#couchtour

William Hooker Interprets a Classic Oscar Micheaux Film in New Britain

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:07:29 -0400

William Hooker Interprets a Classic Oscar Micheaux Film in New Britain:

“People study that D.W. Griffith film as one of the best of the period… It’s the epitome of racism, the highest point of racism I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s literally disgusting, completely against everything we know of, and it’s being studied by everybody.”

Dirty Projectors' David Longstreth Talks About Songwriting

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:41:25 -0400

Marrying art-song sensibilities, contemporary pop frameworks and angular, outside grooves, Brooklyn’s Dirty Projectors are a musicologist’s dream. Composer David Longstreth’s songs sometimes work within conventional structures; elsewhere they struggle against them. The last two Dirty Projectors albums — 2009’s Bitte Orca and Swing Lo Magellan, from last year — have established them at the forefront of cerebral indie rock. They’ll perform at Pearl Street Ballroom in Northampton on April 15, with Delicate Steve opening.

Longstreth spoke to CT.com from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y., about his approach to songwriting. (This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.)

With the last two records, the group has coalesced into a powerful, profound kind of band, seemingly without having to sacrifice your compositional voice.

Well I don’t really like sacrifice. I don’t really like compromise [laughs]. I like to have it both ways. To me what you’re saying sounds like a compliment, and thank you. But sometimes it feels like people are prepared for a band’s arc to go one way, which is kind of a striptease, a banality. And I’m not interested in doing that with Dirty Projectors. What I am interested in is indelible songwriting. I don’t think honoring the conventions of a song — like a verse a chorus and a bridge — is in conflict with whatever is new that I or anybody else has to say. I think one of the beautiful things about a song is that it can make connections to any time, even the future. And so, Swing Lo Magellan is all about the songs, and writing songs that did what I talked about, and at the same time do what the Dirty Projectors does.

When a new Dirty Projectors record comes out, one of the things that excites me is to see what you are doing with harmony. Is the importance of strong melody and harmony lost on a lot of listeners?

I don’t know. I was just walking down the street this morning, singing “Your Mother Should Know” by the Beatles. I was thinking about the Baby Boom, and I was thinking about how in the 1960s, there was a thing where the Baby Boomers were into their parents’ music. You know, that whole dancehall revival. And then I was thinking about the melody of “Your Mother Should Know,” and that it seems crazy to me: the leaps in that melody, and how long-form it is. It’s not a two-bar phrase, it’s not a four-bar phrase, it’s like a 16-bar phrase, but I don’t know, it’s probably fucking weird. So I was thinking about that and wondering if punk music kind of lowered the ceiling of melodic invention in the musical language we’re prepared to listen to. I don’t know, there’s other forms of invention that are maybe more at the forefront right now, but there’s always room for a good melody.

The song “Just From Chevron” sets up a narrative frame, with the female vocals on the outside of it, like a Greek chorus or something. The frame of that song, and the way it kind of accumulates instruments along the way: Do you think about those things while you compose, or is it kind of internalized at this point?

You always just do what the song wants to do, and sometimes it takes a second to figure that out, and sometimes it’s just abundantly clear from the get go. “Chevron” just kind of did itself, and I was like, “Is this right?” And I was like, “Yeah, I guess it is right.”

The orchestration of the vocals and the instrumentals in that song: Is that something that comes out during the songwriting process, or do you have to come back to it and say, “This is how I’m going to set it up when I’m doing it for real?”

That gets back to the process of how I wrote all of those songs. The process was that I would go up to this house in upstate New York for three or four or five days at a stretch and just kind of marathon it, try and get as much out as I could, and just demo it. So a lot of the demos are finished songs, and I don’t really remember a lot about decision making per se, but on the demo of that song it begins with a three-part harmony, and ends with a three-part harmony, and there’s that voice in the middle, and I guess that is part of the idea.

Sometimes you record a demo and you fall so in love with it that rerecording is a process. Do you have this problem?

Sure, demos [are] always going to have a magic, an intangible, and for Swing Low, that’s part of the aesthetic of the album: the imperfection of the moment, and really just the idea of life being captured. I’m not looking for an absolute document of the songs necessarily on that record, so once I figured that out about those demos, it made recording a lot easier. And recording the stuff with the band was an extension of that same process: Let’s not make it be perfect, let’s make it have a vibe.

When someone’s writing a song, it’s easy to worry that they are too plain, or too dirty, or something. I remember hearing a story about Eric Clapton playing on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” that they had to Beatle-ize his guitar playing.

They had to “wobble” it.

Yes. Did you have to “wobble” anything on the album at the end of the day?

I think it was already pretty wobbly [laughs].

Was there anything you had to clean up?

I wasn’t sure how to mix the album, and mixing an album sucks, dealing with every element over and over again. And there’s nothing like mixing that makes you fall out of love with the music you’ve lovingly written and recorded. But, we kind of gave it to a bunch of mixers, including some people who are famous and prominent and all that, to do a spec-mix, so we could choose how we were going to do it. At the end of the day, I didn’t like any of them, and so basically I mixed it myself. You know, I knew what I wanted in terms of the “wobble” — where I wanted it and where I didn’t want it.

Anything new planned for the future?

We’re working on a couple things right now that I can’t really talk about, but what we’re basically doing this summer is a bit of touring and a whole lot of recording.

Prog-Rock Stalwarts Yes Play a Trio of Classic Albums on Their Current Tour

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:39:07 -0400

In the spring of 1972, Yes guitarist Steve Howe was recording a guitar solo for “Siberian Khatru” for the upcoming Close to the Edge album. Engineer Eddie Offord mic’ed his amplifier up close, as usual, then asked his assistant to stand in the studio and swing another microphone, plugged into a twenty-foot cord, in circles around his head, creating an improvised Doppler effect as the microphone arced close to Howe’s amplifier, then backed away.

For the first time ever, the five current members of Yes — Howe, bassist Chris Squire, keyboardist Geoff Downes, singer Jon Davison and drummer Alan White — are performing the entire Close to the Edge album on tour, without the swinging-mic assistant. (Howe can easily stomp on some kind of pedal gizmo if he wants that effect; no need to endanger lives.) The deep aesthetic divide, separating studio albums and live performances in the 1970s and beyond, will also be absent.

“We were one of the first bands that pioneered [the full-album show] back in the ’70s, when we did the full [Tales of Topographic Oceans] album,” said drummer Alan White. “That was the actual stage show: all four sides of Tales of Topographic Oceans, and the encore number was ‘Close to the Edge,’ which is about 20 minutes long. So that’s how long the show was.”

Actually, on the current tour, Yes perform not one, but three complete albums — The Yes Album (1971), Close to the Edge (1972) and Going For the One (1977). They’ll appear at MGM Grand at Foxwoods in Mashantucket on April 5. (Because of time constraints, they’ll only do the first two albums at casino shows.)

White replaced drummer Bill Bruford shortly after the completion of Close to the Edge. (Bruford ran, quickly, into the waiting arms of King Crimson.) He was given only a few days to learn the material before the start of the U.S. tour. “It wasn’t a difficult period, actually,” White said. “I seemed to take it in stride at the time.” An experienced session player, White was used to learning parts quickly; John Lennon called him in 1970 to play on the Imagine sessions (that’s his slap-backed shuffle on “Instant Karma”). “I was only 20 years old. I thought, ‘Well, I guess this is what happens to people in the music business,’ realizing only 10 years later, when I looked back, that, ‘Wow, did I really do all that stuff?’ What a period.”

The members of Yes — singer Jon Anderson, especially — were impressed with White’s resume, which also listed sessions with George Harrison and Steve Winwood. “I was interested in progressive-type music,” White said. “I already had my own band that experimented with time signatures and influences from jazz and other areas of music. So, it was a challenge, but I seemed to rise to the occasion. We were all worried, the band and myself, but I said, ‘I’ll give it a go.’” White’s first gig on the tour came after an intense period of study, one that didn’t involve rehearsals with the full band.

“I had to do it all by Braille, as it were, then get on stage and play it,” White said. “It was quite an interesting period. We all looked at ourselves afterward and said, ‘I can’t believe you got it right.’ It was a lot of listening to music day and night, practicing with the albums and coming up with the parts… That’s called growing up very quickly in the industry.”

True, the material on this tour is now 40 years old. But the new show offers fans the chance to hear their idols play whole albums, which is probably how they’ve been listening to those records all along. White said the response has been overwhelmingly positive. “People just love the fact that we’re doing this. Also, we’re halfway through a tour right now, but the band is playing exceptionally well right now, so I just look forward to every gig, because you see lots of happy people with smiling faces.”

Playing whole Yes albums, White said, doesn’t require any special training or mental gymnastics, but doing three albums is the band’s way of one-upping others who pull off, say, single albums.

“It’s just an interesting marketing tool that’s a little bit challenging for the band,” White said.

The day after we spoke, White and Yes boarded the MSC Poesia for a week-long cruise from Ft. Lauderdale to Jamaica and Grand Cayman, joining Steve Hackett’s Genesis Revisited, the Carl Palmer Band, Tangerine Dream, Saga, Nektar, Zebra, Glass Hammer, IOEarth and Heavy Mellow on the ship. Four stages, acoustic shows, surprise prog-rock jams under the stars, meet and greets with band members: it’s the Cruise to the Edge.

“It sounds like putting old horses out to rest,” White said. “But actually a lot of enterprising young bands are doing these cruises nowadays. It’s a business… The Moody Blues are on the boat we’re getting on. It’s pretty interesting: them getting off the boat, and us getting on.”

The Grimm Generation Celebrates Noir Radio With "The Big Fame"

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:37:11 -0400

Way back when, the family would congregate around the warm, vacuum-tube glow of the household radio every evening, to soak up scintillating, one-size-fits-all tales of femme fatales, gumshoes and Martian invasions, side-splitting comedic skits and the latest pop hits from Tin Pan Alley.

Not much has changed, right?

At least not in Windsor, Conn., and not this Saturday, when the fabulous Vintage Radio and Communications Museum — a joint stockpiled with heaps of switchboards, transistors and dials — hosts The Big Fame: A Night of Old Radio & New Songs.

Carmen Champagne and Jason Krug, co-founders of local band the Grimm Generation, conceived the show as a simple, radio-ready revue. It’s since grown into a dramatic, multimedia happening, complete with food (provided by two area sponsors, Newington’s GoldBurgers Restaurant and Get Baked, a Windsor bakery), additional musicians (singer-songwriter Julie Beman’s Girlfriend Project), a narrator (Ginger Miller) and the full GG band — Krug and Champagne, Lys Guillorn (lap steel, banjo, bells and guitar), Eric Bloomquist (bass), Julie Drechsler (cello) and “Killer” Kerry Miller (drums). The show might even be broadcast over the airwaves, using the museum’s studio.

“That is potentially happening,” Champagne said. “They’ll broadcast it live, but their reach is only out to the train tracks in front of the building. It’s not anything that’s going to be heard.”

Krug is largely responsible for the script (Champagne wrote the introduction), loosely based on “Blink, I’m Gone,” a memorable song from a recent EP, Coming Home, about a troubled character named Asher. The rest of the show weaves together songs from their extensive back catalogue (Krug and Champagne are incredibly prolific) and material written for an upcoming CD, to be released sometime this summer. Old-style radio commercials, promoting the two sponsors, are plugged in along the way.

“We like doing different things,” Champagne said. “We like to create events out of our shows, and this was a great way to do that. We work together well. If one of us gets an idea, they run with it. Jason was inspired one day and put it all together.”

When you string them together, songs shift and squirm. They take on unintended (if not quite unwelcome) meanings. Our minds naturally connect dots we may not consciously realize are there. Even in the age of the $.99 single, we tend to group bite-size musical pieces into larger, dramatic forms. Depending on the nature of the songs, finding a story that runs through them all, without too many seams, can be daunting.

Not for Grimm, it seems. “All our songs tend to be of that genre, pretty much relationship-driven,” Champagne said. “So to string together a narrative based on the songs we have in our catalogue was not a far stretch. It came together fairly easily.”

The museum, meanwhile, lined with essentially every type of radio/communications gizmo imaginable from the beginning of time, is the ideal venue for the Windsor-based duo. “The Radio Museum is in Windsor,” Champagne said, “so we were very aware of it and had actually scouted it out at one point as a video possibility, but that never came through. They were looking to start a music series. Just being what we do, kinda noir, it all fell together.”

Radio, as a vibe, also appeals to Champagne and Krug. “It’s the generation that we’re from, not the old-school radio shows, but we grew up on radio,” Champagne said. “That’s always been a connection between Jason and me. It’s about the music. It’s always been about the music. When you’re given an opportunity like this, you really have carte blanche to create the show.”

There’s tweaking to be done — to the script, the music, the costumes — up until the day of the show; a final dress rehearsal took place over the weekend. When the show ends, the GG are considering shopping the show around to other area venues. “It’s a nice little package,” Champagne said. “We’d absolutely like to take it on the road if the idea presents itself.”

“This was a nice way to get musicians who take the time to create original music to get it heard in a way that is different than just a gig at a bar,” she continued. “This is something that might appeal to somebody who may not want to go to a bar to listen to music but who would like to go to a show and be entertained.”

Mike Doughty Talks About Selling Songs on Demand

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:09:27 -0400

Want to buy a Mike Doughty song, in the key of your choice (the options right now are C, C# and D; perhaps others can be negotiated), with a bridge (that’s extra), performed by Doughty, signed, numbered and delivered (via digital recorder) right to your mailbox? ($810.27, please.)

Or scrap that: You do want the song — “Dogs/Demons,” which has never appeared on an album or been played live — sans bridge (a $267.18 savings; who needs a bridge anyway?). And since Wall Street is currently breaking records again, why not have Doughty tack on the “personal message” option (your name, date, a few other details and whatever you want him to say, within reason)? (Total cost: $35,878.62.)

A strange commercial enterprise, yes, but one that Doughty fans will likely embrace. Soon after leaving Soul Coughing — one of the great (if underappreciated) alternative bands of the ’90s — in 2000, Doughty jumped straight into a busy solo career, recording and touring, blogging when he can (at doughtybespoke.com) and writing material for The Lo-Fi Lodge, a subscription service for fans who’ll receive an unreleased recording once a week for 32 weeks.

Two big projects — The Book of Drugs, a memoir, and The Flip is Another Honey, an album of covers — bookended his output in 2012. Doughty spoke to the Advocate by phone from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y. He’ll play a solo show at Bridge Street Live in Collinsville on March 16.

I know you keep pretty close tabs on pop culture. How much does it flood your head during the songwriting process?

I don’t know if I sit down and really think about current events in any capacity, important or not important, when I’m writing songs. I sort of work from notebooks I’ve been keeping, and the stuff is usually more fragmentary. I’m not a topical guy. I’ll start with some words that sort of fit, for some ineffable reason, and I’ll sand it down until I find what the song wants to be about, if I may be permitted to sound like a hippie for a moment.

Is there a set time in your day for writing songs?

Songwriting is a lot looser than other kinds of writing. When I was writing the book, I had to think, “I have to get up, I’ve got to write 300 words or 500 words.” But songwriting just happens when it happens, just when something occurs to me. It’s not even necessarily that an idea jumps into my head. It’s more that I feel like picking up the guitar, or I feel like looking at the notebooks or whatever. I do know that when I’m on the good foot, I wake up and pick up the guitar first thing in the morning, and usually there’s a couple of good riffs that come out of it.

Did you have to pitch the book, then keep yourself to a strict writing schedule?

I decided I was going to write the book, and I knew a dude at Da Capo. There was a literary agent that had been poking around, seeing if was interested in writing something for a few years. So I talked to her, and she said, “Why don’t you write an outline and some sample pages?” I was like, “I just don’t want to do that. I want to sit down and start writing a book and grapple with that and let it go wherever it wants to go.” So I just went with Da Capo, because it was easy, you know? Then, to my editor, the moment it was all set up, I said, “How long does it need to be, and when do you need it?” He was like, “Oh, you know, just take your time.” Almost consciously I said, “Okay, great, I’ll talk to you in 18 months when you’re yelling at me to finish it.” And that’s exactly what happened. I’d written about 50 pages of it to send to him, but basically I was like, “Okay, when you call up and yell at me, that’s when I’ll finish it.” Eventually he did, and I finished it in six or seven months.

What kind of roles do covers (recording and playing) serve in your life as a songwriter?

I don’t really know. But I do know that I’ve been sitting down and figuring out the chords to songs for as long as I’ve been playing the guitar, and most of the time I just steal. I’ll take an element of [a cover song] and build my own stuff on top of it. So there is a very conscious choice when you sit down with the task of interpreting something. And also, there’s stuff that I’d just never done before, in terms of having to listen to the particular phrasing of how things were sung — particularly the John Denver song [“Take Me Home, Country Roads”] — and really sit down and practice it, and really have to nail it, which is something you don’t really have to do when you’re simply stealing.

I love the concept of the digital recorder for a lot of reasons, but one that sticks out right now is the specificity of the price list: $543.09 for the song, plus $267.18 for the bridge, and $35,335.53 for the personal message. It speaks to the difficulties of placing any particular dollar value on art.

Exactly. And it’s jarring. You look at $249.95 and there’s a certainly blankness to it. But if you look at, like, $234.62, it kind of looks more like money than a straight $300 does. For me, it connects you with the fact that this is a sum. It looks like your bank balance.

How many folks favor C, C# or D?

I get a lot of D#, or whatever the highest one is, I can’t remember. I think people must think, “Oh, it’s the highest key, it must be the best,” even on the subconscious level. But you know, I’ve sold enough to keep it interesting, for me.

What can people expect at the show?

The show is solo-acoustic versions of stuff I’ve been doing in the last 12 years. I don’t play Soul Coughing songs at this particular point in my life.

The Old-School Hip-Hop of Dr. Westchesterson Goes Viral

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 10:10:00 -0500

We’ve arguably reached a point where we measure a musician’s global impact by how many views they’ve gotten on YouTube.

If that’s the case, the career of Western, Mass. hip-hop artist Dr. Westchesterson, who shares a bill with You Scream I Scream and Ladyhips at Arch Street Tavern on March 9, is off to a good start. “413” and “(I’m From) Western Mass,” two of his hometown shout-out vids, have been viewed over 100,000 times. (One web commenter suggested Westchesterson has accomplished more as a Western Mass-booster than any politician.)

Notoriety, even the hyper-local kind, can be a mixed blessing, however, if you’re trying to stay on the quiet side of the law. According to his website bio, Westchesterson was busted with 20 lbs. of marijuana in the late ’90s, when he was working as a medical doctor in Portland, Ore. Allegedly, he skipped bail, living either in Mexico or Canada for a few years before returning.

“It has elements of tragedy,” Westchesterson said by phone from an undisclosed location. “It was bleak there for a little while. I did some shenanigans there in the ’90s that tripped me up for a bit.”

The Advocate hasn’t been able to substantiate his claims. And anyway: why bother? The Agawam native doesn’t appear to be milking his outlaw past for much of anything. He’s a likeable guy who sounds more ashamed of his past than proud. (C’mon: it’s just weed, a substance that’s almost legal in the state where he was arrested.)

Westchesterson dresses well, sports a beard, wears sunglasses and smokes a pipe — presumably stuffed with decent pot. He has interesting friends — one owns the Dukes of Hazzard/General Lee-painted Charger Westchesterson rides in the “Western Mass” video. (“It kinda made sense to use it in the video because it matched the outfit,” the Dr. said.)

Another pal is comedian Steven Wright, who also appears in “Western Mass.” “We hang out and talk about crazy things,” Westchesterson said, “things you might imagine talking about with Steven Wright. We’re usually coming up with weird scenarios: wouldn’t it be funny if this, wouldn’t it be funny if that.” One scenario involved Wright’s cameo. “I said, ‘Why don’t we do something funny together?’ He was great. Obviously, he’s gracious. He’s the greatest guy. It was nice of him to take the time and be in it.”

Read the full story at CT.com.

Hitting the Small Screen: Connecticut Designers in the Apps and Games Business

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 12:22:27 -0500

To the casual, iPhone-toting observer on the street, success in the app-development game means launching the next Angry Birds, the next Words with Friends, the next Fruit Ninja. It’s all about creating that simple, super-addictive, viral app that pays for the 65 or so clunkers you’ve designed along the way, spinning off movie scripts and T-shirt licensing deals in the process.

”Games are very hit-driven,” says game developer Joshua DeBonis. “If you release 10 games, maybe one of them will pay for all 10 of those. There’s no way to predict which one will be the hit. Sometimes great games don’t make any money and terrible games make a lot.”

There’s an entrepreneurial, independent spirit surrounding the game and app development world, for sure. And much of that creative work happens in Connecticut, where firms, ranging in size from dozens of employees to one guy with a laptop, pump out catchy games, add-ons to existing iPhone or Android features, or handy, information-based widgets.

Take MEA Mobile, for example, a New Haven-based design firm with two additional offices in New Zealand. They partnered with Walgreens pharmacy to create Printicular, an app that allows iOS and Android users to print photos from their camera roll, Instagram and/or Facebook accounts at their local Walgreens, usually within the hour.

“It’s a great example of local company app development with a major retail partner,” says Vin Framularo, MEA Mobile’s business development manager.

Most of MEA Mobile’s apps — there are presently over 100 of them on the market — are consumer photo and video applications. Popular apps include iLapse (a professional-quality time-lapse video creator), Speed Machine (a fast/slow motion video recorder), Grid Filter (a tap and design photo tool) and Part (a whimsical iPhone app whose tagline is “make something simple - find something beautiful”). They also develop grabby games (one called LexIt is due out later this year).

One top-selling video app is iSupr8 ($1.99), which allows users to shoot video that looks like it was taken with an old Super 8mm camera.

“It’s like Instagram for video,” says managing director Bruce Seymour, who’s listed on imdb.com as a producer and actor in several independent films. “It takes beautiful HD footage and wrinkles it up and adds dirt and dust and grain, which makes it look like old-school footage. It’s very cool.”

For the most part, developers like DeBonis and Seymour work on two fronts: designing products or strategies on a work-for-hire basis for outside clients, to keep the lights on, with little risk involved; and developing speculative, in-house apps that potentially could land them on easy street.

Read the full story at CT.com.

Composer Hilary Tann Headlines the 13th Annual Women Composers Festival of Hartford

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 12:19:30 -0500

Over the last 12 years, the week-long Women Composers Festival of Hartford has grown into one of the Northeast’s top destinations for hearing new music by living female composers.

The reputation of the festival, now in its 13th year, has grown to where an internationally recognized artist like Hilary Tann, who succeeds Judith Shatin as this year’s composer-in-residence, wasn’t sure her work would make the cut.

Tann, a Welsh-born composer, cellist and pianist, teaches music at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., where she also founded the orchestra and acted as its principal conductor for 15 years. She holds degrees from the University of Wales at Cardiff and from Princeton University. Her music, deeply informed by her studies of the traditional music of Japan, has been recorded by some of the world’s top ensembles, including the European Women’s Orchestra, Tenebrae, Lontano, Meininger Trio, the Thai Philharmonic and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic.

Back in 2011, when Tann was the composer-in-residence at the Eastman School of Music’s women composer’s festival, she submitted a couple of chamber works for consideration in Hartford.

“I was feeling good about that,” Tann told the Advocate by phone from her office at Union. “I don’t actually send out much stuff, but I was interested in this festival… And of course, the way to be involved is to actually be involved, not just as an audience member.”

No response. “They didn’t accept anything,” Tann said. “Here I was feeling pretty good about the composer’s life, and I thought they should have accepted something.”

A month later, Tann received an e-mail from festival organizer Daniel Morel. “It said, ‘I was so pleased that you submitted something. We’d like you to be our composer-in-residence for 2013,’” Tann said. “Everything turned alright after all… When you are a composer, you’re never quite sure what will work for people and what will not work for people.”

Read the full story at CT.com.

Ben The Sax Guy Records a New Album, Again

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 09:39:00 -0500

Hartford musician Ben Golder-Novick, also known as Ben the Sax Guy (or Benito the Troubadour, if you aren’t into the whole brevity thing), was hoping to have a new recording out this year. Then he got mugged.

The Sax Guy, 31, spent months — years, even — teaching himself the ins and outs of laptop recording, and he was close to finishing enough tracks for an album. “The ideas were starting to develop and I was finishing some of the songs,” Golder-Novick told CT.com. “I had it all on my laptop and a backup hard drive.” Last October, Golder-Novick returned one evening from Boston, where he was visiting family and attending an unveiling ceremony for his late grandfather. Three men approached Golder-Novick in the parking lot of his Hartford apartment complex and demanded the laptop, backup drive and other possessions.

“One guy came up to me like, ‘Give me all of your stuff,’” Golder-Novick said. “I pushed him away and started running, but two other guys came out and threw me to the ground… I wanted to say, ‘Hey, guys, here’s my wallet. Here’s what I need!’ That was about four years of my life.”

Golder-Novick, a graduate of the music education program at the Hartt School of Music, wasn’t harmed. He had been working on the tracks slowly, taking his time, in between teaching elementary school band and chorus at Tolland Intermediate School, gigging with his own projects and getting called for sideman work. He didn’t lose anything of great monetary value, and he got a free month’s rent out of the deal. But he can’t get back the time and music he lost.

“What’s ironic is that one of the reasons I wanted to live in Connecticut was that it wasn’t fast-paced all the time,” Golder-Novick said, “because it’s ‘safe.’ And then this happened.”

Read the full story at CT.com.

Interview: Matisyahu

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 16:56:00 -0500

As a teenager, Matisyahu — the shape-shifting Chassidic-reggae-hip-hop musician who performs at Hartford’s Bushnell Center on Feb. 17 — freestyled for spare change at Phish shows. A few years ago, he sang Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry” to 50,000 people at Bonnaroo. God certainly works in mysterious ways.

That could serve as a tidy summary to a novel career trajectory. Sometime around 2002, when Matthew Miller (as he was then known) was writing his breakthrough hit “King Without A Crown,” he was already diving headlong into the Lubavitch sect of the Chassidic Jewish faith. Over the next few years, as Matisyahu (Matis, for short), he became a bonafide superstar. Both Live at Stubbs (2005) and Youth (2006) went gold. A song called “One Day” could be heard on NBC commercials for the 2010 Olympics. He jammed with his idols, including Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio. As his latest album, Spark Seeker, shows, the process of transformation, for Matis, will never end; recorded in Los Angeles and Israel with producer Kool Kojak (who’s also worked with Nicki Minaj and Ke$ha), the release coincided with Twitter pictures of a beardless Matis. (Later, he appeared in an online video without a yarmulka and left a cryptic message on his website: “No more Chassidic reggae superstar. Sorry folks, all you get is me…no alias.”)

Matisyahu is currently touring behind Spark Seeker: Acoustic Sessions, backed only by a cellist and two guitarists, fielding questions from audience members in between songs. The soft-spoken musician talked with the Advocate by phone from Cincinnati about the tour so far, paring back his sound and discovering what lies beneath. [This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.]

Q: What has the experience of performing in such an intimate setting been like for you, and what sort of reception have you seen so far?

A: The reception has been great. The shows have been sold out, almost all of them. It’s really not about the number [of musicians onstage], because I do play with a trio. But it’s drums and a lot of electronics. It’s a completely different style of show. It’s not new to me, because I’ve done lots of these shows over the past few years, but I’ve never done an official tour. I’ve done one show here or there.

Q: I read that you are fielding questions from audience members. Has anyone asked you something that you found really surprising? What’s the general tone of the questions?

A: It depends on the night. Sometimes it’s just a total free-for-all, like, “Hey, Matis, can I come up onstage and hug you?” Or, “What’s your favorite color?”, “Would you perform in my festival?” Sometimes it’s much more of a serious tone. There’s usually a lot of joking around that goes on. Ideally, there’s a lot of joking around, then there’s one or two serious moments. But I’m never surprised by the questions people ask, because people ask the most far-out and ridiculous things, so I’ve come to expect that.

Q: Is there one that sticks out as something that caught you off guard?

A: You know what people ask me about a lot? They ask me about “what’s my favorite,” my favorite this, or my favorite that. It’s a concept that I don’t understand, this concept of favorites, you know? “What’s your Torah passage?” Or “what’s your favorite song to play?” I don’t have favorite anything. I like things. But it’s not like a competition for me… I don’t put all of my eggs in one basket… I guess it’s just a way of speaking. They just want to know what songs I like. Maybe I’m being too literal.

Q: Do those questions lead to very short answers from you, or are people expecting you to really expound upon the nature of your favorite color, for example?

A: Sometimes people want to know the history, the story. They want to know what’s behind the beard, or [did I go through] a change of philosophy, the inner workings of why I shaved, or if I’ve changed, if I’ve moved my stance, religiously. So then, that sort of prompts me to give more of a full explanation of why I grew a beard in the first place, to give it some context. That’s usually one of the opportunities I have to expound more, to go more in depth about who I am, my life choices, and so on.

Read the full interview at CT.com.

Interview: Branford Marsalis

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 16:58:06 -0500

In his 52 short years on this planet, what hasn’t saxophonist Branford Marsalis done? Composing Broadway scores and movie soundtracks; recording with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey and his brother Wynton; running the Tonight Show band, when Jay Leno took over from Johnny Carson; jamming with the Grateful Dead (check out the exquisite “Eyes of the World” on Without a Net) and subsequently venturing out into the jam-band world with Buckshot LeFonque; teaching college; winning Grammys; starting a record label; bringing aid to his native New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; leading his own quartet for more than a decade. (Whew.)

Sometime around 1996, Marsalis decided to make his quartet — longtime members Joey Calderazzo on piano and Eric Revis on bass, and relative newcomer, Justin Faulkner, on drums — his primary focus. Last year they released the aptly titled Four MFs Playin’ Tunes, which was named Best of 2012 Instrumental Jazz Album of the Year by Apple’s iTunes. He’ll bringing the powerful, musically telepathic group to UConn’s Jorgensen Center for a single night on Feb. 7.

Marsalis spoke to CT.com by phone about his new recording and the highlights of a long career in music.

Q: You’ve been with your quartet for more than a decade (drummer Justin Faulker came on board more recently). When rock groups are together for a long time, nobody bats an eyelash, but when it happens in the jazz world, it’s perceived as more of a rarity. What’s the secret behind keeping a band together?

A: Rock groups stay together for a variety of reasons, mostly that it’s a lot of money to walk away from if you become one of those groups. With a jazz group, all of the musicians have to see potential for growth. It’s counterintuitive, in a way… In popular music, once you develop a sound, you tend not to walk away from that sound. The change in concept comes from a new hairstyle or a new look, a new uniform… With certain things, the people who like the music are, generally speaking, very unforgiving when you start learning a bunch of music and adding new elements. That’s a bad thing.

I think that a lot of jazz groups have latched onto that idea of trying to define what your sound is and sticking to it. But I have always not really been a fan of that, which is why I would make, in long run, a lousy pop musician. In the short run, I could do okay. But everybody in the band knows that I’m going to keep working and everybody in the band is continuing to work. We’re all on the same wavelength. The schedules allot for guys to leave and work with other bands and do other things and come back with those new ideas. I think that that’s a lot of it. We have a really good band, and a very versatile band.

Q: If you look at what your band will play together a week from now, and you listen back to eight or nine years ago, can you hear a change? Do you hear a different level of interaction above and beyond the tunes that you do?

A: Not really interaction-wise. Musicians are still people, and some people don’t play well with others, and they become musicians anyway. Some people interact well, and personally we interact well, and in music we’re all on the same wavelength. I remember people I grew up with in New Orleans. We all interacted well. I started reading books that they didn’t read, and I was actually in a theater class and had to read plays. I had to learn how to become different characters, and it’s not whether or not you were good at it. That wasn’t the point. It was more about the exercise of it, to have to think in those terms. It changes the way you see the world. It changes the way that your brain operates. Gradually, over periods of time, there were friends of mine that it became more and more difficult to sustain long-term relationships with.

A lot of us go to reunion, and we talk about what we’re doing now and how we see the world. There’s always that group of guys where it seems like the best years of their lives were 1975 or 1976. They just want to talk about ’75 or ’76. There’s a musical parallel: it’s not that we’ve improved interaction, but we are all expanding our vocabularies at the same time. We’re bringing new ideas and new attitudes to the music.

Click here to read the full interview on CT.com.

Sunday Notebook: If Phish Studio Albums Were Led Zeppelin Records

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 10:07:00 -0500

This will only make sense if you’re temporarily willing to imagine Phish studio albums being comparable in quality to Led Zeppelin records.

This is not about value or quality. This is about sequence and tone, and to a lesser extent (much lesser) the years each record was released. (1971 and 1996, for example: were they similar years? Were they worlds away in terms of foreign politics, the U.S. economy, and so on? It seems like it; the first depressed, the second buoyant. Ultimately it doesn’t matter much.)

What similarities are there between Phish and Led Zeppelin? Can you name more than two? Quartet, quartet. White males, white males. That’s all I got.

So, if Phish studio albums were Led Zeppelin records…

— Junta/Lawn Boy would be Led Zeppelin I.

— Nectar/Rift would be Led Zep II.

— Hoist would be Led Zep III.

— Billy Breathes would be ZOSO.

— The Story of the Ghost would be Houses of the Holy.

— Farmhouse and Undermind would be Physical Graffiti, and Round Room would be Presence (though chronologically out of order; it’s an imperfect world, I know).

— Joy would be In Through the Out Door.

(Bonus: A Live One/Slip, Stitch and Pass/Live Phish would be The Song Remains the Same/BBC Sessions/How the West Was One.)

What’s Coda?

***

Other thoughts:

DwD is about the flatted third scale degree (a negative influence) and the natural fourth (stabilizing, pleasant). That’s when the third in the guitar solo is so decidedly the major third. It’s clearly fourth, not minor third-land.

***

There’s a straight line from Golgi -> Chalkdust -> Sample in a Jar.

Taylor Ho Bynum Premieres His Prince Project at Real Art Ways in Hartford

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 07:26:00 -0500

Franz Liszt did it. So did Gustav Mahler, the Rolling Stones, John Lennon, Anthony Braxton, Liz Phair, Dirty Projectors, on and on.

Come to think of it, every important artist steps outside of his or her own head space, at some point, to reimagine another person’s work within the context of their own time period and style. Re-interpretation — through cover songs (the Stones, Lennon, and other pop musicians) or along a sliding scale of re-contextualization (Liszt, Mahler, Braxton, and so on) — is a necessary step for developing artists; at the very least, it can act as a serviceable palate-cleanser along the way. Arguably, most musicians emerge from the experience with a greater understanding of their own creative minds.

New Haven-based cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum’s Prince Project, premiering this weekend at Real Art Ways in Hartford, is much more than a tribute act. Prince is to Bynum — perhaps best known as an experimental jazz musician and an acolyte of Anthony Braxton — what Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker were to Braxton, Bynum’s mentor: an artist who lit a fire, back when he was still coming to grips with what music was all about.

“That’s the process part of it that becomes very interesting,” Bynum said. “There is a very creative aspect to investigating a repertoire that can certainly illuminate something about yourself when you’re going through the process.”

Click here for the complete article at CT.com.

New Film Follows Foo Fighter Dave Grohl As He Revisits the Studio That Changed His Life

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 14:25:00 -0500

There’s a lot to love about Dave Grohl: his body of work with Nirvana and Foo Fighters, his old-school rock boosterism, his affable pizza delivery-guy persona.

Sound City, a new film about a run-down studio in Van Nuys, Calif. where dozens, if not hundreds, of classic albums were recorded in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, gives us yet another. You sense Grohl used every bit of his considerable clout to pull together important, little-heard voices in the record business to round out his first foray into documentary filmmaking, and it works. (Sound City plays at Hartford’s Real Art Ways at 7 and 9:30 p.m. on Jan. 31.)

Sound City was a shithole. “I’d say you could piss in the corner and nobody would complain,” says producer Joe Barresi. The space turned off a number of artists who were expecting the lush rock-star accoutrements offered by other top-shelf studios; the ones who stayed were galvanized by the studio’s urgent vibe. An impressive album-cover montage scrolls through many of them: Pat Benatar, Kansas, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Nine Inch Nails, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Metallica, REO Speedwagon and many others, as well as some of the weirder records — by Telly Savalas, Vincent Price, Evel Knievel and Charles Manson — committed to tape at Sound City.

“We’d record anything,” says Tom Skeeter, Sound City’s owner from 1969-1992. “Anybody who could walk in the door and pay the bill.”

Click here to read the full review.

"Steam" Tweets

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 10:46:00 -0500

Thanks to @TheBabysMouth for encouraging me to get my thoughts together on this one.

***

@TheBabysMouth Ready for some “Steam” tweets? Here goes — Maybe 10 of them coming. (Sorry, everyone else.)

(1) The “Steam” jam happens entirely on the dominant (d, V of g; major or minor mode doesn’t really matter here).

(2) No matter what they do, no matter how much they tonicize D, that dominant tension will always be present: how/when will it resolve to G?

(3) That’s the problem: how much to tonicize D, how far outside to take it within the set parameters: D major/minor “blues” mode, low-to-high dynamic trajectory, mid-tempo feel, etc.

(4) Can they make it unrecognizable? Sure, as long as they come back down to earth.

(5) The jam’s “frame” — that it HAS to go back to the tonic/verse is what keeps it from going Type II. Unless they hack that away.

(6) Hence the problem: taking it outside, striving for transcendence, knowing you’ll have to re-enter the song proper.

(7) It’s exactly like “Maze” in that sense (same key structure, too). Same problem, same clever range of solutions.

(8) Think of the “Steam” jam as a dominant-area “cloud” (tidy little metaphor, too) they’re playing on top of.

(9) Eventually everything has to fall back to earth. But it’s fun while it lasts. (End.)

Daphne Lee Martin extends her reach with 'Moxie'

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 10:08:00 -0500

Daphne Lee Martin extends her reach with 'Moxie':

There are songwriters who’d rather get all of their teeth pulled than talk about their songs.

Daphne Lee Martin, a New London-based singer-songwriter who celebrates the release of her new album, Moxie, with a show at the Oasis Pub this Friday, is not one of those. Martin blogs extensively about her work. (Visit her website, for example, if you’re wondering why an extended sample of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ voice shows up on “House That Built Itself.”) She wants to be understood, without having to change the way she writes. And blogging about her songs, sometimes months or years after they were written, is about exorcism and elucidation, in equal parts.

(Click the link above for the full article.)

#couchtour Mini-Podcast at CT.com

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 08:09:00 -0500

#couchtour Mini-Podcast at CT.com:

With Tom Z. We talk about #couchtour and some other stuff.

Click the link above to tune in. Shouldn’t take too long.

#couchtour: A Growing Number of Artists Are Live-Streaming Their Shows, and Fans Are Tuning In

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 15:17:46 -0500

#couchtour: A Growing Number of Artists Are Live-Streaming Their Shows, and Fans Are Tuning In:

Here’s a link to a long article I wrote on the growing number of #couchtour participants, bands, venues, technology and so on. Thanks to Ryan Montbleau, Bill Carbone, Cortney Harding, John Adamian, Jack Forchette and StageIt for talking to me.

Birds of a Feather

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 11:32:36 -0500

(originally published 1/7/13)

Phish is a band of overachievers, adept at making what they do seem easy. They’ll jump on trampolines (less often now than in previous years) and add other physical challenges to the already difficult task of playing their instruments well, as though trying to mask the overarching nerdiness of it all. (It’s not cool to just be good.)

There are extensive musical obstacles barring entry for the unconverted, but there’s also the long accumulation of homegrown culture to consider: vacuum cleaner solos, “language” jams, the Gamehendge mythology, audience/band chess matches, musical Halloween “costumes,” Type I vs. Type II jams, flying hot dogs, big balls. It’s all manna for Phish heads, late-night study material for “noobs,” or inside jokes for haters to laugh at, depending who you ask.

The complexity of the three-decade-old Phish universe explains why you don’t hear many Phish tribute bands. But drummer Keith Laudieri, a Northampton native and a co-founder of a new Phish tribute band called 7 Below, thinks it’s possible to start one, and to do it better than anyone else.

Laudieri, 33, has been going to Phish shows since 1994. He attended all four nights of the recent New Year’s Eve run at New York’s Madison Square Garden (New Year’s Eve was his 81st show). “I’ve been addicted to it for awhile,” Laudieri told the Advocate by phone. “As a teenager, I got a tape from a friend of a 1992 Phish show. I just fell in love with it immediately. I became the biggest recording, collecting nerd in the world and had thousands of hours of Phish, before the Internet. I was trading with people all over the world for blanks and postage.”

Three years ago, Laudieri, who also plays with the Northampton-based Afrobeat big band Shokazoba, found guitarist Josh Weinstein — 7 Below’s “Trey Anastasio” character — on Craig’s List, along with two other musicians who ultimately couldn’t keep up. Laudieri and Weinstein shelved the project for more than a year while they looked for a keyboard player and bassist. “Nothing really happened,” Laudieri said. “I kept putting ads out. Nobody could do it.”

It’s not surprising. Phish has well over 150 original songs in its catalog, many with elaborate, Zappa-like composed sections, where each instrument will maintain its independence by doing something distinctive and contrarian; the piano zigs, the guitar comps or noodles, the bass asserts. There’s little deviation in these written parts from night to night, and none of the notation has been published commercially. It’s up to the players — using iPhone apps and YouTube close-ups of the band members’ hands — to figure out what’s going on.

Then, the high-flying, extended group improvisations, which you’d think would be the easy parts. But Phish — famously — have practiced jamming techniques behind closed doors, for hours upon hours, using idiosyncratically named exercises (“including your own hey hole,” for example) to facilitate communication between band members. They often get slammed for their vocal chops, but as a unit, they’ve grown into their voices (again, with considerable study and practice), arranging them in complex layers of harmony. Take those skills, flex them on stage for 30 years, in front of an audience who’ll point out every single flaw (now with Twitter!), and you’ll get a sense of what any Phish tribute band is up against.

Is it possible, then, even with the right musicians, to put one together in only a few weeks?

Eventually, Weinstein met bassist Jeremy Shimko, and got in touch with keyboardist Pete Fagen, an old friend. Laudieri was leaving for a month-long European tour with Shokazoba, so they found another drummer and began gigging as Forbin. Laudieri returned, and they re-worked the group as 7 Below. “That was literally two weeks before Thanksgiving,” Laudieri said. “It’s been seven weeks. But I’ll tell you what: in seven weeks, we have 42 songs, including ‘You Enjoy Myself,’ ‘Divided Sky,’ ‘Stash,’ ‘David Bowie,’ ‘Reba,’ all the hard stuff.”

7 Below analyzed all the other Phish tribute bands in the country, finding about 10. “There’s one out in New York, one in Worcester, Chicago, a couple on the West Coast,” Laudieri said. “We went through and scoured for days and days and days and listened to all of them. And we said, ‘Okay, we think we can do this better.’” Laudieri also believes there’s a huge, underserved market that’s ripe for the picking. “Phish doesn’t really play that much anymore… We all have dozens of friends who are huge Phish fans, and they’re all so psyched for this band to be happening… I have friends in their 40s who were seeing Phish at Nectar’s in Burlington, and all of them [say] ‘Wow, you guys sound like ’80s and early-’90s Phish… I’ve got a busload of people coming down for the debut show [at the Main Pub in Manchester, this past Saturday], and they don’t go see Phish anymore, because they don’t like modern Phish. They want to hear the classics. They want to hear Trey not flubbing, and all that stuff. And they’re really psyched about that energized sound.”

7 Below works from memory, aided by apps and iPhones. They record all rehearsals and send videos back and forth of each other playing their own parts, so that they can practice as a unit, even when they aren’t physically together. Once a week, for 4-5 hours at a time, they’ll practice, without breaks. Laudieri estimated he spends about three hours a day with the material — listening, drumming his fingers, sitting behind his kit. The morning we spoke, Laudieri had already sent or received around 30 band-related e-mails.

“It’s all about homework,” Laudieri said. “We all already know the songs. We’ve all danced to the parts and anticipated the changes coming up in our dances… We learn individually, and when we get together, we run it and run it and run it until it’s tight.”

Laudieri is no stranger to the tribute-band scene. When needed, he fills in with Shakedown, a popular regional Grateful Dead tribute band. He’s worked with former Dead members Donna Jean Godchaux and Tom Constanten. And with Shokazoba, his successful original band, in place, he’s happy to invest the time, effort and money needed to get 7 Below off the ground.

“Probably the chief reason why more people are not doing it,” Laudieri said, “[is that] if you can find four people that are on that level of talent to be able to pull it off, they usually want to play original music… When you’re a musician and you’re listening to your favorite music, you’re playing along in your head. That’s what gets you off. This band is sort of self-fulfilling for all of us. We’re doing it as much for ourselves as for other people. I get off more playing ‘Reba’ than I do listening to ‘Reba.’ It matches my dance moves exactly, because I’m the one playing it.”

Right Here

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 11:30:15 -0500

(originally published 12/31/12)

For more than a year, Becky Kessler and Floyd Kellogg have been working on an album together at Casa de Warrenton, a century-old house situated on a half acre in Hartford’s West End, owned by architect Jeff Jahnke. Kessler has only lived in Connecticut for two years, but she’s already well known to Advocate readers, having won this year’s Grand Band Slam award for Best Singer-Songwriter. Kellogg, a multi-instrumentalist and producer, splits his time between Nantucket and Connecticut, working with bands and playing in You Scream I Scream with partner Audrey Sterk and keyboardist Jake Vohs. I showed up at the house one recent morning to listen to raw tracks with Kessler, Kellogg, Jahnke and Andy Comstock, Kessler’s partner.

Kellogg walked around, drumming on a desk. The previous night, he and Kessler had opened for guitarists Nels Cline and Julian Lage at Hartford’s Arch Street Tavern. Now, at 10 a.m. on a Saturday, Kessler wore a dazed, happy look and last night’s clothes. Two years ago, she owned a restaurant with Comstock, a chef, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks; they currently manage a friend’s property in Roxbury, Conn. and plan to start an organic farm. They keep chickens. “I moved around tons when I was growing up,” Kessler said. “The Outer Banks was the 11th place that I lived, and I was 14 when we moved there. But that’s my home, because it was the longest place I ever lived.” She came north for college, enrolling at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Kessler studied jazz guitar for two years, went part-time for a spell, and left. “I was definitely one of those typical Berklee dropouts,” she said. “It was too much.”

Kessler went quiet for a few seconds. Jahnke, playing at psychoanalysis, offered her a space on a couch in front of a flat-screen TV, which displayed a ProTools-like recording program. Kessler teased Kellogg for cutting his own hair. “You can’t tell, right?” he said. Jahnke said it looked kind of mullet-y. (I stayed out of it.) We walked to an adjacent room, where drums are sometimes recorded. “The bass is recorded in the basement,” Kellogg said. “There’s a guitar cabinet in the other room.”

Kellogg, who runs the recording end of Casa de Warrenton, met Jahnke at UConn, when Kellogg was in a band called Adios Pantalones, and knows him from then and from a string of later encounters. They run headphones everywhere, for communication. Bands from New York and Boston come through town, to record and stay at the house. Neighborhood musicians pop into Casa de Warrenton, to add parts as needed. Once, Kellogg and Kessler rolled home a vibraphone they borrowed from jazz player Ed Fast of Conga Bop. Some recording takes place elsewhere; Kellogg brought a portable getup to Kessler and Comstock’s farm to add a piano part, using the property’s 1920s Steinway.

The album wasn’t supposed to take this long. “It was funny, because Floyd kept saying, ‘Minimal, organic…’ Kessler said. “And then we got into it, and it was such a blast. He got real inspired and went nuts.” Early on, Kessler said, “We had one big block session for three days, up until five or six o’clock in the morning. We would get up at noon, and we would start again… We were totally absorbed in it. It was like the outside world didn’t exist.”

“Some records take a year to make, or more,” Kellogg added, “especially when it’s just a couple of people going at it, playing all the parts, producing it, engineering it — which you can do, but it becomes a little more painstaking.”

It seemed like a good time to hear something. Kellogg cued up a track called “Anytime You Fall.” Kessler sang in a dark, husky alto over delicate, reverb-ed guitar. Using an e-Bow, Kellogg draped sustained, distorted single-string guitar lines over the top; underneath, he added earthy, organ-pedal bass. “It was 4 o’clock in the morning,” Kessler said. “Floyd asked if I wanted to do one more, and I really didn’t… I can hear 4 o’clock in the morning in those vocals.”

Kessler wrote “Anytime You Fall” soon after moving to Connecticut. “Some of them are going to get thrown away, but you just keep writing. On the albums, the real good ones make it, and you just toss the rest, or save them for later,” she said. In general, the work-flow goes like this: Kessler writes, Kellogg arranges. “Our tastes just mixed perfectly,” Kessler said. “I couldn’t believe it… He acts like it’s one of his own tunes.”

The group busts Kellogg’s balls for taking so long to finish the record. But he also has a life: he lost his father this year, and his son was born in May. Summer, for Kellogg, was baby-land. Unlike You Scream I Scream records, he also has to mix this one. “Everything’s got its fucking challenge,” he said. “It’s a balance between what’s going to feel right and keeping the emotion intact.”

The next track, “Hole in My Heart,” straight-ahead, up-tempo pop, came on, and everyone fell silent again. The atmospherics of the previous song were tempered. Two minutes in, new chords and contrasting melody show up, and the phrasing becomes unpredictable. “We were playing it a lot faster than I had played it when I wrote it,” Kessler said. “I trusted Floyd, but I was like, ‘Damn, this is fast.’” Kessler and Comstock disagreed about the origins of the tempo. “When you play solo a lot, you tend to speed things up, to make up for the lack of other things around you,” Kessler said. “You have to be really careful. I finally started using a metronome and making myself be patient with it… You’re uncomfortable with how much is not there.”

Kessler first met Kellogg when he and Sterk were visiting with recording engineer Carl Nappa, who mixed You Scream I Scream’s Zookeeper album and supplied some ribbon mics. Kellogg played some of Kessler’s recordings for Nappa. (“He was like, ‘That little girl?’”) Jahnke was the bridge between them. He talked about hearing some of Kessler’s early recordings with other Connecticut musicians. “Not to bash those guys, who are great musicians,” he said. But, he thought, putting Kessler and Kellogg together, “this is going to be way better than that.”

The last track, “Right Here,” started: three chords, a hiccuping drum figure, Kessler’s wordless syllables. Then: her voice drops out, three chords change to four, the guitar/bass/drum texture darkens, expanding to include banjo, piano and feedback loops. It’s the best song so far.

“The cool thing about Becky’s stuff is that there’s tons of songs that have these odd time signatures, but I never feel like I’m playing math-rock,” Kellogg said. “It doesn’t feel like I’m walking down the street sideways.” “Stuff that Floyd does with You Scream I Scream, I actually felt like I was really inspired by that when I was writing that tune,” Kessler said. “Lyrically and manipulating the words, totally. ‘Buh-buh-buh…’ At first it was weird, me singing that. And then it just became natural.”

Recently, Kessler and Kellogg have been playing live gigs, to flesh out some of the tracks and to see how they live on a stage. They might end up changing the name of the project, from “Becky Kessler” to something else, before the album gets released. They may add other players — a bassist, a guitarist, pianist, what-have-you — but then again, they may not. The duo returns to Arch Street Tavern on Saturday.

“The stuff we’ve been doing lately is not going to be on the album,” Kessler said. “Of course, I’m more psyched about that because it’s new. But it’s going to be a lot different, a lot more edgier stuff… We’re thinking for the next one we’re going to record it differently too. We’re thinking about just putting a few mics in a room and just playing.”

“This one kind of got pushed together,” Kellogg added. The next one, he said, “would just be minimal, just a few overdubs.”

Isn’t that what you said last time? More ribbing.

Kellogg became defensive, for the first time all morning. “It’s not unheard of to take a year to do a record,” he said.