Night Beds, the songwriting (and full band) moniker of Nashville’s Winston Yellen, has had a lot of words spent on them this year, and all of them have been accurate. Yellen’s voice is haunting and absolutely arresting whether he’s deploying it at the height of its power or whispering, and the music that backs it is…
Category: opinions about concerts
dawes + shovels & rope @ cat’s cradle
Dawes is one of those bands where I have tried for years to grasp the deep, fierce love with which fans of the band approach Taylor Goldsmith’s music, and after three or four shows, I remain perplexed. I enjoy Dawes, but there’s nothing in their songs that snags my heart and flips it over. What…
the national @ red hat amphitheater
I wrote about the show for Speakers In Code, which is the only — ONLY! — place you can also see my photos. I have never seen so many photographers react so quickly to change lenses in the pit as I did — zooms to fixed 50mm and 35mm — when Matt carried his mic out…
the front bottoms @ local 506
Back in the summer of 2002, my buddy Lirette and I spent a lot of time driving around Southern Minnesota, listening to the Refreshments’ genius 1996 brat punk record Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy. It’s the perfect summer record, and while that summer was notable for about 17,006 other reasons, some of my best memories…
fall out boy @ 9:30 club ; save rock and roll club tour
I wrote about what Fall Out Boy means to me, and what it meant to me to shoot them on Friday night, for Speakers In Code. Some other things: They played everything I could have hoped to hear, except the acoustic version of “Nobody Puts Baby In A Corner” from the My Heart EP, which…
preview: fall out boy @ 9:30 club
HIS FACE, YOU GUYS. Last night was such a huge rush. where is your boy tonight i hope he is a gentleman
josh ritter @ cat’s cradle, may 2013
(People searching for the setlist, I hope you come here and find it!) I am not exactly shy about my feeling regarding Josh Ritter; it is one of my least complicated listener-artist relationships, in that flat out I love his weird ass unconditionally. I believe that rock and roll is a religion, and I believe…
pickwick & basia bulat @ local 506
I wrote about the Pickwick set for Speakers In Code. Basia Bulat opened, and as Adam told me I would, I fell promptly in love with her immediately. She’s got an incredible voice, a knack for out of the box songwriting that just wrang my heart, and she played some of the greatest, oddest instruments…
fitz & the tantrums @ haw river ballroom
I have been to two shows lately that have surprised me; I am sometimes a little snotty about the fact that Triangle concert crowds can be a bit … stodgy. Appreciative, sure. But non-reactive, often. And I don’t what’s been different at these two shows: call it a change in audience demographic, call it drunkenness,…
frightened rabbit & wintersleep @ cat’s cradle
Frightened Rabbit absolutely destroyed the Cradle last night; a sold out crowd hung on every word that frontman Scott Hutchison — in a particularly cheerful, gregarious mood — said, and those moments when the crowd’s collective voice rose up over the band in chorus, those are the moments that give me shivers. I was in…
brand new kind of photography 