Author: Desire' Moses

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John Paul White steps out post-Civil Wars

Swamp and soul play out on John Paul White's new solo album, Beulah. He's at the Southern on October 19. Publicity image.

Originating in the 19th century, “Beulah Land” is a popular gospel song based on the biblical reference of Israel. It’s a hymn that Alabama singer-songwriter John Paul White grew up hearing (his dad’s side of the family is Southern Baptist), and one that sparked a familial namesake.

“My dad called my little sister Beulah as a term of endearment and I noticed that I do it, too, with my daughter and with my wife,” White explains. “It’s just another way of saying ‘honey.’”

Beulah is also a term unique to the world of William Blake, one of White’s favorite poets.

“He was a very spiritual guy and he had his own little mythology for what he believed, and one of the things that he did believe was that there was a place that you could escape to through meditation—a place you could go to heal and to re-center to just relax and get your life back together,” White says. “And then you had to come back to earth. You couldn’t stay there. It wasn’t heaven; it was just a little place, a little oasis.”

It was Blake’s usage of the word that inspired the title for Beulah, White’s solo album that came out in August.

“There’s no better term for the process I’ve been going through and how these records were born, and what state they were born in, than that,” he says.

White’s referring to the quiet years he’s spent since the dissolution of The Civil Wars, the celebrated harmonious duo he formed with singer Joy Williams. Once the pair called it quits in 2013, White returned home to Florence, Alabama, to recharge and focus on his family.

“I was so blissfully happy at home being husband and dad and also label owner and studio owner that when [these songs] started popping into my head, I really wanted to ignore them because I knew that once I wrote them, I’d have to record them,” he says. “And as soon as I did, all I could think about was playing them for other people and wondering what their reaction would be, if they would connect with it.”

Just as White couldn’t resist these songs, they also beckon to the listener. Part swamp, part twang, and all soul, they’re sonic enchantments woven together by White’s hypnotic acoustic guitar. Released on Single Lock Records, the label he co-founded with Ben Tanner of Alabama Shakes and local businessman Will Trapp, he split the recording process between Single Lock Records studios and the legendary Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, where he grew up. It’s an area steeped in a storied musical tradition, known for producing its own distinct sound and caliber of artists—some of whom make up the rhythm section on the record.

“When I was coming up through the ranks…that was the level that you had to come to to be able to get a job around here,” he says. “So I always had that bar set, which was a really great thing for me as a musician. But these guys all became my close friends and heroes and confidants and they’ve all been extremely supportive of what my generation and the generation behind me is doing and they’re all very proud and we’re proud to carry on the legacy.”

An allegiance to his roots combined with a tendency to stay humble is quintessential to White’s approach to music, as evidenced on his latest single “What’s So.”

“The way that I was always raised is you know don’t put on airs, don’t act like you’re better than anybody else,” he says. “Any time that I would have some sort of success, I’d always just kind of ‘aw shucks’ it away…And I’m still kind of that guy and I’m okay with that.”

 

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Wild Child fights through tough times and finds magic

Kelsey Wilson and Alexander Beggins are the founding members of Wild Child, a seven-piece fusion rock band from Austin, Texas. Publicity photo

The sound of Wild Child is hardly categorical. With horns and strings, it’s orchestral; with tap-your-feet basslines, it’s all groove; with ukelele-based riffs, it’s easy listenin’; and with bare piano arrangements, it’s full of soul. Fronted by Kelsey Wilson (vocals, violin) and Alexander Beggins (vocals, ukelele), the Texas indie- pop outfit has honed its blend of effervescent tunes for the past six years. Lyrically deep and sonically infectious, thus is the magic of Wild Child.

“That’s my favorite juxtaposition with our band, that we talk about some seriously heavy stuff in the lightest possible setting with smiles on our face,” Beggins says. “We’re talking about things that aren’t fun but we’re having fun doing it.”

The band’s spirit embodies the polarities that attract us to music in the first place. Whether it’s the soundtrack to your weekend dance party or the backdrop of your mid-week pity party, music is healing and it’s meant to get lost in. Wilson understands this function of songwriting. Much of the material for Wild Child’s latest album, Fools (2015), stemmed from personal life events: The dissolution of her engagement came during the same week her parents announced their split.

“At the time, you just think like it’s our creative outlet: It’s how we get over things, it’s how we process things,” she says. “For our first record, Pillow Talk, we were just processing these things for ourselves—it wasn’t for anyone.”

But in the four years since Pillow Talk’s release, Wild Child’s tour hustle has generated a buzz. This time around, Wilson’s songwriting is being received by a dedicated audience.

“This is a unique situation where I’m dealing with ridiculous stuff and I’m singing about it every single day,” she says. “But it helps me because it’s such a serious and honest place that I have to go to that I can’t just go through the motions. I have to get into it.”

A perfect example, she says, is when the band performs the track “Break Bones” from Fools. The song outlines that moment when you realize that a relationship is over, but are having trouble letting go. Accompanied by piano, Wilson’s pure vocal rings out: “It’s getting too hard to pretend / Too much to say I can’t contend / There is more breaking here than we could ever mend.”

“It doesn’t feel good unless I’m really sad by the end of it and then I know that we did the song justice,” Wilson says. “And there will be some nights where it’s insanely hard.”

That’s where Beggins comes in, relieving anxiety and tension. Wilson recalls the show they played on Valentine’s Day.

“It’s like the last thing I wanna do is get up on stage and try and act super happy and jolly and sing these fucking songs ever again,” she says. “And he just took it upon himself to like make me laugh the whole set. He took a roll of tape from the sound guy and was like, ‘Let’s see how long this tape is,’ and made the crowd unroll it…The whole show was so weird but it got me through the whole thing. And people in the audience had fun, too, because they were thoroughly confused the whole time.”

Wild Child
The Southern Café & Music Hall
September 29

Beggins and Wilson met while touring as backup musicians for a mutual friend, and the creative connection was practically instantaneous.

“I didn’t know how to finish a song or write a complete one until I met Alexander,” Wilson says.

She estimates that the two wrote their first song together, “That’s What She Say,” in less than 20 minutes—and they haven’t stopped writing since. After recruiting friends to fill out the songs, Wild Child was born.

“We could actually do everything that the other one wasn’t comfortable with,” Wilson says. “I can have a million melodies floating around in my head, but I never know how to put ’em down, what to do with them. But the second Alexander starts playing a riff, I just know what happens.”

When writing Fools, Beggins and Wilson extended their collaborative approach, relying on the rest of their bandmates to achieve the right sound.

“As a band of seven, we really came together on this album,” Beggins says. “[Kelsey and I] provided the skeletons and framework for this, but this was the first album where we really meshed together.”

But the key to crafting any Wild Child song is to keep the band’s essence at the forefront.

“We take these songs [as] a go-crazy release, not as a let’s-dwell-on-these-horrible-things-that-happened,” Wilson says. “It’s more like, let’s take these things that happened, make a badass song out of it and then rage every night with a crowd of people who have been through the same shit as you.”

Contact Desiré Moses at arts@c-ville.com.

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Peter Bjorn and John play to the beat of pop history

Peter Bjorn and John pair modern pop flair with old school aesthetics as the opener for Beck at the Pavilion on Monday. Publicity photo

Haunted by spirits of recordings past, music studios are just as legendary as the work they’ve cultivated, and they often come equipped with their own folklore. Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” echoes throughout RCA’s Studio B in Nashville. Memphis’ Sun Studio gave us the first recordings of both Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. Muscle Shoals Sound Studio became synonymous with rhythm and blues in the ’60s and ’70s, and served as a breeding ground for hits such as The Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” and Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools.” Founded by Jimi Hendrix, Electric Lady Studios birthed rock ‘n’ roll classics including Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy and Patti Smith’s Horses. So it’s fitting that when Swedish trio Peter Bjorn and John set out to make a big pop record that could stand among the greats, they turned to a studio in Stockholm formerly used by the country’s most notorious pop group, ABBA.

“A huge self-playing music machine is located right outside the studio and it was a present from ABBA to their manager,” says John Eriksson, who puts the “John” in Peter Bjorn and John. “It is supposed to be able to play ‘Thank You for the Music,’ and seeing that weird thing every morning made us wanna do the best Swedish pop songs since ABBA.”

Peter Bjorn and John
With Beck at Sprint Pavilion
September 19

The result is Breakin’ Point, PB&J’s seventh album and its first in five years. It’s been a decade since Eriksson—along with his bandmates Peter Morén and Bjorn Yttling—saturated the airwaves with an infectious whistling melody on their commercial breakthrough, “Young Folks,” and the band’s latest offering is an ambitious expanse of pop intensity. Eriksson partially contributes this slick, refined sound to the studio environment.

“The old vintage gear from the ’70s and the brown wooden walls truly make an impression on the music,” he says. “Almost all of the music we have recorded in it lately has a touch of the music from that era.”

The studio is now part of the independent artist collective and label INGRID, which PB&J members formed in 2012 alongside musicians Andrew Wyatt and Pontus Winnberg from Miike Snow, Lykke Li, Coco Morier, Jocke Ahlund, Nille Perned and Jonas Torvestig.

“INGRID is like a dream come true,” Eriksson says. “We created a platform where everything is possible. If someone wants to drop a piano from the 10th floor and record that crash and put it out on a 7″ vinyl on our label, she or he can do that. If someone wants to cut down a bunch of pine trees and erect them inside a music venue, he or she can do that.”

When creating INGRID, the group was inspired by a Danish film collective called Zentropa.

“Zentropa had a very strict and amazing list of dogmas that the filmmakers had to follow,” Eriksson says. “Our dogma is that everything is okay and that we would not strive to make any money. It’s our own anti-capitalistic pop culture hub.”

Breakin’ Point is PB&J’s first record on the INGRID imprint, and while they didn’t drop an instrument or create a makeshift forest, the trio certainly had their work cut out for them.

“We wanted every damn bar of every damn song to be the greatest in the history of pop music,” Eriksson explains. “We wanted to challenge ourselves to raise the bar so high that we almost couldn’t reach it. Our goal was to make an album filled with songs that could be played side by side to classics like ‘Billy Jean,’ ‘Moonlight Shadow’ and ‘True Colors.’ That is maybe why it took five years.”

Over the past five years, when not working as PB&J, they’ve each stayed busy with outside collaborations. Eriksson recorded with Wild Nothing and Ane Brun, Yttling went into the studio with Li and Franz Ferdinand, and Morén worked with Cass McCombs. As a group, they contributed to Yoko Ono’s album, Yes, I’m a Witch Too.

“In our side projects and collaborations we can use other personas,” Eriksson says. “We can be your own horrible bosses or our biggest fans. We can play everything ourselves or bring in other musicians. And that gives us new energy, new ideas and new confidence. Then we meet up in the band and smash everything to pieces.”

Turns out, it takes some time to break through the ceiling.

“During the first two years of the process we sort of went into a pop laboratory and tried every combination of song structures, arrangements and sounds,” Eriksson says. “When our research was completed, we had the foundation of the album, but we still needed to develop what we had.”

Catapulting their sound into orbit, PB&J enlisted a slew of first-string producers including Patrik Berger (Robyn, Icona Pop), Paul Epworth (U2, Paul McCartney), Greg Kurstin (Adele) and Emile Haynie (Eminem).

“To make our extreme pop dream come true, we needed to bring in some folks that are used to dealing with top-notch songs,” Eriksson says. “We had built the cars but we hired people to do the paint jobs.”

Because PB&J raised the stakes with Breakin’ Point, it’s natural to question whether the title is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But, as it turns out, the indie darlings are here for the long haul.

“Once you start writing songs, it will very soon turn into an addiction,” Eriksson says. “It takes over your whole being, Once you’ve started, you can’t stop.”

Contact Desiré Moses at arts@c-ville.com.

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Diet Cig’s Alex Luciano dances to a DIY beat

Diet Cig’s Alex Luciano and Noah Bowman, who are performing at the Southern on August 16, met at a house party and formed a fast friendship, which led to a five-song EP, a 7-inch follow-up and an upcoming full-length. Photo: Publicity photo

Don’t hang out with Diet Cig if you’re not willing to risk arrest or have your exploits immortalized in song. That’s not to say that every night the self-proclaimed “slop-pop” duo spent on the road over the past two years ended in flashing lights. It simply means that as in life, anything can—and will—happen.

“I just wanna get cool, let’s go swimming in a swimming pool / Show you how to hop the fence and meet you there in a few minutes,” Alex Luciano sings on “Pool Boyz,” from the band’s 2015 debut EP, Over Easy. “Had no idea the cops would cancel your tour / Pay your bill in merchandise sales / Let’s have a slumber party tonight in jail.”

“That was a really big bummer that we turned into a silly song,” Luciano recalls.

With a playful modus operandi, these moments of unpredictability are where Diet Cig shines, thriving amid life’s dichotomies. Sure, your 20s are messy and full of roadblocks, but they’re also exciting and ripe for adventure. Where there’s overwhelming uncertainty, Diet Cig finds freedom. “I don’t have any kitchenware / but I can walk ’round in my underwear,” Luciano sings on “Breathless.”

With Luciano on guitar/vocals and Noah Bowman on drums, the band is a byproduct of the same burgeoning DIY scene in New Paltz, New York, that spawned indie breakouts like Porches and Quarterbacks. The two met at a house show where Bowman’s band, Earl Boykins, was playing. Between songs, Luciano asked Bowman for a lighter and he handed her a bottle of wine instead.

“Now that I am a performer, I feel like I’d be so irritated with anyone who, like, asked me for anything as stupid as a lighter during my set,” Luciano muses. “So he was really gracious and kind about that.”

They formed a fast friendship and began noodling around on instruments together. Released on Father/Daughter Records, the resulting five-song EP took off, leading to a steady stream of touring gigs and a 7-inch follow-up, Sleep Talk/Dinner Date.

“I started playing guitar in high school. I learned three chords and learned some Bright Eyes covers and didn’t do anything with that,” Luciano says. “But then when I went to college, I had seen my first couple DIY shows and I was really impressed by people who were just like me, young kids in college just playing simple songs that were still poignant and, you know, meant something.”

Although Diet Cig songs clock in at a brisk two and a half minutes or less, they pack a punch. Tight, straightforward compositions highlight Luciano’s funny, incisive commentary. “I’m going through these phases of people and places / And the turkey is tasty, just like the shit that you’re talking,” she declares on “Dinner Date.”

While Luciano writes all of the lyrics, she credits Bowman with arrangements. Having played in bands since he was a teenager, he expands on the technical side of things.

“I actually don’t think Noah knows any of the lyrics to any of the songs but he knows the melodies,” she says. “Noah’s super helpful when we’re writing with finding good hooks and just integrating the lyrics rhythmically into the song.”

Bowman also comes up with all of the song names.

“[He’s] so much better at naming the songs than I am,” Luciano says. “I just think about it too much. His brain puts together phrases nicely.”

And when they needed a band name for a show flier, he came up with Diet Cig.

“It was really just a spontaneous jumble of words,” she muses. “But we like to say that we are addictive but not bad for you.”

It’s true: One taste of their live show and you’ll be coming back for more. As a performer, Luciano is spunky and buoyant, spending as much time in the air as she does with her feet planted on the stage. Reminiscent of a sprite, she kicks and twirls and jumps off amps. Her excitement and energy is infectious, propelling the crowd to dance right along with her. But, as she explains, her magnetic stage presence is something she had to work on.

“It really took me a long time,” say Luciano. “I was so nervous. I had performed before but I had never performed my own content to other people on stage.”

With Bowman providing encouragement from the drum kit, Luciano got through a four-song set. She then developed a strategy to help her deal with her nerves.

“I started really moving around a lot on stage and dancing around almost as a way to deal with the anxiety of being on stage,” she says. “Because one of my biggest anxieties stems from not being the best musician technically, and I would mess up a lot and I was really nervous about that. But I figured if I was dancing around a lot and having a lot of fun then I wouldn’t feel so bad about messing up.”

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Steve Gunn captures the road well-traveled

Steve Gunn brings a full band and his simple-yet-expansive musical landscapes to the Southern on Monday. Publicity photo.

The magnetism of life on the open road has a long-standing mythos in American popular culture. Wide-eyed travelers were encouraged to get their kicks on “Route 66” in the blues standard first recorded by Nat King Cole in 1946. Sal and Dean’s cross-country pursuits defined a generation in Jack Kerouac’s beat manifesto while the frenetic image of Raoul Duke barreling down the desert highway with drug-induced fervor in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas marked a seminal turning point in literature.

On his new record, Eyes on the Lines, guitar virtuoso Steve Gunn picks up the mantle in a meditation on exploration and adventure. Unlike the paths taken by Kerouac’s or Thompson’s protagonists, his trip evokes a warm sense of aimlessness, one where the car is set to cruise, the windows are down and the sun gives way to a lilting breeze. “Take your time, ease up and waste the day,” Gunn encourages in his rich baritone on the album’s opening track, “Ancient Jules.” Driven by a soaring riff and interlocking melodies, the song crescendos with a masterful solo and fades into reverie. It’s a tune to get lost in, harkening back to the time you “slept in the grass / sky turned gray.” The rest of the album follows suit: carefree, bold sentiments accompanied by layered, controlled guitar work.

“A memory flash up into the hill / We’ll make the drop by night,” Gunn sings on “The Drop”—a nod to trucker culture inspired by his time traveling around England, where he observed truck drivers at British rest stops.

“The drop, basically, was trucker slang for location,” says Gunn. “For their destination, their goal to where they need to get.”

Although Eyes on the Lines is a collection of songs bursting with momentum that propels the listener forward, the drop is unknown. Here, it doesn’t necessarily matter where you’re going; it’s how you get there. This concept is mirrored in Gunn’s approach to writing music, which he says is heavily influenced by the philosophies of minimalist artists.

“People like Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt, where they kind of simplify what they’re doing and really focus on this gesture and, you know, that kind of process is almost as important as the result,” says Gunn. “I think about music in that way and I like to get kind of deep into it and, you know, really work a lot with repetition and cyclical elements of music.”

His lyrical work is no exception. The characters in his songs change direction, retrace their steps and seek different paths. Meanwhile, the album title is a double entendre, drawing on its minimalist inspiration while never losing sight of the road.

“It has a multiple meaning,” Gunn says. “There’s that idea of like white line fever, where you’re staring at the road for too long and you kind of become sort of hypnotized by it.”

Gunn grew up in Philadelphia, where he became immersed in the rich music scene and got his start in a punk band.

“I was lucky enough to be in a town where there was a great guitar store, where I took lessons and I also had pretty close access to the city,” he says. “My whole kind of musical world really opened up when I was old enough to kind of go around by myself and check stuff out. And then there’s also a lot of great bands in Philadelphia so I got to meet a lot of musicians and play a lot of shows and kind of figure out how to play live and all that stuff.”

In his own work, Gunn draws on folk, jazz, blues and more. He credits his parents for his expansive musical palette.

“My parents were around in the ’60s and they were really into soul music and there were a lot of DJs and bands that came through,” he says. “We always had music on in the house.”

Eyes on the Lines is Gunn’s eighth solo effort, but it’s his debut on indie stalwart Matador Records. With a career that spans more than a decade, his musical output is as diverse as his influences. He’s been a solo instrumentalist, one-half of the Gunn-Truscinski Duo, a guitarist in Kurt Vile’s The Violators and a collaborator with Mike Cooper as well as old-time band the Black Twig Pickers. It wasn’t until 2013’s Time Off that he began singing. The follow-up, Way Out Weather (2014), received critical acclaim and was his first album to feature a full band—a sound that he returns to on Eyes. Since finding his voice, Gunn has opted to write lyrics from the viewpoint of a narrator.

“It’s something that as a songwriter I feel is important,” he says. “[To] look at other people and sing about…what they’re thinking about. And maybe certain people who don’t necessarily wanna tell their own story—that have probably a more interesting story than most people—kind of the hidden treasures of the peripheral world. For me, it’s all about working and playing…absorbing my surroundings and reflecting it back out.”