Cake In 15

In Which Your Correspondent Gets God or Do People Still Say “Shoe Leather”?

Peter Wolf Crier

Life is a problem, a huge hurtling shitstorm of trials and tribulations, long treks, hard waits, frustrations, disappointments and anguish. Someone’s gonna get screwed, so it might as well be you and if you know that all this is going to happen to you there is no reason to get all down in the mouth abut it, especially when you can stand on a streetcorner with the sun shining on you and an ethereal breeze, listening to Dawes and the crowd sing out “When My Time Comes”. No use getting down about it, especially when it was yer dam self that left your ID and wallet at the hotel, just be grateful you didn’t lose the sucker and wait it out.

Wait it out and hit the road were themes of the day yesterday. And although I swore I didn’t come down to Austin to see local bands in the last post, there was too much Minnesota happening at SXSW yesterday not to pay attention and get some coverage. Vita.mn hosted their Minnesota music showcase, featuring Solid Gold (who have their own billboard right now in downtown Austin, courtesy of their record label, Green Label Sound) Lookbook, Romantica, Jeremy Messermith, City on the Make, We Became Actors and winners of their “Are You Local?” competition, dirty electro-rappers Bight Club. Staciaann spent time there shooting the event and eating up the free BBQ, so look for photos of that here and on Vita.mn.

Bight Club

Kitty-corner from that showcase, Dom Davis of Dearling Physique and Hilary Davis of Bella Koshka presented the 45th Parallel showcase that they organized, surprising the people who had come into the El Sol y La Luna restaurant expecting a taco and delighting the peple who had shown up for them. Dearling Physique kicked off the set with Davis performing in full-face glitter. They have an EP release coming up at the Varsity on Friday April 16th, so look for that. Anthem Heart were also on hand with a sweet portable screen-printing rig they had welded together over the weekend and were printing up custom “Austin” T-shirts. When we walked past six hours later, they were still at it, except out on the street and “living on borrowed time” in honcho Ken Hannigan’s words, as they were still stealing power from the restaurant!

Bella Koshka

It also feels like I shouldn’t complain about trekking across downtown and the river to catch Spirits of the Red City at the “All Yr Friends Are Here” showcase. Hell, that’s a local band that plays so infrequently in the Twin Cities that you almost have to be out on the road to catch them. When you do see them, though, they are so totally engrossing and worth it, with their nigh-spiritual chamber-folk. As @gimme_noise put it in a tweet, they are like “the eye of the storm” and despite whatever travails you may face, Spirits are a balm. Dark Dark Dark was also on that bill and they will be sharing the stage at the Cedar Cultural Center on April 15th, so add that to your already hectic April show calendar.

Spirits of the Red City from CakeIn15 on Vimeo.

CakeIn15 pal Pezzettino was playing her show for the Muzzle of Bees blog in a lovely little spot by a canal but when I showed up (running late and running, as per the course) she was nowhere to be found. Turns out she had taken her little band of followers on a field trip to a nearby grotto to perform, and soon she was back on stage stomping her boots, wailing with her accordion and flinging her glockenspiel around. The joy of watching Pezzettino is the childish abandon with which she throws herself into her songs, and you are not immune from it at all- you will participate in some capacity.

Pezzettino from CakeIn15 on Vimeo.

Later, the potential for frustration mounted, mainly because the desire for the bands was high. The Dickie’s clothing company sponsored a day party at an intimate house venue just south of downtown that featured an excellent line-up, capped off by the one-two punch of Dawes and Delta Spirit. These two bands have made regular stops in the Twin Cities, and the first time they were on tour together, so it would have been a treat to see them both back-to-back again. Although the people who arrived early and have everything prepared got in right away, as you might have gleaned from the first paragraph, Nuts McRunner here unwittingly left his ID at the hotel, so though Staciaann got in alright to snap photos, by the time that was sorted, there was a line stretching down the block. The will to persevere will win out, though, and being grateful for the little things pays off in the end. As people began to lose hope or interest, the line diminished and many people who had been waiting out the line got in to catch at least part of Delta Spirit’s uplifting, populist folk-rock. The people, with their will and perseverance shall be victorious!

Dawes

From there, on to Emo’s, where Peter Wolf Crier were to play their third and most important show of the day. This was their official SXSW showcase, opening up an awesome line-up Miles Kurowsky (formerly of Beulah), Rogue Wave, Local Natives, Adam Green and Delta Spirit. The PWC boys didn’t show any signs of wear from the day, and what has been most fun in watching them ply live I how the songs off of Inter-Be have mutated in arrangement. Peter Pisano thanked the city of Austin for their hospitality and invited them all up to Minneapolis for cold weather and hot chocolate, so start saving up your Swiss Miss. After the show, Peter Wolf Crier’s crazy day was capped off with an interview by Craig Finn of the Hold Steady, who is in town for the IFC television channel doing musician interviews, so look for that awesomeness.

Peter Wolf Crier from Stacy Schwartz on Vimeo.

The rest of the line-up for that show was rock solid, any one of those bands is worth your dime live, Rogue Wave especially so. Kurowsky was extra effusive to the crowd, pulling up a fan and his girlfriend which whom he- was a “pen pal” to sing, and then inviting people to call out songs, on the condition they come up and sing them themselves. When one wag called out “Popular Mechanics” and then demurred to sing, Kurowsy fixed him with a stare and laughed, “You can’t just call it out and not do it. If you want it, you have to fucking want it.” Might as well be a life mantra there.

Rogue Wave

Cutting out of Emo’s (which is an amazing venue, like First Avenue only two times bigger and with most of the roof torn off) Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson at the Saddle Creek showcase was the target. MBAR’s first self-titled album contains a couple of my favorite tracks of the past few years, “The Debtor” and “Buriedfed” and he played both- “The Debtor” solo with his Epiphone and “Buriedfed” accompanied by synth keys, that turned it into a camp tragic opera, weird and compelling, death in the 80s. The songs themselves always stand up, whatever the arrangement, they have the ring of Dylan with Lou Reed’s junkie issues, and I’m glad he is alive.

Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson from CakeIn15 on Vimeo.

To end out the night, church seemed to be like an appropriate place to be and Central Presbyterian has opened its doors to intimate SXSW performances for years now. Norwegian songsmith Sondre Lerche fit the bill to a T, switching between a borrowed acoustic and plugged in Gretsch for his dynamic style that alternated between Paul Simon-sweet and Elliott Smith-angry. Cheers erupted when he tore into “Two Way Monologue” and he was self deprecating throughout, to the delight of the crowd. In noting the special nature of the venue, he remarked he was “not big on the church scene,” and when he introduced a song from his album Phantom Punch and people clapped, he joked that, “The label told me it didn’t sell well.” Although many people here are representing the labels, so many of the people attending are in it because they love the music and want to be here; all else in liefe can be between them and their god.

Sondre Lerche from CakeIn15 on Vimeo.

Judgement Day/Zoe Keating street orchestra

In Which Your Correspondent Gets Free Lunch or The Best of the Disaster Principle

You know you’re at South By Southwest when breakfast is lunch and you know you’re in Texas when that breakfast is beef brisket. It’s kind of like the Texan Breakfast of champions, and thanks to the folks at AOL/Spinner, Wednesday got off to a tasty start. Mark one day down for free breakfasts. Today, the Muzzle of Bees day party with Peter Wolf Crier should have free breakfast burritos.

Wednesday during the day was mostly spent at the Paste magazine party. Some old friends and favorites were playing and the new bands did not disappoint either. First up on the bill and with a nice crowd already for a noon slot was Basia Bulat, Canadian songstress who has been through the Twin Cities several times and who Staciaann met in the bathroom at First Avenue while Basia was trying to figure out which dress to wear for her gig. Backed by her brother Bobby on drums and Alison “Wonderland” Stewart on viola, Bulat’s warm and buttery alto filled up the room, even as she closed out her with a solo rendition of “Hush” an old gospel tune, against the noise bleed competition from the outside stage and street. Bulat’s songs, especially when she plays the autoharp, have a swirling old plains feel to them, and they were a beautiful way to kick off the day in Texas.

One of things you do need to do if you want to get the free swag/drinks/food is show up early. After Basia’s set, so by 1pm, one of the bars had already tapped out their reserves of free Sierra Nevada and the Izzie sodas were gone by 2. Still, while waiting in line for such things on the outdoor patio, Louisiana’s Givers were putting on a terrific little set. With a sort of noodling psychedelic guitar sound grounded in some deep bass and fuzz pedals, they came across like a more Jefferson Airplane influenced Dirty Projectors and were really fun to watch live, especially as the female lead switched between acoustic guitar and stand-up toms in front of her. I can only imagine that with their multiple guitar lines and percussive punches that they are a band that could fall dangerously flat on record, but on stage the mix was hot and they should definitely be on the Twin Cities tour watch list.

Back inside, Free Energy came onstage to play their first show of the day. Since Paul Sprangers used to front Hockey Night in the Twin Cities there is obviously a desire to call Free Energy a “local” band, in the same vein as the Hold Steady. In the debate posed on Twitter by @gimme_noise, @Staciaann and @doubleasterisk took the side of claiming but @solace put some distance between the band and Minneaolis, saying that the Hold Steady made it easy to claim them with their references to Twin Cities landmarks in their early records. Here’s a Mid-western passive-aggressive stand for you; we’ll claim the roots if they really truly blow up, and if not, Philly can have them. Still, with the crowd they packed in at the 7th Street Entry a couple weeks ago, and their totally infectious mix of T. Rex and J. Geils Band (which is really easy to get into if you happened to be a Hockey Night Fan) is definitely ascendant.

Free Energy from CakeIn15 on Vimeo.

After an amiable set from New Yorkers Freelance Whales, whose sprinkling can used for percussion had a warning label posted on it that any use other the recommended was not advisable, Carolina Chocolate Drops came on and did something amazing. Two men and a woman, from North Carolina, they get down deep into American music. When I interviewed Ben Knox Miller of the Low Anthem and asked him about the current popularity of roots music, he responded, “Hey, I don’t know if there’s any one reason, but music that comes from the old traditions will always be around. It’s real, it’s simple.” The Chocolate Drops embody and vivify that Faulkenerian chestnut that the past isn’t even past, because through their fiddles, banjos, guitars, kazoos, jugs, bones, breath, hands, feet, their very bodies, it lives in them and on stage, music specific to time and place and yet transcendent of it. Old blues tunes, drum-and-fife, Dixie jigs, plus a cover of Blu Cantrell’s 2001 revenge belter “Hit ‘Em Up Style”, everything comes full circle and anyone who cares about American music has no excuse to miss them when they come in to town this summer, or to pick up Genuine Negro Jig, out now on Nonesuch Records.

Carolina Chocolate Drops from CakeIn15 on Vimeo.

Frightened Rabbit provided the first real exposition of the disaster principle of rock and roll, that everything will go wrong, we want to watch it happen and we want even more to watch a band pull though, the thrill of riding along the edge of chaos into the light. As they came into the Galaxy Room, the Glaswegians were already looking harried. Although this band of Scotsmen is rarely sunny by disposition, their dourness and desperation can be incredibly forceful and compelling, sounding like a thunderstorm across the glen. Still, they did not look like happy campers and as frontman Scott Hutchison tried different variations of UK-US converter plugs it became clear that his guitar pedals and their keyboards would not be willing to cooperate. As they became more wild-eyed and with time running out, they signaled back to their sound man, who came through the monitors saying, “Fuck it, this is the most rock and roll thing I’ve ever done.” So, making do with an acoustic guitar hooked into a direct input and some of their backing instruments, they tore into a shortened, sweaty and impassioned set. As born out by their excellent albums Sing The Greys, The Midnight Organ Fight and the recently released The Winter of Mixed Drinks, Frightened Rabbit play their hearts out. They did it in the face of adversity on a hot day in Texas and will surely do it again in more amiable circumstances at the Varsity Theatre on May 10th.

Later on in the day, Minneapolis locals and CakeIn15 faves City on the Make faced their own difficulties while playing a show on the swank stage at the Belmont. On the way down to Austin, singer Mike Massey lost his voice, and so when he took the stage, his blues rasp was deeper and rougher than usual. The band adjusted well, so that Peter Blomgren’s guitar and Stephen Rowe’s bass had extended playing time against Colin Stumbras’ drums and Massey’s upper registers were unaffected, leading to a fierce mix of high and low dynamics that made tunes like the soulful “Ships Across the Ocean” and Minneapolis summer classic “Chicks on Bikes” grind and pop. Later on at the Green Room Booking gig at Lambert’s, Ruby Isle was doing their thing with the lights on, which is not as dirty as it sounds and had the diminishing effect of stage wildness. Still, I really can’t wait for their new-wave cover album of Appetite for Destruction comes out this summer.

I’m going to try and catch as little Minneapolis music as possible whilst here, it seems like going on a package tour to Italy or Egypt and only eating turkey-mayo sandwiches. Speaking of food, and I am going to belabor this point, Austin’s street vendors put Minneapolis to shame. Where is our street food? We got these goddamn cupcakes from a truck! You can’t tell me that winter makes it impossible, there is so much we do only in summer that street food should be one of them. City Council member Gary Schiff, I am going to tag you in this note when it imports to Facebook, and I want you to get on it, mmkay? Because this is a travesty. Imagine if Rotisserie Brasa had a pulled pork sandwich stand on Nicollet. Let’s get on this.

Here’s where the Hipster Heirarchy comes in- Staciaann with her badge got into the NPR Showcase at Stubb’s with the Walkmen, Spoon, a very dimly lit Broken Bells show and an outrageously phenomenal Sharon Jones fronting her Dap-Kings. I, however, with my limited access wristband did not get in for any of that, but I did get to meet up with my best friend from college who I had not seen in far too long. She has become a dubstep DJ, and so we packed in underground at Barcelona to dance like crazy to some of the best current dubstep DJs, DreadBass Soundsystem and Eprom, both from San Francisco and Manchester, England pioneer MRK1. After mostly standing in crowds during the day, letting loose and dancing with friends to people doing what they love, that’s some beautiful freedom, and you couldn’t really ask for more.

Actually, you might ask for more linking, video and photo. We’re working on it. With limited bandwidth and capacity, uploading video is not the easiest. We will do a recap when we get back and clean everything up then. Love you all.

In Which Your Correspondent Gets Free or The Benefits of Bureaucracy

Hunched over in the exit row of the tiny plane (I had to use the bathroom standing like a closed parentheses) heading down to Austin, Fort Wilson Riot’s “A Wordlessly Whispered Melody” shuffled onto my iPod. A sudden swell of nostalgia and I spun the dial back to play the Idigaragua album in full. Perfect traveling music. Two and a half years ago, when the Twin Cities theater and music scene was still relatively unknown to me, I was a part of the stage production that accompanied that rock-opera’s premiere, and I count it as one of the singular best and most formative experiences of my life. It was one of those things that was ridiculously hard work to pull off, that became more pleasurable the harder it became, was a rough an d beautiful synthesis of music with movement and art. The people I made that show with, I love them all still.

It seemed only fitting, that the dangerous travels and travails of the American journalist be the soundtrack for my first push down to South By Southwest. Here seems like a perfect place to lose oneself, to encounter gypsies and pirates and singing, dancing cacti, or their modern counterparts. I think PR and marketing people must be the carnival barkers with their Dancing Geek of Ciegozia. You have to go into this willing to accept those dangers, the perils of booze being flung at you, the weight of people pushing their band’s free swag, late nights, long lines and auditory assaults from all angles. Take it in, write it down and smash the glass of the rules you follow.

There is, however, a bureaucracy and hierarchy to the South By Southwest Music Festival, something a little akin to bribing your way through a Soviet regime. Who you know and how fast you get there are keys to getting the most out of your visit to Austin, like knowing which shopkeeper in Tito’s Sarajevo has a shipment of sugar coming in. However, unlike some dour Politburo meeting during the Cold War, all the apparatchiks of SXSW are well-coifed neon hipsters or leather-clad grungy rockers. No one is going to mistake our skinny jeans for Mao suits, and the purpose of meeting is the pleasure principle, and once formalities have taken place, you can get around to partying hard. ‘Round here, we’re trying to tear down the Berlin Wall of humdrum living.

Upon entering the Austin Convention Center, the air buzzes with attendees and functionaries running around with wireless devices, gathering credentials and standing in lines. The highest credentialed level is the Badge (which Staciaann has) an imprinted security-coded device that grants different levels of access to the various functions and conference panels, easy circumvention of lines and an all around munificent blessing. The wristband (which I have) is tagged on, unremovable for showering and general human functions offers access to basic services like venues, of course for a price. It is also totally possible to see plenty of great music for free, often on the condition that you RSVP to the open invitations beforehand.

The Constellations at the Fader Fort

At South By Southwest, the RSVP is the everyman’s secret weapon. On Tuesday night, before the festival even kicked off in earnest, an RSVP to the Levi’s Fader Fort (this is no place to start quibbling about corporate sponsorship of music) opened the doors for free popcorn, mechanical bull rides and Southern Comfort-Red Bulls and a performance by Canadian band Metric. Which is pretty amazing, because anyone who has seen or heard Metric should have, in the words of another journo on the trip, an “indie-rock boner” for lead singer Emily Haines. Hell, if you are capable, you should probably just have a regular boner for Emily Haines. And to push up for free to the very front so that when she spins her head and prances…

Hang on, a Japanese glam punk all-girl band in black vinyl and kimonos just walked past. I may be distracted like this throughout.

So, when Emily Haines prances and bounces around the stage for “Help I’m alive” and “Gimme Sympathy” her sweat lands on you like holy water. When the finale of “Stadium Love” rolls around and you’ve only been in Texas for four hours and seen a band you would have paid $25 at First Avenue to see and the weather, though cold, has the promise of sunshine and warmth, good god, I’m alive and my heart keeps beating like a hammer.

Metric

Metric

As the night progresses, because we feel unconstrained by schedules or coverage expectations (I hope, dear reader, to remain similarly unencumbered throughout the festival) we wander through the streets, eating BestWurst hotdogs, which put to shame Minneapolis and it’s abhorrent lack of decent street fare, stop in to some parties, watch people wander around. One of those people happens to be Craig Finn of The Hold Steady, who is in town doing music interviews for a show in IFC, so I get my picture taken with him. One of the people in our hotel room says that she swears she saw him on our floor later that night, so if Craig Finn is staying on our floor, there might be some very awkward hanging around the elevators later in the week. But the night goes on. We run into the Ice Cream Man, who gives us free swag and with free pineapple basil ice cream, we walk through the streets to a place called the Beauty Bar and music streams out of different venues every ten feet; this is what freedom looks and sounds like.

My phone just reminded me I am supposed to be at work in 15 minutes. Nope, I already am. At work riding the bull, leaping in the water.

Carl Rides The Bull from CakeIn15 on Vimeo.

Less than 24 hours before we get on a plane and get ourselves down to Austin; believe me, we’ve been counting down the hours. But, ’til then, here are the rest of the Spinner.com interviews. You can tell they were getting to the end of assignments with the run of WXY here (I almost got to interview Xzibit, wherein I would have asked him solely about Extreme Home Makeover, but Spinner has a special hip hop site that took care of that) but it was still a good run. These interviews make 17 in total over the last 3 weeks or so which ain’t too shabby- editors, take note.

Woolfy
“But yeah, one of these days, I’m going to write a song, she’s going to love it and leave Spike Jonze, and it’s going to be Woolfy and fucking Karen [O].”

Woodgrain
“Memphis was one of the most insane nights we experienced on that trip. We saw a lot of people get thrown out like battering rams, two car wrecks, it was just amazing. It was super wild.”

XYX
“Suddenly, in Monterrey there were a lot of interesting bands, this was, like, four years ago, five, that suddenly a lot of good bands were emerging from nowhere here in Monterrey but they didn’t have recordings or money to go into a studio, so we got cheap recording equipment and started recording those bands we thought were interesting.”

Yakuza
“Just go down and have a good show and have a good time, meet people, mingle, go out, do stuff. Don’t just hide in your fucking van or hotel room, if you’re fancy enough to have one of those.”

YACHT
“I think that they can expect their personal space to be invaded, direct communication. It is not a one-way show, the audience is very much a part of the show and we expect a lot of them.”

Yelawolf
“It’s not a fallback career at all, it’s all I have. I dropped out of school in 9th or 10th grade, man, the only other jobs I had were throwing bricks, throwing fish, ditch digging, all that shit. Just blue collar. I don’t want to make just ten dollars an hour for the rest of my life.”

Yes Giantess
“We’ve done a lot of official remixes for labels and bands but I would say that our favorite was one night, we were goofing around and we did a remix of ‘Party in the USA’ by Miley Cyrus.”

As I posted up before here and here, I have been doing a number of interviews for South By Southwest sponsor Spinner.com (they are the people bringing you the Smokey Robinson Soul Revue) which have been taking up a lot of planning time over the last weeks. The bands have run the gamut, they are are trying to get every official showcasing band interviewed, so this has been a drop in the bucket, but I have Skyped Ireland for the Minutes, caught up with a 60-year-old alien named Ygarr Ygarrist to talk about his band Zolar X and called across town to chat with Ben Weaver, along with a whole bunch of others. Here is the latest batch, as I scramble on deadline to get that last ones in before heading down to Austin next week. Browse through, for all the variety, some truths remain; we do this because we love it, no one hands it to us and the more fun you can have, the better it sounds.

Christopher & the Souls
“We gave it all we had in terms of pure volume and primitive teenage energy, and I think it has held up pretty well.”

Year Long Disaster
“All the time you spend trying to get drugs you can spend in a much more positive way. Those are lost hours. It’s amazing how much you can get done in a day.”

Amplified Heat
“I have always loved vinyl. On the last tour, some of the cities we went to people didn’t want CDs, they were going to wait til we had it on vinyl.”

Zolar X
“Then I read a book, a rock and roll book from years ago and somewhere in it, it said, “Don’t ever look like your audience.” That and we loved Star Trek.”

Ben Weaver
“I just like to write songs about animals and grocery carts and things. I don’t really know, because I don’t try to describe my music. That’s why I make music.”

The Minutes
“If you’re playing lots of shows, don’t get fucked on the first night. That’s the end. It’s downhill from there. That’s probably the only plan if you’re in a band. If you’re not in a band, go everywhere, drink everything, meet everybody.”

Little Brazil
“Extra cell phone batteries. That was the biggest problem for me in the past couple years. Cell phone batteries and secret stashes of cash that you can keep on your body that maybe the drunk version of you won’t find”

Zlam Dunk
“The U2 comparison came because I use a lot of delay in my guitar riffs. Lostprophets, I don’t know, I don’t know if that person was trying to piss us off or what, but I don’t know where that came from.”

If you haven’t been keeping up with Perfect Porridge’s State of the Music Blog series, you’re missing out.  This is no shameless self promotion – although Cake In 15 founder Staciaann did contribute here.    It’s a great little overview of what people in various parts of the music world think about the music industry, & more specifically about music blogs & their role in that industry.

Greg is putting this series of interviews together in preparation for his panel at SXSW this year.  It’s an interesting read, & there are definitely more than a few takes on the music industry & where it’s headed.  Greg describes the subject of his panel as this: “Just how important are music blogs to the industry today, is that prominence growing or fading, and how will new technologies and strategies impact the marketing mix in the coming year? Join prominent music bloggers, record label and PR firm executives to discuss the state of the industry and what’s around the corner.”

To get your own fix of the discussion without actually attending the festival, go here to read the various interviews he did in preparation.  We look forward to hearing how everything went down in Austin.  Minneapolis represent!

Last year, The Avett Brothers gave CakeIn15 one of their favorite shows of the summer- at the MN Zoo Amphitheater, outdoors, packed in close with a slight drizzle breaking into golden dusk and the perfect cool night, transcendentally American and energetic. Thoreau would be proud. You get the feeling, too, that Thoreau would take a shine to the Avett’s current tourmates, Providence, RI’s The Low Anthem. Starting with their 2007 debut What The Crow Brings and followed up with Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, which was self-released in 2008 and then picked up by Nonesuch Records in 2009, multi-instrumentalists Ben Knox Miller, Jeff Prystowsky and Jocie Adams have worked together to create an intense, shambolic vision deeply rooted in American traditions and nature. Oh My God, Charlie Darwin was recorded on a near-deserted island off the coast of Rhode Island and in late 2009, the band retreated to an empty pasta sauce factory to record, again reveling in the silence and isolation to draw out the melodies. But before any of that hits wax, there is touring to be done, America to see and songs to be sung. The Low Anthem open for The Avett Brothers in the First Avenue Mainroom this Friday, and CakeIn15 shot some e-mails back and forth with Miller to get his take on the importance of naming, solitude and who he likes for the baseball season.

You and Jeff met hosting a graveyard jazz radio show- What were some of the records you bonded over?

Jeff made most of the picks, because I don’t know much about jazz. He’s obsessed with jazz bass, so there was a lot of that on the show. Mingus, Christian McBride, and the best of them all Ray Brown.

You and Jeff went through several different bandmates before Jocie joined- how did she come in to the picture and how did you know it would work?

Yea, when we got serious about the band, we started as a trio with a blues song writer named Dan Lefkowitz from Virginia. He split after a year leaving us as only a duo. That’s when we started learning lot’s of different instruments so we wouldn’t be a bass and guitar songwriter duo. We wanted to have beautiful and deliberate textures for all the songs. Jocie first came along because we asked her to play clarinet on a track of our first record. But she started showing up to shows with her clarinet and we’d invite her to sit in. Before we knew it, she was picking up all sorts of instruments that were on the stage and playing fluently. She’s so very talented.

Unlike many band names “The Low Anthem” feels like a deliberate statement. How did you choose that name?

Not deliberate at all. In fact it was given to us by a childhood friend of mine who played ever so briefly with us in the early days of the band. It wasn’t until years later that we learned the name came from an Ayn Rand book called Anthem. It’s an awful book. Really boring. But what’s in a name anyhow?

(more…)

This Saturday another show takes over both the Entry & Mainroom at First Avenue.  It’s a awesomely affordable way to see the hand-picked bands representing Minneapolis who are showcasing at SXSW in Austin, Texas.  Also, there are donuts for $1!

There are two parts to this insane $5 deal – the Mainroom boasts six heavy-hitters in the local music scene: Jeremy Messersmith, Lookbook, City on the Make, Peter Wolf Crier, The Pines, & Romantica.  The Entry hosts the semi-finalists of Vita.mn’s Best of Local Bands contest where you’ll get to see newbies Bight Club, Hunting Club & Joey Ryan & the Inks!  Whoever wins that faceoff in the Entry will play again in the Mainroom at 9:15pm.

The whole she-bang is hosted by two of our favorite people, The Current’s Mary Lucia & Vita.mn’s Christian-Philippe Quilici.  There’s an afterparty in the Entry following the whole thing with The Moongoons!  There is no better bang for your buck this weekend.  Hope to see you there!

In some exciting news, ascendant CakeIn15 pals Peter Wolf Crier signed to record label Jagjaguwar today, home of acts like Bon Iver, The Besnard Lakes and Dinosaur Jr. It is an exciting move for the duo of Peter Pisano and Brian Moen, who just released their record Inter-Be this last fall with the Jeremey Catterton-directed house show This Is Not For You and graced the First Avenue Mainroom stage as part of the “Best New Bands” showcase in January. Even more exciting for CakeIn15 is that Staciaann’s photos of the band, which have been widely used online and in their promotion, will grace the cover of the record when it comes out on CD and vinyl! It has been an exciting couple of months for the talented two, their record bears out that talent and we couldn’t be more proud of them.

Also, Jagjaguwar will be releasing the much-hyped Eau Claire/MSP yacht-rocking supergroup GAYNGS record Relayted this spring, so look for that for your prom flashbacks and summertime deck shoe wearing.

From the SXSW Spinner Files, here is an interview with hard-rocking Texan rockabilly broad Rosie Flores. About to turn 60 this year, Flores started making music as a teenager and came up in the 80s with the likes of Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett and Lucinda Williams. When I caught up with Flores early one morning, she had just came back from touring New Zealand in support of her most recent record, Girl of the Century. Our conversation lasted well over a half hour, much longer than the interview edited for Spinner, in which she talked about how the Beatles changed everything and how if only Taylor Swift wasn’t under pressure to sell millions of records, she might make something that isn’t just sugar. So she’s sweet, opinionated and plays a wicked guitar which makes her totally Texan and totally rock and roll. Check it all out here.