Author Archives: Easy Ed

Sandra Louise Dyas Storms The Big Apple (ton)

For a visual artist a show at a gallery is the equivalent of a musician grabbing a killer gig at that special venue. Back in January 2014, a friend of mine got her moment, and I chronicled and published the story over at the No Depression site. Thought I’d bring it back home, because it’s a great story about a special person.

January 19, 2014- On my map, Appleton Wisconsin is about a half inch north of Milwaukee, and maybe slightly less than two inches to the right of Minneapolis. My friend Sandy Dyas was worried needlessly last night about driving back home to Iowa City this morning, because there might have been a storm coming in. But I can report that she is home safe and sound. Sipping wine on her couch and resting.

She wrote to me: “After seven hours of driving (not always such great roads…) I am now HOME! and so happy to be here. This is the BEST show I have ever made. It is due to a lot of things, but the gallery really helped me create an interesting and connective space. And i also used three video monitors with pieces i have made – they formed sort of a triangle in the circular room.”

This show she speaks of is as important to a photographer as to what a night at the Whiskey or Bottom Line means to a musician. A chance to show off your best stuff, get recognition and acknowledgment for your hard work from both fans and peers, maybe sell some of the books you’ve published. It comes after she Kickstarter-ed a new book of her work titled “my eyes are not shut” which she published two years ago this week. (Available here.)

Lawrence University, which was founded in 1847, is a small but prestigious institution and uniquely integrates a college of liberal arts and sciences with a nationally recognized conservatory of music, reached out to Sandy with a pretty sweet deal. At the Kohler Gallery inside the Wriston Art Center, her large exhibition opened the other night with a lecture and reception and will be on display to the public through March 16th, 2014.

Those of you who have been reading my articles at No Depression these past five years probably are well aware of Sandy’s story and incredible images. For those who are not, I’ll tell you that Grant Alden would sometimes pluck her work out of the piles he’d receive from artists, managers and record labels, and feature them for stories in the magazine…back in the day. I can tell you she is a major music junkie and being based in Iowa City, she’s tight with everyone in that scene.

Her official bio reads like this: Sandra Louise Dyas is a visual artist and a Lecturer in the Art Department at Cornell College. She received her MFA in Intermedia at the University of Iowa in 1998. Her first book of photographs entitled “Down to the River; Portraits of Iowa Musicians” was published by the University of Iowa Press in June 2007.

About the new book, Sandy says “Drawn to people and environments and especially light, my camera is a way of recording life as I see it. I strive to create a collaborative and authentic portrait of the ever-changing, strange and beautiful world we live in. This book is a collection of people, places and things I want to hold on to and remember.”

She’s put together a short video where she speaks about how she developed a passion for taking pictures, and how she chooses the best of the bunch. And below a little bit we’ll show you the final selection. The voice of Sandy is layered here, so don’t think it isn’t streaming properly. You know…artsy effects.

The young woman is Caroline Louise, and this was shot in Andrew Iowa for the 2013 project “Lost In The Midwest”.

The very best way to share my feeling about the work that Sandy does is to share it with you. In a world where everyone has a great camera built into their phones, where you can edit on Instagram and publish to thousands of eyes on social media in minutes, I imagine that the life of a professional artist is not very different from a musician. You Tube, Spotify, Pandora and the handful of downloading sites still out there make it tough to derive a revenue stream. Sandy is one of the lucky ones who has a ‘day job’ at a college, and is in demand for her incredible portrature abilities.

Take a look at some of her work…I’ve posted some below.

Visit her official site.

Her personal blog.

Buy her books.

And maybe if the spirit moves you, take a trip to Appleton.

Phillip Henry and Hannah Martin: Mynd And Meteorology

Phillip and Hannah They say that the world is a lot smaller these days, what with news, culture, art, fashion and all sorts of events traveling at supersonic speed through Earth’s inner space. For a few days last week it seemed that everyone posted something on their social media weapon of choice about the passing of Nelson, and today I’m seeing pictures and music of Lennon and tomorrow it will be remembering Sandy Hook. Or snow. The weather is of utmost interest. And in fact, I had a flashback tonight about weather or rather the forecasting of it at the little Chinese restaurant in our village as my sixteen year old son and I shared dumplings, ribs and sesame chicken. And oh yes, we did have brown rice so that made it all ok and healthy-like.

But I was riffing on the fact that although long range forecasts say that in six days we’re going to have a snow storm, three days from now the forecast will likely change to being sunny with highs in the upper fifties. Nobody will remember what the weather person on the tube said just a few days earlier, as long as they get tomorrow’s weather right. And then I entered the Wayback Machine.

When I was a kid there was never a long range weather forecast on television news. It was relegated to a couple of minutes about 24 minutes into a 30 minute show, and the guy…it was always a guy…came on screen with a map behind him with little cloud, sun, rain or snow cut-outs stuck to it (and this is before Velcro), and he’d tell us what tomorrow would be like. He was right usually, or at least half the time.

Weatherwoman But then somebody got a great idea. Why just a one or two day forecast…when you can have a week’s worth! A long range forecast. And it didn’t have to be right or even real, because as each day went by you could keep changing it. All you had to do was increase the odds for tomorrows weather prediction from 50/50 to (let’s say) 75/25, and the rest would just march into place and you’d be a genius. It was at this moment in time, probably the early seventies as I recall, that weather became big. Fat men with bow ties were replaced with handsome male models, later to be replaced with blonde women except in Latin America. And that’s not a gender stereotype. It’s just that women weather people spend a lot of time telling us about the weather while out on location, and their hair is naturally lightened by the sun.

Anyway, back to the music.

I was thinking about the end of the year reader’s favorite album poll tonight and making sure that I wasn’t missing anything, when thanks to the webbie thing, I discovered that there is this duo in England that seem to be on everybody’s list back (or is it ‘over’) there. Last year they received a Spiral Award (have no clue what that may be) for Best Duo, and they’re up for the same award this year (well…actually they call it the 2014 award…I don’t know why) from the BBC Folk Awards. I’ve heard of the BBC.

They are Phillip Henry and Hannah Martin. And the album they released this year is called Mynd. So I Spotified it tonight and love it to death. They are damn good. He’s a slide guitarist and harmonica player and she is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. Someone named Mike Harding, whom I don’t know, wrote (or maybe he said) “On hearing the first notes of the first track I knew that I was listening to a modern classic. One of the most exciting albums I’ve heard in years” And Martin Chilton of the Daily Telegraph wrote (I’m sure) “An imaginative and innovative album – songs that linger in the memory held together by the fine musicianship of Henry and Martin. Strong and original – an unusual treat.”

So with such a small world we live in, it’s astonishing to me that here in our midst we have a truly wonderfully produced and executed roots album from just five or six hours away by air, and most of us I’d venture to guess never heard of it. And probably won’t. Unless Rick Rubin produces the next one for Lost Highway or T-Bone puts them on his next Coen soundtrack. I don’t know.

I went to You Tube, and found that they have quite a few songs and visuals up. Some are well produced. And then there was this one. A lonely little cover song from James Taylor, with just a paltry 163 views. Miley Cyrus gets a 163,000 views in a nano-second. And this is far from their finest performance or best song (in fact, I don’t think its even recorded on their albums), but it says a lot. Listen and watch. This is music happening in some small club, on any night, at any time, in any corner of the world. And we miss it. In a blink of an eye, it’s over. But now, here in the 21st century, we have ways to capture and preserve. And we do. Which is pretty cool.

I heard it’s going to snow on Saturday.

When I originally published this piece at No Depression, I titled it: I Was The 164th Person To Watch This Video

Stray Birds and Caitlin Canty: A Cold Night, Sweet Hug and that Tall Bass Player

Its Saturday night before Thanksgiving 2013. The wind whips through the trees, occasional snow flurries fall from the sky over the village of Hastings-On-Hudson in the state of New York, and inside the Unitarian…whatever it is (please don’t call it a church)..building; there is music. Sweet, sweet music.The Common Ground Community Concerts‘ series, eleven or twelve seasons strong, is presenting Caitlin Canty tonight, along with headliner The Stray Birds.

Caitlin, who I walked up to after she left the stage, told her I loved her and gave her a big hug…before dropping forty bucks on all her albums and EPs, which caused her to instigate a reciprocal hug…is (currently in 2015) promoting a new album produced by Jeffrey Foucault. Visit her website and get to know her.

The Stray Birds, whose debut album last year was well-written about (there are lots of posts on our site) and played heavily on radio, particularly by stations in the NPR universe, far exceeded the expectations I had. As much as I love the album, I couldn’t imagine how three players could reproduce the recorded beauty, precision and collaboration in a live setting. But this was a quite magical, stand out performance, shared by maybe a hundred people in a small room. And it reminded me a bit about Al Pacino’s speech in Any Given Sunday.

“Now I can’t do it for you.
I’m too old.
I look around and I see these young faces
and I think
I mean
I made every wrong choice a middle age man could make.
I uh….
I pissed away all my money
believe it or not.
I chased off
anyone who has ever loved me.
And lately,
I can’t even stand the face I see in the mirror.

You know when you get old in life
things get taken from you.
That’s, that’s part of life.
But,
you only learn that when you start losing stuff.
You find out that life is just a game of inches.
So is football.
Because in either game
life or football
the margin for error is so small.
I mean
one half step too late or to early
you don’t quite make it.
One half second too slow or too fast
and you don’t quite catch it.
The inches we need are everywhere around us.
They are in every break of the game,
every minute, every second.”

Like a football team, this trio of stray birds have practiced and created not just songs, but movements within the songs that make three instruments and three harmonious voices sound as if there were three hundred. While they each learned their craft in the classical environment, they also grew up in homes with parents who exposed them to folk, old time, bluegrass and blues, which pretty much makes them the children of the children of Woody.

The tall bass player.

Within this particular world of acoustic music, with none or only meager financial subsidies from the record labels, hardly any record stores left to visit and only pods of festivals for the tribes to gather, our minstrels are left to traveling from town to town. Playing their hearts out, they rely on the generosity and hospitality of their promoters and audience. And it is the ritual that between sets and after the show it is hoped for that you’ll make your way to the merch table…where goods are sold and an opportunity to connect with the artist is available.

Many musicians find the idea of “business” an emotional draw from the “creative” process. How many times have you been to a gig and hear the performer almost be apologetic about selling their work, or simply mumble into the mic letting their voice trail off? And to those I say…get over it.

Caitlin Canty came prepared with her Square credit card reader and a small case of product. She mentioned her albums in song introductions, quite organically. She said she’d be at the table selling her music at the end of her set, and so she was. And the tall bass player with The Stray Birds, he used humor and personality to let everyone know that they had something new to share. Or rather, sell. An EP…five tracks….called The Echo Sessions. And the result was that after the encore, instead of retreating to their green room (actually the Sunday classroom for grades 1-3), and feasting on squab and champagne, they mingled, gabbed, smiled and sold their product.

Recorded in a single live session on October 8th of this year, at the Echo Mountain Studios in North Carolina, this beautiful five song set of carefully chosen covers can be checked out here, and of course there are links to iTunes and CD Baby. The band writes on their website that this recording is “dedicated to the people who inspire us to sing our way through life. These songs came into our lives as echoes. Whether through another artist’s recording or someone’s rendition in a kitchen, they made the long journey from their writers’ hearts to ours. May our voices be another echo in the lives of these beloved songs.”

I listened to my copy on the way home, and have replayed it a few more times as I sit here after midnight writing these words. There will be a new album forthcoming (it came), but in the meantime we have these five songs to hear and savor. Check the website.

Here’s a video of the Stray Birds covering Townes’ “Loretta”, which is on The Echo Sessions.

The Thing About Emily Mure

I realize that in this community of old hippies, post-punk latter-day newbie-parental types and the occasional bluegrass traditionalist who stumbles here by mistake because they think we all love to hear the “Orange Blossom Special” covered the same way six thousand times, that I sometimes stand alone. Well maybe not alone, but sort of to the left of the main event. The reason being is that I suck up new music and young(er) musicians like a Dyson on a shag carpet. And despite my posts in the last eleven months about Jules Shear and his wife Pal Shazar (four times), Lou Reed, the Smithereens (just once each) and Grateful Dead (twice)…much of what I listen to is from people in their twenties and thirties, and sometimes even their teens. This year at a Rosh Hashanah dinner I found myself defending Miley Cyrus as being as relevant as Beethoven…or maybe it was Woody or Pete. And Taylor Swift? Dig her. Sort of.

Let me tell you how I listen to new music, no matter who, new, young, old or how established the artist is. Fast. Yes, I admit that while skimming quickly on the iTunes player or Spotify is not very fair or friendly, and devalues the art and hard work that goes into it, its how I roll. If it catches my ear, it’s a keeper. If not, it gets the hook. Gong Show style. The ones I find interesting get placed in a one thousand song playlist and they stay with me for at least three weeks, and get listened to either in a shuffle mode or maybe end to end if I’m really enthralled.

Say hello to Emily Mure, and her latest album Odyssey.

I found her music last July, after reading about her on another website. It went into the aforementioned playlist and has stayed there ever since. And, to be utterly honest, it’s not because I fell in love with it straight off, but because it haunted and challenged me. There was/is something about her songs and voice that made me want to go off into a quiet place and to be sure I captured each and every note. She surprised me too. When I expected the melody to go up the scale, it went down. When you think it’s time for a minor chord transition, she shifts to a major key. And just when you’re pretty sure you’ve got your basic coffee house folky singer-songwriter, she slips into that chamber mojo mode where people like Marissa Nadler and Meg Baird live, and then out of nowhere…I mean like an Ali left jab…you get a pedal steel, oboe and a cello thrown at you. Bam.

She’s a New York City girl who attended a performing arts high school, studied classical music and played the oboe at Carnegie and Avery Fisher Halls while still in her teens. At college she studied Oboe Performance and Psychology…and for the life of me I can’t figure out if that’s one major or two. Some college kids get into dope, drink and sex…she succumbed to folk, bluegrass and the guitar. Falling in love with traditional Irish music, she took off across the Atlantic for a summer studying Celtic music at the University of Limerick. After she came back home to finish her studies at Ithaca College, she moved to Galway and busked in the streets for six months.

“I moved out to Ireland with my best friend from college. At the time I was in need of escape and after spending some time in Ireland a few years before for an Irish/trad summer program, I decided to go back to explore the country further. I didn’t go with the intention of singing on the streets- I wanted to just travel. We got temporary work visas and I was having trouble finding a job. After one afternoon busking, I decided I would try to do this for income- and so I did (for a very modest but livable income) It was challenging which is why it was great. I learned so much about myself and it thickened my skin and gave me confidence.”

By 2009 she was back in New York and recording her first album, while performing on the vibrant folk circuit that we have in this part of the world, from Pennsylvania to Maine. In 2012 she started getting some airtime on television and began recording the current album…which is available at all the usual places like here and here and here and here.

Emily has been touring and doing shows to support the new album, and as all DIY artists do, she has her day job of teaching guitar to help pay the bills. Given her background, I asked her if she was involved in the classical world. “I still play the oboe but mainly for fun. I am thinking about getting back into ensemble playing but for now- it’s mostly just a hobby. I’m enjoying writing for my oboist- Emily DiAngelo. I love the oboe but didn’t love the repertoire or the classical music atmosphere which is why I made the shift once I started playing guitar and writing songs. Felt like folk and songwriting was more me.”

February 5, 2017: As is the case with most of the musicians I’ve written about through the years, Emily and I had never met. We exchanged emails and stayed loosely connected via social media. I knew she had moved to Massachusetts, was playing on the club and coffee house circuit throughout the Northeast, and worked as a music teacher. Last night she did backup singing at folksinger-artist Joe Crookston’s Imagine Nation concert and we spoke at length before the show. She’s living back in Manhattan and working on a new album. Her website is updated, has playlists and videos, lists her tour dates, and contact information if you’re in need of singing, songwriting or guitar lessons.

In the original article that was published, I also mentioned Emily’s grandfather, guitar player Billy Mure. Since then, through the magic window of Google, I’ve decided his story should be told on it’s own. When I write it, I’ll link it here.

In the meantime, here’s a video Emily posted recently and this song is stuck inside my head. Glad we finally met…this is a very special person.

The Night The Singer Forgot The Words

I’ve been playing guitar close to fifty years now, both solo and in bands, and outside of an occasional harmonic background “ah ah ah” or “ooo ooo ooo”, I don’t sing. First off, I’d do it badly. No English accent, no Texas twang. But more to the point, I can’t remember a lyric even when I’ve heard the tune a thousand times and the words are written on a piece of paper six inches in front of my face. It’s been an issue for me like acne on a teenage girl’s face. And then I noticed that Lucinda Williams almost always has a stand with her lyrics sitting on it while performing on stage. And Frank Sinatra, when I saw him at the Sands in Vegas right before he died, used an old fashioned floor tele-prompter that rolled the words along and for much of the show it appeared he was staring at his shoes.

Most of us who hold regular type jobs have bad days at the office, studio or store. Shit happens. You’ll make a mistake, we all do. Inevitable. Destined. Unavoidable. You ship the wrong part, give a customer a steak when they ordered fish, tell your boss you saw his wife last night at a bar with some other guy, spill red paint on the white carpet or play in the key of C while everyone else is in E. You go home, feel awful, maybe have a drink or a smoke or watch the tube and realize maybe things aren’t all that bad. Perspective is a great healer of wounds,

So let me tell you about this show I went to…

I’d been wanting to see this particular singer-songwriter-guitarist for years, and as luck would have it, the show was literally down the street from me. Not exactly a house concert, but a warm-up for an upcoming tour that just happened to be at a house turned into a beautiful venue. And only twenty bucks to get up close and personal, rather than travel later to a larger venue in the city for probably five times that. What could be bad?

The room, which I would like to note was quite lovely with a great stage set and a state of the art sound system, was packed. Twas the usual crowd for a thirty-something Americana/roots/acoustic artist these days: mostly late-fifties to early-seventies, gray hair, baggy jeans, old t-shirts and chattering about the time they saw this band or that. Everybody kew somebody that knew Pete Seeger. Everybody went to Woodstock. You know what I mean.

So after a local warm-up act who you clap extra loud and a little too long for because her parents and siblings and relatives and friends are in the audience to see her and you want to be nice, the fairly seasoned, highly talented and well regarded singer-songwriter-guitarist comes out on the stage and proceeds to play. Songs that are so beautiful you tear up. Guitar playing that one can only wish they could emulate. Vocals that are crisp, clear, on the right beat and then…oops.

They forget the words, make a joke about it. We laugh. It happens again on the next song. Another joke. We laugh even harder. This is some night we think to ourselves. Not your polished hundred buck concert in the city…but a real exchange of human frailty and emotion.

After an hour and at least six songs that get mangled and maimed, there is a hint that perhaps this singer-songwriter didn’t practice enough. Or at all. My favorite line of the evening: “C’mon…if you were going to play a concert, would you listen to your old albums to remind yourselves of the songs?”

Uh….yeah. I might have. You didn’t.

Because this artist is so good and somewhat loved, he pretty much got a pass from the audience. With each song you held your breath in anticipation of the upcoming blooper, but of the twenty or so songs in the set, he only had to stop seven times because of premature memory loss. And if you’re a baseball player, you’ll be going to the Hall of Fame with that statistic.

With all the new technology these days, I still like this old fashioned way to remember the lyrics. And take this advice…when you’re on stage and make a mistake, don’t lose your head.

“Van Gogh – Trauernder alter Mann” by Vincent van Gogh – Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.

The Allman Brothers and Life of Pie

New Yorker Before you invest too much time here, this ain’t got much to do about Duane and Gregg. It’s more about a few paragraphs buried within a larger story published by New York magazine this week called Why You Truly Never Leave High School. The gist in a nutshell: everything you are today can be traced back to your days in the tenth through twelfth grades. Or maybe almost everything.

Laurence Steinberg, a developmental psychologist from Temple University who researches such stuff, makes this statement that really made me sit up and think: “There’s no reason why, at the age of 60, I should still be listening to the Allman Brothers. Yet no matter how old you are, the music you listen to for the rest of your life is probably what you listened to when you were an adolescent.”

All of a sudden I start to understand why so many of my elders…alright, lets call them my contemporaries if we must…spend so much time waxing about the old days of the sixties and seventies, of the Byrds and Gram Parsons, the Beatles and Stones, Journey and Kansas, Manilow and Diamond. You get the idea, I’m trying to be democratic with the small “d”. It’s all tied into the development of the prefrontal cortex and your dopamine levels, and “any cultural stimuli we are exposed to during puberty can therefore make more of an impression”.

Steinberg again: “During times when your identity is in transition, it’s possible you store memories better than you do in times of stability.” Example: “I am the kind of person who likes the Allman Brothers.” Egads…a life sentence of Eat A Peach.

The extension of this and other research that’s now being done by psychologists and neurologists, are the differences in development for today’s teens from my generation. And the article, which is touted on the front cover with the sub-title of High School Is A Sadistic Institution, is well worth your time to read if you’re interested in such things.

But the thought about how our aural patterns and preferences develop, and more importantly stick with us like glue, is what I find fascinating. I know that I still am listening to much of the music of yesterday. But on the other hand, I also listen to lots of new things, and two nights ago I even spent an hour listening to an avant-garde radio show broadcast on WNYU. Yes, my son had it on, but I stayed there with him and listened. And liked it. (Is that the musical equivalent to “Some of my best friends are into avant-garde”?)

Now to be clear, the research doesn’t say that all of a sudden at age sixteen we stop developing or are no longer interested in learning and being exposed to new things. Hardly.

On the other hand, let us talk pie for a moment. When I was a teen…and would find myself getting into a particular state of craving…my go-to nibble was either the entire box of Nabisco Nilla Wafers my mom hid in the pantry or a Tastykake Blueberry Pie, which today is just a mere shadow of itself packed in a fancy plastic sealed carton. While the box may claim “Baked Fresh Daily”, there is no indication of being delivered and sold that same day. Preservatives.

Back in the old days, it came from the bakery still warm, and the side of the box had air vents for the steam to escape so that the crust remained crisp and didn’t get soggy. While Tastykake also satisfied with their Chocolate Junior, Jelly Krimpets and Cream Filled Cupcakes, it was always the pie that I’d reach for first. And if they didn’t have blueberry, apple was a close second.

And the reason I bring this up is that in terms of comfort food, in times of stress I might still reach for one of these tasty treats from my high school days. It’s the pattern ingrained in me. And I might still throw on a little Byrds or Springfield, some Moby Grape or perhaps Lowell George or the Youngbloods or if I’m feeling out of control, Pearls Before Swine.

High school was sadistic…but the magic’s in the music and the music is in me.

The New York article, which I linked above, was written by Jennifer Senior. An unlikely name for this piece.

Six Strings of Love and How Ricky Nelson Changed My Life

Like many other American kids in the fifties and early sixties, I fell in love with wood and strings while watching Ricky Nelson play at the end of each weeks “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett” TV show. I recall dragging my parents to my Uncle Lou’s music store to sign up for lessons and he said guitars were just a fad, so I took home an accordion instead. That lasted about a month.

For the next year I saved my pennies for my first axe: a black Silvertone S-623 archtop with f-holes and white pick guard that I bought from Sears and Roebucks. That guitar got lost along the way, and outside of a decade flirtation with a Hagstrom solid body electric that ended in the mid-seventies, I’ve always been an acoustic man.

There is something honest and truthful about being unplugged and the images of old cowboys out in the prairie or sharecroppers on the steps of their shacks, takes me back to times that may have been simpler or maybe not. Never one to spend a ton of money on my instruments, there are times I admit that I lust after the Martins that you see on e-Bay for twenty grand or more. I do like those Taylor guitars and the way they ring, and if you ask me, an old National steel is just too cool for words.

Whether I play them or not, being around guitars just feels damn good. In high school I hung around the Guitar Workshop in Philly, long gone now. Met David Crosby there, who wandered in with Joni Mitchell. When I go to Nashville I go to Gruhns’ and for loads of fun there’s Willie’s in St. Paul. There used to be a bunch of music stores off Broadway in Manhattan, but they’re all shuttered now.

Nowadays I go through websites to see whats new, or look through the Guitar Center catalogs that get stuffed into my mailbox. It’s a pretty lousy substitute for standing in store full of wire and wood. Sort of lonesome…

The Real Easy Ed

Americana and Roots Music Broadside