Defeating Amendment One

Hello intrepid blog-followers who still come see this blog occasionally!

I will be playing solo along with John Darnielle (Mtn Goats) and Greg Cartwright (Reigning Sound) at MotorCo in Durham on April 19th. Tara Defrancisco will also perform.

We are raising money to fight Amendment One, which is on the ballot May 8.

You can buy a ticket to attend, or pay more and have your request guaranteed to be played! Here's the link, hope to see you there:

http://motorcomusic.com/showroom-protect-nc-families-benefit

UPDATE: last day to make your requests! see you tomorrow night at Motorco!

Dave

On March 2, after a long year in which he simultaneously battled cancer and made the most of his time on earth, our dear friend David Doernberg died at his home in New York City. He was surrounded by family and friends.

I can't possibly enumerate the ways that Dave was intertwined into the fabric of our own family & lives. Likewise i have a feeling the hole that his passing leaves is larger than we even yet know.

If you follow Superchunk you've seen Dave's handiwork in our music videos. If you were at the Merge 20th Anniversary celebration in Chapel Hill a couple years ago, you saw the giant red trees that Dave helped execute & hang. If you've been to my wife Andrea's restaurant Lantern you have seen Dave's unique sensibilities at work; he designed the restaurant. If you've read the Merge book Our Noise you've seen a photo of Dave in his "Metal Dave" phase behind the t-shirt table on our first European tour.

Dave was in our wedding and in fact my wife and i may never have met if it wasn't for Dave.

Dave loved food, music, film, sports, art, travel, friends...in other words he loved life and it was great to live life around him. He was open to it (life) in a way that many people are not.

Dave was an enthusiast but not profligate with his enthusiasms -- he was a critical and detailed thinker about the things he loved.

Obviously there is a lot more to say about David than can be said here.

Mainly he was a friend like no other & I miss him already.

You can get a good sense of Dave from reading his blog eatdavelove

There's an nice obituary that documents some of Dave's film work at filmmakermagazine.com

Memorial contributions can be made to Doctors Without Borders or No Kid Hungry.

Hey There!

Happy New Year!

Been awhile over here... at a certain point i look at just HOW long it's been and then the idea of trying to catch up is overwhelming so i just procrastinate a little longer...

So, lots happened since October!

Put out a new Superchunk 7" for "Learned to Surf" w/ non-LP b-side "Sunny Brixton" in the UK.

Played Superchunk shows in Madrid, Barcelona, and London. Had a great time in all those places! Awesome crowds, fun shows. Not to mention the food...

Made some Year-End Lists of favorite stuff.

Been tweeting a lot. Tweeting over here too!

It's been a year since starting the tumblr of our home kitchen compost, it's over here at Compost Beauty

Coming up -- two solo shows on the horizon:

Feb 11 at the Cave in Chapel Hill
Feb 23 at Swedish American Hall, SF, for Noise Pop

Hope to see you soon!

10 Years of OCSC

Trish Mesigian and her fabulous bar the Orange County Social Club recently celebrated 10 years of existence with a series of shows in the bar itself and at the Cats Cradle down the street. I played a solo set, there's a clip of me doing "Rope Light" HERE in the dim light of the bar.

The set was thematic-ish:

Getting Older (the Clean
Outside This Bar (American Music Club)
Hey Salty
Rope Light
Music Lovers (Destroyer)
Lets Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits (Magnetic Fields)
4th of July Asbury Park (Springsteen)
I Don't Want To Go Home (Southside Johnny)
Autumn Got Dark
Punch Me Harder
Swinging Doors (Merle Haggard)
Song for A Clock
Digging for Something

Lots of great shows the whole week, capped by Seven Brides for the Meatwagon doing their famous slew of covers good and bad.

Thanks Trish & everyone who works at OCSC!

Transfigured Time at Westobou Festival

My first visit to Augusta (though i met someone at the Superchunk Atlanta show who was convinced we had played there 20 years ago; as far as i know we did not!) was a good one. The Westobou Festival is run by people who are genuinely enthusiastic about art and bringing it to their town, and the venue we played, Sacred Heart Cultural Center, was kind of insane. Built in 1898, fallen into disuse and de-sanctified by the late 80s, nearly destroyed but saved by a wealthy patron, it's a fairly stunning and great-sounding place to play music / see a performance. Our performance in particular went well, nerves and all considering it was our first live performance of the music.

We paired one new piece with each of the four Maya Deren films shown -- Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, The Very Eye of Night, and Ritual in Transfigured Time. Having done it once now, there are some arrangements that i'd like to tweak and flesh out further, so hopefully we'll get to play this music again in the future...

Thanks to Kristen Beard, Seamus Kenney, Brian Paulson, Mark Simonsen, and Matt Vooris for playing, as well as Carl Purdy and Angela Rubendall, Augusta musicians who joined us on violin.

We unfortunately had no time for any James Brown landmark-seeing, mainly because we were busy getting lost in the winding hallways of the haunted inn we stayed at. Next time!

The Week in Rock

Two Superchunk shows this week in major metropolitan areas...for some reason it's taken a year since the release of Majesty Shredding to make it down to Atlanta, and it's been TEN YEARS since playing there period apparently, but the lineup for this Thursday at the Buckhead Theatre looks awesome, The Dodos and Times New Viking open up. Both of those bands are also playing (on different days) at the 2nd edition of Raleigh's Hopscotch Festival. Too many bands to see, will have to pick my spots.

Thurs 9/8 Atlanta, GA -- Buckhead Theatre TICKETS
Saturday 9/10 Raleigh, NC -- HOPSCOTCH Festival TICKETS

Meanwhile preparations have begun in earnest for the Transfigured Time event in Augusta Sept 29 & it's great to start to hear actual musicians (other than myself) play the music for the Deren films... Tickets for the Westobou Festival HERE

(Atlanta poster courtesy Nate Duval, we'll have them for sale at the show!)

Late Summer

wow a lot of time has passed since my last post here, almost too much stuff to recount. some fun solo shows opening for Dino Jr & Rob Delaney the same week at the Cat's Cradle. the rock/comedy axis continues to turn.

Superchunk played really hot, really fun shows in NYC (at the House of Vans warehouse) and Chicago (at the Pitchfork Festival). 'forkfest show was seriously one of the hottest shows we've ever played and we weren't even on the stage w the most direct sun.

got some Superchunk shows coming up in September:

9/8 Buckhead Theater - Atlanta, GA BUY TICKETS HERE
9/10 Hopscotch Festival - Raleigh, NC BUY TICKETS HERE

and then in a more Portastatic-y vein, on September 29th i'm back in GA to perform a live film score to accompany 4 Maya Deren films. still writing the score currently! but making good progress and i'll be performing it with an 8-person ensemble, apparently the venue is an old church, sounds like the whole thing will be really cool (as long as we hold up our end w the music...).

the evening is called "Transfigured Time" and it's the opening night of the Westobou Festival in Augusta, GA.

enjoy the waning days of summer!(course it'll be hot as blazes for another good month)

Thanks Brazil!

had a couple great, weird shows (like most of our shows in Brazil) last weekend as part of the Virada Cultural in Sao Paulo state -- both outdoors, one late night, one in the afternoon, in Mogi Das Cruzes and Sorocaba, Brazil. our fans in Brazil are dedicated (it's been 11 years since we were there last) and a bit unhinged, just like we like them. Fabiana and Sergio were great hosts, and the shows actually ran on time which is a change from Brazil tours past where we literally just added 2 hours onto anything in the itinerary. other acts performing on the festival included both clowns and mimes (separately). here's setlists...

MOGI DAS CRUZES

Throwing Things
My Gap Feels Weird
New Low
Detroit Has a Skyline
Rosemarie
Animated Airplanes Over Germany
Like a Fool
Hello Hawk
Learned to Surf
Cast Iron
Digging for Something
Slack Motherfucker
Skip Steps 1 & 3
Everything at Once
//
Crossed Wires
Seed Toss
Hyper Enough
//
Precision Auto

SOROCABA

Learned To Surf
My Gap Feels Weird
Detroit Has a Skyline
Crossed Wires
For Tension
Nu Bruises
Kicked In
Iron On
Digging For Something
On The Mouth
Driveway to Driveway
The First Part
Precision Auto
Throwing Things
//
Brand New Love
Slack Motherfucker
Hyper Enough

Now playing: Jorge Ben - Negro é Lindo

RIP Billy Bang

An incredible improviser on an under-utilized instrument in the jazz world, Billy Bang made some amazing music on his own (one of my favorite albums by him is the solo Commandment (No More Records)) and with several groups including Sun Ra's Arkestra and his own String Trio of New York. He died last week at the age of 63.

Good obits at NPR and the Times.

Read it in Books

My wife Andrea's excellent cookbook came out last week, it's awesome and available where awesome books are sold. It's called Cooking In The Moment. Here's one particularly great review on the Daily Beast by Katrina Heron wherein MFK Fisher and Alice Waters are both invoked; pretty good company!

This Saturday is Record Store Day. There's usually a ton of pretty exciting stuff out on vinyl that day and i hope to get some stuff (though i'll be at Coachella for the day for some Love Language, Arcade Fire, and other fun in the sun), but the volume of releases on that day has become so great that it seems like they should do it twice a year and spread the love a little bit. It already seems to encourage people to just think about record stores once a year rather than on a regular basis (though i do get the idea), maybe one in the Fall in addition to one in the Spring would work...

Speaking of Saturday, there are a couple Superchunk items coming out -- a split 7" with Coliseum on which we both cover Misfits songs, and it's on colored vinyl. I love stuff like this. We recorded our song in the studio in my basement. Also out Saturday is a reissue of Here's Where the Strings Come In, which has been out of print for awhile now, and on vinyl for a long time. It'll be available in all formats and you get a couple bonus items for download if you buy the CD or LP: Vol 5 of the Clambakes, (a live recording from 2003) and 4 acoustic 4-track recordings from Strings-era. The 2003 show is from the Cradle and we were touring in support of Cup of Sand, so there's some unusual songs on the setlist for that one! Sounds pretty good, too.

Midweek listening:

Jonny - s/t
Robert Wyatt - Shleep
Bill Evans Trio - Live in Paris 1974
Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Belong
J Mascis - Several Shades of Why
James Blake - s/t
The Beatles - For Sale
Panda Bear - Tomboy

Been Awhile

Hey! Been awhile since i had time to post here but it's not that i haven't been THINKING about posting. At a certain point so many things happen that i MEANT to post about that then it just seems too overwhelming to try to write about it all so maybe i'll just skip some stuff. Went to Austin for SXSW and saw some great bands. In addition to the excellent Merge artists that were all over town (Wild Flag, Wye Oak, Telekinesis, Apex Manor, cool trio version of American Music Club, Times New Viking & Versus...Jenn of Wye Oak & Mark Eitzel pictured above backstage at the Parish) that week, i managed to squeeze in some Yuck, Edwyn Collins, The Obits, OFF! and The Barreracudas (reminded me of the Chesterfield Kings). All good stuff. Still missed tons of stuff i would have liked to have seen incl Black Lips, Ted Leo solo gigs galore and Sharon Van Etten who i have yet to see live. Also had an incredible meal at Uchiko. Sushi in Texas? Yes, and more.

Somehow Austin manages to be fun despite the fact that when you leave that inspired set you just saw to close out the night at some sweaty club, you emerge to thousands of drunk idiots dropping their pizza in the street to the sound of someone freestyling to a digeridoo and some bongos that are strapped to a dog on a rope leash at 2 AM. The 6th St situation at this point is so terrible (yet somehow unavoidable, though i did steer clear for the most part) i'm not even going to check my spelling on digeridoo.

Cold and raining once again here in NC but hey it'll be 90 degrees here soon enough...

Listening this week:

V/A - The Sound of Philadelphia (Soul Jazz)
Yo La Tengo - President / New Wave Hot Dogs / Painful
Yaz - Upstairs at Eric's
American Music Club - California / Mercury
Tortoise - Beacons of Ancestorship
Fridge - The Sun
The Verlaines - Some Disenchanted Evening
Nick Cave - No More Shall We Part
Mal Waldron - Left Alone
Prince - Controversy (insane show at the RBC Center last week, too)
Jimmy Webb - Archive
The Zero Boys - Vicious Circle

been reading We Got the Neutron Bomb which means i have to dig out my Dangerhouse comp...

last and semi-least, we have a limited number of Majesty Shredding-themed tote bags for sale featuring the "Tube Guy" that graces our backdrop over at the Merge Store!

Popular Venues

played our hometown Cats Cradle as well as a pair of shows in the cozy confines of Radio City Music Hall last week.... good times at all shows for us, the crowd at the Cradle was raucous and we played one of our longer sets ever there, tightening it up considerably for our 40-min slots at RCMH between Wild Flag and Bright Eyes. here's lists from all that!

CATS CRADLE 3/4/11:

Surf
My Gap
Detroit
Cursed Mirror
Rope Light
Rosemarie
Silver Leaf and Snowy Tears
The Question is How Fast
Breadman
Crossed Wires
Digging For Something
Driveway To Driveway
First Part
Martinis on the Roof
Slack
Everything at Once
//
Like a Fool
Hyper Enough
Where Eagles Dare
//
Punch Me Harder
Cast Iron
Precision Auto
Throwing Things

PHOTOS & review at TRIANGLE MUSIC

RADIO CITY 3/8
Learned to Surf
Crossed Wires
Detroit
Seed Toss
My Gap Feels Weird
Like a Fool
Hello Hawk
Digging
Slack

RADIO CITY 3/9
Slack
My Gap Feels Weird
Crossed Wires
For Tension
Skip Steps
Rosemarie
Digging for Something
Driveway to Driveway
The First Part
Hyper Enough

soon after returning from NYC we got news of the terrible quake and tsunami that hit northern Japan. even for a country that gets a lot of earthquakes, this is beyond anything in recent memory and there's a lot of devastation -- please help if you can!

Japan Setlist Recap

we knew Japan would be fun, the crowds are always engaged and excited and this trip was no different though i think in a couple instances the kids let loose a little bit more even than in the past, especially when it got to encore time. Tokyo was off the hook from the first song. we had our first ever trip to Fukuoka which seemed like a city i'd like to spend more time in, great food there like everywhere else and some architecture we didn't have time to check out. it's only been about 14 months since we were last in Japan and we compared old setlists to make sure we weren't repeating ourselves too much this time for those coming back for more...here's setlists...

OSAKA - Fandango

Throwing Things
My Gap Feels Weird
Crossed Wires
Baxter
Detroit
I Guess I Remembered It Wrong
Kicked In
So Convinced
Iron On
Rosemarie
Learned to Surf
Hello Hawk
Digging for Something
Driveway
Everything At Once
//
Slack
Hyper
Children In Heat
Fishing
BlendingIn
//
Cursed Mirror
Precision

NAGOYA - Club Upset

Untied
Digging for Something
My Gap Feels Weird
Skip Steps 1&3
Cursed Mirror
Rosemarie
Tie A Rope
Song for Marion Brown
Watery Hands
Learned to Surf
Rope Light
For Tension
Driveway
First Part
Everything at Once
//
Crossed Wires
Hyper
Slack
Blitzkrieg Bop
//
LikeAFool
100KFireflies

FUKUOKA - Drum Club

So Convinced
Water Wings
My Gap
Digging
Seed Toss
Rosemnarie
Detroit
Like A Fool
Learned to Surf
Crossed Wires
Hello Hawk
Punch Me
Driveway
1st Part
Everything at Once
//
Mower/CastIron/Precision
//
Slack/Fishing
//
HyperEnough

TOKYO - O-West

slack
crossed wires
my gap feels weird
detroit
cursed mirror
rosemarie
kicked in
so convinced
learned to surf
digging for something
punch me harder
from the curve
first part
everything at once
//
martinis on the roof
skip steps 1 & 3
hyper
where eagles dare
//
throwing things
precision
//
100K fireflies

pushing our old-ass bodies to their limit is a good thing!
thanks to Hideki, Tak, and Contrarede for being perfect hosts as usual, and to Andy and Kei at P-Vine who puts out our records over there.
next up: Cats Cradle!

Radio Time!

me and Wilbur hitting WXDU this afternoon at 4 PM, tune in!

been lax on Japan recapping, but it will happen!