Category Archives: TVD Nashville

Okay, so I really like Nashville-based musician Geoff Koch. He’s got a pretty voice and plays pretty songs, and I like him, and if you like pretty voices and pretty songs, I highly recommend giving him a listen.

Koch was one of a dozen musicians to participate in a Chevrolet (yes, as in the car company) documentary called The Chevy Music Showcase. Koch has three albums you can give a whirl: Throwing Rocks at Your Ghost, Live at Lucas School House, and If It Feels Good Don’t Do It, the latter of which was produced by Wilco’s and Uncle Tupelo’s Ken Coomer, who also played drums on the album. I caught up with Koch by phone for a quick chat just before his set at the Casbah in Durham, North Carolina.

I am new to you and your music, and since I may not be the only one, tell me about yourself.

Well, I grew up in St. Louis, MO.

Oh, I love it there.

It’s a great town. I lived there my whole life, and I went to college at University of Missouri in Columbia, and it was around that time I realized I just wanted to play and write songs and make songs. By the time I finished college, I knew that’s what I wanted to do that more than anything else. Around 2004-ish, I started to record my own songs and just got to the point where I didn’t want to just play Nirvana and Neil Young and The Beatles. I love them, and those are some of my early influences, but I wanted to play my own melodies and songs. It was around then I started putting out my own CDs, and I’ve been touring around the country making music since about that time.

Last August, I moved to Nashville, and I’m really happy. I always knew it’s where I wanted to be. It was a toss-up between L.A. and Nashville for a little bit, but logistically, Nashville is still close to family and St. Louis, and it just made the most sense. Also, for my purposes, Nashville is more of a songwriters’ town.

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“Step right up. Come on in…” Those lyrics from “The Grand Tour” succinctly capture the spirit of the very public George Jones memorial service at the Grand Ole Opry House on May 3rd. Thousands of people, coming to pay their last respects to country music’s supreme singer, filled the venue to capacity for the two-and-a-half hour ceremony.

Tributes poured forth from the podium and songs were reverently, sometimes tearfully rendered in a ritual that Nashville has honed and polished to a rhinestone shine. In Music City’s version of a jazz funeral, the roles are established and the participants follow an unwritten, yet strict script with little deviation.

First, Jesus. There is always Jesus. For country music and the Christian faith are forever intertwined. Though the genre has long celebrated the joys of Saturday night abandon, it is the promise of Sunday morning redemption that provides the music’s essential yin-yang. This balance has rooted the music from the beginning and was prominent throughout Jones’ Opry vigil. Contemporaries remembered the “no shows,” the addictions and raucous road stories while Jones’ pastor provided evidence of a man of unwavering belief.

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“I write quite a bit,” Josh Rouse mentions casually as we begin our trans-Atlantic phone conversation. No exaggeration there, as his output has been remarkably prolific over the last decade or so. Encompassing solo albums, band recordings and a fascinating side project with Spanish singer Paz Suay dubbed She’s Spanish, I’m American, Rouse’s work ethic is enviable. An expatriate living in Spain with his Suay (now his wife) and their two young children, Rouse reflected on his new album, The Happiness Waltz, his time in Nashville, and his vinyl past.

The Happiness Waltz feels likes it’s coming from a very personal perspective.

It’s a collection of songs I’ve been building over the last few years. They felt more like classic American singer-songwriter material than the other stuff I had been working on, which was jazzy and tropical. I called Brad (Jones, Nashville-based musician and producer) to discuss it and he said, “Oh yeah, your fans are going to love that,” so I just kept writing in that vein. Six months later, he flew over and we recorded the album in five days in my studio here in Valencia. I used the musicians I play with now and we knocked it out really quickly.

I was listening to John & Yoko’s Double Fantasy album a lot at the time. I really like that album and I wanted to take the same approach to lyrics about relationships and capture snapshots of my life. The Happiness Waltz is just a title that popped into my head and I thought, “That’s a nice name.” The record is up and down emotionally, like life. We swing from joy to pain every day and I wanted that to reflect in the album.

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Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan, better known as The Milk Carton Kids, first came together in 2011 and quickly created a signature sound based on their voices and two vintage acoustic guitars. Having self-released two collections, which were widely downloaded, their latest album, The Ash and Clay, was released by ANTI- on March 26th.

They celebrated the LPs’ street date by performing live at Hollywood’s Amoeba Records and then left for a short tour of Europe, where I queried Ryan via email:

Were records a meaningful part of your musical education?

Not until recently, but as of a few years ago, yes, profoundly. Much is made of the difference in sound enjoyed by listening to vinyl. I appreciate and love the richness and warmth, the pops and the hiss of old records. But the most important effect my conversion to an exclusive vinyl listener (at least at home) has had has been on the very nature of how I experience music.

Merely depriving oneself of the ability to easily skip tracks slows the frenetic pace of the day, allows the mind to wander and regain focus, the imagination to engage, and the listener to sink deeply in to a prolonged engagement with the performance. In this way records are able to demand the attention they deserve and require for their full appreciation.

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I am a recovering punaholic. When applying words to the page, my mind naturally twists them into witticisms for my amusement. I regard it as a sign of good taste, but I realize that most people prefer their prose to taste good. (Did I also mention that I’m a master metaphor mixologist?) What makes me and my former sociology professor laugh generally induces groans among the regular reading public. With this in mind, I will try to exercise restraint going forward. But enough about me, let’s talk about Hey Marseilles.

Hey Marseilles is seven-man ensemble from Seattle, WA, the land of Microbucks, Starsoft and disappointing professional sports teams (oooh, there’s gonna be letters…). They are refreshingly beard-free with the exception of the drummer and, well, whaddayagonnado? In describing their sound, many critics have used the term “chamber pop.” I will avoid that phrase, as it causes me to think of “chamber pot” and, hence, irresistibly rich pun material.

Simply, I will say that by adding cello, viola, trumpet, clarinet, keyboards and accordion to the usual indie guitar/bass/drums instrument scrum, they transcend mere May-Decemberists. (C’mon, you gotta give me that one.) With cleverly-turned lyrical phrases laid over finely-honed melodies, they create music which makes rail-thin couples swoon. (Have you ever noticed how skinny people tend to pair up with other skinny people? It’s a case of love the one your width, I guess. Sorry, that one slipped out!)

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When The Wallflowers landed in Nashville to record their latest album, Glad All Over, they were under the gun. With no songs written and 29 days scheduled for recording, there was no time for sightseeing or leisurely club hopping. Well, almost no time.

“Nashville is a great place to get work done and have fun,” said the band’s bass player Greg Richling, noting that they did get around town a bit between sessions. However, most of the time was spent inside Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound, all of the band in one room recording live and letting the sounds bleed into one another. “We’ve always recorded very organically,” explained Richling, and that approach was ideal for Easy Eye’s analog raison d’être.

The stripped-down approach comes through in the songs, with a much rougher edge to some of the tracks than you might expect. “I had been listening to a lot of The Clash,” Richling recalled, inspiring a bass line which became the foundation for stand-out album track “Reboot the Mission.” Once basic recording was completed, the band realized that they really had channelled “The Only Band That Mattered” and decided to gamble on asking Mick Jones to appear on the song. Jones agreed, and after a few transatlantic file exchanges, Jones had contributed not only to “Reboot” but “Misfits and Lovers” as well. For die-hard Clash fan Richling, who counts Paul Simonon as a bass hero, it was bucket list-worthy achievement.

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Anticipation is a powerful force, whether you’re waiting for your vacation to finally arrive or just trying to coax some ketchup out of the bottle. The more intense the expectation, the higher the probability of disappointment. With this in mind, I held my hopes in check as I watched Grimey’s Too go from blueprint to reality. A few proposed opening dates came and went, but finally, the “open” sign was posted and it was time to see what these entrepreneurs hath wrought.

As it turns out, my hopes were far exceeded by the execution. With Howlin’ Books and an outpost of local coffee brewers The Frothy Monkey sharing space with used vinyl, CDs and DVDs, it felt like the hippest Borders you never saw. The well-lit front room with high ceilings and attractive shelves made for an inviting entrance as I beelined for the used vinyl room. There, in luxurious space, I gleefully browsed the selections with several other shoppers.

Co-owner Doyle Davis noted that all of their used vinyl back stock has been pulled from a separate storage facility and is now in the basement of Grimey’s Too. Happily, this means that the selection upstairs will be refreshed frequently and the new check-in space means that they’ll have more room to take in and evaluate private collections. All of which should be welcome news to Music City’s vinyl enthusiasts.

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Sometimes, it seems that life is one big scheduling session. We plan and plan, have meetings to outline future meetings and check our mobile calendars constantly in fear of missing the next appointment.

What a pleasure, then, when something fantastic comes out of the blue, causing us to take both hands off the iCal and just let go. Such was the case last Friday, when the folks at Grimey’s New & Pre-Loved Music suddenly announced that they would host an instore appearance by indie royalty Yo La Tengo the very next day at 1pm. Not only that, there would be free hot chicken from Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, in your choice of mild, medium, and death wish. I mean, c’mon— Yo La Tengo AND free hot chicken? Buh-bye, Saturday chore list!

While a packed-to-the-rafters crowd patiently waited for the chicken to arrive, the members of Yo La Tengo chatted and shopped, with Ira Kaplan taking a particular interest in the store’s stock of vintage soul 7” singles. Once the fiery fowl was served and their Scoville unit levels had been properly spiked, the band stepped up to the mics.

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