Morning Shorts

Worthy charity label Hungry for Music has a couple new releases out. Besides getting some good tunes, here's what you're doing by buying a CD:

Hungry For Music is a grassroots volunteer-driven 501 (c)(3) charity organization with a nationwide and international outreach. Hungry for Music's mission is to inspire underprivileged children (and others) by bringing positive musical and creative experiences into their lives. Since becoming a non-profit in 1994, Hungry for Music has brought the healing quality of music to thousands of people through its musical instrument donations, concerts, and workshops. We support our programs through memberships, benefit concerts and events, raffles, and the sale of Hungry for Music produced compact discs.

First up is A Case for Case: A Tribute to the Songs of Peter Case, a honking 3-CD set featuring Richard Buckner, Victoria Williams, Joe Ely, Steve Wynn and John Prine. This'd be a not-bad way to brush up on the Case songbook if you plan on catching the reunited Plimsouls on their fall tour.

Also out soon, but not yet on their web site, is the ninth edition of their baseball-themed Diamond Cuts series. As on all other eight releases, Dan Bern contributes a song, this time "Rincon" (presumably about juiced Twins reliever Juan Rincon). Bern's been playing another baseball- (and tennis- and cycling-) tune on his current tour, "Bonds and Landis and Rafael Nadal". It's the kind of topical, off-the-cuff tune you hear him do live but usually not on an album, that makes it worth catching the show.

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The New York Times goes behind the music to explain all those erratic Cat Power shows: "Another day, another fifth of Scotch. And that wasn’t all. Chan Marshall said her mornings began with a minibar’s worth of Jack Daniel’s, Glenlivet and Crown Royal." It's all a bit uncomfortably Leaving Las Vegas. But with things on the upswing, Chan might be hitting a big or small screen near you:

Like Will Oldham, another indie-folk rocker who is currently starring in the film “Old Joy,” Ms. Marshall is considering a foray into acting. She said that the cult director Wong Kar-wai invited her to play Jude Law’s ex-lover in the movie he is now shooting. Mr. Wong, she said, told her he was in the habit of playing “The Greatest” for his actors before each scene.
Ms. Marshall spoke of auditioning to join the cast of “Saturday Night Live” next summer. Then again, maybe her future involves domesticity. She said she was ready for a relationship and wanted to have children.

Austinist has a YouTube clip of Smog and Joanna Newsom performing together on Tuesday, Newsom playing piano against the deep dark tide of Billy's "Rock Bottom Riser". Did we tell you not to miss his tour?

Pitchfork reports on ex-Gorky's Zygotic Mynci leader Euros Childs' new solo album, Chops, out October 10th on Wichita. You can stream a couple of groovy tracks at his MySpace Page.

Bert Jansch has announced a few shows to support his Drag City debut. He'll play LA and San Francisco in October, then Brooklyn and Chicago in November.

MP3: Bert Jansch - The Black Swan

Rock Bottom

A blog that's new to me, The Yellow Stereo, has posted in mp3 a complete Joanna Newsom show from Queen Elizabeth Hall, sometime in 2005. The quality isn't terrific, and given the stripped-down nature of The Milk-Eyed Mender, songs from that album aren't all that different, but it does contain some songs from the upcoming Ys.

Reading The Yellow Stereo's post, I'm reminded that indiefolkforever favorite Bill Callahan, aka Smog, will be contributing to Ys.

Smog's got a sort-of-recent EP out, Rock Bottom Riser, which combines rerecordings of two of the best tracks from last year's A River Ain't Too Much To Love with two new tracks and two videos for the album tracks. The spare reading here of "Rock Bottom Riser" is classic Smog, circa Knock Knock - wherein his unsentimental baritone, so often making pitch-black fun, is 98% sincere, leaving you with a totally comforting 2% of uncertainty. This is music to listen to disoriented in the dark after an afternoon nap in winter.

Smog is hitting the road in what I'm pretty sure is a solo tour, and seeing him solo is the best way to enjoy the tension between the serious and silly sides of Bill Callahan. Tour dates begin tomorrow and are listed at the botom of his Drag City page, which also has videos for "Rock Bottom Riser" and "I Feel Like the Mother of the World".