Tom Peloso is busy. Has been busy. May always be busy. Helped found the Hackensaw Boys, Virginia’s supercharging grass-rock act. Left Richmond and moved to Nelson County. Popped up on David Letterman’s TV show with Modest Mouse, playing bass on “Satin in a Coffin.” Joined the band, in fact, and is currently preparing for a tour that starts in Nova Scotia and then takes him to the tenth annual All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in the United Kingdom. Hopped onstage with The Shins in May. Had to postpone a gig at Dust because he’s back on-call with the Mouse.
|
Loudest Mouse in the house: Tom Peloso (second from right) readies his solo LP, The Last Saturday of the Year. |
So it’s easy to understand why Peloso put aside The Last Saturday of the Year, a collection of music and lyrics he’s been working on, in one form or another, since 1999. Peloso began The Last Saturday around the time he left Richmond. “For lesser words, it was an exorcising of demons,” he said during a recent interview. The writing process is one that Peloso alternately refers to as therapeutic, and less clinically as a way of “crawling out of a hole.”
Then, business became busy-ness. “I kinda put down my therapy, or what was helping me,” he explained. “I don’t know if it was because I got busy with the Hackensaw Boys or Modest Mouse.” In 2008, Peloso revisited a few tunes he’d begun and realized that “it was continuing my medicine, my working through of personal things.”
Now, Peloso has an EP of selections from The Last Saturday for sale; the album, recorded at Monkeyclaus and engineered by Abel Okugawa and Raphael Wintersberger, may see a release as soon as this fall. And, every so often, Peloso has a bit more personal time in an otherwise busy schedule; read an interview with Peloso in the Feedback blog at c-ville.com.
I say "open," you say…
Last week, Feedback made his first trip to a Wordsmith Open Mic Poetry Jam, a monthly reading series organized by the meltingly charming Ebony “Black Violet” Walden. After a few months at Bel Rio, Walden hosted her first poetry jam at Is last week and brought in a packed house (yet again) and, based on what Feedback heard, one of the more varied collections of performances to grace the Black Violet’s stage. In fact, Bernard Hankins—typically found keeping beats in local band The Hill & Wood—brought down the house with a hearts-and-hand grenades slam poem.
Check out the next Wordsmith session, or sign up to perform by e-mailing wordsmithpoetryinc@gmail.com. In the meantime, Feedsy will try to get Hankins into the C-VILLE office to drop a few lines.
The mariners’ revenge
By the time you read this, tickets for the Decemberists’ September 24 gig at the Charlottesville Pavilion will be on-sale and, presumably, moving quicker than Guinness at an Irish wedding. At $25 a pop, it’s a steal, people—check out how hard Red Light Management’s saltiest sea creatures can rock on land.
The same week that Feedback caught wind of the Decemberists gig, he learned that beat-blending laptop god Girl Talk would perform a free gig at John Paul Jones Arena on August 22. Free, that is, for any current undergraduate or graduate students at the University of Virginia; non-students may consider themselves non-invited. Look on the bright side, music fans—the Corner will be entirely free of students for a night! Anyone want to hit karaoke night at Baja Bean?