The Athens Blur Magazine Issue 13 by Stephen Simmons

BAND of BROTHERS For the members of newgrass quintet Packway Handle Band, the business of being a band has been a true labor of brotherly love

WATSON TWINS

Ten questions with L.A.’s favorite sister act on the verge of their new record

YEASAYER

Brooklyn’s top of the pops preps a breakout year

SHOW, AND TELL

Recording ability has made concerts multimedia events — does it hurt, or help?

IMITATION OF LIFE

Kenan Thompson’s done well for himself by mimicking others

52nd GRAMMY AWARDS GUIDE >>

in memory

downbeats

vic chesnutt 1964-2009

(photo: Daniel Peiken)

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editor’s photo pick

downbeats

timi conley

“

Do it loud. Do it big. Make it fun.” full spotlight on p.18

(photo: Jason Thrasher)

ATHENS BLUR MAGAZINE

features

BAND of BROTHERS 28

For the members of newgrass quintet Packway Handle Band, the business of being a band has been a true labor of brotherly love. story by Allie Goolrick photos by Justin Evans

The Watson twins Ten Questions with L.A.’s favorite sister act

by Alec Wooden

SHOW, AND TELL

Recording ability has made concerts multimedia events. Does it hurt, or help? by Ed Morales

Grammy Guide

A host of high honors is up for grabs — but are the Grammys still a relevant industry measurement?

Imitation of LIFE

Kenan Thompson’s done well for himself by mimicking others

by DeMarco Williams

ATHENS BLUR MAGAZINE

departments

24 music c OLUMNS

38 48

26 50

9 11

S p otlights: OK Go Galactic Editors Beach House Aloha Timi Conley Daphne Willis Yeasayer The Watson Twins

FROM THE EDITOR Making the Grammys worth it THE FIRST WORD: Jefferson’s four rules WORTH A THOUSAND: Who says you need words?

12 13 14 16 17 18 19 24 26

a LSO:

EAR CANDY: 20 Album Reviews: Nakia, Stella StageCoach, Morningbell, Nick Cave & Warren Ellis, Swimmers, Lymbyc System, Souls of Mischief, Big Kenny, Bluebrain, Eisley, Ken Will Morton, Bear in Heaven, Nana Grizol

16 20

a RTS & e NTERTAINMENT upcoming on the screen upcoming at athens’ cine DVD Release Calendar

c oncert shots

The Month in Photos

38 40 45

ATHENS BLUR MAGAZINE

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There’s no way I’m not going to watch the Grammy Awards, though I really don’t want to. My feelings on the awards show –– and most of the artists ‘The Academy’ has come to stand for –– is pretty much on par with flourescent lighting. It’s unavoidable and in your face, but all it really ever does after a while is give you a headache. I don’t care who wins most of these categories because, by and large, I believe that for every person represented inside that gold envelope, there are a dozen artists at home that no one in the Staples Center cares to hear. For an organization charged with representing and protecting music, they sure don’t care much about music. But I’ll watch, no doubt, because I love to bark at the moon and complain to no one in particular (and there’s guaranteed to be a few shots of Taylor Swift, right? She’s not bad to look at.). Instead of calling the whole show a wash, I’ve decided that there really are some worthwhile things to track at the 52nd Grammys. A handful of artists with ties to our area are up for a whole lot of awards. Whether or not you buy into the Grammy philosophy, these are some folks you’ve gotta get behind: Zac Brown Band (nominated in Best Country Performance by a Duo/Group, Best Country Album, Best New Artist) My first memory of this band is working will call at the Georgia Theatre for a ZBB show in roughly 28 degree weather. Outside. But from that, and from interviewing them a couple of times since, there’s no doubt the members of the band do rank pretty high up there on the “helluva buncha good guys” list. They’ve done a lot for Athens, including a mega-benefit at the Fox Theatre for the Georgia Theatre this past fall. Lady Antebellum (nominated in Best Country Performance by a Duo/Group, Best Country Song) While they claim Nashville as their home (and rightfully so), not many people realize that Charles Kelly and Dave Haywood (who, along with Hillary Scott, make up LA’s core), went to the University of Georgia. I root for just about everything else UGA, so why wouldn’t I pull for them? Sugarland (nominated in Best Country Performance by a Duo/Group) Jennifer Nettles is from Atlanta. Well, actually, from Douglas County. But Nettles has lived the songwriter’s lifestyle in Athens and Atlanta since long before Sugarland became huger-then-mega-huge in the country world. She’s still a supporter of the small-time arts (and cut her teeth just 60 miles away at Eddie’s Attic in Decatur). I can cheer for that. Lance Ledbetter (nominated for Best Historical Album) 87% of you are scratching your heads right now and trying to find Lance’s nomination. You probably won’t, and you certainly won’t see it on TV. Lance, owner of Atlanta vinyl restoration company Dust-to-Digital, is nominated for Best Historical Album with Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950. His Athens connection? He's been nominated twice (and won last year) for collaboration work with Athens legend Art Rosenbaum on collections of folk and field recordings.

Alec Wooden Executive Editor

ON THE COVER: Packway Handle Band. Photo: Justin Evans

The Athens Blur Magazine P.O. Box 7117 Athens, Ga 30604 Main Office (706) 353-7799 Sales (706) 207-9091

BLUR FROM THE EDITOR

DEAR READERS

Executive Editor Alec Wooden alec@athensblur.com Director of Sales Stephen Simmons stephen@athensblur.com Account Executives Cole Taylor cole@athensblur.com Brandi Peiken brandi@athensblur.com Design Lauren Mullins, Nicole Owen, Alec Wooden Editorial Interns Jessica Cole, Zack Kraimer, Maggie Summers Contributing Writers Matt Conner, Amanda Cuda, Natalie David, Matt Fink, Jennifer Gibson, Allie Goolrick, Coy King, Bret Love, Ed Morales, Ned Rauch, Jon Ross, DeMarco Williams Contributing Photographers Alyssa De Hayes, Stefan Eberhard, Wes Elkin, Justin Evans, Alex Gibbs, Chris McKay, Ryan Myers, Daniel Peiken, Jason Thrasher

For general comments and inquiries: editorial@athensblur.com For advertising opportunities: sales@athensblur.com The Athens Blur Magazine issue 13, copyright©2009 By The Athens Blur Magazine, INC. The Athens Blur Magazine is an eight issue/year music and variety publication, proud to be based in the “Classic City” of Athens, Ga. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or part in any way by any means unless written permission is received from the publisher. Published monthly except for each summer issue in the United States of America and distributed free of charge (limit one copy per reader, each subsequent copy is distributed at a charge of $4.95). Postmaster send address changes to The Athens Blur Magazine, P.O. Box 7117 Athens, Ga. 30604

Hey! Done with your Blur? Recycle it!

ATHENS BLUR MAGAZINE

THE (FOUR) GOLDEN RULE(S)

THE SUBTLE WAYS THOMAS JEFFERSON SHAPED MUSIC Six or seven years ago my at-thetime girlfriend and I took ourselves to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home outside Charlottesville, Va. And what a home: the dome, the windows, the books and books and books, the doors strung with weights and pulleys that allowed pairs of them to open simultaneously. The land, the views, the headstone that, per his instruction, makes no mention of the fact that he’d been president— it’s quite a place the man made for himself. I don’t remember a thing about our tourguide, but I remember lots of things she said, including how uncomfortable she was talking about the whole business about our third president and the slave Sally Hemings, how their shagging spawned a parallel line of Jeffersons who history (and their cousins) would spend 200 years trying to ignore. Jefferson was a complicated, multi-faceted, multi-talented guy, our guide said, over and over again. She’d point to a device he invented that made an instant copy of whatever he was writing then wave her hand at the gardens he laid out and then explain that Jefferson died deeply in debt and spent wildly beyond his means. She said he had a list of four goals that he felt everyone should achieve every waking day: 1) Learn something. 2) Exercise. 3) Drink wine. 4) Listen to music. Those four tasks, she explained, made up the core of what Jefferson considered a good, productive day. You figure it wasn’t very hard for Jefferson to make sure he learned something. The guy was an expert on so many topics, it’s hard to imagine he lived a single day without learning more than most college freshmen learn in a semester. Exercise was easy then, given that walking, riding a horse and boating were the only ways to get around then and all three of those activities are now Olympic events. He had a vineyard, so Rule No. 3 was a cinch. Rule No. 4, though, got me thinking. Jefferson died 50 years before Edison came up with the phonograph, so any music he heard had to be performed live. It helped, of course, that he played the violin well. According to the foundation that maintains Monticello, Jefferson practiced for three hours a day when he was growing up. At some point, probably not while sawing away at scales as a kid, he said music “is the favorite passion of my soul, and fortune has cast my lot in a

Ned Rauch

Jefferson had a list of four

goals that he felt everyone should achieve every waking day. 1) Learn something. 2) Exercise. 3) Drink wine. 4) Listen to music.

country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism.” He bought a pianoforte for his wife, a harpsichord for one daughter and a guitar for another, making the Jeffersons, not the Carters, Virginia’s first family of music. But for Jefferson, and everyone else kicking around at the time, listening to music was an active endeavor. There was no button to push that would fill the air for hours on end with music from all over the world; no way to capture it for later use. It must have been like when people first discovered fire, finding a lightning strike and dipping a branch into the blaze, carrying the branch back and feeding it so it wouldn’t go out and return them to the dark. The only music that reached a pair of ears in Jefferson’s time came from a pair of hands (or a mouth) from a few feet away (no amplification, either). That makes most music appreciation a remarkably elitist pastime—

you had to have time and means to dig it— and puts Jefferson, one of the fathers of the world’s first great democracy, Mr. Power to the People himself, somewhat out of touch. I bet most people would have said of his fourth rule, “Buy me an instrument or a ticket to the symphony and I’ll listen any day you like. For now, I’ll concentrate on feeding my kids.” As I type, I’m listening to a Blind Willie McTell album called Atlanta Twelve String. McTell was born in Georgia about 75 years after Jefferson died and 30-some years after the end of the Civil War (I’m being vague here because McTell’s date of birth is disputed). “I’m broke and I ain’t got a dime. Everybody getting hard luck sometime,” McTell sings. Jefferson knew of hard luck — his wife died young. He was also brilliant, driven, creative and imbued with the idea that all men are created equal … except, well, all those men (and women) he owned. These were people who would only start to be treated as human beings decades after Jefferson’s death. McTell was black and just a generation or two removed from them. Like Jefferson, he was brilliant, driven, creative and a musician. He learned Braille as a kid and wrote scores of songs that would help form the basis of the blues. And yet, had they somehow crossed paths, one wonders whether Jefferson, enlightened founding father and all that, would have invited McTell in as he made good on Rule No. 4 for the day, or sent him down to the fields. How many days of obeying Rule No. 1—of learning—would it have taken Jefferson to fully understand the wrongs of slavery (something about which he was admittedly conflicted)? If a person’s looking for four daily rules to shape his or her day, Jefferson’s aren’t bad. Of the four, it’s really just the last that’s changed at all. I wonder if Jefferson would be pleased with how easy it’s become to listen to music on a daily basis. I wonder what he’d think of the role music played in the civil rights movement. Or of the fact that music helped a poor, blind kid from Georgia, a kid whose not-too-distant ancestors someone like Jefferson could have owned, achieve a kind of immortality, audible on a daily basis. Ned P. Rauch lives in New York City and writes for www.tendollarradioshow.com and plays guitar in the band Frankenpine.

ATHENS BLUR MAGAZINE

BLUR THE FIRST WORD

music

MUSIC SPOTLIGHTS

not running in place

OK GO IS ABOUT A LOT MORE THAN TREADMILLS

OK GO PHOTO COURTESY BIG HASSLE

It was a perfect storm. That’s how OK Go bassist Tim Nordwind explains the explosion of the band’s video for “Here it Goes Again.” You know the one — where the band members perform a hilarious, amazingly synchronized dance on treadmills. The video for the song, from the band’s 2005 album Oh No, became an instant hit, scoring more than 2 million views in its first two days on YouTube and turning the band into a cultural phenomenon. Soon, OK Go was invited to perform the treadmill dance live on the MTV Video Music Awards. The video was even parodied on an episode of “The Simpsons” (arguably still one of the most reliable measurements of pop culture relevance). Years later, Nordwind still can’t believe the hoopla over “Here it Goes Again” — particularly since another video the band released previous to that one (for “A Million Ways”) didn’t cause nearly the stir that those treadmills did. “We were shocked,” Nordwind said during a recent phone interview. “It surpassed what we thought it

ATHENS BLUR MAGAZINE

“There’s a lot of extremes in every direction on this album. There’s a lot of extreme highs; a lot of extreme lows. There’s a lot of extreme happiness; a lot of extreme sadness.” — Tim Nordwind, OK Go — would ever do.” The band got its start when Nordwind was just 11 years old, growing up in Kalamazoo, Mich. A theater enthusiast, Nordwind met future OK Go guitarist/ singer Damian Kulash (then 12) at the Michigan-based arts camp Interlochen. Though Kulash was studying visual arts and Nordwind focused on theater, the two boys shared a love of music. “It was always a pipe dream of ours to have a band,” Nordwind said. Years later, they met drummer Dan Konopka in college. In 1999, they formed OK Go, but the last piece of the band — guitarist/ keyboardist Andy Ross — didn’t join until 2005. The rest, as they say, is history. Treadmill-hopping, viral video history. Of course, once you’ve caught lightning in a bottle the way OK Go did with “Here it Goes Again,” there is a pressure to do it again. But, weeks before

the release of Of the Blue Colour of the Sky — the band’s first album since Oh No — Nordwind didn’t sound pressured. The album takes its name from an 1876 book, which promoted the theory (later proven false) that blue light cures all ills. Nordwind said it seemed like a good title for an album about “trying to find hope in situations that seem pretty hopeless.” Colour, he said, “feels very different from the previous album,” but is a powerful piece of work in itself. “There’s a lot of extremes in every direction on this album,” Nordwind said. “There’s a lot of extreme highs; a lot of extreme lows. There’s a lot of extreme happiness; a lot of extreme sadness.” The band enjoys experimenting with its sound and style, Nordwind said, and audiences seem to like that about them. “Everybody expects we’re going to do something different,” he said. “I think we’re going to continue

WHO’S WHO Damian Kulash (vocals, guitar), Tim Nordwind (bass), Dan Konopka (drums), Andy Ross (guitar, keys) FORMED 1999 in Chicago, Ill. LABEL Capitol Records LATEST RELEASE Of the Blue Colour of the Sky (2010) ON THE WEB www.okgo.net to try to do the unexpected.” After all, doing the unexpected is what launched the band in the first place — though Nordwind argues that the success of the “Here it Goes” video was largely a matter of timing. After all, it came out just as YouTube was hitting its stride as a place to watch wacky web videos. Nordwind also admits that the video must have just struck a chord with people. “I’ve gotten so many comments like ‘My brother and I used to make videos like that when we were little,’” he laughed. — Amanda Cuda

Collaborators help galactic write city’s musical history

GALACTIC

MUSIC SPOTLIGHTS

NOLA MUSIC: THEN and Now WHO’S WHO Ben Ellman(sax, harmonica), Robert Mercurio (bass), Jeff Raines (guitar), Rich Vogel (keyboard) FORMED 1994 in New Orleans, La. LABEL AntiLATEST RELEASE Ya-Ka-May (2009) ON THE WEB: www.galacticfunk.com

PHOTO BY RYAN MASTRO

Galactic's latest album is a tribute to home. The group — a band that's moved from funk to R&B to rap and back again — searched for inspiration in the neighborhoods of New Orleans, its adopted home base, tapping into new trends like bounce music, a hybrid of rap spiced with punk sensibilities. By capturing the Crescent City's changing scene in Ya-Ka-May, Galactic has written a history of New Orleans music. The disc features appearances by fabled names etched in the city's musical memory, but also includes lesser-known artists currently helping create alternative cultures in the area. Rappers and hip-hop artists are lined up next to brass band pioneers on the album. Even when faced with so many fresh, intriguing musical ideas coming from the Big Easy, organist Rich Vogel says the group never proposed discarding the city's musical heritage. “Those things will always be here and will always be a part of New Orleans,” he says. “They're part of the fabric of life, when you think about brass band

right now on athensblur.com hear “Dark Water” by Galactic

music and second lines, and we wouldn't want it any other way. But there is other stuff.” This new music may be a little harder to access than the omnipresent brass ensembles. While the scene is not entirely underground, tourists will have trouble finding bounce and rap artists like Sissy Nobby and Big Freedia. In addition to playing a different style of music than the traditional New Orleans tunes, these newer guys can take on personas that are very different from those of brass band musicians. Vogel says many bounce artists are cross dressers. “It's surprising,” he says. “Hiphop culture, in a way, seems like it wouldn't be that friendly to that sort of expression.” Ya-Ka-May isn't solely a Galactic record. Out of 15 tracks, only two lack contributors, making for a song list that reads like a mainstream hiphop disc. The sheer magnitude of different interpretations

means each track is different; everyone's voice is heard, but the guests never stray far from their hosts' swamp funk backbeat. The recording process evolved organically. Ya-KaMay was recorded in the city, and collaborators would swing by the studio and listen to the band lay out the basics for a song. Some artists took these musical ideas home and wrote lyrics or fleshed out the tune, but others simply winged it. “It was fun. It was really one of the most rewarding things about making this record,” Vogel says. “We were working with people that we could actually get together with in a room much more readily and work on something.” Galactic's recorded output is hard to define. Ya-Ka-May differs from the band's previous release, From the Corner to the Block, which is musically light years away from the band's first offering, 1996's Coolin' Off. The group has embraced stylistic changes throughout its career to create a persona that truly embraces the band's varied influences.

“For many years now, we've been messing with that formula,” Vogel says. “We've moved into a more modern production world and started messing around with samplers and effects and programmed drum beats.” These records are separate pieces of Galactic's DNA; the entire double helix can be heard in live performances. Any given show might draw from a variety of albums, but Vogel insists his task in the studio is to search for innovative, fresh sounds on each new record. Internet availability of the band's shows is even more reason to experiment with new sounds in the studio, Vogel says. If fans can download multiple live versions of any given horn tune, what's the point of producing a strictly funk-based instrumental release? “We've been trying now for a while to do something with our records that we think is a little different, something interesting to us, something we feel like we haven't heard before,” he says. “I doubt very much we're going to make another Coolin' Off or Crazyhorse Mongoose.” — Jon Ross

ATHENS BLUR MAGAZINE

MUSIC SPOTLIGHTS

beyond boredom

EDITORS BREAK OUT OF THEIR COMFORT ZONE EDITORS WHO’S WHO Tom Smith (vox, rhythm guitar, piano), Chris Urbanowicz (lead guitar/synth), Russell Leetch (bass, vox), Ed Lay (percussion) FORMED 2002 in Staffordshire, England LABEL Kitchenware Records LATEST RELEASE In This Light and On This Evening (2009) ON THE WEB: www.editorsofficial. com

Chris Urbanowicz is bored with his own music. And when you’re stuck playing the same songs night after night, that becomes a bit of a problem. For the Editors guitarist, that meant something had to change when recording their third fulllength, In This Light and On This Evening. But change can become a bit problematic. After all, Editors were only two albums into a burgeoning, successful career — not exactly prime time to switch things around. But a bored musician is simply not acceptable, so Urbanowicz and the rest of Editors — Tom Smith, Russell Leetch and Ed Lay — went back to the drawing board. “For me, it was a case of it being a bit of a mess,” explains Urbanowicz. “It was just okay. I remember watching Some Kind of Monster, that Metallica movie, and I remember they kept using the word 'stuck' saying things like, 'Well, it's okay, but it's a little bit stuck.' I remember thinking that was true. I felt like we got to the end of the road with what

ATHENS BLUR MAGAZINE

PHOTO COURTESY OF EDITORS

courtesy WARNER BROS.

we could do and needed a bit of a change.” Enter some new instruments. Rather than rely on the rhythmic guitars and familiar dark strums of previous releases like The Back Room (2005) or An End Has A Start (2007), Smith & Co. decided to take a different approach, even if it meant completely abandoning the actual instruments of choice. It was a drastic difference and something that ended up sparking new life for the band. “Once the synthesizers came out, everyone felt excited again,” says Urbanowicz. “It felt like 2004 again. It took us out of our comfort zones, so it felt like when we first got together and we didn't know what we were doing. Something exciting was happening and it was that moment of discovery.” Helping out with that discovery was uber-producer Mark “Flood” Ellis, whose production credits include everyone from U2 and Nine Inch Nails to Depeche Mode and Sigur Rós. As Urbanowicz describes, the English foursome had already developed the new

“Once the synthesizers came out, everyone felt excited again. Something exciting was happening, and it was that moment of discovery.” — Chris Urbanowicz, Editors — technique and style, but Flood became an all-important guide through such uncharted waters. “Flood’s a bit like us in that he likes dark and scary music. If anything's a little too pretty or a little too sweet then he'll want to change it. Or if anything was a little too weak, then he'd make it heavy. It was just one of those things where something you might not spot would come up and he'd change this or that. “His influence wasn't huge since we'd already decided where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do,” he continues. “Instead, he was just the guiding light to tell us we were going the right direction that we'd already chosen to go. There were a lot of new instruments and things could go really wrong.” It’s the new direction that should excite fans of Editors and garner new ones as well. Urbanowicz notes that the new

right now on athensblur.com hear “Papillon” By Editors

material is already polarizing in many ways, with most enjoying the developed sound. Also, an insane tour schedule in the first half of 2010 should carry the band further than ever before. “I think I'll be in Tasmania,” reflects Urbanowicz when asked where he’ll be with the turn of the new year. “We're playing in Australia and New Zealand. Then we're in Japan for a week. Then we're in London and a bit of recording. Then we tour the States. Then we tour the UK. Then we tour Europe again. Then we do the festivals and then I think that's August or September and I might just go home.” — Matt Conner

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MUSIC SPOTLIGHTS

OH SO DREAMY!

BEACH HOUSE GETs OBSESSED MAKING ALBUM No. 3

PHOTO BY JASON NOCITO

BEACH HOUSE

WHO’S WHO Victoria Legrand (vocals, organ), Alex Scally PHOTO: RYAN MASTRO (guitars, keyboards) Teen Dream. The phrase evokes images of Tiger Beat magazine covers and John Hughes-style teenage romance. But for Baltimore duo Beach House, it represents something far less concrete. “I think ‘Teen Dream,’ for us, is just really symbolic of that unbridled obsession and passion and that feeling of really, really loving things and giving yourself to things wholeheartedly, that you get as a teen, and then occasionally when you’re older,” Alex Scally, the guitar and keyboards half of Beach House, says of the duo’s choice of title for its third album. “The title is more like an invitation to be intoxicated in this feeling.” Accepting the invitation finds Beach House at its best yet. Indie darlings from the start, their 2006 eponymous debut caught the attention of Internet tastemakers for its beautiful, dreamy pop soundscapes and singer/organist Victoria Legrand’s captivating alto, a voice that inspired Grizzly Bear to steal the chanteuse for backing vocals on Veckatimest’s “Two Weeks” and “Slow Life,” that band’s contribution to the

ATHENS BLUR MAGAZINE

right now on athensblur.com hear “Norway” by Beach House

Twilight: New Moon soundtrack. Teen Dream, however, showcases not necessarily an all-new Beach House, but one that has finally realized its sound to completion. Having more time to write and record than ever before (Beach House was recorded in three days, 2008’s Devotion in 10), Scally and Legrand relocated to upstate New York to wholly immerse themselves and take full advantage of the month they were given for their Sub Pop debut. But the creative energy surrounding Teen Dream came to the surface nine months earlier. Freshly back in Baltimore with tour obligations for Devotion finally fulfilled, the duo felt an immediate gravitational pull to start writing anew. The process ultimately became more intense and exciting than either Legrand or Scally anticipated, even from those early tugs of inspiration. “When we started to put together all the ideas that

FORMED 2004 in Baltimore, MD LABEL Sub Pop LATEST RELEASE Teen Dream (2010) ON THE WEB: www.beachhousemusic.net

had been forming, our little songbuds, they pulled us really hard,” says Scally. “It wrapped us inward. We could have spent 30 hours a week working on it, but it was asking us to spend more. We were really compelled by the songs and by the process.” Once holed up at the studio in New York, a converted church called Dreamland (“It didn’t have that scary ominous feeling that churches have. It was more like a barn”), Teen Dream became Scally and Legrand’s end-all be-all, 24/7. There were no distractions, no other thoughts. “We had always recorded in Baltimore, and I think the reason we [recorded in New York] was

so that there was no chance of going out at night. There would be no chance of seeing friends,” he says. “The only thing in our minds was the record.” Such an intimate creative process suits the intimacy that often comes across in Beach House’s music. Quick to point out that this intimacy does not stem for any kind of romantic entanglement, (“Whenever people see a band that’s two people, a guy and girl, that’s one of the first things they assume.”), Scally asserts that even though their working chemistry is a factor, that sense of familiarity and connectivity comes straight from Legrand. “That’s how she communicates, it’s like pulling you inward. Even me, and I’m in the band,” says Scally. “I’m like the No. 1 Beach House fan because I get to listen to her sing all the time. The way she says words, and the kind of words she uses, and the way that she puts together a melody, I think is what elicits an intimate response from people.” In an effort to expand the band’s reach beyond music, Beach House curated a series of videos, each corresponding to a song on Teen Dream, for a DVD to be packed with the new album. Not music videos per se, filmmaker friends of the band were assigned a song, given a little bit of money, and had free reign of artistic expression. “It’s amazing because when you write music you always have your visions of it and when the videos came back and we got to see somebody else’s vision of it, it almost shocked us. It brought in our own understanding of the music,” says Scally. “That’s something we hope will happen for everyone, that they watch these videos and experience a different side of the music than they originally felt and are led into a wider and richer world of interpretation.” — Natalie David

ALOHA AGGRESSIVELY MOVES FORWARD ON NEW RECORD ALOHA

MUSIC SPOTLIGHTS

Saying Hello to a new sound WHO’S WHO Tony Cavallario (vox, guitar), Cale Parks (drums, piano), T.J. Lipple (mellotron), Matthew Gengler (bass) FORMED 1997 in Bowling Green, OH LABEL Polyvinyl Records LATEST RELEASE Home Acres (2010) ON THE WEB: www.myspace.com/ aloha PHOTO COURTESY OF ALOHA

If you’re a long-time fan, you saw this coming a mile away. However, if you’ve been away for a bit, there’s a surprise in store. That’s because the up-tempo aggression found on Aloha’s new release Home Acres seems light years from the initial soft shell of balladry the band emerged from on 2000’s That’s Your Fire. The organic metamorphosis makes sense for those up close, but it’s a different story on the outside, even as recently as one album ago. That’s because their last album, Light Works, brought exactly that — a mostly delicate, slender affair with pop structures that evoked early spring or late fall. Home Acres instead summons the listeners attention front and center, the direct opposite (Aloha-style) of its sibling. What’s most surprising is that the songs on both discs came from the same writing sessions and were only divided at the very end. “There was a pretty fruitful time of writing music with me mainly writing guitar music in my studio,” says Tony Cavallario, principal songwriter and vocalist

right now on athensblur.com hear “Moonless March” by Aloha

for Aloha. “When I looked at what we had — and there were about 25 songs, mostly sketches — I noticed that many of the songs were more of a lightweight, acoustic sort of realm. Then another group of them were a little more sturdy, more rock and roll. Instead of making an album of both, I wanted to separate them from each other as much as possible. So that’s why we did the Light Works album. We just wanted to clear those lighter songs off of the queue and then focus on making a more concrete, more guitar-based album for Home Acres.” The Polyvinyl quartet initially envisioned the entire collection of songs as a dual release of sorts, with the heavier sound of Home Acres coming right on the heels of Light Works. Instead, plans were changed or scrapped, forcing the band to wait longer than expected. Thus, Cavallario

“I can’t think of any band — any substantial band — that hasn’t gone through a phase where they did something that was specifically meant to evoke a certain sound.” — Tony Cavallario, Aloha — admits fans might have lost out on that intended perspective. Then again, he reserves the right to experiment from time to time. “Some people might think that it’s an anomaly, but I think it’s a logical progression for a band to move like we did. I can’t think of any band — any substantial band — that hasn’t gone through a phase where they did something that was specifically meant to evoke a certain sound. So it might seem off of the trajectory for the band, but I think it’s a normal thing to do. Even Alice in Chains did that.” “Our original plan was to do Light Works and then say, ‘Oh, that was nice’ and then put out another record,” he continues. “But this record’s actually taken longer than we planned. So it does seem like what you mention. I think if Home Acres

would have come out a year ago, people would not have put so much thought into where Light Works fit into the chronology of Aloha.” Although Cavallario doesn’t let on to any frustration, he believes the last album was glossed over by those confused by the album’s direction — something he hopes to avoid this time around. “Honestly, I think it was skipped over by a lot of people,” says Cavallario. “There were definitely some people that I’ve been close to for a long time and are long-time fans of the band who actually prefer it. They like the cleaner sound of it. They like the less aggressive sound of Aloha. But like I said, we set out to do something very specific and I think we did exactly what we wanted to do, so what people think really doesn’t matter to me.” — Matt Conner

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MUSIC SPOTLIGHTS 18

dressed for the occasion the many musical faces - and outfits - of timi conley

Halloween's better than half a year away, but Timi Conley is ready. To be fair, he's always ready to jump at an opportunity to dress up. “I’ve always loved dressing up, ever since I was a kid,” laughs the man whose live shows are known for wild costumes as the basis of his stage presence, fittingly wearing a pair of self-proclaimed “nerd glasses” he brought along for the occasion of his conversation with Blur. “I've got a deep closet worth of stuff, man.” He's also got a deep mind of musical ideas that, whencoupled with an exhaustive work habit, makes it difficult to miss Conley in his various incarnations - solo, with Kite To The Moon, Abbey Road Live or his David Bowie tribute. “I'm not a put-on,” he says of his many musical faces. “When I get on stage, that's me. I'm freaking out, but that's because I'm a freak. With Abbey Road, for example, I'm not really trying to be John Lennon, I just get up there and do my best to represent the music and have a good time with it and play it well.” And regardless of the project, the bottom line is simple. “Do it loud. Do it big. Make it fun,” he says. “I'm kind of a sucker for stimulation of all kinds, and I just happen to really, really have a sweet spot for sound. I just love sound vibrations. And when it all comes together, I'm just really in heaven. And being able to produce those, it's amazing. I think that's maybe one of my gifts, I guess, is that I can really get into it. And at this point, I've done it long enough that I'm really comfortable on stage and don't have any anxieties. So what comes across is just that pure bliss.” Conley didn't always intend to “do it big” with music - admittedly, his first love as an art student in Massachusetts was visual arts. It was during his senior year of that degree, much at the urging of his friends, he began to explore

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Timi Conley WHO’S WHO Timi Conley (vocals, guitar) FORMED In a NASA Test Tube LABEL Row Your Boat Records LATEST RELEASE Nerd Sexy (2010) ON THE WEB www.myspace.com/ bitchinsolos right now on athensblur.com hear “Still Vibration” by Timi Conley

photo: Jason Thrasher

a budding music bug in response to a growing disillusionment with the art around him. “I'm a really outgoing person and I got frustrated with the art scene,” he says now. “Up there, at the time, everyone was just sort of introverted and their stuff was really hyper-personal.I was having a tough time negotiating my way through it. Then I found out that musicians are a lot more my style of people to hang out with.” The rest is a history that's played out in front of Athens crowds for almost two decades and one that, while it's featured Conley as an integral piece in many groups, hasn't seen as

much solo material as one may anticipate from a constantly stimulated musical mind. That's set to change with Conley's solo debut, Nerd Sexy, from locallyrun Row Your Boat Records. “Part of [the motivation] was Daniel (Peiken, of Row Your Boat) saying 'I want a Timi record,'” says Conley. “And he's not the only one who's told me that. So I finally got the picture. I had maybe eight songs sort of finely tuned to what I wanted to hear out of them, because I was sort of [writing] for myself. There was a wall between what I was doing and what I thought would be appropriate for presenting to

people and integrating into a band format. A light just went on in my head and said 'this is viable.'” The “writing it for himself ” aspect is the underlying key to a record that possesses almost as many personalities as its creator. “Nerd Sexy is the result of a fevered, multi-dimensional, attention-deficit, quizzical, multi-personality mind. And that is me,” he says with no hint of a joke. “It's a highly textured album that has every mood you can imagine, just about. But it's real playful and totally unfiltered. I thought later about maybe tweaking a few things so it would be more family friendly (laughs), but I decided to leave it as is so people would really see what I did. For better or worse, that would be the honest thing.” So with record in hand, Conley must feel some relaxation, right? “I'm so fucking tired right now,” he says with a laugh. “I mean, I haven't had a vacation in like two years. But I can't stop. I just want to do more.”

— Alec Wooden

A LITTLE LUCK Turns a songwriter’s DREAM inTO A REALITY

Singer/songwriter Daphne Willis may be the luckiest girl in the world. She’s on the eve of releasing her debut record, mounting a tour to support it and handling all the writers who suddenly want to know all about her, all because of a simple twist of fate. Two years ago her selfreleased EP, Matter of Time, found its way onto a compilation played on some American Airlines flights. On one of those passenger lists was Vanguard Records president Kevin Welk, who happened to snap in his earbuds at the same moment Willis’ songs were airing. He was so impressed by her work and her husky, streetwise Norah Jones vocals that he tracked her down through her MySpace page to her hometown of Chicago and quickly laid a contract on the line. It really was as easy as that. But even as she prepares for the tour, she still can’t believe it. “I was actually studying secondary English education with a minor in Japanese studies at DePaul University. I was making EPs and I definitely wanted to [make music] as a career, but the music industry is so competitive and it’s really hard to make it and be able to support yourself,” she says in a tone as friendly as it is incredulous. “So it was always like a hobby for me. I put a lot of time into it, definitely, but not in the hopes of making it big. It was always just like an amazing hobby and my passion.” At 22, with her debut fulllength record, What to Say, being released on Vanguard in February, Willis is ready to show the world she’s more than what some have termed a “female Jack Johnson.” As a guitar player, she says the comparison isn’t totally undeserved since her EPs were largely folksy and acoustic. But on the new record she’s dabbling in sounds that once existed only in her record

DAPHNE WILLIS WHO’S WHO Daphne Willis (guitar, vocals) FORMED 2007 in Chicago, Ill. LABEL Vanguard Records LATEST RELEASE What to Say (2010) ON THE WEB www.myspace.com/ daphnewillismusic; www.daphnewillis. com right now on athensblur.com hear “Bluff” by Daphne Willis

collection, which she says has opened her up to a whole new level of musicianship. “It’s cool because it’s still very much me, but it was kind of like an eye opener,” she says. “When it all started off, I didn’t have as many resources. As I gained experience, we could

MUSIC SPOTLIGHTS

A DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

PhotO By laura CROSTA

“I wanted to have different songs that crossed over into different styles. It’s kind of all over the place. I’m kind of all over the place.” — Daphne Willis — add in horns and other things and take those experiences and develop a sound and make something I didn’t even know I could do before.” It’s an unusual spot to be in for someone who has only been playing guitar for about four years, and writing songs for even less. But it’s not entirely unfamiliar, either. As the daughter of two parents who spent their college years as music majors, Willis has been exposed to different styles and genres her whole life. Like many people, she was raised on a lot of Beatles and Motown. But her father was also an avid and skilled banjo player, and she says the biggest influence on her soulful vocals is Lauryn Hill. “The Lauryn Hill album [The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill]. I would listen to that over and over again and copy

the inflections she did with her voice,” she says. “But I never took lessons or anything. It was just me growing up singing.” The Hill influence is obvious, as is that of Norah Jones, another Willis favorite. But it’s what she does with these vastly different styles that will likely have the power to determine if Willis can stand out from the pack and develop a unique voice from the bits and pieces that shaped her craft. “I wanted to have different songs that crossed over into different styles. One song has total jazz, one swings in the middle, then there’s a total rock song. But then there’s an underlying pop sound,” she says. “It’s kind of all over the place. I’m kind of all over the place.” — Jennifer Gibson

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ear candy

album reviews

Nakia Water to Wine Who said all reviews had to be about current releases? Nakia (pronounced with 2 schwas), is a powerful, soulful vocalist who croons Motown, gospel, and Southern blues on Water to Wine, which debuted in early 2009. This Alabama native set up shop in Austin, Texas and has garnered a groundswell of fans and accolades ever since. “Choose Your Poison” kicks things off in a moderate third gear, and you’ll find yourself singing the line “Momma hit me with your whippin’ stick” long after you’ve put your iPod away. The standout on the album is the title track, penned by the singer himself. Every writer has his/her version of the “Sorry, baby, I gotta keep movin’ on” theme, but this just may be the banner song for the genre. Listening to “Water to Wine” reminds you of breaking up with your first girlfriend (if only I’d chosen these words to do it, I would have spared myself five hours on her doorstep). Still, it’s Nakia’s voice that carries the album. He has major league pipes that can both gently pull and painfully rip passion from his gut. Still not sure what Nakia is about? Think of Joe Cocker mixed with the Southern touch of The Black Crowes. He’s been touted as one of Austin’s best vocalists, but even Austin can’t hold back a Texas-sized talent like Nakia for too much longer. — Phil Pyle Stella StageCoach The Great Divide From opening track “I Can Hear the Sound” (all ebullient piano and driving drums) to closing track “High Above” (a cascade of tubular bells and marching strings), The Great Divide pulls for your attention. Finely crafted and pieced together by Newnan, Georgia’s Stella StageCoach, Divide is a wonder of cellos, violas, saxophones, vocals, drums and guitars. It’s a sun kissed album of your favorite musical memory, whether it be decades old or from mere days ago. Divide maintains a folky veneer even as it experiments with various styles. “We Have The Light” paces into a lively rumba while Matthew Morgan and Victoria Cockrum jaunt through a genteel duet. The title track lilts along with a happy ukulele, while the stellar “Paper Crown” waltzes by before being swept up in a myriad of strings. It would be easy to scold Stella StageCoach for its scattered display of musical modes if it wasn’t so subtle and confident at every turn. Are there some issues? Sure. “He Won’t Stop” would easily be the best song if it weren’t so long , while “The Night the Angels Cried” lumbers in repetition midway through the album, slowing down Divide’s powerful momentum. But that’s no real reason to fuss. The album’s best song, the riotous “What Have I Done,” gives rise to a simple answer. What have they done? They’ve created a lasting piece of elegance. Newnan should be proud. — Ed Morales Nick Cave & Warren Ellis The Road If I were to make a list of the coolest film soundtracks of the past decade, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ scores for “The Proposition” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” would be near the top of it. After working together for over 15 years in the Bad Seeds and Dirty Three, the dynamic duo has honed an emotionally evocative sound perfectly suited for the big screen, and The Road marks yet another brilliant addition to their canon. A gut-wrenching film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Road” follows a man (Viggo Mortensen) and his young son (newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee) as they make their way across a bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape destroyed by an unnamed cataclysm. Director John Hillcoat balances touching scenes of father-son bonding with terrifying sequences involving roving gangs and human cannibals, and the music treads similarly disparate emotional ground. From the pastoral gentility of the opening “Home” and the haunting beauty of the title track to the discomforting dissonance of “The Cannibals,” Cave and Ellis adroitly tailor each song to suit the scene, yet never lose sight of a cohesive sound. Cave’s piano, Ellis’ violin and various woodwinds create moments of elegiac beauty, which only make the disturbing loops and frenetic percussion of the uptempo tracks all the more effective. As with their previous soundtracks, you don’t need to have seen the movie to enjoy this music. But if you have, the emotional impact of their compositions seems all the more impressive. — Bret Love

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the briefcase Morningbell Sincerely, Severely A little south of the South, Florida harbors an estuary of culture that lends itself to a bizarre melange of musical styles: Tropicalia rubs up against hick rock while gritty punk chats up bootypop as cubanismo hip-hop looks on. Gainesville is Florida’s answer to Athens, a college town in the middle of nowhere and a haven for art starved, small town refugees. Morningbell plausibly claims king for a day to both Gainesville and the diverse Florida musical landscape with Sincerely, Severely, a sprawling psych-pop wall map. With so much going on that initially it felt like being thrown down a well, stepping back and listening to the tracks out of order helped me make sense of how much detail brothers Eric and Travis Atria put into the crafting of each song, and subsequently the entire album. It could be argued that a small dose of schizophrenia was involved, as while the entire record oozes innate sexuality, it slaloms a course that runs both jerky, impulsive and ready steady, make-love smooth. Swelling, Weezer-like choruses answer to Shins-y verses, literally and rhythmically curt. Bouncy, angular African guitar licks decay into beautifully soft, fingerpicked acoustics that lap the shores of Goldfrapp in a sun-drenched field of dandelions. Title track “Sincerely, Severely” gives Al Green a deadly run while Bowie at his most conceptual is faithfully and creatively conjured. My first thought was that this was two albums of material that could be released separately, but letting it sink in with all its dreamy bigness was worth the faith. — Coy King The Swimmers People Are Soft Having emerged in 2008 with the thoroughly listenable but largely unremarkable Fighting Trees, the Swimmers seemed likely to be the sort of band to release a handful of pleasantly backward-looking tributes to 70s AM pop and then shuffle off into obscurity. People Are Soft seems to be a concerted effort to avoid just that fate, as the Philadelphia quartet sheds their pop classicism and embraces a whole new set of reference points, showing themselves equally adept at C86 twee (“Shelter”) as they are fizzy power pop (“Drug Party”) and radio-ready ear candy (“Nervous Wreck”). Shaking off the humble understatement of their previous recordings, People Are Soft is an unabashedly anthemic pop album, with nearly every track overloaded with backing harmonies, handclaps, and analog synth detours that utterly eradicate their previous reliance on staunchly organic textures. Like Wilco’s Summer Teeth, another album that announced a band’s shift into a new stylistic phase, these are songs powered by a taut rhythm section and topped with glossy synthesizers and sing-along hooks, with vocalist and guitarist Steve Yutzey-Burkey possessing a voice that is perfectly suited for the nuances of soaring choruses and heartbroken melodies. None of that would matter, of course, if the songs weren’t equal to the artifice, but the Swimmers’ makeover proves all they needed was another layer of paint. — Matt Fink

Bluebrain Soft Power

Formerly The Epochs, brothers Hays and Ryan Holladay now emerge with swirling pop structures that unfold within several subgenres yet never lose their melodic power or prowess. Don’t miss “Ten by Ten” and “Funny Business.” [Matt Conner]

Eisley Fire Kite EP

The haunting candle-glow pop of Eisley loses its melodic flow on Fire Kite’s four songs, favoring more stilted, stomping structures instead. But the DuPress sisters (Stacy, Chauntelle and Sherri) still pretty up the chamber enough to make this a worthwhile listen. [Matt Conner] Bear in Heaven Beast Rest Forth Mouth In the Gen-Y pissing match that is online buzz press, no one is making a bigger splash than Bear in Heaven. And for good reason — Beast is an addictive collection reminiscent of all that has ever been good in euphoric psychedelia. [Alec Wooden]

Ken Will Morton True Grit True Grit is the most polished addition to a KWM discography that multiplies with a frightening regularity. And like those before it, Morton flashes his songwriting muscles with an uncanny ease and charm. [Alec Wooden] Nana Grizol Rush Maybe never before have I heard such a carefree sounding album about...well, caring. Rush is a whimsical, breezy swing through emotions that otherwise aren't — a delightful must-have from one of the most underrated artists in Athens, Ga. [Alec Wooden]

Souls of Mischief Montezuma’s Revenge It’s been nine long years since this Hieroglyphics crew last released a new album (see: 2000’s Trilogy: Conflict, Climax, Resolution), and more than 15 years since their seminal underground classic, 93 ‘Til Infinity. That’s an eternity in the hip-hop world, where trends change faster than Lady Gaga’s wardrobe. Peers such as A Tribe Called Quest and The Pharcyde have gone the way of the dodo, and the sort of complex, battle-tested lyricism the Bay Area’s brightest bohemian MCs have to offer is no longer in fashion. No matter. A-Plus, Opio, Phesto and Tajai have returned with the best album since their debut — a lyrical tour-de-force with fantastic production courtesy of Domino and the legendary Prince Paul. The group has clearly matured a bit, but their sound is classic ‘90s backpacker hip-hop, with tag-team rhyme patterns and a cohesive sound that never grows old. “Won1” rides atop a typically creative Prince Paul beat, with distorted guitar, slamming syncopated beats and soulful singers supporting fierce lyrical flows that will leave you rewinding to catch every word. Elsewhere, the subject matter ranges from dealing with crazy women ( “Postal”) to leaving them ( “Lickity Split”), from crime-based storytelling (“Dead Man Walking”) to laid-back paeans to the joys of summer (“Home Game”). This sort of old-school throwback may not have a place on commercial hip-hop radio, but it is a refreshing reminder of what made groups like Souls of Mischief great in the first place. — Bret Love Lymbyc Systym Shutter Release

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As instrumental post-rock has largely faded from view, pushed to the side by the more exotic strains of noise collage and electronic soundscape, it’s easy to forget just how powerful the traditional tools of the trade can be when effectively utilized. Providing a reminder, brothers Jared and Michael Bell offer Shutter Release, a sonically diverse and melodically complex set of tracks carved out of analog synthesizers, fingerpicked acoustic guitars, tinkling found-sound percussion, majestic strings and purring horns. Worked out over a series of phone calls while the brothers lived apart in Brooklyn and Austin respectively, their third album is a remarkably cohesive affair, neatly unfolding in meticulously contrasting patterns that drift from evilly churning drums and majestic strings of “Ghost Clock” to the cooing lap steel and banjo and crashing cymbals of “Bedroom Anthem.” In fact, the formula becomes a little worn by the end, as too many tracks follow a similar trajectory through sleepy, slowly congealing intros that eventually culminate in a soft eruption of tumbling drums, whirring electronics, and interwoven melodic lines that pull the song toward an uplifting climax before settling back down into a stoic conclusion. To their credit, they pile a remarkably diverse set of sounds upon that sturdy template; one just wishes they’d topple that edifice every now and again. — Matt Fink

Big Kenny The Quiet Times of a Rock and Roll Farmboy I know what you’re thinking. The second half of a mega-popular duo act releases his own solo album after his former cohort, John Rich. It has “Andrew Ridgeley” written all over it, complete with a trademark top hat. But Big Kenny manages to dodge that “duo-gone-solo” curse. Is he the best vocalist in Nashville? No, and he seems okay with it, and since he’s one of the best songwriters working, we’re okay with it, too. With Quiet Time, Big Kenny gained freedom to create without the restrictions of label suits who prodded him for more polished, commercial “Big and Rich” tracks that made them, well, big and rich. Not coincidentally, the song “Free Like Me” begins,“When I’m in these walls/I’ll say anything I want.” Bucking the norm, Big Kenny enlists the Canadian Blackfoot Confederacy to open “Wake Up,” a song not necessarily about Native Americans but having a melody that apparently lends itself well to tribal chants. “Go Your Own Way” is a ballad chock-full of minor chords and a full orchestral string section for backup. Not your typical Nashville fare. “Long After I’m Gone” is already a commercial hit, and I’d bet a few more songs on here will be, as well. Big Kenny reaffirms that an artist can go solo because he/she actually has something to say rather than just wanting to be heard. Hats off! — Phil Pyle

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YEASAYER BRACES FOR THE BREAKOUT ROLLERCOASTER To the extent that the indie rock aesthetic has generally been defined by standing in opposition to the music that dominates Top 40 radio, the last ten years have provided numerous challenges to that integrity vs. the commerciality dynamic. First, Justin Timberlake turned up on stage with the Flaming Lips and on hipster “best of ” lists. Then, Kelly Clarkson’s “Since You’ve Been Gone” became the favorite cover song of indie bands, just as everyone from of Montreal to Grizzly Bear mentioned Beyonce as an inspiration. By the end of the first decade of the 2000s, indie rockers were all over the pop charts and pop music was all over indie

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rocker’s iPods. With Odd Blood, Yeasayer set out to prove that even 80s pop deserves a second act. “I like using the word ‘pop,’ but I don’t really know what it means anymore,” says vocalist/ multi-instrumentalist Chris Keating. “I want it to sound alien. For the textures, if they’re tribalistic in any way, it’s like an alien culture. Not really as earthly as the first record. That first record conceptually was all about the choral sound and that became the aesthetic of the first record. And for this record, we decided, ‘Let’s blow away some of that haze and reveal some more of the clarity.’ That’s putting your balls on the table a little more,

by Matt Fink

pushing the vocals up. It was more of a pop sensibility.” The product of three months spent in the isolation of a snowbound Woodstock, New York studio, the Brooklyn trio’s follow-up to 2007’s All Hour Cymbals is a powerhouse pop album by any definition. Built out of complex polyrhythms and vintage 80s synth textures, the album is part New Order, part Animal Collective, its constituent pieces ranging from the sexed up funk of “Love Me Girl” to the bubbly dance-pop of “Ambling Alp.” And while Yeasayer’s early trajectory landed them well ahead of the curve in their blending of African pop and day-glo psychedelia, there is

Yeasayer formed only after both had finished college and grown tired of attempting to establish themselves as solo artists. Bringing Wilder’s cousin Ira Wolf Tuton in to fill out the lineup, the trio began to make music based upon the idea of balancing the organic with the synthetic, wrapping acoustic guitars in analog drums and vintage keyboards. And while Odd Blood swings the balance toward the electronic, the lyrics keep it rooted in the viscerally tangible. “We thought the record was very physical, and we wanted the title to reference physicality, like, blood and guts and gore,” Keating says. “We were always dealing with these ideas for what we wanted it to sound like, like, ‘It should sound like bones crunching.’ And right now on athensblur.com hear “Amblin Arp” by Yeasayer

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YEASAYER WHO’S WHO Chris Keating (vocals, keyboards, guitars), Anand Wilder (vocals, keyboards, guitars), Ira Wolf Tuton (multiple instruments) FORMED 2006 in Brooklyn, New York LABEL Secretly Canadian LATEST RELEASE Odd Blood (2010) ON THE WEB www.yeasayer.net

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hardly a trace of their debut’s exploratory mix on Odd Blood. “I think that’s important,” Keating says of the band’s reinvention. “That’s what my favorite artists always did, switched record to record. I think in this day and age, it’s not like we’re a skiffle group that is influenced by American blues. There’s this whole wealth of crazy influences at your disposal, and I’m of the age that I grew up listening to hip-hop and rock and electronic stuff pretty equally. It wasn’t like I was a metalhead or anything. I was always listening to a lot of different stuff, and I’d like to make music that reflects that in some way.” Their roots stretching back to when Keating and vocalist/keyboardist Anand Wilder were classmates at Baltimore’s Park School (the same high school where Animal Collective’s members attended a few years earlier),

the fact that it’s electronic and dancey and futuristic, the phrase ‘odd blood’ seemed like some futuristic slang that people would use in a post-globalized homogenous world – a phrase for someone that sticks out.” Back in this world, Odd Blood is the kind of record that ensures Yeasayer will stand out, its baffling mix of familiarity and otherworldliness making it both immediately accessible and puzzlingly obtuse. If their goal was to make one weird-ass pop record, one festooned with obvious reference points that are all aiming in opposite directions, they’ve succeeded. If their goal was to reach the pop charts, they might have to be happy with missing their mark. “Honestly, I kind of thrive on people telling me the record sucks,” Keating says. “That’s a lot better than saying they like it but it sounds like everything else.” B

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Photo: Dan Monick

Athens Blur Magazine: Music isn't exactly a new hobby for the two of you, is it? Chandra Watson: We’ve always been surrounded by really good music. [We had] a very music appreciative household. My mom says when we were little we used to walk around the house singing, and used to get in trouble for singing at the dinner table (laughs). Leigh and I actually started singing when we were about 9 or 10 in church. [That] was when we first started getting a little bit of training and understanding harmonies and things like that. And once we started singing together, we really tapped into something we love. Leigh Watson: [Mom] listened to a really eclectic group of music that really allowed us to not have any boundaries with what we were listening to. CW: When we were teenagers we started to

ATHENS BLUR MAGAZINE

learn how to play guitar and started to get involved in the sort of underground scene that was happening in Louisville, going to hardcore and punk-rock shows. There was a lot of weird, experimental music happening. ABM: Is there ever a fear that people, because you're twins, will see you as a novelty act before they ever hear the music? LW: That’s definitely something that comes into play. People want to make you a gimmick because you are twins and you are identical and you look alike. That’s something you deal with your whole life — you get cast in the school play because

they need two people that look exactly alike (laughs). It’s something that you’re constantly aware of, something that’s always in the back of your mind when you have an identical twin. But I feel like we’ve been lucky to be involved in projects that are legitimate and real [to help stand out]. ABM: You may look identical, but I'd bet there are some personality variances. What are those, and how do they find their way into the music? CW: Are you trying to find out who is the evil twin?

ABM: Basically. CW: (laughs) Well, we both came from different backgrounds. I was a theatre major and she was an art major, so she spent college in a studio by herself and I spent college having to perform in front of people everyday. So initially when we first started playing in a more serious realm, that was maybe more evident. Musically, we're probably more on the same page on this record than we ever have been. We’ve worked hard on these songs and have pushed ourselves to the next level, hopefully, of crafting really simple but heartfelt songs. ABM: When you moved from Louisville to Los Angeles, was there a noticeable shift in how it affected you musically? LW: I think it was more the level of experience and also just starting to play with people who were upping the ante for us. We weren’t just playing with weekend warriors who had jobs and wanted to be musical on the weekends. We started meeting people who spent every day and every second that they had making records and playing with friends. ABM: Was it hard trying to bring any country roots along? CW: Growing up in Kentucky, there was this sort of anti-country thing that we experienced because we were young kids who were rebelling against what was sort of the norm there. So all that time we’re like ‘country music, oh no, no way.’ We kind of rebelled against that. But moving to California, and being out of that element, allowed us to realize that that’s part of our history, part of our roots. Why wouldn’t we indulge in taking some of those sounds and incorporating them into what we do? So moving to California helped us be okay with having a little bit of country in there. ABM: Speaking of shifts, there is a noticeable one on Talking To You, Talking To Me. LW: Yes, but it wasn’t a conscious shift. I think both of us have been growing as songwriters and the songs kind of came out that way. The way that the songs were written, they were calling out for a really rhythm-section, bass record — a really vibing record. I don’t think it was intentional, but it just kind of happened. We’ve always been very into R&B music — that’s a huge part of us growing up, as well. And it’s sort of coming to the surface, just like the country and americana stuff did on the last record. All of our records are sort of sides of us, but this one has a little more soul — it comes from that direction.

CW: Once we had been working on and demoing these songs, we realized that the things these songs were calling for are things that we always use — organs, electric guitar, things that we use on every record. But it was more about how they were played. Somehow

right now on athensblur.com hear “The Devil In You” by The Watson Twins

it came out that way. LW: We decided to approach this a little bit differently. The last couple of records, we’ve done this thing where it’s more of us singing together (on the melodies), these sort of intricate, familial harmonies. On this record, we took a different approach. Whoever was singing lead, the two of us would then sing backup for that track. We basically took our approach as to how we would sing backup for another lead vocalist and we applied that to our record, which is different for us. CW: And that was an intentional sort of thing, because the songs really lent themselves to that. ABM: What are the advantages of writing the songs separately as opposed to collaborating on everything? CW: We remain friends that way (laughs). I feel like that’s our comfort zone and we’ve always done it that way. There will definitely be a point where we begin collaborating on writing. Right now, I feel like one of the big steps for this record was just confidence. We felt confident enough to tap into places and write things that weren’t necessarily safe and weren’t what people thought the Watson Twins should sound like. We were ready to take a step and shake it up a bit and be okay with how the record came out, personally. We were okay with writing and singing songs that didn’t necessarily sound like our other records. In previous recordings, we definitely went in a very safe direction, where our comfort zone is and where we’ve been singing for years and years.

it and then just strike stuff. So in my songs on this record, I tried to not allow myself to get stuck in the song and really look over the lyrics and process the songs and figure out the best way of telling people these ideas and stories that I’m trying to relate. So

that’s something I’ve definitely learned. She’s taught me to be more aware of the content of the song and what the meat is, and what can be changed to make it a better song. CW: Thanks, sis (laughs). LW: You’re welcome. So true (laughs). CW: Leigh has a great ear for hooks. She tends to write things that are very catchy and stick into your brain. To be able to say something really simply and say something that resonates and isn’t too heady ... she’s helped me to realize that a very simple chorus that has a great melody is better than 90% of the song. She has the ability to craft those types of hooks and choruses. ABM: You're at the start of what you hope will be a long career. How will you always be able to avoid music turning from a passion into a going-though-the-motions sort of job? LW: When Chandra and I sing together, it’s a spiritual experience. When we sing harmonies together, it resonates inside me and creates an energy that you can’t get singing a song alone. And that’s why I think we continue to do it. That’s something that I hope I will never take for granted and it’s something that continues to energize me and makes me excited about music. CW: I think because we’ve had something inside of us that’s been calling us to do this since we were little kids, there’s this passion and spirit that just draws us to it. If someone does this just because they want to be rich or famous…you can’t do this job for that reason. It’s too hard. You can only do this career if you truly love it.

ABM: Moving forward, will you continue to do more collaborations? CW:Those are always new and exciting. And it helps you to keep things fresh and interesting. ABM: What would you say is the LW: We’ve been so lucky to play with biggest thing you've personalamazing musicians. And that table is ly learned from each other? constantly being filled with different people. LW: Chandra writes very metaphorically. And that can really be a way of keeping She has more of a meticulous mind when it things fresh and reinventing at every turn. comes to working on lyrics and stuff. When I Meeting players and meeting people who feel like something good may be coming out, inspire you, that kind of stuff is definitely B I tend to get stuck in something and build on fuel for the fire.

ATHENS BLUR MAGAZINE

cover story

BAND of BROTHERS For the members of newgrass quintet Packway Handle Band, the business of being a band has been a true labor of brotherly love.

story by Allie Goolrick

ost of the members of Packway Handle Band grew up together. They’ve toured under the Packway moniker for nearly nine years. They've been on the road full-time since 2006. They even sing and play on the same microphone. But where other bands might crack under the pressure of too-much-together-time, the quintet is lucky enough to (mostly) get along, even under the most strenuous of circumstances. “I know bands where people don’t get

ATHENS BLUR MAGAZINE

photos by Justin Evans

along and they’re talking about going on the road full time and I just think, ‘Don’t even bother,’” laughs fiddle player Andrew Heaton. “No matter how well you get along, it’s going to turn into this thing like what you see on war movies where everybody’s sitting there and no one says anything to anybody else without it being derogatory. And everybody has a derogatory name for everybody else.” Today, the band laughs at Heaton’s assessment, but it's clear that there’s a

genuine affection amongst the bandmates. When Blur catches up with Heaton, banjo player Tom Baker, guitarist Josh Erwin and mandolin player Michael Paynter via conference call, it’s hard to tell where one band member ends and another begins. But then, expressing themselves in concert with each other is nothing new for Packway. Along with bassist Zach McCoy, during their live shows, the quintet crowds around two centrally-placed condenser mics, instruments and all. To

see them onstage is like watching a fiveheaded monster: the band seems to move telepathically, each member pulling back or leaning into the mic as one fluid whole. And though the band is fully at home now in the old-time stage set-up, learning to mix themselves on one microphone took years of hard work. “One year, we practiced around a broomstick,” recalls Erwin, who credits the shared-mic system with inspiring the band’s high-energy sets. “When you only have two condenser mics to crowd around you kind of feel compelled to give it everything you have.”

Though these days the bandmates sound like grizzled pros when talking about their craft, they are quick to point out that they started off playing rock music—far from the pure bluegrass category that they often get lumped in. Growing up together in Kennesaw, Ga., Josh, Tom, Zach and Michael spent their high school years — according to Erwin — jamming and playing crappy rock music in my basement.” It wasn’t until Tom’s older brother brought back a mandolin from Colorado that the band started to experiment with a different style. Though they had little exposure to bluegrass

and old-time music, Tom picked up the banjo and Michael learned the mandolin and pretty soon the band was arranging harmonies. “We weren’t singing any harmonies that were straightforward at all or correct the way that harmonies are technically supposed to be done,” says Erwin. “We were just playing what we thought sounded good. I don’t know if it was very close to real bluegrass.” Despite their lack of familiarity with bluegrass, in 2002, the newly-named Packway Handle Band entered the Bluegrasss Competition at the Telluride

ATHENS BLUR MAGAZINE

Music Festival. Competition aside, the trek to Colorado became a source of personal legend, as well as the beginning of a long, strange trip for Packway Handle. “We took a little Chrysler minivan and there were six of us in there with no air conditioning,” recalls Erwin. “The air conditioning went out in New Mexico. Somebody always had to sit on the floor, paperclip-style.” “I thought you guys had to run the actual heat in it because the car was overheating?” asks Heaton, who seems to know the story by heart even though he didn’t join the band until the next year. “We were riding through the desert with the heat on,” Baker agrees. “We came back into Athens and that thing would not go above, like, 35 miles an hour. We just destroyed that van.” The only thing that the band can’t laugh about in recalling the trip is the fact that they walked away with 4th prize at the prestigious competition—a feat that, for a band with little bluegrass experience—is

nothing short of remarkable. Unlike their fellow competitors, Packway brought a lot of new material to a genre that is generally heavy on cover songs. So, in a sense, it was their unfamiliarity with bluegrass that brought the fresh energy and perspective to the competition and made the judges sit up and take notice. “I guess in retrospect it was so funny because they were going to this competition with almost no experience in bluegrass at all,” says Heaton, who joined the band on fiddle in 2003. “I think that what goes on at some of these concerts is they get so tired of hearing the same thing and rehashing the same thing that (Packway) really seemed like something different to people.” Pretty soon, the band was touring the bluegrass circuit—adding McCoy in 2006 when they started on the road full-time. They’ve since toured all over the country and in Europe, sharing stages with the likes of Ralph Stanley, Larry Keel and Yonder Mountain String Band. They’ve

released three full-length records — Chaff Harvest in 2004, (Sinner) You Better Get Ready in 2005 and a self-titled record in 2008 — plus a live EP in 2006, and will release their 3rd full-length studio album, What Are We Gonna Do Now? in February. But despite their continued success in the bluegrass arena, the band’s rock roots kept them from ever fully committing to a traditional bluegrass sound. They’ve experimented with collaborating with other bands like Venice is Sinking on their stage shows, and have included instruments not common even on the bluegrass circuit, like saxophone and flute, into the mix. “The more we started arranging songs, they started to get more and more away from bluegrass,” says Paynter. “I realized there’s no reason to adhere to this preconceived notion of bluegrasss music. We could just come up with original songs and play them with bluegrass instruments. That’s kind of what we’ve been doing ever since.”

What has emerged over the band’s nine years is a sound that at times sits fully in the bluegrass tradition, and at other times is completely quirky and self-deprecating about whether or not the band fits into that category at all. The bandmates revel in pushing their rhythms to almost comic speed, singing raucous, spirited choruses that stress their voices to the limits and at times poking complete fun at their own players. (“Our mandolin player plays the fiddle completely upsidedown/he makes infernal racket and all other kinds of sound.”) The band even makes fun of their name, which has been the source of hilarious amounts of scrutiny over the years. They tell Blur vaguely that the story involves a friend of the band’s and isn’t that interesting; the band’s new song addressing the origin of their name, “What is A Packway Handle?” isn’t that much more insightful. “We used to try to tell the whole damn story but it’s just too weird and the circumstances of creation involve Tourette’s syndrome and too much beer.” Despite their ever-present sense of

band,’” says Erwin. “That’s funny that that’s become a real standard thing for bluegrass bands to say.” In fact, the band got to go head-to-head with their more traditional counterparts this past fall when they opened for Ralph Stanley at the Melting Point –– and the results were sort of a mixed bag: “Some people were either into it or completely aghast or just didn’t know how to take it,” says Paynter of the experience. “It was definitely a fish-out-of-water scenario.” Recognizing the conundrum of “to bluegrass or not to bluegrass” is a large part of what informs their new release, What Are We Gonna Do Now? Recorded entirely by the band in Heaton’s home studio, the EP is a mix of humorous jams about being a bluegrass band and straight-forward tunes with rock-style vocals and bluegrass instrumentation. Where previous albums were recorded like the band’s stage show, all around one mic, on the new record Heaton set up the recording and every band member came in and overdubbed their parts separately.

forward into new, more independent, territory. “There was something that was tempting about knowing that I wasn’t going to be blazingly loud and exposed with my own line in or my own microphone. It would be blended in with what everybody was doing,” says Heaton of playing in the single-mic scenario. “As time goes on, that has been less of a reason to go with this.” Still, they have too much fun with it to abandon the single-mic set-up entirely: “Even if we get away from using the single mics, it will still be a part of our show,” says Paynter. “Just because it is something unique and something people enjoy watching.” No matter the stage set-up, the band’s reverence for the bluegrass and old-time music makes it hard not to see Packway as an indicator of the direction that modern bluegrass is going: with their high energy and great sense of humor, the group is injecting life into a tradition that has seen a major resurgence in the past decade— partly due to bands like Packway trying to think of bluegrass in an entirely different

"We were really just impersonating a real bluegrass band," laughs Baker of the band's beginnings. "But we happened to be doing it in a way people liked."

humor, it’s hard to say whether Packway is a rock band making fun of bluegrass, or bluegrass band that is changing the face of a traditional genre. Like “newgrass” contemporaries the Avett Brothers, Packway is quick to dispel any notions that they think of themselves as a true bluegrass band, insisting instead that they are just a band that uses traditional bluegrass instrumentation in new ways. “I don’t know if any single or aroundthe-mic bluegrass band has ever added sax and flute,” Heaton points out. “Eventually our stage show is going to get more and more elaborate, at least with different instrumentation. I just want to do justice to the songs we’re putting out there.” Still, they recognize that trying to get away from the cliché of being a typical bluegrass band has become sort of a cliché in itself. “Almost every band that we’ll play with in the bluegrass genre go out of their way to add something that says ‘bands that don’t like bluegrass will like this

Also new to this release is the addition of snare hits and organ, hardly traditional bluegrass instruments. If the record’s new title is any indication, the band is on the cusp of some pretty major changes—and not just in their formal releases. Though they’ve made a name for themselves through their onstage round-the-mic style, they’re not necessarily planning to stick with that stage set-up forever. “I guess at different times we all have these visions of ways that, at certain points in the show or at the end of the show, we can sort of step away from the mic and go to a totally different set up,” says Heaton. “We don’t see any reason to restrict ourselves to one sort of stage structure if we don’t have to. And we don’t think we do.” As ironic as it may seem, the very thing that got Packway Handle to where they are today—playing so closely as one unit—is what they think will help them move

way. “I think it's part of a trend. It’s a trend towards us moving more and more away from feeling restricted by the bluegrass form,” says Heaton. “Now I think we’re trying to do other things. “ Whatever they’re doing, Packway seems to be doing it right. In 2003, they beat out 72 bands in the Miller Lite– “Locals Only” Battle of the Bands, they’ve been voted Athens’ best bluegrass band for an astonishing seven consecutive years in the Flagpole Music Awards, they won first prize at the Podunk Festival Band Competition, and have since won both 2nd and 3rd place at the Telluride Bluegrass Band Competition. But they haven’t let the success get to their heads. The same lighthearted attitude that they took to the first Telluride on that harried journey out West is still working for them today. “We were really just impersonating a real bluegrass band,” laughs Baker of the band's beginnings. “But we happened to be doing it in a way people liked.” B

2010

grammy

guide

are the grammy awards still a relevant industry force? or an overblown popularity contest? whatever your opinion, here’s the rundown on some big accolades up for grabs in the 2010 edition. Album of the Year I Am... Sasha Fierce Beyoncé

Credits: Bangladesh (producer), Ian Dench, DTown, Toby Gad, Sean Garrett, Amanda Ghost, Jim Jonsin, Beyoncé Knowles, Rico Love, Dave McCracken, Terius Nash, Radio Killa, Stargate, Christopher "Tricky" Stewart, Ryan Tedder & Wayne Wilkins, producers; Jim Caruana, Mikkel S. Eriksen, Toby Gad, Kuk Harrell, Jim Jonsin, Jaycen Joshua, Dave Pensado, Radio Killa, Mark "Spike" Stent, Ryan Tedder, Brian "B-LUV" Thomas, Marcos Tovar, Miles Walker & Wayne Wilkins, engineers/mixers; Tom Coyne, mastering engineer

The E.N.D. Black Eyed Peas

Credits: Apl.de.ap, Jean Baptiste, Printz Board, DJ Replay, Funkagenda, David Guetta, Keith Harris, Mark Knight, Poet Name Life, Frederick Riesterer & will.i.am, producers; Dylan "3D" Dresdow, Padraic "Padlock" Kerin & will.i.am, engineers/mixers; Chris Bellman, mastering engineer

The Fame Lady GaGa

Credits: Flo Rida, Colby O'Donis & Space Cowboy, featured artists; Brian & Josh, Rob Fusari, Martin Kierszenbaum, RedOne & Space Cowboy, producers; 4Mil, Robert Orton, RedOne, Dave Russell & Tony Ugval, engineers/mixers; Gene Grimaldi, mastering engineer

Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King Dave Matthews Band

Credits: Rob Cavallo, producer; Chris Lord-Alge & Doug McKean, engineers/mixers; Ted Jensen, mastering engineer

Fearless Taylor Swift

Credits: Colbie Caillat, featured artist; Nathan Chapman & Taylor Swift, producers; Chad Carlson, Nathan Chapman & Justin Niebank, engineers/mixers;

Record of the Year “Halo” Beyoncé Beyoncé Knowles & Ryan Tedder, producers; Jim Caruana, Mark "Spike" Stent & Ryan Tedder, engineers/mixers “I Gotta Feeling” Black Eyed Peas David Guetta & Frederick Riesterer, producers; will.i.am, Dylan "3-D" Dresdow & Padraic "Padlock" Kerin, engineers/mixers “Use Somebody” Kings of Leon Jacquire King & Angelo Petraglia, producers; Jacquire King, engineer/mixer “Poker Face” Lady GaGa Lady Gaga RedOne, producer; Robert Orton, RedOne & Dave Russell, engineers/ mixers “You Belong With Me” Taylor Swift Nathan Chapman & Taylor Swift, producers; Chad Carlson & Justin Niebank, engineers/mixers

Q: What’s the difference between “Record of the Year” and “Album of the Year?” And why are the “Record” nominees not necessarily the name of a “record?” And where does that leave “Song of the Year?”

A: “Record of the Year” recognizes the recording work of a particular song (hence the lengthy credits), but not necessarily the entire album that song appears on. “Album of the Year” recognizes similar production work for the entirety of an album. “Song of the Year” recognizes the writing, but not necessarily production of a particular track.

Song of the Year "Poker Face" Lady GaGa (Lady GaGa & RedOne, songwriters) "Pretty Wings" Maxwell (Hod David & Musze, songwriters) "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" Beyoncé (Thaddis Harrell, Beyoncé Knowles, Terius Nash & Christopher Stewart, songwriters) "Use Somebody" Kings of Leon (Caleb Followill, Jared Followill, Matthew Followill & Nathan Followill, songwriters) “You Belong With Me" Taylor Swift (Liz Rose & Taylor Swift, songwriters)

Best New Artist Zac Brown Band “Chicken Fried,” “Whatever It Is,” “Toes,” “Highway 20 Ride” Keri Hilson “Knock You Down” (feat. Kanye West) MGMT “Electric Feel,” “Kids” Silversun Pickups “Panic Switch,” “Substitution” The Ting Tings “That’s Not My Name,” “We Walk”

More Nominees

album nominations Best Country Album

The Foundation (Zac Brown Band), Twang (George Strait), Fearless (Taylor Swift), Defying Gravity (Keith Urban), Call Me Crazy (Lee Ann Womack)

ALTERNATIVE ALBUM

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (David Byrne & Brian Eno), The Open Door EP (Death Cab For Cutie), Sounds of the Universe (Depeche Mode), Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Phoenix), It's Blitz! (Yeah Yeah Yeahs)

Contemporary Blues Album

This Time (The Robert Cray Band), The Truth According To Ruthie Foster (Ruthie Foster), Live: Hope At The Hideout (Mavis Staples), Back To The River (Susan Tedeschi), Already Free (The Derek Trucks Band)

Rock Album

Black Ice (AC/DC), Live from Madison Square Garden (Eric Clapton & Steve Winwood), 21st Century Breakdown (Green Day), Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King (Dave Matthews Band), No Line on the Horizon (U2)

Americana Album

Together Through Life (Bob Dylan), Electric Dirt (Levon Helm), Willie And The Wheel (Willie Nelson & Asleep At The Wheel), Wilco (The Album) (Wilco), Little Honey (Lucinda Williams)

Pop Vocal Album

The E.N.D. (Black Eyed Peas), Breakthrough (Colbie Caillat), All I Ever Wanted (Kelly Clarkson), The Fray (The Fray), Funhouse (Pink)

Contemporary Folk Album

Middle Cyclone (Neko Case), Our Bright Future (Tracy Chapman), Live (Shawn Colvin), Secret, Profane & Sugarcane (Elvis Costello), Townes (Steve Earle)

Best Rap Album

Universal Mind Control (Common), Relapse (Eminem), R.O.O.T.S. (Flo Rida), The Ecstatic (Mos Def), The Renaissance (Q-Tip)

Comedy Album

Back from the Dead (Spinal Tap), A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All! (Stephen Colbert), Internet Leaks ("Weird Al" Yankovic), My Weakness Is Strong (Patton Oswalt) Suckin' It for the Holidays (Kathy Griffin), Tall, Dark & Chicano (George Lopez)

Contemporary R&B Album

I Am... Sasha Fierce (Beyoncé), Intuition (Jamie Foxx), The Introduction of Marcus Cooper (Pleasure P), Ready (Trey Songz), Thr33 Ringz (T-Pain)

R&B Album

The Point Of It All (Anthony Hamilton), Testimony: Vol. 2, Love & Politics (India.Arie), Turn Me Loose (Ledisi), BLACKsummers'night (Maxwell), Uncle Charlie (Charlie Wilson)

Performance nominations best female pop vocal performance

“Hometown Glory” (Adele), “Halo” (Beyoncé), “Hot N Cold” (Katy Perry), “Sober” (Pink) “ You Belong With Me” (Taylor Swift)

male pop vocal

“This Time” ( John Legend),“Love You” (Maxwell), “Make It Mine” ( Jason Mraz), “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” (Seal), All About The Love Again” (Stevie Wonder)

pop duo or group (with vocals)

“I Gotta Feeling” (Black Eyed Peas), “We Weren’t Born To Follow” (Bon Jovi), Never Say Never” (The Fray), “Sara Smile” (Daryl Hall & John Oates), “Kids” (MGMT)

female R&B vocal

“Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” (Beyoncé), “It Kills Me” (Melanie Fiona), That Was Then” (Lalah Hathaway), “Goin’ Thru Changes” (Ledisi), “Lions, Tigers & Bears” ( Jazmine Sullivan)

male R&B vocal

“The Point Of It All” (Anthony Hamilton), “Pretty Wings” (Maxwell), “SoBeautiful” (Musiq Soulchild), “Under” (Pleasure P), “There Goes My Baby” (Charlie Wilson)

rock solo vocal

“Beyond Here Lies Nothin’” (Bob Dylan), “Change In The Weather” ( John Fogerty), “Dreamer” (Prince), “Working On A Dream” (Bruce Springsteen),“Fork in the Road” (Neil Young)

rock due or gorup (with vocals)

“Can’t Find My Way Home” (Eric Clapton & Steve Winwood), “Life in Technicolor II” (Coldplay), “21 Guns” (Green Day),“Use Somebody” (Kings of Leon), “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” (U2)

hard rock

“War Machine” (AC/DC), “Check My Brain” (Alice in Chains),“What I’ve Done” (Live) (Linkin Park),“The Unforgiven III” (Metallica), “Burn It to the Ground” (Nickelback)

female country vocal

“Dead Flowers” (Miranda Lambert), I Just Call You Mine” (Martina McBride), “White Horse” (Taylor Swift), “Just a Dream” (Carrie Underwood), “Solitary Thinkin’” (Lee Ann Womack)

male country vocal

“All I Ask For Anymore” (Trace Adkins), “People Are Crazy” (Billy Currington), “High Cost of Living” ( Jamey Johnson), “Living for the Night” (George Strait), “Sweet Thing” (Keith Urban)

country duo or group (with vocals)

“Cowgirls Don’t Cry” (Brooks & Dunn), “Chicken Fried” (Zac Brown Band), “I Run to You” (Lady Antebellum),“Here Comes Goodbye” (Rascal Flatts),“It Happens” (Sugarland)

music’s great big distraction

grammys still stand tallest

By Natalie B. David

By MAtt Conner

h, the Grammy Awards. Each year the Academy puts on an excuse for the music industry to give itself a great big pat on the back. An hours-long advertisement for the bands, artists, albums and songs that have already been stuffed down our throats ad nauseam, the Grammys are less a celebration of the past year’s triumphs in music and more a ratings-grab spectacle dedicated to the status quo. Not surprisingly, when confronted with dwindling ratings for the Grammy telecast, the industry went full force for style over substance. After pairing Eminem with Elton John, most of the performances for the awards show have been manipulated for sheer shock value, promising never-to-be-seen-again mash ups that, for the most part, sound better in theory than in practice (Anybody catch Jay-Z and Coldplay last year? Ugh.). Not that these performances aren’t entertaining on some level. But they serve as a great distraction, in hopes that we won’t realize just how short they’re selling the music world by continually nominating only the most obvious members of the multi-platinum club. In a year with a number of phenomenal records from a wide variety of artists, the current list of “Album of the Year” nominees is nothing short of shameful. Sure, taking into account every album released in a year wouldn’t exactly solve the problem (and there are a lot of bad albums out there), but how can an award mean anything if the Academy doesn’t seek out nominees beyond the morning wake-up playlist from VH1? Then again, they once gave an award to Milli Vanilli, so maybe wishing for added credibility is asking too much.

onsider it a last stand of sorts. This digital age that defines and consumes so much so quickly brings an addiction to everything new and fresh and hip. While there’s much good to say about music and the times we live in, it also leaves a devastation in its wake – one that so easily forgets its roots, history and context. From discs to hard drives, from albums to singles, from print media to webzines, there’s precious little ground to stand on anymore that points to a musical heritage behind us. And then there are the Grammy Awards, which admittedly have a mountain of issues facing them in terms of relevance. Yet even though it’s easy to roll our eyes at its many problems, it’s still one of the last century’s grandest traditions we have left. Since 1958, the Grammy Awards have provided a yearly Who’s Who within the music industry. Even with endless other awards and prizes handed out, it’s the Grammy that stands tallest with its rich history of historic performances and dazzling moments. It’s a chance for today’s musicians and artists to join the pantheon of those gone before them – a connection that flies in the face of the Internet era. While it’s easy to argue the merits of winners and losers, good choices and bad, the reality is that the Grammy stands for something bigger than the winner of “Best Album” or “New Artist” of that particular year. Instead, it’s about the tapestry of a greater cultural collective that today’s musicians can still be a part of. B

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SHOW, AND TELL

With recording ability at their fingertips, fans have made concerts multimedia events. Does it hurt, or help? photo: Joshua Payne By Ed Morales

avid Lowery doesn’t dread the camera flashes or the crappy YouTube videos; in fact, he welcomes them. Lead singer for Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, a pair of bands with faithful followers during their decades of work, Lowery embraces the passion his fans have for the live show. You want audio — go right ahead. Candid pictures — here I am. Film it — why not. But then there’s this whole texting business. “We were with Cracker in Macon this past summer, and during the show David had it, saying “Can I have that phone?” to a group of frat kids who were fucking around and texting in the front row,” said Velena Vego, band manager for both Cracker and Camper who also serves as booking agent/talent buyer

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for Athens’ 40 Watt Club. “It is an irritant with cell phones because what we’re seeing is people just texting in the middle of concerts, and you know the bands can see that. I know that was the place to be that night but they weren’t there watching the concert.” From their beginnings, Lowery’s bands have embraced the Grateful Dead’s approach to concerts — you can film, record and take pictures anytime, but you just can’t sell any of it. This attitude has made it easy for Lowery and his bandmates to transition into today’s concert scene — where gigs have become multimedia events with an endless shelf life splayed across the Internet. But with everyone having picture-taking, recording and video capabilities in the palm of their hands, is the modern-day concert no longer a collective experience of the moment? Has it become a roomful of individual multitaskers, texting and waiting for their favorite

song so they can call their best friend and raise the phone above the din of flashing cameras? Does it matter? “I could see where some artists are worried about what is being heard out there if they aren’t regulating what is being taped,” Vego said. “But there’s no way to stop it. Personally, as a manager for two rock and roll bands, I would say we need to embrace this policy because at least people are [at the show] and excited about it and they’re trying to spread the word.”

or all the good technology brings, Ben Ferguson still misses the mystery. President of Nimbleslick Entertainment, a company managing more than a dozen artists

including prog-rock mainstay Perpetual Groove, Ferguson recalls a time when bands’ reputations were built on album covers, hearsay and imagination. “I remember as a kid sitting down with my parents’ record collection and looking at the Led Zeppelin records,” Ferguson said. “I had heard stories from friends and my old man about them, but I always remember holding the records and going ‘Man, these guys lived in castles. They were into witchcraft. What kind of fucking shit is this? Who are these guys?’ “And now you can wake up and see what your favorite guitarist had for breakfast, and the people who don’t supply enough of that information suddenly get looked down upon. It’s a fine line to balance because as you grow a band and the fan base gets larger, at some point you have to pull back the reins a little bit and develop that mystique.” It used to be — not too long ago — that being in the music industry meant making records and going out on tour to promote them. Not anymore. Bands are content providers, and it’s through technological ingenuity and reaching out to its fans that a band can rise above the myriad of choices found through a simple Google search. “It’s 2010 and people aren’t buying records, they’re buying individual singles if that,” Vego said. “Where a band makes more money than anywhere else is the live concert. People might not have all your albums, but they’ll still pay $15 to $20 to see you play a couple times a year.” A December report by Billboard Boxscore spells this out. Data between December 2008 and November 2009 shows more than 73 million people worldwide spent a record $4.4 billion in concert revenues, an 11.7 percent increase over the previous year and the second straight year of double-digit growth. In the United States, despite a difficult economy, revenue was steady as more than $1 billion was spent on concerts. Ferguson understands this. It’s through the live show — with all its flashes and phones and record buttons — where bands set themselves apart. And those who join in the recording fray with the audience are getting the most mileage. “People are going to be doing this and it’s going to be very difficult to police, so let’s just let it happen,” Ferguson said. “It adds to the viral factor of band promotions and getting the band’s name out there. From the organizational point of view, we use that stuff quite a bit and there’s an endless amount of ways or applications to go about doing that. We have someone on the road constantly Twittering during the set list, so when the band is playing their songs, he’s putting that out to the Perpetual Groove Twitter list. We’re also taking video clips from iPhones

“it’s a fine line to balance because as you grow a band and the fan base gets larger, at some point you have to pull back the reins a little bit and develop that mystique.” - ben ferguson, nimbleslick entertainment so there’s usually a video clip, whether it’s 30 seconds or five minutes, that’s tagged with that particular song.” For PGroove, it extends off the stage as well. All the guys have iPhones, so updating blogs and Web sites can be done anywhere, anytime, without any of them needing to understand how it happens. The key is keeping fans connected, and so far, it’s working. PGroove shows, in the vein of Phish and Widespread Panic, have found a loyal, well-documented base who go for fun and friends. The proof is on the screen. “It’s funny because you look at the photos that the kids post up and most of the photos are pretty crappy,” Ferguson said. “But what comes along with those photos are them with their friends before the show, after the show, and they’re all having a good time. It puts together a narrative we would be very hard pressed to produce on our own.’ In the past few years Cracker and Camper added the post-show meet and greet to the concert experience, further breaking down the wall between artist and fan. It’s an easy, and profitable, practice. “The guys do meet and greets all the time,” Vego said. “Country bands are notorious for that and that’s why they have such a huge following. As the band manager with Cracker one of the first things I said was ‘I just think you guys need to go out there and I think you’d sell more CDs if you go out by the merch table and just sit and take a picture and sign a CD.’ And it works. We know it automatically does better for our sales.”

ut this blasting of barriers is not for everyone. Performers as varied as indie crooner M. Ward to country superstar Kenny Chesney have shunned cameras and recording equipment at their shows, posting signs and pulling people out of aisles for shooting out of turn. For Chesney, the breaking point came last summer when filming fans had him tripping over lyrics. In Boston it was reported he took a fan’s camera, returning it later without the memory card. A few weeks later, a notice on

his Web site informed of a no camera policy, adding “your bags will be checked at the door and you will NOT be allowed admittance with a camera in hand.” While not banning cameras at their shows, Band of Horses’ lead singer Ben Bridwell takes none too kindly to the practice. In an interview with Pitchfork, Bridwell wrapped up his feelings succinctly: “Everyone’s got a fucking camera in their hand and, I don’t know, is there no sanctity left for live performance with going to a show and seeing it with your own eyes and remembering it? Do you have to tape every second, or even just your favorite song?” Vego, whose role as the 40 Watt’s booking agent is to have the venue abide by each band’s particular request, doesn’t see too many artists seek a camera ban. Still, there are exceptions. “Some people will say no videos, especially if they’re doing newer songs because they don’t want those to get out until the new record comes out, but I would say by and large they really do not care about the camera thing,” she said. “There’s definitely going to be artists that come in and don’t want anything. Social Distortion was “no cameras, no video” and we had to put that sign out right when people walked in that [they could not] bring cameras and video in.” For those in resistance, Peter Corbett has a stern message. “I’ll make it simple – get over it,” he said. “It’s hurting your bank account.” Corbett is the CEO of iStrategyLabs, a company based in Washington D.C. whose mission is to help its clients “connect with audiences online” and “create experiences in the real world that satisfy a brand’s need to engage its target audience in a deep and meaningful way.” Simply put, Corbett helps his clients reach the largest audience it can with all the digital tools it can muster. Boasting clients such as Nasdaq, American Outfitters and Corona, Corbett doesn’t see how a band can survive without using everything at it’s disposal. “Bands will have backlash over time if they don’t cater to what it is their fans really want, and what their fans really want is some form of participation,” he said. “If participation is shooting a photo on my iPhone and uploading it to a specific place where the band pulls it up on their Web site, awesome. Even better, what if the lead singer chooses his favorite fan photo of the week? What artist doesn’t want to be famous? How do you get more famous? You get more pictures and video shot of you. Harness the talent and passion of your fans to promote you, and if you’re not doing that there are other people who will be surpassing you in your rise to fame.” In financial stability, too. By not making an effort to compile the images and recordings of their fans in one place, bands miss out on

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Ingrid Michaelson embraced the fans fascination with digital keepsakes at her recent Athens show. Photo: We

an opportunity to bring the community into one main marketplace. “People are herding in a specific way — I’m going to shoot pictures, I’m going to shoot video, I’m going to do this thing — so how do you channel that herd into something that’s going to benefit you? People are inevitably going to be shooting video, etc., I need to be sure I’m pulling all of that content together in a place where I can sell them something rather than it being somewhere else.” Then again, at a certain level of superstardom, limiting your fan base from doing this or that doesn’t matter. In Forbes’ 2009 poll of the top-earning musicians, one country act rises millions above the rest: Kenny Chesney, earning a cool $65 million. How’s that for a snapshot?

or the bands that go too far in the other direction — completely bowing to the whims of every fan out there — there’s also trouble to be had. Ferguson’s role with his many bands is to keep a balance of what gets shared and what gets saved. On the one hand, you want your fans to be informed and happy. But on the other, if everything is known, what sense of discovery remains? “When you don’t have that mystery, you don’t have people in the audience using their

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“i could see where some artists are worried about what is being heard out there if they aren’t regulating what is being taped. but there’s no way to stop it. at least people are trying to spread the word.” -velena vego manager, cracker

imagination into who those people onstage are. That’s one of the allures of rock ‘n’ roll and always has been,” Ferguson said. “You get artists who check Facebook or message boards every single day and read all of this stuff, and slowly stuff other people are saying starts to influence them. I’ve seen musicians and bands forgetting who they are and catering to what people are saying to them online, which is a dangerous situation.” At that point, a band might start to lose what gained them those fans in the first place, which could prove fatal in a musical environment thriving as it moves into a new decade. “I forget who said it, but a classic quote I heard was ‘there is nothing wrong with music today, there’s a problem with the business model,’” Corbett said. “For sure, and

that’s changing rapidly. But there’s nothing wrong with music, there’s nothing wrong with bands and I would venture to say the music in the past five years is so much better than it was in the mid to late ‘90s.” It’s all a matter of timing. Bands coming up today have the luxury of added exposure, but lose the ability to take their time finding their way. One bad night, one disgruntled message board pest, or even one misplaced mic could end a career before it even starts. There’s no place to hide anymore, and the lack of privacy and time to develop could keep a hidden gem from finding its rightful audience. “A lot of our clients have fans who are armchair quarterbacks and think they should be doing one thing or another,” Ferguson said. “You don’t ever see musicians or anybody from their organizations getting on those people’s pages and saying, ‘Well I just went down to the HR department in your company and I really feel like you could be doing things a little bit differently or a little bit better.’ Think about this: What if Led Zeppelin had all of this technology around in those days, and the band was road testing material and someone said ‘You know what? Stairway to Heaven really fucking sucks. I mean, I’m not a fan, it’s way too long.’ Just imagine if that had been the case.” Imagine there’s no Stairway to Heaven? Nowadays, it’s easy — if you try. B

arts & entertainment UPCOMING ON THE SCREEN making sure it’s worth your $9.50

BOOK Of ELI (DECEMBER 15) (Hughes Bros.) A post-apocalyptic world is plagued by desolation and pain. One man, Eli, holds the answer to redeeming the world and all of humanity in a solitary book. Within the text is the key to salvation. However, such a prize is sought by many, including those who wish to destroy it or use it as a weapon. Eli must fight his way across a desolate and unforgiving land, struggling to protect the book and its secret, and deliver it to those who can use it to save the world.

44 Inch chest

tooth fairy

(JANUARY 22) (Malcolm Venville) Colin Diamond, a scorned husband, recruits his wannabe-gangster friends to abduct his wife’s lover. What ensues are the antics of an angry man who tries fruitlessly to come up with the nerve to kill this Casanova, while his friends stand by and encourage him to finish the job.

(JANUARY 22) (Michael Lembeck) An all-star hockey player is sentenced to “time,” for crushing children’s dreams. While there, he uses his own personal style to be a tooth fairy. However, to remove his sentence, he must learn the ins and outs of being a proper tooth fairy and how to believe in dreams.

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To save a life

The WolfmaN

(JANUARY 22) (Brian Baugh) A popular high school kid who has everything finds his life irrevocably changed when a fellow student commits suicide. Jake Taylor befriends a boy other students think is a loser, at the risk of losing his friends and his reputation, to try to prevent the same thing from happening again.

(FEBRUARY 12) (Joe Johnston) A legend of a man-eating beast that only feeds at the full moon creates havoc in a country town for years. But when the wolfman returns to hunt the townspeople, it infects another man, and they fear there is nothing that can stop the killing rage of the beast.

EDGE OF DARKNESS (JANUARY 29) (Martin Campbell) Detective Thomas Craven’s life is shattered when his only daughter is killed in front of his eyes. Plagued by her memory and believing the target was meant to be him, Craven relentlessly pursues the identity of his daughter’s killer. What he uncovers, however, is a secret that will force him into a world of conspiracy and lies. There, he will fight to understand the truth about his daughter and seek revenge for her death.

I LOVE YOU, PHILLIP MORRIS

VALENTINES DAY

(MARCH 26) (John Requa) A happily straight man suddenly realizes he is a happily homosexual man. In an effort to buy the latest accessories, he becomes a con man, but is quickly thrown in prison. There he meets the love of his life. However, their happiness together is not without some unusual trials and tribulations.

(FEBRUARY 12) (Garry Marshall) Ten people explore the meaning of Valentine’s Day in the City of Angels. On that special day, the lives of these 10 people intermingle to experience love, jealousy, lust, and everything in between, showing that loving a Blackberry, your dog, or the “wrong” one is never something to be ashamed of.

COP OUT

THE CRAZIES

(FEBRUARY 26) (Kevin Smith) Two cop buddies go undercover to retrieve a stolen vintage baseball card. However, these veterans definitely don’t follow the rule book to track down the thief, which gets them in more than their share of trouble, including run-ins with an exotic woman and the gangsters that kidnapped her.

(FEBRUARY 26) (Breck Eisner) A sleepy Pennsylvanian town is suddenly plagued by a sickness brought on from a biological weapon. It ravages the people infected, making them homicidal and eventually turning them into zombies. As the local sheriff tries to keep the town from panicking and find the answer, the military takes control.

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arts & entertainment

BEST BETS An Education (Director: Lone Scherfig) Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a headstrong 16 year-old facing the prospect of a pre-determined, Oxford-educated life as an upper middle class English girl before she is rescued from the tedium by an affair with David (Peter Sarsgaard), a man 20 years her senior. Adapted for screen by Nick Hornsby (About a Boy, High Fidelity) from the memories of Lynn Barber, “An Education” follows Jenny through the eye opening experiences of the urban wealth and mature romance in 1960s Britain and France.

The MESSENGER broken embraces

(Director: Oren Moverman) Capt. Tommy Stone (Woody Harrelson) and Staff Sgt. Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) have perhaps the most difficult job in the U.S. Military: informing family members of their loved one’s death in combat. Harrelson plays the grizzly vet of this grizzly job, tutoring and mentoring the young Foster in the emotional roller coaster with one underlying rule: don’t get involved or allow things to become personal. Winner of Best Screenplay and Peace Film Awards at The 2009 Berlin International Film Festival

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that evening sun

(Diector: Pedro Almodóvar) When Mateo Blanco loses his sight and his lover Lena (Penelope Cruz) in a brutal car accident, he feels that his life is over. So much so, in fact, that he assumes a new name: Harry Caine. As Blanco, he was a succesful script writer and director. As Caine, he is a shell of his former self, living in mourning and, when old secrets are revealed, in scandal. The movie relies heavily on flashbacks to compliment both the past and present aspects of this film.

(Director: Scott Teems) Based on William Gay’s short story “I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down,” this film follows the life of elderly Tennessee farmer Abner Meecham, who flees his nursing home to return to his rural lifestyle only to find his farm occupied by renters set up by his son while he was at the home. Meecham takes up a tense and determined residence on the property, hoping that Lonzo, who subsists on disability payments from an accident, won’t make enough money from the farm to exercise the purchase option in the lease.

check www.athenscine.com for specific show times and run dates

BEST BETS The LAST STATION (Director: Michael Hoffman) The Last Station follows the life of Russian Socialist writer Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) in the final year of his life — particularly the tumultuous relationship with his wife, The Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren). At the urging of his most devoted disciple Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy drafts and signs a new will that leaves all of his work to the Russian people rather than his own familiy. Sofya and other family members try everything within their power to rectify the situation before time runs out on the great Russian writer.

the imaginarium The WHITE of dr. parnassus RIBBON

(Director: Terry Gilliam) Dr Parnassus, the director of the magnificent “Imaginarium” travelling show, has a dark secret — in a web of deals with the devil, he must give up his daughter on her 16th birthday, which is rapidly approaching. As Dr. Parnassus becomes more desperate to protect his daughter, he renegotiates his deal, leading to a competition that will bring everyone in touch with more fantastical characters than they can possibly imagine.

(Director: Michael Haneke) Winner of the 2009 Palme D’or at The Cannes Film Festival, The White Ribbon takes place in a German village during 1913 and 1914, depicting a tightly-knit aristocratic estate in which everyone, from the local pastor and doctor to toiling Polish migrant labourers, knows their place. On the surface everything is fine. Then, as is so often the case in Haneke’s films, a small incident disrupts the calm, exposes that calmness as illusory, and starts a train of events that threatens to overwhelm the whole social order.

check www.athenscine.com for specific show times and run dates

A prophet

(Director: Jaques Audiard) Condemned to six years in prison at the young age of 19, Malik El Djebena cannot read or write. Arriving at the jail entirely alone, he appears younger and more fragile than the other convicts. Cornered by the leader of the Corsican gang who rules the prison, he is given a number of “missions” to carry out, toughening him up and gaining the gang leader’s confidence in the process. Malik is brave and a fast learner, daring to secretly develop his own plans.

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Imitat ofLif

tion fe

Kenan Thompson’s done well for himself by mimicking others by DeMarco Williams Doing impersonations is serious business. Get them right and your audience falls all over you. Hell, even the subject might let you know you’ve done an admirable job. Get the mimic wrong… Well, he or she will let you know about that too. “Every time I watch like Jay Leno’s new show,” comedian Kenan Thompson begins, “I [wonder] if I'll ever get a chance to be on there because I went on The Tonight Show and tried to do a Jay Leno. He hated it. I mean, it was a bad Jay Leno impression. I don't even think they aired it when, you know, they showed the interview or whatever. It was just like an awful moment. He really hated my Jay Leno impression.” A six-year veteran on the sketch comedy institution Saturday Night Live, Thompson’s Leno copy might be one of the few impressions he’s yet to master. No matter if the moment called for Al Roker, Maya Angelou or a gay Target shopper, the 31year-old Atlanta native has consistently nailed the role. “You try to go with something that's familiar to people,” explains the former Nickelodeon star of his comedic approach. “That way they can jump on board with what you're trying to do, basically. I only mimic people that really have like interesting voices because it's really hard to mimic someone who just talks regularly like me. There's nothing fun about that.” Of course, impersonations aren’t the only thing Kenan Thompson does well. When Hollywood needed a leading man for a big-screen adaptation of the classic Fat Albert cartoon, Thompson was there. When Nike called for a silly voice for its LeBron James puppet, guess who it looked up? Oh, and when the USA Network hit dramedy Psyche sought out a quality actor to sell his part in a barbershop quartet, you already know what happened. Yet even with all of that, Thompson still credits SNL for preparing him for the gigs his agent tosses his way. “A lot of people that graduated from the show [say], ‘This show is nothing like anything else,’” confirms Thompson, who appears to be channeling his comedic energies on NBC these days. “Everything else is downhill from here. They're right. I'll do guest stars and stuff like that in between shows and all you do is come in and say your lines like how it was when you were auditioning, you know? [With] SNL you have your hand on the pulse. And, you know, if what you do isn't funny, then you don't get to be on the show. And no other show is like that. So, yeah it is preparing you to be able to deal with any situation.” So, folks, if you should see the ever-alert Kenan Thompson on the street, ask him to portray a versatile, hard-working actor with a good sense of humor. We can almost guarantee you he’ll nail the impersonation.

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Release dates are subject to change. Check store website as these dates approach.

jan

The Hurt Locker Moon Halloween II Fame (2009) I Can Do Bad All By Myself A L’Aventure In the Loop

jan

Gamer Pandorum The Invention Of Lying Whiteout Outrage

jan

Surrogates Whip It This is It St. Trinian’s Saw VI

feb

A&E DVD RELEASE CALENDAR

upcoming dvD releases Zombieland New York, I Love You Amelia (2009) Ong Bak 2: The Beginning

feb

Time Traveler’s Wife Couples Retreat The Stepfather A Serious Man Song of Sparrows Serious Moonlight

feb

Law Abiding Citizen Coco Before Chanel Good Hair Black Dynamite Women In Trouble Immigrants

This DVD calendar is brought to you by Visio n Video. Visit them at www.VisionVideoMovies.com

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concert shots

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8 7

. Benji Hughes @ New Earth Music Hall (Ryan Myers) Glitch Mob @ New Earth Music Hall (Wes Elkin) EOTO @ New Earth Music Hall (Wes Elkin) Jordin Sparks @ STAR94 Jingle Jam (Chris McKay) Raquy & The Cavemen @ New Earth Music Hall (Stefan Eberhard) Kyle Hollingsworth @ New Earth Music Hall (Ryan Myers) Will Robinson, Mike Dekle, Greg Barnhill, Johanna Cotten @ The Rialto Room (Daniel Peiken) Don Chambers @ JJ Harris Elementary (Daniel Peiken) ATHENS BLUR MAGAZINE 46

concert shots 1

3 4

Joker @ New Earth Music Hall (Wes Elkin) DJ Rusko @ New Earth Music Hall (Stefan Eberhard) DJ Rusko @ New Earth Music Hall (Wes Elkin) Cobra Starship @ STAR94 Jingle Jam (Chris McKay) Music Tapes Caroling (Ryan Wilson) Billy Joe Shaver @ Melting Point (Daniel Peiken) Burnt Bacon @ Melting Point (Ryan Myers) ATHENS BLUR MAGAZINE

worth a thousand... A look inside the Georgia Theatre, January 2010. Photo: Justin Evans

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