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August 7-13, 2008
buzz@boulderweekly.com
Pealing the Orange
Wild Sweet Orange highlights the Triple A Radio Summit
by Dave Kirby
The cultural clutter
Nellie McKay talks about her new CD and why she doesn’t care about music right now
by Margaret Hair
Pealing the Orange
Wild Sweet Orange highlights the Triple A Radio Summit
by Dave Kirby
Despite highly refined schmoozing skills and a shockingly lengthy career covering music in this town, we stopped waiting for a VIP invitation to the Triple A Radio Summit a long time ago. It may be because of marginally disparaging remarks we made about them back when Clinton was in office, or the fact that radio types seldom care what print media has to say about them and their programming… or, OK, perhaps nothing worse than benign neglect. We don’t take it personally.
In any case… they’re back again this year, lodged up at the St J at if-you-have-to-ask room rates and milling about at the Fox for three days of music on one of the best club stages in America.
(From the unsolicited advice file: don’t forget to tip generously, guys ’n’ gals...)
Most years, the marquee varies between up-and-coming bands in need of some radio exposure, a thin slice of eclecticism and the occasional warhorse trying to revitalize a shopworn career with a re-invention of some sort.
But we’d encourage everyone up at the Fox on Friday night to catch Wild Sweet Orange’s set. Behind the languid and self-assured vocal of singer Preston Lovinggood, the Birmingham, Ala., quartet brings a slightly sideways guitar-rock casserole to the table, a bruised and exhausted disquiet dressed in cooperative and colliding acoustic and electric guitars, listing between folkie intimacy and throw-down electric like someone doing a leaning barstool balancing trick.
On the strength of their 2006 EP, WSO found themselves quickly championed by a handful of alt-music blogs and the much-respected KEXP (Univ of Washington), which began playing the distinctly unsettling “Ten Dead Dogs” last year. The band has recently made an appearance on Letterman and caught some exposure on Grey’s Anatomy, and their full-length debut CD, We Have Cause To Be Uneasy, just hit the shelves a week or so ago. The one-two punch of the quirky, troubling “Ten Dead Dogs” and the push-pull rocker “Tilt” is one of this year’s best CD leadoffs.
People say this all the time, but it would appear that WSO’s uncanny blend of reflective and insightful hymnals with full-out rockers, bittersweet bios and caustic first-person narratives and shoe-leather elegies to their suburban childhoods is poised for a solid run at the brass ring.
We’re never sure how much influence these conventions really have on radio programming, but if a few of the programming types write these guys’ names down and take it with them when they head back to work next week, it’d be a good thing.
On the Bill
Wild Sweet Orange and Astrid Williamson will perform at 9 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 8, at the Fox Theatre, 1135 13th St., Boulder, 303-443-3399.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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The cultural clutter
Nellie McKay talks about her new CD and why she doesn’t care about music right now
by Margaret Hair
Nellie McKay — eclectic and notoriously independent jazz/pop/cabaret vocalist and arranger — does not field interview questions the way most people do.
When asked what people can expect from her Monday show at b.side lounge, McKay says, “I really have no idea what will go on.”
When asked to describe her songwriting process, she says, “I’m generally looking for the easy way out.”
When asked if she has anything else to add to the tail end of the conversation, she humbly requests that the readership of Boulder Weekly consider adopting a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, in order to reduce animal impact on global climate change.
In conversation both verbal and musical, what she is saying can sometimes be mixed up. Luckily for McKay, that is not to say that the results are not, for the most part, good.
The Britain-born, Harlem-raised musician has garnered attention since her 2004 double-disc debut, Get Away From Me. Her self-produced follow-up, 2006’s Pretty Little Head, came in near the top of most high-minded critics’ lists. And her most recent release, 2007’s Obligatory Villagers, acted as a synthesis of the musical theater, pop and jazz styles celebrated in her previous output.
McKay’s songwriting is supremely likeable, despite its sometimes-inconsistent style and subject matter. Why she seems to have so little confidence in the live and recorded aspects of her relatively young career is unclear.
“I really don’t know how to perform yet,” she says over the phone from the East Coast. “You know, I guess it comes easily to some people, and I’m sure there’s a secret to it. I just haven’t discovered it yet.”
It’s possible that everything drummed up around McKay — the critical acclaim, the attention she received after Columbia Records pulled out of releasing the full version of Pretty Little Head — is more than she’s bargained for, or is interested in.
“I just want to write some decent music; that’s the hard part,” she says, explaining that writing well is not the easiest thing, and that she seems to know less and less about it as she goes along. McKay is equally vague about what makes that process so complicated.
“I guess it’s hard to pinpoint, you know, but compared to other things going on in the world — compared to this election, compared to how corporate interests have completely merged with politics at this point and are raping the world blind — music just doesn’t seem as important at this point.
“I think I have trouble understanding the point. If I want to hear good music, why make more? I think maybe I should make less,” she says, adding that she’s not sure why so many people feel they have to make a contribution to the zeitgeist. McKay is noncommittal on whether her addition to the American music catalogue has been a boon or a bust.
“I’ve made good material, and I’ve added to the clutter,” she says. By “clutter,” she means just that:
“Just the clutter of stuff that’s out there, whether it’s just the stuff that you hold in your hand, or maybe it’s something that you never even come into contact with, or it’s one of the millions of songs that come out in a year,” she says, giving insight to why her records turn out the way they do.
McKay has set up numerous challenges for herself, striving to create songs that do not crowd the pop consciousness. It’s why her music can be so accessible while remaining so pervasively weird, and it’s why she can alternate from a hip-hop-influenced rant to a cynical, sultry jazz ballad without coming off as a focus-free hodgepodge. How she recognizes that achievement when it happens is another question.
“If it feels good enough. It’s just, you know… obviously sometimes you just sense things aren’t working,” she says. “You know how people click? Songs have a similar way, or movies have a similar way, of clicking or not clicking. And if it doesn’t happen, you just have to force it. You have to feel kind of lame.”
Whether McKay manages to make things click on upcoming projects, including an MTV-backed musical version of the movie Election, remains to be seen. The project could be a gamble, considering McKay’s description of MTV as an organization that “scares me, just generally.” But it also might not be, considering the staggering talent for musical arrangement she displayed on Obligatory Villagers.
Hopefully it does work, and McKay continues to feel her contribution to the cultural clutter is a necessary one. This is just too interesting to give up on.
In the Box:
Nellie McKay performs at 10 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 11, at b.side lounge, 2017 13th St., Boulder, 303-473-9463.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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