Lakers Celtics game seven: Magic and Larry must be smiling
June 17, 2010 by Beatweek · Leave a Comment
As the Lakers and Celtics head into game seven of the NBA Finals tonight, the current players on both teams are too focused to be doing anything as shallow as stopping to smile. But retired players from both franchises, while certainly rooting for whichever team they won championships of their own with, have to be smiling as the current Lakers-Celtics Finals sets itself up to become one of the most storied NBA championship series in league history. Only a non-competitive game seven tonight could take the luster off this series (not that Magic or Larry or Kareem or McHale would mind so much as long as the blowout is in their team’s favor), but as legends who’ve gone through tight championship series themselves, they can perhaps appreciate tonight’s game for the memories it evokes of the Lakers Celtics rivalries of old, for the grand spectacle of a seven game series, than current players like Kobe Bryant and Ray Allen who are simply trying to win what will one or the other be the final game of their 2009-2010 season.
Taylor Swift wraps up Fearless Tour tonight in Massachusetts
Taylor Swift is bringing hear Fearless Tour to a close tonight at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massacusetts. Swift’s tour, which has been running for so long that it’s named after her late 2008 album release, has evolved in its latter stages to include football stadium shows, with capacities generally triple or quadruple that of indoor sports arenas. Of the wrapping up the Fearless era, the Pennsylvania native remarked “I’m walking on a cloud today.” Swift’s brand of country pop music has made her one of the most popular country singers as well as one of the more recognizable young pop stars on the planet. Although her tour is officially over after tonight, Taylor will be performing at a Nashville benefit concert on June 22nd in order to help flood victims in her adopted hometown. She’s also set to perform at a Canadian music festival on July 10th.
Dropkick Murphys interview
March 15, 2010 by Beatweek · 2 Comments
Beatweek talked to lead singer and bassist Ken Casey who, through a thick Boston accent, described them as family men. They still encourage heckling from beer-bottle-wielding New Yorkers, as long as it’s not at the shows they bring their grandmothers and daughters to.
It’s that special time of year for Dropkick Murphys. For their annual celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, Dropkick is playing seven shows in six days at Boston’s House of Blues and releasing their second live album, Live on Lansdowne, Boston MA. It’s a 20-track jaunt through their career that shows off the band in the only way to truly appreciate them: with the live energy that’s fueled tons of raucous shows over the years.
“Over the course of fourteen years, we’ve played thousands and thousands and thousands of shows and we’ve recorded six albums, so it feels like the more natural thing to do is play live,” Casey said.
He called the audience the “8th member of the band,” saying that, “With the nature of the music, and the intensity, we feed off the audience and they feed off of us. This music is so much more conducive to being played in front of people.”
After ten years of St Patrick’s Day shows in Boston, at seven shows a clip, Boston has seen around seventy Dropkick Murphys shows in mid-March over the last decade and it’s become an event, to say the least. It may be in Boston every year, but he says fans come from all over the world, listing Europe, Australia and Japan.
“It’s become kind of like an asshole convention,” Casey said, lovingly. “There’s a lot of camaraderie. It’s kind of cool to see people make those connections.” He said that fans come year after year and he sees the community develop. His own memories of the annual week seemed to overwhelm him.
“As far as memories go, I mean, oh, man. Tons of different crazy things throughout the years,” Casey said. He choose to hone in on his family memories, mentioning that his daughter is on the new DVD, dancing on stage, and that he brings the whole family along.
“One year we had both my grandmothers, my mother, my wife and my daughter. It’s four generations of women in my life. It’s nice to be able to play a form of music to have grandma come to.”
Having seen their March show in Austin’s Stubbs BBQ, it didn’t seem like a grandma-friendly concert – at least not if you got too close. The legendary outdoor venue was packed with hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, green-shirt-clad men crowd surfing and moshing in a way the venue hadn’t seen since Metallica came through the year before. And Austin is a neutral venue. You should see what happens when the Boston heroes go to New York.
“We always, from the early days of the band, had gone down to places like New York City and bad mouthed the Yankees from the stage and had bottles thrown at us,” Casey says proudly. In the weeks and months after the Red Sox won the world series in 2004, they were playing for a pissed off Yankee nation, but that didn’t stop them from doing what they always do.
“Halfway through the show, we killed the lights and had a video screen drop on the stage, and it was the ‘Star Wars’ music comes on (dun dun dun dun) and you just hear ‘The most epic collapse in sports history!’ and we showed all the highlights. They were in shock. As they threw the bottles, all I could say was, ‘You don’t wait eighty-six years to rub it in and then not rub it in.’ As much as New Yorkers hate when we do that, they respect that we have the balls to do it.”
Sports are essential to Dropkick Murphys’ success as they’ve been a part of huge moments in defining moments of their beloved Red Sox and Bruins. They played at five “nail-biter” games in a row where the Red Sox won on the last at bat and are undefeated at any Boston sporting event they’ve played.
“Our first kind of foray into officially touching that kind of stuff was a song about being Bruins fans, called ‘Time to Go.’ That kind of led us down that path of playing at Bruins games and playing at some Red Sox games. “The nature of the kind of music we play is all about being intense. Certain moments in sporting events are intense and they go hand in hand. We’ve had a good run. Every time we’ve played live at a Bruins game or a Red Sox game the home team has always won. We’re 10-0.”
“It’s pretty awesome to be a part of it. It’s awesome to play in the parade. Those are the types of things a kid that grew up here as a big sports fan that you never dream could happen to you. To me, that’s personally a greater experience than any success the band could have in the music world.”
It’s easy to call them a bar band because of the heavy drinking fans with sing-a-long anthems, but Dropkick Murphy makes the connection easy. They own their own bar, McGreevy’s, a re-creation of an old Boston staple.
“It’s been a landmark for Dropkick Murphys fans to go in Boston. I was more into it for the history of replicating McGreevy’s,” Casey said. “It’s full of Dropkick fans from open to close.”
They’ve got a bar and a stage, but they don’t want to to get too political and divide their fans, despite their appearance on the “Rock against Bush” soundtrack.
“As a band we’ve always been political. Probably going on that ‘Rock Against Bush’ thing is the most overtly political thing we’ve ever done. Sometimes I feel if a band is too outspoken off the stage, people tune them out because to a lot of people music is an escape. We try to not soapbox.”
Live on Lansdowne, Boston MA comes out March 16th, the day before St. Patrick’s Day, in the middle of their run. What can we expect from the week of St. Patrick’s day shows?
“We always have a few surprises up our sleeves, but we can’t say that because then it wouldn’t be a surprise.”
Learn more at DropkickMurphys.com • iTunes • Facebook • Twitter
Gretel in the Podsafe Cafe
Hailing from Boston, the trio that makes up Gretel delivers eclectic Americana-folk music full of instrumental surprises that fit together seamlessly. I love the description of the music off of their website: “Gretel’s songs evince an honesty and directness usually reserved for confessionals and bathroom stalls.” In that directness, their songs lyrics paint beautiful pictures and scenes that seduce you to keep their CD’s on repeat. Their latest release, The Dregs, was released June 2, 2009. Reva, the lead singer talked to us about making of the album, being on the road and finding inspiration.
Each song you perform and record is perfectly arranged with sounds that set the song apart from the others while bringing them all together in your own eclectic sound. How much time do you spend crafting each song and what risks did you take on this record?
Recording is a long and involved process for us. We started the recording process over on each song on this record at least twice (after they were well under way), and most of them didn’t start sounding right until after the third attempt. Even just writing the songs takes me a while. I tend to spend at least twenty hours on a song before it’s ready to play for the band, and then it usually goes through many incarnations before we settle into how we want it to sound as an ensemble–harmonies, instrumentation, dynamic changes, and the like.
Recording is a really terrifying and exciting thing to do when you’re doing it yourself. All the chances you take will fail or succeed based on your own skill sets and vision. It’s very scary to know that if your record sucks, you can’t just say, “Well, the producer thought…” or “The label said we had to…” If any of our records suck, it’s my fault. I’m the producer. We’re our own label. There’s no wizard behind our curtain to blame things on, which makes my knees knock. At the same time, it’s kind of exhilarating. When you have an idea–no matter how farfetched it seems–you can try it and see if it works. I just make sure that the players I record with (my bandmates Phil and Melissa fall into this category) are really exceptional at what they do, so that I can make a harebrained suggestion and know pretty quickly if it will work or not. If the idea is a good one, a good player will be able to do what I ask and it will hit in the way I wanted it to. If an idea sounds bad when a good player plays it, I know my idea was off.
A good example of a successful, sorta weird idea that worked out (in my opinion) is when the cello comes in during the middle of Renegade. I told Emily Hope Price, the cellist, that I wanted it to sound like our ship was going to go down and she was the storm that was dragging us to the bottom. I sound like a crazy person when I say things like that, but when a good player listens closely and tries to put into sounds the things described, the idea takes on a real and valid shape. Her interpretation of my description really worked because she’s a great player and a good listener. I can’t make records without people like that.
How is The Dregs different from your last two albums?
The Dregs is darker–in terms of theme and soundscape–than our last two records. I think it’s the best songwriting I’ve done so far, and the arrangements are much more full. I’m also a better engineer than I was before, so things just sound better at their fundamental wavelength level. The songs are a lot shorter, and they travel a more appropriate distance within themselves and within the record as a whole. We’re getting better at making things sound like themselves. We’re getting better at making us sound like ourselves. Overall, I think this is the record that shows the band most accurately.
Where do you find inspiration?
Inspiration from a songwriting perspective is something that I think I just bank and wait on until I have the necessary time required to turn out a song. Life is so full of heartbreak and wonder. My friends’ lives, the world’s chaos and confusion, my own incompetence at being a human being, good books and poems–these things all lend themselves to song. I also feel inspired by my friends and the musicians around me–to keep working and to keep the quality of the work high. Some of my friends make records with really inventive arrangements. Some of my friends put on really great, high energy live shows. Some of my friends can let loose in a song like they’re possessed by the devil. All these things go into the hopper of what is possible and what can be attempted. Art is a peeling back of a cheap veneer to reveal the true grain beneath, and when I see and hear people doing that, or hear of things in their lives that force that upon them – those things are inspiring. Not inspiring in an uplifting gosh-now-I-feel-better way, but in a way that makes me contend with reality anew. Reality – when it gets really specific – is inspiring.
How have you used social media to connect with new fans and promote your music?
We’re trying to do better with this one. I work a lot to try to pay for things like making records and going on tour, so the time I could be spending on utilizing facebook or twitter as marketing tools doesn’t happen like it does with some acts. For this last record and release, we had some good friends really throw their energy into online promotion, and it worked really well. It’s still something I’m coming around to because I didn’t start making music in order to spend a lot of time on the computer (or for that matter, to work a ton as a waitress to pay for making music), so the thing that I try to make sure I do enough of and do well is the music–writing, arranging, recording and playing out. Things stack up and don’t get tended to in ways that I’m sure would really help us out, but I don’t want to forego the music in order to do the marketing. But yes, we do use online social media outlets on a regular basis and hope to expand into using them more.
The personal touch you take to your music with the Deluxe edition of The Meteorite and the hand stitching on your posters is refreshing. What inspires you to go that extra mile?
I think the things I/we do always go back to trying to answer the question: What do we want to make? If I’m not interested in the thing itself, I don’t know why other people would be. I don’t like mass produced things very much. I like one-of-a-kind items–from clothes to coffee mugs. If the packaging of a product is specific and unique and one-of-a-kind, I think it says to a potential owner of that product that the thing (in this case, the music) housed inside that packaging is also specific, unique and one-of-a-kind.
I try to make things to sell (or promote us with) that I would be excited to own. For us, the extra mile isn’t really an extra one–it’s part of the mile we’re already trying to walk. It does take more time, that’s true, but it fits within our overall aesthetic. The reason to sew on every flyer is the same as the reason to change the harmonies at the end of a song, or add an extra measure of silence in the middle of another one–it’s to refresh the eye and ear, pull the audience and ourselves in closer; it’s an aiming for the beautiful for no other reason than that it’s beautiful. It’s a strike against utilitarianism and against a cost/benefit analysis that would trade good art for bad art if it meant the stack of dollars would be higher. As individuals, we’re after a high quality of life for ourselves and everyone else–the good, the beautiful, the loving and the true. Our music – what it sounds like and looks like – reflects that.
What are your tricks for being on the road for long periods of time in close quarters? What do you listen to on the road?
We actually spend a lot of time on the road in silence. We do listen to music together (full albums) and podcasts (our two faves are This American Life and Radio Lab). We’ve found that for us, the trick to being on the road is not doing it for over three weeks at a time without a good break. People weren’t meant to live in cars or vans. It can be tough, but playing shows every night for people who love to hear us is amazing.
What are you most looking forward to in the coming months now that the CD is released?
We have no idea what our next steps are, but I’m looking forward to writing a bunch of more songs, getting them into the set, trying to get out on the road again, and making another record. Being in a band–unless you’re content to be a local band only–is kind of like flipping a coin to figure out your next move. Except, when you don’t have any funding besides what you provide yourself, you have to hustle like mad to find a coin to flip. What’s next? More music.
Check out iProng Magazine’s 42nd issue featuring a cover story interview with the Black Eyed Peas, a hands-on look at the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3.0, and the top fifty accessories for iPhone and iPod. Also interviewed: Butterfly Boucher, Davy Knowles, Endless Hallway, Gretel, Kingsfoil and much more.
