Musings About Music

Here's a bunch of musings about music. Before I get my musing shoes on, please let me invite you to check out Fufkin.com's My Space page at

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Now let's talk music. Item # 1 – Chicago is now Festival Central. Lollapalooza just announced its lineup – this time the festival, which takes place in Grant Park, will take place over three days. In the meantime, there will be two festivals at Union Park. There will be the second Intonation Festival, with acts like The Streets, Bloc Party and Jon Brion. That takes place on June 24 and 25. Last year, Pitchfork Media helped put together this festival, but this year, it's an independent entity. Now Pitchfork has its own festival. It's July 29 and 30, and includes Ted Leo, Mission Of Burma, Yo La Tengo and Spoon. As a Chicago resident, these festivals are great news. In one sense, Chicago is in the middle of the country, and well situated to host these festivals. Still, the weather in Chicago, especially in late July and early August, is pretty brutal. Last year, temperatures were in the high 90s for both Lollapalooza and Intonation. I hope things are better next year.

Item # 2 – the Country Music Hall Of Fame. I finally made it to the new Hall, which opened in downtown Nashville four or five years ago. I highly recommend going to it. The new (newish?) Hall is bigger than the old one and is filled to the brim with tons of good stuff. I spent almost four hours there, and probably could have spent more if I had more endurance.

Item # 3 – KT Tunstall. I didn't review her debut album, but it is a dandy. This woman of Scottish and Chinese descent has turned the difficult trick of making an album that is intelligent and artful, while staying very accessible. It more singer-songwriterish than, for example, Feist. Don't hold that against Tunstall. She's already gone down a storm in the U.K., so let's see if the U.S.A. will fall.

Item # 4 – Wreckless Eric. He recently played a show in Chicago at the intimate Hideout, his first in the Windy City in 26 years. After fine opening sets from Jon Langford's Ships And Pilots and Amy Rigby, the star attraction played a set that mixed pure pop magic with forays into Eric's strange mind and a couple of songs that were infused with edgy emotion. The set really took me places. Eric is a great storyteller -- in fact, his second song, his Brit hit "Reconnez Cherie" was laced with Eric explaining how sophisticated he felt at 21 writing a song with French lyrics and how stupid he felt years later living in France and realizing the words didn't mean shit. He opened with his breakneck ode to producer "Joe Meek", and mixed in his classic Stiff material with some of his other creations over the years. He, of course, did "Whole Wide World", his brilliant first song that still sounds great today. His wobbly regular guy voice hasn't seemed to change a bit.

Eric also did a reading from the book he penned a few years ago. He read a passage about his last time in Chicago. The excerpt he read made me think about hunting down a copy of the book. As priceless as the passage was, it was even funnier hearing Mr. Goulding take down chatterboxes a peg or two. Amy Rigby joined him for a few catchy ditties, and her rhythm guitar support allowed Eric to show off some lead guitar chops. His penultimate song was a cut-to-the-bone number called "33s and 45s", which picks over a break up in painful detail, with a focus on splitting up a couples vinyl LPs. Eric was totally into it. A great show.

Item # 5 – The Smoking Popes are back. I saw them the same night I saw Wreckless Eric. After a reunion gig this past November, now captured on CD and DVD (and featured in my capsule reviews this month), the band embarked on its first tour, culminating in two hometown gigs at Metro. I caught the first one. Why aren't these boys rock stars? Of course, seeing a beloved band on its home turf might skew ones perspective. The adulation was amazing. But something else was more amazing – how many peeps in the crowd were probably 8 or 9 years old when their final album for Capitol came out. This is what I call the Weezer effect – while the Popes were defunct, the word of their music spread. This was aided by props from Chris Carraba, the man who is, for all intensive purposes, Dashboard Confessional. The emo prince apparently told an interviewer that the Popes' "Pretty Pathetic" was a template for his songwriting.

The impact of this song is apparent live. It's the story of a guy turning over a relationship that went sour. Unlike most revved up Popes tunes, it starts off with simple acoustic guitar backing. There are no amazing insights in the song – it's just that Josh Caterer touched upon things we've all felt when the rug has been pulled from under us. Samples: "I begin to sense/her distance/I panic and hold tighter/but that makes it worse;" "a love as strong as ours/doesn't just go away/you can't just turn it off/unless she was lying all those times;" "I should have seen it was hopeless and left it alone/but I had to go on embarrassing myself." Talk about capturing a common experience. Josh did it so well, about 80 percent of the crowd was singing along.

Anyway, the show was fantastic. They are a well oiled machine, with a ton of great songs. They played a new song, "Sweet Pea", which fit right in. I'm hoping for a new album later this year.

Item # 6 – You may remember Jen Trynin, a singer-songwriter who emerged during the post-grunge major label feeding frenzy. She spiced up her songs with big guitars, fitting in with the music of the day. She has put out a memoir of what led up to her signing by Warner Brothers and how her climb to stardom got derailed. The book is called Everything I'm Cracked Up To Be: A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale. Trynin is an appealing personality, and if you are familiar with her lyrics, you won't be surprised that she translates well to the narrative form.

Her personality is what carries this book. Sometimes she is quite revealing about her frame of mind while she's being touted as the next big thing. The pressure makes her fearful and she makes one bad decision involving her bass player. Other times, the book is a bit too glib, as Trynin is either unable or unwilling to dig deep and provide real insight into what happened to her. One distracting aspect of the book is that many of the names have been changed to protect the innocent (and the guilty). Presumably, this was for legal reasons. So a number of record executives, bands and musicians are given aliases. This really becomes irritating, as this story would benefit from as much context as possible, and changing the names of so many players makes it difficult.

I don't think this book is as successful as So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star by Jacob Sichter, the drummer for Semisonic. His account was more detailed and benefited from that. Trynin's book has its moments, but doesn't fully succeed.

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