TEAM LAST CALL

Davey Havok is a dark and enigmatic rock star, waif-thin with androgynous good looks, a straightedge vegan who has become one of the voices of a brokenhearted and disenfranchised emo generation.
He’s also naked as a jaybird, as the hapless maid in his hotel is about to discover.
“I’m on the phone!” he hollers to the startled maid. “Thanks!”
When fully clothed, the 33-year-old singer spends his time shocking people in an entirely different way as the frontman of goth-glam punk band AFI. On the band’s newest album, Crash Love – the eighth record of the band’s 18-year career – Havok and company continue in their chameleonic ways, this time steering away from the electronica-tinged sound of 2006’s number one smash Decemberunderground and embracing a driving, melodic, bare-bones rock sound.
In anticipation of AFI’s November 12 show at the Electric Factory, Team Last Call tracked down the au naturale crooner to talk about why you won’t find him crying in a corner anytime soon.

Team Last Call: You’ve said that you’ve never been more proud of a record than you are of Crash Love. What prompted you to say that?
Davey Havok: It’s hard to step back from something you created and explain why it means so much to you. It moves me in a way that our music’s never moved me before. For the first time, when I listened to it through, I felt a sense that it could transcend any sort of era. That’s not to say it will, but I was struck with that feeling. I thought about it more – and I don’t think I’ve ever articulated this – but this is the first album really ever that I feel I can play for my friends and say, “OK, check out our new album,” without having to skip any songs.

TLC: Especially starting off in punk and hardcore like you did, you’re taking a huge risk by constantly expanding your sound, and it’s something you’ve gotten a lot of flack for. Have you reconciled yourselves to that?
DH: Absolutely. It’s something that we accepted very early on. It really comes from the ethos of being a punk and hardcore band. It was really because we just didn’t give a fuck. In the same way that we were playing punk and hardcore and didn’t give a fuck that anybody liked it, we continued to write and play what we liked and didn’t give a fuck if anybody liked it. Our hope is that people do like it, but if they have an issue with it, it doesn’t matter because we’re doing what makes us happy.

TLC: I can’t believe you keep getting away with it.
DH: Neither can I. Well, I can believe it in some respect, because the longer we’ve done it, the more our fans have come to expect that progression from us. Not to fear it, but actually in a way demand it. To release a record that sounds like our last record would be more of a detriment to us.

TLC: AFI attracts a lot of fans who feel like outcasts. Why do you think people react that way to your music?
DH: I think it really comes naturally from me. I really feel that likely it’s pervasive in the sentiment of the records because my feelings tend to be contrary to those of your general, average person. So if people connect to that and recognize that, it’s just something that’s part of the way I write.

TLC: Did you have music as you were growing up that served the same purpose for you?
DH: Pretty much everything I love was music from people who disassociated themselves from the masses in some way. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they weren’t a massive band, if you look at The Cure, for instance. But their perspective was not the average.

TLC: You seem relatively upbeat and sociable. It’s funny, because I’ve always had this idea of you, like, always crying in the dark.
DH: Most people do.

TLC: Do you care about that?
DH: Oh, no. It doesn’t bother me. Whatever people think of me is fine, however they want to envision me. I find it curious. I’m always intrigued by who people think I am and the persona they have created for me, what they think I’m into, what they think I’m not into. But I certainly understand that consideration, that I would be a bleak and miserable person, because a lot of my lyrics are very despondent. Luckily, I have the music to use as catharsis. If I didn’t, I might spend more time sitting and crying in a corner than I need to. Also, I think manners are very important. To be a sullen rain cloud when conversing with someone, be they your friends or a journalist, I think is inappropriate.

TLC: You are famous for your lifestyle choices, being vegan and straightedge. Why is that stuff the most important to project?
DH: I really think for the good of this world that, if I could have it my way, the whole world would be vegan and straightedge. So that’s why I feel it’s important to create an awareness of this lifestyle, create an awareness of the choices people make. To bring awareness about those lifestyles can bring a positive change, if only on the level of an individual.

TLC: It’s wildly entertaining, the amount of wrong guesses and suppositions you can find online about what AFI stands for. Do you have any personal favorites?
DH: I’ve heard we’re Christian, and that always tickles me. I’ve heard that I’m a junkie. I’ve heard that I’m a vampire. I’m a junkie vampire. That can be your pull-quote.

TLC: That quote just got boxed out in 24-point type.
DH: Thanks. I don’t spend a lot of time reading about myself or researching myself, so it’s hard to come by this stuff. It’s always pretty funny, and it’s rarely true.

TLC: Even the acronym itself. “A Flame Internal!”
DH: We’ve had people say it stands for something that doesn’t even have the right letters beginning the words. “Oh, that stands for Ah, Fuck You.” It’s like, what are you talking about?

TLC: You started this band 18 years ago at the age of 15, practicing in garages. Do you ever think about what you might say to that kid?
DH: Just do what you love, I’d say. Don’t try to write something that you think someone else will like. Write something that you like, and if they don’t like it, fuck ’em. That’s what it’s about.

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

As you already know, Dethklok is the biggest band on Earth. Ever. The Norwegian death metal band boasts a fan base of millions who willingly risk life and limb (and often end up losing both) just to see Dethklok play. The band is so big that it ranks as the world’s seventh largest economy. So  powerful that it’s been called “the world’s greatest cultural force.” So unreal that it’s a … cartoon.
Dethklok’s wildly popular animated series, Metalocalypse, returns this month for its third season on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. The series’ creator, writer, songwriter and resident guitar god, Brendon Small, is currently touring America with a live-band version of Dethklok, performing such timeless classics as “Bloodrocuted” and “Briefcase Full of Guts” under an animated screen.  The band’s second album, Dethalbum II, debuted in September at #15 on Billboard, making it the highest-charting death metal album in history. 

Team Last Call: I’m trying to imagine the initial pitch you made to the network for a cartoon about a death metal band that murders its own fans.
Brendon Small: I work for a network that is contrarian, so they got it immediately. It wasn’t too hard of a sell. I know they’ve gotten tons of pitches for, like, “It’s a band, but they’re zombies.” This isn’t a new thing. It started with The Archies. They made millions of dollars off of this band that didn’t exist.

TLC: So, you basically get to make cartoons, tell jokes and play guitar for a living.
BS: I definitely have the ultimate job. I can’t think of any other job I’d rather be doing. The only bad part is that I talked people into financing it, and now I have to deliver it. Even though it’s fun work and it’s satisfying work, it’s still work. I don’t take vacations and I don’t sleep that often. Right now I’m at that point where I’m like, “Oh, wow. I’m missing deadlines on the writing side because I’m on the road. I wonder how that’s going to work out?”
 
TLC: You’re out-selling and out-charting the “real” bands, some of which, like Mastodon, you’re even touring with. Does that get uncomfortable?
BS: I don’t believe that people would buy my record in place of buying a Mastodon record. I think there’s room for everything. I think the only person I would be in direct competition with is if there were another cartoon metal band out there. And hey, any other dildo that wants to go create a TV show and do what I did – why didn’t you do it first?

TLC: Dethklok is kind of like the gateway drug of metal bands.
BS: That has been the coolest part about this. The thing that I get is, “Hey, this is my first metal show ever,” or “I never purchased a metal record before,” or “I don’t even like metal, but I like Dethklok. What else is out there?”

TLC: Goodbye Hannah Montana, hello Cannibal Corpse.
BS: If I can do just a little of that, then I’m happy.

TLC: For the uninitiated, can you explain the purpose of a pain waiver?
BS: A pain waiver legally disallows any liability for anything that could possibly happen to you within the realm of Dethklok. So you trip, you fall, you die … You basically fill it out and you enter your credit card number, your pin number, your social security number, your date of birth and all that stuff, and then we have rights to film your dead body, we have rights to all kinds of fucked up stuff.

TLC: It even says that if the sight of you getting murdered disturbs the band members …
BS: They have the right to sue you. It’s pretty harsh, but you gotta think about the band. You gotta make them happy. If you bum them out by dying in front of them, then they can sue you.


TLC: What do you think is the grossest thing that’s happened to audience members at a Dethklok show?
BS: I’d probably say falling in love with each other. I think that’s pretty disgusting.

TLC: What was your personal favorite crowd massacre scene to write?
BS: It’s hard to go beyond what we did in the first show, which was, they do a coffee jingle and they pour scalding hot coffee on people in these gigantic vats, and then they put cream and sugar on top of them too, just to humiliate them even more. We could launch convicted felons into the sky and destroy them with a laser beam if we wanted to, but that fucking coffee thing, it’s hard to beat that. I think tarring and feathering would be kind of fun. Like, smearing their collective faces into dog shit would be a funny thing to me.

TLC: What powers does Dethklok’s music have?
BS: There are things that happen once they get together and start playing. There are even possible supernatural things that happen. Sometimes they get together and play and the weather starts changing.

TLC: What’s next for Dethklok?
BS: They’re in a very precarious place since we left them in the last episode. They’re basically without a manager, and they’re driving their own business right into the shitter. This third season deals with a little bit more of that “OK, we’re up here. Who the fuck are we now? Now what do we do?”

TLC: And what’s next for you?
BS: In the near future, I see a vacation happening. I won’t fucking do anything. I’ll sleep and put on 40 or 50 pounds. Eat some really good food. Kill a couple of trannies. You know, the American dream.

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

The Boston boys (and girl) of All That Remains became the toast of metal-town following the release of their most recent album, Overcome, which catapulted the band from Ozzfest second-stage anonymity to hard-rock radio celebrity. With the Top 10 Mainstream Rock success of “Two Weeks,” ATR showed that even metalcore bands can play Fall Out Boy for a day.
Incidentally, “metalcore” isn’t a label the band takes kindly. They’re an opinionated bunch, as Team Last Call found out first-hand during a recent interview with guitarist Mike Martin.

Team Last Call: Prior to “Two Weeks,” was radio success even on your radar?
Mike Martin: Not even close. We were actually thinking about not putting the song on the record, because when we heard it was all singing, we were like, “That’s weird.” I initially was just like, “Wow, kids are going to hate this so much.”

TLC: You’ve taken some flack for making your sound more melodic. Do you care?
MM: Nope. When a record comes out and sells five times faster than your previous record – which sold fairly well – you really don’t have time to care, because everything’s too busy going awesome.
 
TLC: It probably takes the edge off of little Billy’s mean blog post when you can finally have a good per diem.
MM: Or you get on stage and there’s a thousand people at your headlining show. It’s like, “Well, OK, the little jerkoff who’s masturbating to Internet porn all night in his mom’s basement doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.”

TLC: At this point, how do you measure success for the band?
MM: I guess you could already consider it a complete success, making a living off of it, making enough money. None of us have jobs when we go home anymore because we don’t really have time. We’re literally living off music. We’re playing every night of the week. That’s considered “making it” to a lot of people.

TLC: To be a touring musician and not going home to live in your parents’ basement is a success to a lot of people.
MM: Which all of us still do, basically, but whatever.

TLC: I’ve always heard All That Remains referred to as a metalcore band, but I just don’t hear it in the music.
MM: That just makes you smarter than everybody else, because we’re not.

TLC: Well, go on ...
MM: That’s the stupidest word for music ever invented, basically. It’s just dumb. If a metal band has dynamics in their music and it isn’t just this straight double-bass crap the whole time, it’s called metalcore. It’s just annoying and awful. We’re just a metal band, and that’s really all there is to it. It’s simple.

TLC: Which is worse, when people call you metalcore or when people call you a Christian band?
MM: I saw this one post like, “These guys are a bunch of Christian assholes.” Which is hilarious, because we’re the furthest thing from it. Just another example of people being completely ignorant and having no idea what they talk about.

TLC: When you get to those nasty sites like Lambgoat, sometimes it’s just best to turn off the monitor ...
MM: Lambgoat’s just straight-up vicious. I went on that website one time, and I was like, “OK, I’m never coming back.” I saw one comment that was like, “I hope this band flips off a cliff on their bus and dies.” Like that’s really necessary. Jesus Christ.

TLC: Is it true that [frontman] Phil [Labonte] is a conservative Republican?
MM: I don’t know what he is. I just know that he talks about politics a lot, and every time he does I leave the room. He sits in the front lounge on Twitter and watches MSNBC for 15 hours a day. He Tweets about everything that happens every 15 seconds. If you start talking politics with him, be prepared to be busy for hours and hours, and be prepared for me to not be in the room.

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

It’s October, which means it’s time for Team Last Call’s annual Halloween column. Most of TLC’s previous October columns were devoted to scary subjects like Mark Wahlberg’s superfluous nipple and John McCain’s old man smell. But this year, we were really looking to raise the bar, to find a story subject that, like the realization that Larry King might still be sexually active, would haunt readers long after the column was over.

That’s when we came across the KFC Double Down sandwich, without a doubt the single most terrifying thing we’ve encountered in 2009. This bad boy is like the Steve Buscemi’s teeth of handheld food. At its core, the Double Down is a bacon sandwich, which is already bad news, only this bacon sandwich comes slathered in swiss and pepper jack cheese and the mayonnaise-based Colonel’s sauce. Oh, and instead of bread, the Double Down is held together by two deep-fried chicken filets. In summation, that’s a bacon sandwich in a bun made of fried chicken. I don’t know what kind of magnificent pervert thought it up, but he deserves a medal, and then deserves to be shot.

When we first heard about the Double Down, we thought it was a joke. So we decided to consult the leading authority on the subject, a website everyone should visit at least once a day: This Is Why You’re Fat (Tag line: “Where dreams become heart attacks”). Sure enough, we dialed up the site (www.thisiswhyyourefat.com) and there the sandwich sat, glistening and greasy like a breaded Rush Limbaugh. Our curiosity piqued, we decided to track down the folks behind the scenes at This Is Why You’re Fat, Jessica Amason and Richard Blakeley, to ask a few questions about the Double Down.

Team Last Call: Why was the Double Down a good fit for the site?

Jess: Needless to say, any meat-on-cheese-on-bacon-on-cheese-on-more-meat is a given for This is Why You’re Fat.

Richard: Cause that’s why you’re fat, duh!

TLC: What were your first thoughts upon hearing about the sandwich?

Jess: I thought it was what SNL’s Taco Town Taco was to Taco Bell, except this was KFC actually owning its own absurdity!

TLC: Did you, like most people, think it was a joke?

Richard: Yes, and a very good one at that, because there was a commercial to go along with it on Food Geekery.

Jess: The commercial sold it for me. I thought, “Well, they’ve gone and done it now, haven’t they? They’ve taken fast food to the next level.”

TLC: Have you had a chance to try one?

Jess: No, and honestly, I never had anything against the traditional sandwich structure. If it ain’t broke, don’t throw more meat on it!

Richard: I don’t eat chicken or bacon, so I’m not planning on doing it any time soon.

TLC: Is there another sandwich you’ve discovered this year as heart attack-tastic as this?

Jess: In the same spirit of “sandwiches 2.0,” I’m partial to the Pizza Burger. [A giant burger between two large meat pizzas, topped with eggs, bacon and colby and pepper jack cheese]

Richard: The Pattie LaBurger. [A triple bacon cheeseburger with deep-fried patties as buns]

It didn’t take long after its debut for word about the Double Down to circulate. “How can I get one?” everyone wanted to know. “And how bad is it for you? Would eating it kill you right away, or would it take a few hours? And why is Rush Limbaugh such a massive turd?”

Speculation about the sandwich’s caloric content was running wild. Men’s Health food and nutrition editor Matt Goulding wrote in an article, “Independent labs are estimating that [the Double Down] has around 1,200 calories and over 50 fat grams, based on what’s in the other KFC sandwiches.” But were those numbers to be trusted?

Not according to KFC public relations guy Rick Maynard, whom Team Last Call contacted in early September.

“There have been numerous incorrect reports in the media regarding the calories in a Double Down,” he says. “While we wouldn’t run final numbers on a product unless it is rolled out nationally, we estimate the Double Down at about 590 calories.”

Stop laughing. He’s serious.

While Maynard wasn’t able to come clean about the Double Down’s stats (he also claimed the sandwich has precisely zero grams of trans fat), he was able to take the time to crush our dreams of trying one for ourselves.

“[The Double Down] is a test market item that is available for only a brief time and in only two markets: Providence, RI, and Omaha, NE,” he says. “At this time, there are no plans to introduce it in Pennsylvania.”

At least we still have Pattie LaBurger.

It’s two in the afternoon, and Kimberly Schlapman is in a hotel room somewhere near Portland, OR, trying in vain to pacify her 2-year-old with ice chips.

As one of four members in Nashville band Little Big Town, Schlapman is wrestling to reconcile her two new identities: mom and country music star. Her life as it stands now is a blitzkrieg of diaper changes and meet-and-greets, with nightly stadium concerts peppered in for good measure. Despite the hectic schedule, however, she and her bandmates are enjoying one of the first truly peaceful moments of their career, which up to this point had been pockmarked with record label strife, divorces, and family deaths (Schlapman’s first husband died of a heart attack in 2005).

After more than a decade of trials and tribulations, the dust seems to have finally settled in Little Big Town. The release of the group’s latest album, A Place To Land, signaled the beginning of a healthy relationship with new label Capitol Records. All four members are happily married (two of them to each other), and the babies are coming in rapid fire. Team Last Call caught up with Schlapman (and daughter) to talk about tragedy, triumph and other aspects of life during Little Big Town’s pregnant pause.

Team Last Call: Until recently, your life as a band was just one tragedy after another. Do you feel like survivors to a certain extent?

Kimberly Schlapman: Oh, definitely. We have persevered through all kinds of stuff. We are definitely survivors, and we are survivors because we love the music and we love each other. When one of us is down, the other three pick up the load and carry that one along. We have a really special bond.

TLC: To be a band for this amount of time and to still have your original four members is amazing in and of itself, but then to go through that kind of adversity ...

KS: I’m proud of it. Karen and I had this idea about 13 years ago, I think, to do this band. We knew that we would have to put together the best vocal collaboration we could, but also, it had to be the right personalities that could live together, because we knew we’d be stuck together more than we would our families. Thankfully, I guess we made the right choices. Karen and Jimi ended up getting married, so that was the perfect choice for her.

TLC: I read that before you were successful, you were at a point where you would have qualified for food stamps.

KS: We made such very little money. My late husband was my provider. He had a good job, so it was OK that I wasn’t making anything on the road. But some of the members of the band didn’t have someone to provide for them. The four of us would drive ourselves in the van anywhere in the country that would have us play, just for gas money and to cover the van rental. There were many, many very lean years for our band.

TLC: Now you’re on the other side of the spectrum with these huge tours. You can hardly sneeze without being nominated for some kind of award.

KS: We’re just thankful for our journey. As we look back, we know that every part of our journey was meaningful and for a certain purpose. We wouldn’t want the easy road, looking back. Our journey is the reason we write the songs we write today and the reason we make the music that we make. I’m sure of it.

TLC: You guys are like a commune on wheels with your spouses and children in tow. What’s that like?

KS: We love it. We thankfully have gone from a minivan to two buses and trailers, so we’ve got a little room to spread out. We have the crew on one bus, and then we have the four of us and spouses and two babies on our bus. It’s fun. It’s a challenge. As a mother, it’s a challenge with a two-year-old to keep her quiet at times. But when we get down and get kind of drudged in the business part of it, it’s nice to have the perspective of a little infant child. We just love it.

TLC: It must be tiring, because you have downtime as a musician, but you don’t really get to punch a clock on being a mom.

KS: I’ve waited a very long time to be a mom. It’s the best job in the whole world. I wouldn’t trade anything for it. And it is challenging at times, and it’s tiring, definitely, but I’m used to it now. I think I’m just tired all the time and I don’t even notice it. I’m just used to sleep deprivation and just being run ragged. But my husband also comes out. He’s just my rock. He is my helpmate and is Mr. Mom out here on the road.

TLC: There really isn’t even a hint of controversy in your background. I think there’s something about being in the country market where having a clean image also seems to be expected.

KS: It is expected. I think it has a lot to do with how we were raised. Not that any other artists were raised poorly or anything. But we were raised to appreciate what we have and to give back. It probably is expected in our format, and I’m glad. We’re just normal, average people. We’re not perfect. We certainly know how to have fun.

TLC: What would you put on Little Big Town’s tombstone one day?

KS: I think this is a band that never quit and always persevered through the struggle, and it paid off. Why have we made it? Because we never gave up. The times when nobody wanted to hear our music, we believed that we were making music worth hearing. We pumped our arms. My late husband used to say, “Pump your arms!” And I think of that so often, because that’s what we’ve done as a band. We just pumped our arms through it and made it.

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

At this point in his career, Gabe Witcher has a fairly sophisticated palate. He’s sampled the finest vintages of the finest strains of music, sniffed, swirled and spit.

Since the age of 5, the prodigious fiddler has performed with the most titanic of bluegrass legends, recorded on more than 300 records by artists from Willie Nelson to Beck, and contributed to film scores ranging from Brokeback Mountain to Toy Story. In short, the dude’s been around the block a time or two. But that didn’t stop Witcher from freezing up the first time he heard the composition his Punch Brothers bandmate Chris Thile had developed for the band’s debut – a 42-minute, four-part suite titled “The Blind Leaving The Blind.”

“I pressed play for the first time and it sounded like Super Mario Brothers on crack,” Witcher laughs during an interview from his southern California home. “It took me three or four days. I had to slow it down, get inside of it and read the score. Once I started to be able to hear it past the video game-iness of it, it started to make sense.”

That particular opus – the centerpiece of Punch Brothers’ debut album, Punch – was the launching point for the band’s sonic voyage into what the New York Times dubbed “American country-classical chamber music.” As unlyrical as that title may be, it’s as good a tag as any, although still barely vague enough to contain Punch Brothers’ expansive sound. Armed with banjo, fiddle, mandolin, guitar and upright bass, the five virtuosos deftly transcend the limitations of acoustic music and yield something literally and figuratively unheard of, something that breaches the worlds of both Bill Monroe and Bjork and inhabits every inch of the land between, from the complex grandiosity of classical music to the precise immediacy of pop.

Witcher puts it in simpler terms: “Music that we like, put through the filter of a bluegrass ensemble.”

“We’ll play a Radiohead song, and we’ll do Bach, then we’ll play Flatt & Scruggs, then The Strokes,” he explains. “Music is just music. It’s all made up of the same stuff. A good piece of music will translate through any medium, any instrument.”

Witcher and Thile, the latter most famous as one third of million-selling newgrass trio Nickel Creek, hit upon the concept for Punch Brothers (named after the Mark Twain short story Punch, Brothers, Punch) in 2006 while commiserating over recently failed relationships with the help of plenty of whiskey and several jam sessions. The idea to start a band came immediately, but didn’t come to fruition until Thile introduced the first tastes of “The Blind Leaving The Blind,” a meandering, yet intricately plotted piece pregnant with leitmotifs and counterpoints. The two dropped their other projects, rounded out the band with friends and likeminded musicians, young prodigies all, and set off like Magellan into the black waters of sound.

“It’s been the best, most positive musical experience that I’ve had,” Witcher enthuses. “One of the things that I think interests all of us as musicians is to come up with something that people haven’t heard before, that we haven’t heard before. We’re always searching for a new texture, a combination of instruments, a new form of song, a new way for a collection of notes to be ordered. Especially coming from the bluegrass world, there’s a lot still to be explored.”

Meet JBOT, a musician who, tired of dealing with egomaniacal bandmates, decided to start a rock band with robots as backing musicians. He built the robots himself with tender, loving care, giving one a guitar, another drums, until the band was completed. On the seventh day, he rested.

Then tragedy struck. JBOT’s beloved robots turned evil, captured their creator and yanked out his intestines and eyes. Now JBOT lives a tortured existence under the cold, watchful eyes of the robots, who delight in nothing more than humiliating their creator during their nightly concerts.

Team Last Call interviewed poor JBOT in anticipation of Captured! By Robots’ October 26 concert at the Chameleon to see how long we have before the robots take over the entire world.

Team Last Call: Why did you build the robots in the first place?

JBOT: Just all the stuff you have to deal with when you’re in a band, everything from drunk band members to girlfriends to “Oh, I can’t tour because I have a baby now.” So I decided to build some robots to take the place of human band members and see if they would do what I wanted – and they didn’t.

TLC: When did you first know that things went terribly wrong?

JBOT: It was pretty early. I had a horrible coffee-spilling accident with the CPUs when I was making the first two, Drum Bot and Guitar Bot. I don’t know if that’s what made them go against me and be evil, but it was something. As soon as I plugged them in, they captured me. They put a chip in my head and activated this chip as sort of a method of control. It’s called a Biocerebral Chip. It’s almost like being hit with a cattle prod. Not that I’ve been hit with a cattle prod, but that’s what I would imagine it’s like.

TLC: You’ve been captured for almost 13 years now. Are things better or worse overall?

JBOT: In the beginning, it was all torture and bullshit, just constant abuse. The first couple of tours we did, it was just me and the Drum Bot and Guitar Bot. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the situation where you’re lonely and tired and working really hard, and all you get is people yelling at you all the time, but it gets old fucking fast. But their hatred of me has gotten less over time. I think we sort of have a functionally dysfunctional relationship these days. We’re like an old married couple because we’ve been together for so long.

TLC: Why do you think Guitar Bot in particular is so damn mean?

JBOT: I think part of it just goes down to the instrument. I don’t know if you’ve met many guitar players, but generally – no offense – guitar players are pretty much dicks.

TLC: Do the bots tell you what kind of music to play?

JBOT: They don’t really care what we play. Basically, they rock hard and they’ll rock with whatever we play. And if the music I choose is bad, they just use it as another excuse to rip on me.

TLC: As far as you can tell, is there any way to avoid the imminent robot apocalypse?

JBOT: I think it’s only a matter of time. I think the human race is on borrowed time as it is. It’s not going to be global warming that kills us. I think it’s a tossup between two: either asteroids or robots taking over. The most likely is going to be robots taking over.

TLC: I would think so.

JBOT: Yeah, I’m pretty good with trying to analyze situations with percentages and statistics. I’ve run the numbers.

TLC: If people come out to the show, aren’t we in a way financially supporting this plan for them to take over?

JBOT: I don’t think so. I’m a bad robot builder. That new Japanese humanoid robot – my god, that’s what we need to worry about. That’s the scary part. I think we’re safe for the next five, 10 years. But if you know you’re going go die tomorrow, are you going to cry today or are you going to go out and party?

TLC: I’m going to party with robots.

JBOT: Totally!

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

As the frontman, mastermind and (presently) the only member of Brooklyn rock band The Honorary Title, Jarrod Gorbel has learned a few valuable lessons about surviving as a working musician. First, don’t sell out. Second, follow your heart. And third, never underestimate the binding properties of the burrito.

A recent evacuee of the major label system, Gorbel has mastered the art of fan relations. One of his best and most engaging ideas has been the auctioning off of “chipotle dates,” where fans can win the chance to grab a burrito with the singer-songwriter when he tours through their town.

“It’s always a surprise,” he says with a chuckle. “You would assume that who would sign up for these contests would be the teenagers, the younger demographic. But now it’s this 25-year-old teacher woman who wants to share burritos with us. It’s funny, but cool.”

Unorthodox, maybe, but Gorbel’s fan-friendly methods are part of what’s kept the indie crooner’s career afloat, despite his former label’s costly missteps. Gorbel founded The Honorary Title in 2003 as an outlet for his folky indie-pop songs. But when the band upstreamed from indie label Doghouse to parent company Warner Brothers in 2007, the major label powers-that-be had a decidedly different kind of sound in mind for the band. Namely, the biggest, most radio-friendly rock songs Gorbel could write.

“I had to put all my energy into these songs that were not my favorite, not the ones that I personally loved. I was trying to be something I wasn’t because I thought it would be a vehicle to do what I want all the time,” Gorbel recalls from a tour stop in Orangevale, CA. “[But] we’d go on tour, and the fans just wanted to hear my favorite songs, the ballads and the more folk Americana-influenced ones. So I said, ‘Fuck it. I’ll just do what I want to do.’”

Fast forward two years, and Gorbel is doing just that. He’s currently touring in support of a new solo EP that marks a return to the ’70s folk and alt-country influences that helped to frame his earliest work. Come early 2010, he’ll put an endcap on those major label years by dropping the band name altogether and releasing an eponymous album he recorded earlier this year with Rilo Kiley’s Blake Sennett.

“It’s scary in a sense, but it’s also a huge relief,” he says of the transition. “Finally I get to do everything I want to do. But then, I am backtracking. From the business outlook, it’s like starting over. But I do things hands-on, just by literally talking to fans in every city that we play. Fans of The Honorary Title, they understand.”

Until the album’s release, Gorbel says, his primary focus is on touring and building his fan base in the most honest and genuine way he can. “And,” he adds, “eating the finest burritos.”

Have you ever thought to yourself, “I wonder if any of my friends is eating a sandwich right now? And if so, is there lettuce? What about cheese?”
Well, I’ve got good news. The answer to those and equally important questions (“Is there mayo?”) can be found on the social networking website known as Twitter, where people of all ages, races, religions and sexual orientations gather to, through the miracle of wireless technology, slowly bore each other to death.
For the uninitiated: Twitter is a service that allows subscribers to create posts of up to 140 characters at a time and send them directly to other Twitter users. These posts – or “tweets,” as they’re called by people for whom dignity isn’t a priority – can be about virtually anything that pops into the author’s head, including, but not limited to, such popular topics as “It’s raining outside,” “I’m in the mood for tacos” and “Kittens are so cute.”
In other words, if an epiphany is what you’re searching for, Twitter might not be the tool for you. Conversely, if you firmly believe that the world needs to know each and every time you have oatmeal for breakfast, you might be the right kind of tool for Twitter.
Here’s a tweet from Todd, who is wearing a new shirt today. Here’s a tweet from Bill, who thinks that moms are hot. And here’s a tweet from Jill, who – OMG! – is eating a sandwich! And to think that you almost missed it! I mean, where would you be without this type of insta-communication in your life? Having sex, probably.
Ultimately, Twitter boils down to millions of people devoting their time to methodically narrating the minute-by-minute activities of lives that might actually be interesting if they weren’t spent almost entirely on Twitter. Oh, paradox! Fortunately for those people, being interesting is hardly a prerequisite for tweeting. Exhibit A: the single most popular Twitter user is Ashton Kutcher, who is dumber than ham loaf.
Some users take it very personally when you make fun of Twitter. “Stop the h8!” they say. “No 1 is 4cing U to look!”
Then they send out a tweet like: “Why do people PARK in a DRIVEway, and DRIVE on a PARKway?!?!!?? LOL! What’s up with that?! ROTFL LMAO OMG BRB L8R” and prove my whole point. Sure, Twitter has some attractive surface qualities, but underneath, it’s nothing but a mind-numbing wasteland of moronic half-thoughts and Hallmark Card platitudes. So basically, Twitter is Sarah Palin.
My young coworkers have tried for two years to convince me of the virtues of Twitter. “You should start your own account,” they say. “We can follow each other.”
“But we sit within 10 feet of each other for eight hours a day,” I answer. “Can’t I just, like, tell you what I’m thinking?” At which point they grab their phones and start sending out tweets about how Old Man Royer just doesn’t get it. Which I totally don’t.
But despite their ridicule, I have stood my ground and refused to start an account, based largely on my longstanding belief that stupid things are dumb. Twitter is just not for me. It’s not for you, either. Know who it’s for? Miley Cyrus, whose last tweet was (and I quote): “I am craving 1. Subway sandwich 2. Whopper from BK 3. A white chocolate mocha frap :( I’m veryy veryy hungee”
I don’t know what depresses me more: The fact that she actually used the word “hungee”; the fact that she thinks anyone would ever care what she wants to eat; the fact that her 1,660,046 followers really do care; or the fact that my coworker is one of those followers.
In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that I did sign up for Twitter for a brief period of time, mostly because it’s hard to write about something you know nothing about. That’d be like a goldfish writing an article about space travel, or the Steelers writing a book about not looking stupid in gold tights. So, against every fiber of my being, including the fiber that says thirty-somethings shouldn’t be reading tweets written by Miley Cyrus, I created an account. I have to say, I was sort of excited. I was about to join the Twitter revolution, to discover what had millions of people so freaking cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs that they spent all day with their noses glued to their phones. I logged in, took a deep breath, put my feet up on my desk and waited for the winds of social networking to sweep me away.
Then it came, the moment I had been waiting for. My first tweet. And it said … wait for it … wait for it …
“I like dogs.”
OMG. L8R.

Ten years ago, an impish wee-man known as Moby became the world’s most unlikely pop star thanks to the multi-platinum success of Play, a transfixing crosspollination of old gospel field recordings and modern-day house beats bolstered by the monster hit “South Side.”
While Gwen Stefani is no longer licking the back of his head in music videos, little else seems to have changed in Moby’s life. The self-proclaimed “weird, bald, middle-aged man” is still completely unequipped to deal with fame. He’s still hated by millions of people for no apparent reason. And he’s still churning out artful electro-pop that manages to be simultaneously poignant and escapist. His latest album, Wait For Me, is being hailed as his finest effort since his 1999 breakthrough. Ambient and subdued, it’s described aptly enough by Moby himself as a “hangover record.”
Team Last Call chatted with the baldheaded beatmaster prior to his North American tour to discuss his name, what he wants to think about on his deathbed and a certain phenomenon known as “nerd sweat.”

Team Last Call: Is it true that you got the name Moby because you’re actually an ancestor of Herman Melville?
Moby: That’s what my parents told me. Before I was born, they had decided that if I was a boy, my name was going to be Richard Melville Hall. And then once I was born, they looked at me and realized that was a very grown-up name for such a little baby. So as a joke when I was literally 10 minutes old, my dad started calling me Moby. I don’t think either my mother or my father anticipated that 43 years later I’d still be saddled with my infant joke nickname.

TLC: Wait For Me is getting an amazing response. It got on my radar because I flipped on NPR and heard the music critic call it your best album in a decade.
M: I try very hard not to read any of my own press. At this point, there are still a lot of journalists that just hate me for whatever. I could make the best record in the world and they’re still going to hate it. If I read good press, it makes me uncomfortable. If I read bad press, it makes me want to kill myself.

TLC: Why do people hate you?
M: I was actually talking about this the other day. Do you watch The Simpsons? Do you remember the Simpsons where Lisa had a bully? They realized that what the bully was responding to was the pheromones in Lisa’s nerd-sweat. That’s all I can think of. Maybe I’m missing something. It seems like there are probably more loathsome people on the planet than me.

TLC: Over the past couple of records, you’ve returned to making music for yourself, as opposed to satisfying expectations of a record label. Did you have some sort of epiphany?
M: The epiphanies that I have tend to be things that are fairly self-evident for most people. My epiphanies happen slowly over a long period of time. I rarely have one of those “Saul on the road to Damascus” moments, where the scales fall from my eyes and I can suddenly see things clearly. It usually comes from making the same mistake a few hundred times.
I guess what happened was, I never expected to have a record contract and I never expected to have any success as a musician. So then when Play became very successful, it certainly wasn’t a bad thing, but I was quite unprepared for any of the ramifications of success, the creative ramifications. After Play, suddenly I was getting more phone calls from the record company. I found myself trying to make records that the record company liked and that the press would like and that people would like – trying to please everybody. And especially with the album Hotel, I ended up with a record that I just wasn’t all that happy with. So I guess with Wait For Me, I just wanted to focus more on first and foremost trying to make a record that I loved, and then trying to make a record that another individual would love. Instead of generalizing about tens of millions of people, just trying to think of one other person at home in their living room on a Sunday morning when it’s raining outside.

TLC: Making an album like this is obviously not about trying to make millions of dollars and get free drugs. What is it about?
M: I have an answer, but I hope it doesn’t sound overly earnest, even though it’s true. At some point, I realized, I mean, life is short. Maybe we live to be 70, 80, 90 years old, but in the grand scheme, that’s not such a long time. I guess I just asked myself the question, “On my deathbed, what do I want to remember?” And I don’t want to remember meetings with record companies where they’re talking about collaborations with Top 40 stars. I don’t want to remember spending my time at celebrity parties. For me, one of the only things that I feel gives my life any degree of meaning is working hard trying to make music that I love.

TLC: That sounds honest, not earnest.
M: It’s hard. In interviews, you want to retain a degree of detachment. I think a lot of people, when they do interviews, they sound tough or they sound ironic or they sound like they don’t care. I’m neither tough, ironic nor apathetic.

TLC: You’re at a weird point now where you’re starting to sell more records out of the country than you are in the U.S. Does that matter?
M: It’s a bit strange. We just finished a European tour, and the shows there were a lot of big festivals where we’re playing to about 60,000 people a night. And then I’m looking at the North American tour, where on average we’re playing to around 900 people a night. Which is fine – I actually selfishly really enjoy playing smaller shows. But I think it was on the last record where I sold more records in Belgium and the Netherlands than I did in the United States.

TLC: Was it ever much of a priority for you to be famous in the first place?
M: I truly believed that I would spend my entire life making music in my bedroom that no one would ever listen to. If we had been talking 20 years ago, I would have guessed that my life would involve teaching in college and working in a book store. There’s never been any plan. When I found myself having success or being more in the limelight, it was very accidental. As a result, I wasn’t really prepared to deal with it. Now the way I deal with it is by almost avoidance – avoiding a lot of the institutions of fame that for me I just don’t see as particularly appealing. Most of the people who really pursue the world of fame, they have lives that I wouldn’t even want to have. Not that their lives are even available to me. I’m 43 years old. Being 43 and not able to dance does kind of limit your ability to be famous in 2009.

TLC: You keep talking about being 43. Do you feel cooked? What else is there?
M: All I want to do for the rest of my life is try and make music that I love. I’m not really too concerned about how the music is made or where the music is made or whether it’s successful. Honestly, that’s pretty much it. I mean, it’d be nice at some point to fall in love and get married. It’d be nice to learn how to put up drywall. It’d be nice to speak Spanish better. But pretty much the only serious goal I have in life is trying to keep working on music.

Armed with a quiver full of syrupy metal ballads and clad in zigzaggy, yellow-and-black spandex armor, the soldiers under command in California metal band Stryper single-handedly put Christian rock on the mainstream map in the ’80s.
While their peers on the Sunset Strip notoriously drank, snorted and shot themselves full of every available substance after shows, Stryper handed out free bibles. Needless to say, “odd man out” is an understatement. But despite almost constant ridicule, Stryper took their gospel to the Top 40 airwaves and set up shop at MTV with megahits like “Honestly.”
After a 12-year hiatus, Stryper reunited in 2003 and released a pair of albums, including 2009’s Murder By Pride. This month, the band welcomes original bassist Tim Gaines back into the fold and embarks on a 25th anniversary tour that includes a stop at the Chameleon on September 23. Team Last Call tracked down singer Michael Sweet to get the lowdown.

Team Last Call: What was the catalyst for this tour for you personally?
Michael Sweet: My wife passed on March 5, and right after she passed, a light went on in my mind and in my heart to heal. It’s not that Stryper needs immense or intense healing. It’s just that there’s still some things going on with the band, things from the past that I don’t think have completely been let go of. And I just thought, how cool would it be for all of us to get together, go out and do a tour together and not just tell people that we forgive and forget, but show them? Live it.

TLC: I read that you’ve got new yellow and black suits for this tour. Are you going to be rocking the spandex?
MS: Definitely not.

TLC: What’s the significance of the colors to you?
MS: Back in the day, there really was no significance. It was just a bright color, bold color. Then as we progressed and became Stryper, that’s when we found the scripture to go along with the stripes, Isaiah 53:5, “By his stripes we are healed.” That’s when we came up with the acronym and that’s when we defined the colors to be more like a warning that God’s message through this band is going to be presented.

TLC: It’s funny that even now, 25 years later, people still aren’t over the fact that you guys are a Christian band.
MS: We are that band that falls into the category of getting it from all sides. We really do. I’m not complaining. We’re used to it. We’ve been dealing with it for years.
We’ve always been a band that’s gotten it from the secular mainstream side for being a wimpy Christian band who, because we’re a Christian band, we must not be good. We can’t play, we can’t sing, we can’t write, we can’t perform. We must suck because we’re Christian. And the flipside of that coin is, from the church, we can’t be a Christian band because we’re metal, because we’re hard rock, because we look like we look, because we sound like we sound. It’s impossible, because of those things, to be Christians, so we’re hypocrites, we’re wolves in sheep’s clothing, we’re fake. So we’ve gotten it from both sides for years.

TLC: What’s the meaning behind the new album title, Murder By Pride?
MS: We all have pride. I feel like I have a lot. We’ve got to stand and put our pride aside and to just follow what it is that God wants for our lives and not let our pride cripple us.

TLC: You know, I’ve got to say, after being slapped around like the band has over the years, it seems remarkably ballsy to talk openly about stuff like that.
MS: We are four guys who blow it on a day-to-day basis. We sin, like everyone else. We’re weak guys, and we need God. We’re not ashamed to admit that. We all need God, man. It’s something that we’ll talk about and hopefully be humble enough to admit for the rest of our lives.

TLC: If you got to design it, what would you put on Stryper’s headstone?
MS: I would want people to read and know that no matter what, we always took a sincere, bold stand for Christ. I hope that that came through. Did we do some things kind of cheesy and corny? Yeah. But we tried.

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

There are pros and cons to having a computer as a bandmate. He rarely comes up with song ideas, and almost never pitches in for pizza. On the other hand, he doesn’t drink the band beer, and if he ever gives you any attitude, you can unplug him.
No one has learned these lessons as well as Jason Reynolds and Rob Lindgren of Revolution, I Love You, an indie rock-dance-pop band from Middletown, Delaware, whose third member always seems to view the world in ones and zeros.
“It sucks, because the laptop doesn’t go to the diner with you after the show. It’s not much fun,” says Reynolds.
“On the other hand, breakfast is a lot cheaper,” Lindgren offers.
The laptop is in some ways Revolution, I Love You’s defining element, providing the fat-bottomed beats and buzzing bass that turns Reynolds and Lindgren’s eerie Brit-pop into something fiercely fun. Stripped of the ornamentation, the songs might come across as gloomy, if not downright creepy, with Lindgren moaning and crooning in half-time over droning keys and dark guitar lines soggy with reverb. But those chirpy, choppy beats wring out the melodrama and replace it with a winking dare to dance. In the words of Black Eyed Peas, Revolution, I Love You are not afraid to get retarded when necessary.
The band captured this dichotomy on its debut EP, noise. pop. deathray., released last year to rave reviews that drew comparisons to modern-day buzz bands like Menomena, Ratatat and other groups that, frankly, RILY had never heard of prior to recording the album. “I listen to a lot of Bright Eyes and Rob listens to a lot of The Smiths,” Reynolds shrugs, adding Squarepusher and Aphex Twin as electronica influences.
“When we first started writing the album, we wanted to make something expansive and strange, but we kept coming up with these quirky little pop songs,” Lindgren says. “So the goal became to make these pop songs work with our propensity for abrasive noise and weird arrangements.”
Lindgren and Reynolds have been playing in bands together since high school, but it wasn’t until they were in college that one of their projects finally started to take off. So they both quit school to pursue it on a full-time basis – just in time to watch all of their bandmates quit. It was around that time that Reynolds wrote a song called “Can I Get the Door for You?” that would lay the foundation for Revolution, I Love You’s ass-shaking future.
Reynolds recalls, “At some point, I said the now infamous words: ‘Why don’t you try putting a beat under that?’”
“I entirely misunderstood him,” Lindgren says. “Apparently, he wasn’t thinking of ’90s house when he said ‘beat,’ but that’s what he got.”
The success of that song was the impetus for RILY’s sound to-date; the dance odyssey had begun.
So they can talk the talk on the dancefloor, but can they walk the walk?
“I do the Lawnmower,” Reynolds deadpans.
“And I’m working on the Carlton,” Lindgren says. “But seriously, I wouldn’t brag, but I don’t think either of us would get kicked out of the club, either.”

Last month, Team Last Call began an inspirational series of columns for English majors addressing issues like masculinity, grammar mastery and the remarkable way in which those two things cancel each other out.

As a general rule, all English majors are fueled by the same basic elements: Pringles, Little Debbie snack cakes and a crushing set of insecurities. And TMZ. We are not an outdoor breed, and as such shouldn’t ever be expected to participate in activities that involve dirt, shirtlessness or roughhousing of any sort. We also have poor motor skills and tend to struggle with things like 1) upper body strength, 2) lower body strength and 4) math.

But we have positive qualities too, such as our ability to write self-help articles. Which brings us to today’s column, in which we will examine the practice of writing for a living and how it relates to fatherhood. There’s nothing quite like theresponsibility for another human life to really drive home the point that, by nature of the fact that you’re an English major, you don’t know how to do anything. Yet, as a father, you’re expected to have all the answers – especially if you’re having a little boy. There are things that you as a father need to teach your son. Tough things. Manly things. Things you know nothing about, like carburetors and leaf blowers and … what do you call those things again? The ones that are always denting your car when you’re not looking? Wives.

No, you don’t know about any of that stuff because you, the English major, were too busy crying over Artax dying in the Swamps of Sadness to learn anything useful growing up. While the other little boys played soccer and earned their Boy Scout badges, you spent your summers pretend-making out with Winnie Cooper in your elbow and trying in vain to get past Soda Popinski on Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out.

But it’s important not to let the past get you down. Just because you never learned how to “change a tire” or “fix a leaky faucet” or “develop pectoral muscles” doesn’t mean you’re not fit to be a proper male role model. Your son will simply have a different kind of father figure to look up to and emulate. The kind that has Lady Gaga on his iPod. On the plus side, by the time everyone’s kids are all grown, yours will be able to punctuate circles around the rest of them. Sure, he might be plump and dateless, but he’ll be able to write a sonnet like it’s going out of style. Which it undoubtedly has.

While some little boys grow up with images of their fathers fighting crime and rescuing kittens from burning buildings and felling trees with their bare hands, your kid will have visions of you curled up on the couch with a laptop balanced on your stomach, watching reruns of What Not To Wear when you thought no one was looking. But in your sedentary state, you’ll be able to teach him such invaluable manly lessons as 1) A scoop top and an A-line skirt can have a slimming effect on the hips, 2) It is too possible to make a meal out of Easy Cheese, and 3) As long as you’re wearing sweatpants, things like tissues and napkins will always be redundant.

Some little boys learn how to fish, or build furniture, or design little wooden racecars that speed down the track and win first prize like the one in that Subaru Forester commercial. You know the one I’m talking about. The one that makes you feel like a horrible father, even if you’re a teenage girl, for not knowing how to help your son build a car like that. Well, winning first place in the Pinewood Derby might seem nice for some kids, but it’s not in the cards for yours. Your son is going to enjoy advantages of a different variety. Other fathers could teach him how to drive a stick shift or properly grill a steak. I guess that’s exciting, if you’re into “knowing” how to “do stuff.” But only you, the English major, can teach him the crucial, panty-dropping art of correct semi-colon usage; you can also teach him the best way to hand a credit card to the plumber, how to eat his weight at Hot Diggity Dog and, most importantly, how to hide it from his wife when he gets home for dinner.

In summation, English majors have nothing to fear when it comes to fatherhood, apart from the certainty of failure. But other than that, you’ll do just fine. And who knows? If you keep your child focused on the right kind of activities, maybe in a few years he can show you how to knock out Soda Popinski.

“I don’t necessarily want to have the first line of my obituary be, ‘He played a good organ patch.’”

Ah, the plight of the sideman, the second fiddle, the often-faceless, underpaid, rarely laid unsung hero of rock and roll. As far as the breed goes, Franz Nicolay is among the more recognizable, as much for his kooky handlebar mustache as his high-profile gigs in The Hold Steady and the World/Inferno Friendship Society. He’s a magnificent musician, an accomplished guitarist and accordion player whose fired-up piano is often the match to the Hold Steady powder keg. But does Nicolay get the glory? Of course not. He’s a sideman.

So what’s a Number Two to do? For better or worse, the answer in most cases is “solo album,” which is music speak for “vapid, masturbatory disaster.” Ever hear a Gene Simmons record? OK then.

In Nicolay’s case, however, the solo album is a revelation in its own right – if not for breaking new ground musically, then for illuminating exactly where his bands get a good portion of their spunk from [he also performs in Balkan klezmer band Guignol and chamber-pop collective Anti-Social Music]. Major General, released in January, is a curious, vibrant record that skips audaciously from all-American barnburners to gypsy romps. Flanked by a roster of musicians that includes members of World/Inferno and Dresden Dolls, Nicolay bellows cathartically and operatically about everything from subway graffiti to Jeff Penalty, a replacement singer for the Dead Kennedys. The music can be melodramatic and over-earnest, but at least it’s honest. Above all, it’s obvious that the album is less of a vanity project than a means for Nicolay to find a home for some the nomadic songs wandering around his brain.

“I didn’t feel like I had much to prove,” says Nicolay. “I had just built up a collection of songs that didn’t have an obvious home in World/Inferno or The Hold Steady or any of the other bands. A couple of the songs I’ve had around forever, and I just felt like, ‘Even if I don’t ever play this song live, I just want to get it on a record and move on.’”

Major General is the beneficiary of Nicolay’s lifelong musical wanderlust. The songs cascade off each other, punk bleeding into gypsy bleeding into – was that a clarinet solo? When isolated, only a few songs (”Jeff Penalty,” “Dead Sailor”) raise the pulse the way a Hold Steady song might, but as a whole, the album captivates with its sheer scope and ambition.

“I get excited about novelty,” Nicolay says. “I’ll get really excited about Balkan music for six months, and then I’ll get really excited about the Beach Boys for six months. There’s always some tidbit that I’ll get out of each of them about ways to sing background vocals or where you put the glockenspiel overdub or how the string arrangement for a George Jones record differs from a string arrangement on a Divine Comedy record.And all that stuff goes in the cauldron and can bubble up in unpredictable ways.”

Nicolay brings his mustache, his guitar and his botanist friend (he’ll have to explain that one himself) to ABC for a special solo show this month.

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

Lancaster Countians get a crash-course in Tuvan culture when Alash Ensemble, a quartet of master throat singers, visits the area for a special performance.

Tuva, a Siberian neighbor of Mongolia and a republic of the Russian Federation, has inspired curiosity around the globe with its singular form of singing, in which the vocalist produces a low, guttural tone and, through careful manipulation of the vocal tract, splinters the tone into two, three or even four notes simultaneously. Depending on the singer’s specific mode of throat singing, the “extra” tones resemble anything from a whistle to a songbird to, in the “kargyraa” style, the cries of a yak. It’s a surreal, improbable-sounding exercise that requires excruciatingly nuanced control of muscles that most humans rarely, if ever, use.

The only thing as unlikely as the sounds these men are producing is the story of Sean Quirk, an Ohio-born, Wisconsin-raised man who now travels the world as manager and interpreter for the group.

Quirk first encountered throat singing while in school in St. Paul, Minnesota. His fascination with an album he heard by master singer Huun-Huur-Tu eventually led him to try the artform for himself – for better or worse.

“I started imitating a couple months after I first heard and was blown away by the music,” he says in a Fly Magazine interview during Alash’s latest North American tour. “I made a lot of bad noises.”

After learning what he could on his own, Quirk earned a Fulbright fellowship and soon packed his bags for the south of Siberia to study at the feet of the masters. Soon after arriving in Tuva in 2003, he met Alash, a group of young men as beloved for their steadfast commitment to tradition as their vision for marrying the music with modern influences.

“They had been an ensemble going on five years at the time and were all members of the newly formed Tuvan National Orchestra,” Quirk recalls. “Being of a similar age, and musicians, they and the orchestra took me on as a student in Tuvan music. Naturally, we became friends, as the orchestra kind of adopted me in a sense, to the point of letting me sit in on the bass doshpuluur [a Tuvan lute], a post which eventually became my official job in Tuva to the present.”

Over the next six years, Quirk would marry a Tuvan woman, have two daughters and set up a permanent home within the culture that still holds his fascination today.

“Nothing can describe hearing and feeling it live. I have been living there a long time and seen a lot of Alash shows, and it still gets me deep each time to hear it up close,” he attests. “People also shouldn’t just expect ‘fancy vocal tricks,’ but rather a deep and richly developed music involving instruments and vocals which simultaneously feels exotic and intimately familiar.”

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

My wife and I found out a few weeks ago that we are going to be having a baby boy. Since that time, I’ve been busy making a mental list of all of the things I need to teach him about being a man, including how to blow a good snotrocket and how to wear blue socks with black pants.
Then I need to teach him how to properly woo a woman, which is something I know a thing or two about, what with me being an English major and all. English majors, if you didn’t know, have been proven by science to be the world’s single sexiest demographic, thanks in part to our way with words and in part to the fact that we can put total lies into print and make them look like actual facts.
I decided to major in English for the same reason that all young men major in English: zero upper body strength. But I also had a desire to pick up women, and I figured that one way to go about that was to learn the seductive art of language. Because everybody knows that nothing’s a bigger turn-on to a college girl than having her grammar corrected.
I could hardly wait to make the ladies swoon with my masterful grasp of semi-colon usage. “Come over here, baby girl,” I’d say. “Daddy is going to punctuate your sentence in ways you never dreamed of. You heard me right, sweet thing. I’m about to parse this verb from the infinitive all the way down to the subjunctive. Trust me when I say that as long as we’re together, my participles will never dangle.”
Pickup lines like these never really “worked” on high school girls, but I always chalked that up their own lack of sophistication. If they couldn’t appreciate some well executed iambic pentameter, then that was their problem. Except for the part where they wouldn’t make out with me, at which point it became my problem. But in college, it would be different. In college, the girls would recognize genius when they saw it.
In college, the girls did not recognize genius. It didn’t take long for me to discover the ugly truth that an English major is about as attractive to college girls as a lip fungus. We are simply not cut from the same cloth as people like McDreamy and McBulge-pants, or whatever his name is, with their “chiseled physiques” and their “salaries that are big enough to live on.” And that, I’m sorry to say, is the kind of man that college girls go for.
English majors, on the other hand, tend to be introverted, lumpy, melodramatic Beta Males who, generally speaking, aren’t considered to be “hunks,” except for in the following sentence: “Once the team captains had selected their players, all that remained on the gymnasium floor were a discarded jock strap and the English major, a blubbering, asthmatic hunk of dough in navy shorts and tennis shoes.”
We do have our good points, though, including our soft, uncalloused hands and our ability to weep openly during that one scene when Frodo gets stung by the giant spider and is carried off by the orcs into the castle of Cirith Ungol. Or maybe that’s just me.
But no matter how hard we try, we English majors will never be the objects of lust for those young college women. We will never be able to titillate them with our gerunds. And our writing, while eloquent and emotive, has zero alcohol content, rendering it virtually useless to nine out of 10 college girls. And the tenth probably has a unibrow or wears Crocs.
But Darwin be damned: in the end, we somehow always find a way to get the girl. I personally succeeded – and this is something I recommend to every English major I meet – by making fart jokes.
Women love it when you can make them laugh. Which is something we English majors rarely do, or at least not without getting naked first. But through the magic of fart jokes, I found a way to use my otherwise useless degree to attract a beautiful, intelligent, awesomely weird girl who under normal circumstances would have always looked at me like I had just stepped in a big pile of caca-doodie.
Fast-forward 10 years, and here we sit, awaiting the arrival of our son – who, by the way, has already been proven by science to be the single most beautiful, intelligent, awesomely weird baby ever. And that one’s no lie.