Category Archives: TVD Washington, DC

Americana kingpin Jason Isbell is always a gracious frontman and performer. But he had to stop his show with his band The 400 Unit a couple of times Tuesday at Wolf Trap in Virginia to take in what he was seeing: a nearly full outdoor amphitheater packed with fans who had been waiting as long as he had to hear songs from his most recent album Reunions, released in May 2020. Sixteen months later he was performing it as he intended before an appreciative crowd under a rising half moon. “Here we all are!” he marveled. “No screens!”

A lot of the new album’s songs were built for playing live and the first couple selections from his set, “Overseas” and “What’ve I Done to Help,” snarled with expressive guitar solos from he and guitarist Sadler Vaden. Both favor a kind of wild, electric slide tonality echoing the best of ’70s inventiveness from Duane Allman to David Lindley. Isbell has attracted wide attention with his songwriting, though, with compositions that are full of the kind of detail and turn of phrase that can stun midway through.

With his wife Amanda Shires back in Nashville recovering from an unnamed malady, it’s tempting to say the band played harder and tilted more toward rock than they might have had she been there with her countrified fiddle and backing vocals. Vaden added Pete Townshend-style windmill slashes to his guitar more than once, which might have triggered drummer Chad Gamble to rumble like Keith Moon, while bassist Jimbo Hart conjured up a bass solo or two in the tradition of John Entwistle. But then again, Isbell can turn on a dime and produce quieter acoustic meditations that are all the more astonishing when they quiet a big outdoor audience that had been rocking along minutes earlier.

To keep things interesting for himself, his band, and maybe audience members who catch more than one show, Isbell switches the setlist around each night. As a result, those who peek at what he’d played in previous shows may be disappointed when he didn’t play them here. But then again, pulling things out of the hat means playing some unexpected selections, from “Alabama Pines” in the first half of the show to “Speed Trap Town” toward the end.

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Willie Nile’s pent up energy for getting back on the road was fairly palpable in his show Saturday at the Hamilton in DC.

Originally scheduled for April 2020, it had been postponed by the pandemic to summer that year, then to April this year, to finally this late summer date 16 months later. In the interim, the rocker released two strong albums of new material to play to fit along with favorites from a 40 year career.

Blending the drive and heart of the Stones with a raspy delivery of a Dylan, Nile is a master of combining the simplicity and sheer fun of Chuck Berry with the poetic insight and effective wordplay of the folk scene where he rose. With a veteran three-piece backing, his set careened from carefree, anthemic rockers to declarative stands that are durable enough to endure for future issues than the ones from which they sprang.

The title song for his new The Day the Earth Stood Still, as well as its “Blood On Your Hands” rose from the pandemic’s rise and spectacular initial fumbling by the government. “The Innocent Ones,” about another humanitarian crisis, was dedicated to Afghanistan refugees. From the uprisings for racial and social justice came “The Justice Bell,” inspired by the lifelong civil rights work of Sen. John Lewis.

Nile’s long-awaited DC show came on the day of a march marking not only the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, but to endorse the voting rights act that bears Lewis’ name. Many of the streets adjoining the venue were still closed off from the day’s activity.

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Elizabeth Cook could well be the best of the legion of DJs on Sirius XM. Her weekday “Apron Strings” show on the Outlaw Country channel reflects her personality, as she speaks frankly and sometimes brashly about her life, her musician friends, and everyday hard knocks in her engaging twang. She’d bring that same charm to solo appearances with just a guitar accompanying her stories and really well written songs.

Out on tour for the first time since the pandemic shutdowns, she has emerged as a completely different performer. Dressed in kind of a silvery space age Ziggy Stardust jumpsuit and surrounded by a three-piece rock band, she roared through her headlining set at the Union Stage in Washington Saturday—a transformation that surprised at least some in the seated audience.

Cook has dropped the names of rock bands in her sassy songs before going for a full bore sound 0n her 2020 album Aftermath, whose excessive production more aligned with crossover roar of “The Perfect Girls of Pop” of which she refers to on one of its singles. But in front of an electric band of long haired guitarists and a Mohawked drummer—and following a quiet and very well-received acoustic solo set from Waylon Payne—you’d hardly associate her with the honest and vulnerable persona she beams out on satellite radio.

At first playing a powder blue electric mandolin and then a guitar—whose plug fell out at least once; you couldn’t hear much of what she was adding on strings either way—Cook concentrated on her sharp lyrics, which were often muddied inside those hard-charging arrangements.

Cook has crafted some strong anthems, from “Thick Georgia Woman” to kick off the set; the popular “El Camino” mid-show, and the triumphant “Sometimes It Takes Balls to be a Woman” to end her encore. When it came time for a cover, she went not to any of the classic country she plays on the air, but the Velvet Underground. Nice to hear “Sunday Morning” anyway.

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On a splendid summer’s night in the shadow of Rodin’s greatest work, Laurie Anderson sat with her electric CR violin before a laptop before two invited audiences of a couple dozen each last week to tell some stories that cast their usual spell. Live performance in any form is still a rarity as the COVID-19 pandemic subsides; the joy of gathering as we once did to share in artistic expression is something that felt as rare and lovely as the summer night’s breeze.

Anderson’s own plans were altered during the lockdowns as well; a major exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum was bumped now until September 24. The museum itself, closed for 15 months, won’t reopen until August 20. Anderson’s appearance in the splendor of the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden beneath the famous curved Brutalist building, now covered with scaffolding, was being filmed for its use in conjunction with the upcoming “The Weather,” billed as the largest ever U.S. exhibition of her artwork.

Anderson was there now, she said, to share some of her stories, inspired by the stories of Balzac, whom she credited with piercing observation and powers of description of ordinary events made extraordinary. She told one of his stories, or what she could recall of it, of a wind that blows into a town, under its door jambs and under dresses.

This connected with her own aim for the exhibit, inspired by John Cage’s famous “Lecture on the Weather,” commissioned in Canada and read by US war resisters there. With her own work on “Weather “devised in the Trump years,” the pandemic-caused delay means “some of the imagery has different meanings to it, to say the least.” But her tales, so strange but not entirely unbelievable, touched on the oddity of modern life with the artist as a kind of sociological spy into different corners of American life.

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PHOTOS: JOHN SHORE | In our time of the Coronavirus Clampdown, fans of live music are feeling the void, just as musicians have seen their livelihoods temporarily disappear. The nation’s string of music clubs reliably alive with nightly shows are shuttered and empty as the streets around them. One of the nation’s best-loved venues, the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC is attempting to fill that void by streaming a string of live shows it shot for a public television series that ran a few years back.

The 12 episodes of Live at 9:30, recorded in 2015 and 2016, features performances from nearly 60 different artists—from heritage acts like Garbage, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and The English Beat to local heroes Trouble Funk and Thievery Corporation to groups that have long since outgrown playing 1,200-capacity clubs like the 9:30: St. Paul and the Broken Bones, Grace Potter, and Lake Street Dive.

Filmed with 15 different cameras, the intent was to “capture the energy of the audience, something we unfortunately can’t reproduce at the moment,” says 9:30 spokesman Jordan Grobe. The shows, streaming free on Liveat930.com, reflect not only the energy of the room, but the variety of its bookings.

“Each episode focuses on five different artists to show people different genres they might not be familiar with,” Grobe says. “So for instance, you might love Gogol Bordello, but not be familiar with Shakey Graves, so those are in an episode together.” “The format of it is sort of a reverse Saturday Night Live, where instead of it being 85 percent comedy, 15 percent music, it’s 85 percent music, 15 percent variety.”

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For a few years there, the Pogues coming through DC around St. Patrick’s Day was as common as The Dubliner being at max capacity on the day when everyone wears green. DC got to celebrate a little early this year when Pogues tin whistle player Spider Stacy and bassist Cáit O’Riordan, backed by the Grammy-winning Cajun band, Lost Bayou Ramblers, brought “Poguetry: Songs of the Pogues” to the Black Cat last Saturday. “I fucking love being in DC,” said Stacy at one point.

The pairing of Irish folk-punk music and Cajun may sound like an odd couple initially, but the two are incredibly similar with use of fiddles, squeeze boxes, marching pattern time signatures, and so on. The Pogues song “White City” showcased this dichotomy really well, with the Cajun style as the backbeat, and the Irish trad serving the tempo and flavor. It was also interesting to hear Pogues lyrics in Cajun French as in “Dirty Old Town,” which was sung by the Ramblers singer/fiddle player Louis Michot.

Stacy, a Louisiana resident since 2010, almost seems to be leading a charge in merging both genres, much like the Pogues did with Irish folk and punk.He and the band tossed around lots of Cajun French phrases between songs, and he played tin whistle, both Saturday and on the recording of the Ramblers’ “Si J’aurais Des Ailes.” Rumor also has it that they may be doing a record together soon.

Roots embracing wasn’t just on a musical level, but a fun fashion one as well. Stacy, O’Riordan, and Michot were all wearing different colored jumpsuits, and when I inquired if there was a significance about them, Michot explained that there is a whole history with older Louisiana men and jumpsuits. “We like, them,” he said. “Lots of older men in Louisiana like my grandfather, they had them for different occasions.” For those of you seeing the next batch of shows, you may see the whole band wearing them soon.

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Last Wednesday evening, DC’s Anthem hosted Irish songwriter Dermot Kennedy for an exciting night of music that showcased both his talent for song craft and his skill as a live performer.

Dermot Kennedy was in command of every aspect of his performance. His melodic acoustic riffs were perfectly complimented by the gargantuan sound of his band, even down to the smallest hum of his electric accompaniment. Kennedy’s vocals, engaging on their own, were pushed atop the mix to shine through it all.

Live, his material comes across as both intellectual and surprisingly dark conjuring a very unique experience, down to his stage presence which highlighted the moodiness of the evening with creative side lighting and negative space to emphasize the venue’s atmosphere.

Kennedy is on tour to promote his first full length LP, Without Fear via Interscope Records. The album boasts four singles including the radio hits, “Outnumbered” and “Power Over Me.” Without Fear debuted at number two on the UK album charts upon its release in October 2019, and came in at number twenty-one on Billboard in the US. Without Fear is available in standard black vinyl which arrives with a digital download for those of you without a record player in your cars.

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PHOTO: STEPHAN GIOVANNINI | “I didn’t want to put this record out,” Chad Clark tells me at the beginning of our conversation about Sorry You’re Here, the most recent release by DC-based band Beauty Pill. “It’s a pretty interesting journey.”

You’ll find the album filed under new releases in your record store or on your preferred streaming platform, but Sorry You’re Here was first conceived in 2010 as the soundtrack to a devised dance play by the Taffety Punk theatre company. The premise of suicide.chat.room tends to give listeners pause, because the text is taken entirely from real chatrooms of the late 1990s and early 2000s devoted to the subject of suicide—not how to prevent or avoid it, but how to actually do it, and why so many people felt the urge to take their own lives in the first place.

“I love the play,” Clark says. “I stand by it as a work of art.” It’s certainly not for everyone; because the text of the piece is gathered from real life—and death—online, it can be a disconcerting experience for audience members. “It’s sensitive, but it’s not a timid work,” Clark explains. “It doesn’t surprise me that it’s disturbing for some people. But artistically, at that level, I support it.” Given the difficulty of the material, his initial hesitation to release the music to a wider audience might seem obvious. “It’s not an area that I take lightly,” he says. “[But] my unease about releasing the music had a lot more to do with the fact that the style of the music deviated very strongly from what people expected from me or wanted from me at that time.”

Eventually, he decided to part ways with Dischord, not because the label imposed what he refers to as a “kind of an aesthetic straitjacket,” but because fans of other Dischord artists expected something different from what Beauty Pill had to offer. “This music is far out and away from what people thought I should be doing,” he explains. “I was nervous, I was insecure, that’s just the reality. And now I hear it, and what’s happened in the time since is people have really come around.”

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I simply love the 2005 EP “In the Reins”—so much so that I would even deem it among my favorite releases from both Calexico and Iron & Wine—and with their combined body of work, that’s saying quite a lot. 

“In the Reins” was the first joint calibration between Calexico and Iron & Wine and is revered by musicians and beloved by their fans. Rein’s soothing and rhythmic grooves are stunning, yet subtle, and its songwriting is extraordinarily delicate. The title track alone, “He Lays In the Reins,” is a song that feels like a warm bed on a cold, rainy day as its calm verses wash over.

Samuel Beam better known by his stage name, Iron & Wine wrote all the songs for the EP and cut it with Calexico’s Joey Burns and John Convertino in a studio in Tucson, Arizona. This current tour led them to DC’s Anthem last Friday night for an unforgettable set by two bands who seem destined to perform together. The venue seemed to come alive for Friday’s show as the mood was truly electric—especially for a seated show. “In the Reins” is available on black vinyl from Subpop Records.

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The Independent Minded podcast features conversations with indie artists in the music and entertainment business.

Pop culture legends “Weird Al” Yankovic and Henry Rollins, indie icons CAKE, Gogol Bordello and Mike Doughty, and up-and-coming indie artists The Districts and Vagabon talk about their experiences in the business, their inspirations and passions, and their recent projects.

The podcast is hosted by Ron Scalzo, an indie musician and radio producer with 9 self-released albums and an independent record label of his own, Bald Freak Music.

Episode 112 | Ron interviews Philadelphia indie music icon G. Love about The Juice, power naps, politics, Brooklyn accents, beards, Brushfire Records, and being hazed by Keb’ Mo’. Ron also rants about The Grammys.

Did you know that the Library of Congress has an extensive vinyl record collection, and that when that collection gets periodically culled, the records get tossed in the bin? Enter the Vinyl Record Preservation Society, a DC based non-profit that places these otherwise doomed discs in the possession of schools and senior care facilities for folks to enjoy. A humble but noble effort, and one that needs funds to keep moving.

Enter the fine folks at DC’s Pearl Street Warehouse, a smaller room in the city’s Wharf which hosted a benefit for the organization on the last Thursday in what felt like a never-ending January. In addition to local rock and ska bands, the night’s lineup included saxophonist Ron Holloway, vocalist Franky Perez, Carmine and Vinny Appice and, much to my delight, the one and only Billy Gibbons.

After DC locals The Deplorables kicked the night off with a bite sized, three song set, ska band Free Lobster Buffet took the stage. I’m not a ska fan normally, but this was a fun one. Bassist Chris Boesen is also the head of the Vinyl Record Preservation Society, so the band was a natural fit for the night.

Cramming eight musicians onto the Warehouse’s tight stage, they got the crowd’s excitement up with a fun, high energy set. My own favorite was their jam “Nude Beach.” In addition, they brought out Holloway for a few tunes as well as Perez, who sang alongside FLB’s own Joan Bishop. This is a talented lot—great to catch them on one of their mid-Atlantic/East Coast dates. The tuba player gets sweaty and undressed during the set if that tells you anything about the fun levels. Boesen acted as emcee for the remainder of the night.

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Grace Potter brought her considerable talents to Washington, DC’s Anthem this past weekend, touring in support of her new release, Daylight. In tandem she brought one very special guest for the evening, Devon Gilfillian. 

Potter’s latest album was released to critical acclaim in October of 2019 and is a big step in a new direction, leaning more than ever toward the pop side of her blues-rock roots. For Saturday’s performance she was in excellent form and simply as exuberant as ever. Dancing straight through the first few songs of the set, she appeared elated during “Love is Love” and “Back to Me” which proceeded the title track of the new record, “Daylight.”

Potter even honored some older fan favorites such as the soulful “Big White Gate” off of 2007’s This is Somewhere which was a request just four songs in. Throughout the evening Potter also seemed to glow and radiate from within, and it’s obvious that her new band suits her well as she’s hit a whole new stride. Daylight was released via Fantasy Records and is available on gold-tiger vinyl.

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PHOTOS: RICHIE DOWNS | The DC Record Fair, now in its eleventh year, just gets bigger and better.

Vendors arrived early to seize prime real estate before the venue opened to the general public at 11 a.m. on Sunday, January 26th, while early bird buyers paid $3 more to beat the crowds. Dozens were busy digging—upstairs and down—as soon as the doors opened. They surely weren’t disappointed: veteran vendors and freshman sellers alike brought their best discs, from high-priced collectibles to $10 must-haves.

At Penn Social, elbow room is in short supply, but most people didn’t seem to mind, gamely trading places and taking turns so everybody got a chance to eyeball everything and hopefully go home happy. The bar opened for business along with the doors for diggers to drown their sorrows or celebrate big scores.

Downstairs a rotating regiment of District DJs kept things grooving, while the coffee bar did a roaring trade in liquid pick-me-ups. Lindsey Mastis—ABC7 news anchor, vinyl enthusiast, and human pick-me-up—made the rounds, interviewing buyers and sellers and livestreaming the event on Instagram, complete with her trademark jumps for joy.

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The weekend before the Super Bowl historically signals two things: a welcome reprieve from your TV and couch, and now in its 11th year, the DC Record Fair.

The DC Record Fair returns to Penn Social on Sunday January 26, and just like every year we’ll have 40+ vinyl vendors from up and down the east coast, DJs, drinks, food, and loads of records designed to put a welcome hurt on your wallet or pocketbook. You’ve been warned.

Our friends at the Fillmore Silver Spring put together the above feature a while back that outshines any descriptive copy of the event we could conjure—hit play.

THE DC RECORD FAIR WINTER 2020 DJs:
11:00 – 12:00: DJ Chaim
12:00 – 1:00: Adrian Loving
1:00 – 2:00: DJ Pari (Soulpower Richmond)
2:00 – 3:00: DJ Guiherme
3:00 – 4:00: Lulu Lewis / Dylan Hundley & Pablo Martin
4:00 – 5:00: Kriz Baronia (A Town So Small, Stay Smooth)

Mark your calendars!
THE DC RECORD FAIR
Sunday, January 26, 2020 at Penn Social, 801 E Street, NW
11:00–12:00, Early Bird Admission $5.00
12:00–5:00, Regular Admission $2.00

RSVP and follow via the Facebook invite and watch this space for updates!

We burned the midnight (Old Engine) oil in DC when The Budos Band presented its funk/rock/soul party as a burnt offering at the 9:30 Club on a cold, wet Saturday night.

Kicking off the late night party was Paul & The Tall Trees. Led by Paul Schalda who, like the Budos Band, hails from Staten Island, NY, Paul & the Tall Trees are described as an intersection of classic bands like Buffalo Springfield and The Band. These are apt comparisons; live I also heard hints of Neil Young. It’s a poetic, occasionally tortured, but ultimately warm sound. Underscoring that warmth was Schalda’s frequent references to his father, a member of his own band.

The Budos Band (Jared Tankel, Thomas Brenneck, John Carbonella Jr, Mike Deller, Daniel Fodor, Andrew Greene, Rob Lombardo, Brian Profilio, and Dame Rodriguez) took the stage at the stroke of midnight. I’ve been a Budos fan for ages, having discovered them when I was taking a walk on a summer evening in Milwaukee. They were performing in a park near the Milwaukee School of Engineering and I stopped for a listen. After ten minutes, I bought up half the merch table and never looked back, having fallen hard for the band’s ’70s Afro-funky instrumental sound. Saturday night marked only the third time I’d seen them since that first evening in Wisconsin years ago and I couldn’t have been more stoked.

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