January '14 reviews

The best new records I heard this month were ones I reviewed for The Grid: Rosanne Cash and Hidden Cameras.

 In Cash’s case, I’d always liked and respected her, but I’d certainly never fallen head over heels for anything she’s done. This record, however, is flawless: I don’t dole out 10/10 ratings lightly. I’m also greatly enjoying her 2010 memoir, Composed, which has been sitting on my desk at work for, well, three years, but I just picked it up this week (read Carl Wilson's excellent review here). Cash plays the Flato Markham Theatre in Markham, Ont., on Saturday, Feb. 1. My Grid review is here.

The Hidden Cameras are a band I wondered if I would ever love again the way I did from about 2002-05. To me, they seemed to have stalled, and I didn’t enjoy any of Joel Gibb’s newer songs as much as I did those that sprung from his initial burst of inspiration. This album makes me a believer again: both the sound and the songs signal an entirely new chapter. The Hidden Cameras play a noon-hour show at the University of Guelph on Feb. 13, a show at the Starlight Lounge in Waterloo that same night, and Lee’s Palace in Toronto on Feb. 15. My Grid review is here.

Here are the other January 2014 releases reviewed in my column for the Waterloo Record and Guelph Mercury.

Couer de Pirate – Trauma (Grosse Boite)

At the end of a TV drama there’s often a plaintive piano track, often sung by a pixieish woman, sometimes a cover version. Quebecois superstar Couer de Pirate was commissioned by just such a TV show to do 12 such covers, which comprise this, her English-language debut. It’s an odd showcase of the woman’s talents, as this is very much a one-dimensional representation of her capabilities: every song is the same tempo, features almost the exact same piano chording, and she sounds careful never to betray any actual emotion (lest it distract from the TV montage, no doubt).

And so here is a gimmicky reworking of Amy Winehouse, mopey numbers by The National, Bon Iver and Patrick Watson, not-bad takes on Nancy Sinatra, Tom Waits and the McGarrigle sisters, and a surprising reinvention of Kenny Rogers’s “Lucille.” But there are also all-too-obvious picks: does anyone need another cover of “Ain’t No Sunshine” or “Dead Flowers”? Why cover “Last Kiss” after Pearl Jam did? And for anyone whose followed Couer de Pirate’s career closely, it’s more than disappointing that her take on The Weeknd’s “Wicked Games” is nowhere to be found.

As with most covers albums, this is a mild distraction—and an odd move into the Anglosphere from a woman who has sold hundreds of thousands of records in her native tongue. (Jan. 23)

Download: “Lucille,” “Summer Wine,” “Heartbeats Accelerating”

Fred Eaglesmith – Tambourine (EOne)

Somewhere in a small town in North America tonight, Fred Eaglesmith and his band are playing a small community hall packed with fans. The next night, it will happen again in a new town. And then again. And again. In an age of blockbusters, Eaglesmith is a small-scale niche marketer par excellence, putting out 17 records in 33 years and touring endlessly. He’s had much more popular singers cover his songs and land Top 40 hits with them, but he still works with Guelph producer Scott Merritt and makes his records in a tiny hamlet in Norfolk County, with one microphone and his five-piece band—two guitarists, a mandolin player and a rhythm section—all playing together at once. It’s the kind of country and early rock’n’roll that Eaglesmith, 56, grew up with. Tambourine could be 1964, it could be 2014, and it sounds all the better for not letting us know the difference.

Although Eaglesmith’s recordings have evolved over the years, the sheer volume of them could lead you to think they’re interchangeable. He’s been working with his current band for several years now, ever since the death of long-time sidekick and mentor Willie P. Bennett, and they bring a renewed vigour—as well as three-part female harmonies—to his delivery. But Tambourine stands out as being one of Eaglesmith’s most solid collection of songs in many years; it’s not just mood, nuance and performance that he and Merritt nail perfectly this time out. And with “Nobody Gets Everything,” he’s most certainly written another hit—for someone else to eventually sing, while he continues to get in the van and do his own thing. (Jan. 30)

Download: “What It Takes,” “Nobody Gets Everything,” “Train Wreck”

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings – Give the People What They Want! (Daptone)

There’s a track on Sharon Jones’s new album called “Long Time Wrong Time”: it’s been four years since we heard new material from this hard-working soul singer, but it’s never the wrong time to hear Sharon Jones. This album was pushed back seven months while Jones battled Stage 2 pancreatic cancer—which forced her to take the longest break of her career.

So much about Jones’s personal story is inspiring, from her hardscrabble upbringing to her decades of obscurity to her late-in-life stardom to this current medical battle; every time you hear her voice, you want to root for her. Listening to her fifth album, easily her best, you hear a woman who would never let something like a potentially life-threatening disease get in the way of a good show.

So of course Jones is fantastic, and of course her Dap-Kings are the tightest backing group this side of the E Street Band (they’ve been used by Amy Winehouse and Michael Bublé, among others). They’ve been at it full-time for more than 12 years now, and what started as a retro revival soul shtick has fully evolved into songs and a production approach that doesn’t recall glory days long past: it often exceeds them. Give the People What They Want delivers 10 tracks that most often recall the Staples Singers: not just Jones in Mavis’s role, but guitarist Binky Griptite’s evocation of Pop Staples’s guitar, and the increased role of backing vocalists Saundra Williams and Starr Duncan.  

Jones sings here about how “People Don’t Get What They Deserve”—and while she may been sidetracked lately, there’s every indication here that her upward trajectory is about to go sky high. (Jan. 16)

Download: “Stranger to My Happiness,” “You’ll Be Lonely,” “Long Time Wrong Time”

Doug Paisley - Strong Feelings (Cameron House/Warner)

Everyone loves Toronto songwriter Doug Paisley—as they should. His 2010 album Constant Companion was hailed as a classic by all who heard it; it was a slow-building word-of-mouth favourite, a collection of homespun songs that sounded like you’ve known them all your life, sung them around campfires in the summer, kept you warm in long Canadian winters. Leslie Feist sang on that album. Mary Margaret O’Hara sings on this one. The Band’s Garth Hudson plays on both. Afie Jurvanen of Bahamas has toured with him, and appears here—as does Bazil Donovan of Blue Rodeo and avant-garde sax man Colin Stetson. If his soft-spoken delivery is any indication, Doug Paisley is not an extrovert rustling up any favour he can; these people all came to him.

Paisley’s craft comes from such a well-worn tradition, from Gordon Lightfoot through to Sarah Harmer, that there is little room for surprises. And yet “Where the Light Takes You,” an otherwise straightforward Blue Rodeo-esque mid-tempo country song, is transformed in the coda into a minor-key psychedelic turn with the sudden appearance of analog synth that pushes the song into Pink Floyd territory. Likewise, “What’s Up Is Down” would be a standard folk ballad were it not for the jazz piano, Mary Margaret O’Hara on backing vocals, a sad trombone and a soloing saxophone.

Constant Companion is a hard album to top; Paisley doesn’t exactly do that here. But Strong Feelings is still a more-than-worthy introduction for most folks to Paisley’s talents—enough to illustrate the rare, intangible gift he possesses, the one that separates the merely good from the truly great. (Jan. 30)

Download: “Song My Love Can Sing,” “Radio Girl,” “Where the Light Takes You”

Bruce Springsteen – High Hopes (Columbia)

High hopes, indeed—that sums up the way every Springsteen fan has felt for the past 20 years, a period of time when the icon has both thrilled and chilled, rarely consistently. Few of his albums are true clunkers (Working on a Dream); a few can stand strong alongside earlier triumphs (Magic); some are merely successful sidetracks (We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions). Springsteen himself likely has high hopes for this record: his last album, Wrecking Ball, was his first ever to not be certified gold sales status in the U.S.

As a compilation of stray tracks and covers from the last decade, High Hopes is predictably scattershot: part well-trod cliché, part overdue (he’s been playing “American Skin” live for the past 14 years), and partly a welcome chunk of worthy new songs. It also rounds up a few strong covers: Australian punk band the Saints’ “Just Like Fire Would,” the droning “Dream Baby Dream” by Suicide, and the title track, by obscure L.A. band the Havalinas.

Despite the fact the album was made with different producers and different band members—now-deceased E-Streeters Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici are here, as is everyone else who’s been in and out of the band in the last decade—it hangs together surprisingly well, due mostly to the fact the material never sinks as low as the worst moments on (the otherwise not-bad) Wrecking Ball.

The only misstep is the prominent role afforded guitarist Tom Morello, whom Springsteen clearly adores and grants second billing on most of the tracks here (listed as “featuring Tom Morello”), even shared lead vocals. Springsteen obviously feels like he’s tapping into the youthful energy of someone merely 15 years younger than him, allowing Morello to take multiple solos employing his patented pyrotechnics from his rap-rock days in Rage Against the Machine. Ever wonder what Eddie Van Halen would have sounded like in the E-Street Band? To find out, one must suffer through the heavy-handed take on the 1995 song “Ghost of Tom Joad,” where Morello indulges in unnecessary shredding.

Holding pattern Springsteen—maybe that’s the best we can hope for while we wait for a tour announcement. And pray that Morello stays home. (Jan. 16)

Download: “American Skin (41 Shots),” “Just Like Fire Would,” “Down in the Hole”

Bruce Springsteen's Wrecking Ball

Bruce Springsteen – Wrecking Ball (Sony)

2012 demanded a big-moment, cultural watershed album from one of America’s working-class heroes. The U.S. is in the middle of not only an economic crisis, but an existential one—and it’s an election year partisans paint as a battle between good and evil. What better time for a Bruce Springsteen album? And not just any Springsteen album (the less said about 2009’s Working on a Dream, the better), but one where he’s firing on all cylinders, playing to the back seats, waving the tattered flag and standing up for the common man in one rousing anthem after another.

Ideally, said album will also be at least pretty good—and Wrecking Ball is, more often than not, pretty fantastic.

Springsteen has done this twice before in the last decade: once, on 2007’s knockout Magic, when he saw upstart young disciples like Arcade Fire stealing his mojo, and once in 2002 when he channelled the energy of the reunited E Street Band to help heal America in the wake of 9/11 on (the arguably less successful) The Rising. In 2012, he sees his beloved country dissolving into a bubbling cauldron of bitterness and defeatism: “the road of good intentions has gone dry as a bone.”

Springsteen easily taps into that anger on one banker-bashing number after another. By comfortably numb pop music standards, he comes off like a raving, Fox-baiting Marxist, even though the themes here are perfectly in keeping with the folk classics he reinterpreted on 2006’s We Shall Overcome—an album with which Wrecking Ball not only shares sentiments, but most of its backing band. (Very few E Streeters appear here—oddly enough, no-longer-touring member Max Weinberg is one of them).

Springsteen is not just channelling old protest songs, however. He’s pissed, and so are his protagonists. The angriest song here is “Death to My Hometown,” and it’s far from the lament of a similar name that closed Born in the U.S.A.: it decries the “robber barons” and “greedy thieves” who “ate the flesh of everything they found.” Furthermore, it’s set to a rousing, militaristic Celtic march, like it’s being sung by bloodthirsty barbarians crossing bridges into Manhattan, looking for heads to roll.

Even a seemingly more reassuring song—"Jack of All Trades," in which a handyman narrator assures his family that they’ll be self-sufficient amidst the current storm—concludes with the same narrator expressing a need to “find the bastards and shoot ’em on sight.” This isn’t about fairness or victimhood: it’s about vengeance.

Meanwhile, whereas Springsteen’s narrators on 1975’s “Meeting Across the River” or 1982’s “Atlantic City” have trepidations about doing some shady business to get by, the man in 2012’s “Easy Money” is swinging with a new-country swagger, boasting about strapping a pistol, hitting the town and looking for, yep, easy money. Springsteen doesn’t sing it with any shame or regret; this character sounds joyously entitled. And in the context of this album, why shouldn’t he? The corporate cannibals who profited from the bank bailouts are rolling in it—why should the average schmuck bother working for his windfall?

Lead single “We Take Care of Our Own” sets itself up to be another “Born in the U.S.A.”: a song with a feel-good anthemic chorus that is actually about what a pile of shit America has stepped in. Springsteen mourns the death of empathy, charity and civil society: “From the shotgun shack to the Super Dome / there ain’t no help / the cavalry stayed home.” He sings the titular chorus with a straight face, simultaneously mocking the sentiment while wishing it was still true.

On the title track, Springsteen taunts the forces that are tearing his community apart, inviting them to “bring on your wrecking ball / c’mon and take your best shot.” The bridge of the song urges: “hold tight to you anger / and don’t fall to your fears.” The song is Springsteen at his stadium best, with a wordless chorus, dynamic swells and ebbs, a horn section, Max Weinberg driving the ship, and the lyric’s ability to turn desolation into delirious release.

The rest of the album isn’t always as musically successful. Producer Ron Aniello is an odd choice: his biggest clients to date appear to be Jars of Clay, Barenaked Ladies and late-period Candlebox, and some of the production choices are a bit Pete Seeger-meets-Nickelback. The first rap to ever appear on a Springsteen album is performed by Michelle Moore on an uninspired gospel song, “Rocky Ground.” More than a few tracks sound good only because they’re in Springsteen’s hands; if anyone else—say, uh, Bon Jovi, for example—attempted the exact same material, it would be laughable. And finally, why does Springsteen hire Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello to play bloated and bad guitar solos on the ballads? Ultimately, however, these are all forgivable crimes, and Wrecking Ball is far more consistent than we’ve come to expect from late-period Springsteen.

It’s fitting, then, that Wrecking Ball is also the first Springsteen album since the death of his iconic sidekick, saxophonist Clarence Clemons in 2011; an excerpt from Springsteen’s eulogy for him appears in the liner notes, and Clemons appears on two tracks. (It’s not clear if they were recorded before or after his spot on Lady Gaga’s 2011 album Born This Way. For history’s sake, let’s hope it’s after.) Clemons’s solo on the 12-year-old live staple “Land of Hope and Dreams” (appearing for the first time on a Springsteen studio album only now) is undoubtedly affecting—but only really because it sounds like the last gasp of a once-great powerhouse. As sax solos go, it’s rather innocuous—nothing like the Clemons who would have once stolen the song out from under Springsteen and carried it to a whole other emotional level. It’s sad but beautiful, undeniably poignant, hearing him give all he had left, on a song about travelling to the afterlife.

Maybe more than the state of the nation, more than the election year anxiety, Springsteen knew that the best tribute he could pay his friend was to frame his final recorded moments inside a rousing rock’n’roll record that ranks with Springsteen’s best since he put the E Street band back together.

Download: “We Take Care of Our Own,” “Wrecking Ball,” “Land of Hope and Dreams”

The Blankket

Steve Kado is no stranger to this site, for his outspoken Torontopian theories as well as his role as midwife for Final Fantasy's surprise success.

The founder of the Blocks Recording Club--more about that next week--just put out his second solo EP as The Blankket, his covers project (get it?) which in this case focuses entirely on Bruce Springsteen. Suitably, it's titled Be Your Own Boss. I've been a fan of this idea ever since I first saw him perform it at the Brave New Waves anniversary show in March 2004, though why it's taken him three years to finish four songs is a minor mystery to me. The result, both live and on disc, has baffled both of Toronto's weeklies: here and here.

Springsteen is such a huge and complicated figure to tackle, and of all the recent acts garnering Springsteen comparisons, I think that only Arcade Fire really nail it with "(Antichrist Television Blues)," where Win Butler turns the working class escapist fantasy and gives it an evil twist: there, economic liberation and salvation are directly linked to sexual exploitation and messianic religious fervour.

Kado tackles four Springsteen songs: "Dancing in the Dark" is the sad, self-loathing lament that the lyrics always intended it to be; "Badlands" becomes a jaunty, earnest K Records love song; "Thunder Road" is, well a bit of a shambles; and "I'm on Fire" is a desolate, pulsing drone driven by howling, distorted vocals that appear as if Kado is taking the self-immolating lyrics quite literally... that edgy and dull knife sounds like it's ripping through his skull Pan's Labyrinth-style.

As you can see below, Kado takes this all deadly seriously, as he well should. But for all the talk, Be Your Own Boss is somewhat slight--there's so much more that could be done here. Plus, since I first saw Kado do "Dancing in the Dark" four years ago, both Chad VanGaalen and Ted Leo have also discovered that song's inherent darkness in their live sets.

This interview was conducted for a CBC Radio 3 piece about Blocks, that should be airing shortly, though none of this material is featured there. Some of it will run in the May 10 issue of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, in advance of The Blankket's house show at 130 King St. N on May 18. The Blankket is also performing this weekend in Toronto at the Over the Top festival, Friday May 4 at Sneaky Dee's with Flosstradamus and Yah Mos Def.

If this post leaves you wanting to hear more of Kado's theories, there's a 2006 Wavelength interview here.

Considering my own passion for the subject of Springsteen, I feel like this conversation could have gone on for hours. Luckily, because I was there primarily to get soundbites about Blocks, it didn't. For the sake of my minidisc batteries, I tried to stay out of the cultural theory rants as much as I could--always difficult with Mr. Kado.

---

Steve Kado
January 31, 2007
locale: Blocks Recording Club office above the Tranzac

In a nutshell, what appeals to you about Springsteen songs?
There’s a sentimental attachment. It’s some of the first music I ever heard in my life. I do actually just like it, in a pretty uncomplicated way. There’s a lot in there that you can access, a lot about it that’s pretty interesting. They’re amazing songs, and they aren’t done the way other songs are done.
Comparing Bruce Springsteen to Neil Diamond, for example, I just like Neil Diamond too—I really enjoy his music, especially his American response to Beatlemania. He occupies an interesting place when everyone really got into British pop music, he did this weird kind of American pop music that wasn’t Beach Boys-y, it was Northeastern as opposed to Californian in orientation, and it co-exists at the same time as the Beatles. It’s very well done, very exciting to listen to. But if you were going to cover Neil Diamond, you don’t have too many angles available to you. You have sincerity or critical sarcasm, and those are the two poses I could see to cover something like “I’m a Believer.” Either you are a believer, or you think it’s stupid that anyone would be a believer. That’s not terribly interesting to me as material to cover. As much as I like it.

“Stepping Stone” has been done a number of times, mostly by punk bands.
But there’s only one angle there: it’s nasty! “You’re a terrible woman.” That’s the point. “You use people.” It’s a great song, but it only has one application. You can be sincere about it; you can’t really be insincere about it. Minor Threat were sincere about it.
With Bruce Springsteen, you don’t have this either/or about being sincere or non-sincere. You have a bunch of emotional categories that you either do or don’t identify with, but at the same time, the songs I especially don’t identify with are these tropes about the automotive and the way freedom is purchased in many of the songs.
Because there are different narrative layers in Bruce Springsteen songs, I don’t think that’s necessarily authorial voice per se so much as it’s him creating these situations, or analyzing the existence of these situations and presenting them for you to consider. Is that just another thing that’s tragic about this situation? That any kind of success or escape is going to have to be mediated by capital? Which ultimately will produce the same effects it creates at the beginning? Inevitably, capital is the crux of the majority of the drama in these songs.
If it’s an interpersonal drama, it’s still a drama that exists because people are in situations that are desperate, and their relationships are created along these lines that are economically predetermined.

“You Can Look But You Better Not Touch.”
Yeah, and “Used Cars.” There are all these songs where the economic has a deep personal meaning, and it’s not just something so simple as, ‘I want money, lots of money.’ That’s been done anyway. The Flying Lizards, who are one of my favourite bands of all time, might even be my second-favourite band of all time, because I think David Cunningham is a genius. The Flying Lizards did an amazing cover of “Money,” but the song itself isn’t the winner with that, it’s the context it’s placed in. It’s on a record where the first song is a Bertolt Brecht cover. All the other things that go on in that Flying Lizards record frame this cover of “Money” that then gives it this whole metacritical…

But most people, including myself, only know that single.
True. It’s a shame. The single is still critical, but the larger critical angle is really subtle, nuanced and interesting. On the single itself, it’s very ‘ha-ha, get it?’ But that joke is the centerpieces of a larger thing. It’s like saying you know what Sartre is about but you only have the ‘hell is other people’ quote hanging around. It’s the good one-liner, but it’s not the (snaps fingers).
I think Bruce Springsteen is really an exemplary songwriter in terms of both personal drama—feeling emotional—but also how he’s framing people’s relationships to capital and the culture industry in his songs. There’s so much in there for people to do. All the Springsteen covers—there’s room to be bad, too, obviously—but there’s so much room to succeed.
He’s writing them for himself to sing, of course, but if you choose to sing them he throws you so many bones, makes a lot of things easy for you, and fun to do. There’s an opportunity for you to sing the song this way, which is completely a part of the way the song is, that will make this feeling happen. Then just by going up by one note, you can make it do this. Those opportunities are all there.
You can see him using them to great effect, when you separate him the writer from him the performer. He takes all these avenues himself, and I can take those avenues too and not have them come out the same way.

To me, so much of his performance is tied into having such an amazing band. Though conversely, no matter how well orchestrated, the songs are just as successful when stripped down to one person. They portray a different aspect of the grand drama in those songs.
I think it’s there to be done. Part of what’s in the songs is that it is able to be done by one person. Ensemble playing, especially on records like Born to Run—or even the first three albums, with songs like “Rosalita”—those songs offer some of the most amazing ensemble playing of the 70s on them. That is one of the things that’s attractive about Bruce Springsteen, is hearing his band slay. At the same time, it’s not what is THE attractive thing about Bruce Springsteen. If you were just in it to hear sax solos, you could be looking elsewhere.
It’s what he brings to them that makes them such an issue. You can tell by how poorly they’ve all fared as solo artists. It’s the material that really stands out above everything else, and the fact that he’s such an able interpreter of his own material makes it all the more amazing, all the more charismatic and exciting. But they are two separate issues.

Why do people not want to believe you’re being sincere?
A lot of people don’t want to believe certain things about Bruce Springsteen. And maybe they have certain ideas about what sort of things I’m interested in or what kind of person I am. They can tell based on how I look and what my concerns are or how I’m dressed, what kind of company I’m keeping and what context these things are happening in. I’m not a steelworker. I’m not some guy from Jersey. They assume that what’s in Springsteen is limited to Bob Seger terrain, but he was better looking and therefore more appealing and that’s why there’s more fuss about Springsteen.
People have certain stereotypes [about me], which are largely correct. ‘Here’s someone who is university educated, has enjoyed a fair amount of privilege in his life, has bizarre academic concerns as opposed to thrillingly visceral Americana Detroit car concerns. What’s this guy doing with this material? He’s obviously mocking it.’
The people who doubt my sincerity are the people who really don’t get it, or the people who are examining what it looks like the project is, rather than how it works. I was on tour recently in the American Midwest and Northeast, and in lots of these places—like in Detroit—the behaviour of capital has been brutal. The collapse of the American manufacturing sector is what’s made Detroit a synonym for ‘terrifying.’ The people there all felt that it was really straightforward. They didn’t feel I was being weird with the Boss. In Detroit specifically, I got a great deal of positive feedback. In other places like Pittsburgh, an old steeltown, in places that are directly a part of these songs, as opposed to Toronto, which never figures at all into Springsteen type stuff. In places that are either like or actually are protagonists in some of these songs, people got it, I think. It was heartening, because I do feel so sincerely about it. I do really care so much about the songs.

Is the Blankket ever going to be more than this?
The Blankket was never meant to just be a covers thing. The covers were easiest. A really good way of figuring stuff out and how you want to do music, is to do a bunch of stuff that already exists. I have an original record that is mostly about Theodore Adorno, that I want to finish by this summer because I plan on touring in Europe. I have to attack that task. I might do another Springsteen record, actually, with only songs from Tunnel of Love. It would be “All That Heaven Will Allow,” “Brilliant Disguise” obviously, and “When You’re Alone.” I got into Tunnel of Love near the end of me finishing this project, and it would have really changed the whole thing had I still been working on it consistently. Maybe it will be a whole separate thing.

It says so much that when that record came out, he had just got married, and the celebrity press spun it as, “Oh, Tunnel of Love! He’s just written this romantic record about his wife! And here’s the first single, ‘Brilliant Disguise!’”
It’s terrifying, eh? He’s so dark on that record. It’s a divorce record to his wife, and if it weren’t for some of those more questionable 80s production choices, it would totally be Nebraska 2. And even better in a way, because it’s so much more personal and the terror is so much more real on lots of those songs. “Brilliant Disguise” is just a horrible patch of sentiment, it’s a terrible realm of doubt to even consider if you’re seeing anyone. It’s all the stuff you don’t want to think about at all. The whole record is like that, except “All That Heaven Will Allow” is a weirdly optimistic song, but the bookends on either side of it, lyrically, are about utter failure.

Can you describe the current state of the Blankket live show?
Ok, well, I cover my head with Vaseline and stick my head in a bag of rice and do mostly Bruce Springsteen songs in my set. That will probably change soon. I just finished a tour where I got really into the rice, but I also feel like I’ve pursued that direction. I want to do interesting performing stuff in general, and regularize it for touring purposes. It’s an interesting process, especially because it’s the kind of thing people do all the time: they rehearse to get things tight before a tour, and I feel like I have other needs. At some point I discovered shop towels and thought, ‘These solve so many of my problems!’ I just transpose what would be normal musician tasks into this surreal Vaseline world.

[Blankket shows in 2006 consisted of Kado inviting the audience to bring radios, which would transmit his backing tacks via an MP3 player, somewhat similar to the Flaming Lips’ earlier experiments with radio performance. Most of the shows were held in unconventional places, like the side of a highway in Brantford.] Are you still working with radios?
I’m not still working with radios because I feel it demanded too much of the audience. I wanted to have this relationship with the audience, but either it wasn’t honestly meaningful for the audience to be backing me, which is fair—they’re making a choice, and there’s more of them. I understand what that means. If it becomes meaningful to them, I’d consider doing it again, because I am very interested in working with that technology. There are some aspects of that, that I left unexplored, which I would explore if radio adoption was high. If people were really stoked, I could have done stuff that would be really, really interesting.

Were you using an iPod transmitter for backing tracks for those shows?
I was using an MP3 player that had two stereo outputs, so basically four channels out of it that I could send, and I was at one point broadcasting two parallel signals from car radio transmitters. They weren’t iPod transmitters, because those are expensive and work in a way that’s no fun to play with. These were very simple, purchased-in-Chinatown things that plug into your lighter in your car. I modified those to take batteries and bought a bunch of kits, radio hobby kits, that have little printed circuit boards, and I built a bunch of those. The radio transmitter thing was a hassle in a lot of respects. I’m not the best electronics guy. My sautering was not the finest. I was doing a house show at Kevin Parnell’s house, and I had to fix the transmitter when I got there. I showed up, plugged in the sautering iron, sautered it, and it sort of worked the whole time. The only person who really liked it was Sandro Perri, who thought it was amazing.
If it’s not working, there’s no shame in moving along. I can’t actually say: “None of you can come in without radios,” when I’m playing shows outside anyway. Part of the goal of playing with radios was that I didn’t want to play in bars; I wanted the freedom to explore areas with people and do fun things in interesting places with a group of people. I can’t really say, “It’s $2 cheaper if you bring a radio,” because I’m not taking money in for it anyway.

And people might spend $10 in batteries to bring their radio.
Potentially, yeah. If I said there was a cover charge for this event, people would decide whether or not they wanted to go, and if they go they’d pay me five bucks. Whereas, they could buy a radio instead, keep the radio afterwards, and see the show. One of the things that interesting to me, but harder for other people, is that radio is a vanishing technology. It’s in a strange liminal space where there’s this interesting technique of wireless broadcasting we’ve developed that we’re all moving away from, but for no reason—because it works! It does the trick!

It’s the original wi-fi!
It’s going to have to come back around to that anyway. But there was this shift to memory-based stuff, where you make all your choices in advance, and then nothing surprising happens, unless you planned to have a surprise somewhere along the line. It’s interesting. What’s going to be really cool about radio is that at some point the radio will be so depreciated, that it can become extremely local again. The CRTC will back off on regulating it because it will just be nothing to people.
At the same time, the technology is very easy to work with on a hobbyist level: you can build a radio quite easily, or radio transmission parts quite easily. I’m also interested to see what happens when peak oil makes it impossible to ship microcomponents around, or making the manufacturing of microcomponents difficult. The main ingredient in radio is coils, which are just wires that you coil and then it has different physical properties—which I find unbelievably weird, that the shape you put something in gives it a new physical property.
There’s so much that’s so amazing and mysterious about radio as a technology, that it’s so attractive to work of. It’s just whether I’m relying on the audience to work on it with me, or whether maybe at some point I just work with radios and present this crazy stuff to an audience, and say: ‘Come into my radio room, and look at all this stuff that’s happening without wires!’

-end-
note: Radio art enthusiasts near Toronto should know about the Deep Wireless festival, which kicks off this week and runs the entire month of May.