Melissa Giannini

It’s posted on VillageVoice.com’s Sound of the City blog right now:
Following SleepWhenDeadNYC’s Subway Show from Bowery JMZ to Goodbye Blue Monday

p.s. When you’re done there, check this out: quarterlife
And this: My So-Called Independents

Bon Iver
For Emma, Forever Ago
Jagjaguwar

More rustic, beautiful folkiness

Justin Vernon isn’t the first young punk to disappear in the wild and emerge a transcendental folkie. Thoreau comes to mind. As do Retsin (Cabin in the Woods, 2001) and Sleater-Kinney (The Woods, 2005). And if you’re familiar with the indie scene’s freak-folk-out of the past half-decade, this isn’t the first you’ve heard of For Emma, Forever Ago, the meditative mood-fuck Vernon assembled alone in his dad’s Wisconsin hunting cabin under the name Bon Iver. After a limited self-release last year, the disc wound up on some Blogtown best-ofs, and Jagjaguwar picked it up for an “official” release this month.

While none of Bon Iver’s background notes scream “new”—dissolved love affair, check; band breaks up (Vernon’s freak-jug outfit, DeYarmond Edison), check—the chilling, rusty grandeur of For Emma will stop you in your snow tracks, however little it snows around here. And there’s the key: Equal parts awe and nostalgia, hearing Vernon’s muted strums and granular falsetto fade like spun sugar into breath vapor is like seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time. With idiosyncratic vocals and the simple acoustics of a man alone in this world (plus guitar), the tunes could’ve easily melted into monotony. But each track folds seamlessly yet distinctively into the next, like imperfect logs split and added to the pile; audible is the intensifying beat of a heart burdened by physical/emotional labor, and the layered echoes of a ghost chorus cascading across a chasm or against the walls of a creaky cabin-turned-cloister.

Bon Iver’s French-ish nom de plume, along with intermittent mementos of his process (minor studio tweaks included) and the bold move of throwing out the real name “Emma,” hints at a sort-of sound vérité. But his bon mots are blab-and-retract, the details muddled in heavy metaphor and barely discernible murmur. Whimpers work better than words, though, to express the husky tenderness of “Skinny Love” or “re: stacks.” For Emma is a work uncorrupted by trend or tricks, but now it seems like every band wants to find its own side of the mountain. Vernon says “the goal was to hibernate”—to which Thoreau tsk-tsks: “as if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”  Melissa Giannini

Will success spoil Fred Thomas?
Saturday Looks Good To Me hits a new high

by Melissa Giannini

Aside from the fluorescent lights, Mountain Dew banner and cluster of tailored suits, this CMJ day-stage performance is just like any other Saturday Looks Good To Me show. Fred Thomas, of course, is front and center. He has a slightly surprising air of confidence about him. He’s even making jokes: “Hello. We’re Saturday Looks Good To Me, the official band of the CMJ festival. It’s a real honor. Thank you, CMJ. Thank you, Mountain Dew.”

The band sounds good. They sound almost as if they, you know, practiced. As if they signed on last winter with the indie K Records, renowned for championing the energy of a falling-apart set, and then went ahead and got it together anyway. Playing hits, rarities and lots of songs off their new Fill Up the Room LP, the band closes with “Money in the Afterlife,” a cathartic new song strung together by a jittery guitar hook, smooth vocals in the style of Morrissey-meets-Merritt and a celestial wash of guitars, cymbal crashes and divine three-part falsetto harmonies.

As the suits swarm stage-left, it’s likely everyone has the same thing on their mind: Fred Thomas just might not have to wait till he’s dead to see some of that afterlife dough.

Rewind

Almost seven years earlier to the day, Metro Times asked Warn Defever of His Name is Alive to put together a lineup for a show at its annual Blowout fest. His first booking was Saturday Looks Good To Me, even though they hadn’t yet played a single show. It was the project of an Ypsilanti-Ann Arbor native who was staying in Defever’s extra bedroom, participating in what might be considered a loose interpretation of a music-production apprenticeship.

At that time, Thomas was working with several other groups, but he was also experimenting with a Beach Boys loop that one of his then-bandmates had taped. Thomas had also just come across a Teach Me Tiger tape made by fellow musician Crispy Fachini, that was like a sonic séance, conjuring old soul as filtered through Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. “I talked to [Fachini] a lot about it,” Thomas says. “I said, ‘Crispy, I heard your tape and it blew me away because it sounded so otherworldly.’ It was kind of an encyclopedic jumping-off point for me.”

The experience would mark a major shift in Thomas’ musical career. “I really liked the music Crispy was doing, and that His Name is Alive was doing,” he says. “And the more I talked to both of those bands, the more it seemed that they were just really big music fans, and they were doing their own version of stuff that they liked.”

Thus, Saturday Looks Good To Me was born, sounding like deranged Motown — like the most instantly likable 45 ever made after a spin in the washing machine. With help from 15 friends, he recorded nine songs that make up the band’s self-titled 1999 debut, and then an 11-song CDR titled Cruel August Moon. When those sold out, he re-released the original on his own Ypsilanti Records, including a few tracks from the CDR.

The night before the Blowout show, the band played a basement party at Ann Arbor’s Pirate House. And it looked like everyone at that show stumbled to the Blowout performance to catch it again. There was firecracker tension in the room. These kids knew what was coming. I didn’t, but it was hard not to be excited around all that buzzing. Half the kids from the crowd — the ones dressed in red — jumped onstage and started blaring pop cacophony with horns, strings, tambourine and bells on top of the guitar-bass-drums core. It was explosive. Sweaty music fans flooded the dance floor, shaking and smiling and dancing with abandon. So, this story is not an exercise in distant, arms-folded, journalistic objectivity. This band changed my life. And chances are good that if you’ve seen them, yours as well.

“I honestly can’t think of anyone who has heard SLGTM and hasn’t liked it,” says Stephen Cramer, who ran Detroit’s annual Summer Smash indie-pop fest from 1999 to 2006, a festival Thomas played four years in various formations. “Fred’s one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met, and when you translate that to music, it was unavoidable that he would do great things. Although he’s moved out of state, I know the Ann Arbor and Detroit scenes are still indebted to his goodness.”

New York: ‘You were sleeping on floors’

Being in transit is a pattern that has continued in Thomas’ life to this day. After taking a “recording vacation” with stops in New York; Providence, R.I.; Louisville and Boston, which resulted in the band’s first national release, All Your Summer Songs on the Champaign, Ill.-based Polyvinyl Record Co., he moved back to Ann Arbor, then Detroit, and recorded Every Night, their second official full-length for Polyvinyl, along with a bunch of seven-inches and CDRs for micro-indies.

A year ago he moved to Portland, Ore., and this past July, he landed back in New York. Thomas doesn’t really seem to stay anywhere too long. Sure, he’s lived in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti most of his life. But he’s been on the road touring since his late teens.

“The thing about Michigan music that’s so amazing is that it’s so community oriented, yet not community friendly in a way,” Thomas says. “Everybody knows everybody and everybody’s in each other’s bands, but it’s this perpetual underdog vibe. Although people probably secretly really love what you’re doing and really look up to you, you would never feel that, because there’s such an undercurrent of competition. There’s always this struggle so you forget how to not struggle. But [the scene in Detroit] creates a dynamic tension that really makes for some of the most magical, hard-fought things ever.”

So he moved to New York — “the most challenging place in the world, in the summertime, when it was hot and terrible, with no money. And I just got a real sense of what it meant to be miserable for a little while,” he says, only slightly in jest. He really is broke — something that hit home while watching him scarf down a slice of pizza … and my leftovers as well. He came to New York with nothing — all his amps and keyboards are still in Michigan. “My drum kit’s somewhere in somebody’s mom’s basement. The limitations become the new canvas,” he says, which explains how a 31-year-old musician, who’s got at least a hundred songs under his belt, can continue to keep things fresh and interesting.

‘It’s a very personal record’

Fred and I are joking about how all the songs on his new record, and even the title Fill Up the Room itself, could be construed to be about sex or masturbation. In intention, however, it seems that the songs are more aligned with death — whether it’s dying anonymously “on the ocean” or looking down on Earth from a spot snug “in the sides of clouds” or physical decay.

The main “difference” everyone’s talking about, however, is Thomas’ singing. Several people, usually women, sing most of the band’s past catalog. “All those lyrics were kind of written on the fly,” he says, “and it was more just a pastiche of different influences,” he says. “But this is back to the basement, writing songs as if nobody’s ever going to hear them. It’s really naked … about moving around the country, people I love dying … or falling so deeply in love that it shakes up your whole thoughts about being alive and being in the world. You can’t really tell somebody else to try to sing it and make sense of it. It has to be from the core of your being.”

But the core of Thomas’ being is a pastiche of influences. A longtime record-store worker, he has heard everything. His notorious mix tapes feature the Shaggs next to Orange Juice next to Microphones next to Albert Ayler next to King Tubby next to Linda Perhacs next to Aliyah. There are still plenty of creaky doo-wop moments and handclap dancers on Fill Up, but it’s definitely less blatantly bubblegum. It’s a grower. But once it’s inside you, it’s one of those records you’ll have on repeat for months.

“Fred’s a pop visionary,” says Calvin Johnson of K Records. “He has a very unique perspective on classic pop music.” In Thomas, that means unusual takes on music that “seems normal and ordinary. … He’s drawing from the past, from Modern Lovers to the more recent past but he’s moving into the future. He’s referencing them in his mind, but it doesn’t affect the way he makes music. So it comes out all Fred-istic and, uh, Fred-dazzled.”

Often, “visionary” is code for “difficult to work with,” but for all the dozens of musicians in SLGTM over the years — folks who might see an ad for a Saturday show in the paper and then not know until sound check that they’re expected to show up, if at all — hard feelings are apparently nominal.

Longtime vocalist Betty Marie Barnes describes Thomas as “maybe the funniest person I’ve ever met. When you travel with people all the time, you know them really well. And sometimes you know them in ways they don’t want you to know them. But I think it’s always been a really easy collaboration, just being around him and working with him.” She says when she heard Thomas would be singing most of the songs on Fill Up, she wasn’t hurt or offended; she was excited for him. “I think that he has a voice, and it’s important for him to communicate those songs the way he does,” she says.

‘Canadian chocolate is better’

Fill Up the Room clearly marks a new level of seriousness for the band, and not just content-wise. But it’s not the first time they’ve graced the big time. Radio-ready Saves the Day invited the band on a tour in 2002; Saturday had a song on Newlyweds (it was surreal), and of course there were the much-rumored-about meetings with legendary Sire Records chief Seymour Stein two years ago.

“Different people will say different things about what his visits to Detroit were all about,” Thomas says of the period following Stein’s signing the Detroit band the Von Bondies. “But I was under the impression he was there to see a bunch of bands play and figure out if he wanted to sign anybody else.

“I was really excited to talk to him because he’s been responsible for a lot of bands I love finding their audience, finding their voice. Some people have been like, ‘I heard you turned down a million dollar recording contract,’ and that’s not true. I just had dinner with the guy once and talked to him several times in passing, and he was really smart and sweet and I respect him a lot. But I don’t think that our band is ever going to be a major label band. I feel especially now, it has to be about doing what you want to do and staying true to your ideals.

“We have a sturdy fan base,” Thomas says. “And people are still hearing about us for the first time.”

That fan base was built on a painstakingly individual level. Thomas continues to sell his own merchandise. When he was my neighbor in Detroit a few years ago, I stopped by to find him elbow deep in a box of chocolate. Apparently, a Canadian fan contacted him about buying some records, and she wound up in a trade. “Canadian chocolate is so much better,” he said, his mouth full of candy.

“A band is really nothing without the people who are listening to it,” Thomas says. “And if they’re going out of their way, leaving the house, coming to your show, figuring out where it is, buying a T-shirt … that’s all a real blessing. If people are like, ‘Oh, you didn’t play this one song,’ I’ll be like, ‘I’ll go play it for you right now in the alley.’” A San Diego fan sent him a MySpace message recently about being excited to see the band play because he was having a bad day — his car was broken into and all of his CDs were stolen. So, Thomas wrote him back, asking for his address so that he could send him some burned CDs. Thomas is good to his fans because, as a longtime music fan himself, he identifies with them on a deep level.

Cramer says that while many Detroit-area artists have achieved success, none are as gracious about it as Thomas: “I hope he one day achieves massive success, because 1) it would make the world a better place and 2) Fred wouldn’t let it get to his head.”

Saturday, Oct. 27, at the Blind Pig, 208 S. First St., Ann Arbor. 734-996-8555.

Melissa Giannini is a freelance writer based in New York. Send comments to letters@metrotimes.com.

Architecture in Helsinki’s Places Like This
Playful pop that’s a touch too unhinged and bleepy for its own good

During the making of Places Like This, Architecture in Helsinki vocalist Cameron Bird and drummer James Cecil IM’d parts back and forth between Brooklyn and Melbourne: “It got to the point where we were jamming on Instant Messenger!” Bird says.

If that’s the kind of thing that taps your keys, you will <3 this album. But while such ingenuity might set AIH apart from, say, Art in Manila or I’m From Barcelona (they’re not), it’s hard not to long for their previous unfettered, tiptoed, face-to-face meanderings. We still get the band’s characteristic echoed ethereality, but past timid, breathy harmonies have been replaced by orgasmic girl-gasps and blaring Bird vocals that trade off between Kermit-y, Fred Schneider-y, and drunken-subway-dude-y. Synths and random bleeps (is someone playing Frogger during “Red Turned White”?) play a greater role as well.

It’s not an altogether bad adjustment: A playful party vibe emerges, and “Heart It Races” is a perfect summer anthem, flawlessly encapsulating the anxiety of a recent Brooklyn transplant with cheeky chants replicating the reggaetón thump that Brooklynites hear out their windows, while inexplicably great lyrics like “I bought it in a can/And stirred it with my finger” compliment echo-chamber steel percussion that conjures that guy from the L platform. But the highlights diminish from there. “Hold Music” sounds like a lost B-52s single, and its companions are all mercilessly up-tempo dancers and rockers: This is the kind of record you might pop in to stay awake during the final stretch of a 10-hour drive to meet your lover at a motel in Kalamazoo. (Motel in Kalamazoo—now there’s a band name!) Places Like This ultimately shares qualities with its IM-chat womb: It’s entertaining as hell, but eventually you’d rather just minimize the window and get on with your day.  Melissa Giannini

Bonde Do Role

Meet the Courtney Love of Brazilian baile funk

By Melissa Giannini

Marina Vello, a vision in bright yellow eye shadow and messy black bangs, is shouting something in Portuguese, stretching a metallic-blue Lycra-stirruped leg over the monitor at the edge of the stage at the Brooklyn club Studio B. Wrapping the mic chord around her neck and left wrist, she finds her footing and reaches her right hand out into the crowd, which is going appropriately batshit. She can’t seem to get close enough, so she jumps right in, the dislocated arm from an ill-advised stage dive a few months back a nonfactor. Pretty rock-star, considering Bonde Do Role aren’t really a rock band.

Though her antics suggest her idol Courtney Love, the 22-year-old MC for this Brazilian trio (pronounced bon-juh doh ho-lay and named for their favorite hometown snack shop) actually trades in a mutant strain of baile funk—a whiplash-inducing mix of Miami bass, samba drums, Alice in Chains riffs, and lascivious rapping that originally hails from the favelas (shantytowns) of Rio de Janeiro. Hours before this typically racous show, Vello recalls her rock’n'roll roots: “I sold my hair to buy my first guitar. Two-hundred dollars!”

Turns out she wouldn’t need the ax—by 2005, she’d hooked up with beatmaker/MC Pedro D’Eyrot, 23, and DJ/producer Rodrigo Gorky, 26, in their hometown of Curitiba to record the genre-hopping tracks that caught the attention of globe-trotting DJ Diplo, who released their first EP on his Mad Decent label. Their debut full-length … With Lasers, is out now on Domino. “In Brazil we have this joke that everything with the addition of lasers is better,” Vello explains, sort of. “Like, a bottle of water with lasers: so much better.”

As Bonde Do Role prepare to take their Brazilian mishmash worldwide, many pratfalls await. Homesickness, Exhaustion. Unagi. “In November 2005, Pedro had sushi and went to the hospital and had his appendix out. In November 2006, Gorky had sushi and went to the hospital and had his appendix out,” says Vello. “I don’t eat Japanese food, but if I do try it, I have to be sure it’s not in November.

Fast Facts:

Sepultura drummer Igor Cavalera’s three kids—ages three, five and eight—sing on “Geleia de Amendoim” (“Peanut Butter and Jelly”), the B-side to third single, “Gasolina.”

Gorky’s mom does water aerobics to … With Lasers. “She took the CD to the teacher and said, ‘Oh, can you please play my son’s band?’ “

DIW
January 2006

Gimmie Shelter or Gimmie Death

DIW’s favorite electroclash survivors, Adult., give us the lurid backstory behind their new album and an exclusive tour of their gorgeous Detroit home.

By Melissa Giannini

The artwork for Gimmie Trouble, Adult.’s latest LP, features three pairs of antlers protruding like legs from blank mounds, not unlike the neutered crotch of a Ken doll. A pasty phantom hand holding a handkerchief reaches up to wipe a bronze plaque, which conveys the band name and album title. Inside are other images of cabin fever, all in dispassionate, monochromatic brown. The back cover lists the song titles on stationary from the desk of Helen Bach.

“She’s someone … we know,” says Adam Miller, one third of the Detroit electro-punk group, implying that he feels more comfortable keeping Bach’s identity under wraps.

“She lives in the thumb,” offers band member Nicola Kuperus—the “thumb” being the region of the Michigan mitten that looks like, well, a thumb.

“She’s sort of like Bloody Mary. Except she’s real,” adds Sam Consiglio, rounding out the trio.

An avid shutterbug (she’s a freelance fashion and music photographer for Planet E Communications, BPM, The Wire, and more), Kuperus created Gimmie Trouble’s sterile visual element, which is an extension of the skull-and-crow, still-death imagery found within the band’s Thrill Jockey Records debut, the D.U.M.E. EP.

Beyond Kuperus’ recognizable aesthetic blend of corpse-cold noir poses and painfully detached imagery are 12 new songs. At times, the analog synthesizers strike the ear with characteristically paranoid laser-light precision. At others, the sounds squiggle like sparklers, complete with smoke and tracers. Similarly, the beats either maintain the band’s typical rubbery bounce, or they drag—echoed and distorted—like they’re half underwater. Most of the tracks incorporate a bit of both in an attempt to make the songs more fun for the band to play live. Consiglio (of Tamion 12 Inch) is also a new addition to the mix. Adult. previously consisted of Kuperus and Miller as a husband-and-wife team. The two invited Consiglio and his guitar along for the ride when they realized their new songs needed an extra set of hands.

I used to have this joke that when we would go on tour, I would come off stage and there would be a group of people waiting by the side of the stage to beat me up,” says Consiglio. “They’d be like, ‘You ruined Adult. Adult. is Adam and Nicola, and that’s it.’”

Another major development on Gimmie Trouble is Kuperus’ voice, which has stretched way beyond its former electro-monotone to a full-on punk wail. Although it’s a bit jarring at first, her vox burrows into your brain, making itself comfortable after a few listens. The breathy conclusion to “Turn into Fever” even conjures comparison to PJ Harvey’s psychotic rant from “Rid of Me.” After viewing Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, a documentary chronicling the recording of Metallica’s St. Anger, Kuperus said she took notice of James Hetfield’s thorough vocal preparations and was inspired to scour eBay for vocal warm-up tapes.

The trio wrote and recorded Gimmie Trouble over three months inside the historic home Kuperus and Miller recently purchased in Detroit. The house was built for a family and then served as a photography studio and telemarketing center for 50-odd years. The couple is in the process of converting it back into a home and has finished the recording-studio portion of the project. The dining room, which was previously a darkroom, is in the process of renovation. The table is partially set for a dinner party—the “set” for Adult.’s first proper music video (“In My Nerves”), which will be shot the following day. Miller explains the plot as “a formal, awkward dinner that goes awry.”

The majority of DIW’s interview takes place inside a cement-block addition with 13-foot-high ceilings that used to be the photo studio. While recording the album, Adult. used the room as a racquetball court.

“It was funny because we’re all just totally un-athletic,” says Consiglio. “We’d play tag with the racquetballs. We would try to hit each other with the balls.”

Picturing the trio cooped up in this unfinished space for three months of a brutal Michigan winter to create an album as claustrophobic and energetic as Gimmie Trouble, one can imagine that a few rounds of racquetball might have prevented an actual case of cabin fever. As another possible antidote, the band is embarking on its biggest tour to date in support of the new record. The four-month tour will take them throughout North America and Europe. Although the three have a definite sense of home—their musing about Detroit alone could fill an entire magazine—touring is what they do best, and it’s often their inspiration.

“We played in Moscow, and a guy came up to me and hugged me,
says Miller. “In broken English he said, ‘I never heard of you before tonight, and you changed something right here [touching his chest], and you will have changed it forever.’ I just teared up. … As hokey as it sounds, bands like PiL and Dead Kennedys changed my life when I was 14 or 15, and I’ve never gone back. I would only hope that I could corrupt someone else like that. I was inspired, and I hope to inspire.”

Venus
Fall 2001

Lovetta Pippen

Straight outta the gospel choir, the blues chanteuse’s voice rings loud and clear for His Name Is Alive

By Melissa Giannini

During a recording session for His Name Is Alive, Lovetta Pippen sang a six-minute a cappella piece called “Amazing.” A year later, Warn Defever added some strings to the track for inclusion on the band’s Emergency album. Over the course of six minutes, pitch tends to vary. Amazingly, she was perfectly in tune the entire time.

“I’d say her and maybe John Brannon (Easy Action, Laughing Hyenas) are the best singers I’ve ever heard in my life,” he concludes with a wry smile, the kind he probably gave Cameron Crowe while telling the director his favorite movie was Batman. Or the one he wore while dozens of people scrambled screaming up the stairs of Detroit’s Majestic Theatre basement after he set off explosives during a noise installation/safety hazard appropriately named Fire Truck.

Defever quickly bookends making light of the bold statement with wide-eyed confidence. “When you’re in the roomm with them [Brannon and Pippen], there’s so much … heart. You feel like you’re with someone who’s an American treasure.”

You can hear his seriousness throughout every crook and cranny of Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth, the band’s latest album, released July 17 in the United States on 4AD/Beggar’s Banquet. Unlike previous HNIA albums where wispy ethereal vocals fit snugly between fuzz curtains, guitar static and zap buzzers, his latest work frames a single voice. the sparse R&B instrumentation is merely a backdrop that frames Pippen’s devastatingly soulful singing. Blues? Hell yeah.

Pippen has worked with Defever and His Name Is Alive for around six years, but in the past she was more of a featured guest. She sang in the gospel choir incorporated into 1996’s Stars on ESP and provide soul-crushing accents cascading throughout the folds of “Everything takes Forever” on Ft. Lake, released in 1998.

Even her speaking voice drips with raspy rhythm. I had to catch my breath when her husked hello drifted over the line during a recent phone interview, the very first solo interview the singer has ever done. She laughs, the kind of full-body blast that crinkles up at the ends, when I ask how she takes such compliments from the guitarist/creative force behind His Name Is Alive.

“Warn’s crazy. I take that as a compliment. But you know … Warn. He makes me laugh. I think he knows that I’m kind of hard on myself. If I do something and it’s not exactly how I want it to come out, you know, I’m sort of a perfectionist and he knows that. He’s like ‘Oh, no. It’s great.’ So I think it’s kind of a joke.”

The 22-year-old may speak modestly, but she sings with the confidence of a been-there-done-that blues chanteuse and a spark of spontaneity sewn from years of isolated obscurity. While growing up, Pippen’s mother and pastor father wouldn’t allow her or her siblings to listen to secular music. As an adult, she’s hearing centuries worth of sound with fresh ears.

“It was kind of overwhelming at first,” she admits. “Now, I’m kind of getting into the groove of things. But it makes me a little frustrated that I missed out in my younger years on so much. So much music I wasn’t allowed to hear. there are certain artists that I had never heard before. It just gives me an opportunity to see it from eyes that only certain people can see. Where I am right now, seeing certain things for the first time.”

The only exposure she had to popular music was through television.

“You know when they sell those records on TV? We knew all those songs. That was pretty much all we could get. Except I would hear kids singing different songs at school. It was sad, but, yeah. It’s like a whole new world.”

Like Defever, who learned to play music from his grandfather as a child before even hearing the radio, Pippen’s early exposure to music was through performance with her family.

“My parents kind of put me up to it. My father was a pastor. And we were his children. And we kind of had to help out with the duties of singing at the church. My mother taught us those songs—you know, “Jesus Loves Me”—all those songs. If your parent calls you up to sing, you’ve got to do a good job. The pressure’s on. So I guess when I was around 6 or something like that was when people started saying, ‘You have a nice voice.’ I started getting called up at church all the time. But my mother and my father were very musical people anyway. It was kind of just a normal thing, to sing. My father played the organ. My mother had a very lovely voice. It was just knd of the norm. It wasn’t anything special that we were singing. I think until people started going, ‘Let that little girl sing this Sunday. We wanna hear that little girl sing’—that’s when I started realizing, ‘Oh God, what have I gotten myself into?’ No, but that’s how it pretty much started. It went from there. From me singing at church for most of my life.”

As a child, singing brought her nothing but pleasure. As she got older, however, Pippen became more accountable.

“That’s where I think I get my attitude from in terms of me always wanting it to be perfect. Because my father was very demanding in terms of, that note wasn’t right or this note wasn’t right. Very constructive. He criticized all the time. It started off as a good thing and then when I started getting older, there was more and more pressure for me to put on this show at church. It was stressful. I’m serious. And you never knew when they were gonna call you. You might not be on the program. But someone just goes, ‘Come on up, Lovetta! Sing us that song!’ And you were like, ‘Oh … God.’

“There were two or three songs that peple just loved. And I had to sing those songs all the time because they wouldn’t dare hear anything else. One of the songs was ‘When I See Jesus,’ and I swear to God, I don’t ever want to hear that song again.”

Her sisters and brother still sing and play music. “It’s kind of hard to get out of something like that when you’re raised in that way.”

Meeting Defever, who has lived in the same Livonia, Michigan, home his entire life, which just happens to be less than a mile from the hospital where he was born, was a bit of a culture shock to say the least. He had hired her gospel choir to come to his home recording studio and sing some songs for Stars on ESP. The choir director was extremely strict and wouldn’t allow Defever or the male members of his band to speak with the female members of the choir. At one point Pippen snuck away while the director wasn’t looking and asked Defever if he believed in UFOs.

“Things seemed a little weird around here. And we started talking about aliens. I don’t know why I asked him about it. That’s one of my things. … It’s something that I think about. I think it just comes from me wanting to know that there’s something other than this. I think everyone has that hunger to know what happens after you die and all that. but it just seems so logical that there would be something other than this. It makes life more exciting to believe that. Because if you don’t believe in something other than this, then I don’t really know. It’s kind of a disappointment, you know? I guess it’s just my way of making life exciting. I’m always looking up to see something. I never can quite get anything. It’s just intriguing. I like to believe there’s something else. … And he gave me a book. We chatted for a few seconds. And that was pretty much it. He invited me to come back to do some more things and then it just snowballed into what it is now. It was so unplanned and so unexpected.

“I wanted to go, ‘You’re weird; this place is weird.’ But it was great. It was fun. He goes, ‘Do you want to sing some more songs?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ And then I’d come back and sing more songs and do more shows. And here we are.”

When she first heard how Defever had incorporated the gospel portions into the album—a kind of Phil Spector-ish reworking of an old folk song, Pippen’s response was ‘Wow.’ She had never heard His Name Is Alive before so it was different and strange and wonderful.

She has come to love the spontaneity of working with Defever.

“The song, ‘Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth,’ I came over and I had never heard the song before and he just goes, ‘However you feel it, just go for it.’ And I sang it and it’s on the record. So the song you hear is the song that I did that day, the first time. We tried to rerecord it and it wasn’t the same … thing.”

Defever has penned the vast majority of the HNIA catalog, which is almost entirely sung by women. Pippen takes ownership of the songs, wrapping her voice around them like shiny reflective paper and torn Scotch tape.

“I try very hard to understand more of the songs. I’ll sit down with Warn and say, ‘I’m having trouble with this song. What does it mean? Because I’m not figuring it out.’ And he’ll do his best. Usually, he doesn’t do a very good job [laughs]. And I’ll just interpret them into what I feel they mean. And that’s the way I’ll sing it. I don’t know. Sometimes I may be singing a song and thinking one thing and the crowd is thinking a whole different thing. I think I do tht with most of the songs. I take them and I interpret them. I try to gain some clues from Warn and then I interpret them my way.”

Someday does feature one song written by Pippen and Dan Littleton of Ida. Called “Happy Blues,” it’s one of the more light-hearted tracks on the album. The term light-hearted is used a bit loosely, however, since the song describes the ecstasy of finally dropping a jerk amid the inevitable crumbling reality that ensues after any breakup.

“The song is kind of like an attitude, how often you view life,” Pippen explains. “How I was viewing life at that time. How I feel driving through life. I heard the music and I think that’s what I was feeling like at that time. I think it’s a pretty good song. Warn kind of laughed at it the first time he heard it. He goes, ‘Happy Blues? What kind of song is that?’ Well, I think it grew on everybody.”

While Pippen’s unique style may one day be recognized as influential, in the meantime, she points to fellow Detroiter Aretha Franklin as an influence.

“She’s the queen. Singers that appeal to me always seem to have this fearless attitude. Fearless and they have a freedom in their voice. You can’t just tell them anything. It’s like, ‘Do your thing. I’m not gonna bother you.’ I love that.”

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Venus
Summer 2006

The Fiery Furnaces

The bro-and-sis duo reminisces about hometown softball games, grandma’s grooves, and their latest release, Bitter Tea

By Melissa Giannini

Eleanor Friedberger hit a three-run triple during her heyday as a catcher for her Oak Park, Illinois, high school’s softball team. The feat warranted a headline in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Friedberger’s Big Day Powers Oak Park.” And according to a biography for the Fiery Furnaces—the band she shares with her brother, Matthew—it remains her crowning achievement.

The biography is a tongue-in-cheek rant, a stream-of-consciousness-style life history painted onto a piece of rice—each grain of truth stretched and exaggerated until it could feed a family for a week, before deflating into a self-defeating cliché: “He then moved back in with his mother, sealing his fate and cementing his status as a parasite and waster of indulgence and advantage.”

These words, written by Matthew, the parasite, speak volumes about the band and its most recent album, Bitter Tea. They speak to their modest sense of self, cross-hatched with their propensity to indulge in the art of personal myth and their sense of humor, which is dryer than the house wine we shared at a Brooklyn bar during our March interview.

“Ooh, that’s delicious … not,” Eleanor comments upon first sip.

“I tasted dirt. Good. It’s a little dirty,” her brother concurs.

After delivering our wine, our server took a seat behind the tall bar and took to resting his chin on his forearm and listening to us talk. It was clear that he recognized Eleanor and Matthew. They are bona fide rock stars to be certain, and it is quite possible that in this waiter’s mind, something very important was happening. Granted, we also were the only ones in the bar.

To be completely honest, the majority of our conversation consisted of sharing stories about the small-pond celebrities we know in common from my hometown of Detroit. But for all of their sarcasm and brother-sister bickering, there is still an instant familiarity to their combined demeanor, and instead of an intimidating, asthma-inducing Q&A session, our interview melted into a soft-edged Midwestern meet-up. The Friedbergers hail from Oak Park—a near-Chicago suburb—and recorded Bitter Tea in Benton Harbor, Michigan, an experience they loved.

“We grew up going to Lake Michigan every summer, not too far from there,” Matthew said. “Our mom used to vacation in St. Joe when she was a little kid. Our great uncle would sing at the House of David [a religious communal society based in Benton Harbor].”

Eleanor adds, “Half my clothes are from Benton Harbor.”

But it was a big bottle of house wine, and we managed to get back to Brooklyn in our conversation to talk a little about the new record.

Speaking of honesty, their most recent release might be the most revealing of the duo’s canon. Where 2003’s Gallowsbird’s Bark and 2004’s Blueberry Boat tossed a wordplay salad and 2005’s Rehearsing My Choir had the siblings in the backseat of their then-82-year-old grandmother’s life story, Bitter Tea’s lyrics have a lovelorn quality. There is a lot of waiting for true loves to return, losing true loves in the rain, and a lot of “you’re there and I’m here” and “you swore you’d never leave.” Musically, it’s a clear return to the ADD-addled, defaced-pop sensibilities of their highly touted debut.

FIRST BASE

Chinese bitter tea is known for its initial bitter flavor, followed by a sweet finish. It’s said to have cleansing qualities combined with antioxidants and anti-hypertension relief.

Matthew refers to Bitter Tea as being girly, “sissy psychedelic Satanism,” or the granddaughter record. “We made the record right after making Rehearsing My Choir, thinking that they would go together,” Matthew explains. “This one would be the other side of the grandmother record.”

Or maybe the sweet finish. It evokes the China Town hipster kitsch of bamboo plants, cute 10-cent soaps, $5 slippers, and fake Dolce sunglasses. But while it’s more straightforward in a pop sense, it is by no means bubblegum. Vocals are played backward, creating an anxious, suction-cup sensation that Matthew describes as “The beautiful sound of a human voice trying to rush back inside the mouth from which it came.” Not to mention subject matter that swirls with themes of gambling addiction and loss. Likewise, musical themes jump back and forth without warning, and all kinds of effects provide a texture far from what’s considered easily digestible.

“We always want to exaggerate it one way or the other to make it something different or definite,” he explains. He does most of the writing and playing. Eleanor does most of the singing and some drums. “If the song has got a loud noise in it, you want to make sure it’s a loud noise. If it’s backwards and not in tune, you want to make sure it’s especially backwards and not in tune.”

But the songs themselves are strong and can withstand whatever abuse is forced upon them. “Waiting to Know You” is a standout. A wistful sigh of a song, it’s the last track on some lost Northern soul album, with groove dust crackles replaced by speaker-fuzz squiggles.

Lyrically, the wordplay has graduated into a surreal style of storytelling, with a Haruki Murakami-style subtlety to its humor. In “Oh Sweet Woods,” Eleanor is kidnapped by “two extra-blond, short-sleeve, button-down-white-shirt, blue-tie mystery Mormons” who think she “stashed away the only pewter pocket watch that ever belonged to Joseph Smith’s great-great uncle’s brother-in-law.” Imagine this story set to a catchy half-disco complete with cheesy keyboard handclaps and you’ll understand.

Also a standout is Eleanor’s voice itself, carrying the narrator from a little thatched hut to Tahoe, the California side, to Borneo and a town called Nevers, which “never wasn’t was what it weren’t.”

“It’s a place you think is nice,” Matthew says softly. “You’re going to run away there, but it’s not going to be better. You’re not going to know your way around it. You’re not going to manage to escape.”

Another engaging song, “The Vietnamese Telephone Ministry,” tracks a quest to find religion, listing the addresses of various houses of worship in Los Angeles, California: the Right Road Ministry, the Armenian Brotherhood Bible Church, the Iglesia Evangelica Rey de Reyes y Señor y Señores, the Brotherhood of the Cross and Star and Kingdom of God in Faith, the Sweet Hour of Prayer Mission, St. Innocent Orthodox and Jesus in Delight and so on. It ends with Eleanor saying that she finally called up with the Vietnamese Telephone Ministry at 323-221-7625. Several message boards detail Fiery Furnaces fans’ failed attempts to call this number. A quick Web search informed me that the actual number for the Vietnamese Telephone Ministry is 323-221-6725.

PLAY’S AT THIRD

While Eleanor’s voice is striking—like a blunt-edged Nico, a more lilting Patti Smith—her stage presence is what ties everything together. Rarely flamboyant in dress, she relies on other elements of intensity to grab the listener, such as highly concentrated eye contact and severely controlled movements.

“(It’s from) years in front of the mirror, dancing around to Led Zeppelin, trying to re-enact ‘In My Time of Dying’ over and over again in some strange way,” she explains. “I don’t know who I was pretending to be—not Robert Plant, not myself.”

Matthew thinks it stems back to her softball days.

“It’s from saying (in a tough, Brooklyn “accent” holding up two fingers): ‘OK, two outs.’”

“Oh yeah!” Eleanor laughs. “Being onstage is just like being behind the plate. You know, I have to stand up every once in a while, I address the audience, like when you have to tell the players how many outs there are, where to make the next play.”

Matthew continues in the same accent from before: “Play’s at third. Play’s at third.”

Eleanor equates the feeling of being onstage in front of thousands with being at bat, in front of a few family members and friends. It sounds kind of ridiculous at first, but then not, because it’s … true.

“When I used to play softball, I’d pretty much have the same feeling. I’d be a little bit nervous, going up to bat. It’s pretty much the exact same … at big games, I can remember going up to bat and thinking, ‘People are watching me.’”

Matthew is loving the direction our conversation is headed. He gets to tease his little sister, but an overriding sense of pride also rings clear: “OK people, this song’s called, ‘Two Outs, Play’s at Third.’”

“It’s just fun to play catch,” Eleanor continues. “I could do it for hours, just throw pop-ups, grounders …”

BASES ARE LOADED

Eleanor had never been in a band before the Fiery Furnaces so she didn’t have a lot of practice “except in my own private, imagined pretend time, which I did a lot of, which I think a lot of people do a lot of, but no one really talks about.”

Matthew is her only brother, and when he went to college (the started the band when they were both done with school), she had the house to herself from the age of 14. “My mom would be working, and I’d have three hours where I could be alone at home, playing music really loud, pretending to drink vodka drinks. I’d have Sprite with ice and I’d cut pencils to make them look like cigarettes, and I’d pretend to drink and smoke.”

Matthew, incredulously: “You ‘pretended’ to drink and smoke when you were 14?”

Eleanor, sheepishly: “Well, I drank, too, but not in the afternoon after school.”

Matthew, jokingly: “You had to take the edge off with a drink?”

Eleanor, also joking: “No, I saved that for nighttime.”

Matthew took piano lessons, played upright bass and played in a few bands during his youth. “None of them were very good, no offense to my good friends who were in them. It wasn’t their fault. It must have been my fault.”

When Eleanor was about 10, she remembers Matthew, who was 14 or 15 at the time, playing in the basement with two other guys: “It seemed totally normal, and our mom never cared or anything.”

And Matthew returns with: “It is normal. What are you going to do? You’re 13, so you’re not going to play fort anymore. You have to play rock band.”

SLIDING HOME

The siblings’ musical upbringing goes beyond Eleanor’s lip-synching in from of the mirror and Matthew’s basement bands, however. Rehearsing My Choir made the siblings’ family myth public. They set the life of their grandmother, a retiring choir director in Chicago, to music.

“It would make sense to include our grandmother [in our music] because she’s the real music lover in our family,” Eleanor says.

Matthew is quick to correct her: “No, she’s not a music lover. She’s a musician. Our dad is the music lover, but not at all a musician.”

Their father likes classical and 18th century music, Matthew explains.

“The interesting thing about our grandmother is she’s constantly ‘playing’ music, never ‘putting on’ music, which is a very nice attitude.”

Eleanor adds: “She’s picking up the sheet music and playing the piano.”

Matthew says he really appreciates being exposed to that as a kid, “because that was a normal action as much as putting on a record or whatever, being passive about. It was very lucky [that we were] exposed to that kind of thing, where you go and play music to entertain yourself. With music, you go and play it and sing it as opposed to put it on.”

Lately, Eleanor admits that she hasn’t been listening to music as much, or in the same way anyway, saying iPods have changed the way she listens to music. But when pressed, she does say that her boyfriend was in Brazil recently, and he brought her back some records.

But when pressed on details about her boyfriend (Note: It’s been widely reported in headlines bigger than the three-run triple that her and Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kopranos have dated. And, oh, the band appears to have just returned from Brazil), Eleanor is keeping quiet. “He’s just some guy I like,” she says with a warm smile.

I guess that life story is staying private, at least for this inning.

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Venus
Winter 2002

Jean Grae Superstar

The hip-hop MC and producer discusses Eminem, image, and sex-change operations

By Melissa Giannini

Jean Grae looks like someone. I can’t really place it. Is it an elementary school classmate, someone I see on the train everyday, or a kid from a former television family? Janet Jackson in the role of Wilona’s adopted daughter, Penny? No way, that’s not it at all.

She bears no resemblance to Miss Jackson post–Good Times, or any other mainstream pop diva for that matter. The underground hip-hop MC-producer and all-around cool lady is concerned more with expanding her grae matter and maintaining creative control out of respect for herself and her audience. It’s never really crossed her mind to expand her bra size or surgically control her waist measurement to get people to listen.

Jean Grae is not about image—so much so that her anti-image has become an image in itself. Major-label reps of course tried to get her to sex it up a bit. And then there was a rumor going around the offices of big-time indie label, Matador, that she was a man (supposedly, Grae was joking with the label’s owner that they needed to speed up the signing process because she had to pay for the “operation.”)

“Apparently, he took it to heart,” Grae laughs. “Which is stupid. So yeah, they never wanted me to get sexy [like some other labels]. They just thought I was a man. Which is that much better.”

Matador didn’t end up signing Grae. She put out her first full-length, Attack of the Attacking Things on micro-mini indie Third Earth Music. Frustration with not getting signed inspired some of the sharpest rhymes and tightest tracks on the record: “They still want chicks with tits and ass out / My respect is worth more than your advance cash out.” If the label heads heard these songs, she might’ve had more luck. Then again, probably not. She’s got a definite underground sound and attitude—a smooth funky flow over skittish beats and a mouth full of no-hold-back poetry: “And a big f*** you to bitch Chris Lombardi at Matador / And every A&R that turned me down / Props to kids who stayed loyal since “Baseball” dropped / And copped the underground / See, the barrel was facing me / Now I’ve turned the gun around / And it’s got unlimited ammunition / I dare you to question.”

Born to exiled South African jazz musicians, Grae grew up in New York and was a vocal major at the High School of Performing Arts. She also developed a love for writing and production and studied music business at New York University. After a semester, she dropped out of the classroom and hopped into the field. Since then, she’s emceed and produced with Natural Resource, produced singles for Pumpkinhead and The Bad Seed and worked with The Herbaliser. She’s provided countless cameos, including a track on Mumia 911, Apani B Fly’s Estragen, and Mr. Len’s Pity the Fool, which included the disturbing and brilliant “Taco Day,” a track that inspired more than a few “female Eminem” references. Now in her mid-20s, she’s released her first self-written and –produced full-length and has plenty more in the works.

There aren’t too many women doing what you’re doing right now, at least independently. Is it a lonely place to be, or do you think it’s changing?
I definitely think that on the underground scene, there are a lot of females, such as the Anomalies and Apani, who are really trying to push for a change in the music industry. But as far as mainstream goes, it’s hard to break through, not because of the audience is ready for, but pretty much what the label is willing to invest their money into. They’re still into an image and a “sex sells” sort of thing, so it’s a little more difficult. I’m just thankful that I’ve been getting the love from the media that I have been, for doing a record with no budget on a label that nobody’s heard of and being able to compete with people who have million-dollar budgets. And I don’t necessarily even think of it as a female issue, but just almost a change in music coming around. People are starting to be like, OK, there’s got to be something else out there other than what the media has been force-feeding them. I think the doors are definitely opening, especially to underground artists right now.

You’ve said before that you don’t like being called out as a female MC or producer—even to the point that you’ve said you’re a woman second.
It’s not that I’m a woman second. It’s very obvious in the way that I approach the music. I’d like to be promoted as an artist first more than anything. Definitely, I wouldn’t say I’m more of a feminist. I would say I’m more for people being themselves, being individuals, and pushing their creativity first. I think that’s important. I think that a lot of young female artists coming up, especially in the mainstream, it’s just the same thing over and over again—a pretty face, but really, what’s behind it? I think if we’re going to push ourselves as female artists, then we have to do it in the right way.

You’ve put out songs before under names that are non-gender-specific (What? What?, Run Run Shaw). And Jean is still kind of ambiguous because spelled differently, Gene, it’s a male name. But there are female associations with it, specifically, the X-Men character, Jean Grey. Do you think you’ve reached a point where your skill has been established and you don’t need those names anymore to get people to listen without immediately “genderizing” you?
You know, I never even really thought of it like that. I didn’t know I was. When I did What? What?, I didn’t even think of it. That’s very interesting. It was kind of just where I was at the moment. And Jean Grae, it’s the X-Men character, so I don’t know. That’s a very interesting question. I’ve never been asked that before. Good work.

Even Grae has somewhat ambiguous connotations. As a color, it’s not black or white. It’s kind of blurred.
I didn’t want to have a name that was Miss something and obviously, I’m not little, so there’s no Lil’ Grae. Actually, the first name I had was a DJ name I used, Cleopatra Jones. I never really thought of it as if I were being ambiguous with the name. That’s very interesting. I’m going to think about that later on today.

How are you liking the independent route so far? Are you doing it again with the next record?
I’m guessing it’s going to be independent, because no major has stepped up to the table as of yet. It would be nice to have something that had a little more financial backing, but for right now, having the creative control is beautiful. I can do what I want. And I know that there’s a definite fan base who’s gonna go pick it up. If we don’t have the money for video budgets and everything like that, that’s fine. The first album I don’t think was necessarily radio-friendly, but then again what’s radio-friendly is changing from day to day now. So yeah, the next release is probably going to be pretty much as independent. I’m actually working on it right now. I’m trying to get it out by December, January.

Is that the one called Boo This Woman?
That’s actually the third one. The second one, I’ve decided to work with a production company called Magic Fingers. I wanted to step away from doing producing and everything and focus on the writing. It’s kind of like the one-and-a-half record. It’s just going through a group of producers that are incredible, and they’ve all got a different sound. This one is Involuntary Inebriation.

How did you get into the space to write and record “God’s Gift” (a song on Attack told through the perspective of a male playa)?
I think “God’s Gift” took the least time to write. Masta Ace had given me a tape with some beats on it and I went through them and picked three of them and I kept listening to that one. I had no idea what I was going to do with it. I usually don’t have an idea until I start writing, and as soon as I started writing, it came out from that perspective and it was so easy to write that way. I think it’s a lot easier for me to jump out of my own skin and put myself in another character and write from that perspective.

Last year, Tori Amos put out a record of covers written by men. There’s a pretty chilling one of the Eminem song where he raps about killing his wife. Have you heard it?
I heard about it, but I’ve never heard it.

What do you think of being called a female Eminem?
I’ve heard that before. I’m flattered. At least it’s not the female MC Hammer. It’s cool. ’Cause who wants to be that? But I think the only similarity possibly is that a lot of lyricists aren’t really focused on doing concepts and telling stories anymore. I think he would be the No. 1 person to point out as, “all right, he’s doing conceptual things and she’s doing conceptual things.” Sometimes I do tend to get a little violent with the concepts. But it’s not necessarily me. It’s just telling a story. I’m an Eminem fan, so it’s flattering.

Like on “Taco Day” (where Grae tells the story of a prom queen on a murder spree)?
Yes. That was the big female-Eminem song. But I wasn’t trying to copy him or do it in any way. It was just the way it came out. That song is interesting because I wasn’t even jumping out of my perspective (as a woman), but I was rhyming out of voice and everything and trying to put myself as far into the character as I could.

But unlike Eminem, your overall message is pretty positive. Who are you trying to speak to?
There are certain songs on the album that are definitely directed to certain groups. I think “Block Party” is toward a young audience and not necessarily black, for lack of a better word, people of color. Not even just in America, just worldwide. We’re at a point where things have gotten extremely stagnant and everybody seems to be settling for what they’ve got and I think we’re missing out on a lot of opportunity. I know that my audience is a mainly white audience. And I definitely appreciate the fans and everything, not to take anything away from that. But I think it’s important that if I have an ability to have a captive audience of people who listen, why not say something positive to these kids? Nobody else is. And if they are, it’s kind of getting lost in the other messages that are put out there. It would be nice if I could widen my audience to include them because they kind of don’t know I exist. It’s not necessarily their fault. But I think a lot of stuff on this album is directed to a younger black urban community.

So what’s next? The one-and-a-half album, Boo This Woman. Anything else? I heard something about you working with Mr. Len again on a project called Brickface and Stucco.
Oh yeah, Brickface and Stucco, myself and Mr. Len. We should probably try and start working on that. Thank you for reminding me. Myself and MURS from Living Legends are also trying to work out doing an album, but it’s difficult because we’re on different coasts. I think we’re really going to try to find a time that we’re both traveling. And I guess whenever we can get it done, we’ll get it done. The next single should be coming out … and then a little white label in between. And hopefully an EP before the album.

Wow
I know. I’m crazy to be doing too many things. But I’m not running out of music anytime soon, so why not?

Big Brother – 5/23/2007
One is the loneliest number
Big Brother is more than a one-man-band, dude’s an army!

Adult. – 5/4/2005
Adult. grows up?
A new record finds “The Uncordial Two” looser and dirtier

ESG, Grandwizzard Theodore, Jazzy Jay – 5/21/2003
Funky-butt chic
Bronx trailblazers get their due….

Scene Creamers – 7/24/2002
The Cream of the Scene
Don’t hate the Scene Creamers because they’re beautiful.

Moldy Peaches – 1/23/2002
Moldies but goodies
These anti-folkies sing their innocent dirty minds

Ida – 1/9/2002
Inside voices
Ida — that semipermeable collective of morose ’n’ melodic New York musicians — gets shushed, Time Stereo-style.

Cyndi Lauper – 12/5/2001
Talking funny
Cyndi Lauper raps a blue streak on punk, womanhood and all that crap

J. Mascis – 11/28/2001
Monstrous influence
After Dinosaur Jr, J Mascis carries on with a new iteration of gritty, indie-rock greatness

Red Shirt Brigade – 10/31/2001
Pop pioneers
After a Seattle recording session and a cross-country tour, Red Shirt Brigade’s new pop revolution comes home

Man or Astro Man? – 10/24/2001
I am the cosmos
Nine years and still counting down, the indescribable Man or Astro Man? keeps trekkin’ the electro-surf-punk planet

Tori Amos – 10/17/2001
Of Amos & men
From Eminem to Neil Young, Tori Amos craws inside the creative birth canals of 12 male songwriters, singing their words to make her own point.

Built To Spill – 9/5/2001
Ancient familiar
Built To Spill’s Doug Martsch has a poetic take on the past

Uncle Kracker – 8/22/2001
No sweat, kid
Uncle Kracker leaves the worrying to us

Viki – 8/7/2001
Babe in toyland
One of the wildest performers in Michigan, Viki has rediscovered the primal joy of making music with what she’s got.

Trailer Bride – 7/31/2001
Sailors take warning: Listen to haunting tales of Southern gothicism as Melissa Swingle and Trailer Bride head straight into the red-sky storm

Roxy Music – 7/24/2001
Re-make/re-model: Roxy Music takes another spin

Echo and the Bunnymen – 6/26/2001
Echo-logical: Ian McCulloch prattles on and on about hot dogs, electronic music, life … and the Bunnymen

Bliss 66 – 6/19/2001
Blissful beginnings: Downriver rockers Bliss 66 construct a fantastic reality from scratch

Ani Difranco – 6/12/2001
The Ani anomaly: Difranco’s still strummin’ toward an alt.existence

Coldplay – 6/5/2001
Uncontrollable chills: The four young chums from Coldplay turn up the AC as they headline the State Theatre in their first Detroit appearance

White Stripes (cover) – 5/29/2001
The sweet twist of success: Jack and Meg earn national stripes

Retsin – 5/8/2001
Nomad’s land: Mesmerizing multi-instrumental duo Retsin finds a home within friends, projects, a van and anonymity

The Sirens – 5/1/2001
Songs of the Sirens: Girl groups, then and now, find it in his kiss and standing by their sisters

Paik – 4/24/2001
Free to be: Paik’s otherworldly sound grounds itself in reality

Windy & Carl – 3/20/2001
Waking up slowly: Windy & Carl open new levels of consciousness

Ansonia – 3/6/2001
10 more to watch: Local bands on the rise

Saturday Looks Good To Me – 3/6/2001
10 more to watch: Local bands on the rise

Stroker Ace – 3/6/2001
10 more to watch: Local bands on the rise

They Come In Threes – 3/6/2001
10 more to watch: Local bands on the rise

Crud – 3/6/2001
Crud piles it on: This local band is known for its unmatched rock energy … they serve up full-on debauchery and a sonic headache you’ll never forget

Orbitsuns – 3/6/2001
Orbitsuns radiate: Members of Crud harness a different kind of energy in Orbitsuns, which has more of a country-western, rockabilly kick

Moods For Moderns – 2/27/2001
Practice, practice, practice: But first, beers and talk about haircuts

Slum Village – 2/27/2001
Sounding it out: Slum Village lays it down rough and easy

Low – 2/6/2001
Been down low: But things are looking up for (under) groundbreaking trio

Slumber Party, American Mars – 1/30/2001
Space cowboys: Slumber Party, American Mars and other Detroit bands are rediscovering their Midwest roots, blending a little bit of country into space-rock transcendence

12 Angry Steps – 12/12/2000
Anger management: From roots to rage, Detroit’s 12 Angry Steps gets with the program

Audra Lynne Kubat – 11/21/2000
Unmasked Amazon: The solo side of Audra Lynne Kubat, Amazon songwriter, who keeps things simple and profound

His Name Is Alive (cover) – 11/14/2000
Warn’s World: After more than 10 years, His Name Is (still) Alive

The Witches – 10/24/2000
Fright night: The Witches’ new CD casts a universal spell, with melodies that are low on gimmick and high on innovation

Damage Manual – 10/17/2000
Damaged greats: Rock veterans bring crazy wisdom to industrial supergroup

Versus (cover) – 10/10/2000
Four-lane suburban highway: The future rock stars in Versus stops for pork chops on the way to stellar insanity

Drinking alone – 9/19/2000
Ryan Adams pours his own sound from the heart

Bangin’ the walls of stone – 8/29/2000
Alabama Thunderpussy gets loaded and pushy

Moroccan soul – 8/15/2000
Known worldwide for his spiritually moving performances, Hassan Hakmoun sings his traditions to the wide world

Queen Bee, Radium, Jelly’s Pierced Tattoo, Die Zünderpatooties – 7/18/2000
Smokin’ in the girls room: Detroit musicians let us know what it’s like being “the chick” in the band

Queen Bee, Radium, Jelly’s Pierced Tattoo, Die Zünderpatooties – 7/18/2000
DIY for dames: Want to start your own band? Here are some helpful tips

Liz Copeland – 7/12/2000
Liz’s Law: All-night radio jock and club DJ Liz Copeland connects the wires of Detroit electronica at Sonic Boom

Elephant Gerald – 7/5/2000
Misshapen identity: Recently signed to a Hollywood label, local foursome Elephant Gerald slides between a few old genres into something sexy

Mary J. Blige – 2/6/2002
No more playin’
The bullshit bulldozing Mary J. Blige gets down with the song business at hand

Peggy Lee – 1/30/2002
Peggy Lee: 1920-2002
Remembering nights around the turntable with that sultry, saucy sound.

Multi-artist – 12/19/2001
The gift of Detroit garage
Holiday gift picks: Make your own boxed gift collection of Detroit garage rock ‘n’ soul circa 2001

Femi Kuti – 11/7/2001
Here comes the son
Femi Kuti carries the sounds of his father, Fela, forward

Jonathan Richman – 10/3/2001
If he were a rich man
Transcendental troubadour Jonathan Richman would still champion the little things, with all the humor and seriousness his fans have come to love

Gold Dollar (venue) – 8/15/2001
Hip hole in the wall
The demise of the Gold Dollar leaves a void in the scene

Cibo Matto – 7/10/2001
Japanese-born master sound chefs who serve up an irresistible stew of funk, hip hop, hardcore, melody and fractured pop

Detroit Electronic Music Festival (cover) – 5/22/2001
Electric heaven: Could it be, would it be, the festival of our dreams?

Summer guide issue/music – 5/15/2001
Cruel, cruel summer: Sound specialists study the season’s sonic screeches and sedatives

The Sirens – 5/1/2001
Songs of the Sirens: Girl groups, then and now, find it in his kiss and standing by their sisters

D-12 – 4/3/2001
Dirty D-tour: For Detroit Music Awards headliners D12, roots are thicker than hype

Playlist salad – 12/19/2000
It’s not so hard to cater to everyone’s musical tastes

Insane Clown Posse – 12/19/2000
Carson’s OK: Insane Clown Posse takes on NYC and TRL

PJ Harvey – 11/28/2000
After the firestorm: Polly Jean Harvey estimates the damage, and returns to St. Andrews Hall for an intimate session with her feverish fans

DJ Assault – 10/31/2000
Bein’ his bitch: MT’s music ho gives it up for DJ Assault, amazing herself with an inexplicable love for booty bass

I just wanna dance – 10/3/2000
Promoters sue Highland Park over alleged dance party brutality

And the winner is … – 9/19/2000
MT’s Music Awards Hall of Fame hits us with the best shots

Listen locally – 9/12/2000
New releases promise plenty of autumnal tunes

After the Dally – 9/6/2000
An evening of experimental arts competes with the Dally in the Alley

Alley cats – 9/5/2000
Old friends, new sounds and cheap thrills at the 23rd Dally

3, 2, 1 … – 9/5/2000
St. Andrew’s Hall to discontinue Three Floors of Fun.

Films for imaginary music – 8/15/2000
Contest asks filmmakers to make music for a filmless sound track

Trade secrets – 8/15/2000
Former Piston John Sally to host music and entertainment trade show at Cobo Center

Napster not napping – 8/1/2000
Napster’s still alive, and busier than ever

Detroit on the map – 7/25/2000
Reading the Village Voice’s glimpses of our city from the outside

Down with the clowns – 7/25/2000
Witnessing the Gathering of the Juggalos — with Faygo’d feet stuck firmly to the ground

Hip hop over the top – 7/25/2000
Detroit celebrates its growing hip-hop status at Rap Blast 2000

Techno on the brain – 7/25/2000
Will electronic music save Detroit’s soul? It’s a question being asked worldwide

Party under the bridge – 7/25/2000
Electronic music promoters join forces to put on an indoor-outdoor event

Cross-country clubbing – 7/18/2000
Digital bar-hopping from Santa Monica to the Blind Pig

Read and rock on – 7/11/2000
Revolution is the new electro-mag for techno music and culture