items tagged with Daytrotter

Keegan DeWitt is inviting his fans along on his journey, in what passes for real time in the music industry.

The Nashville-based musician and composer has many of his film scores available for free on his Web site. His earlier solo recordings found him in singer/songwriter mode. A trio of singles over the past year have shown him making the transition from solo artist to bandleader. And he hopes that all those elements will come together on the album he and his band are working on.

A Daytrotter.com veteran with three sessions under his belt and an EP (last year’s Nothing Shows) released by the Quad Cities-based site, DeWitt will perform as part of the September 3 Daytrotter Barnstormer 5 concert in Maquoketa’s Codfish Hollow Barn.

Two years ago, he said in a phone interview this week, he recorded largely by himself with a couple of string players. As he’s built a band, he said, “we wanted to make sure that everybody was following us on that trajectory, instead of listening to something that was super-outdated. ... We wanted to make sure that through this process of making music ... we weren’t waiting on anybody.”

Daytrotter.com’s latest Barnstormer tour – five nights of live music in Midwestern barns – closes Saturday at the Codfish Hollow barn in Makoqueta. The Reader published an interview with headliner Sondre Lerche in 2009 (RCReader.com/y/lerche), but we wanted to acquaint our readers with a couple of the other bands on this year’s tour: Guards and the Romany Rye. (The bill also includes Keegan DeWitt, ARMS, Mike & the Moonpies, and Hands.)

Guards: A Series of Fortunate Events

Richie James Follin said that the ongoing joke of his current band is that as long as a song has a Omnichord – an electronic instrument that was meant to mimic an autoharp – and a 12-string electric guitar, it’s a Guards song, regardless of genre or any other consideration.

So Guards’ seven-inch of covers includes a startlingly sleepy and longing inversion of Metallica’s “Motorbreath” alongside transformed tracks from M.I.A. and Vampire Weekend. There’s a dreamy, retro haze over everything, but on that and the earlier collection of seven songs that Follin posted on Guards’ Bandcamp site (Guards.Bandcamp.com), the vibe ranges from dark, propulsive pop to angular, doom-filled rock. (Both sets of recordings can be downloaded for free.)

When I talked with Nathaniel Rateliff earlier this week, he was driving a dump truck for his job as a gardener, and closed the interview with these pronouncements when asked if there was anything he'd like to mention: "I love to swim. I like poultry."

Aside from hinting at a dry sense of humor, these things suggest that Rateliff is grounded person. And that's reflected in the path that he's chosen.

The Denver-based singer/songwriter, who will perform two Daytrotter.com shows on August 27, had an opportunity to have his rock band (Born in the Flood) and perhaps his current folk-ish outfit signed to the Roadrunner label. But he chose instead to follow his heart.

If the husband-and-wife duo of Tennis disappears a year from now, it will remain a great story. Frugal living and romance led to a sailing trip that led to the band that captured their journey in evocative, lovely lo-fi songs. Another period of frugal living will let Tennis test the musical waters over the next year, and if it doesn't work out, Patrick Riley said he's okay with that.

In a phone interview last month, Riley said he and his wife have saved enough money at their day jobs over the past year to "buy ourselves another year of doing whatever. Since music has taken off, we're just going to try the music thing for a year. ... If we can sustain ourselves, we'll keep doing it. If we can't, we'll just turn it back into a hobby again."

When Jenny Lewis, the singer of the indie-pop outfit Rilo Kiley, released her 2006 solo debut Rabbit Fur Coat, she credited the album to Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins.

That small act of generosity is the primary reason that the Watson Twins -- who will perform a Daytrotter.com show at The Speakeasy on August 18 -- have their current visibility.

The California-based band Dawes has parlayed its debut album, last fall's North Hills, into slots at this year's Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza festivals, and if you've heard the sensitive and often lovely record, you know that's probably not an easy transition.

The group's warm, nakedly emotional songs recall the 1960s and '70s -- aggressively, one could say, if aggression weren't so antithetical to them; they seem built for intimate venues. AbsolutePunk.net wrote that the album is "a collection of 11 near-flawless roots-rock offerings that drip with such a defined sense of soul, grit, and harmony [that] it feels nearly criminal to label this album contemporary." Rolling Stone named the album's "That Western Skyline" one of the 25 best songs of 2009.

Guitarist, lead vocalist, and songwriter Taylor Goldsmith is only in his mid-20s, but North Hills is full of musical maturity, patience, and confidence -- a willingness to let the work overshadow the performers.

The band Fang Island -- playing the former ComedySportz location in Rock Island on Monday -- is named after a place from a story in The Onion, but it would be a mistake to infer that the band is in any way a joke. There's certainly a silliness there -- guitarist Jason Bartell admitted that many songs start with "cheesy" riffs -- but it's also nakedly sincere.

Think the unapologetically adolescent approach of Weezer, or the id arena rock of Andrew W.K. as starting points. But Fang Island benefits from having few lyrics -- and because they're generally shouted by a group, they barely register. Fusing big, bright, loud guitars, strong melodies, and some prog-rock unpredictability and complexity, the band makes a joyful noise unfettered by angst. As Pitchfork noted: "What helps Fang Island steamroll past cynicism is how 'fun' isn't just an ornament for them; it's embedded in the band's musical DNA."

"I think the best way to make music is that middle line [between] ... not taking it seriously enough and taking it way too seriously ... ," Bartell said in a phone interview this week. "It comes down to honesty in some ways." The band needs to pursue its aims "in a very pure way," he added.

On the day he's playing a Daytrotter.com show at RIBCO, singer/songwriter Dale Watson will release Carryin' on, and the album seems a natural fit for a guy who's been a country-music relic from the beginning. That's a compliment, by the way.

Since his 1995 debut Cheatin' Heart Attack, Watson has been writing and performing country songs in a style out of fashion for decades. But it wasn't until this new album that he was able to combine his own songs with musicians from the era he emulates.

His band for Carryin' on was assembled by steel guitarist Lloyd Green and included Hargus "Pig" Robbins on piano and Pete Wade on guitar -- all noted session players active in the 1960s and beyond.

While Watson's regular band -- with which he'll be performing in Rock Island -- is adept at old-school country, the 47-year-old said in a recent phone interview that people his age and younger simply can't beat the old-timers: "It's just something you have to have lived to play."

Roughly 100 seconds into "Down Down Down," the third track on Peter Wolf Crier's debut Inter-Be, the drums kick in. That's the duo in microcosm, as Peter Pisano's fully formed guitar-and-vocal songs are amplified by the drums and other accents Brian Moen added relatively late in the process.

The band will perform a Daytrotter.com show at RIBCO on Tuesday, June 22, and the moral of the Peter Wolf Crier story is to follow things where they lead.

Dan Snaith sounds tired of answering questions about math.

He comes from a family of mathematicians; he earned a Ph.D. in the field in 2005. And because he records and performs (under the name Caribou) electronic music, journalists (this one included) ask him a lot of questions about the relationship between his primary academic and musical pursuits. They both involve computers, don't they?

Snaith -- who will be playing with his band at a Daytrotter show at RIBCO on Saturday, June 5 -- said there are some similarities. But not many. "Being able to do what you want ... is kind of an intuitive process," he said in a phone interview last week. "In both mathematics and in music, you kind of have to use some gut-level intuition to piece things together. [But] I think they're very different in many ways."

What's evident listening to the music of Caribou is that Snaith's electronic instruments are largely tools, not ends. There are certainly electronic sounds, but the songs sound organic and feel handmade, and his singing voice is ethereal, warm, and emotive -- a perfect offset to any digital coolness. Put differently, there's nothing mathematical about Caribou's songs.