MIA'S GEA

Like most people, we first caught wind of Mia Doi Todd via her 2002 album The Golden State, which found the quirky art-folk songstress inexplicably sheltered (albeit only momentarily) under the corporate arm of Sony/Columbia and produced (quite well, actually) by Mitchell Froom. Todd's strikingly clear, vibratoless singing, unconventional song structures, and chamber-folk sound subsequently returned to the indie world from whence they came, where her decidedly non-mainstream sensibility seems ultimately more at home. She's done some great work since then, and her latest, Gea, is possibly her most organic, relaxed-sounding album to date. We just interviewed Todd for a fun piece that will be running in the next issue of Harp magazine. Turns out she has a background in Japanese Butoh dance--as an East Asian Studies major in college, she wrote a thesis on one of the style's founders, Hijikata (there's a song of the same name about him on Golden State), and got a grant to live in Japan for a year to study Butoh. We asked her to talk a bit about it, and to imagine what kind of dances (not necessarily Butoh) she might envision for some of the songs on Gea. Due to a combination of the mag's space limitations and Todd's engaging verbosity, there were plenty of interesting outtakes, which we decide to share here. Don't forget to look for the article, you voracious culture vultures.

"Butoh is a sort of avant-garde dance form that started in Tokyo in the 1960s," says Todd. "There were student protest movements, outlandish street performances that evolved into [what they termed] 'The Dance of Utter Darkness'. Butoh talks about the human condition, whereas ballet strives to make the body a superhuman vessel of godlike proportions, Butoh is very much about human fragility and the human condition. I was very influenced by Hijikata's teachings, not just for dance but also for my music. My songs are often about the fragile nature of human emotions. A lot of [Butoh] training is about sensitivity in the body. My songs kind of do that in an emotional way, I think...to try to experience the human condition rather than get around it."

River of Life/The Yes Song:
“It's a celebration of life. I imagine all my friends on the beach with a bonfire at night, dancing around the bonfire, just like hippie dancing in a circle, holding hands. The song's about individuality and self-expression, so I imagine these people dancing through the night around the fire, and then eventually the sun rises and they go down to the border of the ocean and the land, and just celebrate life.”

Night of a Thousand Kisses:
“We actually made a music video for this song. This song is really about romance, so I imagine it as a pas de deux, for two people. It could be a ballet, but we chose to make it a tango. There's a lot of romantic tension and longing, and I think tango expresses that very well.”

In The End:
“This is, I think the heaviest song on the album, the tearjerker. It could be about Mother Earth speaking to humankind...or it could be about a relationship between two people. I can imagine two dancers, this one would be a duet. I can imagine one dancer dancing behind a scrim you suspend from the rafters of a stage. One dancer would be in front of the scrim on the audience side, the audience would only see their silhouette on the scrim. [The dancer behind would be] Jumping, turning, with a lot of virtuosity, and they would have no relation to the dancer in front of the scrim...[who is] dancing with more sensitivity much more slowly.”

Old World New World:
“It has the same sort of celebratory atmosphere as 'River of Life,' so I can see us going back to the beach and the bonfire. I has some kind of do-si-do-like square dancing in it, but it's also about individuality. So this would be another celebratory hoe-down, with everybody clapping and singing along."

FLASH DRIVE-BY

As the death throes of the music industry get progressively more spasmodic, it's interesting to observe the panoply of half-baked schemes that get trotted out in the interest of its salvation via new modes and models. It's all a bit reminiscent of the '90s web boom's glory days, when every greedy lamestain with an html handbook and a single-syllable domain name tried to P.T. Barnum their way to mini-moguldom. One of the most amusing of these schemes is the "collector's" flash drive. Several enterprising labels have trotted these out in a desperate attempt at creating "digital innovations" and swimming upstream in a withering market. USB drives containing digital album files housed with the appropriate band-branded graphic (sometimes offered on a convenient bracelet for safekeeping) have been made available by everyone from Ringo Starr (you still can't buy digital downloads of the Beatles catalog, but oh well) to Barenaked Ladies. Even Radiohead, whose unique approach to releasing In Rainbows saw them universally hailed as digital-distribution visionaries, is engaging in these questionable practices. Check it out: you can go to the Radiohead Store (screw you, I'm not putting in a link) and buy the "Limited Edition USB Stick" that contains the band's previous seven EMI albums, as recently released on old-school box set, for 80 pounds. Now, they also give you the option to simply purchase the same tracks as regular downloads without the USB drive for 35 pounds, but then you'd be missing out on, um, let's see here...oh yeah, the USB drive! But hey, it comes "shaped in Radiohead's iconic 'bear' image and housed in a bespoke (what is it, a three-piece suit?) deluxe box." In case you were wondering, the actual box set is only going for 40 pounds anyway, but that iconic bear image may just be too seductive to resist. Oh good, here comes the orderly now with our meds...

SCRAPPY SCRIBBLERS

Now that the notorious writers' strike has been settled and America is assured of another season's worth of carefully crafted inanity, we thought it might be a good time to start pondering the status of other scribes in the entertainment media world. Specifically: what would happen if songwriters went on strike? Would Jimmy Iovine be trolling L.A. dives in search of desperate/unscrupulous scabs to fill out the tail end of the next Gwen Stefani album? Would Metallica finally be forced to release the Neil Diamond tribute album that's been their unacknowledged destiny all along? Would the charts and airwaves be filled with a flood of new-but-inexplicably-familiar tunes like "Soak up the Sunblock, "Dessert Rose," and "SexyBackHair?" Would the proprietors of Youtube and Google lose their status as premier interactive web zillionaires to the guy who runs the the Alanis Morissette Lyric Generator? These and other questions should be food for thought as you envision the source material for the next batch of musical reality shows for which those suddenly prolific TV writers are doubtlessly cooking up celebrity-host intros right now...

THE BOYS IN THE BUBBLE

We were just thinking about the fact that two of the hottest young buzz bands right now, and another cult-status type who's been bubbling under for awhile, all seem to have an unexpected influence in common.

From the abundance of ambivalent-at-best reviews (by anyone other than corporate buttkissers Rolling Stone) of anything Paul Simon has done in the last 20 years, you'd be within your rights to assume that by this point in time, his cool factor had dropped to a level roughly somewhere between Mitt Romney and the current Deep Blue Something (ask your older brother, kids) reunion tour. This is, of course, in direct opposition to the fact that (with the exception of the execrable Capeman) he's produced nothing but brilliance throughout his entire solo career. Freakin' critics.

That said, it tickles Music Geekery pink to observe that aforementioned hotsh*t twentysomethings Yeasayer and Vampire Weekend both sound like they spent the time between forwarding Onion articles to their friends in their formative years locked in their bedrooms with nothing but Graceland for company. We're hardly the first to note that the lilting South African-tinged guitar lines, polyrhythmic grooves, and general grad-school sensibilities of these guys bear distinct trace elements of Forest Hills' favorite son. And Bonnaroo-friendly singer/songwriter Brett Dennen has frequently attested that Graceland-era Simon is a primary influence (it's pretty apparent upon listening to his album, So Much More). The only downside to this is the fact that the late, lamented Actual Tigers, who worked a similarly Simon-indebted sound on their lone, great album in 2001, turned out to be a little too far ahead of the curve. Somebody find AT frontman Tim Seely, who kicked off an equally unfortunately under-the-radar solo career in 2005, and tell him the zeitgeist is finally upon his ass.

KIDS IN THE HALL

A new batch of inductees to the Country Music Hall of Fame were announced today, and even your crotchety old pals at Geekery Central can't find any cause to complain about the selections this time. (Don't even get us started about 2007 inductee Ralph Emery). This year, the artists who go down in honky-tonk history are Emmylou Harris, Tom T. Hall, the Statler Brothers, and Ernest "Pop" Stoneman. There's a hell of a lot more hang time in the Country Hall of Fame than there is in the Rock Hall, asa fact exemplified by the "timely" induction of Stoneman, who's been dead for 40 years and started recording in the 1920s. Nevertheless, for a guy who hung with the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, Stoneman (patriarch of the Stoneman Family) isn't as widely known as he should be, so kudos to the Hall for recognizing him anyhow. Emmylou Harris, the baby of the group at age 60, is a no-brainer, the literal "eminence grise" of that crossover paradigm where alt-country, boomer singer/songwriterdom, and mainstream Nashville intertwine (it's practically a rite of passage for everybody who's anybody in the aforementioned areas to record a duet with her). Hall, meanwhile, is another story. His sharply observed story-songs unquestionably place him among the best American songwriters (country or otherwise) of the late '60s/early '70s, but he might as well be Ezra Pound for all the Sugarland/Carrie Underwood crowd knows/cares. And despite the Joe Henry-helmed 1998 Tom T. tribute album, Hall has never really been hipster-embraced either, probably because where his peers (Kris Kristofferson, Billy Joe Shaver, et al) rocked the hirsute hippie look, Hall had more of a high-school-gym-teacher image. As for the Statler Brothers, they've never been a huge favorite here at MG, but they sure could harmonize. You can't deny their pedigree, and they did provide comic relief on the great, short-lived Johnny Cash TV show.

THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

We at Music Geekery can hardly feign anything approaching surprise when the agendas of art-for-art's sake and the Grammy awards fail to dovetail, but usually they're not even close. When prefab popsters A, B, & C are the only ones in the running, it's no skin off our aesthetic apple which one wins. But when they wave it in our faces, when they come so tantalizingly close to recognizing substance over style, it's difficult not to kvetch. So as happy we were for old-school soul comeback queen Bettye Lavette when she got her Grammy nomination, we were twice as scandalized when she didn't walk away with the golden gramophone. Instead, the award for Best Contemporary Blues album went to J.J. Cale and Eric Clapton for Road To Escondido. Now look, we've got nothing but love for Cale, and nothing in particular against Clapton, and we experienced no overt spasms of pain upon initially listening to the duo's aforementioned effort, but it's a largely unremarkable affair whose main purpose is to convince Starbucks-bound, NPR-addicted muppies that their childhood hero is still cool because he's working with some guy who never had his own VH1 Classic special. And those supporters still stand no better chance of making it through Escondido awake than you or I.

And then there's the scandalously uncrowned soul queen, Ms. Lavette. The lady spent the last several decades singing her butt off to little acclaim. Finally, a couple of years ago, her "comeback" album I've Got My Own Hell To Raise brought her profile up to the proper level. Her emotionally naked, supremely soulful work received accolade after accolade at last. And the follow-up, The Scene of the Crime, proved to be just as rewarding. Ironically enough, the Muscle Shoals-recorded album's title refers to the fact that Lavette first recorded in the legendary music town in the early '70s, only to have her work buried by Atlantic (and finally released decades later on a European label). Surely it's the height of effrontery then, that some 35 years later she should personally and artistically transcend what she attested was a truly traumatic experience, only to be seduced and abandoned by the bozos at the Grammys. Fortunately for us (and her), in the end it means diddley, and we've still got a thrilling emotional rollercoaster ride available to us all when we visit The Scene of the Crime.