Lucy Foley, Copenhagen

I'm releasing my debut album on October 1st! It's called Copenhagen. Without further ado, here it is.

Cool stuff made by my friends, #2: Vacuum Tree Head, Thirteen

Last year, I sang some vocals on an album by a band called Vacuum Tree Head, aka Jason Berry and a loose collective of musicians based in San Francisco and New York. They have been making music for some time, and their latest album is the first time I have sung with them. The album has recently been released and is called Thirteen. It's brilliant and intense, a tightly packed twenty minutes of joyful artrock mayhem. This video features the vocals of the other singer on the record, Sylvia Gordon:


VACUUM TREE HEAD - HINDI KO ALAM

vacuum tree head

You can hear a selection of their stuff on their myspace, but right now the only place online you can hear the songs I sang on is CD Baby, where they are snippetised. I sang in strange tongues on "Djinn 2", "Neck Talkers", "Backlit Epiphany" and "Nights of Horseback Salad".

Wombat Recording Company

Jesus this place has become a bit of a youtube zone of late. I'm going to spend the next while posting links to work by friends of mine, stuff I find inspiring, fun, interesting, good. Let's start with Wombat Recording Company.

This is the home of Ross Bonadonna, owner and operator of Wombat, which is a recording studio and creative production studio in Brooklyn, New York. I've been making my record there with Ross, who has also produced the entire thing. You will be hearing what we've done there over the past year really soon (mwahaha).

Meanwhile, Ross has recently launched a site for his Wombat Music Workshop, currently a place of crazy and unusual compositions which are gorgeous and tender, after you've gotten over the initial shock of the new. The first release from the Workshop is called "A Perfect Day", an album-in-progress which you can download free on Bandcamp! You can hear me singing on "Ladybug".



Ross is on Twitter, though you wouldn't know it most of the time. He's a studio guy, who burrows underground and does excellent work there. It's up to the people who surface with their shiny, golden records to be the proof of that.

Just have to have more of that

Janis on Dick Cavett, some time later. Got to love a chatshow host that has a lighter on standby on the desk. And the refreshingness of the conversation! And nobody has to hold up the record because everybody who needs to know about the record knows about the record. Goddammit.

They laughed me out of class, out of town and out of the state, man

So I'm goin' home.

Ah, Janis. This is beautiful.

Jimi Hendrix on Dick Cavett

Well it really was 1969. I think this is the first interview I have ever seen with him.

Paula Carino, Open on Sunday

A friend of mine in Brooklyn has made a new album, and she's using kickstarter to help her fund CD manufacturing costs. If you click on the widget below, it will take you to a page full of links to some of her music and where you can support her for as little as $8, which will get you a free download of the album as soon as it's out!

Only three days to go before the funding deadline, so get busy, folks.

Hard not to like him

The Guardian published an interview with George Michael a few days ago. Got to love his frankness.

See the Seams

This got voted #1 in The Guardian's Best-Of-Decade best-in-show album list, which I think says more about British broadsheet criticism than it does about albums that were made in the last 10 years. The criteria they used to decide this were also boringly fashion based. But the guy clearly has a playful and energetic way with words. I think I'm going to sit down and listen to this all in one go, because it describes a kind of journey through itself, though on first listen it's got similar qualities to what I found in Speech Debelle: musical mind-numbing monotony and a lot of earnestly over-worked lyrics. You know, you can see the seams, you can feel the effort.

So here's another journey I just took on the internet this past hour.
From Brian Eno, talking
to U2 at 19 years old.
to what Brian Eno did to U2

Dig that bridge on Unforgettable Fire. Fuck were they smart to get Eno in.

Once Eno is on your mind, he's on your mind.
And you have to end up here.
Every time I get there, I get the goosebumps.
Speaking of which, this is an interesting thing. So good you could listen to it twice, you say? Well... more than 20 years later, but you can really hear what it's made of.

And after all that, you end up inspired. Disclaimer: your results may vary.

"The hit song is hard to come by these days..."

Do you sometimes write poems? Do you harbour a secret desire to one day hear them set to music, sung by a silky smooth crooner, or just someone who can sing? Well, for the small price of $99, you can have somebody spend 48 minutes 15 seconds with your song on Protools and have a real genuine actual CD made of your song-poem.

It's an industry, and though one of the operators in this documentary is quite young and is making a living from it, it's got to be a dying business these days. This is a 54 minute documentary I discovered on clicker. If you're interested in the lives of people who oneday wandered down a cul-de-sac of some faraway part of life, met some other people there, commerce was traded and nobody ever returned, then you will probably find something terribly compelling about this documentary.

Watch out for the writer of the song, "The Thing". His face upon listening to the work of the studio guy is priceless. These guys have skills, no question. You can see the onetime Grammy winning, Elvis backup singer sighing in sheer desperation, but it is entirely inaudible on the recording. That's gifted.

Also viewable larger, here.

UPDATE: I've just been looking through old archives, and look what I found. Think this might be a candidate for the song-poem industry makeover?

Mad World

Usually when a pop or rock song is remade as an acoustic piece of melancholia, especially if it involves strings, it bores the crap out of me. But I have been mesmerised by this song, and go through bouts of listening to it over and over. It's gorgeous. It is like Gary Jules excavated the original Tears For Fears song and made it vibrant again. The piano riff is a very lovely thing, it really makes the song. There's not much to the song, really. But I love it. If you haven't heard this version before, you are in for a treat. But you probably have. It was the song over the credits of Donny Darko, and it elicits the mood of the movie so beautifully.

I think we all need this today

Marlene Dietrich playing the saw. Short and sweet. If you want to skip the repartee, start about 1:15.

The 2 Train: sweet and groovy

So I'd like to introduce you to The 2 Train: my new band! The 2 Train is me, Lucy Foley (voice) and Ross Bonadonna (guitar). We play a mixture of jazz, pop and bossa nova songs. Ross and I have been playing together since he discovered I could sing, and this past March we recorded a bunch of songs by the fireplace here in Clare. You can hear them on our myspace page. We're also busy making my first album in Wombat Recording, and I look forward to being busy with both projects for a while yet.

We're available for bookings throughout Ireland, Europe and New York, and you can contact us at the address on both the myspace page and from my website.

Ordinary people, at picnic

Apparently Michael Jackson spent some time in Ireland a couple of years ago. He was trying to find a place to live here. None of it worked out, but some stories have emerged from that time. This anecdote was one I thought illustrated something very nicely. Something about massively different worlds, at picnic.

Pat O'Hagan of estate agents Savills showed the star and his children around a "large, important country house in Co Meath" in September 2006, then priced at "around €20m".

Picnic

He was told to arrive at the house to show around an unnamed client and that there was to be nobody else on the premises. There was also a request that the party be permitted to have a picnic on the grounds of the property. "The picnic request made sense -- they could hardly stop in McDonalds or Supermacs on their way back, and he had to feed the kids. We had salad and sandwiches and crisps and a glass of wine," said Mr O'Hagan.

"Michael chatted away . . . He spoke about doing three concerts a day from the time he was very young. He had a certain amount of resentment against his father because of the amount of pushing that was done when he was young.

"The kids were there, rolling down the lawns, which were wet, and they went to feed the chickens in the yard. They were lovely, they were very well-mannered kids and he was very attentive to them. It was a group of ordinary people having a chat and a picnic out of the boot of the car."

Alphabet street

This is short, but kinda cool. Also the only actual youtube video of Prince singing Alphabet Street that I could find at 3am last night. Sometimes you just need it.

A few interesting Michael Jackson links

Ok, well if you're looking for some way beneath the MJ myth, you might want to start with this. Oh, love of Lisa Simpson has revealed some of the finest humanity in many human hearts, and this is very sweet indeed.



MJ wrote "Do the Bartman"! because he loved Bart Simpson so much. Well I feel Michael Jackson's heart here. This is lovely.

A journalist who knew MJ personally for years, talks.

Lisa Marie Presley is having a unique experience of MJ's death. (via LA Times)

This is pretty mesmerising. I wondered on facebook how MJ might have looked if he hadn't been interfered with, and Tabitha came up with this and this. Wow. How open and plain human those possible versions of himself look. The Mail version looks the most plausible to me. That kind of fame does not lead a person to looking like a binman. It has its own sheen, its own patina.

It all went arseways after Thriller. A generally good wnyc Soundcheck show, looking at Thriller, and the impact it had on MJ's career. Specifically, the crippling effects of success. He never made another great album again. It's such a pity. He clearly had it in him, still. The man was a phenomenon.

An article about the album he had (partly?) recorded when he died.

Man, his affairs are so messy. So much debt, and motherless children. There is some talk that Debbie Rowe will probably reclaim the two children of hers, and she is likely to get custody, being their natural mother. So what of the third child? Is the family to be split up? Isn't the whole situation bad enough? It's a mess.

So. He sold over 800 million records in his lifetime. His appeal spans generations of childhoods. Off the Wall and Thriller are such profoundly groovy records. I mean, they just groove.

But I don't know what he was trying to pull off with the London gigs. I think his whole relationship with fame was so deeply enmeshed with his own sense of self worth and existence, that it was just folly all the way down. How can a man of 50 try to recreate the kind of spectacle that he was famed for 25 years previously? It is a pity he could not just start with what he actually was, rather than endlessly clawing for the next thing that could kick his fame into what it had been. That time is gone, probably forever, for everybody.

Because deep inside all that crazyshit that Michael Jackson had become, there was this:

The man in the blue suit; the man in the white suit

So the security queue at JFK was a nightmare of inefficiency and chaos, with a guy in a blue suit and blue latex gloves in a desk in the middle of it all, looking around at anyone who sniffed and took everybody's passports and put a little mark on them. I suppose they had to give him something to do. His job was to look out for sniffles. Seriously.

It's not going to be so easy to get rid of swine flu but they have to look like officialty is making its moves to get the situation under control or some other suitable platitude. The lousy news is that swine flu is expected to run riot this winter. The good news is that fatalities are commensurate with any other normal flu, which is to say, very very few.

I cannot believe I am blogging about swine flu. It is so hard to care. It was the guy in the blue suit in the madly inefficient JFK queues what made me do it. Here's a picture of David Byrne's gig at the Prospect Park Bandshell a couple of weeks ago. Yes, I know you can't see David Byrne. He was wearing white. He's in the middle.

Nora, the amateur

Amateur: lover of. One who does it for the love of the thing, the passion, the rapture of the moment. This is Nora. The following two videos are likely to make you cry if you're sensitive to this kind of thing.

How sad, how lovely

Take an hour to listen to this hour long documentary about Connie Converse. Listen to the songs, and her voice. There's an uncanny quality in her. Her songs go on journeys into yearning, into the uncanny.

This is an incredible story. Connie Converse wrote songs on her guitar and sang them in the mid fifties: songs of such intimacy, wit, hip, poignancy and unconventionality that would not be really heard at all in the mainstream until Joni Mitchell came along, and that was just a totally different epoch later. Say what you like about Bob Dylan, intimacy was not his strong suit. This woman was writing these songs before any of these people showed up. Before the Beatles showed up, for Christ's sake. Before Elvis showed up. Before rocknroll showed up. Long before the lone human singing her own songs on a guitar showed up.

It's an hour long radio show, and there are also photographs of Connie from around the time the recordings were made, in Greenwich village in 1954. These songs have just emerged for the first time, a couple of months ago.

Connie Converse left New York, dispirited at lack of record industry interest in her songs, in 1960, right when Bob Dylan was arriving in town. She moved to some city beginning with M: somewhere she never really felt right in, though she had by the sound of it a very close supportive group of family and friends around her. One day in 1974, she packed up her volkswagen, dispatched a bunch of farewell letters, and headed off. She has not been heard of since.

She would be 85 now. I so much want to call out to her, to tell her that people are listening, that we love her songs, that there will be so many people who will listen to and love her songs now. That she was living out of time and place, that people care about her story. That I care about her story.

Connie Converse! I care about your story. I love your songs. You matter. You absolutely matter.


Connie Converse website
on myspace

So there's more to it than that

You know it's true I do more stuff than I said a few days ago in a post about how I don't do much other than stare into space while "working on a song" and tend to the menagerie around here, lately. I mean, mostly I do those things. Those things take up most of my day. But also, I fuck around on the internet for 15 hours a day like everybody else, and that includes looking at some interesting stuff. So at the very least, I could hit you up with some of that stuff. But you know, I suppose I think if I post something here I want to be wholeheartedly enthusiastic about it, rather than, uh, not being wholeheartedly enthusiastic about it. And yet...

Yesterday I discovered Jeffrey Lewis and Janelle Monae and returned again to Jamie Livingstone's daily polaroids. I can't describe what it is that I love about these pictures, so many of which are unremarkable, or badly exposed, polaroids, but the textures of them renew my love for film far more rawly than some gorgeous clean beautiful pictures I've also been looking at elsewhere. There is something so roughly gorgeous about Jamie Livingstone's lifelong daily shot project that takes my breath away.

Jeffrey Lewis? Sidewalk cafe guy, plays that folky sixties style guitar with a kind of maniacally dense lyrical style, ripped off melodies (Suzanne Vega's Luka for one, and a Blind Faith song, "You can all join in" -- though in fairness the BF song goes "Make up your own words up if you want to, any old words that you think will do" -- and somewhere else a paraphrased Leonard Cohen quote that is magnificent in its original), but he does it interestingly and he clearly loves music and it's playful and depending on your mood, listenable stuff. He's on tour right now, seems to spend a lot of time on tour generally. But basically, he's very new york, which is kind of comforting. You know? When what is considered new york these days is so fucking bland, it's nice to hear this and recognise it, to know that this is Typical L train Rider and hear his thoughts. Also makes comics.

The other gal? Kinda fun. Listen for yourself.

So here's a thing that bothers me intermittently, lately. This is the first time in popular music history when vast swathes of the people who are arriving on the scene and making music are largely rehashing-without-reinventing earlier periods of music, whipped entire from 1982 electronica or 1964 Motown, and literally just mimicked to the last detail with cut and pasted new lyrics onto them. This has never happened before in this way, and the entire music firmament from labels to magazines is lapping this shit up wholesale, and encouraging it, calling it genius. This bothers me.

It also bothers me to see people walking around in eighties drag. It's weird shit, man. Why would you want to do that? It's not everybody who is doing this of course, and there is interesting music being made nonetheless, and it isn't as if music has not historically been endlessly appropriated and appropriated again. But the history of pop and rock music has up until very recently, gotten forged by those who reinvent what came before, rather than literally literally mimic the exactly approximated and carefully studied mannerisms and tropes of what came before. This creeps me out. It's like music stalking. It's like identity theft. And it's being done by 20 year olds with talent. And it is what is, if anything, getting hoisted and Grammied™ and lauded and sold sold sold sold sold. And, of course, even more depressingly, bought bought bought bought bought.

I was also looking at some highly improbable, fun stuff yesterday.

Bright, pretty New Orleans-based Swedish one woman band.

We really have a lot of hissy fitters living in the house this week and it is beginning to get on my one remaining nerve.

Oh, and this is a wordcloud of my um, followers, over at twitter. It's clear and kinda nice.