Hello friends.I'm on tour with David Bazan selling things. I'm also tour blogging.Check in here.love.Caleb
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Blogging Somewhere Else
I've been hanging out here waiting for something to start
The end of summer is a beautiful thing - the most mild and easy to enjoy days of the lazy season. The sunsets begin to come earlier, it's already happening, and the leaves start to fade from a brilliant green to a duller, paler, shade. Then to yellow, then to orange, finally to brown. The pools close, you have a final cookout, and dig your jackets out of the untouched end of your closet. The sc...
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The Casino, in a Cubscout Tee
The almost robotic, staccato eighth notes, the undercover disco beat, the mid-verse noise loop wherein someone hits the body of their jazzmaster with a fierce force, throwing their input switch to and fro as quickly as they know how. It's funny how musical the most robotic song from one of the most truly minimal bands of our time is. On minute and fifty-six seconds of hinting. Gesturing shyly a...
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Inside Yr Guitar
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Get in your car and head for the interstate. Pick up your friends and go somewhere. Strum furiously at the conditioned air. Dive bomb on the imaginary tremolo arm with reckless abandon. Stop for coffee at a time-loop, ghostly shell of a gas station. Get back in your car.[mp3] It Hugs Back - Unaware
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Let me know you know, so I can leave it alone
I am going to the beach tomorrow - fear not, this is not a "see you in eight days," sort of thing a mere two days after my return to form. I'll still be around - but I'm going to the beach tomorrow, and while at the beach, one finds it difficult to listen to music that does not possess that certain sunny quality. Things with a lot of room, lots of fresh air and sunshine, plenty of opportunities...
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And then nothing turned itself inside out
From time to time I get the desire to really listen to Yo La Tengo. These phases can range from as short as a few hours to as long as a few weeks, but sometimes I get an insatiable urge to jam on some mathy, chilled-out, art-school hipster, noise rock. The unquenchable urge to put And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out or I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One on and wish I had saved my money a...
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State of the Union
I vanished for 43 days. A whole bunch of you emailed and commented with pretty much two standard responses: either wondering where I was, and asking that I return to blogging, or being curiously angry and calling me an asshole. While I'm honored that you felt strongly enough about HTFAF to call me an asshole, I'd ask you to say you're sorry.Blogging is hard - harder than people realize. Quite f...
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Andrew Bird Covers Smog!
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In one of the more excited moments of my week, I came across this video from one Mr. Andrew Bird's in-store performance at our local record store here in Nashville, Grimey's, which happened earlier this week. I didn't attend the event, due to prior commitments, and now I'm really wishing I would have, as he covered one of my favorite songs in recent memory, Smog's Cold Blooded Old Times. Video ...
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AA Bondy Announces New Album
Good news for me, freshly back from vacation:In case you care about anything other than Snow Leopard and the new Macbooks, I thought you might like to know that AA Bondy will be releasing the follow-up to his spectacular American Hearts. It's called When The Devil's Loose, and it will come out September 1 of this year. The track titles and location of recording (Water Valley, Mississippi) sugge...
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R.I.P. Jay Bennett
Jay Walter Bennett died late Sunday night / early Monday morning in his Urbana, IL home. I've often very loudly made my case that Jay Bennett's presence was the best thing, and his absence the worst thing, to ever happen to Wilco. Jay was a huge part of the band's production, songwriting, and instrumentation from Being There to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. He also released several solo albums in the p...
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Casiotone for the Painfully Alone Announce Tour
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Owen Ashworth, the tall quiet dude behind Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, knows a thing or two about playing music for people in rock clubs - he does it a lot, both on this continent as well as Europe, and he's going to be doing it for a very extended period of time this summer. Some of June, and all of July will find CFTPA in a sweaty van, drinking gas station water, and sitting around doin...
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Brent Knopf of Menomena to Release Solo Record
Well, well, well. It seems those clever dudes in Menomena are constantly coming up with ways to take your hard-earned money for some songs, not that you're complaining, and this time it's in the form of a solo album. No, not from Danny Seim, or Lackthereof as you may know him, who released a solo album last year on Barsuk (and many before that on his own). No, this time it's Brent Knopf - the o...
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Awesome Judee Sill Tribute Announced
Judee Sill is a cult-hero of sorts - dead, incredibly talented, and maybe slightly unwell mentally, her music contains all the proper ingredients to make me swoon, and swoon I do. I only pretty recently got into Judee's legacy and have been trying to get the melody Jesus Was a Crossmaker out of my head ever since - un-succesfully, I might add.So imagine my glee when I found out that there is a ...
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The Tonight Show with The Decemberists
The Decemberists - friends of Barack Obama, talk good with words, excellent and advanced readers, and tonight's guests on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno - make sure you tune in as Jay's days are numbered until Conan takes over - coup style. I don't think anyone's complaining about that one.The D's also ahve some touring to do if you'd like to go pretend you're being eaten by a whale, watch John...
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Indie Rock Tacos - Brought to you by Ex-Shins Drummer
Remember when we told you about the Shins frontman James Mercer firing his longtime drummer and bassist? Well, as it turns out the drummer side of that equation - one mr. Jesse Sandoval, has already filled far more satisfying ways to fill his time - namely opening a taco truck in Portland.I'm not sure what the taco truck scene is like in Portland - the Pac. NW is not exactly a haven for south-o...
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Finish Your Collapse and Stay for Breakfast
Well - slow music day, but luckily I have an exciting tale to recall for you: on the way to get a nice Tuesday brunch this morning at our favorite eatery, we noticed a building had collapsed. Exposed steel beams and all, and half the building was now resting on an SUV and a pickup truck. Turns out it was a wreck gone awry that lead to the partial collapse of the Gallatin Rd. Hair World and Beau...
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Centro-matic does Twitter Chat, Announces Only Tour of '09
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Centro-matic is arguably the hardest working band in Indie Rock. They routinely spend half the year in a van, and half the year in a studio as if it's nothing, but eventually everyone needs a little downtime, so the boys will be taking some this year for various reasons. Those reasons include having babies, making records for side-projects, recording other bands, and hopefully some sleeping in ...
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The Shins Shed Members, Gain Members, Make Album, Etc.
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Say bye-bye to #2 and #4In what I would imagine is a pretty messy situation, despite James Mercer's insistence otherwise, the Shins frontman decided to replace long-time (like before the Shins were the Shins) drummer Jesse Sandoval and keyboard/auxiliary man Marty Crandall. In their sted, the Shins now feature Ron Lewis of Grand Archives, and the Fruit Bats on Bass, and Joe Plummer of Modest Mo...
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There are Kings, There are Queens
Athens, Georgia's newest example of excellent Indie Pop, Casper & The Cookies are here just in time for summer to usher in the month of May with some new tracks. I have a huge, unashamed soft spot for bands who write sugary pop songs - SSLYBY, Beulah, The Little Ones, The Long Winters, etc, etc, I'm just a fan of feeling happy sometimes, you see, and that's never more true then when the sun sta...
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John Vanderslice Announces Huge Tour
JV is a lot of thing - incredibly kind, the owner of an incredibly awesome studio, and apparently completely and fully tireless. Ya see, John has been releasing records for a really long time, especially compared to most other dudes in Indie Rock, and you'd think by now he'd just want to stay at home for a while and garden for a while, but he doesn't. He wants to get into a van, and drive thous...
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