marramgrass

Sometimes the power in music is in the associations it makes with what else is going on when you hear it. This week’s tune, “Remains” by Maurissa Tancharoen and Jed Whedon, is a great track by itself, but I enjoy it more for how I came across it.

Whedon’s brother Joss is the man behind some of the most interesting genre TV of the last decade or so: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Firefly and the current Dollhouse. The fraught first season of Dollhouse ended with an unexpected and initially unaired future-set episode called “Epitaph One”, in which the writers were pretty cruel to their characters in order to lay out some of the darker ideas the show plays with. Revolving around a couple of powerful scenes, “Epitaph One” is very good TV (much better than unfortunately large chunks of Dollhouse’s first season).

The sadness and hope of the final scene of the episode can be heard in the song.

“Remains” [YouTube]

There seems to have been a glut of good, smart TV over the last number of years. I hear The West Wing and Battlestar Galactica talked about a lot, although I haven’t seen any of either of them. (I’ll hear about that, I know.) As in books and in film, I find some really high quality hidden away in genres where the mainstream might never find it. That’s a shame, I think.

Eleven years ago I sat among a group of people in a church hall and played a bit of guitar. There was a friend there who, with a bit of encouragement, did some fine singing. Last week, after a long time gigging and winning some financial backing, that friend released her first album.

I tend to experience slight anxiety when someone I know releases a recording. It could be a bit awkward if I don’t actually enjoy listening to the music. It gets bought as a matter of course, but not necessarily listened to much. I’m glad to say that I have been enjoying listening to Coming Around by Elle Stevenson.

For a first long-player it’s a strong collection of tracks in the acoustic-y, piano-y, female singer-songwriter-y vein. (Hmm. Does that sell it terribly well?) The song that has really caught my ear is “Almost Forgiven”, with its disarmingly jaunty piano line. (I suppose I might regret ‘jaunty’, too. I’m no good at this game.) If you like it, you should like the rest of the album. Behind the smooth presentation, some of the lyrics are pretty raw. It’s an effective combination.

No streaming options for this one, again. This is what happens when I pick songs from less-prominent local artists. You can get a short preview — or buy it! — on Amazon’s MP3 store. There are also a few tracks for listening on Elle’s Last.fm page.

U2 get a lot of stick, probably partly because of Bono’s media profile and charitable efforts. Is it easier to be philanthropic when you’re stupendously rich? I don’t know, actually.

I came to U2 pretty late in the day, as a teenager, somewhere between Zooropa and Pop; my friends included a disproportionate number of pretty intense U2 fans. I devoured the back catalogue, eventually came to love Pop, and got pretty hooked.

I’ve backslidden a little since then. The shine started to fade during my first listen to How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, and the Vertigo show we caught in Glasgow did next to nothing for me. (This was disappointing. The two other times I’ve seen them live were memorable for all the right reasons. Elevation in Manchester is one of my favourite gigs.) I think I’ve listened to No Line On The Horizon three or four times at most.

The band were at the height of their powers when they were (so the story goes) at their least cohesive as a group, in the time of Achtung Baby and Zooropa. This was when the songwriting was still sharp but the sound had hardened up a bit. Those two albums serve up some of my favourite tunes, including my probable Best Song Ever (I won’t name it — it’s too predictable).

On Zooropa, there’s the mundane yet surreal imagery of “Stay (Faraway, So Close)”, swaddled in blunt guitars and understated vocal harmonies. This song holds memories of driving home late at night, periodically tapping the back button on the car’s CD player to listen to it just one more time. I still find it difficult to listen to it just once, thanks to the shivers it gives me.

“Stay (Faraway, So Close)” [YouTube]

“Stay (Faraway, So Close)” [Spotify]

I went through a very comprehensive Counting Crows phase in my late teens. I’d still listen from time to time, and this morning the iTunes Genius threw up this track.

“Anna Begins” first featured on their debut album, but I got to love it on the VH-1 disc of the double album Across A Wire. (That’s a great introduction to the band, actually. Two discs, each a live show: one is an acoustic VH-1 Storytellers set, the other a rather louder MTV show.)

This song still represents some of my favourite writing from the band, and the VH-1 performance brings a suitable intensity to the track. Actually, I prefer quite a few of the arrangements in that set to the original album versions.

“Anna Begins” [YouTube] (Another different arrangement, but also good.)

“Anna Begins” [Spotify]

“The Lochmaben Harper” is one of those appealing folk songs telling a story that gets a smile. Yet, as is often true, a lot relies on the performance.

I took some photos a few years back, at the launch of Emily Smith’s second album. She introduced the song with a bit of the tale, and sang it with the wit and the wink it needs and deserves. I remember it as a brilliant gig all round, actually.

Emily’s won a bunch of awards, and is well worth listening to. You can get her music, including this track, on iTunes.

(I can’t find “The Lochmaben Harper” on YouTube or Spotify, but you can find some tracks in each place: on Youtube and on Spotify.)

I had to miss a few weeks of the Tuesday Tunes, there. There hasn’t been much time for any kind of blogging, lately. Inbetweentimes, though, there has been much listening to music — or, at least, having of music on in the background while working on something that isn’t a blog post. Which gives me a few tracks to mind to choose from.

This week, then, is “Bearing Star”, from Iain Archer. It’s a gentle song off his Revelation Bell EP. In case you’re curious, Revelation Bell is by far my favourite of his released records. (I did have a MiniDisc of demos that included very different versions of songs like “Boy, Boy, Boy” and “Mirrorball Moon” to the ones that were eventually released on Flood The Tanks; I much prefer them to the album verisons. Those recordings were brilliant, but the disc was lost sometime during one of the house moves we made a few years ago, and I haven’t been able to find those recordings again. A shame.)

I’ve sung your name over in a thousand different ways
Because I like the sound of it and the person it portrays

(No streaming options I could find for this one.)

If you try and pick a standout track from the Bill Mallonee/Vigilantes of Love canon, you’re spoiled for choice. Country-ish rock with a conscience and a heart of protest, there’s a lot of powerful song. “Resplendent” is probably my favourite of the lot. I won’t bother trying to offer commentary; have a listen and I’ll let the song do its own talking.

Bill Mallonee, though. There’s a man who can write. He can perform, too. My introduction to him, and VoL, was at an acoustic gig in a church hall in Edinburgh. It was smallish room, with plastic stacking bucket chairs around folding tables, cabaret style. The venue tended to attract a slightly older than average gig-going crowd, and they seemed to know him well. I’ll say this: he tore the place up.

Ages ago, Jonny linked this article on where Bill Mallonee has ended up. There’s something slightly sad, and humbling, about it.

“Resplendent” [YouTube]

“Resplendent” [Spotify]

Blame an exchange on Twitter last night. Richard Burton, with extra menace:

No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space.

No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets and yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes and slowly, surely, they drew their plans against us.

When I was a kid, one of the records I found among my dad’s small collection of vinyl was the comprehensively named Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of “The War of the Worlds”. I listened to it enough that the eery cry of “Ulla!” gave me some pretty vivid nightmares.

The War of the Worlds has had some very high-profile adaptations: Orson Welles’s famous 1938 radio play, the brilliant 1952 film, the not-so-brilliant 2005 Spielberg/Cruise blockbuster. Jeff Wayne’s is my favourite (maybe because it was my first).

“Thunder Child” is the tiny moment of hope — maybe we can beat the Martians — that’s quickly dashed. Tom Cruise isn’t around to thrust explosives into the belly of the machine, unfortunately.

Stirring.

“Thunder Child” [YouTube]

“Thunder Child” [Spotify]

Still with the country-ish music, I’m afraid.

My wife and my parents got together and bought me a mandolin for my birthday some years ago. It’s a fantastic wee instrument, and there’s nothing that sounds quite like it. The thing about the mandolin is that you expect the music to be either something Mediterranean-sounding, or bluegrass. (If you don’t know bluegrass, think country with more energy but even less credibility. I’m pretty sure we’ll come back to it on a future Tuesday.)

When I first picked up the mandolin, one of the names I came across was a young guy (of an age with me, roughly, which at the time made him much younger than the average well-known mandolin player) called Chris Thile. He’s kind of like a guitar hero of the mandolin world, but with as much melody as shredding — more Satriani than Vai, if that means anything to you.

Where Thile isn’t quite your typical mandolin player, the band he played with at the time weren’t your typical bluegrass/folk/country band. Nickel Creek did things a little differently, showing off their bluegrass roots but combining them with much more indie, rock influences.

It sounds good, doesn’t it? It does to me.

The title track of their 2002 album is “This Side”, which I first noticed for the great mandolin solo in the middle (once a guitar nut, always a guitar nut — even with eight strings instead of six), but it drew me in to a great track on a really excellent album.

There are songs, many of them, that make me stop whatever I’m doing and listen. Then there are the ones that I can feel, that do something in me. Sometimes it’s in the lyric, sometimes something in the music. “This Side” is a tune that makes me stop, close my eyes, and aspire to making music that sounds like that.

“This Side” [YouTube]

It’s coming up on three years since we moved from Edinburgh back to Northern Ireland. Part of me still misses what is a fantastic place to live, although we are, by now, very happily settled back home. One of the things I miss (and I have mentioned this before) is BBC Radio Scotland, which has some brilliant programming. Two of the DJs who were on Radio Scotland while we were there — Iain Anderson and Tom Morton — became some of my main sources of new music.

Both shows, at the time, tended to occupy the space between easily accessible rock, folk and country, which explains much of the music I picked up during the six years I was in Scotland. One of the artists I enjoyed was Josh Ritter, and my first conscious encounter with his music was with this song.

“Girl In The War” is the first track on Ritter’s Spring 2006 album, The Animal Years. It sets the tone for the album: it sounds pretty sweet, and pretty gentle, but the whole thing has bite. There’s politics in there, and protest and bitterness. “Girl In The War”, so far as I can figure, is about the seduction, and the frequent foolishness and hypocrisy, of war — aimed squarely at the war in Iraq and the ‘War on Terror’. It’s also proof that a politically charged song can be beautiful, too, and can have a seductive quality of its own.

The rest of the album is worth listening to, also. The other key track, I think, is “Thin Blue Flame”, which picks up some of the imagery from “Girl In The War”. It’s the penultimate track on the album, but is the climax and the companion to the opener.

Ritter’s music has appeared on a few soundtracks. (If I remember correctly, another song off this album featured in an episode of House a while back.) He deserves a listen, especially if you like American, slightly country, slightly folky rock.

“Girl In The War” [YouTube]

“Girl In The War” [Spotify]

And a freebie:

“Thin Blue Flame” [Spotify]