Author: Shea Gibbs

Brett Dennen has a knack for writing upbeat hits. At least once on each album, he lays down a jaunty single that toe-taps its way up the charts.

It turns out, that’s exactly in line with Dennen’s personality. Preparing to get on a jam cruise out of Miami on Valentine’s Day, Dennen was giddy—and possibly a little drunk—when he talked to C-VILLE Weekly to preview his February 25 show at The Jefferson Theater.

C-VILLE Weekly: So you’re about to get on a boat with fans for four days.

Brett Dennen: Oh God. Yes. It’s a big mixer. There’s no place to hide. I suppose you could hide in your room, but then you’re stuck in your room on a boat.

Could you find a place to hide in the bowels of the ship?

I’ve been on five of these now, and I’ve tried to get down there. It’s impossible. They design the boat so there is no way anyone could stumble on it. You would have to open a door with no handle and go behind a staircase. I imagine seeing this big steam engine room with these sweaty guys with their shirts off and women doing laundry down there. The cabaret dancers are down there having a smoke break. They’re all eating and mingling and working in the same room. There are comedians down there in tuxedos with long thin cigarettes looking like Frank Sinatra circa 1952.

To me, your music has a youthful quality. Who’s your target audience?

My core audience is probably women from the age of 25 to 45. Single women. Single mothers. You are the first person that’s ever thought I had a younger audience. My whole career I’ve been told, ‘Your music is lyrical. Young people aren’t going to understand it.” No one has ever said to me, “Ah man the kids are going to love this.”

Do you find it easier to write happy songs or sad songs?

It’s hard to be depressed. People think it’s easy, but it’s hard. It’s hard to write a happy song and make it interesting though. The trick is to inject a little sadness in every happy moment, like “Oh man, this cruise is great. Well, it’s going to be over soon.” It might be the opposite too. It’s the sweet and sour combination. I think that is a great place to live, and people can really relate to it. The trick is not to go too far with it, knowing when enough is enough. It’s like saying, “Hey it’s a beautiful day outside. We sure are lucky. Not everybody is this lucky.”

Do you start with music or lyrics when you write songs?

I write differently on every album, and I’m always left with the fear of not knowing how I will write the next album. I just have to wait for inspiration to strike, and I start working on songs and I start finishing songs, and I get inspired and get in the habit of writing every day. But I will go through long periods of not writing anything and wondering how the hell I am going to write another album. I need to go to songwriter’s therapy or something.

How have you developed as a songwriter over the years?

I’ve gotten better at saying more with less, and I think I’ve gotten better at just being happy and confident and letting the marriage of melody and lyrics do most of the work. Before, I think I was hung up more on being lyrical and not paying too much attention to melody. I used to just write a lot more. I don’t really do that as much. I’m at a point in my life where I don’t write unless I feel inspired to write.

What is it about Brett Dennen that resonates with people?

I wish I knew. I would do more of it. It probably has something to do with my voice. Most of the people I am in a category with all start to sound the same, like they live in the world somewhere between Ryan Adams and Ray LaMontagne. Those two guys separately are amazing, but then there are a lot of people that imitate them. I honestly don’t know what it is, but I know I sound different than most singer-songwriters.

I hear some reggae influence in some of your songs. Is that intentional?

I think reggae is some of the best music you can listen to. I used to be big into reggae. I want to write a song and for people to be like, “How do you write a song like that?” And I would say, “I was really into this at the time,” and they would be like, “Whoa, I totally can see that now.”

Have you ever been mistaken for Shaun White?

No. I have been told I look like Shaun White, but he’s a lot shorter than me. One time I went to a Ben Kweller show, and Ben Kweller at the time had really long red hair, and at the time I had really long red hair. I went back to say hi to Ben, and apparently Shaun White is a big Ben Kweller fan, and all three of us were backstage with really long red hair.

Good luck on the boat. You have Charlottesville to look forward to when it’s over.

I haven’t played in Charlottesville for a long time. Virginia is for lovers. The last time I played there, someone gave me a pair of flip flops, so maybe this time I will get some Birkenstocks or something.

 

California folksinger Brett Dennen brings his unmistakable voice and shock of red hair to the Jefferson on Tuesday.

Pop-soul throwback Lake Street Dive’s music is kind of like all these Spiderman movies, to loosely paraphrase drummer Michael Calabrese.

“There is this whole thing right now in our culture of reaching back and trying to do something new with old ideas and make sense of them in our modern time,” he told C-VILLE Weekly in a recent phone interview. “I just hope all this is leading toward something else.”

Whatever it’s leading to for the music industry, it seems to be a good ways down the road. Lake Street Dive, on the other hand, might be on the verge of something big in the near future.

Largely due to the strength of its recent tour of the late night TV scene—and particularly the “Colbert bump,” according to Calabrese—the up-and-coming band has had a slew of tour dates sell out in the past several weeks. When Calabrese, lead singer Rachel Price, trumpet/guitar player Mike Olson, and upright bassist Bridget Kearney hit The Jefferson Theater on February 23, they will play to another full house.

Popularity has come quickly for the band since two years ago, when a sparse video of a Jackson 5 cover went viral and people started talking about the four classically trained musicians.

“‘I Want You Back’ was our calling card for a while,” Calabrese said. “Because of that, we were able to get out and grow. We have been a band for 10 years, so when the universe handed us some luck, we were able to take advantage of that.”

Lake Street Dive’s recent surge in popularity seems to be part of a wider trend of independent musicians rediscovering and repurposing retro sounds—think Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings faithfully reproducing vintage funk/soul or The Black Keys co-opting the blues. For its part, Lake Street Dive fuses pop from the late ’60s and early ’70s with soul and R&B, laying backbeat grooves under Price’s throaty caterwaul.

The goal, Calabrese says, is to take the sounds that had people sock-hopping back in the day and make them move some butts in modern concert venues. The result is not unlike the music—at least in spirit—of recent chartbusters Alabama Shakes, who Calabrese said Lake Street Dive looked to for production insights prior to going into the studio for the band’s latest album, Bad Self Portraits.

“We listened to some of their tracks with our producer because there are some awesome production choices” on the Shakes debut album Boys & Girls, he said. “They are into the same bands as we are, I think.”

Unlike the instant success of Shakes, Lake Street Dive has been refining its sound and fighting for a popular foothold since Olson brought the foursome together in 2005 at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, the institution that nurtured the talents of Medeski, Martin and Wood and, more recently, songwriter Aoife O’Donovan.

Calabrese said Olson, a composition major, had formed several bands at the conservatory before finding the combination of Price, Kearney, and himself. The drummer said the band has over the years tightened its sphere of influences to the pop-soul combination we hear today, although folk and ’90s music is thrown into the mix at times.

Calabrese said Olson handpicked Lake Street Dive in much the same way Miles Davis formed his jazz bands, before realizing his mistake. “And yes, I just compared Mike to Miles Davis,” he said.

If there is a member of Lake Street Dive capable of attaining such rarified status, it’s undoubtedly Price. With the vocal power and soul of an Amy Winehouse but presumably without the demons, the jazz vocalist sets the tone for everything the band does. And while Calabrese suggests vocals are “the most immediate way to react to a band’s sound” as if to imply Lake Street Dive is more than just a sexy lead singer, Price’s pipes wouldn’t be a bad thing to ride to the top.

According to Price, all four members of Lake Street Dive are songwriters, with everyone breaking off to craft their own tracks before bringing them back to the studio to flesh them out. The most difficult hurdle for the talented group will most likely prove to be that whole “something else” Calabrese hopes all this is leading to.

Even the band’s breakout Michael Jackson cover has pigeonholed the quartet at times —Calabrese said some fans thought they were a “cover band”—and with no experience with being big stars, the future is anything but set.

“As all this is happening, we are still just green in the music industry,” he said. “We’ve never paid close enough attention to the music business to see what happens, so we’re just along for the ride. But we’re prepared, and hopefully we have enough history behind us to ride it out.”

Lou Barlow has been involved in some of the quaintest rock ’n’ roll feuds of all time. In an industry where grudges are common and time seems only to deepen rifts between once-close bandmates, the Dinosaur Jr. bassist and Sebadoh frontman has pretty much made up with everyone he’s ever crossed.

The lo-fi legend was reportedly kicked out of Dinosaur Jr. by lead singer J. Mascis in 1989, just as the band was reaching wide audiences and right before it signed to a major record label. He and Mascis buried the hatchet and got back together in 2005. Ho hum.

Sebadoh, the band Barlow started toward the end of his Dinosaur Jr. tenure, began to fray about six years after the band formed and went on official hiatus in 1999. In 2007, the boys got back together and started touring with little fanfare before releasing their first reunion record in 2012—all in a day’s work for Barlow.

Ahead of Sebadoh’s February 22 show at The Southern Café and Music Hall, Barlow took a moment to share the personality that has such a propensity for breakups and make-ups. He’s prickly, but he’s also quick to laugh off any awkwardness. And, yeah, there’s plenty of awkwardness.

C-VILLE Weekly: So everything seems to work out for you in the end, eh?

Lou Barlow: Everything seems to work out in the end for me? I don’t personally feel that way, but I can see how it would seem like that. To me, the future is never solid.

How did you and Mascis make up so easily?

The music is just really good. That has always been the most important thing for me through all of it. Dinosaur Jr. was a pretty good band, and that’s more important than personal issues and everything else.

How would you describe your relationship with Mascis before the breakup and after the reunion?

I don’t know if there was ever any tension between us musically. We’ve always kind of shared tastes and musical ambitions. It is kind of the same for me personally since we got back together. But like I said, the music is the most important thing. That goes for Sebadoh too. For me, it is always about helping other people realize their musical ambitions.

How have you changed as a musician in the past 20 years? I feel like the new Sebadoh record has less angst.

I don’t really hear that. I think it is still pretty angsty, almost surprisingly so. You’d think it would be a little less. I still hear a lot of tension in what we do. I like to call it emotionally claustrophobic.

How do you keep up that level of angst?

You would maybe see me, a successful musician, and imagine I had mellowed a lot. But man, there are always things to worry about. Addressing anxiety is something I’ve always done with my music. It’s a way of working through it.

Your music has always featured unique, even challenging sounds. What do you think about the way bands use effects these days?

I’ve always loved shoegazing music. But for me, when it comes down to making the music, I try to keep it really basic. I don’t know why. I love extremely atmospheric music, but when I start to add that kind of thing it always feels strangely disingenuous. Texture is extremely important, but for my own music I always find myself stripping things away.

How do you keep moving forward if you’re always stripping away?

It’s not hard for me because I’m just really interested in music and singing. I love making records. There are few exceptions when I‘ve gone into a studio to make a record and didn’t have a great time. I really like playing live, too. Maybe that’s why I don’t rely too much on textural issues. The more simple it is, the more real it is. My idea of whether something I’ve done is great is always changing, and I always feel like my best work is ahead of me.

What is it you like about making records?

With Dinosaur Jr., the amazing thing was how unlikely it seemed. J just works in such an incredibly detached way, and he doesn’t really break from that persona the entire time. When we were making our first reunion record, he seemed to not enjoy any aspect of it, but then we ended up making a record and it was good. Every time I finish a record, it always seems kind of miraculous.

How does Sebadoh sound on the current tour?

This is the fourth tour we’ve done for the record, and we’re almost too tight now. When we ended our last tour, some people were coming up to me after the shows like, “What the hell?”

Can Sebadoh and Dinosaur Jr. continue to coexist indefinitely?

We’ve been touring for almost the entire duration of Dinosaur Jr. being back together, so it’s been coexisting this long. I like going back and forth between the two, and I hope to continue that.

Can Lou Barlow continue to play indefinitely?

If you’re a career musician and that’s what you do and you don’t have any fallback, you play music until you die. There’s a long tradition of people who have done that, and that is probably what I will do.

What do you want mentioned on your headstone first, Sebadoh or Dinosaur Jr.?

I hope I write a song before that happens that will actually define me more than both those. I hope I’m remembered for songs I wrote rather than bands I was in.

Sometime in late elementary school, you learn about the didgeridoo (occasionally spelled didjeridu). It’s a funky instrument played by half naked Aboriginal people in the Australian bush. It’s more than a thousand years old. It doesn’t actually sound all that great.

Then, while attending a Phish show, you come across another didge. It’s pressed to the lips of a spacy hippie sitting at the edge of a drum circle. It somehow makes sense in context. But it still doesn’t actually sound all that great.

Now, you’re standing in the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art museum in Charlottesville. A hulking 32-year-old man in a frumpy collared shirt, khakis, and work boots is balancing a didgeridoo on a museum table. He starts in on the droning, the instrument’s signature sound. But there’s something different about the way he plays the didge. It’s tonal— this one is naturally tuned to C, to be exact—but it comes across as more of a rhythm instrument than a horn.

The musician, William Barton, is widely regarded as one of the best didgeridoo players in the world and, as an Aboriginal Australian, is the face of the modern didgeridoo (oxymoron be damned). Barton tours the world on the strength of his ability to play a piece of wood hollowed out by termites and white ants, and this week he’s in Charlottesville for two public shows, one on February 19 with the Charlottesville High School Orchestra String Ensemble and a second on February 22 with the UVA McIntire String Quartet as part of TEDxUVA.

Back in the museum, one of only two in the world devoted entirely to Aboriginal art, Barton taps away at the side of his instrument while huffing and puffing across its mouthpiece in rapidly shifting cadences. Then he really goes for it, breaking into a didgeridoo-amplified beat box punctuated with deejay hand motions and dropping a “check this out” through the horn that sounds like it could well have been auto-tuned. It’s like Doug E. Fresh just stepped out of an Aussie time machine.

This is “didge fusion.”

“I try to connect one of the oldest Aboriginal instruments to Western music,” Barton said. “But it’s still important for me to respect the traditions of the instrument.”

The phrase didge fusion is subject to interpretation, according to Barton. In his own music, it typically refers to the use of the wooden horn alongside classical symphonic Western arrangements, such as full orchestras or string ensembles. Barton’s played with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, among others, over the years. His solo work typically features him finger-picking a classical guitar while playing a didgeridoo affixed to a stand, not unlike Bob Dylan strumming away at his Gibson with a harmonica mounted on his neck.

The idea, Barton says, is to take the Aboriginal tradition and put it in a slightly more modern context. Hopefully, the effort will introduce the music of his ancestors to wider audiences.

“I’ve played the didgeridoo all over the world,” Barton said. “I was recently in Paris to play. I came in one night and left the next day.”

That’s not to say Barton has made himself rich through his craft, although he said he makes a “pretty good way of it.” It’s more about doing what he loves and playing music with some of the world’s best musicians. Along the way, he’s managed to rack up a number of awards, including the Australian version of the Grammy.

According to Barton’s mom, who’s traveling the States with him on his current tour, didgeridoo excellence is something he’s been on track for since his youth. Barton was taught the didge by his uncle before he’d turned 10, and he soon found he was naturally gifted enough to translate that ability into playing other instruments.

“He heard the rhythms of the Earth and the sounds around him,” Delmae Barton said.

When Barton steps onto the stage this week, he’s likely to take a few people by surprise. The first striking thing about him is his speaking voice. Small minded as it may seem, when a native Australian playing an instrument five times older than the United States of America drawls away in perfect Aussie-accented English, it’s somehow disarming. Having grown up in the city of Mount Isa in Queensland, Barton carries himself more like a shy American than an heir to a 40,000-year-old heritage.

Then there’s the music. Whether you like the didgeridoo or not, it’s Barton’s virtuosity on the strings that steals the show. According to the didge master, though, the last thing he would want to do is steal any show. He said even when he’s playing one of his own compositions, as a musician he’s only trying to help the others around him sound their best. It’s a communal approach to making music that would surely make didge traditionalists proud.

“William’s presence is the most effective way to teach students about indigenous Australians and their unique cultural heritage,” said Margo Smith, director of the Kluge-Ruhe Museum. “By collaborating with William, our student musicians are creating something that crosses cultures and reaches deep into our shared humanity.”

Barton performs at UVA’s Culbreth Theater Wednesday night and Nau Hall on Saturday.

The cover art on singer-songwriter Joe Pug’s latest album, The Great Despiser, shows a nearly naked man barely hanging on to the end of a rising balloon.

Who knows what it means? Pug says his lyrics are somewhat autobiographical, but they have enough metaphor and allegory thrown in to create some space between the man and his art.

Still, one way to read the cover is to imagine the balloon as Pug’s career, forced upward by the success of his heartfelt early work and a clever personal marketing campaign. The man, clad only in underwear, is Pug himself.

“I really don’t think you do necessarily get better as a songwriter,” Pug said in a recent telephone interview with C-VILLE Weekly. “It is a constant struggle to stay in the same place and not get worse.”

The same place wouldn’t be a bad one for Pug, who’ll play The Southern Café and Music Hall with his two bandmates on February 12. Pug’s first EP, Nation of Heat, made a huge critical splash in 2008, and his songwriting was repeatedly hailed for its earnestness and easygoing honesty. In a sea of singer-songwriters, he was compared to the greatest folk artists of all time and had somehow managed to wow people with simple three-chord tunes made with spare instrumentation.

Then there was the marketing genius. These days, artists like Pug know they have to give away their music to be heard. There is simply no other way to gain a following. But in 2008, free music was less common.

“It was still a relatively novel thing at the time, so we were able to bring a lot of listeners under our tent because of that,” Pug said. “I was lucky that I picked that moment in time.”

Pug readily recognizes the role luck has played in his career. He says he was lucky to have a manager that was onboard with giving away product, for example. But once fate opens the door to success, Pug believes luck goes by the wayside, and it’s hard work that takes you through.

Pug and his team have tried to focus everything they do on the fan’s experience. Not only have they given away CDs through the mail so people could share them with their friends, they’ve experimented with selling concert tickets direct to consumers. Which is not to say everything has always worked out the way they planned.

“We have put direct-to-fan ticketing on hold for the time being,” Pug said. “It’s labor intensive, and we don’t quite have the capital to continue doing it.”

The focus for now is on clinging to the balloon. To that end, Pug added instrumentation (that his previous albums lacked) to The Great Despiser, making the latest effort more textural and colorful, stacking new sonic layers on top of his sparse guitar playing and resonant singing voice.

“The reason my first albums didn’t have any of that was I didn’t know any other musicians, and if I did, I couldn’t afford to pay them,” Pug said.

The richer context only serves to highlight Pug’s singable hooks and heartbreaking, esoteric lyrics. Put on “Silver Harps and Violins,” and see if you don’t come away with the chorus—“There’s a world out there, I know there is/Where they’ll play my songs on their silver harps and their violins”—stuck in your head for hours. Queue up “Hymn #76” and roll this nugget around in your noggin: “To trust me is to travel past the towers/Those that make it back from here are few.”

Pug along with his standby bass player, Matt Schuessler, and electric guitarist, Greg Tuohey, are headed back to the studio in March with the hopes of building another critical darling. They had expected to get started last month to get a jump on the record before the current tour, but Pug said the songs weren’t ready.

The band, according to Pug, is another story. “They’re both musicians that have the ability to play like virtuosos on their instruments, but don’t feel the need to prove it on every song,” he said. “The songs I write are simple, and the band is overqualified.”

Pug said he himself is best suited to looking forward, staring up at the balloon. A man who’s made some difficult choices over the years, including dropping out of college the day before the start of his senior year, he has a hard time looking back. He admitted he thinks about the leaner times but tries to remember that “the moment you become sour, your creativity suffers.” He said he struggles to listen to his past work without thinking about what he “would have done differently.”

“As you move on, I think to create new material, you have to kill the old material,” Pug said. “That is the creative process.”

He’ll give the old material one more go for this tour. Then it’ll be time to “use that to our advantage,” he said, trying to capture in the studio the appeal of live music, all the while riding the balloon up and up.