February 2012
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Music Controller: Yasutaka Nakata Enters The...
Yasutaka Nakata started his personal music project Capsule in 1997, around the same time a Japanese musical movement called Shibuya-kei reached its crest. It’s easy to imagine a 17-year-old Nakata, joined by Capsule vocalist Toshiko Koshijima, hanging around Shibuya soaking in what had, since the early 90’s, become the cool alternative to J-Pop. Spearheaded by bands like Pizzicato Five and...
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Introduction: Perfume, J-Pop And Me
“I don’t think J-Pop should be made into a particular genre with its own rules.”
Perfume producer Yasutaka Nakata to The Japan Times.
A friend of mine gave me a hard drive loaded with Japanese pop music sometime in 2006. At that point, my perception of J-Pop…and, to a degree, all of Japanese culture…was shaped mainly by Western media. I pictured life in Tokyo just as the...
Coming up: Perfume
Thank you, Jonathan!
I’m incredibly excited about next week’s feature: We’ll finally dive into the wonderful & wondrous world of Japanese pop and have Patrick St. Michel dissect the electro-pop of influential J-Pop girl trio Perfume.
Patrick is a music writer living in Japan and runs an excellent blog on Japanese music called Make Believe Melodies (also in Tumblr form).
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The Living Hood
“You think I make this up? I could never make this up.”
I had another realization recently: so many Drive By Trucker songs are based on a true story. For a band so revered for its literary storytelling, the band’s music, if it were a book, would be more historical fiction, or maybe just creative non-fiction, than anything else. Patterson Hood is an absolute master at this, writing songs we...
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Southern (Studies) Rock
It’s a bummer that I feel the need to talk about the phrase “Southern Rock” during this precious week. But I really do, it really does feel sort of compulsory, as if any meaningful discussion I might want to be having with a DBT non-believer requires addressing those awfully maligned “S.R.” words.
I understand it. For a band with album titles like Southern Rock Opera and The...
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Everybody Needs Love
Why, it would be completely appropriate to ask, am I wasting special One Week One Band real estate on a 45 second clip of a pretty drunk (judging by how empty that bottle of Maker’s Mark looks) Mikey Cooley tossing off a backwoods country Adele tease?
After yesterday, I had a bad feeling I was giving the wrong impression: “Hey! Check out these postmodern Southern Rockers commenting...
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College (Term Paper) Rock
I had a realization recently, while I was listening to Jason Isbell’s song “TVA” and thinking how great and sort of unbelievable it was that I was listening to a commercially available rock band singing about the Tennessee Valley Authority in 2011: there’s something profoundly nerdy about the Drive By Truckers. It’s another of the band’s great tensions: that they can go up on stage and stomach...
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Rock and Roll Never Forgets
“Come back baby, Rock and Roll never forgets” isn’t just the Bob Seger line that Mike Cooley uses, word for word, to end his song “Three Dimes Down.” It’s also one of the Drive By Truckers central mantras, one of their most identifiable obsessions: preserving and not-forgetting Rock and Roll’s past.
The Drive By Truckers can be a wonderfully contradictory band. For all their...
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Let There Be Rock
Greetings everyone, I hope you’re 10% as excited to spend the week with the Drive By Truckers as I am. The band has a long, fascinating history, and I should say that I’m not even going to attempt to do it justice here. I do highly recommend seeking out The Secret To A Happy Ending, Barr Weissman’s fantastic documentary about the band, or at least skimming their Wikipedia Page. Really briefly,...
Coming up: Drive-By Truckers
Thank you, Dave!
Next week, we’ll take a look at the long-standing career of Southern rockers/alt-country act Drive-By Truckers, and to do so we’ve recruited Jonathan Bernstein.
Jonathan is a music writer whose work has been published in Rolling Stone, American Songwriter and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. He’s also writing on his personal tumblr.
Till tomorrow!
—...
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The Softies & Beyond Spotify Playlist →
Enjoy. Much of Melberg and Sbragia’s material is available on the streaming service, though Holiday in Rhode Island, Go Sailor and Melberg’s Cast Away the Clouds are not — consider this a starter kit.
You can, and should, buy most of the duo’s catalog from the K Records web store for $6.99 each. Best part: the PayPal receipt from Calvin Johnson.
While you’re...
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Any questions? →
What do you think of the Softies? Were you a fan? Are you now? Let’s chat.
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Post-Softies, 2000-2012 (And Reunion!)
The Softies’ catalog is a world unto itself, but Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia didn’t stop making music after the band’s informal disbanding. Melberg, who became pregnant after the final tour, would spend the next five years raising a child; she returned in 2006 with Cast Away the Clouds, a release for Double Agent Records very much in the vein of the Softies’ last material....
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One Week // One Band: One Year
Apologies for briefly interrupting Dave, but it was a year ago to the day we kicked off this blog series on showcasing our musical passions with a post on The Replacements’ Bastards of Young — and now we’re here, fifty-two weeks & bands later!
It’s only a year of hopefully many more to come, so we’ll keep the festivities down for the moment, but I just wanted so say...
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You and Only You
We’re about to get into Favorite Albums of All Time territory for me here, so an overview of my Softies fandom may help contextualize the inevitable gushing. Recently, I told the story of the first time I heard the band to the Vancouver Observer for the paper’s Rose Melberg appreciation:
I first heard Rose Melberg totally by chance. iTunes had just been released for PCs, a big deal in...
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Hello Rain
The Pacific Northwest indie-pop scene that birthed the Softies was and is nothing if not close-knit, but even by K Records standards, Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia’s resumes run long. Before we examine the duo’s considerable catalog this week, let’s get some context. Both women have made vital, enthusiastic D.I.Y. music with some half-dozen other bands over the last two decades,...
Coming up: The Softies
Thanks, Courtney!
Next week, we’ll take a look at seminal indie pop duo The Softies, who’ve recently announced their first show in over a decade for Chickfactor’s 20th anniversary party.
I’m very excited to welcome my good pal David Greenwald to the blog and have him dive into the sweetly melancholic world of Rose Melberg & Jen Sbragia for us over the coming days.
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This Fire Grows Higher.
We can’t have a conversation about Codes & Keys without first addressing the elephant in the room: at some point, Death Cab for Cutie grew up. Ben & Nick got married. Jason had a kid. Chris started producing albums for lots of artists. And he released a solo album. The business of being in a band evolved for them, from sharing space in a passenger van across the country with only what...
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Speaking of Narrow Stairs →
If you haven’t read the piece that Gibbard wrote about writing the album for Paste, then you should. It is insightful and almost shockingly honest. But let’s all keep this quote in mind as we move forward today:
“At some point I thought that, as I got older, I’d come to terms with a lot of things. I’d solve some big problems, and eventually I’d become content. It’s almost more...