Working Title

Category: Music

  • Anacortes double header

    (eds. note: this is the sort of thing you can expect to see maybe once every other month if you sign my mailing list. Also this is a real event happening tomorrow in Anacortes.)

    Hello everyone,

    I’m using a sports reference (double-header) to describe what’s happening Saturday. It means something happens, then some other thing, then everyone goes home. Nailed it!

    Sun Tunnels (formerly the graze) is playing at the Brown Lantern tavern in Anacortes, Washington, Saturday (tomorrow) 1/28. Sorry for the late notice! Right after Sun Tunnels will be An Invitation to Love, meaning that I personally will be performing for two hours in a row. I don’t remember writing that many songs, but we timed it at rehearsal and there it is.

    Here’s a flyer:

    Long-time listeners might recall the last time I played there was 2004. No doubt everyone in Anacortes remembers and will throw me a parade.

    Hope to see you there!

    Louis

    PS: That pretty full-color photo was taken by our friend Josh at our Josephine show back in November. Thank you Josh. The Brown Lantern’s booker Erik made the flyer. Thank you Erik.

  • LA jazz musician article about clubs and draw

    Here’s a cool article I just read (via Facebook, thanks Forrest) — the author makes lots of good points.

    The economics of live music is weird. From my own observation, there are thousands, millions of bands. Most are not that great but lots are very good. Each band has a natural monopoly over their own music but that doesn’t mean anything. A band’s incentive to play is generally not monetary. Bookers’ incentives are primarily monetary and draw equals pay, short-term or otherwise. For new clubs, long-term reputation is going to be less important than just keeping the doors open.

    I’ve often been frustrated by bookers who let me do all of the work of booking and promoting a show, who then still take a sizable amount from the door. Musicians’ and bookers’ interests are pretty well aligned, they should work harder to help each other.

  • iRig Stomp

    I got an email from IK Multimedia today announcing their iRig Stomp interface. Adding a bypass switch to an iRig is a great idea… which is why I totally thought of it first! I’m halfway through writing a page about the one I made. It was going to take the DIY musician world by storm and cement my place in the pantheon of great thinkers/bloggers/industrialists.

    That’s what I get for being slow and lazy. I’ll finish that page soonish, I’ll be out of town for a while though and have to rebuild the device and draw a schematic. It’s stupid simple.

  • Boxcar CDs

    Last week the physical CDs for An Invitation to Love’s EP Boxcar arrived. They look like this:

    aitl boxcar ep

    We didn’t order very many and they’re mostly to send to radio and press and bookers. Otherwise we wouldn’t have ordered them. It’s weird because I like how they turned out, but I don’t like having CDs. It’s also weird because I can remember the first time I ordered CDs of my music and how exciting it was to receive them. That novelty’s worn off a bit!

    Either way, we decided on a release date (1/10/2012) and will try to get everyone to listen to it and write something about it or play it on the radio or book us to play their venue. That part’s still exciting.

  • Wednesday roundup

    I meant to call this the Monday roundup but I was delayed. Just a couple of things here… first, I have a music review of a band called Stray Kites up on Blog of Wax. I had some issues finding an angle on talking about Stray Kites… I settled on talking about lo-fi, but what I would rather find words for is the flighty topic of inspiration.

    Back in ’99 my friend Andrew found a website called indiepopradio.com that served a low bitrate mp3 stream of, you guessed it, indie pop. Neither of us had heard of this before. We fancied ourselves musicians; I had started making a habit of writing songs and we had made some recordings on his computer, mostly as a joke (it was also how I learned about Cakewalk). But “music” to us was still defined by what we heard on commercial radio, KCMU being too “weird,” or something… not sure why but we didn’t listen to it.

    So we started listening to indiepopradio.com and it was a revelation, because it turned out you could make recordings, release them, and find an audience, all without having to be in the “music business.” And more importantly, the kinds of music that we were now hearing and gravitating toward was cheaply produced and simple — lo fi twee bedroom pop — also something we didn’t realize you could do. Granted, there were higher-fi bands on there too, like Death Cab for Cutie, the Make Up, Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, Sleater Kinney, who played intricate parts and wrote complex music. But there were many others who got away with much simpler, noisier, and equally charming recordings and songwriting.

    That was hugely inspirational, and we resolved to start a label and put out our own recordings. I’ll leave off for now discussing our relative success and failure on that front, but my point: the Stray Kites record reminded me pretty strongly of that time, and that feeling of youth and creative energy and possibility that was so important.

    Speaking of that feeling, now and again I’ll read the history page on the Elsinor Records website when I want to overdose on it. Vicariously.

    In other news, my “residency” at the Benbow Room ended Friday with An Invitation to Love opening for Rosyvelt and the Chasers. That was fun. We were rehearsed just enough, and I was accustomed enough to the room, where playing the set was more or less automatic, and I could sort of sit inside the songs and play the songs rather than the notes. That doesn’t happen every show, and it’s nice when it does, though I could have done without one of my patch cables crapping out.

    Speaking of Rosyvelt and the Chasers, both bands were great that night. The Chasers in particular were something else — ultra-pro metalheads who were having a lot of fun with what they do. Kind of Spinal Tap, all very cool.