past articles

27 August 06

Jennifer O'Connor: The Never-Ending Story Involves Love And Sorrow And Both Win In The End – Figure That Out

Words by Sean Moeller //Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Photos by Jesse Codling Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) Of the myriad concerns that have to be dealt with by all of us over the course of our lifetimes, it’s those of the garden variety that really give us the chills. The ones that make us shiver to our cores are the unanswerable questions that stalk us, usually from the first days of cognition to the times when we’re moving slowly and on our last legs, shaky and even more concerned because we never got a fucking answer to any of them. Just watch, it must happen, right before we kick off into a great sleep or whatever’s promised as the everlasting, we’ll have this pause—just seconds before the very end—where we all get a chance to float a big, hard mental curse word at the stark realization that we’re still clueless and all that brow-beating and nervous energy spent on the silly little loves, their aches and their contrivances was for naught. All we did was take in the contour of the big picture, failing to really appreciate the thirst for the solutions rather than actually getting anywhere. It’s these two very familiar and conflicting issues of love and death that seem to really force us into different stages of dementia, give us quivering extremities and lips when they back away or come too close. We’re worried about if we’ll find love, how much of it we’ll be allotted, how long it might last, is it the right kind and when will it all be taken away, reduced to a bittersweet lesson or a wisecrack depending on the circumstances upon its departure and who’s departing. We worry about the love we can’t control and the love we never controlled. And we worry about time that we don’t stand a lick of chance against.more...

20 August 06

Cold War Kids: Standing This Close To Pathos May Result In Devotion  

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Photos by Ashley Pincus Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) This is a story about a band that cannot be considered a mock-up or precursor, but the whole she-bang, a font of penetrating pathos suitable for framing. Cold War Kids is a collection of four men who write and play songs as if they’re burning from the inside out, involving themselves so utterly and completely in the stories of their faux characters that to see them in-person, you find yourself checking your own clothes for holes caused by the descending embers of whatever powerful stuff is in the air. They can turn water into wine and battery acid, it seems, pumping the mixture through us and their songs and it is undoubtedly felt, as anyone who’s been privileged enough to take in one of their performances knows. It’s finding a religion in a secular way. It’s feeling things again for the first time, with wonder and exhilaration, even if it’s just with borrowed hands and hearts or for a limited time – the spell to be broken when the cigarette smoke clears out and the night gets let back into the room. Lead singer Nathan Willett, who could be mistaken for a Wild West outlaw in the right garb and with a six-shooter holstered to his hip or a younger Miles Kurosky of Beulah semi-fame, creates sketches of wretched people, beleagured people and almost heroes trying their damnedest that are stocked with vagaries and participles, details and estranged particulars. They are all compassionate attempts at definition and embracing the common things that people encounter every day whether they want to or not. Willett sinks himself into the belly of these characters and is a thinking man – a caring man – when he paints them for all to see. A few weeks ago, he and the rest of his bandmates had Common walk by them as he was going to the stage to perform, giving them a chest thump in response to their wish of good luck. They said it was a highlight and when Willett was asked about that experience last week, he combined his answer with another answer to a question about the prevalence of religious connotations in his lyrics, staying somewhat ambiguous on the latter front.     more...

13 August 06

Conner: No One Ever Thinks They're From Kansas

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) James Duft is driving around Lawrence, Kan., Friday morning, running some errands at the ass-crack of dawn, a time when a “hot” sign in front of the cinnamon crunch bagels at Panera Bread is redundancy, as if one were calling a kettle black, as the saying goes. He was up when it was time to make the doughnuts and read the morning newspaper. The lead singer for Conner had a mid-day voice on him and there was some get-up in his tone. “Can I get back to you in an hour? I have to pick up some drywall stuff,” he said, politely relieving himself of a phone call. He called back in an hour and before long he saw his crew arrive and begin hauling off the heavy construction materials that he’d just purchased and he politely cuts things short again. Such is the moonlighting for the man and his band, a four-piece that seems to be transcribing the private conversations of bar shadows and the people behind them with its danceable exhilaration, its smoky grooves and scratchy tempest that sounds like the things hidden inside old LP covers, worn almost bare from use and the things that all those sexy New Yorkers and Las Vegasites have been thumping their trendy soles to. There’s the new and the old spread all over the band’s second full-length record, but first official release “Hello Graphic Missile,” eagerly anticipated in Europe next week, where the band’s already attracting some ballyhoo through the grapevine. Similar to what happened to The Killers and Louis XIV two years ago, Conner is causing a minor sensation in the UK and Germany before anyone in the republic back home even cares.more...

6 August 06

Thao Nguyen: Projections, Projections, Projections -- And Winged Creatures That Blaze Like Jet Streams 

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) Whenever it’s the truth ye seek about someone else, it’s wisest to go to a second player to reproduce the character than it is to take it direct from the horse’s mouth. It’s almost guaranteed that what you’ll be told will be the most worthwhile matters and attributes of the person in question – likely without the watering down or the beefing up, the superlatives or the hyperbole. Why you’d ever need to worry about not getting a frank answer from Virginian and soon-to-be San Franciscan singer/songwriter Thao Nguyen, regarding her thoughts and her life, is a good first question. If Nguyen were an old-fashioned letter writer, she would write volumes – pages and pages, reams of correspondence between herself and someone or no one in particular. She would record the intricate details of her days – of the finer tastes and freckly embarrassment, equally – and present it in an unabridged form that would be forever consulted as the authority, for there would be nothing left to throw in as an appendix. Nothing. She’s immediately open and immediately a confidante. She’s the person – whether it would be true or just flat-out fabrication – you’d expect to be introduced to as, “This is Thao. I’ve known her since grade school.” But that right there is where she gets as slippery as a bar of soap and a lane in a bowling alley, rolled into one. Her music and the songs it lives in, breath dual lives in such a way that, for as chatty and chummy as Nguyen instantaneously becomes in the first few seconds of introduction – in this case, her emptying of a rotting-from-the-inside cooler as if it contained nuclear waste products – her depth is probably like that of an iceberg. It must – just simply must—stretch the length of Florida beneath her surface, where we can’t spy. She gifts us with Tallahassee and Pensacola, but everything below Gainesville is mystical and below the surface. She’s fascinating in her randomness and her songs – these winged creatures that seem powered by pixie dust, youthful wonder, dogged wisdom that’s advanced beyond her years and a delicate, but uproarious blaze that’s got the heart and the legs of a jet stream.more...