Parlour to Parlour gets an intimate look at Lila Nelson

Waiting to get into the men’s room at Mississippi Studios in Portland, Oregon, I noticed a tall (relative to me, anyway), attractive young lady with a guitar standing quietly by. She was soft-spoken, seemed kind of shy, and turned out she was also visiting from California. Based in Arcata at that time, Lila Nelson was playing an early set before Rachel Taylor Brown that Spring night in 2008, and was about to completely rip apart my initial impression of her.

See the full post at Popdose.

Rachel Taylor Brown welcomes you to her Parlour!

As a member of Chris Robley’s band the Fear of Heights, keyboardist/ vocalist Rachel Taylor Brown had already endeared herself to me with her warmth and unique charm. Then I heard the opening strains of her album Half Hours With The Lower Creatures, and knew that there was so much more to Rachel than I could have imagined. I mean, the woman made music out of cash registers, essentially walking a fine line between serious metaphor and blatant absurdity. And it worked! As I found out, this time and times before, she’s always got something interesting going on.

See the full post at Popdose.

Parlour to Parlour begins today with Chris Robley & The Fear of Heights

Parlour to Parlour begins today with Episode 0. This footage, filmed in San Francisco, CA, during the weekend of November 14-15, 2008, on my grandfather’s old analog Hi8, was “just practice” and not originally intended for the series. But we liked it so much that it deserved a place in the series, even if it was out-of-concept in that it was the band visiting me, rather than the other way around. Hence “Episode 0.”

See the full post (which includes two videos, two mp3 downloads, and a full write-up) at Popdose.

22 Best Songs of 2008 (in my opinion)

Like most music publications worth a damn, Bullz Eye (which isn't exclusively a music publication, but does take its music content kind of seriously) will be publishing its writers' picks for best albums of the year very soon. Some of the staff may also be including their picks for best songs in their published pieces on the site, but not me. I did, however, share my picks with the staff, just for them to take in and enjoy. Now I figure I'll share them here, too, as a preview to the best albums features coming up in Bullz Eye. It's actually one song longer than what I shared with the staff, since I recently got caught up with an album I totally missed. Order is not ranked in any specific way - but I did listen to the songs in this order, and it flows well as a playlist, if you're so inclined...

...links go to last.fm, for all songs that have available streams. As for the resr, that's what Amazon is for. Enjoy!

01. The Fireman “Sun is Shining”
02. Brian Wilson “Oxygen to the Brain”
03. The Parson Red Heads “Got it All”
04. My Morning Jacket “I’m Amazed”
05. Joseph Arthur “She Paints Me Gold”
06. MGMT "Electric Feel"
07. Vampire Weekend “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance”
08. Juliana Hatfield “Law of Nature”
09. Neil Diamond “Home Before Dark”
10. Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan “Back Burner”
11. Rachel Taylor Brown “Abraham and Isaac”
12. Rachel Taylor Brown “B.S. (Beautiful Savior)”
13. Portishead “The Rip”
14. Chris Robley & The Fear of Heights “Atheist’s Prayer”
15. Bob Dylan “’Cross the Green Mountain”
16. Randy Newman “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country”
17. Silian Rail “Not the Wind, Not the Flag”
18. The Happy Hollows “Lieutenant”
19. Deerhoof “Numina”
20. The Gutter Twins “All Misery/Flowers”
21. Metallica “The End of the Line”
22. Guns N’ Roses “Prostitute”

A chat with Rachel Taylor Brown

Last month I had the pleasure of interviewing Portland-based singer/songwriter/pianist Rachel Taylor Brown for Bullz Eye. Not only does she make truly unique, though-provoking music, she's a genuinely nice person on top of it all. The only problem? She needs to get some more live shows booked!

Here's an excerpt from the interview, where she talks about the genesis of her toy piano fetish:

[Producer] Jeff [Stuart Saltzman] has all these interesting instruments lying around in his house, which is a studio, and when he’s working on something, I’d start playing around on different instruments. Like the VSF 30, that’s where I first saw the Yamaha VSF 30 and I had to have one. And it’s kind of the same thing with the piano. A lot of what I have, I’m just copying Jeff Stuart Saltzman (laughs) because he has so much interesting stuff around his house. So that one song on Ormolu, there’s this kind of like experimental tune similar to “Hemocult” on Creatures where it’s toy pianos and Mellotron and things like that. And that was one of the times where I was messing around on the toy piano, and then Jeff is just really good at just silently setting up microphones around me when I’m involved in doing something like that, and that whole tune just ended up being improvised on toy piano and all the other stuff, kind of like “Hemocult” was. And so, yeah, once I played Jeff’s toy piano, I wanted my own toy piano, and I wound up with three or four, ‘cause I’m greedy.

Her latest album, Half Hours with the Lower Creatures, is out now.