Song, by Toad

Broken Records Interview from the Bedlam Theatre Gig

This weekend I am going to be publishing a mammoth post of Broken Records live videos from their Bedlam Theatre gig in March of this year.  The band suggested we get the cameras in and so we’ve got about ten songs, all with top notch audio mixed by Kas, their sound guy, and honestly, I think they look fucking incredible.  I know that’s a bit wanky to say, but in terms of the quality of material that’s been on this site, I think it’s a big step forward, and I am really pleased with how they turned out.  They also give you a really good idea of just why people love this band, and how immense they can be in a live setting, which can often be hard to get across.

Anyhow, at that gig, Jamie and I sat down and discussed some stuff after the show, and I’ve interspersed some of that footage with some teasers of the live stuff to make the above video.  It makes for a really nice ten minute inro to the band and the album and stuff like that, so have a watch, and I expect you all to be waited with bated breath for Sunday’s video extravaganza.

My favourite bit is when we’re discussing lyrics, and more specifically the ones to If Eilert Loevborg Wrote a Song, it Would Sound Like This, and Jamie says…  well, you’ll have to watch it and see, won’t you.

Malcolm Middleton Interview from Homegame 2009

At this year’s amazing Homegame Festival, run by our DIY pals at the Fence Collective (who have been incredibly helpful in the start up of Song, by Toad Records), I had the chance for a bit of an interview with Scottish indie hero Malcolm Middleton.

Neil from Meursault, who is a longstanding fan, conducted most of the interview itself, and we teamed up with Andy from the new Edinburgh live session showcase Off the Beaten Tracks, who shot a couple of session videos at the same time.  You’ll have to go to their site to see the session videos, but it’s well worth the visit as they have stuff from Team Turnip and Come On Gang already up, with Slow Club, Meursault, Randan Discotheque and, I think, Found all to be added in the coming weeks.

The interview itself was really nice, as can be seen in the video above.  Malcolm himself has a reputation for being a miserable bastard, and I have to confess that made me a little apprehensive about talking to him.  I’m still new to interviewing people and, whilst it’s piss-easy when things are going well, turning things around when they are going badly is something of a skill, and one which I am yet to come anything close to mastering. more »

The Toad Interviews Jason Lytle

[I wrote this article for the good folks at The Skinny, who were kind enough to give me the opportunity in the first place.  Song, by Toad does not, yet, have enough pull to swing interviews with the likes of Jason Lytle, so I am very grateful for the chance, and a big thanks to Milo from Products of a Gaseous Brain, who suggested me in the first place.]

When Grandaddy dissolved in 2005, their lead singer disappeared to the mountains in Montana, essentially turning his back on the industry to reinvigorate his relationship with music. Jason Lytle sits down with Matthew Young to explain how he found the road back.

King Creosote didn’t just vanish for ten years in between the fall of the Khartoum Heroes and the release of his first album on Domino Records. Micah P. Hinson wasn’t saved from self-destruction by the redemptive power of music. And Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle didn’t just run away to the wilderness to live in a cave for three years after the demise of one of the most successful indie bands of recent memory.

This is the vague story that percolated through to my mind when, after more than ten years of what any independent band would consider wild success, Grandaddy finally imploded. Lytle moved out to Montana and made a clean break ostensibly, it seemed, to retire. But like Hinson and Anderson before him, Lytle seems to bristle slightly when faced with the simplistic version of his own life story. more »

Micah P. Hinson – Live Review & Interview From the End of the Road Festival 2008

One thing everyone knows about Micah P. Hinson is the fairytale story of his fall and rise from the depths of a drug related incarceration after falling in with the wrong woman, to the valedictory release of his beautiful debut album Micah P. HInson & the Gospel of Progress back in 2004. He was saved by the music, we tell ourselves, fitting the whole thing neatly into a nice, Meg Ryan-friendly narrative that fits the kind of one-dimensional storytelling to which we are becoming increasingly adherent.

I myself had pretty much that basic story in my head when I met him at the End of the Road Festival, in September 2008. Fortunately, before I could stray too far down a path that seems to quite irritate him, Micah himself decided to make sure I knew that was bollocks from the beginning. “The music for me wasn’t like a saviour to pull me out of the dark spaces” he told me early on, after explaining that the narrative in most people’s heads is a pretty superficial charicature of years of his life, the actual story much less neat and tidy than that.

“Even on the new album [Micah. P Hinson & the Red Empire Orchestra] there’s songs, like Keep Having These Dreams that I wrote when I was 19 or something. There’s some other songs on the record that are quite old. On Opera Circuit there are some other songs that are pretty damn old that didn’t come from that exact time. By the time I recorded the Gospel of Progress record I had a lot more than just a couple of dozen songs. By that point I’d been recording songs for eight years. Not sending out demos or talking to labels of any of that shit, but I had a four track and then I moved up to having a computer. By the time I had the Gospel of Progress I probably had five hundred songs maybe, I mean a shitload of songs, and so the Gospel of Progress was when we went back through all of those tunes and decided what the best ones were and that’s what made up the Gospel.

“So the Gospel didn’t come out of a certain time in my life, it wasn’t like there was a fall and there was this rise and all these songs came out, it was nothing like that. And even getting signed to a record label, from the time I lived in the hotel and I was writing songs, and you know my life had fallen apart, and I was bankrupt and all of that shit, to the time that I actually got signed by a record label like at least three or four years had passed between those points.” more »

Nat Johnson & Monkey Swallows the Universe

About a year ago I interviewed Monkey Swallows the Universe, a gorgeous pop band shortly to be going on “indefinite hiatus”. This was a bizarre turn of events for almost every fan because their second album The Casket Letters had recently broken pretty significant ground for the band, helped particularly by a plug on Gorilla vs. Bear, according to the band. They seemed to be on the way up, their audience was rapidly expanding, and people seemed to be getting really excited about them. They seemed, in short, on the up.

The indefinite hiatus came as something of a shock, and so I thought I might have a try at interviewing them before the Edinburgh date of their farewell tour. I was curious to ask about the past, what had caused the split and things like that, but if they didn’t want to talk about that then I was equally happy to discuss their plans for the future. What I got was interesting, funereal, and if the interview had been a professional assignment, something of a disaster.

The first question I asked was whether or not I was allowed to ask about why they were going on hiatus or whether they’d rather I just ignored it and concentrated on the future.

“Yeah, why are we going on hiatus? We’d all like to know that.” was the only response I got. There was an uncomfortable silence, into which Natalie Johnson, the lead singer, inserted some platitudes taken straight from the world of professional football when a manager’s contract is terminated by ‘mutual consent’: not permanent… still good friends… just exploring some different things… the usual way of making it obvious that the different parties to the agreement might well give some very, very different answers to the ones they were all presenting to the public, but that that was all the answer we were going to get.

Okay, so the future, then. I tried that one, but was met with the same sort of stony, glum, painfully awkward silence. No-one, it seemed, had any plans. And then it really struck me what sort of a situation everyone in the room was in. A guitarist without a band is really nothing at all. Everyone had just gone from being part of a much-loved, upwardly mobile indie band with modest but respectable ambitions and a healthy chance of achieving them to the equivalent of the bartender who calls himself an actor. A band is something. A musician, not so much.

Basically, it takes an incredibly long time and an awful lot of energy to build up momentum in the music industry, and that was now all pretty much for nothing. It’s like a relationship – part of the horror of breaking up is not just the personal loss, but the aching weariness of having to go through all that again. The only person who had any sort of direction for the future seemed to be lead singer Natalie Johnson, who already by this stage had a MySpace page with a couple of good songs up and at least half an idea of what was going to happen next. Now it is easy to suggest that the band split because she wanted a solo career and no-one else really had any say in the decision whatsoever, but I really have no idea. Based on the information I have, which is minimal, it seems plausible, but then so does almost any other hypothesis you could put forward.

Her solo career seems to be in good shape though, because she’s back working with the eminently splendid indie label Thee Sheffield Phonographic Corporation, after the equally excellent Loose Music (think Felice Brothers, Willard Grant Conspiracy, The Handsome Family, The Ralfe Band) released The Casket Letters. Her first single is now out, it’s called Dirty Rotten Soul, and it’s really very good indeed. There’s a little more country in the mix than in MStU stuff, but the lovely voice is intact, as is the knack for a sweet melody. The b-side, Mexico, isn’t quite as arresting for me because it doesn’t fell all that distinctive, despite its prettiness. The two bonus demo songs on the CD are lovely though, so it seems that something good might at least come out of the demise of such a good band.

It was a shame though, because I loved their music. At the end of the gig, as an unusually emotional Edinburgh crowd asked for an encore I suggested Chicken Fat Waltz, and the same band member who wanted to know the reason for the hiatus just started playing the song without waiting for an answer from his lead singer. I don’t know, I could so easily be making a mountain out of a molehill, but it seemed just a little symptomatic of the unhappy atmosphere in the dressing room before the show. Who really knows though. I certainly don’t, but it was a weird, weird interview.

Nat Johnson – Heart of Clay (Demo)
Nat Johnson – All This
Monkey Swallows the Universe – The Chicken Fat Waltz
Monkey Swallows the Universe – Sheffield Shanty

Nat Johnson’s Website | Buy the single from Thee Sheffield Phonographic Corporation

The Toad Interviews The Wave Pictures

“I don’t think we’ll ever feel cool.” reckons David Tatersall of the Wave Pictures, despite their being recently signed to one of the hippest labels around: Moshi Moshi. Nevertheless, they’ve just played the main stage at the End of the Road Festival and had people bellowing requests at them left, right and centre. So cool, maybe not, but something is certainly bubbling away in the land of the Wave Pictures. It was the same last year at their show in the considerably smaller venue, The Local. They could have virtually played a whole show of requests.

“That was really strange,” admits David, “and again today, I don’t know how they get this crowd, they do such a good job. For all our friends as well, all our friends play bigger gigs here. Like Darren Hayman, say, and Jeff Lewis, and I don’t know where they all come from because most of the time we play in bars and nobody knows us and every gig is their first time hearing it. It does seem like End of the Road really know what they’re doing and really get an audience that’s into it. Like last year in the tent we had no idea what happened. There was lots of people and they knew songs from CD-Rs that I’d forgotten that we’d done, and it was really, really fun. These are CD-Rs that maybe 50 people in the country have, maybe 100 people at most, but it seemed like everyone who had them was there.”

The video is taken from our interview, and cut in with some footage of their live performance. The sound for the live show is appalling because the sound system overwhelmed the mics on our wee camera, but we’ve learned our lesson and won’t make that mistake again. The wavering crackle of their early CD-R recordings is replaced by a more strident, polished sound on stage. Simply put, they make a racket.

I think I got into The Wave Pictures, about a year ago or so, at the very end of their status as a CD-R band. I obviously caught something of a wave of interest, because within a month or two of my noticing them they had been signed to Moshi Moshi, and vinyl singles and shiny new albums were being discussed. I couldn’t help but wonder exactly what it was that finally made a band that had actually been around for a while seem so suddenly palatable to a record label. Partly, it must be said, it’s unfair to blame labels for not signing a band they probably just hadn’t heard. more »

The Toad Interviews the Builders & the Butchers

It can be a little difficult to interview a band in the absence of the main songwriter, so certain questions about the slightly arcane, grotesque nature of the subject matter can’t really be put. Other rather brilliant ones can, though.

Like how on Earth the band ended up guerilla gigging the lines for other people’s shows early in their days. Apparently they’d just rock up to group of people queueing to get into a gig and play for them, and when I ask them about it they just shrug it off.

“We’d been practising for a while and we didn’t have any shows booked, so we thought ‘we wish we were playing this show’ so we would crash the show. And when there’s tons of people standing in line for a show, they’re already there for music and you can see what kind of a response you would get.”

I can’t quite imagine that sort of habit working very well in the drizzle of Scotland, but The Builders & the Butchers seems to have a pretty relaxed attitude to what constitutes a performance. The fourth wall barely seems to be there at all.

“We ended up playing on the street a lot in downtown Portland. Mostly just practising, we were just kind of playing, seeing what would happen with it.” more »

Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers – Interview & Live Review from Pickathon 2008

I actually know very little about Samantha Crain.  Campfires & Battlefields, one of my regular readers and frequently a kind babysitter of the site when I am absent, emailed me a couple of her mp3s a while back and that was the first time I’d even heard of her.  C&B’s excitement was was obvious, and I have to confess my own pretty much matched his the second I heard her gorgeous, soulful voice break out across the bluesy foundation of the wonderfully sad songs which she writes.

That voice is so rich, knowing and, well, experienced I suppose, that her youth seems almost inconceivable.  21 is still pretty young, and the solidity and presence of the band belie the fact that as a group they are still only just settling on their sound – only just establishing their identity, it seems.  In fact, Samantha herself is only just starting to explore the kind of songs that she herself can write.

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Loch Lomond – Live Review & Interview From Pickathon

This article is very, very long – I’m warning you now. I was trying to cut it down, and eventually just thought fuck it, I don’t have an editor, why not leave it all up there, so I have. There’s a page break though, to stop it eating my entire front page, so if you want to read the whole thing then you’ll have to use the ‘Read More’ link thingy down near the bottom. I’ve also popped in some interview and live footage as well, although the audio on the interview is dreadful, because we couldn’t find a quiet enough spot. I bet the fucking BBC never has to put up with this sort of shit.

Anyway, when you first see Ritchie Young, live, whispering his way through the more delicate parts of Loch Lomond’s material you really worry that he’s going to have the strength in his lungs to force out the rest of the song. It even occurs that he might just apologise, cough weakly and slink off stage in terror. The first time I saw the band perform this weekend they were on the main stage in the midst of a general PA failure, and playing entirely without the benefit of microphones. I’ll be honest, I feared for him.

Then something strange happens. Loch Lomond songs tend to tiptoe along, taking stock of the ground on which they find themselves, before suddenly growing and becoming a bigger, more forceful beast altogether. The do this out of nowhere, too, much like an unassuming lizard that suddenly rears its head, bares its teeth and unfolds a brightly coloured ruff. It’s not terrifying and aggressive exactly, but it is clearly not the meek and defenceless creature you casually mistook it for. Similarly Ritchie will look almost timid and, unamplified, the seemingly disconnected meanderings of the band can sound entirely lost until suddenly, it all changes. The stray strands of instrumental come together to form a coherent swirl of sound, the volume and force of the song elevate noticably and suddenly Ritchie’s voice reveals several new gears. A pained whisper, or a delicate one, breaks out into accusatory wail, like he was suddenly using all of his lungs to push it out instead of just the air in a single breath. The song, put simply, suddenly gets big.

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Bombadil Interview & Live Review from Pickathon

To say that I was not expecting anything even remotely like what I saw when Bombadil played live would be an understatement.  A massive one.  I hate terms like blown away because they are so overused, but I don’t know what else to say.  Giddy?  Exhilarated?  Thrilled to bits?  I don’t know, but even listening to the album now I am taken back to this live show and start giggling, bouncing up and down and wishing I could tell absolutely everyone to go and see this band should they ever get half a chance.  Yes, it was that good; a joyous performance, and a complete celebration of what live music can be.  I saw it almost a week ago now, and I am still bubbling when I think back and try and write about it.

To begin with, though, here’s a little bit of a video that mixes the performance at Pickathon with a bit of live footage as well and, although it’s a bit sketchy, is not bad for a first try.  The songs themselves in their entirety are posted at the bottom of the page.

Bombadil’s album is, I suppose, more raucous than I’d realised.  Listening to it again, I can hear the same songs, and I can see the basis for the live performance, but it is still a relatively studied work of craftsmanship.  It’s a deliberate record, which is the direct opposite of the live performance which is, whilst not poorly executed, just a helter-skelter carnival of chaos and delight.  Stuart plays the piano upside down and back to front, whilst sitting underneath it, Brian and Daniel come within inches of knocking one another flying on numerous occasions, James drums like he’s trying to beat his kit to death,and the whole crazy business so infects the audience with glee that they get a standing ovation and an encore.  At a festival.  I have never seen anything like it.

Bombadil Interview with Song, by Toad from Song, by Toad on Vimeo.

Quite how you harness something like that enough to record an album, much less one so considered, is beyond me, frankly.  It must be like two different bands.

Brian agrees that it’s a very different beast.  “We tried to make the record different from the live experience.  We found that if you go into the studio and just thrash around really hard and stuff then it doesn’t really translate on tape.  We just kinda tried to make sounds that we liked recorded, and it just came out maybe more focussed than the live stuff does.

“I think one thing that we all appreciate in records is variety.  I once heard the Broken Social Scene guy say that what they were trying to do was make mixtapes, almost, for their albums and I kinda like that idea.  You try to get collections of songs unified around something, just to keep things interesting and explore different corners

Harnessing the live energy enough to actually create a controlled recording should, you’d think, take something out of the music.  Listening to the album though, that really doesn’t seem to be the case.  They’re different beasts, definitely, but neither one animal is the lesser for it.

Daniel confesses that it can be difficult to adjust to the two mindsets though:  “We struggle trying to get the energy right in the studio.  It’s really hard to try to find if you’re not performing with anyone, or for anyone.  It’s really hard, at least for me, to get the feelings that I need to get going.  But a lot of the songs always start off more how they are on the record than how they are live, but a lot of times they have to change from record to live.”

That much is true, because the show really does get more and more mental as it progresses.  Actually, it’s a real shame that Mrs. Toad and I only decided to video the first couple of songs of the set to include with the interview videos.  We did it that way partly to keep things simple, and partly so we could still sit back and enjoy the performances we were videoing and not just be at work all the time.  In retrospect I would have loved to be able to show you some of the later songs like Johnny or the truly inspired Cavalier’s Har Hum, but I really had no idea what we were in for.  Next time, we’ll know.

The band was born in a rather unusual way.  When I first read the story on their website about their meeting whilst studying in Bolivia I wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t just a massive piss-take.  Apparently not though.  Daniel tells the story like so:

“We were both [himself and Brian] just studying down there, living with families, studying anthropology.  We only had classes a few days a week so we had a lot of off time.  So half the time was spent travelling and and a lot of it was spent learning to play Andean instruments which was the sampone (SP?) which was those pan pipes, and the charango (SP?) which is a ten-string instrument similar to the mandolin.  And we decided that one of our goals was to record an album while we were down there to bring back to the States. So we recorded it in a children’s music school in Bolivia, and they had all the equipment there, and we recorded it just on a computer.”

The educational backgrounds of the band members (”I was a religion major, Stu was economics, Brian was public policy and James was history”) perhaps seems to explain bizarre songs about martyred saints like Julian of Norwich and the distinctly unusual Kuala Lumpur, which constantly flirts with morphing into a deranged nursery rhyme.  There’s a little more to it than that – or less, I suppose you could say.  James the drummer’s explanation of the latter song swiftly punctures any false impressions of excessively scholarly pretensions that it might be easy to project upon the band.

“That song is the result of us spending way too much time in a van, and finding ways to amuse ourselves and it eventually turned into a song.  It initially started with us making up jingles for different things.  We made up jingles for mustard – Stuart’s got a great mustard jingle – there’s a mayonnaise jingle, soy sauce – it’s the only sauce you can soy.  My parents gave me a world atlas that we put in the car for Christmas and we were flipping through it, and Kuala Lumpur was a nice word.”

Stuart adds “I really like the way it sounds.  It’s fun to add extra Ls when you’re saying it – it kinda helps a long van ride go by.”

It must be said that this kind of silliness fits well with the playful nature of the stage show. Who else but a band that writes pop songs with their roots in mustard jingles would play the piano backwards and take to the stage dressed some in suits, some in bizarre tunics covered in fleurs-de-lis?

“I think it was a marching band outfit or something, from a local high school” explains Brian.  “We’re trying to hone in and match the outfits somehow with the music I guess, and channel the sounds that we’re trying to make into some sort of visual representation.”

James jumps in: “I find it really helps me cut loose too, that we go before the show and we change into wacky clothes that represent our band.  That gets me like, time to go, time to get fired up and time to bring it.”

The performance energy seems to be something that they keep coming back to.  In the UK you go to a gig to see a particular band, and you don’t talk through the thing or otherwise fail to pay attention, on penalty of huffy shushes from other audience members.  In the States, live music seems to be very much part of the furniture in many bars, meaning that the obligation to actually listen is rather less.  Personally, I can’t imagine the frustration of playing to a bar full of people talking through your show with their backs to you, but acutally for a band with the kind of performance instincts that Bombadil seem to possess, this is not a problem really.  In fact, James seems to prefer it that way, and his reasoning makes sense:

“We play in some rooms in different towns called listening rooms where everyone’s seated and staring at you and that’s like ‘Whoah, what’s going on here!’  Whereas a loud bar, while it can be frustrating sometimes it can also be extremely rewarding because if you can get a group together and get them really fired up and moving together and having a really good time, there’s no better feeling than that.”

I can’t imagine anyone talking through their kind of show for very long.  Quite how they don’t knock one another out is a miracle.  Numerous times during the Galaxy Barn show Brian and Daniel in particular seem to be within a whisker of a major collision.  There have been more than a few bumps and bruises along the way though, so it seems they aren’t always quite so fortunate.

“My first show with the band actually, we were playing Rosetta Stone I think for the first time, and Daniel came rocking back at me to count in an intro or something, and tripped on a cord and took out half my drum set.  We finished the song though, but with a new drum part.”

Even during their unplugged set, up in the tranquil, leafy setting of the Woods Stage, there was mayhem.  “Stuart managed to knock my snare drum over mid-song and had to hold it for me.  It worked out though.  We’ve had several people tell us that that’s the favourite moment of any of our sets, you know, us breaking stuff.”

Brian agrees: “That’s actually my favourite moment in live shows these days is like when some sort of sound shortage happens and people are looking at each other, or some microphone falls down.”

He’s right actually.  You find out so much more about a band when things start to go a little awry.  Any band too thrown by technical or practical problems can seem not to have sufficient command of the music.  Given that they wrote the songs, that seems an absurd thing to say, but it’s true.  Bombadil on the other hand seem to embrace this with truly impressive confidence.  I go back to the album, and it’s just impossible to project from that just how much this band embrace the vagaries and chaos that they generate.  They seem to revel in cutting loose and operating on the verge of losing control altogether and that, I suppose, is what makes them so incredibly exhilarating.

Toad’s Pickathon pictures | Toad Vimeo page | Other Pickathon Features

Bombadil – Cavalier’s Har Hum
Bombadil – Rosetta Stone

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