Uncommon Folk: Linda Draper

Uncommon Folk is a feature in which artists we admire talk about the music and other media that inspired and influenced their own work.

Linda Draper's fifth album, Keepsake, will be released by Virginia-based Planting Seeds Records on May 8th. A veteran of New York's loose anti-folk scene, Linda's songs are instantly accessible but hold plenty of depth. Her sturdy songwriting and calm, confessional vocals go down easy, but surprise with shades of darkness finely calibrated to remind listeners of life as it's lived. After a longtime partnership with the legendary Kramer, she worked with Major Matt Mason in producing Keepsake.
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To record something with the intent of it being released on a Compact Disc (even though it’ll also be available on iTunes, etc.) is starting to feel like a nostalgic thing to do, especially with everything becoming digital/invisible/portable these days. CDs are starting to lose their sense of purpose, almost. Thinking about this is how I came up with the title for my latest CD, Keepsake, as well as a couple of the other songs that are on it, like “Cell Phone”.

From 1999 – 2006, I’ve moved 8 times - all around Brooklyn, Manhattan, or Queens. The good thing about moving this often is that you don’t accumulate too much junk. I actually enjoy throwing things away. I’m a packrat’s worst nightmare. But every now and then, I come across something that I want to hold onto.

In 2004, after bouncing around from place to place, I moved into what would be my 3rd basement studio apartment in Queens. When cleaning out the apartment, I discovered a bottle of prescription medication that probably belonged to the person who lived there before me. I looked up online what the medication was for. Apparently they either suffered from anxiety, depression or both. The first song I wrote while living in that apartment was inspired by the former tenant, someone I never met. It’s called “Kissing The Ground”. This song would find its way onto Keepsake, which I recorded in bits and pieces over the course of about a year, from 2005-2006. I was listening to a lot of Cake in 2004, in particular the Pressure Chief album. Thinking back on it now, the lyrics in “Kissing The Ground” were probably at least partially inspired by their song “Tougher Than It Is”. “End of the Movie” is another one of my favorite Cake songs.

Listen to Cake at MySpace

“Among Every Stone That Has Been Cast” was inspired by the music/melodic structure and phrasing of one of the best songwriter/poets of all time, Leonard Cohen.

Watch a video for "Chelsea Hotel #2" at YouTube

The lyrics that are in the title track of “Keepsake” came from my experiences of living in my 1st basement studio apartment in Queens (Astoria) back in 2002-2003. That building caught on fire. My upstairs neighbors, two kids and their mom, died in it. It was all over the news because the kids were related to the actress Marcia Gay Harden. I remember I was actually inside of my apartment making breakfast at the time of the fire. It was late Sunday afternoon in mid December of ‘03. (I like to sleep late on weekends.) I was in my kitchen when I first heard the sound of breaking glass, which I later realized must have been the windows upstairs exploding from the heat of the flames. Outside my own window I saw what I first thought was snow falling but then quickly realized were ashes, followed by chunks of fire, burning ember of tar and wood. I remember I looked out my front door and saw big clouds of black smoke and flames pouring out of the window a couple of stories above me. I yelled “Holy Shit!” a few times, grabbed my guitar and my cordless phone to call 911 and ran like hell out the front door – and then (of course) slipped and fell just like in the movies. Lucky for me, with the exception of a very tiny piece of ember that burned a little hole right through my favorite pair of jeans when I fell, I escaped completely unscathed -- as did my little black kitty.

I’ve gone through some trying times before as we all have, you know, but when you experience and see firsthand how fragile it all is, you can’t help but find it to be that much more valuable and worth fighting for – or running like hell for - even if it’s not that pretty to look at sometimes. The inspection later concluded that the fire started as a result of an unattended candle someone had left in one of the apartments upstairs.

Besides the song “Keepsake” some of the ideas for a couple of the other songs, like “Traces Of”, came from this experience too.

Back to the present: I finally gave into the ways of the world and bought my first cell phone the end of 2006. But I still don’t think I really need one and rarely if ever, answer it…much to the annoyance of most of my friends.
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You can pre-order Keepsake here.

The Keepsake CD release party will be at the Cake Shop in NYC on May 26th, with Carolyn Alroy and Kat Hayman.

MP3: Linda Draper - Shine
Stream: Several songs at MySpace

Uncommon Folk: David J of Novi Split

Uncommon Folk is a feature in which artists we admire talk about the music and other media that inspired and influenced their own work. Pink in the Sink is the second album by Novi Split, the first to be released on Portland's Hush Records. Novi Split leader David J might be familiar from recent Kind of Like Spitting records and tours - and Pink in the Sink opens with "You Got Served", the J-penned track sung by Ben Barnett on KOLS' The Thrill of the Hunt - but Pink in the Sink is a different animal entirely, thanks in part to...Rod McKuen? Read on.

Pink In the Sink picks up where Out of the Mist ends. Out of the Mist was a movie i was trying to make showing the duality between my life and the Frogs' It's Only Right and Natural album. Now, the movie stinks and i shouldn't have worked on it as hard as i did, but i can't start a project without finishing another.

Visit the Frogs audio archive

Anyways, it was the period in my life where the small-town boy moves into the city to find himself. But what he really finds out is that he's just gotten robbed, kicked out of his house, and stranded in a Best Western on the California/Oregon border due to a freak blizzard watching infomercials, dead broke.

So the album officially starts back at my mom's house. I write all my songs on the toilet of one bathroom. When I write I usually turn off the lights and spark up one of those old wall space heaters with the burning coils and stare into it while I mumble words and strum. And those chords and mumbles which I then sing into my phone become the starting points to all my songs.

Looking back on it now, the first year of trying to write this record was a mess. I was broke, freaked out by a batch of bad Salvia, getting dressed up in rayon shirt to go chase tail at the local 80's club. But I remember coming home every night and listening to Rod McKuen's The Single Man on a loop, which sort of steered the direction of the album into the genre of soft rock. The Single Man spoke to me on multiple levels and told me what I needed was a gentle touch, a softly spoken voice, and poorly played viola. And so after that terrible summer I bought a viola, a few new drum-breakbeat LPs, moved into a house of strangers and started the whole miserable process of making a record by myself.

The subject matter of the record was to deal with multiple forms of humiliation. Should've taken me a week and a half, tops. But three and a half years later here we are. The problem is that every time I was inspired by different music, I would want to be that band. So over three years I added to and gutted out all the songs on the record, and there are countless hours of audio to prove it. These artists are responsible for turning the record into an ongoing project that kept me up for nights at a time. Like I said before, one of my greatest influences is The Single Man by Rod McKuen, but i would also like to say that the songs "If You Go Away" and "Jean" are really amazing as well. You've heard his songs your whole life. Johnny Cash, Dusty Springfield, Frank Sinatra, Nina Simone, Neil Diamond, and Scott Walker all cover McKuen. Rod McKuen owns a copy of Pink in the Sink. I kid you not.

Listen to Rod McKuen at MySpace

I like everything Bill Fay does. He has a way of making you love overproduced, underdeveloped music in the worst way. He somehow can sing about his love of God, record after record, without making you feel like he's trying to convert you. "I Hear You Calling" and "Tell It Like It Is" make you feel like drinking wine coolers at temple. Any unnecessary explosive endings to any song on the record have Bill Fay to blame.

On the other side of the fence I'd like to say I really like that first Knife record, the 13 & God record and the second Kanye West record. All those records are bedroom-made when you get down to it. Preproduction must count for at least 80% of those records, and that gets me excited about never having the opportunity or want to step into a "real" recording studio.

One last thing. I have to say that Tanita Tikaram is also very beautiful to me. The first time I heard one of her songs was on a bus going to the airport. It was playing over the speaker system on the bus and I had to record it with a hand held voice recorder after I thought I was hearing an unreleased Will Oldham song. After losing a bet I found out that Ms. Tanita sounds just like a young Will Oldham. They should duet together. The song was called "World Outside Your Window", and tell me she doesn't sound like Will Oldham during the chorus. I guess you'd have to hear it on a bus.

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MP3: Novi Split - Leaving It
MP3: Novi Split - California Skies

Pink in the Sink is out tomorrow on Hush.

See also:
Novi Split at Hush
Novi Split page (with more downloads)
Cloak and Dagger Feature (with downloads of Springsteen, Pink Floyd, Material Issue and Robyn Hitchcock covers)

Uncommon Folk: Don Lennon

Uncommon Folk is a feature in which artists we admire talk about the music and other media that inspired and influenced their own work. Don Lennon's fifth album, Radical, continues in the Lennon tradition of smart, inscrutable lyrics on topics both personal and universal, set to endlessly catchy melting-pot pop arrangements. Radical finds Lennon exploring body image, college students, filmmaker Caveh Zahedi, and the state of indie music in 2006.

Radical, like all of my albums, was written sporadically, over many years and influenced by my own experiences, conversations with friends, books, television, music, food, etc. Things creep in without you realizing it. And one thing that crept in is Bongwater. Someone broke into my car once and the only thing stolen was the Bongwater box set. I was really upset. I hadn’t liked music in a while, and this box set was the first thing to inspire me in years. So I bought it again. I might be the only person in the world who bought the Bongwater box set twice. “Folk Song” is their “Stairway to Heaven.” It shows how much you can do with a song. And it really captures something about the East Village. Like most of their songs, it’s very funny, but there’s a huge amount of cultural criticism in there that’s very serious.

Now, I didn’t realize it at the time I was making it, but a lot of the songs on Radical are loosely related to the topic of school. (I’m glad I didn’t realize it. I would have said, “You can’t have this many songs about school on one album.”) There was a Harvard guy in the 50s named Tom Lehrer who wrote some great funny songs. A lot of them revolve around school. “Bright College Days” is one of my favorites. He liked to portray himself as kind of a dufus, but there’s a lot of truth in a line like: “To the tables down at Mory’s (wherever that may be).” He had the good sense to stop writing songs when it started to bore him and went on to teach math. I can hear him in some of these songs.

By far the most obvious presence on the album is filmmaker Caveh Zahedi. His movies tend to be hyper-autobiographical and usually involve his working through a real life crisis. When I first saw his movie A Little Stiff, I was amazed. At one point I fell out of my chair and just lay on the floor for a while. It seemed like he had figured out a way to put reality onto the screen. As far as I know, his short The World is a Classroom is the best movie ever made about September eleventh. There are little bits of Caveh throughout the album (lyrics about very Zahedian things—teaching, God, sex, masturbation—too many to be a coincidence). So I thought it was fitting to choose a song I wrote about him years ago, “Song for Caveh Zahedi,” to close the album. He says his next movie will be called “How to Legally Overthrow the US Government.” Am I the only one who’s curious about this?

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We've raved about Lennon's albums Radical and Routine before.

You can buy them here.

MP3: Don Lennon - Young People Need Guidance
MP3: Don Lennon - Song for Caveh Zahedi

Hear more at his MySpace.

Uncommon Folk: Jennifer O'Connor

Uncommon Folk is a feature in which artists we admire talk about the music that inspired and influenced their own work. We are thrilled to have Matador artist Jennifer O'Connor provide the latest entry, on her album Over the Mountain, Across the Valley, and Back to the Stars. On this album O'Connor hits the sweet spot between honesty and mystery, aided by her engaging, conversational voice, indelible melodies and lyrics that confide of abject darkness and guarded hope in an all-too-believable way.

I wrote my most recent record, Over the Mountain, Across the Valley, and Back to the Stars, during the summer of 2005 (for the most part). The album that I remember listening to quite a lot during this time was Wilco's Summerteeth. I'm not really sure why, but I kept coming back to that record, especially whenever I was driving around in my car. I think I hoped that I could create something as far-reaching and ambitious as that record felt to me when I was listening to it. (In the end, I think my record kind of feels like the opposite of that!) I think another reason I was drawn to it was the failing/struggling relationship theme that runs through most of the record...as I was dealing with a similar issue at the time.

I also remember listening to Spoon's Gimme Fiction quite a lot. But they are one of my favorites and one of their records seems to always be in my current rotation. I think the exceptionally strong sense of rhythm on this release may have inspired me to do a few things differently rhythmically than I had done previously.

MP3: Spoon - I Turn My Camera On

Oh, and Laura Veirs' Year of Meteors. That was my favorite record of last year so I'm sure that got some play during that time as well!!!

MP3: The Young Rapture Choir - Magnetized (Laura Veirs)

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Matador has put up a few tracks from Over the Mountain:

MP3: Jennifer O'Connor - Exeter, Rhode Island
MP3: Jennifer O'Connor - Today

Her new eMusic-exclusive EP, with a Dylan cover and three originals, is yours with a free trial (along with 21 others) - just try to resist the pull of the eMusic siren song...

Max out your JOC bag with an incredible Daytrotter session full of stripped-down goodness.

After you've filled your satchel with all that free musical swag and bought Over the Mountain, catch her live:

December 13 (tonight!) New York, NY Happy Ending Lounge (Happy Ending Reading Series w/ readers Leanne Shapton, Chris Leo and Marcellus Hall, 8pm, FREE)
December 29 Tampa, FL New World Brewery
January 5 Hoboken, NJ Maxwell's w/ Kevin Devine & Pablo
January 10 New York, NY The Living Room w/Anders Parker
February 16 Washington, DC Rock and Roll Hotel w/Kevin Devine, Pablo, Koufax

Uncommon Folk: Laura Gibson

Uncommon Folk is a new feature in which artists we admire talk about the music that inspired and influenced their own work.

We are excited to have Laura Gibson as the first contributor. Laura's new record If You Come to Greet Me is out this week on Hush Records. The songs on If You Come to Greet Me succeed on the strength of her intimate, genuine vocals, careful pacing and wide-open arrangements that make the most of every note. It's one of our favorite records of the year and perfect for the colder weather. Here, Laura talks about the music she listened to while making the record.

I began writing the songs for If You Come to Greet Me during a monthlong stay in my little hometown, helping out, and spending time with my family (Coquille, Oregon). Living in Portland, I am exposed to really good and creative new music all the time. It's wonderful but can be overwhelming. So I left all of my music in my Portland apartment and limited my music intake to what I could find at the Coquille Library. Mostly, I would listen to these old music anthologies. I found these really great folk and Delta blues anthologies, and listened to Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt and Elizabeth Cotton. These are some of my all-time favorites. I really love their stories and have learned a lot listening to their guitar playing.

During that month in Coquille, I spent a lot of time reading through these old letters that my grandparents wrote back and forth during the 30's and 40's, while my grandfather was out at sea. When I read those letters, and picture them writing, I imagine swinging jazz and dreamy waltzes in the background. I found a good soundtrack for my letter reading (again at the Coquille Library) through Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. I have no idea whether my grandparents would have listened to this music, but it seemed right. The song "Nightwatch" on my album was originally inspired while reading these letters and picturing my grandparents, imagining what kind of song might have played in the background; I like that phantom nostalgia I feel when I am listening to music from other eras. Most of my songs were probably birthed in some sort of feeling of nostalgia.

The Innocence Mission: Befriended and Birds of Our Neighborhood

The Innocence Mission has been one of favorites through many different seasons in my life. Don and Karen Paris have such a way with words and an observant eye for nature. I love it when you can't nail a song down as being happy or sad; their music feels like nostalgia or longing, sweetness and aching. They are winter waiting for spring. She also writes with such intimacy, and it could be romantic intimacy or closeness with her children or prayers to God, or all of these things. I am not sure what kind of intimacy they are writing of or whether it matters, it just makes sense.

MP3: The Innocence Mission - Tomorrow on the Runway
MP3: The Innocence Mission - Where Does the Time Go?

Norfolk and Western - Dusk in Cold Parlours

A friend loaned me this album, and I loved it so much and remember listening to it over and over while lying in bed. At the time, had no idea that these would be the people with whom I would record If You Come to Greet Me. Adam and Rachel's sense of orchestration and instrumentation just kills me. Listening to their music opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me of what I might want a record to sound like. I fell in love with the trumpet and the vibraphone. I am also really captivated by Adam's songs. I think I am probably a visual person; there is always a little silent film running through my head when I am writing or listening to songs. It seems like his songs always pay attention to the atmosphere and surroundings where the song is taking place, and I find there's always a picture, a character or scene in my head when I listen to Norfolk and Western (a city bus, a dusty saloon, a foreign town).

MP3: Norfolk and Western - Impossible

M Ward, especially Transfiguration of Vincent (that album as a whole). I love the otherworldly quality of his voice, and he has inspired me to become a better guitar player. M Ward is one of my biggest influences.

Stream: Three songs from Transfiguration of Vincent

Dolorean (another Portland band): the song "The Light Behind My Head" from Not Exotic is probably my favorite of his songs.

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As for Laura's music, you can download "Hands in Pocket" and stream "Nightwatch" and "Wintering" on her MySpace.