Music Notes

Unlikely to be able to participate in this thread since I am in Ireland and it will go live at midnight, but I will be curious to read it in the morning….

Two weekends ago was Newport Folk Festival. As always it was a lot. Since I am going to be just a little critical of some of the programming thoughts a bit later, let me lay out a couple of points up front about how great this festival is. Tickets are almost impossible to come by (I am able to go because my friend got the tickets in his divorce so now I buy one off him every year, otherwise I clicked to buy the extremely few tickets that go on sale the very second they went on sale. I did not get any, though on the Friday, I did rise far enough up the waitlist that I could have bought them for that day alone that morning), but if you can go, it’s a well-oiled machine, minus managing the lines to get in that get pretty backed up and could be done better. Everything starts and ends on time to the second. The food is excellent–highly recommend the BBQ (believe it or not, the RI place they get for this is absolutely delicious), the lobster roll, and the poke. The food prices are not outlandish. They have water stations everywhere, so this isn’t the kind of thing where they charge you $7 for water or something like that. The bathrooms remain clean, with workers constantly checking. The setting, overlooking the bay, is of course astounding. While nothing like this is actually sustainable in any way, there’s a real effort for composting and they have a lot of workers there to make sure that happens right.

You do have to make choices with the last sets of the evening, which of course are often big acts, because it’s not just going to this, it’s going and then dealing with the traffic to get out when everyone else is, which can be really rough with that many people in a park. It would be tough to ask for a better festival when it comes to logistics. It would be tough to ask for a better festival when it comes to programming either for most people, but there is a critical analysis to be made and I will make it shortly. But first, the sets I saw, very briefly discussed since I don’t have hours to write this:

Friday:

1. Snacktime. This is a soul/funk band out of Philadelphia that has gotten a lot of attention over the past few years. They have a sports theme–they are all big fans and have their own jerseys made up and such, so they appear on Jason Kelce’s show and stuff like that. They are a very fun band to see. One thing about Newport that I will get to later is that if you want to see the younger Black acts, you kind of have to go earlier in the day and that’s part of the criticism I am going to have here. Would absolutely see these guys on tour.
2. Dogwood Tales. There’s usually 30 minutes or so between sets and so they have a couple of tiny stages set up for new and unknown bands to play. I rarely check these out because those breaks are good for things like food and bathroom, but I happened to wander by and it was announced this was an alt-country band out of Virginia and I’m like, OK, this might be my kind of thing. It absolutely was. These kids, who were totally overwhelmed to be there and acts on these stages ofter are, rocked in that 90s/00s alt-country way. They have an EP I think and that’s it, but they also have a lot of talent. Reminded me quite a bit of Centro-Matic. Was impressed.
3. Robert Lester Folsom. Caught part of this set; an older guy with a huge beard, sang surprisingly sweet tunes. Might check out his recordings.
4. The Deslondes. This sounded cool, a New Orleans-based sort of The Band. But I thought this was the worst show I caught in the festival. Do you like The Band in the Cahoots era? Then this is your thing. They sing well together–and this is the aesthetic of this festival for better or worse. But boring.
5. Big Freedia. I left The Deslondes to see the queen of New Orleans bounce. Big Freedia is a transgender woman who is a dominant and beloved figure of New Orleans hip hop and brings the heat. Did a whole Saturday Night/Sunday Morning thing, doing the profane and then the sacred. Can throw some serious rhymes with a very deep voice. Brought up audience members to shake their ass. Talked about the horrors of Gaza with the choir she had with her. A nice contrast to the lame harmonies that are too dominant among the millennial white bands that are all over festival. Leave it to the trans Black woman to bring some fuckin’ balls to Newport.
6. S.G. Goodman. I had heard really good things about Goodman’s country/folk/rock/whatnot and her albums are on my list of things to hear but I hadn’t actually heard her before. This was absolutely great. I immediately fell in love. The songs are so smart and she’s such a good storyteller. Not to mention closing with a Butthole Surfers cover. This is just classic old school southern songwriting spanning the eons from Jimmie Rodgers to Patterson Hood.
7. Kevin Morby. This was the first artist of the day I had seen before. My 3rd Morby show. He’s never quite a favorite with his upbeat folk-rock, but always solid songwriting and singing.

Unfortunately, a big thunderstorm then hit. I decided to bail, in part because I was already tired due to the heat before the storm, in part because I didn’t know if or when they would start the evening again and figured I’d get ahead of traffic, and in part to save my energy for the last two days. I was bummed to not see MJ Lenderman. Would have seen Kim Deal and Yeah Yeah Yeahs too. Oh well. It did start again after an hour, but what can you do?

Saturday:

1. Ken Pomeroy. I don’t always get to Newport because it’s a very long day, especially if you are really there to see music and not the scene (which is maybe half the people, lots of people just go to hang out in their lawn chairs 100 yards from the main stage and have a nice time). There’s not much actual seating and it’s a long day standing. But I had heard great things about the indigenous songwriter from Oklahoma and I was not disappointed. Staggering talent from someone who is not yet 23. Fantastic songs about small town Oklahoma and being a very different kid in a right-wing culture.
2. Diana Silvers. So this was another of the small set shows. It felt a little big for Silvers, in part because she was nervous and in part because there were some sound difficulties. She said it was her first show ever, which didn’t make sense to me, but OK. She’s a nice folk singer, kind of what you’d expect if you were to define “female folksinger in her late 20s/early 30s.” But then I found out that this wasn’t some no one. She’s a well known actor who had a big role in Booksmart, among other films. Then it all clicked to me who she was. Still doesn’t quite explain why she was playing this set. Guess it was OK.
3. Saya Gray. Loved the energy, didn’t totally know what to make of the music, seemed like enjoyable poppish folk-rock to me, probably should listen to more of her work.
4. Bonny Light Horseman. A lot of people I know love them and I have not loved them, so I am sort of withholding judgment, but will note that they to me feel an awful lot like many bands who end up beloved at Newport, which is that they sing great together but don’t sing about a hell of a lot and are really popular with people in the 30s, but seem slightly gutless to me. Again a bit more about this in a minute. I caught a few of their tunes–good singers, good musicians, but whatever product.
5. Obongjayar. Finally, the British African diaspora reaches Newport. I wish there was more programming like this. He’s a Nigerian-English soul singer/rapper who has a really good band and is super charismatic and funny and can really sing and hold a crowd. I bet this would be freaking great inside a club at night.
6. Mon Rovia. This was touching. Mon Rovia is the stage name of a guy who survived the Liberian civil war when he was a boy, lost his parents, was adopted by an American family, and has seen way too much. He openly talks about his depression and a lot of his songs are about just surviving. He’s a very good songwriter and it all ends up sounding more inspiring than a bummer. He keeps on keeping on.
7. Iron & Wine. I had last seen Iron & Wine in 2007 and I probably wouldn’t pay his concert fee compared to everything else I can see, but I thought sure, why not. It was OK. I really love some of his songs, but his pastoralism can get pretty boring and this show was honestly a little boring.
8. Waxahatchee. This was my 8th Waxahatchee show. I feel way cooler than I have any right to because I got into her when she was playing in small spaces in Providence in front of 30 people in like 2015. And now she’s a total fucking rock star. As a live performer, she’s still kind of inconsistent. I saw her at Big Ears solo and it wasn’t that great of a show. She mumbled a few things to the audience, did her work, and got out. But here? She owned the stage and showed more charisma than I had ever seen from her. She did most of Tigers Blood and a couple of older tunes and a Kathleen Edwards cover and brought MJ Lenderman out to play guitar for several songs. It rocked and she was a huge hit and it was great.
9. Public Enemy. I can now say I’ve seen Public Enemy. They are pretty old! Flav had his grandkids there. But they can still deliver, both he and Chuck D, whose voice remains as powerful as ever. They still have their militant types guys on stage too as part of the act. They try to do some moves themselves, but they ain’t getting any younger. One thing I thought was super cool is that they played some of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” as it’s been 60 years since Dylan went electric at Newport and in between verses, Chuck talked up how revolutionary it was. That was cool. This wasn’t a completely amazing show, but it brought the politics much more than most of the acts.

Sunday:

1. Mary Chapin Carpenter. I did not think Carpenter would rock this much live. She absolutely killed it. She was so glad to be there as well after something like three decades. It meant a ton to her. This was an excellent set, one of the best of the festival. This was also by far the best day of the festival for me, so this was a great start.
2. Margo Price. After a couple of albums where Margo decided she wanted to be Stevie Nicks instead of Loretta Lynn, she is back doing full-on country music. I strongly suspect the album sales and critical reviews are two good reasons why. She is much, much better as a country singer than another rocker. She killed this set too, doing some great new cuts, a couple of covers (including a Porter and Dolly song with John C. Reilly, who is always around the festival; I think he runs his entire acting schedule making sure he is free that weekend), and some of her older songs. Killer set.
3. Richy Mitch & the Coal Miners. This was a new band to me, again needing to find someone to see at a moment when I didn’t really know anyone. Acceptable bunch of kids doing a folk-rock thing out of Seattle, including a song about Lake Missoula, the giant Ice Age lake that blew and basically carved the modern Northwest geography. I’d listen to more.
4. Lucius. Like a lot of bands at Newport, the ladies of Lucius sing wonderfully together and don’t quite make me love them despite that. I find this band completely fine but not as exceptional as many. One person who disagrees is Mavis Staples, who was at the festival and came out for their set to sing with them. OK, if Mavis is cool with them, so I am. By the way, while Mavis doesn’t move super fast anymore, she still sings great and how someone of her age still has a voice like that is an interesting question.
5. Maren Morris. While Morris is a bit too pop-country for my tastes, she is part of the Official Newport Crowd, which means she gets invited again and again. So I decided to check out part of her set. Whatever you want to say about some of the styles she uses in her music, she can write a pretty funny and honest song. After a bad relationship and divorce, for example, she says she has finally started dating again and talked about dating apps (what is dating using apps like for a famous singer who has topped the country charts???) and how she likes to occasionally hook up with a guy but not for him to stay over, which they are wont to do, so she wrote “Bed Not Breakfast” for that experience. I laughed. It was funny.
6. Hurray for the Riff Raff. What a great way for me to end this festival. Alynda Segarra does not fuck around with music or politics. Segarra is very, very angry at the world and should be and closing with “Pa’lante,” that included reading a poem from a dead Gazan murdered by the Israelis was the best possible ending. What could be better. Such power and such glory through music.

I could have stayed for the big closing act, which turned out to be a lot of the performers getting together and doing songs of resistance. The traffic would have been death and I was very, very tired.

As it turns out, I went to almost all the same shows as Jonathan Bernstein, who was the Rolling Stone writer on the scene, so you can check out his recap too.

So my slight criticism–Newport revovles around a few people and one of them is for some reason Nathaniel Rateliff, who has an outsized role in putting the festival together. I have no idea why. Unlike Newport Jazz, where Christian McBride runs the programming but is a universally beloved jazz legend who everyone respects across the spectrum of what jazz means, Rateliff is a fairly minor figure whose folky rock has its fans, but even among artists of his era is a very minor figure. This means two things. First, it means Rateliff’s friends are always in the festival and second, it means a lot of bands like his are in there. And what that means is a lot of bands who sing well together but largely don’t sing about much of anything important at all, a lot of popular millennial bands who really wish they were in Laurel Canyon in the 70s, where everyone looked great, the drugs were fantastic, and so was the vibe, plus you could sing about yourself instead of about politics. So you have a lot of bands like Dawes and Geese and Illiterate Light and Mt Joy and Lucius and Andrew Bird and Langhorne Slim and Shakey Graves and Nickel Creek (or its musicians in their side projects) there a lot. Some of these bands are perfectly fine and none of them are really exactly bad. Actually bad versions of this kind of thing are Mumford and Sons and Avett Brothers, though I know the latter has been there in the past. It leads to a very white millennial thing with lots of good harmonies and very little to think about.

I’m being unfair a bit here, perhaps, but there’s a sameness that begins to creep in year after year. What I’d really like to see is Newport have a year where no one on the lineup has performed there in the past, or at least not in the last decade. There are enormous parts of the folk scene, writ large, never ever represented at Newport. James McMurtry has not played Newport since 1993, for example. Other than jam bands, bluegrass has been totally out of it for years. Latino artists are awfully rare. Almost all of the Black acts are early in the day and tend to be minor figures. By far the best year I’ve gone is 2021, when as a response to BLM, Newport (which did the festival over two weekends to limit the crowds as Covid was still a thing) gave over one to Allison Russell who put together an astounding lineup, but all of that has been forgotten, basically. It’d be great to see, say, Blood Orange there. Or Laura Veirs. Or Rodney Crowell. Or La Santa Cecilia. I could go on. A great festival needs a bit of a shakeup, both in terms of who it invites and the type of band it invites.

But I will almost certainly go next year if I can.

A few other bits:

I saw Jeannie Sealy when I went to the Opry. She was one of those artists who managed to create an entire long-lasting career strictly through the Grand Ole Opry. She hadn’t charted in decades and yet played to large crowds every week, if only for two songs. So she’s kind of a legend, even outside of the fact that she blazed a lot of trails in a country music establishment that hates change. RIP.

I discussed Flaco Jimenez here, but let’s talk about him some more.

Eddie Palmieri was a hugely important figure in salsa music. Unfortunately, salsa has done the bluegrass thing and stopped changing at all because it’s fans want the same damn thing over and over and over again. That was not Palmieri’s style and he pushed hard to expand what salsa meant, to the point that he hated the entire term that he felt ossified music that shouldn’t ossify. Serious RIP here.

One thing I appreciated about Michael Lydon is him disliking the early Beatles and not changing his mind much about that after The Beatles actually became a good band in the mid 60s.

Fantastic story on Brittany Howard in Bitter Southerner., as she gets Alabama Shakes back together for a new album and tour.

Elizabeth talked about her essay in the Times last week that discussed the disappearance of drugs and bad behavior from rock and roll documentaries. She’s right of course that there’s a limited upside to the endless focus on that. But of course, the idea of a documentary on Led Zeppelin that doesn’t go into this a good bit is absurd, if for no other reason that it was central to why the band was terrible after 1975. Great essay.

This week’s playlist:

1. Merle Haggard, Down Every Road, disc 2
2. Neil Young, On the Beach
3. William Parker, Kalaprusha on the Edge of the Horizon
4. Joe Ely, Live at Liberty Lunch
5. Derya Yildirim & Grup Simsek, Yarin Yoksa
6. The War on Drugs, Slave Ambient
7. Dave Alvin, Public Domain
8. Bonnie Prince Billy, The Letting Go
9. Lucy Dacus, Home Video
10. Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves, Hurricane Clarice
11. Zazou Bikaye/CY1, Noir et Blanc
12. Jason Isbell, Something More than Free
13. Waylon Jennings, Waylon Live, disc 2
14. Larry Cordle & Lonesome Standard Time, Songs from the Workbench
15. Yo La Tengo, Stuff Like That There
16. Plains, I Walked With You a Ways
17. Adrienne Lenker, Bright Future
18. Courtney Barnett, The Double EP
19. Lucinda Williams, self-titled
20. Sonic Youth, Sonic Nurse
21. Bonnie Prince Billy, Master and Everyone
22. Drive By Truckers, Decoration Day
23. The Tallest Man on Earth, There’s No Leaving Now
24. Lori McKenna, The Bird & the Rifle
25. Raye Zaragoza, Woman in Color
26. The Bakersfield Sound: Country Music Capital of the West, 1940-1974, disc 2
27. Butch Hancock, Own & Own
28. Drive By Truckers, Decoration Day
29. Yves Tumor, Heaven to a Tortured Mind
30. Bobby Kapp & Matthew Shipp, Cactus
31. Rilo Kiley, More Adventurous
32. Angel Olsen, Burn Your Fire for No Witness
33. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming Sessions
34. Chris Acker, Future Lunch
35. Mekons, Fear and Whiskey
36. Chad Taylor Trio, The Daily Biological
37. Mount Moriah, Miracle Temple
38. Richard Buckner, Dents and Shells
39. Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Navigator
40. John Moreland, Live at Third Man Records
41. Tom T. Hall, Places I’ve Done Time
42. Johnny Cash, With His Hot and Blue Guitar
43. Richard Thompson, The Life and Music of Richard Thompson, disc 2
44. Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry, At the 2nd Fret
45. Dwight Yoakam, Hillbilly Deluxe
46. Wild Billy Childish & CTMF, Failure Not Success
47. Juliana Hatfield, Pussycat
48. Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir/Talinn Chamber Orchestra/Risto Joost, Tonu Korvits: Moorland Elegies
49. Yo La Tengo, There’s a Riot Goin’ On
50. Rough Guide to the Best African Music You’ve Never Heard
51. Ikue Mori & Zeena Parkins, Phantom Orchard
52. Arthur Russell, Love is Overtaking Me
53. Vince Staples, Big Fish Theory
54. Tom Russell, The Long Way Around
55. Tom Waits, Bad as Me
56. James Brandon Lewis Quartet, Abstraction is Deliverance

Album Reviews:

Jordana, Something to Say to You

This 2020 album is pretty decent indie pop. It’s certainly not breaking any new ground, but her combination of grunge and bubble gum pop is not bad. She’s had some bigger releases since this album came out so I might check them out. Basically, the way to see her is as the next generation of young women like Snail Mail or Soccer Mommy, writing introspective teenish songs that love rock and pop equally. And there’s not much wrong with that. Also, “Fuck You” is very fine song and a sentiment I can get behind.

B

Night Palace, Diving Rings

More dream pop, this time though with some serious orchestral arrangements. I don’t know the album is kind of whatever but the arrangements work pretty well here. The vocals are very floaty, even for dream pop. The vocals also though need some bite to them. Floaty has its limitations, inventive arrangements notwithstanding.

B-

Tim Berne/Matt Mitchell, One More Please

A 2022 duet between the saxophonist Berne and the pianist Mitchell. Brilliant musicians of course, though this collaboration does land a bit on the arid side, which sometimes happens in these experimental jazz albums. It’s a completely fine recording, but doesn’t warm my heart or, perhaps more to the point, make it likely that I will purchase it. An interesting duet exercise, but it’s an exercise.

B

PinkPantheress, Heaven Knows

One way you start feeling really old is when young musicians cite musicians who you also think of as super young as major influences. That’s what Pink Pantheress, a British pop artist who is moving closer to stardom, has said of Hayley Williams of Paramore. But hell, of course this is how it is always supposed to happen. And in fact, it’s good to hear artists who basically don’t care about the 60s and 70s. As for the music, it’s solid pop. Hell, it almost gets me to dance, by which I mean slightly moving in my chair. Now, the album has a sameness to it that does begin to make one lose attention. And some more attitude could be useful here–maybe a bit more Lily Allen, to refer back to a generation that matters a lot to her. As these albums go, there are a lot of collaborators, including Kelela and Central Cee, who adds a strong British male rap voice that mixes things up a bit on the album’s third biggest hit, “Nice to Meet You.”

B

Mary Halvorson Quartet, The Bagatelles, Vol 1

In the mid 2010s, John Zorn composed a huge series of tunes he called “The Bagatelles.” To my knowledge, there’s nothing too specific uniting these except for when he wrote them and specifically that he was writing them for jazz, which was a shift from the string quartets and the like he wrote for in much of the 2000s. I’ve seen a bit of this performed live when Big Ears gave a couple of days over to Zorn a couple of years ago and he brought out a huge array of bands to do some of them. They are challenging and they rock. Now he’s decided to unite some musicians to record a bunch of them. This is the first. The now legendary guitarist Mary Halvorson leads here with a quartet she put together that includes Miles Okazaki also on guitar, Drew Gress on bass, and her usual partner Tomas Fujiwara on drums. I’m largely mixed on Zorn’s unbelievable amount of recorded work, but this is pretty dang good. This avoids the postmodern chopping of Zorn’s earlier work that hasn’t always aged well and instead is just basically a kick ass noise rock album. A lot of you would like it.

A

Mk.gee, Two Star & the Dream Police

This is a super odd album–it’s a combo of 80s influences, R&B, and a lot of modern production. But it’s just so diffident. Nothing really strikes or bites. It’s just kind of out there, floating in the ether, needing something to make all this hit home. But nothing does.

C

Craig Finn, A Legacy of Rentals

I came to Hold Steady late in life and then fell in love with them. In fact, there’s just a whole bunch of mid-2000s era bands I kind of missed due to where I was in my life and I still haven’t really circled back to all of them. Finn is the king of singing about being a fuck up and the title of this 2022 album is basically that guy. He’s not really a singer at all–he often speaks his lyrics. But god damn if he isn’t a hell of a storyteller. These aren’t oppressed people or anything–the whiteness here is pretty profound. These are the characters a lot of us have known–the guy who gets a job after college at a restaurant and stays in that world forever and drinks way too much and is still doing cocaine in his 40s and has bad relationships and just is kind of hanging on because how could he change at this point? Basically, the only difference between this and a Hold Steady album is that it rocks less. Which doesn’t hurt it much, but maybe hurts it a little bit.

A-

Buck Meek, Haunted Mountain

Adrienne Lenker is the big wig from Big Thief but Buck Meek is her writing partner and bandmate and he has a successful solo gig too. This is his 2023 album. As with his other albums, I find him to be a fine second banana but a somewhat lacking front man. He’s a pretty good songwriter; one can see why he and Lenker write so much together. But his voice doesn’t have the power of hers and it ends up sounding like a nasally whine who is also kind of whining about the world. It’s an alright album because he is a good songwriter, but alright is as high as I’ll give this. Very much fits into the freak folk world, which as far as I can tell combines the limited instrumentation and vocal stylings of folk while also being sure to not actually sing about much but yourself. Perfect for the 21st century. I;m being a bit harsh here about someone I respect, yes.

B-

Mick Flannery, Goodtime Charlie

Incredibly overwrought Irish singer thinks that singing as hard and emotive as he can will put it over, but it doesn’t. Given that Valerie June and Anais Mitchell guest on this album, I may be the minority. But I feel June oversings by and large and she provides a nice contrast to him here, which tells me plenty.

C

Sarathy Korwar, Kalak

The polyrhythms of South Asian music work so dang well in the broader based global scene and into the club scenes too. This has opened up interesting opportunities over the past few decades for musicians from the region that might not have existed otherwise. This is the kind of collaborative project that I mean, with Korwar deeply rooted in musical traditions but also working with a New York DJ to create an album for the future, urging the embrace of art and literature and humanity. India certainly needs voices pushing against Modi’s nationalism anyway, and while no one in 2025 is going to claim that a musician is likely to make a difference, it’s still a good message and good music.

A-

April March, In Cinerama

This is an act by a French singer trying to do 60s pop. And while I don’t usually care for strictly nostalgia work and am not even particularly a fan of 60s pop, this is actually a pretty solid album that draws from the best of that era and recasts it into a pretty appealing package. She’s a good writer, which helps a lot.

B

As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics.