Weekly Music Roundup: Benefit Songs, Continental Breakfast, & RIP Tom Petty
This week, musical support for relief efforts in Texas and Puerto Rico; The Mountain Goats climb to the summit of podcasting. And RIP Tom Petty.
Remembering Tom Petty
Of course, the big music news of the past week was the death yesterday of Tom Petty. One of the best-selling artists of all time, Petty had a long career full of major hits. This is not necessarily the unalloyed paradise it might sound like, because some of his songs became so ubiquitous – used in movies, TV commercials (especially cars – Petty wrote great driving tunes), and the like – that you began to take them for granted, or even resented having to hear them again. But occasionally, we’d get a reminder of just how good his songwriting could be. When Jonathan Demme used “American Girl” in Silence of the Lambs, for example, it did so much to set the mood of that scene (pretty girl driving down the highway) and to set up the contrast with the horror that would come next. And when Tom Petty took to the Super Bowl halftime stage in 2008, the general thinking seemed to be “oh great, another old-timer playing safe songs for the Baby Boomers. They’re still afraid of booking anyone younger after the Janet/Justin wardrobe malfunction.” But Petty put on a great show, reeling off four of his greatest hits in just about 12 minutes, and while I had seen Petty live in a small club in NY when the Heartbreakers were just getting started, this is the live performance that I’ll remember:
Amanda Palmer’s New Song Is A Puerto Rico Relief Benefit
“Small Hands, Small Heart” is a song that Amanda Palmer wrote in three days last week to mobilize her large online following to help with disaster relief efforts in Puerto Rico. What I like about the song is that despite being for the proverbial “good cause,” it is as spiky and sarcastic a ditty as you could ever wish for. Palmer has always had a flair for the dramatic, often inhabiting a character (or characters) in her work; but “Small Hands, Small Heart” sounds like she is simply channeling herself, despite the numerous voices she employs. References to “small hands, small heart,” “big man, big mouth,” and a bit of braggadocio about the size of a certain body part will not be lost on anyone listening, so Palmer doesn’t belabor the point. But it’s interesting to hear the line “this land is your land” turned into something so caustic.
Proceeds benefit the Hurricane Maria Community Recovery Fund in Puerto Rico.
Bill Frisell’s Compilation EP Is A Hurricane Harvey Benefit
Guitarist extraordinaire Bill Frisell has also created something to help hurricane relief efforts: a digital compilation drawn from his archive of live recordings. It was put together after Hurricane Harvey had smashed into Texas, and especially the Houston area, and is called Hurricane Harvey Relief. As with Amanda Palmer’s song, the proceeds from this compilation will all go to relief efforts, this time the relief fund put together by Houston mayor Sylvester Turner. This is notable because Turner, a former lawyer, is helping to deal with an unanticipated by-product of the Texas storm: he announced that he would personally represent in court any undocumented residents who were in danger of being deported because they had to ask for help after the storm. As for the compilation itself, it finds Frisell and his top-shelf colleagues in rare form over the course of seven tracks. Check out this performance of “Boubacar,” Frisell’s tribute to the great West African guitarist Boubacar Traore, in a live Seattle gig from 2006.
The band that night included the great slide guitar player Greg Leisz, and when those two get together it is always worth a listen.
Support Turner’s relief fund and get the compilation here.
Kamasi Washington’s New EP: Smaller, Still Epic
Sax player and composer Kamasi Washington has reached a level of visibility on the music scene that’s rare for a jazz musician. Much of that is a result of his playing and arranging work on Kendrick Lamar’s brilliant 2015 album To Pimp A Butterfly, and when Washington followed that up with a hugely ambitious 3-LP set called The Epic that got mostly rave reviews, he suddenly found himself on the festival circuit with the country’s most popular rappers, singers, and bands. Now, Kamasi Washington returns with an EP called Harmony of Difference, and though it’s far shorter than The Epic, it is still ambitious in both concept and band size. It consists of five short tracks that then spawn a lengthy suite that weaves earlier thematic ideas with each other. Originally done to accompany a visual art work by his sister, Amani, in this year’s Whitney Biennial, the music suggests different attributes and personae, from slow funk to breakneck jazz fusion, and further suggests that these can all combine to become more than the sum of their parts. The spirit of John Coltrane hangs over the titles: “Knowledge,” “Perspective,” “Truth.” In “Integrity,” Washington’s big band takes on a Brazilian cast, with a bossa nova rhythm and a melody that’s redolent of mid-century Brazilian pop.
Kamasi Washington and his band play at Terminal 5 on November 22.
All Hail The Mountain Goats, Conquerors of All Media
Apparently, John Darnielle is not content with his dual career as one of rock’s greatest storytellers (as leader of The Mountain Goats) and as a critically-acclaimed and best-selling author (Wolf In White Van, Universal Harvester). Now he aims to conquer the world of podcasting as well. I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats is a new podcast featuring conversations between Darnielle and Joseph Fink, creator of the hugely successful fictional podcast Welcome to Night Vale. Each episode of the podcast will be accompanied by the release of a cover of a song from the Mountain Goats’ 2002 lo-fi classic All Hail West Texas. It all leads to the April 2018 release of a full 2-LP set of covers called I Only Listen To The Mountain Goats: All Hail West Texas, featuring podcast series guests like Andrew Bird, Amanda Palmer, Craig Finn, and others. The first of those covers is by the remarkable Laura Jane Grace, the lead singer of the band Against Me!, who chose the song “The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton.” (Denton, being north of Dallas, hardly qualifies as West Texas, but whatever…) This is the song that got a generation of Mountain Goats fans to enthusiastically yell “hail Satan!” at concerts, and Grace’s unadorned voice-and-guitar performance sounds eerily like Darnielle’s own. If, that is, Darnielle’s original had been recorded using a proper microphone.
Courtney Barnett, Kurt Vile, and the Comforts of Home
The intercontinental friendship between Australia’s Courtney Barnett and Philly’s Kurt Vile is about to spawn a collaborative album, the appetizingly named Lotta Sea Lice. They’ve released a new single and video in advance, called “Continental Breakfast,” which offers some charming, intimate home movies of both musicians. (That’s Jen Cloher with Courtney Barnett at 1:06 – watch for Jen’s session in our studio on November 2 at 2pm ET.) The video is a perfect match to the song, which has a homespun, folky, somehow poignant sound, with both singers warbling through the melody more or less on key and the guitars weaving a shimmering filigree behind them. After the success of their first single, the whimsical, possibly Byrds-inspired "Over Everything," released last month, their album and tour look to be highlights of the fall.
Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile play at the Beacon Theater in NY on 11/1, with Jen Cloher opening. That concert is sold out.
