So I was driving home from a meeting the other day, listening to XM Radio when Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” came on. I hadn’t really listened to the song in quite some time, but I thought it was an appropriate lesson in recent South African history with the World Cup currently being staged there.
While listening, it reminded me of my greatest, personal musical memory. Back on June 15, 1986, my sister and I were in the sold-out crowd at Giants Stadium for the final show of the Amnesty International Conspiracy of Hope Tour. It was an amazing day and night of music that allowed me the opportunity to see the genius that was Miles Davis perform live. Last night, while watching the Tony Awards and hearing so much about the musical “Fela,” it reminded me that I also saw the late, great Fela Kuti perform that day.
Anyway, back to “Biko” and Peter Gabriel. It was the powerful, chilling performance of “Biko” during that show that turned me into a huge Peter Gabriel fan. It also made me truly understand the power of a great song and a great artist.
So, in honor of my 24 years as a Peter Gabriel fan, I will be posting one PG video per day on the ol’ blog here this week. I’ll start it off tonight with the video of his performance of “Biko” at the Amnesty show on June 15, 1986, and continue adding one each day through this coming Friday.
With my May 22 wedding date fast approaching and spare time at a minimum these days, I decided to take advantage of some personal time yesterday and spent a couple of hours with my keyboard and MacBook to see if I could get the creative juices flowing again.
I am a big fan of the group Keane and love their new single “Stop for a Minute” (featuring K’naan). Since that song has been in my head lately, the song I tried writing yesterday started off with a Keane-like feel. However, what transpired over the next couple of hours showed why I could never be a real songwriter.
The song started with a simple piano part and a lyrical hook of “hit the ground running” immediately popped into my mind…so that became the working title. The rest of the foundation came quite easily — especially since I borrowed some bits from some aborted musical ideas from my past — and it did actually have a bit of that Keane flavor to it.
But then I decided to add a drum intro and it wound up being a nod to the intro to the song “Hold On” by Yes…so that introduced bit of my prog-rock influences.
And then I thought, “You know what? This needs horns.” So that brought my Phil Collins influence into the mix.
Finally, and this is really my big weakness as a songwriter/arranger, I decided to add some strings…because most of my songs inevitably end up with strings to cover up my lack of skill as a keyboard player.
And guess what my simple, little Keane-like pop tune ended up sounding like…the theme song to an action TV series from the 80s. Just take a listen and tell me you don’t envision cheesy title cards and graphics over actors and actresses with big hair and poofy clothes with forced smiles in ridiculous situations.
Ben Folds performs in Montclair, NJ, on 4/9/10 (Photo taken with Blackberry by B. Kelley)
Wow! It’s been a long time between posts here on the ol’ blog, but I’m taking the time to put a quick one up here to talk about yet another personal Ben Folds live show experience for me.
This time, Alison and I went to see Ben Folds perform solo — just “Ben Folds and a Piano” (as the tour is known) — at the Wellmont Theatre in Montclair, NJ. As I found out during this show, Ben Folds apparently lived in Upper Montclair for a brief period several years ago, so there was some reminiscing on Ben’s part and then a weird moment when somebody from our row — we were three rows from the stage — started having a conversation with Ben about somebody he knew from his short time living in the area.
It was my first time at the Wellmont and I must say it’s a nice venue…and the sound was great from the third row. We bought ourselves a couple of drinks in the lobby and I was concerned we’d have to down them before heading to our seats, but the orchestra seating area actually has at least a couple of bars toward the back and the seats are all individual chairs on a hard floor so I guess they’re not concerned with spillage like more traditional theater venues.
Anyway, onto the show itself…the opener was a fantastic Australian singer-songwriter named Kate Miller-Heidke, who performed with her musical partner/husband Keir Nuttall on acoustic guitar. KMH, as I’ll call her, showed off her amazing voice in her first number, “Our Song,” a beautiful track from her 2008 CD Curiouser (iTunes link). But she followed that up with very intelligent, witty and profanity-laced pop songs that were catchy, funny and amazing. The best moment was when KMH moved over to piano and performed her “Are You F*cking Kidding Me?” — which really should have the parenthetical subtitle (“The Facebook Song”). It is a cleverly written track describing her reaction to receiving a Facebook friend request from an ex. Fortunately, for those of us in the U.S., the American release of Curiouser includes a live version of the song as a bonus track. If you like beautifully sung, intelligent, mature pop music that ranges from heart-wrenching (“The Last Day on Earth”) to hysterical (“God’s Gift to Women”), then definitely check out KMH.
As for Ben Folds…well, he was brilliant as usual. Unfortunately, I spent most of the first song getting up and down to make room for people moving in and out of our row because some freakin’ kids sitting in the row behind us — without tickets for those seats — thought they could just direct people who had those tickets to sit in the row in front of them — our row — without there being any consequences. Of course, when people showed up to sit in those seats as Ben started playing, all hell broke loose in our row. At one point, I just yelled out “This is ridiculous.” One couple responded that it wasn’t their fault because the kids were in their seats in the row behind us. I replied loudly, “Don’t worry. I know (and turning to the row behind us)…it’s all their fault because they don’t know how to read a freakin’ ticket!” At that point, the kids took their sense of entitlement and finally went to their proper seats and order was restored.
From that point on, though, the show was great…Ben talked about seeing a video by Insane Clown Posse that was going to stick with him forever. He then tried to play his song, “Sentimental Guy,” but kept cracking up at the thought of the Insane Clown Posse video and couldn’t even get through the first verse of the song. After three or four attempts, he just moved on to another song (near the end of the show, Ben finally got around to getting through “Sentimental Guy”).
Unfortunately, Ben didn’t play “Zak and Sara,” which is a personal favorite (I also found this odd because one of the t-shirts being sold at the merch table featured an illustration inspired by “Zak and Sara”). However, he did play old favorites like “Kate”, “Emaline” (after someone yelled it out from the audience), “Narcolepsy”, “One Angry Dwarf” and the always-amazing “Philosophy”…so that made up for it.
Oh, actually, there was one more encounter with the “Entitlement Kids”…right after the show ended and people started heading to the exits, a couple of the kids who were sitting in the wrong seats came back to reunite with their friends who did have tickets for seats in the row behind us. One girl decided to walk on the seats and spill some of her drink on me as she went by. I was all set to lecture the kids, but was led out of the theater by Alison to avoid any conflict.
But it was a great night of music overall. Ben was his typical outstanding self and KMH was a fantastic musical discovery.
Back in November 2007, more than a year into my relationship with my now-fiancee, Alison, I had recorded an early, instrumental version of a song for her. I had worked out some lyrics for the choruses and the first verse, but that was it.
Because Elvis Costello wrote the ultimate song called “Alison” — a song my Alison can’t stand, by the way — I just couldn’t bring myself to call it that. Hence, I constructed the name “Alliel” by combining my fiancee’s first name and her last initial. My Alison only spells her name with one l, but “Alliel” looks better than “Aliel” so I added the extra l into the song title.
Anyway, a few days ago, Alison went to a baby shower, leaving me home alone to clean and do some things around the house. Instead, I fired up GarageBand on my MacBook, finished writing the lyrics, changed/added some of the piano parts from the 2007 demo and recorded a more finished demo version of “Alliel.”
I realize my voice isn’t the greatest, but once I start recording vocals, I seem to always find myself trying to do some interesting things with harmonies. And then I added the “big vocals” at the end of the song, which was inspired by a Trevor Rabin (former Yes guitarist who does a lot of composing for films these days) solo album from the late 80s.
Anyway, I posted the song on my TalentTrove.com profile, but you can also listen to it below:
“Alliel” (4:43) Written, arranged and performed by Brian Kelley
You might recall that a couple of months ago, I entered a “best piano/keyboard performance” contest on a web site called TalentTrove.com. I came in second place by one or two votes, mostly because the rules said one date was the final day of voting while the voting system itself was set to end 2 1/2 days earlier.
Anyway, despite that experience, I have entered another TalentTrove.com contest…this time for music considered “electronica.”
Now, even when I was into mostly synthesizers, sequencers, samplers and drum machines, I never really considered myself in the genre of “electronica.” I always thought of myself as pop, techno or — in the early 90s — industrial.
And techno-industrial is what I want to talk about right now. As I have written many times before on this blog, my friend Christian Beach and I have worked together musically — on and off — since 1986 or ’87, I guess. While we were in the ill-fated band TMC & The New Generation (a techno/pop/rap project that I like to describe as “Run DMC meets Depeche Mode”), Christian and I started listening to music generally classified as industrial or — in some cases — cyberpunk. In any case, we really started to get into Ministry, Front 242, Nine Inch Nails, and Nitzer Ebb, among others. Hence, our writing started getting heavier and our songs became angrier and full of more samples. At this point, we convinced our rapper that we needed a name change and we began calling ourselves Interläken Probe, which borrowed from the name of the town to the west of Allenhurst, NJ, as well as the model of car I was driving at the time (a Ford Probe). The “ä” was used to make it look European.
Anyway, one of the last things we worked on as Interläken Probe was a song called “Don’t Lose The Groove.” The phrase had been mentioned during the recording of another song, but it had always stuck with me. When I was trying to come up with lyrics for “Groove,” I thought the phrase fit pretty well in the chorus. In the context of the song, it referred to the idea of the human race all flowing with the groove, and that each of us does our part to screw everything up by losing the groove every now and then (some more than others, of course)…kind of like a record skipping when a needle loses the groove.
Anyway, despite promoting world peace and unity, the song was kind of angry and full of somewhat violent samples. Here is the original rough mix of “Don’t Lose The Groove” that Christian and I recorded around 1990.
OK…back to the present. While thinking about the TalentTrove.com electronica contest, I decided to update one of my old techno songs and submit that for the competition. But which one?
Well, that answer came to me when I stumbled upon “Don’t Lose The Groove” on my iPod. I decided to rerecord “Groove” into GarageBand on my MacBook and bring it a little up to date.
First, I tamed it by removing the samples. While keeping touches of its industrial origins, I made it a more of a dance track. I tried to actually sing the lyrics instead of screaming them like I did in the original. But it just sounded better when I screamed them…although the newer version features more restrained and refined vocals than the original.
I first heard of Winter Gloves when I happened to catch the track “Invisible” from their “about a girl” CD on XM Radio’s The Verge channel. It was the catchy electric piano riff over a techno beat that drew me into the song. I hit the info button on my radio to find out the artist and saw the name Winter Gloves.
Unfortunately, I never wrote down the name of the band and forgot it hours later. Over the next 48 hours or so, I told my friend Jason and my fiancee Alison about this great song I heard on XM, but that I couldn’t remember the name of the band who performed it.
Then, while at a party for one of Alison’s friends, I checked an e-mail on my phone. It was a message letting me know that WinterGloves was now following me on Twitter. I instinctively blurted out, “Holy crap! That’s the band who did that song I heard! It’s Winter Gloves!”
So thanks to a combination of XM Radio and Twitter, I would like to take this opportunity to tell you about the Montreal-based band Winter Gloves, which consists of Charles F (lead singer/songwriter/wurlitzer), Pat Sayers (drums), Vincent Chalifour (synths) and Jean-Michel Pigeon (guitar/glockenspiel).
According to the band’s bio…
Winter Gloves began as one guy’s way of figuring out how to plug himself into life in the big city. It was a single microphone and minimal equipment gathered into Charles F’s downtown Montreal apartment to piece together all the distances he’d covered since growing up in rural Quebec.
A three-song EP (“Let Me Drive”) was offered as a digital-only download and created additional buzz in anticipation of the release of the full-length “about a girl” CD in 2008.
I just bought “about a girl” from iTunes this past weekend and had a chance to listen to it a few times while driving up to Scranton, Pa., for a work-related meeting. I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope to catch Winter Gloves live in the near future.
Here is a video of Winter Gloves performing “Invisible”:
As someone who uses Pandora as a tool for new music discovery and listens to WXPN, the great radio station operating out of Philadelphia’s University of Pennsylvania, and to the emerging artist channels on XM Radio, I sometimes hear a band I like and think to myself, “You know, I wish I blogged about them sooner. Now they’re everywhere.”
But then I realize the artist isn’t everywhere…just everywhere I go for new music. So even though “those in the know” are raving about a certain artist, when I bring that artist up in a conversation about music, I’m always stunned to hear that most of the people I’m talking to have no knowledge of said artist.
So while I may be late to the party among those who pay close attention to the music industry, that shouldn’t stop me from writing about certain artists. After all, if my blog post connects just a few more people to a deserving artist, it’s worth the time to write it.
For instance, in this piece — my first “artist to watch” post in ages, I’m going to take a look at Passion Pit, an electronic group out of Cambridge, Mass., fronted by songwriter Michael Angelakos. Their first full-length CD, “Manners,” was released back in May, but there was buzz about the band after the ecstatic reception to their 2008 EP, “Chunk of Change.”
Passion Pit also has an interesting “from out of nowhere” back-story. “Chunk of Change” actually began as a four-song CD that Angelakos — who was attending Emerson College at the time — made for his then-girlfriend as a Valentine’s Day gift. The CD, however, wound up becoming quite popular on the Emerson campus and soon Angelakos was getting attention from record labels and promoters.
That resulted in the formation of Passion Pit (which currently consists of Angelakos, Ian Hultquist, Ayad Al Adhamy, Jeff Apruzzese and Nate Donmoyer) and the production of the “Chunk of Change” EP, which included the original four songs on the Valentine’s Day CD plus the tracks “Sleepyhead” and “Better Things.” Additional exposure for Passion Pit came from the use of “Sleepyhead” in a Canadian commercial for Sony’s PSP game system and spots for MTV’s “What the Flip?” promotion.
Passion Pit was named one of the top bands at the 2008 CMJ Music Marathon in New York and placed ninth in BBC’s Sound of 2009 list of emerging music acts. The band was also XPN’s Artist to Watch in June 2009.
Built upon electro-pop bass grooves and punchy synth-based hooks, the tracks on “Manners” draw from a number of musical influences. One can clearly hear touches of Brian Wilson/Beach Boys (“Let Your Love Grow Tall” and “Seaweed Song”), early Prince (“Eyes as Candles”) and even U2 (“Moth’s Wings”). For a taste of “Manners,” check out the video for “The Reeling” (my favorite track from the CD) below.
But Angelakos and Co. manage to incorporate those various influences into a cohesive collection of songs on “Manners” that makes for a enjoyable listen throughout. The one issue I have with “Manners” is the sequencing. While the first track, “Make Light” is a decent enough song, it isn’t quite successful as an album opener. If I hadn’t already heard many of the tracks that were to follow, I’m not sure “Make Light” would have drawn me into the rest of the CD on its own.
But if you like intelligent electronic pop music suitable for dancing or just driving around, pick up a copy of “Manners” by Passion Pit.
I will be playing accordion for my good friend, singer-songwriter Christian Beach, when he performs at Twisted Tree Cafe in Asbury Park, NJ, on Friday, June 19, at 9:45 p.m. The performance is part of the annual Wave Gathering Festival, which features more than 175 artists appearing at more than two dozen venues throughout Asbury Park.
Gorgo (mandolin) and Agency‘s Michael Scotto (percussion) will also be taking part in the ensemble.
So if you are in the area, please stop by and take in some great local music.
Just wanted to update my blog readers on the TalentTrove.com contest I had been writing about. Although the official contest rules stated that voting would end at midnight on Sunday, June 7, the poll used for the voting was setup to stop taking votes at 11:21 a.m. this morning for some reason.
I sent an e-mail to TalentTrove.com for clarification asking about the official end date and all I received back was what looked like an auto-reply because it didn’t answer my question. Actually, it raised more questions since the message it sent back to me included this:
TalentTrove will post the top finalists on Friday May 29th 10 AM and voting will last until Sunday June 7th at Midnight. The winner will be announced Monday June 8th at 10 AM.
But the poll is still closed so I guess voting — and the contest — is over a bit ahead of schedule, which is kind of lame.
My song “Vortex (2009)” lost by one vote, but I would like to congratulate fellow New Jerseyan Dennis Crocker for his contest-winning “55 MPH.”
Thank you to all who supported me in this endeavor.
You can help me win the contest by visiting the site to place your vote for “Vortex (2009)” (it’s the third song down from the top in the list of songs).
“Vortex (2009)” is a reworked version of a techno instrumental song I originally wrote in 1992 or so, featuring the sounds of a Roland Jupiter synthesizer I used to have. You can listen to it on the song’s TalentTrove.com media page, or you can listen to it using the embedded player below.
It is a tight race and “Vortex (2009)” is in second place as I write this. Voting ends this Sunday night (June 7), shortly before midnight.
Now, you do need to register on TalentTrove.com in order to vote, but I would greatly appreciate it if you went the extra step to support me — and my song — in this contest. Besides, you may have a talent you want to share with the world and TalentTrove.com may be the place for you to do that.
Brian Kelley 