Nashville with Hardly a Plan

Saturday Night Live just isn't funny anymore. I tuned in to see Beck perform and his band was set up just like the last time he was on while touring Guero. I almost thought they were showing archived footage of the performance. SNL just really doesn't have any performers worth watching other than Darrell Hammond and he is no Wil Ferrell.
Thursday we will be leaving to go to some bluegrass festival at the Ernest Tubbs Theater in Nashville. We will be playing a 3 song set in the morning and a 3 song set in the afternoon on Friday, before heading home some time on Saturday. It should go well, but we don't practice enough to ever be flawless, which would be nice. I forgot to post about the last few outings we had over the course of three months.
We went to Alabama to play at a church that Marty Stuart frequents and we played for part of the Sullivan Family while we were there. They wrote a couple of the songs that we play and seem quite talented. Their banjo/guitar player and back singer Chad played a few songs on his own and sounded great. If he was more charismatic, he could put out a solo album and rock Nashville. Unfortunately, the church only had about forty people there for the concert, so it seemed like a lot of trouble for nothing but politics. On the way back we stopped at a church in Breaux (pronounced "Bro") Bridge and had a much better response with a hundred people. I don't think we sold a lot of albums at either place, but it was fun. Our most recent performance was at a family reunion in east Texas. There were probably about sixty people there and it was the most relaxed performance we have had lately. We played until we ran out of songs. Of course they had more songs, but none that I knew, so I got to pretend which is always an adventure.
Centerpoint sounds like it would be an important place at the center of somewhere besides nowhere, but it really is the center of nowhere Louisiana. We went to weekend restaurant where bands play southern gospel in exchange for food and we got great food. It was all fried and will help me to an early grave. There were about forty people there who sat and watched us like someone staring out of the window at a nursing home. A mentally disabled man greeted us as we drove up by yelling that we were late (always a nice way to start things off) and he actually took care of the financial dealings. The old people who stayed around afterwards asked us a lot of vague, stupid questions which didn't help things along as we ate.
Nashville will definitely move things along for us since we will get to play before lots of people. Hopefully, more bookings will come out of this and make it worth it.

Mercy Me's latest album Coming up to Breathe has blown me away. I listened to the whole thing today and wasn't annoyed by a track. Please understand that this is a rare thing for me since I have a short attention span (not ADHD). Muse's Black Holes and Revelations was great background music for cleaning up around the house. The song tempos varied and parts of it were dark, light, and a mix of both. How We Operate from Gomez hasn't made it out of my cd player at work. I hardly make it past track 6, but when I do, I get surprised by the quality of tracks on the second half of the album, since they are usually the ones which lack energy and greatness.

Catching up on Music

I have been listening to various things in the last few months. Music is always moving in and out from various sources, so much that I only stick to the things which rub me the write way. Alexi Murdoch sounds like he's trying to channel Nick Drake without all of the emotional baggage. The beginning of Time without Consequence starts off well, but bogs down somewhere around the halfway point. "Orange Sky" is a great track and I am glad I found out about it from somewhere other than The O.C. Jubilee was a great album from Grant Lee Buffalo and the heart of the band, Grant Lee Phillips continued his great writing and vocal style with Ladies Love Oracle, his first solo release. His haunting voice and towering melodies are unique and worth listening to when trying to wind down after a long day. I downloaded some Hit the Switch tracks for free from emusic.com and was scared quickly into not listening again. It was a little too heavy for me in the evening. Leigh Nash's Blue on Blue is a great album. She has a heavenly voice and it's nice to hear her be able to sing freely about various topics. The album has more of a Nashville sound than all Sixpence had laid before her and if she can connect with the right audience, she might actually do well. If has been a few days since I downloaded South's Adventures in the Underground Journey to the Stars and I really haven't taken it out of my car yet. The songs are a mix of influences and the majority of them are upbeat, poppy tracks that keep me in a good mood. KEXP Seattle featured the band on a live podcast and I couldn't help but give the album a try. Another band I fell into from the same station, but on different day is the Summer Lawns. Their album First We Waited...Then It Started has Radiohead's OK Computer written all over it, but for some reason has confusing bits at the end of just about each track which really don't connect well with the tracks which follow them. It was great for a long drive and their cover of "This Little Light of Mine" was one of the strangest, but most beautiful tracks I have ever heard. One of the albums I had been looking forward to hearing for a while was The Choir's O How the Mighty Have Fallen. "Nobody Gets a Smooth Ride" is one of the catchiest songs I have heard this year and has been the victim of the repeat button several times. Good Monsters from Jars of Clay was voted album of the year by CCM magazine in September when it was released even though 3 months remained to be heard this year. That's a little forward for me, but still it's a good album. The first 2 tracks "Work" and "Dead Man" are hook-laden modern rock songs from a largely acoustic band and are two of the best tracks on the album, unfortunately, they don't set the pace for the album. "There Is a River" sounds like it was left off of Redemption Songs and is a great song which could easily be turned into a bluegrass jam. Most of the other songs suffer from verses and choruses which don't link up and aren't the easiest to follow, but it's great to hear something totally different from Jars of Clay which doesn't fit the CCM format. I mentioned John Mayer's latest album Continuum in my last post and I definitely give it a thumbs up on both hands. It's a must have for any John Mayer fan and a should have to any one else who loves good guitar music. I got Mockingbird for free from Derek Webb's website. It's still available to anyone who will mail 5 friends about it before getting it. I think it was worth it, since it was free and I have been a fan of Caedmon's Call for years (really just the old independent albums before they joined up with Warner Brothers). The album is really eclectic folk and is great entertainment for a lazy Sunday afternoon. Five for Fighting's Two Lights was a large disappointment. The only track I kept was "The Riddle" and that was only for sentimental value. It was infected with a overwhelming slow pace which bored me severely. How We Operate from Gomez has been one of the greatest surprises. "Notice", "See the World", and "How We Operate" is the best 3 track lineup to start an album this year. Most of the time I don't make it past those songs, but when I do, I really enjoy the album. Paul Simon's Surprise features some great songwriting, but isn't too exciting overall. The Wreckers Stand Still Look Pretty is more entertaining and radio friendly. I didn't know what to expect when I first gave it a listen, but I found pop melodies hung over a blend of country and rock influences. It wasn't annoying, although bits seemed predictable. That's a lot of music and there's always more.

John Mayer/Sheryl Crow Live at the Woodlands

Friday, my wife and I escaped school after a half day and drove 2 and half hours to The Woodlands to get in line for the John Mayer/Sheryl Crow concert which would start at 6:3o. Of course for the first time ever, I overestimated our drive and traffic time, leaving us with an hour wait before we could get in to get seated. We sat out on the hill, this time we remembered to bring a blanket and some books, unlike the last time when we went to see Sting and Annie Lennox. I brought lawn chairs and food and then found out that we couldn't bring either in because the pavilion sells its own food and lawn chairs while tearing wallets from victims' pants. We setup right on the cement walkway behind the rail, basically the first row of the hill. It's always a better seat than in the overpaid seat section where there is no room to move your legs or seat comfortably; where your arms will lock or rub with some person you don't know for 3 hours or so.

Our blanket was just off the center of the stage and just left of the center speaker cluster. The sound was great and couldn't have been much better. Marjorie Fair opened the concert with a depressing 30 minute set. The only song we knew was "Empty Room" which appeared on a Paste Magazine Music Sampler. It was also the best song. For some reason Evan kept starting songs in a major key for the verse and then would seemingly run blindly into a relative minor with the fanfare of Starsailor. It wasn't bad, just parts were disjointed and their set really didn't set the stage for John Mayer.

John Mayer Set list (sorry, I can't remember where the last two songs fit into the set):

Belief
Vultures
Why Georgia
Slow Dancing in a Burning Room
Good Love is On the Way
No Such Thing
Daughters
Bigger Than My Body
I Don't Trust Myself (With Loving You)
Gravity
Waiting on the World to Change
In Repair
The Heart of Life
Bold As Love

Mayer started at 7:15 with "Belief" a mid-tempo song with lots of R & B flavor. Most of the music on his new album Continuum has this type of flavor, which is a step forward for Mayer. His first full length album, Room for Squares, established him as a pop star and Heavier Things took the pop and solidified it thematically and lyrically. The John Mayer Trio live album showed off Mayer's blues chops and showed that he wasn't just some pinup, but it isolated a lot of listeners who bought the album based on what they had heard before from Mayer. Mayer has channeled a blues-infused pop featuring great melodies and solos reminiscent of Eric Clapton's solo records over the years; something that most listeners can connect with on some level because the music offers something to just about everyone. His set primarily came from his latest album (nine songs), two of them first featured on the JMT Try along with "Good Love Is on the Way", and then two of the biggest songs from each of his first two albums. Mayer had another two guitarists on stage, a keyboardist/organist, two horn players, and the bassist and drummer from the Any Given Thursday Live DVD. They were a tight band, but sometimes their sound was overpowering, cluttering the quality for the crowd. Mayer seemed to have improved on the guitar, combining different styles in his new material to make things more interesting, although he seemed more impressed with his guitar playing than with the actual songs he had written and his arrangements showed his confused priorities. He overplayed several solos on several songs, taking monumental Clapton moments and turning them into acid-induced Hendrix lapses of reason. Granted he did things on the guitar that most of us could only dream to play in real time even if we understood what he was doing, but he reminded me of Steve Lukather playing an extended solo at the end of the song "I'll Be Over You" on the Toto Livefields DVD. He started off playing what was on the original song from Farenheit and then ten minutes later, way after everyone else in the band had stopped playing, he looked up and stopped abruptly, looking like he was ready for the men in the white coats to take him to his bed for night-night. Mayer was all show and didn't make much of an effort to connect with the crowd, but his performance was well worth the drive and the cash we paid.

Sheryl Crow::::

A Change Would Do You Good
Hard to Make a Stand
My Favorite Mistake
Anything But Down
The First Cut Is the Deepest
Good Is Good
It Don't Hurt
Redemption Day
I Know Why
Strong Enough
Real Gone
Steve McQueen
Soak up the Sun
Everyday Is a Winding Road

ENCORE

Is It Makes You Happy
Rock N' Roll

LPB (Louisiana's PBS) plays either the touring dvd from The Globe Sessions, Soundstage, or The Very Best of Sheryl Crow at least once a month and my wife and I watch each just about each time it comes on Tv. Something about seeing Jeremy Stacey playing drums again (I saw him play for the Finn Brothers at the HOB New Orleans a year before the hurricane) and enjoying so many of Crow's songs helps it to not get old. The concert really held no surprises, but the sound quality was excellent and a four piece string section only helped things. The set list included many crowd favorites, but also included some slow-paced songs that kind of faded into the background, taking away from what she was trying to communicate to the crowd. They filled the space between the well known songs, but killed the momentum. Crow's band was fairly solid, not a surprise since she's been playing with them for years, but "Strong Enough" sounded severely disjointed and Crow seemed to lose her place a few times on "Soak up the Sun". Crow is a great guitarist and she had no difficulty with singing while playing her acoustic, but she could only hit the root notes while playing bass and singing. This took away from the songs and the overall sound of her music. Her portion of the concert was so much more enjoyable than Mayer's because she connected with the crowd and played arrangements which supported the messages the songs were trying to convey.

Overall, a great concert except for the creepy woman smoking half a dozen cigars behind us, the strange man next to us who was playing air guitar for his wife, and the drunken college frat guy who was yelling rock and roll demanding a "high five" before running back into the crowd.