What Da Ya Know?

The next post will be the whole Rentals show with the interview with Rachel Haden. I'll work on it tomorrow night, but I have to get some sleep tonight, so I figured I'd just write about what's going on for the next few...whatevers.

Today was actually a pretty good day. Up in Columbus, I went and saw Shiny Toy Guns and Kill Hannah again. Was a great show, STG really puttin' on a sweet performance. Carah Faye really....damn, that girl can sing the shit out of songs when she wants to. The fact that she's gorgeous doesn't factor into it, but damn if it doesn't bring people in. The girl is just a natural beauty. And the fact is, this band is making a huge fan out of me, and I want to find all the versions of their one and only album.

Kill Hannah also put on a pretty decent show, though I was suprised the crowd wasn't more into it. In all of my previous shows with them, the girls were fighting to get a piece of any of the band members, and now that this show was all ages, I figured it to be worse. But weirdly, much more subdued. But hey, that's life. Anywho, like I said, the next entry is going to be the end of my Rentals tales for a while. After that, I have a few backup High School Favorites lined up and then, hopefully some new stuff coming.

Oh, I almost forgot, on Tuesday, I will be down in Covington, KY, passing out flyers for STIMTV at the Amber Pacific show. Come say hi if you're going to be there, I could use the love, for I am without...*cue dramatic music anddddddd cut!*

Season One Is Over?!!!!

If you haven't been following my advice and checking out each and every episode of Food Is Not Love, you're a jerk. Yeah, you fucking heard me. A jerk you are!

Now the boys (Dougie From The Block and Douchebag Rene) just finished up their first summer season, so go there now and download the whole thing and get ready for the return, slated to happen....SOOOOOON!!!!!

Dustin Kensrue....

When Sarah told me that Thrice was a band I really had to check out, I was not optomistic. I do not, repeat, do not like hardcore bands. They are some of the silliest bands around, taking themselves so damn seriously, like their pain really matters. Well, when 30 year olds start writing lyrics that I could write (and buddy, I couldn't write lyrics if my life depended on it), then you've all hit a new low.

But for some god forsaken reason, I decided to try this band. And...and at first I liked two songs on their latest album, Vheissu. Two songs grew to four songs, which grew to about 7 songs....you know where this is going. Now, Vheissu is a completely different album from their previous ones, so I was very hesistant to try any of the others out, for fear that I wouldn't think much of them. Why do I fear shit like that? I don't know, just do.

When I finally recieved both The Artist In The Ambulence and The Illusion Of Safety, I could finally say I had nothing to be worried about it. These guys, while still be a kind of emocore type band, could actually play to their expansive strengths in that sound. They could be epic, yet still hard. Most bands can never come close to that, but these guys did this with ease.

But it wasn't till I went to Water Is Poison, which is what seems to be the best fan site on the band out there, that I really saw what these great songs could be. In their audio section, you can find a few different acoustic sets that Dustin Kensrue, lead singer, performed. And when I tell you that this guy is now in my Top 5 of songwriters, which have been home to Rivers Cuomo, Anna Waronker, Ben Folds, Matt Sharp, PJ Paslosky and Sarah Saturday at one point in time or another.

As long as they're cool with me linking the songs, here are the few that I think everyone should be listening to:

"Radio, Radio"
"Bob Marley Medley"
"Stare At The Sun"
"Cold Cash And Colder Hearts"
"Prodigal"
"Artist In The Ambulence"

Download those few songs, and then try to tell me that this guy isn't one of the most talented, but under the radar singers (for the first two)/songwriters (the last four).

Matt Sharp?!!!

Well, I know I promised this weeks ago, but I'm gonna give you this one first and the big one with Rachel later and folks, I'm just gonna let you know, this is more like a conversation between two people then an interview. And those are my favorite pieces to read. Plain old interviews are boring. All of my text is in bold, matt is plain old…well, plain old Matt. Enjoy!

You just reformed The Rentals a little while ago.

It's about a year and a half totally since the day I met Sara (Radle).

You did your solo album and EP, where they were more acoustic and relaxed. How did you come back to playing Moogs and doing that original Return Of The Rentals sound?

It was just a culmination of everything in life coming to that point. There's not really anything specific. More or less, it's just for everybody in the group, from Rachel to Sara to Lauren to Ben to Dan, we all just had to be at a certain place in our lives to want to do what we're doing. Certainly there were just a whole lot of people who contributed to that though. Tegan & Sara certainly helped with that.

Doing the tour with them.

I did a tour and I did 12 songs on their album and really just enjoyed that process of being with them, and I guess that was kind of a gradual step to leading us back to where we are at now. For a long time, I wasn't in a place where I even really thought about doing this kind of music. Now it just feels right, it feels natural.

I'm not sure if anyone's ever asked this, and I don't know if you feel this way or see it this way, but what do you think of Weezer and The Rentals both taking sort of the same path? In that, both bands had successful first albums, cult status second albums and then both bands falling off the radar. You left after Pinkerton to work on The Rentals and then to have them fall apart. And then to have both bands come back.

I've never even thought about that, this is the first time anybody's mentioned it. While those first two Rentals records were done in such similar periods to where Weezer was. The first record was done before we released the first Weezer album, most of Return Of was written and recorded somewhere around the time we were recording The Blue Album, so those lines are very blurry for me.

So no definite line?

No definite line. We finished the album somewhere in between some Weezer touring and we were touring with that dog. a lot at that time and that's all in there together, scrambled up. Seven More Minutes and Pinkerton, the day I finished doing my backup vocal tracks for Pinkerton, which were the last thing I did on the album, that next day I was on a plane going to London to start Seven More Minutes.

Which you recorded mostly in Europe right?

Yeah, we recorded almost all of it there. I went from the studio, basically, to a taxicab, to an airport, to another taxi cab…

They said, "Cut!" and you were out of there.

…yeah, literally, we went from L.A. to the airport to a cab to the studio in London and it was like that same day that we started getting into the studio for Seven More Minutes. So those records are really on top of each other. We recorded a majority of that album, stopped so I could go on the road for Pinkerton and promoting that record with those guys and it's all and then came back…

It's all jumbled together?

…yeah, those are all intertwined. We were like all in very similar places at that time, our ideologies, Rivers and mine…I know he was, I can't speak for him, but I know he was a huge influence on my life and we grew up together essentially.

You went from, basically, the beginning of adult hood to close to now.

Especially the first album, he had a big impact on…

Songwriting?

…yeah, or just "Look at my friend just doing it", writing really great songs. We all talked about it for a long time and I was really just inspired by his abilities and gifts.

About coming back to The Rentals sound.

All those things, they're never singular. It's really easy to write about in a one line, this person or that person were inspiring.

But that's not real life.

Yeah, not for me. Especially with the way I think about the creative process, it's just all important to me. When we were the solo album I made (Matt Sharp), for me it was the environment and the people around me, the person that worked at the country kitchen or whatever, the girl I used to talk to every day there…just that kind of stuff is as much of an influence…

Those daily conversations and everything?

…yeah, everything. And I feel that way now, the people who are generous enough to be apart of our group, they have a huge impact on me. Even if they're not on stage with us, I feel they contribute to what we're doing. All that stuff might really sound cliché. Some of my friends who go on these artistic journeys, some of them have gone onto these pursuits for crystalline, perfect credit, where they can say this person is responsible for this whatever. The thing I really learned from going on tour, either on my own or with a very sparse lineup doing the solo stuff, whatever the situation is, you are in collaboration with somebody. If you're just by yourself with an acoustic guitar, you're working with the sound person and that has a huge impact.

It's a give and go.

And the audience and that kind of stuff. I know for us, how involved the audience is really, it has an impact on the show. If people really don't feel like…

Jumping Around?

…jumping around, dancing and singing, we're gonna play a different way, it might not be necessarily be worse or better for me.

What's it like being on this tour? (at the time, still only 2 weeks in). I'd assume you'd consider Chicago a win, because everyone was in the palm of your hand tonight.

Tonight is a good idea of how elements have nothing to do with anybody in the group. The heat really affected the audience tonight, it affected us. If we had just had air conditioning, that show would have had a completely different feeling to it. It gets a little out there talking about it in those terms, but it all has an impact. Whatever it is, and we've been chasing the sun the whole tour and we have just been in every city with them going "This is the hottest it's been in the history of whatever town we're in". Everywhere we go, they're saying that. And every day we look at the weather report and it's saying it's gonna cool down after we leave.

The heat index for today was 115 and tomorrow is going to be 86.

Yeah, everywhere. Maybe that's good news for Chicago and tomorrow will be cool. But it was really brutal, we took a song out of the set.

"Jumping Around' right?

There's no way in hell, that song would have seemed like four hours in that heat, and I like to make that one stretched out a bit if we can, kind of approach it more…improvisational.

Kind of like "Move On" was tonight?

Yeah, but even more than that. When we started doing it, it was really adventurous and I think we're in a place where we're not taking many chances, but I'm hoping to break though that. But tonight I was like "Forget that", forget tonight's experiment. But I want this group to feel like we can do that. Lauren does a lot of viola and I just give her spaces in the set to just go where she wants to go, just things that are on her own…

Like "Today, I'm gonna play it like this!"

She just does whatever, like one of her…this is gonna sound like hoity-toity and stuff, but one of the violinists she came up with in orchestra was at one of the shows, so she started to do this Mozart solo for viola and violin, she did these references to it and stuff like that and I could just see the connection and glances and I love that freedom.

Then, they had to move the bus! DUH DUH DUHHHHHHH!

This is probably where we have to stop, it's for your safety, haha.

No problem man, it was great meeting you.

Nice meeting you too.

And that was it folks. Matt didn't have to do that interview, but was gracious enough to spare me some of his time. The next interview will be up soon and with a ton of pictures. But for now, you get just this and not the full story. But it will be soon!

Mmmmm.....

Well...what's to say? I promised an update and then what did I do? I almost took three weeks off.

Well, let's just say that having a fever for most of a week and then still being sick for another week made doing anything a chore. But here I am. And I'm doing Warped Tour right now, almost a month after it happened.

Let's talk Warped: I'll come right out and say the best thing at this year's Warped Tour was Joan Jett. She had the most pure set of any of the bands that I at least caught. She played new songs off her new-ish album (it was released in Japan a good while ago) and she played her classics. She allowed all the photographers to shoot her whole set (you normally only get the first 3 songs and that's it). I can’t tell you what it was like to see her just serenade “Crimson & Clover” five or six feet away from me. Very surreal but cool moment. And of course…”I Love Rock & Roll”. How could I not talk about it? It was the end of her set and it really got however many people where there for her singing along. Doing a shoot with her actually gave me the first time where my Dad really knew an artist I shot. He was totally excited.

There were other great moments. Getting to see Jerra again was a nice surprise. Her band Ferus really caught my attention just like Jerra did the year before. Two years in a row is a big thing in my book.

I also met Brandon from Rise Against. A guy I know, who we’ll call…”Jon”. Oh wait, that’s his real name. Anywho, he was doing an interview with him and I told him I’d take a few pictures for him. Here’s one of them!

I caught both Senses Fail and AFI and both put on a decent shows. Davey Havok gave me a couple of good opportunities for good shots. I wish I would have gotten to talk to Jade Puget so we could have discussed The Static Age remix he did for Neon Nights Electric Lives.



Motion City Soundtrack of course put on a great little new-wave packed nugget of a show. Though, in all honesty, I really wish they would be on a smaller stage. I’m starting to see this way too much lately: bands that are used to playing smaller stages are all of a sudden foisted up to the big stages and they can’t…I’d hate to say it, but fill the state. That’s not to say MCS didn’t perform great, I really liked them, but they just seem better fit for a smaller stage, where you can feel the tension of having less space to move.

But the big band for all of us down there in my small group was of course those boys from Colorado…those boys from L.A….those boys from somewhere…Single File. When walking to their booth, I had on my red Saving Face shirt. And after a moment of talking to them, they noticed the shirt and smiled (the girl in the middle used to help “mentor” them and she is of course, Miss Sarah Saturday.) Sloan and the boys were playing only acoustic and man, did I feel bad for them. They got drowned out multiple times by all the stages surrounding them. But they stuck it out, moving their show to the grassy knoll, as far away from any stages they could. Makes me really want to see them soon, though the closest they play is Cleveland…and I fucking hate Cleveland.

Overall though, the show was much better than last year’s disaster. I saw many, many people I either work with in the photo lab or people I’ve seen at many shows. It was hotter than fuck, but well worth it. But it really became a precursor to Chicago and the hell that trip would bring. But that’s for my next entry. Anywho, enjoy!

Not Another Oneee....

Yes, another post with nothing of interest to go with it. But it's just to say that I just got home about 20 minutes ago, and I'm recovering. If you heard anything about Chicago this last week, you'll know the heat was a killer. But I have great stories to tell, along with my big Warped story. But let's give ya a preview of what you're going to get from Chi-Town: interviews baby, interviews. Be back tomorrow.