Chona Kasinger

Every Monday through Friday, we deliver a different song as part our Song of the Day podcast subscription. This podcast features exclusive KEXP in-studio performances, unreleased songs, and recordings from independent artists that our DJs think you should hear. Today’s featured selection, chosen by Afternoon Show host Kevin Cole, is “Sunken Union Boat” by John Vanderslice from his 2009 album Romanian Names on Dead Oceans.

Starting off his in-studio session with Cheryl Waters this past Friday, John Vanderslice said half-jokingly, “I was looking to see what I would play today and I saw that we had four shows archived here and it was the proudest moment of my life.” Truly, we’re the ones proud to have featured John in nearly every permutation of KEXP’s live sessions: going back to 2002, he’s played for us at Bumbershoot, in Berkeley, early on the Morning Show, and even for a John in the Morning at Night benefit show. It’s hard, if not impossible, to find an artist more kind and generous than JV, further proved by the fact he was spending his birthday with us (apparently, not even this band knew!) and then performing a full-set free show at Easy Street later that night.

With his new album, John proves against the stereotype that nice artists don’t suck, nor that he is afraid to change a successful formula. Romanian Names, his seventh album, and first on Dead Oceans, finds the John Vanderslice sound evolving in lyrically and sonically. To begin the process, he moved from his Tiny Telephone studio to his basement and built the songs up from mostly guitar or piano and voice. After full production, once again with Scott Solter, the resulting songs, though, often incorporate more keys and synths and atmospherics than some fans might expect, while alternating between them are more spare arrangements, as with demo-sounding title track. The overt political references of his previous two albums are subdued in favor of more inward searching, though not necessarily autobiographical lyrics. When Cheryl asked what his birthday wish would be, John said that “nothing would change,” referring to his current life and relationship with his wife (who was the subject of parts of 2007’s Emerald City) — hardly the same man who could have done something like the narrator in “C&O Canal”: “I tracked down your friend / And won her heart over slowly / And I walked away /Hoping It gets back to you someday.” Other songs seem more personally specific and thus more publicly vague, as in today’s Song of the Day, “Sunken Union Boat”: “Ready, set, dive again / Open up your mask let the water clean your glass /Find the sunken union boat / Find the 1955 Dr. Pepper can” … “Oh dear me / It’s a trick of the mind.” The song’s jangling, airy melody invite listeners to imprint their own meanings or just merely enjoy it as a two and a half minute sketch.

Following up his Seattle appearance on Friday, JV just performed Sasquatch yesterday and will play a few more dates on the West Coast (in Utah) before he makes his way east with the Tallest Man on Earth. He has a ton of dates listed on his MySpace page, where you can also hear more songs from the album. For now, enjoy this video of “Romanian Names,” recorded during John’s previous KEXP performance, from Opus Music Ventures studio in Berkeley:

Sarah-Ji

• The warmth, the pop, the crackle, and the S&M — all reasons why vinyl has made a Randy The Ram-like comeback. So if you like your music on the pop side and hasn’t noticed the black circle revolution, perhaps the vinyl-only release from the stable of The Mountain Goats and John Vanderslice will pique your curiosity. The tour-only EP was quickly snatched up by fans that caught the recent Vanderslice/Darnielle tour but the pair have a few left that can be grabbed at live shows or through the soon-to-be closing Three Beads of Sweat. If that’s not enough of a fix, John Vanderslice’s Romanian Names is due May 19th.

• By all early and live reports, Coachella this year was a big success. Probably the most drama to happen at the festival, though, occurred when M.I.A. invited fans on stage to dance. But, unlike last year, her set wasn’t shut down as security scrambled to keep too many people from overtaking the stage.

• The 6th No Fun Fest continues the tradition of displaying the best in fringe, experimental, avant, noise, and pysch — but this year will also mark the festival’s first foray into the medium of film. During No Fun’s May 15th-17th run at Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, the festival will be hosting Infinite Sound and Image, a collaboration between musicians and filmmakers that is a part of Rhizome’s New Silent Series at the New Museum. Happening May 16th, the event will feature the works of Jim O’Rourke, C. Spencer Yeh, and Carlos Giffoni among others.

• In a very clear cut and pithy message, Cloud Recordings has announced the August 4th release of Signal Morning, the latest from The Circulatory System.

• Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom, and Peter Sunde — founders of popular bittorrent site The Pirate Bay — have been forced to walk the government plank. The four were found guilty of “assisting the distribution of illegal content online.” Each faces a one-year prison sentence and collectively owes music and film distributors $3.54 million to rectify their media piracy. The group plans to appeal the decision.

• Deerhunter plan to release the five-song EP Rainwater Cassette Exchange in a myriad of formats: May 18th sees the EP’s digital release while June 8th finds the CD and vinyl editions going on sale. Pitchfork is offering the download of the title track.

• Seattle-based institution Sublime Frequencies is taking its brand of Eastern music on the road… in Europe. The tour will feature indie sensation Group Doueh and Omar Souleyman along with DJ sets. The Worldly extravaganza will also feature the talents of the label’s operator and curator, Alan Bishop.

• Musical guest highlights for the late night talk shows this week include Ida Maria, Booker T., The Whip and Ray LaMontagne. Lilly Allen goes from The View to Letterman, and Prince hits the last show available: Ellen. You know you gotta catch Billy Bob Thornton on either Jimmy Kimmel or Bonnie Hunt ’cause the Oscar winning actor… oh, I mean the veteran musician… will either do a lot of apologizing (unlikely), back-pedaling (more likely), or blame throwing (positively) for his jerkitude on Q TV recently. You’ll want to set your DVR for that one so you can skip ahead as necessary!
  Monday, April 20

  Jay Leno: The Killers

  Tuesday, April 21

  Jay Leno: Ida Maria
  Jimmy Fallon: Booker T. Jones
  Jimmy Kimmel: Billy Bob Thornton and the Boxmasters
  The View: Lily Allen
  George Stroumboulopoulos: David Byrne (R)

  Wednesday, April 22

  Jimmy Kimmel: The Whip

  Thursday, April 23

  Last Call: Brett Dennen
  Jimmy Kimmel: Depeche Mode
  Ellen DeGeneres: Prince

  Friday, April 24

  David Letterman: Lily Allen
  Bonnie Hunt: Billy Bob Thornton and the Boxmasters

  Saturday, April 25

  Saturday Night Live: Ray LaMontagne

Chad Syme

This week we present another great live session from KEXP’s broadcast from the Bay Area, at Opus Music Ventures studio in Berkeley. San Francisco resident John Vanderslice, who has made numerous appearances on KEXP over the years, joined us on his home turf and brought along some new songs. Joined by drummer Matthias Bossi, John performed two new songs from his forthcoming album, Romanian Names, due May 19 on Dead Oceans. You can hear one new song below along with a couple of older songs, “Dead Slate Pacific” from Pixel Revolt (2005) and “Fiend in a Cloud” from Life and Death of an American Fourtracker (2002). If you want another preview of the new album, subscribe to our Video Podcast hear “Too Much Time.” For more about the album and his tour with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, read our exclusive interview.

• Sadly, the Cramps frontman Lux Interior died yesterday of a pre-existing heart condition. Born Eric Lee Purkhiser, Lux formed the Cramps in 1973 with his wife, Kristy Wallace, aka Poison Ivy, whom he supposedly picked up hitching hiking. Fusing 50’s rock, punk, horror films, and sexual fetishism, the Cramps performed consistently over their 30 odd year span and released 13 albums and a slew of singles. While the band’s lineup changed frequently, Lux and Poison Ivy never wavered and became true pioneers of psychobilly and garage rock in general, and their influence can be heard in the sound of innumerable bands ever since.
  R.I.P. Lux!

• A no less theatrical act, Spinal Tap, confirmed that they’ll be recording new material this year, to be released as a digital download first and then in physical form. Bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) hints that they’ll record “Warmer Than Hell,” performed at Wembley Stadium in 2007 for Live Earth, and possibly as song titled “Gimme Some More Money” — “with probably with some dubious results,” adds Smalls.

• Think you’re going to just slip in to watch Radiohead perform at the Grammys and then slip out? That’s doubtful now that the list of performers has grown to include Stevie Wonder, Neil Diamond, Allen Toussaint, and a so-pregnant-she’ll-deliver-any-moment M.I.A.. And they’re added to the already long list including Coldplay, U2, Paul McCartney with Dave Grohl, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Lil Wayne, Kanye West, T.I., Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, Kid Rock, the Jonas Brothers, Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Hudson, Katy Perry, Kenny Chesney, Rihanna, Estelle, Taylor Swift, Chris Brown, Adele, Sugarland and a Four Tops tribute with Ne-Yo, Jamie Foxx, Duke Fakir, and a tribute to Bo Diddley. All that in less than four hours? Good luck! … and potentially good watching!

• Fleet Foxes fans can check out a new another great video from Sean Pecknold, brother of frontman Robin Pecknold and director of the previous and great stop-motion video for “White Winter Hymnal.” Here’s an exclusive from Pitchfork TV for “Mykonos”:

• Frequent KEXP visitor John Vanderslice announced yesterday that he’s shifted labels, heading over to Dead Oceans, where he’ll release Romanian Names on May 19 — and he’s got a redesigned website to boot. John talked with us while he was in Berkeley last week about the new album, his upcoming tour, and the label change. Check it out here.

• Despite claiming the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200, it seems Bruce Springsteen can’t catch a break lately. He recently apologized for a Wal-mart exclusive release and took a camera to the crotch during his recent Superbowl halftime performance, for which he’s presently facing mild accusations of lip syncing. Now, he’s fuming mad at Ticketmaster, who he claims was redirecting fans buying tickets to his shows to TicketsNow, a secondary broker site where people exchange, trade, and, sell tickets, often with inflated prices. The CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment, Irving Azoff, has since responded, saying, “While we were genuinely trying to do the right thing for fans in providing more choices when the tickets they requested from the primary on-sale were not available, we clearly missed the mark.”

• In sunnier news, Ezra Furman and the Harpoons finally released a video for “Take Off Your Sunglasses,” which was featured recently as one of KEXP’s Song of the Day podcasts:

Chad Syme

interview by Jim Beckmann

Last week, during KEXP’s broadcast from Berkeley, John Vanderslice offered us a preview of his forthcoming album when he performed two new songs live at Opus Music Ventures studio. Accompanied only by Matthias Bossi on a portable drum kit, John played a stripped down set that was characteristically, and literately, probing, yearning, and moving. Afterwards, John, the nicest guy in perhaps all of indie rockdom, sat down to talk for a bit about the 10th anniversary of his studio, Tiny Telephone, his new album and recent label change to Dead Oceans, and his upcoming tour with John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats:

KEXP: Thanks for taking the time, I wanted to ask you about the tenth anniversary of Tiny Telephone. For the show you’re putting on tonight at Great American Music Hall, you’re performing with an orchestra of how many people?

JV: There are 34 People onstage, so a 31 piece orchestra.

How do you even fit that many people onstage?

We had to mark everything out with ropes and then just bring everyone in close. I don’t need a whole lot of room, so we’re all kind of on top of each other. It’s the maximum number of people you can fit on that stage.

Ten years, though, going strong with Tiny Telephone. You’re still working with some of the same artists, like John Darnielle, right? You’ve been producing his albums.

I co-produced Heretic Pride , We Shall All Be Healed, and Sunset Tree, and then we’re going on tour together.

The “Gone Primitive” tour? It says on your website that it’s not about “going unplugged”, but going “raw and bloody.”

Yeah, John wrote that, and it’s beautiful. He could make a lot of money in advertising. No one can lay it out like John can. It’s going to be a great tour; it will just be John and me and our tour manager in a car together, and that’s it. We’ll be keeping expenses down.

There are quite a few stops, I noticed.

There are a lot of cool little theaters and interesting places. We’re doing wordless music in New York, and playing a lot of weird theaters and churches and places I’ve never been to.

Did you book it?

We have the same booking agent and he’s a genius.

I understand that you have a new album coming out.

Yes, it should be out at the end of May.

And the big news is that it’ll be out on a different label, this time on Dead Oceans. So what caused the change?

Well, I put out six records with Barsuk, and they were amazing to me. It feels like Josh [Rosenfeld] and I started together, when it was the beginning of me having a career and becoming friends with Chris Walla and Ben Gibbard, The Long Winters, and Sunset Valley. With all these guys, we were all figuring it out by ourselves. I did six records [with Barsuk]. It just seemed like that was a wonderful point to move on. I was taking a long time off after Emerald City. I didn’t necessarily know if I even wanted to be on a label again. It was the old thing of “it’s not you, it’s me.” I mean, Barsuk was tremendous to me. I have not one regret from that entire era. I mean I have a million regrets (laughs), but not due to Barsuk.

Is there any kind of change in the way you’re approaching music this time?

I thought there would be, but I don’t think there is. I think it’s the same. You have these great ideas about restating what you’re doing, but then you end up falling in with the old crew, and they’re the old crew for a reason. Scott Solter producing and Matthias [Bossi] playing drums on the record, they’re an incredible group of people. I did take a little time off between records, and I think that did help me. I recorded a lot of songs for the new record, and I think I started moving a lot more quickly. It was a little bit more like recording a double album, you know when bands get into recording. You listen to Physical Graffiti and Quadrophenia, or The Kinks, and you hear a band that’s just incredibly comfortable in a studio and working with great people, but they’re working a little more quickly than they’re used to, creating a looser version, because they’re just putting together an enormous amount of work. And I try to do that. I ended up writing and recording a lot more songs than I ever had in a nine month period and I think that made me strip down some of my more baroque tendencies. It was really fun, and it was a great process.

What about the political angle you sometimes take in songs? On past albums, you were definitely influenced by the last eight years, and now there have been some big changes…

Yeah, it definitely feels like a change. Just his pronouncements on the Freedom of Information Act was enough to get me going, “Ok!” It all started going away when Bush was riding at like a 30% approval rating, and all of that anger, that hatred, it became subsumed by the population at large, and it wasn’t quite as annoying, and as exciting, like it used to be. It was outrageous in 2002. And you’re having conversations with people in bands who are asking why we should be in Iraq, and you’re like “OK, I give up.” But then all of that stuff went away, and I really became interested in love. Because I was in love, and I was… I am, in a very intense relationship, I started thinking about my version of writing about relationships, and I started realizing that every album I was listening to was about relationships. I started thinking, “There’s a reason why people are writing about this. This is very rich, and it’s mythic.” And I wanted to write about infidelity. I wanted to write about the idea of a siren, someone who pulls you off course, and the idea that stability is impossible. You have to navigate as best you can and keep as morally centered as you can, but it’s a mess. I started getting really interested in that, and that’s really what the album seems to me to be about. It’s about love, on a certain level.

Does it have a title?

It’s called Romanian Names.

And that was the first song you played for us today?

Yes, it was. It’s about love in the Olympic village circa 1996, or whenever the Olympics happened, I don’t know (laughs).

I hear you’re also recording an album with John Darnielle?

Yes, we’re doing a “comedian’s record,” and and that will be out by the time we go on tour in March.

What does that mean? Will it be spoken word?

Oh! No! sorry. (laughs) That’s the band name [The Comedians]. It would be funny if it were an actual comedian’s record, though it might be kind of disappointing, but John is very funny.

His book was great too.

Yeah, he’s a great writer.

I would assume for that album you would handle songwriting very differently.

It has been different. We’re going to be in the studio next week, so I’m flying over there and we’re going to record together in North Carolina. We have a lot of days, so we’re just going to sit face to face, trade verses, and do weird shit. It’s going to be really fun.

And you’re going to put it out right away?

Yeah, really quickly. JD has been the master planner on this, but it’ll probably be on vinyl. We don’t like CD’s very much, but it’ll be in digital form somehow. Easily accessible.

It’s an appealing model: vinyl with a digital download.

You can’t beat it. And vinyl sales are up. We just got the master back, and here we are, in 2009, and people are getting test pressings, and they’re really excited about it because it really means something now.

Will you play those songs on the tour?

Yes, we will, and then I come back and do a six-week Vanderslice tour. After that, we’ll probably just do festivals and go to Europe. It’ll be a really busy rest of the year and really fun.

Chad Syme

Be sure to check John’s MySpace page for more information and tour updates, and pick up the new album on May 19. You’re sure to get plenty of John Vanderslice in 2009!

Thanks to Katy McCourt-Basham for the assist!

photos by Chad Syme

John Vanderslice has been a singer and songwriter since at least the early 90’s. Of all the places John has lived over the years, San Francisco is where he seems to be settled for the moment and where he seems to fit. It’s also where he first appeared on the music scene with local prog rock band mk Ultra (melodrama at its finest… also the name of a CIA Mind-Control experiment in the 60’s). It was after his third album with mk Ultra that he got involved with writing and recording his own songs and launching his now famous solo career. Forever the purist, retro, analog guy that John is, he of course also owns his own recording studio, Tiny Telephone, where he records all of his own material. In addition to being a cherished member of the KEXP family, John is also an avid photographer. You can view tons of his photos on his website. A man not afraid to throw down on the street either!

 To celebrate 10 Years of Tiny Telephone’s birthday, John will be performing a special show with the Magik*Magik Orchestra in a 30-piece configuration on January 30th (that’s tonight!) at The Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Together they will be performing old classics as well as introducing new songs from an upcoming album currently being recorded. All proceeds from the event will benefit Magik*Magik, the house orchestra of Tiny Telephone. Special guest is DJ Aesop Rock (though there are sure to be others!).

For the session today at Opus Music Ventures studio in Berkeley, John was joined by Sleepytime Gorilla Museum drummer Matthias Bossi, who brought along a very condensed drum kit!