this monday at the hideout
I welcome one of America's great (if not justly acclaimed) songwriters, John Sieger. I've been good friends with John, and an avid admirer and very occasional co-writer, since the early 1990s.
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About once a year I do a wordplay-generated mashup at my Monday residency. This Monday it's "Graham and Charlie Parker." I seem to recall, during previous mashup preparation bouts, which, by the way, are always extensive and call on a broad swath of the cerebrum, that subtle and surprising common threads have come to light. This time, not so much. The reason you can find an element here and there in, for instance, a Monk head, that can be made to correspond with something in, for example, oh, a Monkees melody, is that the world of harmony is finite. Narrowed down further yet by the subcategories "American" and "midcentury" (broadly speaking, of course) and "popular" (jazz used to be popular music, believe it or not), the project starts looking much less lunatic, and a Monk-Monkees or two-Parker set of music can come to be something other than an otiose comic exercise.
Read Morefreedy &c.
I dish on his new record at Talkhouse:
http://thetalkhouse.com/music/talks/robbie-fulks-talks-freedy-johnstons/
I just took on another outdoor summer band show, Square Roots in Chicago, where I'll be sharing top-dog status and burdens with my old friends the Mekons and Urge Overkill:
http://www.squareroots.org/music/
Read Moreweekend frivolities
I won't be at the Hideout this Monday, but I will be in a bunch of almost equally eerie places -- Effingham IL, Springfield MO, and St Louis. More details on the tour page.
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Me + Gerald Dowd. His songs, my songs, other songs.
house show alert, June 28
Well it's been a bad year for last-minute cancellations. This makes two so far, and this time it was a big festival in Arkansas, with weighty names such as Sara Evans. Is it something I said? "God isn't real"?
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I'll be playing old country songs with the Hoyle Brothers.
the latest
Tonight at 7P I'm kicking off the historic opening of Chicago's elevated park and trail system, called the 606, with a set of rocking summer music that I'm going to do with a 6-piece group. Co-fronting the band with me will be Tawny Newsome, former shining star of Second City and current hotshot of greater Los Angeles. In the band will be Scott Ligon of NRBQ, and several others not in NRBQ, so you really don't need either to like or dislike NRBQ to enjoy this show. Canny marketing!
Read Morebluegrass situation
You can see a well-recorded clip from a trio performance of "Georgia Hard" from last year's Pickathon festival in Oregon on the Bluegrass Situation website:
http://www.thebluegrasssituation.com/read/live-lucky-barn-robbie-fulks-georgia-hard
In the copy accompanying the footage I'm called "venerable" (which is probably worse than anything I've called Ryan Adams) and in the still shot, the three of us, Don Stiernberg and Chris Scruggs and I, look like some of the most unsavory life forms imaginable. I look like a transgendered copy of my mom. Don looks like he's orgasming. Chris is looking grimly into space. You shoulda been there!
this monday at the hideout
If you like a crowded stage emitting many decibels, this is for you. This Monday I'll ring in the summer with a bunch of summer-themed pop covers (Sheryl Crow, hello! Coconut Records, high five! Astrud Gilberto, 'sup? Marvin Gaye, duck!) accompanied by Scott Stevenson, Scott Ligon, Alex Hall, and Liam Davis. They'll all be singing, I'll be singing, and singing more than probably anyone will be the high priestess of modern-day Second City, the divine Tawny Newsome. Come drink and dance with all of us.
this monday at the hideout
I Heart Roger Miller. Me and three other weirdoes play 18 great tunes from Roger's catalog, leaving 35 other great tunes from his catalog unplayed. Emotional forecast: jittery highs, soul-smothering lows.
this monday at the hideout
To replace Wendy Lewis, who was suddenly afflicted with a busted car, a few friends -- Gerald Dowd, Steve Dawson, and John Abbey -- are coming down Monday to do some music with me. Not sure what it'll be but sure it'll be something!
st. paul, rockford, beyond
I just posted a slew of dates, from Friday into late June, on the tour page. I'll be in St. Paul this weekend with Don Stiernberg, then on to Rockford, and there are tickets available for each of those. The first several of my summer shows with Redd Volkaert are also listed; and you can see some upcoming Hideout programming.
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I'm back at my old haunt on Monday, with Cathy Fink, who I met once in Washington, and Marcy Marxer, who I will have met an hour or two before showtime. The duo of Cathy and Marcy is one ("the duo is one," wow, get Schrodinger on the phone) of the top children's acts in the U.S. They're also fantastic old-time country musicians. Guess which guise you'll see them in at the Hideout.
15 tunes, 5 days
That pace is, on paper anyway, comfortable by my standards of tracking. I've done some records a bit faster than that, 6 or maybe 7 songs cut in one long day, but that is pretty tough, unless you're Ray Price or Bud Powell and it's 1962. On Monday, Robbie Gjersoe and I showed up at Electrical Audio in Chicago and started the week with two quiet, mournful duets. On Friday, Shad Cobb joined Robbie and me for two faster trios. In between, we were joined by Fats Kaplin, Jenny Scheinman, Todd Phillips, Wayne Horvitz, and Alex Hall. Fats, who is the ultimate utility player in this solar system, played pedal steel, mandolin, violin, and accordion.
Read Morei'm making a "record" this week!
So no Monday Hideout show.
this monday at the hideout
Robbie Gjersoe and I will play a bunch of new compositions of mine, many of which are in the running for my next Bloodshot release, which I'm tracking the week following. Since the songs are mostly quiet and 100 people in a bar aren't, we're capping attendance at 60 and pre-selling tickets for this one; so if this is the kind of thing that interests you, I recommend buying in advance. Everyone will be seated, and no tapers, audio or video.
friday night at fitzgeralds
Tomorrow, or tonight, depending on when you're reading, but in either event April 17, 2015, I'll be doing something at the great west-suburban roadhouse in Berwyn that I rarely do there: my own thing. The standard presentation that I give when traveling to other towns, or now and again at the Old Town School or the Hideout in Chicago, is a quartet or quintet that plays stuff from my own records!
Read Moreacoustic high-falutin' weekend
As a tribute to my father-in-law, who on CBS-TV's Amazing Race program remarked to my son admiringly of a fellow contestant, "She's a smart girl -- she went to one of those falutin' colleges," I will be falutin' around the midwest this weekend with 4 other smart fellows. There's Robbie Gjersoe, the goofball multi-instrumentalist and Rodney Dangerfield impersonator, who is going to play resonator guitar this outing; Todd Phillips, bassist and co-founder of such enterprises as the David Grisman Quintet and the Tony Rice Unit; Shad Cobb, radically unassuming fiddler whose musical chops are matched only (symmetrically speaking) by his computer expertise; and Don Stiernberg, of whom -- enough!
Read Morethis friday and this monday at the hideout
Scott Stevenson, he of the outsized brain and intrepid fingers, has invited me to be a part of his Chicago all-star salute to Richard Thompson this Friday night. The master songwriter-musician turns 65 or 66, I forget which, on a date not far from this Friday night. I'd be happy to play these great songs on an excuse twice as thin.
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