Bill Callahan – Audiofemme

NEWS ROUNDUP: SXSW 2019 is in Full Swing, New Music, and MORE

CHAI are the buzziest band at this year’s SXSW.

SXSW Takes Over Austin

It’s been a bit of a slow news week, with what seems like 9/10ths of the music industry in Austin for South by Southwest. If you haven’t been, it’s not structured like a traditional festival, with bands scheduled to play certain stages; rather, the entire city is engulfed by musical chaos and madness, with showcases in bars, restaurants, hotel lobbies, record stores, the middle of the street, literally anywhere you can plug in audio equipment (and a few places you cannot). While some bands only play a few of these parties, there are a good number of bands who try to play as many times in the span of five days as is humanly possible. And we haven’t even gotten to the zany marketing maneuvers pulled by start-ups and tech companies and big name brands alike who act as sponsors, adding a little extra overwhelm to an already overwhelming situation.

This year, the big buzz band appears to be CHAI, the matchy-matchy Japanese quartet that just released their genre-bending debut PUNK to Best New Music accolades. Before the festivities got underway, Father John Misty played a surprise set at Netflix’s Speakeasy. Flying Lotus has been teasing his return via what looks to be sidewalk graffiti. Surviving Beastie Boys Mike D and Ad-Rock discussed their forthcoming memoir Beastie Boys Book in an enlightening keynote where they revealed they’ll be starring in some Spike Jonze-directed shows in Philly and Brooklyn to promote it. Bill Nye (yes, the Science Guy) crashed a Q&A with everyone’s favorite House Rep, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to ask some questions about climate change. John Boehner came to bloviate about weed legalization now that he’s got money in the game (he was formally against it). A volunteer was caught scalping $1,650 festival badges (who pays this amount? is that even real?). Oh, and some people showed some films.

That New New

Vampire Weekend’s Jonah Hill-directed jaunt through several Manhattan delis has finally arrived; it inexplicably features Jerry Seinfeld and Fab 5 Freddy and to be honest makes me extremely dizzy.

Y’all still on board with Grimes? Frustrated that her album is taking too long, she’s decided to start dropping demos on the regular starring avatars she made up, sorta like Gorillaz, according to the text posted on YouTube below this first clip, in which she plays a character called “Dark” performing a track called “Pretty Dark.” This is what happens when you hang out with Elon Musk.

Holly Herndon is definitely on track to usurp Grimes’ weirdo pop throne with her latest single from PROTO, out May 10 on 4AD.

Frankie Cosmos announced the release of a digital only collection of piano-driven songs she recorded without her backing band, called Haunted Items, by shared its first two tracks; she plans to release the others gradually over the next few weeks.

<a href="http://ingridsuperstar.bandcamp.com/album/haunted-items-1">Haunted Items #1 by Frankie Cosmos</a>

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are evidently looking to get in on that “Baby Shark” market with the video for the title track to their upcoming LP Finding Fishies.

Carly Ray Jepsen serenades a very handsome ginger boi in the video for “Now That I Found You.”

Anderson .Paak had shared the first single from his forthcoming Ventura LP (out April 12). Its title is a reference to Lebron James and ref whistles pepper the jazzy track, but the political lyrics go much deeper than sports chatter.

Gold Panda surprise-released a collection of spoofy house tracks under the moniker DJ Jenifa.

<a href="http://jenifa.bandcamp.com/album/jag-trax">Jag Trax by DJ Jenifa</a>

End Notes

If you’ve ever wanted to learn about the art of distortion for J. Mascis, now’s your chance – he and the other members of Dinosaur Jr. are hosting three days of workshops known as Camp Fuzz in upstate New York at the end of July.
Most of the Glastonbury lineup has been announced – the legendary British festival will feature headliners the Cure, the Killers, and Stormzy, with Janelle Monáe, Kylie Minogue, Janet Jackson, Tame Impala, Lauryn Hill, Vampire Weekend, Christine and the Queens, the Streets, Rosalía, Hot Chip, Lizzo, Sharon Van Etten, Kamasi Washington, Jorja Smith, the Chemical Brothers, Cat Power, Neneh Cherry, Low, Kurt Vile, Interpol, and more playing further down the bill. More bands will be announced in the lead up to the June 26 opening day.
The Roots have announced the lineup for their annual Philly festival
Smog frontman Bill Callahan will embark on a rare US tour in June and July.
The Lou Reed Archive opens at the New York Public Library today, so they’re issuing 6,000 limited edition library cards featuring Mick Rock’s iconic Transformer portrait.
If you’ve still got a tape deck, you’re in luck – Björk is re-releasing all nine of her albums on candy-colored cassette tape.

ONLY NOISE: Cat Power Was My Surrogate Community in the Canadian Wild

Steph Wong Ken at fifteen, on the cusp of discovering Cat Power’s What Would the Community Think.

ONLY NOISE explores music fandom with poignant personal essays that examine the ways we’re shaped by our chosen soundtrack. This week, Steph Wong Ken forges her own community in a frozen Canadian landscape via Cat Power’s unparalleled howl.

I was 15 years old, standing in a music store with vaulted ceilings and white pillars, a former bank turned A&B Sound. My family and I had recently moved from a palm tree-lined street in Florida to a snowy Canadian city surrounded by farmland and flat, open sky. This place is safer than Miami Beach, my parents insisted, and with its sprawling residential neighborhoods, it was, but it was also very quiet and very white. Growing up with a Chinese mother and a Jamaican father, my neighborhood in Miami Beach felt like home, with Jewish, Latino, and Black families living together on one street in discordant harmony. Though I didn’t know many biracial kids in my area or at school, living in that neighborhood made my background feel normal, an important but uneventful fact of life.

The culture shock of moving was physical (puffy coats over Halloween costumes, hockey, face plants on ice), but it was also deeply emotional for a mixed-up teenage girl like me. I wandered around my new high school like a disembodied head and experienced nose bleeds regularly, probably because Western Canada is dry, but at the time, I thought it meant my body was just as freaked out as my brain was. I loitered in the music store down the street from the bus stop to stay warm and found myself in the indie rock section, staring at Cat Power’s album. The cover showed two female faces cut and pasted together with eyes that looked dead, an image that scared me and also made me want to spend $15 so I could take it home to look at it more closely. And the title, What Would the Community Think: a kind of kiss off and a serious question, a title that encapsulated the ambivalence of an outsider who still cared about other people’s feelings.

When What Would the Community Think was released in 1996 on Matador Records, the era of late ’90s alternative rock was also emerging: a steady loop of Stone Temple Pilots, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bush, Sublime, Soundgarden, and “One Headlight.” This club of moody dudes with gritty vocals and reverb guitar solos felt beamed in from another planet, somewhere far away from me, and my musical tastes gravitated to the records of my parents – Bob Marley, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye. By the time I found Cat Power in the early 2000s, late ’90s alt rock reverb had been replaced with ultra-masculine nu metal, and her music felt all the more timeless, sealed in a jewel case like a balm. Her vocal styling, her signature rasp, and the rough texture of her recordings seemed like another, more intimate way to explore pain and loneliness.

From then on, Chan Marshall’s voice filled my bedroom, singing in a low voice about being trapped “in a hole,” asking me to come down with her. Some days, I interpreted the hole as a safe place, a spot you dug with your own two hands in the ground to rest. Others, when I walked around empty neighborhoods hooded in ice listening to the album on my Discman, the hole was black and all consuming. The sharper edges of a song like “In This Hole” revealed themselves and I believed Marshall was snarling at a tidy, clean existence right along with me, as though we both knew that something was not right here. Her voice communicated sadness and anger, but it was also exciting to listen to, shifting easily from sweet sentiments like “you’re so beautiful” to the bitter wail of “I can try, try.” Here was someone not afraid to howl about there being no one, about wanting someone, and about finding catharsis in a dark, cold place, with a tinge of possibility. The album cemented my lifelong devotion to Cat Power, but it also helped me gain a sense of control, despite chronic nose bleeds and a budding identity crisis in a small Canadian town. Head back against a wall to stop the blood, tissues balled in my fists, I hummed along with Marshall on her song, “Good Clean Fun:”

All things people do in winter/they all melt down in summer

Eventually, I made a few friends at school and like a test, I played them what I was listening to, often mix CDs that featured tracks from What Would the Community Think and other Cat Power albums I had discovered flipping through the plastic sleeve with her name on it: the slow, shy songs on Myra Lee; the brooding anger of Dear Sir; the upbeat openness of You Are Free. What Would the Community Think remained my favorite. Huddled below the stacks of the Catholic school’s library, a portrait of the Virgin Mary hovering above us, I shared an earbud with a friend that made the cut and we listened to “Nude as the News,” mouthing “Jackson, Jesse, I’ve got a son in me,” trying to replicate Marshall’s mournful wail without alerting the librarian. Do you get this? I was silently asking my friends as I played them song after song. Does this make you feel good too? Only later, studying the lyrics, did I understand that there was trauma and loss in the song, a desire to be powerful without the means to be:

I still have a flame gun for the cute ones
To burn out all your tricks
And I saw your hand
With a loose grip on a very tight ship
And I know in the cold light
There’s a very big man
There’s a very big man
Leading us into
Temptation

Later still, I would read about the song’s backstory, of Marshall’s abortion when she was twenty and the reference to Patti Smith’s sons, Jackson and Jesse, in the chorus. But the very big man that appears, a threatening guide, became a lot of things in my head as I listened to the line over and over again: actual men, God, a force that keeps pushing you into places you don’t want to be.

In the coming years, pushy men took the form of guys recommending music to me, lobbying artists and song titles at parties like power grabs. But I found Cat Power’s music in my own bumbling way; later, I would realize this was a blessing, to be able to hold these songs as my own personal discovery. Marshall herself was instrumental in expanding my musical tastes – much of the music I would come to love I first heard via Cat Power’s covers records. I would move backwards from her versions, seeking out the originals and discovering a long line of artists that have influenced Marshall’s sound, particularly blues and soul singers of the ’60s and ’70s. That habit began with “Bathysphere;” once I’d discovered it was actually a Bill Callahan cover, I dove into his discography, though her version is what got me there.

Sitting in my bedroom, wandering around my icy neighborhood, hiding in the stacks at the library, I listened to Marshall’s albums and got through high school, made some good friends, and tried to adjust to nine months of winter a year. Still, I struggled to find a sense of community day to day, and whenever I would start to feel I was losing control, I would put on those songs and feel calm. Even now, listening to What Would the Community Think gives me a sense of nostalgia for my first experiences with the music, as difficult and messy as they were, and confirms how important the album became to me, my private little space that I could get lost in. Though I’ve heard each song hundreds of times before, howling along to each word still feels just as cathartic.

ONLY NOISE: When You Walk

There is certain music that you share with close friends and family. Music that scores the first dance at your wedding, albums you recommend to your sister, and songs that make your dinner party mix. There is music that feels inherently a part of a communal experience, and necessitates sharing immediately. And then, there is the music you hold close to your chest like a winning hand. The work of Bill Callahan and Smog has always felt like the latter to me, and maybe I haven’t so much held it close as I have ingested it completely.

I initially associated Callahan’s work with the friend who introduced me to it, but over time it’s started to feel like my own discovery. That friend and I have only ever communed with Callahan’s music together once, and that was nearly two years ago. We saw him in concert in the summer of 2016, during the little residency of gigs he did at Baby’s All Right. Theoretically the live performance is the most intimate and collective way to experience music, but even then it felt as if we were alone in crowd, together.

Despite my attempts to share Callahan’s music with other people (none of whom have latched on as ferociously as I did), I have spent the most time with his music in my bedroom, or alone in the kitchen doing dishes. This is very similar to the way I enjoyed music as a teenager, and it begets a certain kind of isolation—though at times I can’t tell if I’m responding to the alienation of Callahan’s characters, or projecting my own sense of it onto his songs. Either way, his music has reached me alone for the better part of two years, in moments of stillness and domestic routine: folding laundry, writing, cooking dinner. For me, his records exist in a permanent state of solitude, which is a state that suits me pretty well. But in light of a recent news break, my relationship with his music is taking a new, more public turn.

On Sunday, Callahan’s longtime record label Drag City dumped the majority of their collection on Spotify, Tidal, and Google Play. The label had already released a portion of its catalog—including the discographies of Bill Callahan and Smog—on Apple Music last year, but due to my distaste for the platform’s user interface (and general distaste for change), I stuck with Spotify, figuring that physically purchasing Callahan’s records on vinyl and listening to that 2001 Smog Peel Session on YouTube for a 408th time would do just fine. But downloading the entirety of Callahan’s output moments after it appeared on Spotify allowed me to do something I’d never really done before: take it outside and walk with it.

I was walking when I got the news, actually—heading down Dekalb avenue to meet with Audiofemme’s Annie White and Lindsey Rhoades. I don’t typically listen to music when I walk for a number of reasons, but every single one of those reasons flew out the window when this piece of information fluttered into my Twitter feed. As it turned out, Bill Callahan’s enormous, three decade-deep body of work had been in the palm of my hand for over an hour, and I hadn’t even realized. In a snap of instinct, I located Smog’s 1999 album Knock Knock, and cued up “Held,” a song I’ve always felt sounds like a heavy trod. I’ve listened to this track countless times, but hearing it in a state of motion, chugging down the sidewalk on Easter Sunday, I could pick out crisp details that had been muddied by my indoor multitasking for years. The song’s screeching stretches of guitar and the rumbling percussion seemed to propel me forward with amplified force, and I was surprised by the thudding impact of piano late in the track.

It occurred to me that I’d been missing out on an entire conversation with some of my favorite music, and though I don’t love the lack of spatial awareness that comes with walking around New York with headphones on, it seemed necessary to investigate this exchange further. At least if I got hit by a car, I’d die listening to something I love. On a morning trek to Jackson Heights, Queens, I played my favorite Smog LP, 2005’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love in its entirety. This record is bursting with naturalistic imagery; there are forests of pine, sleeping horses, and rushing streams. These may not be the kind of visuals that spring to mind when you think of Jackson Heights, but the contrast only seemed to beautify the songs and setting. I walked along Junction Boulevard to the tune of “Rock Bottom Riser.” It was a bright day, and I was surprised that I’d never fully absorbed the painterly imagery of the sunlight Callahan conjures with only a few words: “And from the bottom of the river/I looked up for the sun/Which had shattered in the water/And the pieces were raining down/Like gold rings/That passed through my hands.” The sun in my part of the world was passing through windows of the 7 train and bare branched trees, but it wasn’t any less glorious that day.

This new context of listening has allowed me to reach into different corners of Callahan’s songs, inspecting them from all new angles. But the funny thing about hearing his music while walking among other humans is that it kind of reaffirms that original feeling of isolation. Songs like “Teenage Spaceship” and “Ex-Con” comment on this sense of public seclusion. Callahan wrote the former during a period of nocturnal restlessness; he would go for walks around his parents’ neighborhood late at night, noting his sole presence among the stars and the house lights. Listening to it now, having walked at night with it pulsing at top volume, the image of someone strolling in the dark is undeniable. “Ex-Con,” from 1997’s Red Apple Falls touches on this subject more directly. It is notably more upbeat than “Teenage Spaceship,” and its staggered bleats of horn and synth beckon a brisk gait—but its lyrics act as proverbs for the Outsider. “Alone in my room, I feel like such a part of the community,” sings Callahan. “But out on the streets, I feel like a robot by the river.” Then again, that’s a pretty good summation of New York City sidewalks: millions of people, alone, together.

ONLY NOISE: Bringing It All Back Home

By the time you read this, I’ll be home. Not the home I’ve made for nearly a decade – not New York home. I’ll be “home” with a big “H.” The “home” Carole King sang of in “Home Again,” the home James Joyce fled but could never stop writing about, the home of countless poems and plays.

It’s not controversial to say that most songs are about love in some capacity, but I would wager that music about home – whether leaving or returning – makes up a hefty portion of the American songbook as well. Some say there’s no place like it, some say you can never go back to it, but everyone seems to have an opinion on the matter.

I recently conducted a small and unscientific social media survey attempting to crowdsource peoples’ favorite songs about home. This is something I frequently do for various reasons, including a desire for musical diversity, and plain ol’ laziness. But of all my little studies, I’ve never been met with so many responses as this one produced. Home is clearly a topic that hits, well, home.

But why? The participants in my study don’t have too much in common, so their suggestions were all over the sonic spectrum. The only consistent factor between the contributors is that each of them has left home; none of them currently reside in the place they grew up. That seems to be the defining aspect for music about home as well – the longing needs the leaving. How can you miss something, how can you return to something, unless you’ve left it to begin with? In fact, the only song I’ve found thus far about just staying at home is Dolly Parton’s “My Tennessee Mountain Home.” But only the angelic Ms. Parton could be wise enough to appreciate what she has in the moment – the rest of us must lose it first.

While I love and respect Dolly’s depiction of home, I sure as hell can’t relate to it. “Church on a Sunday” and “June bugs on a string” are foreign things to me, about as foreign as Tennessee itself. Bob Dylan’s 1961 “I Was Young When I Left Home” however, strikes quite a chord. “I was young when I left home,” Dylan cries. “And I been out a’ramblin’ ‘round/And I never wrote a letter to my home.” This early-career track captures a far more familiar feeling than Parton’s jovial country ballad. While Dolly evokes domestic satisfaction, Dylan unmasks guilt.

Guilt, along with a strong cocktail of superiority and shame, seem to be the base ingredients for songs about home. Dylan’s portrayal of guilt came in the form of negligence – the thought that while, and perhaps because you are off making a life for yourself, the people you left behind are suffering: “It was just the other day/I was drinkin’ on my pay/When I met an old friend I used to know,” Dylan continues. “He said your mother’s dead and gone/Your baby sister’s all gone wrong/And your daddy needs you home right away.”

The call home is something many of us will experience at some stage in our lives, and it is always a strange beckoning. Revisiting the point of origin you love or hate, or love and hate, is an exercise in ambivalence. We miss home, and we dread home. We want to pay our respects to the cities that birthed us, but we also want to look good for it like home is an old flame; we want to let it know we’re doing just fine without it. As Dylan sings, “Not a shirt on my back/Not a penny on my name/Well I can’t go home this a’way.” The thought of returning to our doorstep worse off than when we left it seems humiliating.

I was young when I left home, too, but “home” for me has always been a fragmented thing. Before I left for New York, I’d lived in nine different houses, and my parents have since moved into their tenth, then eleventh, abode (oddly enough, I sometimes think I moved to New York to settle down). When I “go home,” it isn’t technically going home. The remnants of my childhood belongings are in boxes, save for some clothing hung in the closet and records parked in my dad’s collection. I don’t really have a childhood home, but this is more of a blessing than you might realize. For instance, my childhood home will never burn down. I will never have to sell my childhood home, or squabble over its title with siblings. I will never watch it decay or become condemned – because it doesn’t exist. Home for me has never been a house – it has never been measured in shingles or siding, but in people and meals and songs. I remember when interviewing Bill Callahan last summer I asked what made him feel at home. “My wife,” he said. “My nylon string guitar if that’s all I got to hold on to. Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill.”

Similarly, my version of home resides more in my father’s jumbo 6-string guitar than any midcentury bungalow or wrap-around porch. My dad hasn’t owned a home since 1998, and his rentals have been numerous. Some were even pretty badass – one had a pool table and a hot tub, but while the billiard balls and Jacuzzi did not travel on, the instruments and 4,000 LPs always have. When moving, the turntable and albums were always the first things to be unpacked and set up properly.

Still, “home” encompasses a lot more than just the nuclear family and its hearth. It’s the surrounding town too, and for me that’s the tricky part. The dissonance of visiting a place you never quite belonged is best depicted in songs like Catch Prichard’s “You Can Never Go Home Again” and Blaze Foley’s “Clay Pigeons.” Songs like these remind us that home is a construct; it is a perfect merging of time and nostalgia that you can never physically return to. Foley was well aware of this fact when he sang, “I could build me a castle of memories/Just to have somewhere to go.”

It’s a troubling thought, but maybe we’re so intrigued by the idea of returning home because we want to be rewarded for escaping it in the first place. Look at movies like Garden State and Columbus, or really, any flick about self-righteous, post-collegiate white people returning home to assert their superiority over the ‘townies’ they left behind. Music has a far more graceful relationship with home I reckon, but one can’t help but notice the conflict residing in cuts like “A Long Way From Home” by The Kinks. “I hope you find what you are looking for with your car and handmade overcoats,” Ray Davies snipes. “But your wealth will never make you stronger ’cause you’re still a long way from home.”

Perhaps it is the artists who fled home so quickly that spend the most time singing about it; those who are never home, who are in constant motion, are the ones continuously pondering stillness. Or maybe home is so appealing because the future is always so uncertain. To quote another Kinks song about home, “This Time Tomorrow”: “I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t want to see.”

ONLY NOISE: Not With The Band

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Sam Riley as Ian Curtis and Alexandra Maria Lara as Annik Honore in Anton Corbijn’s 2007 film Control

Imagine it. Spring Fling, 2005. Kevin, the object of your eternal tweenage desire, is playing the school dance – in his band. That’s right. Kevin is in a band. Or, more accurately, Kevin has a band. You see, he writes the songs, and the lyrics. He sings them, and plays the electric guitar. It’s a Stratocaster. He got it last year for his birthday.

Kevin looks great tonight. He’s just gotten a haircut, and he’s wearing that shirt that you love. Kevin looks great in shirts. He’s even swapped out his glasses for contacts, making him look more Kyle MacLachlan than a bespectacled Morrissey. To be honest, you can’t even decide which Kevin you prefer – the one with four eyes, or two. Both Kevins are equally foxy.

This occasion – the Spring Fling of 2005, (which certainly happened and is in no way a thinly veiled decoy for more recent events) should be a wonderful time. You should be dancing, and singing along to Kevin’s trite love songs. Unfortunately, Kevin dumped you last week, and all those songs he’s singing involving words like “baby” and “love me” and “crying” ain’t about you, sweetheart.

Now imagine, that it is not in fact the Spring Fling of 2005. It is the Summer Bummer of 2017. You are not a tweenager. You are a grown-ass woman, and the above scenario involving Kevin and his poorly structured songs is just a taste of what it is like to date and get dumped by a musician. It reduces you to tween angst and humiliation. It makes you feel as though you are standing alone on the Spring Fling dance floor, while everyone else couples up to do that slow eighth grade penguin dance.

As Murphy’s Law would have it, if you have been burned by a musician, chances are you will definitely get his new single emailed to you by a publicist. You will for sure show up to a gig he is playing by accident, because he got added to the bill last minute, sans announcement. But wait – why would you get an email from a publicist? Because in addition to being a grown-ass woman, you are also a journalist. A music journalist.

As a music journalist, you have a staunch, zero tolerance policy when it comes to dating musicians. Even when approached by the most casual of guitar hobbyists, the answer is always no. N.O. Always, except those four five times you permitted an exemption due to… well, proximity. And charm. But mostly proximity. Because here’s the thing about working in a creative field that writes about another creative field, a.k.a., music journalism. You literally meet two kinds of people. 1) Other writers. 2) Musicians.

It’s almost impossible for you to meet men who aren’t musicians – they just flock to you. You hang out in the same places: concert venues, record stores, and bars (while I can’t find statistics on what percentage of musicians are bartenders, I am positive that it’s a very high number. Regardless, Luke O’Neil of Stuff Magazine assures us that “100 percent of bartenders and musicians are drunks,” so there). The point is, a music journalist swearing off musicians of the preferred sex is like a photographer saying he will never date a model, a director never sleeping with an actor, or an author never getting drinks with her publisher. It’s rather difficult.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve tried dating other writers, but I think we are (somehow) far more insufferable than musicians. The competition, the anxiety about typos in your text messages, and the fact that neither of you can get anything done while in the same room together. Historically, writer-on-writer romance hasn’t gone so well, anyhow (see: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath).

Musicians, on the other hand, deal in a different medium – your favorite medium! Plus, they’re too self-absorbed to be competitive, and they’ll always put you on a little pedestal, because you get paid to write your opinions about the thing they live for: music. They may even hope that one day you’ll write some nice opinions about their music (which you would never do, because that would be unprofessional). In turn, you might get a song written in your honor. Oh, I know it sounds corny, but everyone wants a song written about them, just like everyone wants to be a backup dancer in a music video (just once!). It’s as human as the need for love itself.

Sure, a music journalist dating a musician has its obvious downfalls (see: Ian Curtis and Annik Honoré). Of course, the quality of the songwriting can complicate things, but despite what you think, dating a shitty artist is always better than dating a goddamn genius. Look at what Suze Rotolo, Joan Baez, Sara Lowndes, and probably anyone who ever slept with Bob Dylan got – a handful of songs to plague them for all of eternity. Really, really good songs that you can’t even make fun of. Not even a little bit. Rick Astley, on the other hand, has been with same woman since 1988, and he’s never gonna give her up – but if he did, she probably wouldn’t miss that song.

Yeah, yeah, it may seem awesome to date a super hot singer/songwriter, who writes gorgeous melodies about you. It may sound fun to go to their shows, trying not to sing along to every word, because that would be very lame. But here’s the thing: the breakup with the savant is way worse. First of all, you already looked up to them for their abilities. You know they’re hot shit, and you can’t knock their new material, because it’s still kickass. Naturally the chances of their success is greater, which is a catastrophe. This means that you will have to hear about them from people you barely know and see them in magazines. This means that potentially, the barista at your coffee shop could one day be singing along to a song written about you while you wait for your goddamn Americano. Or, in Suze Rotolo’s case: you and your former beau Bob Dylan could be seared forever onto a classic album cover. This is no good.

Conversely, dating a mediocre songwriter ensures a tiny morsel of humiliation to savor after they break your heart. Even if they are otherwise flawless – intelligent, kind, funny, attractive, fabulous hair – their crappy music is your secret weapon. Because no dis hurts a music man’s heart more than “your band sucks, Kevin.”

To be fair, some wonderful art has sprung from the agony of bedding and wedding songwriters, but usually from the hands of other songwriters. If loving a musician wasn’t a complete pain in the ass, Stevie Nicks would never have written “Silver Springs” (for Lindsay Buckingham), Joanna Newsom wouldn’t have penned “Does Not Suffice” (about Bill Callahan), and Mandy Moore might still be married to Ryan Adams (who might have never recorded his last three albums). Considering all of the great songs that have been sown from breaking up, I can’t exactly hate on the heartbreak itself.

But maybe that’s the trick: maybe musicians can date musicians, because the fallout produces great art. Imagine how Bill Callahan must have felt when hearing his former girlfriend Joanna Newsom sing the words, “The tap of hangers swaying in the closet/Unburdened hooks and empty drawers/And everywhere I tried to love you/Is yours again and only yours.”

Ouch. That’s the kind of pain you just can’t conjure with an op-ed…but it doesn’t mean we won’t try.

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ONLY NOISE: Cover to Cover

“What a drug this little book is; to imbibe it is to find oneself presuming his process.” In her latest memoir M Train, Patti Smith speaks of W.G. Sebald’s After Nature with bibliophilic hunger. She is seeking inspiration and therefore turns to a favorite work. Smith continues:

“I read and feel the same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself. It is not mere envy but a delusional quickening in the blood.”

As I read her book with a similar hunger, I realize that I’ve felt this way before, in the precise way she has described it – when I listen to the music I love. “The desire to possess” what has been written, played, and sung. This desire is so strong that it ventures upon wish fulfillment; I often feel as though I am taking communion with the music…eating it, so to speak. For a split second, I near convince myself that I have written it. That it is mine.

I often wonder if this is a personal quirk (a hallucination) or if others experience the same phenomenon. I wonder if it is perhaps the subconscious impetus to cover songs, even. What if instead of mere flattery, or tribute, possession also informed Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah” or Jimi Hendrix’s take on “All Along the Watchtower?” They certainly made both songs their own. I do not mean a jealous possession, necessarily, but an attempt to be “one with” the song, at the risk of sounding faux-metaphysical.

Cover songs as a genre get a bad rep, it seems. Covers = karaoke, or worse, Covers = Cover Bands. It was after all a throng of home-recorded cover songs that launched Justin Bieber’s career. But cover songs lead a double life. In their pop/rock identity, it is often considered a lowbrow, unoriginal form – sometimes even an attempt at latching onto the search engine optimization of the artists being covered. But in a cover song’s blues/folk/country life it goes by another name: a traditional. Throughout countless genres that could be filed under the umbrella of “folk” or “roots” music, artists recorded their own versions of songs passed down by performers before them.

Much like the poems and fables of oral history, it was common for the original authors of traditional songs to remain unknown. Take for instance the trad number “Goodnight, Irene,” which was first recorded by Lead Belly in 1933, and by many others thereafter. But the original songwriter has been obscured from music history. There are allusions to the song dating back to 1892, but no specifics on who penned the version Lead Belly recorded.

Lead Belly claimed to have learned the song from his uncles in 1908, who presumably heard it elsewhere. “Goodnight, Irene” was subsequently covered by The Weavers (1950), Frank Sinatra (1950, one month after The Weavers’ version), Ernest Tubb & Red Foley (1950 again), Jimmy Reed (1962) and Tom Waits (2006) to name but a few.

The reason so many artists (I only listed a couple) covered “Goodnight, Irene” in 1950 was because that was the way of the music biz back then. If someone had a hit record – like The Weavers, who went to #1 on the Billboard Best Seller chart – it was in the best interest of other musicians to cash in on the trend while it was hot by recording their version of the single. Not as common today of course, but in a time when session musicians were rarely credited and hits were penned by paid teams instead of performers, it made sense.

The history of traditional folk songs or “standards” is a fascinating one because it is like a musical game of telephone. The songs’ arrangement and lyrics change with the times, the performer, and the context. And that same model of change can be applied to both the artist’s motive for covering certain music, and the listener’s reaction to it.

For years I quickly dismissed cover songs, finding them boring at best and unbearable at worst. But in my recent quest to become more open-minded, I have revisited many covers…and become a bit obsessed in the process. The first cover song to move me was The Slits’ version of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” which in itself is a pop traditional as it has been covered by everyone from Marvin Gaye, to Creedence Clearwater Revival, to The Miracles. Gaye’s version is the most widely recognized, however, making The Slits’ rendition all the more fascinating. Their 1979 stab at the Motown classic was what taught me that a cover song could be more than just a karaoke version of something. It can become a completely new medium of expression when the artist tears the original apart and stitches the pieces into a new form. The Slits did this so effectively, to the point that theirs and Gaye’s versions are incomparable.

The Stranglers achieved a similar result by reconfiguring the Dionne Warwick classic “Walk On By” in 1978, morphing the lounge-y original into a six-minute swirl of organ-infused punk. Another master of pop modification was the one-and-only Nina Simone, who somehow took the already perfect “Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen and managed to make it…perfecter. I remember a friend playing this cut for me three and a half years ago, and I haven’t gone so much as a week without putting it on since. Nina’s phrasing can make Dylan’s seem predictable, and she dances through Cohen’s poetry in a way that astonishes me to this day, no matter how many times I’ve heard it. I feel that her version is, dare I say, better than the original, though I love both dearly.

But of course, not all covers exist for the purpose of possession. Sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one: that a cover is an opportunity to pay tribute, not ironically, but with reverence. Of course, even artists performing the best reverent covers make the songs their own. Take Smog’s version of Fleetwood Mac’s “Beautiful Child,” which is such a gorgeous recording that I was heartbroken to learn it was a cover, and disappointed upon hearing the original. Ditto Bill Callahan’s more recent take on Kath Bloom’s “The Breeze/My Baby Cries.” Bloom’s take isn’t short on oddball, winsome charm, but Callahan brings a barge full of sorrow, which always wins in my book.

In similar form, Robert Wyatt somehow out-Costello’d Elvis Costello when he covered “Shipbuilding” in 1982, which reaches another dimension of despair with Wyatt’s wavering vocal performance. Another favorite is Morrissey’s interpretation of “Redondo Beach,” an oddly bouncy rendition by the King of Sad.

Though I once turned my nose up at cover songs, I seem to fanatically collect them now. I often dream up cover song commissions that will likely never come to fruition: Cat Power singing Bob Dylan’s “Most of the Time” or King Krule doing “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes. I’d pay them to do it myself if I could damn well afford to. Until then, let the covers of others stoke your desire to possess.

ONLY NOISE: An Anthem For The In-Between

Drift.

Verb:

To be carried slowly by a current of air or water.

Noun:

A continuous slow movement from one place to another.

These are dictionary definitions of the word-a couple, at least. Though if I were to define what it means to “drift” I might say to float, to dangle…to exist in the great in between. To be forever en route.

So much of contemporary music is labeled, stuffed into Sharpied Rubbermaid containers: the “love” song, the “break up” song, the “political” song, etc. And yet over the years I have noticed that some of my favorite cuts have a bizarre, genre-less similarity between them: they seem to be about being neither here nor there. These songs seem to recognize the swirling unknown surrounding them, and accept it as such, neither good nor bad. This lack of specificity has strangely anchored me at some of my most specifically difficult times. They have been the land I spot when out to sea, so to speak.

One of the first songs that made me realize I was headed for a hard drive full of existential playlists was Pavement’s “Range Life” from their 1994 masterpiece Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Stephen Malkmus has always been the king of nonchalance and blasé, putting boredom on a stick and somehow making it seem appetizing. “Range Life” is nowhere short of delicious in its absolute lack of zeal. You can almost picture Malkmus coasting through a blurred-out suburb on his skateboard, never losing or gaining acceleration.

“After the glow, the scene, the stage/The sad talk becomes slow but there’s one thing I’ll never forget/Hey, you gotta pay your dues before you pay the rent/Over the turnstiles and out in the traffic/There’s ways of living, it’s the way I’m living, right or wrong/It’s all that I can do and I wouldn’t want to let you be”

“I want a range life if I could settle down/If I could settle down then I would settle down”

“Out on my skateboard the night is just humming/And the gum smacks are the pulse I’ll follow if my walkman fades/Well, I got absolutely no one, no one but myself to blame”

Perhaps it is merely my interpretation of these tracks that garners such a feeling of warm nowhere-ness. Maybe if Steve Malkmus read this he might say: “Actually, that song was about being on tour.” To which I would say, “being on tour is an in between place.” But Steve Malkmus probably isn’t going to read this, so I am free to project all the existential dilemmas on his music that I can muster.

A true anthem for the unmoored, Bill Callahan’s room temperature “Riding For The Feeling” from 2011’s Apocalypse is a favorite for listless days. It is, one of the most solitary songs I have ever heard, yet somehow manages to evoke both heartbreak and liberation. Again, it is neither here nor there, and reminds me of the pointless joy that can be found in driving for no particular reason or destination:

“It’s never easy to say goodbye/To the faces/So rarely do we see another one/So close and so long”

“All this leaving is never ending”

“In conclusion leaving is easy/When you’ve got some place you need to be”

“What if I had stood there at the end and said again and again/An answer to every question/Riding for the feeling/Would that have been a suitable goodbye?”

When Callahan sings, “all this leaving is never ending” I can’t help but picture a ceaseless swinging door, one that no longer knows the difference between coming and going. One that opens to concrete people and places, but exists in that in between space: in between jobs, and relationships, and albums. To ride “for the feeling” is to drift, to coast for the sake of it, to float on the unknown. I’m not sure what it says about me that is my favorite part of the entire song, and if I somehow miss it I must rewind to carefully consider those six words:

“All this leaving is never ending”

The music video for this track could be considered a meditation on that one line. It is Zen with its unrelenting sameness: six minutes and fourteen seconds of a continuous ski jump over paper mountains. “Riding” is one of the few videos I have seen that deals strictly with the in between. No beginning. No end. Just the little skier coasting infinitely.

“Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space” by Spiritualized is a far more literal hymn for feeling un-tethered. Most will know it from the 2004 dystopian-romance film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which alone could cradle the song in a whole different context. But for me, “Ladies and Gentlemen” is a song for the sensory deprivation tank. It is so buoyant, so expansive in its ambience that it creates the exact feeling its title suggests-floating in space. Lyrically the track is no more exacting:

“I will love you ’til I die/And I will love you all the time/So please put your sweet hand in mine/And float in space and drift in time/All the time until I die/We’ll float in space, just you and I”

“Baby I love you today/I guess that’s what you want/And I don’t know where we are all going/Life don’t get stranger than this/It is what it is/And I don’t know where we are all going”

This is the kind of song that was made for feeling small and powerless in the best way possible. I know that sounds depressing, but if you really think about it, its kind of nice…like staring at the ocean and forgetting about your overdue electric bill.

If there was one bard of the great abyss, I can’t imagine anyone could handle the job better than Bob Dylan, whose catalogue is almost as overwhelming as existential dread itself. “Going, Going, Gone” from 1974’s Planet Waves is a true ballad for not knowing where the fuck life is going to take you. Though the original cut featuring The Band is a prime piece of audio, I have to be honest and reveal that my introduction to it was via the 1982 Richard Hell and the Voidoids cover. It is in a way a perfect marriage. Hell sprung from the nihilist punk scene that didn’t consider its own past or future, that only existed in the moment, much like the voice in Dylan’s song:

“I’ve just reached a place /Where the willow don’t bend/ There’s not much more to be said/ It’s the top of the end /I am going /I am going /I am gone”

“I am closing the book/ On the pages and the text /And I don’t really care /Of what happens next /I am just going /I am going/ I am gone”

“I been hanging on threads /I been playing it straight /Now I’ve just got to cut loose/ Before it gets late /So I am going /I am going/ I am gone”

“I been walking the road/ I been living on the edge /Now I’ve just got to go /Before I get to the ledge/ So I am going/ I am just going /I am gone”

It is the ultimate track for drifting, for nuzzling into the unknown. Because sometimes all you can do is just be.

LIVE REVIEW: Bill Callahan @ Baby’s All Right

This is the closest we will ever get to Bill Callahan’s living room, or…porch. The stage at Baby’s All Right has been set with a sturdy wooden chair and four handsome plants, two flanking each side to make up some kind of homey throne. A long-haired gentleman places ashtrays smoking with incense behind the stage monitors. “I want to be the incense roadie,” chirps a nearby voice, just before Callahan takes his seat in a blue button-up and well-worn boots. He does so without a word, easing into a simplified rendition of “Feather By Feather,” a song from his Smog days.

You could say that all of the evening’s songs were simplified, seeing as they were born of only six strings, a foot tambourine, and occasional harmonica. But one thing to learn from stripping a song to bare-bones is: how well does it hold up that naked? We were given the substructure of Callahan’s melodies throughout the set, and found they can still support the heft of his baritone beautifully; maybe this is no surprise. By force of habit, my ears still cued in the synth strings on “Jim Cain” and the distortion on “Dress Sexy At My Funeral,” but I didn’t want for any of it. The truth at the core of Bill’s sparse delivery is that his songs are bulletproof. They’d be as memorable tinkling out of a hurdy gurdy as they would set to a 30-piece orchestra.

Callahan has said in many interviews, perhaps weary of the ever-present question regarding his retreat from “the Smog moniker,” that he sees Smog and Bill Callahan as one and the same, merely on different points of a continuum. True to that philosophy, he doled out generous helpings of his catalogue old and new, playing everything from “Prince Alone In The Studio,” to “Too Many Birds” and his cover of Kath Bloom’s “The Breeze.” Upon strumming the first chord of “Riding For The Feeling” the crowd nearly fainted with excitement.

“You recognize that song from the first chord?” he said, looking bemused. “That’s the coolest thing. I never thought I’d get there.”

The audience continues to go wild with anticipation.

“I hope it’s the song you think it is.”

There is an austerity about Bill Callahan that I haven’t seen in too many performers…a kind of steely fortitude that makes me wonder if he’s not a man, but maybe a mountain, or a barquentine. He was there to do one thing, and it sure as hell wasn’t chitchat. Callahan doesn’t pander, just delivers. And yet despite the weight of his music, despite this being a rare moment to be earnest, and split open, and to feel something…there will always be a drunken idiot shouting safely from the back of the room.

“I fucking hate you Bill!” barks a fool who has been yelling quite the opposite up until now.

Callahan, who seems as though he could win any argument with the sting of his silence, looks up at the ceiling, a smirk slowly spreading across his lips. “I’m used to it,” he quips.

Anyone who has read a handful of interviews with Bill will pick up on his bone-dry sense of humor, but on the page you won’t get a sense of his comedic timing – the deadly delay he administers between minimal remarks. It’s a joy to see a few soft-spoken words slay a drunken monologue. Perhaps that speaks to the power in Callahan’s lyrics as well: nothing superfluous, everything purposeful, quality over quantity.

It would have been easy for Callahan to call it an early night, but he played a real stew of a set, clocking in at around an hour and a half, and giving us the chance to choose his last song.

“Well, that’s about all I got time for, goodnight,” he says after closing with “Say Valley Maker.”

The drunken fans persist: “To Be Of Use!” they scream.

“Goodnight. Sleep Well. And dream…”

“To Be Of Use!”

“…Dream of…’To Be Of Use.’”

“Show us how, Bill!”

“…Well, first, you lay-first you leave, and then you lay your head on your pillow, and dream. It’s better than the real thing, I promise.”

I doubt that it is better. But I’ll give it a shot anyway.

ARTIST INTERVIEW + SHOW PREVIEW: Bill Callahan

There are certain voices that stab straight through you and assert their place in your life immediately. Bill Callahan wields such a voice. From the first second it struck me I knew it would be with me forever-like a well-won scar. Admittedly, this scar isn’t very old-I only heard of Callahan on my 26^th birthday, which was not all that long ago. So wasn’t it just my luck when after months of pouring over his massive catalogue as both Bill Callahan and as Smog, I should find that the tall-drink-of-sorrow himself is playing six gigs over a three day residency at Baby’s All Right?

Hallelujah.

I had the pleasure of catching up with Bill over email to talk about joy, rap, and epitaphs.

AudioFemme: You’ve been doing this for quite some time now-at this point in your career, what aspect of your work brings you the most joy?

Bill Callahan: Probably starting a new song. It’s like morning full of promise. It’s like a guarantee of rich full days ahead of self-satisfaction, group interaction, performance, etc.

I understand you’re a big hip hop fan-any contemporary rappers lighting your fire these days?

I like some of the fucked up stuff like Young Thug, Future. Whoever does that song, “Baking Soda, I got Baking Soda.”

It seems that in the past, motion was very important to you; the idea of constantly moving forward and being on tour has surfaced lyrically as well as in interviews. How do you reconcile the contrast of perpetual motion and settling down now that you’ve found a home in Austin?

It’s more a state of mind and a perspective than necessarily physically moving great distances. There is a time of gathering experience, that was my youth — after that you can be a little more still and just live what you learned. It’s like Willie says, “Still is still moving to me.”

On the subject of home, what is something that makes you feel instantly at home, at peace?

My wife. My nylon string guitar if that’s all I got to hold on to. Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill.

We currently live in a culture where music is ubiquitous-people utilize it as background noise, to make people shop more, to pump themselves up at the gym, etc. In what setting, or at least, state of mind, do you hope people listen to your work?

Whenever they feel they need it, I guess. And I hope they feel they made the right choice. I recently re-recorded some songs from Apocalypse to be a 12” that goes along with the early copies of the Apocalypse Tour Film DVD that’s coming out on Factory 25. Listening to those mixes in my car, especially One Fine Morning just felt so, dare I say, perfect.

The two things seemed to need each other — the music and the scenery needed each other.

What have you been listening to lately, and in what setting do you like to listen?

I have a stereo set up and pointing at a particular chair at the kitchen table. I sit in that particular chair and listen to records. It’s kind of like a musical meal. Been listening to Carly Simon and the Bee Gee’s a lot lately.

Are you someone who feels at odds with your own era? Or in sync with it?

I believe I’m in sync with it. Because I am nothing special. I’m not an iconoclast or a freak. I’m a product of my era.

What moves you to write songs?

Knowing that humans need more good songs. I might as well try give some out.

I always like hearing established artists’ opinions on longevity. You’ve clearly withstood the test of time as a songwriter and performer, but do you feel that longevity is a viable goal for up-and-coming musicians? Is a steady career possible with such high turnover rates, saturated markets and the ease of piracy?

I can envision an awful future of corporate owned music production and distribution. Then maybe 70, 80 years down the line we’re going to break up into tribes again. And make great music again. And some of the tribes won’t make music at all. I’ve been oblivious to the music industry from day one. I always just do what makes sense to me. Mostly. Sometimes I’ll do something that doesn’t feel right if there’s someone I love and trust urging me to do it. I’ll do it for them as a concession. But I’m usually right in the end! I got into music to make a living, it’s the profession I chose or it chose me. These days I would say if you feel it’s not viable then you’re a fool to start up with it. If it doesn’t feel viable to you then do something else that feels viable. I’m not saying you should only do it if you’re immediately making money at it. Struggle is good. As long as there’s a light at the end. The longevity really comes from within. It’s not “the times” or “the state of things.” If you have the longevity in you then you’ll have longevity.

Words seem to hold high importance for you. At the risk of sounding too morbid, and assuming you would even bother with one, what words would grace your headstone? If that’s too heavy for a weekday-how ‘bout a vanity plate instead?

Loving Husband, Father and Three Pump Chump.

Be sure to catch one of Bill’s sets with Sunwatchers in the next couple of days. I’ll be there somewhere, slow dancing alone.

6/26 @ Baby’s All Right, 6pm

6/26 @ Baby’s All Right, 9pm

6/27 @ Baby’s All Right, 6pm

6/27 @ Baby’s All Right, 9pm

6/28 @ Baby’s All Right, 6pm

6/28 @ Baby’s All Right, 9pm

AudioFemme’s Best of 2013

From elaborate roll-outs to surprise releases, 2013 was a banner year for comebacks, break-outs, break-ups, and overnight sensations. The fact that the most oblique content could cause rampant controversy to reverberate through the blogosphere turned every song into a story and made every story seem epic. At the heart of it all are the sounds that defined this particular calendar year, from electronic pop to punk rock to hip-hop to hardcore and everything in between.

After much debate, we’re proud of our little list and believe it represents releases that are among the best and most important of the year. Here are our top 50 LPs in two parts: 50-26 // 25-1

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And check out our Top Albums of 2013 Playlist on Spotify.
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[/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][fusion_testimonial company=”AudioFemme Staff” author=”Top 50 Tracks of 2013″ image=”http://www.audiofemme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/05HaimDays.jpg”]
In a given year, thousands of records are released, many of them having upwards of ten tracks apiece. So it’s actually physically impossible to hear them all, and can be downright daunting to wrangle them into some kind of intelligible countdown. But we certainly have done our best, here cataloging the tunes we just couldn’t stop playing, and stuck fast in our heads when we finally managed to turn them off.

Here’s our Top Tracks of 2013 Playlist on Spotify.

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Staff Lists:

[/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][fusion_testimonial company=”Lindsey Rhoades” author=”RiotGrrl’s Influence in 2013″ image=”http://www.audiofemme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/kimkathleen.jpg”]
Not only are we as a culture stepping up to finally examine sexism and exploitation and appropriation within the industry, there are more acts than ever completely unafraid to do their own thing – be it overtly political (see: Priests) or revolutionary in its emotional candidness (looking at you, Waxahatchee).
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[/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][fusion_testimonial company=”Rebecca Kunin” author=”2013’s Best Soundtracks” image=”http://www.audiofemme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Soundtrack.jpg”]
Music has the ability to make or break a cinematic moment. Would Jaws be as scary if it weren’t for the theme song? Or would we cry as hard when Leo Dicaprio sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean if Celine Dion didn’t belt “My Heart Will Go On” every five minutes? Probably not.
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[/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][fusion_testimonial company=”Lindsey Rhoades” author=”2013: The Year in Music Controversies” image=”http://www.audiofemme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/musicthoughts.jpg”]In the age of the ubiquitous think-piece, here’s another, and this time, it’s about think-pieces. In 2013 what think-pieces mean is that no one is about to get away with anything.[/fusion_testimonial]

[/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][fusion_testimonial company=”Kelly Tunney” author=”Top 10 Unexplainable Kanye Moments” image=”http://www.audiofemme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Kanye.jpg”]
Mr. West has built up quite a reputation for himself. His musical talent has remained impressive throughout his 6-album career (Yeezus easily made several of this year’s “best of” lists, including our own) but Kanye’s persona has been the subject of parody and scandal for a long time now. This year, though, held several moments of Kanye-crazy that stood out among the plethora of examples from his memorable past.
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[/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][fusion_testimonial company=”Carena Liptak” author=”Notes From The Road” image=”http://www.audiofemme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/BTHEHc8IgAAESY0.jpg-large.jpeg”]
At the beginning of 2013, adventure felt overdue — something about going to new places, with no routine or expectations, opens you up to hear music you’d never think to listen to otherwise.
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[/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][fusion_testimonial company=”Raquel Dalarossa” author=”Top 7 to Anticipate in 2014″ image=”http://www.audiofemme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/outkast-reunion-big-boi-andre-3000.jpg”]
Between the exciting festival rumors and anticipated album releases, 2014 is already shaping up to be a pretty amazing year (at least musically speaking).
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YEAR END LIST: Top 10 Album Covers

Let’s all just agree to agree that hip hop as a genre won the album cover contest this year, okay? Much of the new heavy metal out this year bore covers that ran the gambit between overstatedly woodsy to just plain inexplicable, and pop albums favored stark, angular glamor shots and occasionally left us confused as to why these artists are so mad at us. Release for release, hip hop had some stellar, memorable artwork, much of it instantly iconic portrait art, like Drake’s diptych of his child self mirrored with a matching image of himself as an adult. However, one exclusion from our favorite cover art of 2013 is a hip hop album worth mentioning: Kanye West’s Yeezus.

I know, I know: Yeezus saves. Equally loved and detested, West’s new album will, I predict, come to be one of the lasting albums from 2013, and he’s had his share of notable, exquisite, and ridiculous moments. But Yeezus’ album cover art isn’t any of the above. First of all, the red tape slapped onto the homemade CD is at best a humble-brag for the contents’ breadth and slick production–the record itself is far more magnum opus than it is demo tape, and both West and Yeezus know it. Secondly, it’s neither iconic nor indicative of the year West has had–the image is tepid, and in 2013, the rapper was anything but. Number 10 in our Year End Album Cover countdown employs the same understated formality of Yeezus’ image, but goes for an effect more subtly surreal.

10. Kid Cudi – Indicud

The contrast of the stately frame makes the fire in this image come alive, as if it’s three-dimensional. Dangerous, uncontainable things come inside unassuming packages, and this image is so memorable because it’s unpredictable, framing a scene that doesn’t naturally observe boundaries.

Listen to “Unfuckwittable” off of Indicud here via Grooveshark:

9. Warm Soda – Someone For You

Flat, room-temperature yellow backs this ambivalently nostalgic cover, bringing listless summer days to mind. In fact, the image captures the album’s blistering-but-catchy, vaguely seventies-era sound perfectly.

Listen to “Someone for you” off of Warm Soda here via Grooveshark:

8. The Civil Wars – The Civil Wars

High-definition billowing smoke, a black and grey scale, and the austere white script across the dark grey cloud make this album cover memorably melancholy and archaic. This image looms, foreboding, channeling the loneliness and stark beauty of this band’s self-titled album.

Listen to “From This Valley” off of The Civil Wars here via Soundcloud:

7. The National – Trouble Will Find Me

This odd, and vaguely threatening, photograph evokes a chilly quirkiness that The National’s Trouble Will Find Me delivers. The sterility of the floor–bathroom tiles, maybe–lends a particular spookiness to this shot.

Listen to “I Should Live In Salt”, off of Trouble Will Find Me here via Grooveshark:

6. Bill Callahan – Dream River

The broad brushstrokes of the album’s title look almost like vandalism, as if they’d been painted over an otherwise stylistically intact impressionistic scene. Vast and epic, the foggy image draws my attention to that peeking square of sky above the mountains, and the music on this record is equally complex and easily obscured.

Listen to “The Sing” off of Dream River here via Grooveshark:

5. Tyler, the Creator – Wolf

The yearbook aesthetic is brought off with hilarious attention to detail, but what really makes this cover so bizarre are the faces Tyler, the Creator makes here. Simultaneously nostalgic for and mocking innocence, this rapper nails high school’s un-selfaware awkwardness (no surprise, since the rapper was only twenty-one when this picture was taken).

Listen to “Awkward” off of Wolf here via Grooveshark:

4. A$AP Rocky – Long. Live. A$AP

Sweet baby Jesus, this album cover is terrifying. Strongly evocative of a screenshot from The Ring, A$AP Rocky huddles with his head down, cloaked in an American flag, as the (presumably) VHS film recording him stutters between frames.

Listen to “Purple Swag” off of Long.Live.A$AP here via Grooveshark:

3. Daft Punk – Random Access Memories

Adapting the cursive script made iconic by Michael Jackson’s Thriller to a shiny, austere image of their own, Daft Punk set the standards high for their 2013 release. The album delivered on a grand, complicated scale, setting the band’s course for dance music that was at once nostalgic and intensely intellectualized.

Listen to “The Game Of Love” off of Random Access Memories here via Grooveshark:

2. Death Grips – Government Plates

There’s nothing frill about this stark, badass album, and nothing frilly about the stark, badass album art, either. As nihilistic as the music within, this image zooms in on the message.

Listen to “Birds” off of Government Plates here via Soundcloud:

1. Deafheaven – Sunbather

Like shoegaze metal itself, this cover–an utterly pink black metal album–seems like an illogical combination of things (see the album’s gorgeous Abstract Expressionist-inspired Vinyl design up top as our featured image), but makes glorious sense taken altogether. The image represents a view of the sun from behind your eyelids, a harsh and not wholly possible ascent towards the sublime that perfectly mirrors the journey the group takes over the course of the album.

Listen to “Dream House” off of Sunbather here via Bandcamp:

Tag: Bill Callahan