I’m about to turn you on to a pretty awesome musician. But first, it’s worth telling how I found out about him. One word: MAGIC.

Somehow, this guy’s whole album just showed up on my computer. I didn’t download it — in fact, I’d never even heard of him. But when I found the folder in my “downloads,” I went ahead and listened… and I’m really glad I did.

The guy’s name is Sam Amidon, he’s an American on an Icelandic record label. He’s not a songwriter, so far as I can tell; rather, he takes old folk songs and sings/arranges/records them in a very sparse and spooky sort of neomodern way. There are a number of good tracks on “All is Well” — yes, I think it’s worth clicking on the link, which will get you to him on iTunes so you can purchase. But don’t take my word for it — here’s “Little Johnny Brown,” the least sparse and most haunting.

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Unpack this: He wrote way more songs that you know than you know.

The legendary bluegrass musician Ralph Stanley endorses Barack Obama… could this turn some suspect Appalachians his way?

FXHL+NTRSTS in Lampasas, Texas (Derek absent, as he’s behind the camera)

So we’re finishing Day Six of our eight-day tour de force… Going on the road is a real gamble, as you have to rely on people you’ve never met, in towns you’ve never visited, to set up and promote the shows you’re going to be playing. The show in Houston, for instance, was pretty successful though no one there’d heard of us; the next night in Austin, musical capital of the Southwest, was more or less a flop as far as actual concertgoers and merchandise sales are concerned.

We got done playing here in Abilene, Texas, a couple hours ago (the last band is rockin’ it out right now), and though there was a good size audience, our music didn’t seem to connect with many of them. Mostly high-school and young-college-age kids here… and I wonder if it’s the music or the image: Older guys with beards, who aren’t dressed “cool,” and who don’t do much cool dancing/headbanging/whatever on stage. I was talking to Kyle from Interstates (our touring partners), who has been in the indie rock scene for nearly 15 years now, and we decided performing is a little bit hopeless for us. Not that it’s impossible to find some good shows here or there, but how do we appeal to people like us? WE don’t go to shows.

But driving through parts of the country I’ve never seen… that’s been the fun part. The van has continued to work despite it’s age and abuse; the band has kept up good spirits and had hardly any cross words, despite sleeping on floors and eating very little. It’s also neat, in a bittersweet way, to be away from Shelley and Lewis. It makes me realize how much I do love and appreciate them, and how much they add to my life, and I get a double-shot of pleasure: Thankful to be on tour, able to drive around and play music for a week; and thankful to be nearing the end of it, headed home to reunite with my love and my son.

P.S.: Yes, the above picture is a bit like “The Last Supper,” not only because of the surreal sort of focus but also because Topp looks a lot like Westerners think Jesus did. Texas is a weird place. Wonder what Oklahoma’s like? I’ll find out tomorrow.

Starting this Friday, Foxhole is officially on tour. (It starts Friday in Louisville, and hits Bowling Green on Saturday… CLICK HERE for info on the BG show or any other).

It’s far from the glamorous, drug/booze/sex-filled scenes you’ll see in TV and movies. Who knows… maybe some bands actually do this stuff. But for us, it’s more of a brief road trip, through entirely random places, dotted with performances and sleepovers with people we’ve never met before. Our tour bus is actually a van—a pretty shoddy one, at that, with no AC and just enough seats for people and which gets all of about 10 miles per gallon on the interstate if we’re going downhill. Our venues include a church, an old theatre, a couple clubs, a cafe… it was supposed to include a grocery store, but somehow that prime spot fell through.

Anyway, reflecting on the few brief jaunts we’ve taken—some for days, some for just a weekend, and at least one trip to Michigan and back for a single show—brings a bunch of great memories. There were crappy parts; in fact, when in the middle of it, it almost seems like one continuous journey through irritation and despair. But good memories tend to crowd out bad, and thank God that they do. If not, I’d have had good reason to ditch this whole rock-star idea a long time ago.

Top Five Tour Memories

FIVE: “Your mom’s a nice van!” | It’s hard to fathom that I’ve been in this band, with three of the same people and a rotating cast on drums and in the auxiliary spot, for almost eight years. When we started, we didn’t know how to play our instruments, nor did we have any clear idea of what we were trying to accomplish. That didn’t stop us from recording and self-issuing an EP, and in Summer 2002 we hit the road for two weeks of shows.

It’s worth noting that some of these turned out to be something other than “shows” as I understood that term. One place a freelance “agent” “booked” for us turned out to be open mic night at a bar that usually featured country acts. Having driven all that way, we went ahead and played, and a younger couple that happened to be there did buy a CD from us. So we made $6, gross, on that show.

Anyway, on the first night out we played near Hell, Ohio… in fact, our van broke down in Hell. While waiting for it to get fixed—which took all day—we hung out at a roast-beef restaurant next door, juggling and eating Equal packets and generally bemoaning life. The show that night? In some dude’s garage. Surprisingly, there were a lot of people listening to music in Hell, and so the show wasn’t too bad. It was the beginning for us… the beginning of driving a long way to play music for a few people, of spending our own money in an attempt to share our music with the world.

FOUR: Rockin’ the art museum | On that same tour, we stayed with my friend Taylor’s brother, Wil, and played with his band True Solar Holiday in Roanoke, Va. … Well, that’s not quite right. We actually showed up late; he and the venue had given up on us, and when we walked in everyone else was walking out. Wil (the funniest guy I’ve ever met, period) tried to get the crowd to stay; meanwhile, we went ahead and set up our stuff, then played a show—mostly for Wil, who was one of three of four people left.

The good part of this memory is the camaraderie of staying with he and his girlfriend, Anousheh (a gifted songwriter and singer herself), staying up all night and talking about music, movies, and our general philosophies of life (Nathan, who’s no longer in the band, trying to tell Wil about Jesus, and Wil telling him straight to his face that it was the second-stupidest thing he’d ever heard). The next day we went with Elizabeth (a nice girl who did the art for the band) and Graham (in the most ridiculous metal band I’ve ever heard) to a river-rope jump and then to a posh art museum.

THREE: Signing autographs in Minsk | Outside of Foxhole, I’ve done very little performing. One exception was in 2003, in Minsk, Belarus, where the girl I was courting lived as a missionary. She played too, and so we set up a couple shows—a rare occurrence in Minsk, much less with two Americans. The funny part was that, at the end of one of the shows, literally every girl there wanted my autograph. (If I hadn’t been performing with the girl I’d wind up marrying, I’d probably have ended up in a lot of trouble.) Worth noting, too, is that our trip to the first show was delayed by a opposition protest in the streets, complete with police (militia) in riot gear, after which a few people disappeared. Belarus is still a dictatorship of sorts, but change is coming.

TWO: Naptime’s over — now, some rock! | A show in Owensboro, set up by a friend (to protect his identity, I’ll simply call him Brandon Andrew Miles, and we’ll call his band Stellar Kin)… which was populated mostly by children under the age of 8. How he came up with this idea, I’ll never know… but those kids sure did love the rockin’ anthems of Stellar Kin! Our music, which is a bit more nuanced, didn’t go over quite as well. We radically re-evaluated our sound after this, and are hoping our next album gets some buzz through cross-promotion on Disney Channel.

ONE: To the future! | As with romance, the best part of touring is often the anticipation. Getting amps fixed, guitars restrung, practicing in large concentrated chunks (tomorrow will see me head to Nashville for practice beginning at 10 a.m. and probably lasting until late afternoon)… the fun is in the planning.

[audio http://rjustin.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/murkville_mixed.mp3] “Ooee” (from forthcoming “Murkville” compilation, also included as bonus track on new vinyl version of “We the Wintering Tree”, soon to be available from Burnt Toast Vinyl)

I am proud to present you, fair readers, with two very distinct reviews of our last album. First off, here’s Scott Irvine’s take from AbsolutePunk.net. This ranks as maybe the most pretentious review I’ve ever read… and I’m proud I had a hand in inspiring it. 

What passes? What mutters? What dies? What ascends? Who is in my head and what do they intend to do? Why, with newly born gusts of cathartically wayward winds stuck in seasonal transitory, am I so warm and when did it become such a timely process to articulate these questions that’ve been burning through my skull all these minutes? These laws of motion do not pertain to the psyche yet I feel so inanimately strung over century old bearings that are only just now making sense. My mind is a canvas for errant deconstruction, unbidden reconstruction, and serene destruction. Compromising with the Push and the Pull of hot sex, firefights, steamy shower bathing, or salsa dancing begets the appropriate response. But somehow this new force is oddly uncompromisable; innately tormented commentary through the subtle discordance and rupture of an underwater panorama. It dilutes the room around me as if the prospect of death through unrivaled beauty could bend space and time; graceful and uninterruptedly. Salvation rears and chokes this Push/Pull until the air supply between myself and these emotions, this religious experience, leaves me quaking to the realness of Foxhole. Lonely deaths and miraculous resurgences of hope manifest themselves in every instrumental nuance; tugging and straining the idea that no human voice is heard here, yet at the same time making it clear that trips to the moon can, in fact, be unmanned (per se). Trumpets cry and squirm throughout this Push/Pull, but it’s their fractured tenor that validates their purpose in being a reminder that not all is perfectly composed when hopelessly sinking in a chime-y mist of harmony. Peaks are formed and crescendos glaze them with twinkly, often dwelling, melodies; some of the most jarring song arrangements I’ve yet to hear rolling off the tongue as if this is all just second-nature and no one is really getting hurt in the process. It reads like a novella yet matter-of-factly sticks to a shade reserved for an epic. It blends contemporary instrumental reconsiderations with the grandeur and confidence of old sea tales that dustily made appearances in pubs over a century ago. Crashing waves and choppy regrets filter through a glorious dissonance between the earnestness of the instrumentation and the unabashed static often made the focal point of the song by the whim of brilliant production. What passes? What mutters? What dies? What ascends? Questions so general are all too specific in the context of the Push/Pull and what may remain unanswered is what gives it a beautiful mystery and flighty circumstance. 

Next up, we have a review which was written in Portugese, and I’ve translated it for you. Translated being a relative term, as it’s still hard to make heads or tails of. Anyone with any idea of what this person is saying, please explain.

This band almost finished. Pra would not go to make lack me, they made a generic post-rock to a large extent and nor guaranteed the complete hearing of the record. There in 2006 they had come back with new members, new house in the Burnt Toast Vinyl and one disquinho of little more than half hour that if did not primava for the originalidade had three factors that they made of perfect it: the baterista Jason Torrence, the use of form fan of heavy rock deliciosoa the clear, clear, limpid production and I know more how many adjective similars there.The complicated one to write on music, in special on instrument, is that I can be here stepping on in the accelerator and to deliver metaphors, poetical lines and nor to little would arrive close to the real sensation that it will cause in you, I can suggest or only induce. E I do not want to make this with this record, therefore it presents common elements to the sort that the less intent listener of bands as Explosions in The Sky and Mogwai goes to perceive. I go to abide itself by three itens that I spoke there in top:The baterista Torrence possesss one led rítimica only one, remembers the strokes of the Dave Lombardo (it is, of the Slayer) that you can listen in any place and identify. The fan of heavy rock does not act in first plan in the majority of the times, always aparando the falls of the songs (perhaps there an explanation for the heading of the record) and creating new lines that arrest the listener, making the record to fly in the phones. She creates a good sensation, pra gives will to listen to another time these faces of the Kentucky alone know if at that moment he was one ground of trumpete or the trimmed turn of the battery that called me the attention. A record that until appeared in some publications specialized in top 2006 but that as all the great majority of this type, does not arrive here.  

 Fun stuff. 

FOXHOLE: Circa 2003 

FOXHOLE: Circa 2007

I’m a sucker for clever social commentary, especially when it comes wrapped in parody that, at first glance, is offensive. Not offensive for the sake of offending, but offensive for the sake of waking us up.

And it’s hard for me to know what to say next. A white male blogging on race and culture… well, needless to say trouble lurks ’round every corner. But I saw something today* that woke me up… or, rather, shook my sensibilities in such a way that I couldn’t help blogging about it; in fact, it’s been stuck in my mind for hours now, and it’s probably not going anywhere.

When I was about 14, I went to youth camp—it was here, oddly enough, that I first heard “Gangsta Rap,” specifically Dr. Dre’s classic “The Chronic.” A huge marijuana leaf graced the cover, and the thematic material included gang violence, lurid misogyny and gutter sexuality, and illegal drug use. Some 10-15 years later, much of popular rap music is still dealing with the same subject manner, often in a glorifyingly carefree way. Some argue that it’s “reality;” others (to borrow a term from a different genre) “noise pollution.” Meanwhile, Bill Cosby grabs headlines for speeches encouraging “the black community” to stop glorifying violence, drug use and misogyny… urging parents to act like parents, urging children to pursue their educations and to stay away from drug culture.

Complicating the situation, for me anyway, is the fact that plenty of mature, professional black people enjoy gangsta rap—not to mention all the white male teens and twentysomethings who revel in it. Some of my black coworkers listen to it, yet they’d never see themselves as “hoes” or argue that life on the street is fun and edifying. They’re awesome people, and if I—or anyone, for that matter—ever said or implied that they matched the gangsta rap stereotype, I’d be cursed/slapped/fired/ostracized, and for good reason.

Yet the stereotype pervades, in large part because of rap music. Black Entertainment Television**—pretty much the only nationwide cable network devoted to black culture—plays this kind of garbage at all hours of the day: half-naked women, gawking and flailing in pornographic bliss, set to the beat of an 808 and to the words of some man talking about his conquests and his rims and his crimes and his sex appeal. It’s sad, and it’s infuriating, and yet the black community—no, wait, America—keeps buying it.

And that’s where the parody comes in. A rapper/poet named Bomani Armah put together a rap video that takes deadly aim at the pervasiveness of misogynistic, violent, ignorant rap music and at the masses that let themselves listen to it day in and day out. It’s totally offensive—in fact, just watching it makes a white guy feel a little guilty, as if he’s eavesdropping on a conversation he wasn’t invited into—yet it’s somehow amazing, and it’s got the power to start a major discussion on race, class, ethics and socioeconomics.

Anyway, I think I’ve said all I can say. Below is the video, which is animated. But first, a few disclaimers. I urge you, SERIOUSLY, to consider these things before you push play.

1. If profanity is a stumbling block for you, don’t watch it. There’s a LOT of profanity. Nothing sexual or gross about the language, but it’s filled with cursing. And while I’m not in the habit of broadcasting such stuff, I think it’s worth it for those of you who share my fascination with such parody/commentary.***
2. If you haven’t seen a rap video in the past few years, you won’t understand the visual component. There’s lots of booty shaking and bling-blingin’, a bit of raunchy sexuality, and the images move a warp speed. Be prepared.
3. If you haven’t heard a rap song in the past few years, this one will seem really repetitive… you may think, “Who is this guy? Why can’t he write more than ten words per verse?” Yet this is exactly what passes for music these days… There are plenty of good rappers out there, don’t get me wrong. But most of the crap they play on radio and TV sounds exactly like this.
4. I don’t necessarily agree with all parts of the message.
5. I don’t necessarily disagree with all parts of the message.
6. In a purely spiritual sense, there’s nothing particularly edifying. However, there’s a lot to think about: For the target audience (black youth, mainly, and other rap listeners), a message that’s rarely been offered in such a radical medium; and for others (like me), an opportunity for reflection on subconscious prejudices, assumptions, and direct/indirect advancement of stereotypes.

Okay. So you got this far: Here it is. (If you’re disappointed… well, sorry.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN2VqFPNS8w]

*Thanks to Adam for pointing me to this.

**Black Entertainment Television has, in fact, aired this video on a number of occasions.

***Does the music sound familiar? It’s possible you know it as what it originally was, which is a classical piece (the composer’s name escapes me). But the actual arrangement that’s been sampled and looped is the theme to “Judge Judy,” a show which at once glorifies and exploits minorities, immigrants and the American lower class in general. Which, in my opinion, makes the video all the better.