A few hours late but nevertheless...

October 21st, for me, will always be the saddest day in music.

The day Elliott Smith died is more sad than the day John Lennon died because I wasn't born when John Lennon died. I don't remember coming home from school and checking my e-mail and seeing a message from my friend asking if I'd heard about it which, up until then, I hadn't. It's sad because no other musician had ever touched my life the way Elliott Smith had and no matter how much I may love Okkervil River, it's just not the same because Elliott came into my life when I was lost and didn't know who I was. It's part of being young. But instead of turning to the dreadfully named 'emo' culture (I fear I'm a bit too old for that trend) or the grating pop punk, I was lucky enough to walk into the record store on the right day and get the right recommendation and it changed my life.

It's sad. He's gone and it's sad and last night, I was watching the wonderful Beatles documentary All Together Now and Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono were talking about George and John and they said that it's hard because now they're not here anymore, they're just voices.

But what voices they are.




Twilight


As much as I hate to use the phrase 'swan song', it may just apply with Twilight, perhaps the most heartwrenchingly gorgeous song of Elliott's career, released on the posthumous album, my personal favorite and (in my opinion) the most cohesive of Elliott's many brilliant records, From a Basement On The Hill.

If you don't love Elliott Smith already, now is the time to start. Today, Chad over at Everybody Cares designated a 10 post Elliott day, starting with his high school band, Stranger Than Fiction, including some live gems and is, as everything Chad posts about Mister Smith, beautifully written, sad and thoroughly great.

Just like Chad said, we miss you like crazy Elliott. We all do.



Thirteen (Live Big Star Cover)






Read The Hot Half Life's Genuis post on Elliott Smith.

The Hot Half Life Rocks Out to... Okkervil River at the Metro, 10/14

So any regular readers of my blog will not be surprised at the fact that for my first concert review, I’ve chosen to write up my recent Okkervil River experience. That’s not due completely to the fact that I love and adore them - You also have to take into account that since I moved to Chicago, I haven’t really gone to a concert worth writing up and, well, my very favorite band’s gone a-tourin’ and stopped in my hometown. Could I honestly be expected to pass up such an opportunity? No readers! I couldn’t! I just couldn’t.

It all started out great enough with my lovely date, Rachel and I, stuffing our mouths full of various sushi rolls and drinking the best cups of coffee ever beforehand although that subsequently meant we arrived fashionably late, missing the majority of openers Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears. As for the Crooked Fingers set, I was sadly less than captivated. I have a decent familiarity with Eric Bachman’s work but really, this concert was the deciding factor on whether I pursued Crooked Fingers discography or merely remained acquainted with them on a minimal level. & I was slightly disappointed that I wasn’t all that impressed.

The audience, for the most part, was personable, friendly and seemed to all be there to actually see Okkervil River and when they took the stage, the response was quite amazing, or at least it was in the forefront of the crowd where Rachel and I had managed to inch and squeeze our way to.

The band unexpectedly opened with Plus Ones (a song I always enjoyed as a witty lyrical shout out to anyone with extensive music knowledge, with lyrics referencing Question Mark and the Mysterions, the Zombies and too many more to name in one single blog), throwing me off slightly because I expected something either high energy or super slow to start out the set (Read that as I was waiting for Our Life Is Not A Movie or Maybe or a solo rendition of A Girl In Port) but after it ended, the band tore into the biting Singer Songwriter, A Hand To Take Hold of The Scene and Black and I was thanking my brain for all the endorphins it was releasing because without my adrenaline, I would’ve been eagerly awaiting the emergence of the set’s first ballad to get a break from hand-clapping, jumping and dancing, which was a must as I was in the Metro’s previously designated ‘dancing section’.

Standing out in particular was the witty and biting reinterpretation of The President’s Dead rewritten to The President’s Alive, the raucous one-two-three punch of Lost Coastlines, Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe and For Real which, Will said, were played out of order causing what he said would be a plateau of energy. I, however, thought that playing Lost Coastlines first really ramped up the excitement for Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe and hearing it live, complete with handclaps, feedback and the show’s shout-along audience gave me a new appreciation for a song I thought I’d be hard pressed to appreciate anymore than I already did.

All of this can be put aside for me, however, because by far the best moment came for me at the encore with Will Sheff’s solo rendition of the gorgeous Red, a song that holds a great personal significance to me due to the stanza about taking a dancer home and how she felt so alone. Red is one of those songs that eerily mirrors my life and hearing it done live, just Will and his guitar, is probably going to rank as the best musical moment I’ve got to experience for quite a while.

In the days since, I did read an actual negative review of the show from an Okkervil uber-fan - Sure, things went wrong during the show (Including broken strings and blown out monitors) and there were some set-list deviations which, apparently, caused some rumbles and even bassist Patrick Pestorius admitted they were only ‘half there’ after the show but what can I say? I thought they were amazing. Maybe I’m biased - They are my favorite still-alive, still-together band after all. But between a solid set, an appreciative crowd and an overall amazing experience, I’m sold. And as much as I love these guys and would love for them to actually take a break and not tour their lives away, I cannot wait for them to get their asses back on their bus and get back to Chicago.

Also - Because I can’t help but brag, nothing in the world is better than when you meet people you hold in such high esteem and they are real, personable and everything that you wish they’d be. The guys in Okkervil River are phenomenal gentlemen and I cannot say enough about Scott Brackket and Patrck Pestorius. I wish I could say more about Will Sheff but sadly, I turned into a star struck 15 year old when I glimpsed the gorgeous man and I think the only full, non-stuttered sentence I managed to get out of my mouth was "Thank you for playing Red!". (To which he replied "No problem.")

& because I can't help myself - This is proof, by the by, that I did actually speak to him, albeit briefly and awkwardly!

The President’s Alive (Live)

Red


Also, for more pictures of Okkervil's tenure in Chicago not involving me chatting up Will Sheff (although if you just want to gaze at that lovely photograph all day, well, I'm right there with you), head over to Jeremy Farmer's flickr!

Lyrics and Melody.

Please remember me, happily, by the rosebush laughing with bruises on my chin
the time when we counted every black car passing your house beneath the hill
and up until someone caught us in the kitchen with
maps,a mountain range, a piggy bank - A vision too removed to mention.

But please remember me, fondly - I heard from someone you're still pretty
and then they went on to say that the Pearly Gates have such eloquent graffiti
like: “We'll meet again” and “Fuck the Man” and “Tell my mother not to worry”
and angels with their great handshakes but always done in such a hurry.

And please remember me, at Halloween making fools of all the neighbors
our faces painted white - by midnight, we'd forgotten one another
and when the morning came, I was ashamed only now it seems so silly
that season left the world and then returned and now you're lit up by the city.

So please remember me, mistakenly, in the window of the tallest tower
call, then pass us by, but much too high to see the empty road at happy hour
gleam and resonate just like the gates around the Holy Kingdom
with words like: “Lost and Found” and “Don't Look Down” and
“Someone Save Temptation.”

And please remember me, as in the dream we had as rug-burned babies
among the fallen trees and fast asleep beside the lions and the ladies
that called you what you like and even might give a gift for your behavior:
Afleeting chance to see a trapeze-swinger high as any savior.

But please remember me, my misery,and how it lost me all I wanted -
Those dogs that love the rain, and chasin' trains, the colored birds above there
runnin' in circles round the well and where it spells on the wall
behind St. Peter so bright on cinder gray in spray paint:
“Who the hell can see forever?”

So please remember me, finally, and all my uphill clawing my dear,
but if i make the Pearly Gates, I’ll do my best to make a drawing
of God and Lucifer, a boy and girl, an angel kissin’ on a sinner, a monkey and a man,
a marching band, all around the frightened trapeze-swinger.



The Trapeze Swinger - Iron & Wine.

The Hot Half Life (Finally!) Goes Undercover... With M. Ward.

So a number of interesting things happened in the past week of my life, readers.

First off and of most note in my opinion is the fact that I have acquired a boyfriend.

However this isn’t livejournal so I’ll just say that for the first time in my life, I’ve taken interest in a boy who can outdo me at obscure musical references and has read as many, if not more, books as I have and that at makes me feel at the same time out of my depth and completely matched. It's quite an interesting sensation.

Also of note is that for the first week since I acquired last.fm in July, Okkervil River is not my number one most played artist. In fact, they are not even number two. They are number three. I’m sure they would be number two but we can blame Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s stellar Lie Down In The Light for that displacement and despite their lack of life at the top of my last.fm list, I’ve still listened to them a not-too-shabby 48 times in the past seven days but they have been far outdone, readers, for I have re-fallen in love with M. Ward and he has recieved nearly triple that many plays within this week.



It’s not hard to re-fall in love with M. Ward. Once you’re taken with someone as brilliant as him, your love may abate but it doesn’t disappear. Especially when he puts out one of my very favorite things in the world - Brilliantly reworked cover songs!

You know, it’s probably the number one unwritten rule in the here-to-fore unwritten blogger’s bible that if you have a music blog you must, at least sporadically, post the occasional strange, indie-fied cover song. Preferred in the blogging world are indie-goes-pop covers (Ted Leo and the Pharmacists’ brilliant version of Kelly Clarkson’s Since U Been Gone, for instance) or little-known-alternative-artist-goes-eighties (Like that Bat For Lashes Cure cover that was burning up Elbo.ws a few weeks back) but here at the Hot Half Life household, we get a rut that can commonly be referred to as ‘Amber likes introspective males with acoustic guitars’ so I figure I might as well follow suit with my previous posting on Elliott Smith, Okkervil River, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Dallas Green and instead of posting New Found Glory covering Johnny Cash, I’m going to make this post come full circle and post not about my aforementioned boyfriend but rather post the three finest M. Ward cover songs I have in my possession - Matt does Dylan, Matt does Sonic Youth and, my personal favorite, Matt does Daniel Johnston, taking an already heartbreaking song and making it even more tragic with his timeless whisper of a voice.


Tom Violence (Sonic Youth)


Story of an Artist (Daniel Johnston)


Girl From The North Country (Bob Dylan cover with Jim James and Conor Oberst)

You remind me of something, the song that I am & you sing me back into myself.

One of my favorite albums of all time is Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s I See A Darkness.

It’s evocative, to me, of myself at 20 & I’ll always love Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy for soundtracking many late night drives on I-94 to nowhere on below zero winter nights in Michigan with my heat turned all the way up, mittens on my hands and the my window cracked partially open to let the smoke from my Marlbro reds out of my silver Ford Focus, despite the fact that I'm not really a smoker and I only had them lit because the smell was comforting.

Recently I charted my top ten albums of all time. I See A Darkness came in at number six.

So it didn’t take much in the way of prodding to get me to listen to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s latest recording, Lie Down In The Light. In fact, no prodding actually had to be done at all. Simply put, I was told it was a good record by someone who thus far seems to be right about those kinds of things and guess what? Scott wins. Lie Down In The Light is excellent.

I could wax poetic on why this album is important and what makes it great but basically, it’s fitting that it’s called Lie Down In The Light for, both lyrically and musically, this is the opposite of I See A Darkness. Simple, beautiful, charming and positive, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy continues his reign as the most reliable solo singer songwriter with royal alias that I know of, not to mention one of the most reliable solo singer songwriters in general, evoking a time in music that I wasn’t alive for but I imagine was much different from the landscape of today.

& to top it all off, I think I can say with some degree of certainty that he may have written the best song of his career with You Remind Me Of Something (Glory Goes) which, after writing I See A Darkness, is no small feat.

You Remind Me Of Something (The Glory Goes)

So Everyone (Featuring Ashley Webber)