Rearview Mirror is our annual look back at the year in music from our friends in and around the business.  Musicians, managers, roadies, superfans, bloggers etc..

This year we’re upping the vanity aspect of it by sprinkling in our favorite posts of the past year, which you may have missed the first time around. We came back strong in October, with Editor’s temp job wrapped up and ChaCha on the mend, but it was still easy to pick our favorite post for that month. A bittersweet pick, this post, is full of video we shot from the final show of PE favorites Throwing Stars. A great band, pay your respects by checking out their tasty goodness one more time won’t you?

Frank Turner and Jon Snodgrass, who are indeed buddies, have collaborated once again and given the world a timely song called “Happy New Year” which you can download for free right here.

Today we talk with Lydia Loveless about her first headlining tour, inspirations, song writing and picklebacks.

Postcard Elba: So you just wrapped up a tour that brought you through Bloomington on a dark and stormy night that decided to flood my house – thus preventing me from attending. How was your show at the Bishop?

Lydia Loveless: Hahaha yeah, that was fun….It was an interesting night for sure. The bass player almost got hit by a car and there was no one there, so I was in a pretty whiny mood

PE: We don’t care much for outsiders….

LL: Hahaha

PE: No, but seriously, please come back. We actually rule pretty hard, most of the time. How about the rest of the tour? How was that? If I’m not mistaken this was kind of your first headlining run right?

LL: Yeah, I think we will be back in January actually. It was a really good tour, a whole month…and I was very surprised we actually had crowds in some places, because for the most part no one has known who I am up until the record coming out

PE: It’s certainly a record that is making waves in the roots and Americana scenes, and one that is getting compared to everything from Neko to Loretta to the cow-punk of the 80′s – but I’m curious as to how you think of your sound. Where do you see, or hear, that you’re drawing from?

LL: Hmmmm…well I don’t really know. I think songwriting comes from a very different place than deciding you’re going to mimic someone. Some people like to do that, but I’m reluctant to because I don’t want to sound arrogant or miss the mark. There are definitely people that inspire me, but most of the time people are like, “yeah but….who do you REALLY get inspired by?” haha… I guess I call it rural rock

PE: Yeah, I meant it more in the way of what do you listen to that inspires you – even if that is pretty far out from what you actually do with the inspiration. Because there’s definitely moments of almost punk rock like energy and piss and vinegar on the album, just filtered through this rural sound.

LL: Yeah, I was very inspired by punk when I started writing. But I wasn’t able to really execute it properly, so it turned into country I guess, ha. I was listening to a lot of Exploding Hearts, The Queers, GG Allin…and random stuff my boyfriend introduced me to, including country music.

PE: There’s definitely a connection between punk and honky tonk and classic country, it’s just refreshing to hear someone bridging the two out of the gate, as opposed to what seems to be the model – singer of punk/hardcore band gets older and tired of screaming and buys an acoustic guitar.

LL: For sure. Not sure how that ended up being so popular, it’s really frustrating though

PE:I said this in our review of your album, but one of the things that I really like is that you pull the corner back on the bad-girl image, revealing the insecurities that fuel your, or the character in the song’s, motivation for a self-destructive lifestyle. I guess I’d like to know how autobiographical are your songs? Are they pretty close to home, or are you secretly a Twilight loving Mormon just writing in that voice?

LL: Well, it’s definitely very autobiographical. But many of my lyrics slip from perspective to perspective, and I’m not always being myself. But I am Mormon.

Kidding about that last part.

PE: Of course there’s always an element of fiction in even the most autobiographical material, and I assumed as much, but you know what they say about assuming things.  Ok, so debut full length doing well, just wrapped your first headlining tour – next up is the co-headlining tour with Scott H. Biram right?

LL: Yeah, if I strictly wrote about myself I imagine the songs would be quite dull There is a little tour of just us before that, but then the Biram tour will start. Which is awesome, because I can’t think of a better place to spend January than the south.

PE: It’s just a shame you have to go with such a dull boring dude though right?

LL: Haha, yeah…I have heard it will be “demented”. Should be fun

PE: I don’t know Biram personally, but from his stage persona and the stories I’ve heard….well let’s just say your decadent lifestyle will be put to the test.

LL: It usually is on tour. I’m usually trying to stay in decent health

PE: Hot Yoga? Free weights? What’s your jam Lydia?

LL: I don’t really work out on the road. I use the hotel exercise room and swim, and I do a weird mash up of whatever I can remember from exercise videos. Lame. Mostly though, I like making friends on tour and everything, but I have really bad social anxiety and I like to be alone at the end of the evening. I actually can make myself sick from being in public every night. So I do not really like to party in the strict sense of the word.

PE: Which is of course kind of what you sing about on “More Like Them.”

LL: Yep

PE: So let’s go ahead and wrap this up – you said you’re coming back to Bloomington in January – what are three things you hope to see, smell and experience when you make your triumphant return?

LL: Ha. Well I would like to see and experience a big crowd, and I guess as far as smell goes I got a pickle back at a bar there I hope to smell and taste again.

PE: We’ll try to set up all three for you. Thanks for spending a little of your time off with us, and we’ll see you in January.

LL: No problem. Thanks a bunch!

Check out our review of Lydia’s latest album here and catch her live in 2012 at one of the following shows.

We Never Asked For This is our short review of a band who thought (or their label/manager/agent/girlfriend thought) that it would be a good idea to send us an email saying “like me! like me! like me!” (more or less).

Today’s blind submission comes from Portland singer-songwriter John Amadon.

Sent to us from our friends at In Music We Trust, Seven Stars grabbed us from the start with it’s opener “Empty Fiction” which plays out like a deep cut from side two of Matthew Sweet’s album Girlfriend.  Chimey acoustic guitars that recall the languid ballads of the Kinks or mid-period Stones with plaintive but gorgeous vocal harmonies, we instinctively turned up the volume knowing we’ve landed on something special.  The album is primarily this same kind of slow but sprawling country rock sound but it is interspersed with the occasional upbeat number that sounds a bit like Michael Penn or Elliott Smith at their angsty-ist.  Smith is obviously an influence on Amadon, his vocal style is very reminiscent, but for the most part SS stands on it’s own, clear of any shadow.  If there is one direct thread to Smith, or Sweet or Penn for that matter, it’s the quality of songwriting on hand.  A beautiful collection of songs from an artist that we’re excited to see more from. Check it out here.

Very student-art-film video for the gorgeous song “Sunrise” by Mike Adams At His Honest Weight surfaced today on the internets. Enjoy.

Rearview Mirror is our annual look back at the year in music from our friends in and around the business.  Musicians, managers, roadies, superfans, bloggers etc..

This year we’re upping the vanity aspect of it by sprinkling in our favorite posts of the past year, which you may have missed the first time around. We only had three posts in September as it was a weird month. Editor had a new job that was very time intensive and ChaCha was getting her brain operated on/recovering from having her brain operated on but our favorite of the three was this one – videos from the It Still Bleeds comedy and music variety show featuring Heinous Orca rocking out as the house band, and Jason Evans Groth and EA Strother each playing two brand new never before heard songs.  One worth checking out again even if you did catch it the first time around.

Wedge is offering his album Almost Silent as a free download from now until the end of the year. So if you missed out on this tasty slice of melodic indie rock the first time around, here’s your chance to make amends.  Grab it here, and read our review of the album here.

Today’s tip-off is the pop-rock of Daniel Ellsworth & The Great Lakes

Civilized Man from Daniel Ellsworth & The Great Lakes kicks off with “Bleeding Tongue” full of fuzzy keyboards, sparse and dirty guitar and blown out vocals and sounding not just a little bit like the Black Keys. But once you’ve settled into that groove the chorus hits and you’re not quite so sure anymore. Swirling and untethered it transforms the song, if ever so briefly, and gives you a hint at what’s to come. Moving through a variety of styles Civilized Man come closest to the adventurous pop of John Vanderslice, but whereas Vanderslice transforms his pop with sonic ingenuity DE&TGL bends a core sound around a dozen neighboring corners. Meditative percolating ballads, country shuffles, synth-rock, tin-pan alley, doo-wop rhythm & blues – just when you think you have the album figured out it throws you a curve ball yet again, while remaining undeniably pop and undeniably DE&TGL. Check out the album here and the video for the first single “Shoe Fits” below.

Rearview Mirror is our annual look back at the year in music from our friends in and around the business.  Musicians, managers, roadies, superfans, bloggers etc..

This recap comes from Aaron Distler, drummer for Heypenny, Kyle Andrews and Madi Diaz and details a year where he stopped caring about the hottest new music because he was too busy making his own.

2011 was a weird year for me. I recall in my early 20s watching older friends lose touch with new music. These were friends I’ve been playing music with most of my life, or working in music with them in some form or fashion. People who turned me on to bands like the Cure, Spacemen 3, Velvet Underground, et. al. They inspired me and I was consuming new music like Cookie Monster, churning through Wilco B-Sides from the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sessions, trading hard to find songs, albums or bootlegs with friends and discovering random bands and telling all my friends about them. As I saw my older friends buy homes, have kids, get married and settle down I thought to myself, I can stay on top of this and do all these things! A brief stint at marriage and being a homeowner with two cats and a dog led me to believe that I could still be a tastemaker and be domesticated. Well… then your 30s come and 2 years into it I can safely say that I don’t get as excited about discovering music anymore. Sure things still hit my ear and make me want to listen to them over and over, but I always find myself going back to familiar songs from 2000 or 2004, and so on. I don’t really know when it happened. It’s as if I woke up one morning and stopped caring.

There is one thing that is for certain and that is I’ve become much more excited about playing music. 2011 was a busy year for me as a musician. Heypenny released A Jillion Kicks and we toured heavier than I ever have. For most of my life as a musician, I was nothing more than a weekend warrior, heading out on short runs every other weekend if not every weekend, hitting a 2-8 hour radius of where I lived. I can count the amount of 2 week tours I’d done on one hand. In 2011, I traversed the country for weeks at a time with Heypenny, only to get home and have 2 days to do laundry and hang out with my girlfriend before leaving for another 2 weeks with Kyle Andrews. As a teen and even into my early 20s, I dreamt of playing in NYC. I did it once in 1999 and fell in love with the city and did it again in 2002 and throughout the years with Heypenny I got that same feeling when we would go up to do a show with Jupiter One on a small run. And in 2011, It seemed as though I was in NYC every 2 months or so getting to do what I’d always dreamt about. In August, we played to over 140 people at Bowery Electric. A monumental thing for us. In November, I got to knock another thing off the bucket list. At the age of 30, I had never been to the west coast, let alone toured. Luckily my job afforded me the opportunity to visit LA in 2010 and May of 2011 but this November, I got to travel the country, traversing through time zones and playing music with Kyle Andrews and Madi Diaz. I played in Los Angeles, San Francisco and drove up the coast into Oregon where DJ (Heypenny’s bass player) used to live while he was getting his Masters in Philosophy. I was lucky enough to see things I’d never thought I would see. The redwoods. The cliffs at Haceta Head where moss grew on the sides of larger than life rocks and waves crashed, spraying water 30 feet into the air as I stood 10 feet away from it on a rock off the coast. We drove over mountain passes covered in snow where trees stretched into the azure blue sky. We drove to Cougar Dam and hiked to some natural hot springs and soaked in 107 degree water on the side of a snow covered mountain.

So, while I might not be hip to Lana Del Ray’s “Video Games” or Youth Lagoon or Toro Y Moi or whatever the kids are listening to these days, I can honestly say that music is still making me feel alive. More so than I think I ever did in my teens or 20s. And while my beard is turning grey and I get excited about Fleetwood Mac songs as opposed to OFWGKTA, I’m feeling more youthful than I ever did as a 21 year old, perhaps because I’ve finally crossed that threshold I’d envisioned as a 15 year old, that is, going to cities, familiar or new, playing music with my best friends and being able to support myself in doing so. And while I might not have the nicer car or biggest TV, I’m doing all of those things listed above and they are certainly the finest things in life. Cheers 2011.