled “The Raven”; side two, “The Wilderness,” would lean into country and bluegrass; side three, “Consider,” evoked Stills’ more melodic folk-rock instincts; and side four insisted “Rock & Roll is Here to Stay” with a trio of rockers that led to Stills’ solo acoustic elegy, “Blues Man,” saluting departed comrades Jimi Hendrix (who had appeared on Stills’ self-titled debut), Duane Allman and Canned Heat’s Al Wilson.
Preceding that lament was “The Treasure” a full-throttled rocker verging on progressive rock sprawling over eight minutes. A showcase for the ensemble’s collective power, the song would emerge as a live highlight during the band’s subsequent maiden tour.
That grand design was consistent with the album’s ascendance as the dominant focus for Stills and his rock peers, even if lyrically the songs largely plumbed more modest and familiar romantic themes with a few stabs at philosophizing, as on the unintentionally ironic “Rock & Roll Crazies,” warning of rock lifestyle hazards then handicapping Stills more than the song’s intended audience. That track stalled as a single, as did “It Doesn’t Matter,” but the album, which was released on April 12th, 1972, was able to land in the top five on the Billboard album’s chart while largely restoring Stills’ critical esteem after the criticism he experienced on the previous two solo sets.
On balance, Manassas impresses most through Stills’ melodic gifts, soulful vocals and instrumental chops. If the lyrics suffer by comparison with his strongest songs with Buffalo Springfield and CSN&Y, the material succeeds overall through the ensemble’s collective taste and the ambitious array of styles. More than any other project, the album documented Stills’ eclectic influences as absorbed during an itinerant upbringing as a military son in the South, along the Gulf Coast, and Central America, where Afro-Cuban styles would join his more familiar folk and blues.
Relaxing the obsessive need for control that shaped earlier solo and band projects, Stills found common ground with his band mates, sharing writing on selected tracks with Hillman, Lala, Taylor and former Burrito (and future Firefall member) Rick Roberts.
It’s tantalizing to consider what Manassas might have become had those bonds had the time to deepen. Instead, a follow-up was hastily recorded following a hiatus prompted by an ill-fated album reunion for the five original Byrds. That project took Hillman out of the picture in the first of a series of recombinant band distractions that would gradually dismantle the original septet. Hillman would be lured into a new supergroup proposed by manager David Geffen, teaming him with Eagles collaborator J.D. Souther and Buffalo Springfield/Poco survivor Richie Furay. Stills himself would be pulled away first by his wedding to French singer Veronique Sanson, then by CSN&Y reunion talks on Maui that soon collapsed.
By the time Stills reunited with his band Manassas, they had lost Dallas Taylor to a crippling heroin addiction, as well as Calvin Samuels, defecting for personal reasons. With a new bassist and drummer, the band limped through a 1973 tour before one of the final dates on that circuit, at San Francisco’s Winterland, signalled their impending end when David Crosby and Graham Nash joined them onstage, with Neil Young stepping in later in the set, prefiguring the 1974 CSN&Y reunion tour. Hillman would depart as planned for the Souther Hillman Furay Band, taking Paul Harris and Joe Lala with him.
Another Troy, NY act to make the list (there’s something in the Capital Region water folks). These guys make some catchy indie rock songs. You can’t listen to “Funny” without bopping along to it. The guitar riff is bound to get stuck in your head, as well as the 80’s Prince-like synthesizers near the end of the track..”Dreamboat” has The Killers written all over it with that driving drum beat and an infectious chorus. The ending of “Prisoner” makes me want to experience live music again because it absolutely goes insane with everyone playing as fast as possible. I can only imagine who that would leave an audience with their mouths wide open in amazement. “Dark Honey” is probably the biggest swing into pop-rock territory on the record, with a continuous build that once it hits the peak you just want to stand up and shout, whether someone is around or not. The piano lad ballad “Rare Feathers” lets you back into the world on a more contemplative note than the rest of the record. It’s a beautiful end to the 13 track effort.
Lyrically rich Guitar driven indie-pop-rock with the heart of a singer songwriter and the soul of an emo kid, This album is awesome! Upstate NY rockers who kick ass musically and lyrically
