Crowtown Episode 31

Jefferson and I sit with the host of WNYC’s Soundcheck to discuss our Presidents project: Of Great and Mortal Men: 43 Songs for 43 U.S. Presidencies.  Oh hell yes!

Crowtown Episode 31

Voting Is Good

Yessiree!  Step right up and register to vote today for 15% off your Standard Recording order for Of Great and Mortal Men: 43 Songs for 43 U.S. Presidencies (or anything else Standard sells).  Just click here and follow the leftward link to get your 15% off coupon code.  Pick up our pals Everthus the Deadbeats or Marla Hansen while you’re at it.  Them’s good records that we like!

While I’m at it, if you’ve not heard the piece on NPR’s All Things Considered you can listen to it here.

NOW

We three Presidential songwriters, along with about 10 other musicians, played a gig a few weeks ago in Sacramento–a kind of local celebration of the release of Of Great and Mortal Men.  I took some of the proceeds of that gig and joined the National Organization for Women (NOW if you dig acronyms).

There are numerous reasons to do this–it’s an important organization for forwarding the rights of over half of the people on this planet: geniuses, scientists, writers, mothers, poets, wives, doctors, etc.  But more immediate for me is the knowledge that Jefferson, Matthew and I collected over 50 musicians together to put together Of Great and Mortal Men and I think there are only four women on the entire project.  That seems embarrassing to me.  (Not to mention that to my immediately knowledge there are no people of color whatsoever.)  One could make the argument, I suppose, that we wrote a bunch of songs about white men and hence the “casting” makes sense, but I still don’t like it, and I’d guess my co-writers have similar feelings on the issue.

In any case, there’s much a man can to do help, and this is just one way.  Apologies to women everywhere for our phallocentric representation of a phallocentric history.

If you’re interested in NOW, just click here.

American River College

American River College
Sacramento, CA
Tuesday, November 18, 12:15pm – 1:15pm
Location: Raef 160

Facilitator: Michael Spurgeon

Of Great and Mortal Men: 43 Songs for 43 U.S. Presidencies

Hosted by ARC English Professor Michael Spurgeon, Christian Kiefer and J. Matthew Gerken will discuss their new triple CD project: Of Great and Mortal Men: 43 Songs for 43 U.S. Presidencies, an indie rock romp through American history. They’ll also perform a few of songs from this project live with help from drummer (and Presidential trivia maniac) Chip Conrad. Nick Miller, in a feature article on the group in the September 4, 2008, Sacramento News and Review writes the project is “dynamic, both stylistically and thematically, exploring ambient, prog and funk while portending a darker view of U.S. history.”

This activity meets ARC goals 1, 4 and state PD guideline B.

On Insight

Hey!  Jefferson, Matthew, & I spoke on Capitol Public Radio (Sacramento) show Insight today with the great David Watts Barton at the helm.  Listen in as we talk about all manner of Presidential songwriting madness (including clips and discussion of Ford, Jackson, L.B. Johnson, and Washington). 

Here’s the link for the archive.  We’re on second, after the super smart scientists discussing the Hadron Collider.  Yeow.

Link to Insight’s homepage here, in the advent that the link above is not working.  Thanks to Mark Jones, Jen Picard, and David Watts Barton (and the absent Jeffrey Callison) for having us on air.  Go team!

Of Great and Mortal Men available NOW!

J. Matthew Gerken, Christian Kiefer, and Jefferson Pitcher

OF GREAT AND MORTAL MEN
43 Songs for 43 U.S. Presidencies

Buy a Physical Copy!
Direct from the Label
Amazon

Buy a Digital Download!
iTunes
Amazon

TRACK LISTING
(sound clips available at the digital download sites linked above)

CD 1

1. George Washington (Washington Dreams of the Hippopotamus) feat. Vince DiFiore (of Cake)
2. John Adams (Armed with Only Wit and the Vigor of the U.S. Navy) feat. These United States
3. Thomas Jefferson (The Mouldboard of Least Resistance)
4. James Madison (Zinger)
5. James Monroe (The Last Cocked Hat) feat. Marla Hansen
6. John Quincy Adams (Death in the Speaker’s Room)
7. Andrew Jackson (Benevolence) feat. Califone
8. Martin Van Buren (The Little Magician) feat. Tom Brosseau
9. William Henry Harrison (So You Don’t Have To)
10. John Tyler (In Hindsight) feat. Bill Callahan (of Smog)
11. James Knox Polk (The Other Is Better / The Landscape to Transform) feat. Monahans
12. Zachary Taylor (Rough and Ready)
13. Millard Fillmore (The Proof Is in the Pudding)
14. Franklin Pierce (My Only Enemy Is Myself) feat. Stephen Yerkey

CD 2

1. James Buchanan (God Will Strike You Down) feat. Reid Maclean
2. Abraham Lincoln (Malice, Charity, and the Oath of God) feat. Wooden Wand
3. Andrew Johnson (Was Ever Alone?)
4. Ulysses Simpson Grant (Helicopters Above Oakland)
5. Rutherford Birchard Hayes (The Beard of God)
6. James Abram Garfield (Seven Months)
7. Chester Alan Arthur (The Epitome of Dignity)
8. Stephen Grover Cleveland (Bees and Honey) feat. Tetuzi Akiyama
9. Benjamin Harrison (Kid Gloves Hands Surplus to Big Sugar)
10. Stephen Grover Cleveland (Rubbermouth)
11. William McKinley (Czolgosz’s Dream) feat. Magnolia Summer
12. Theodore Roosevelt (The Sherman Act Does Not Care) feat. Dean Haakenson (of Be Brave Bold Robot)
13. William Howard Taft (There Was No Longer Use to Hide the Fact That It Was Gout)
14. Thomas Woodrow Wilson (A Life Among Men) feat. Jamie Stewart (of Xiu Xiu)

CD 3

1. Warren Gamaliel Harding (An Army of Pompous Phrases)
2. John Calvin Coolidge (On Silence) feat. Radar Bros.
3. Herbert Clark Hoover (Woe Is a Spoon-Shaped Heart)
4. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Illuminating the Bright Lines)
5. Harry S. Truman (Suits and Fine Trousers vs. Hiroshima) feat. Denison Witmer
6. Dwight David Eisenhower (When Ike Walked the Land) feat. Mark Kozelek and Alan Sparhawk
7. John Fitzgerald Kennedy (There Is No Plan)
8. Lyndon Baines Johnson (Ladybird Take Me Home) feat. Steve Dawson
9. Richard Milhous Nixon (2 Under Pay Off the Coast of Africa) feat. Tom Carter
10. Gerald Rudolph Ford (Now You See It, Now You Don’t See It)
11. James Earl Carter, Jr. (A Great Beam of Light) feat. Rosie Thomas
12. Ronald Reagan (Such a Marvelous Dream) feat. Califone
13. George Herbert Walker Bush (It Was Foreshadowed Here: The Beginning of the End)
14. William Jefferson Clinton (The Mighty Lion Will Not Roar Again)
15. George Walker Bush (Though the Night)

AS THE STORY GOES…

On September 9, 2008, Standard Recording Company released the release of a triple CD Of Great and Mortal Men: 43 Songs for 43 U.S. Presidencies, a collection penned by songwriters J. Matthew Gerken (of Nice Monster), Christian Kiefer, and Jefferson Pitcher (formerly of Above the Orange Trees). The set features a slew of special studio guests including Califone, Rosie Thomas, Bill Callahan (Smog), Alan Sparhawk (Low), Mark Kozelek (Red House Painters, Sun Kil Moon), Marla Hansen (Sufjan Stevens), Steve Dawson (Dolly Varden), Vince DiFiore (Cake), Monahans, James Jackson Toth (Wooden Wand), and Tom Carter (Charalambides).

This project initially came about as part of “February Album Writing Month,” a website (www.fawm.org) that challenges songwriters to write 14 songs in 28 days. The three songwriters wrote and recorded rough demos of the first 42 songs in February 2006 (leaving only George W. Bush for later). “It was an amazing challenge to get that many songs written, even split three ways,” notes Kiefer. “Blasting the first four or five is easy and then you’ve used up all the ideas that have been floating around and have to come up with new ones. And you have to come up with those new ideas right now.”

It was decided soon after that the project was too interesting to leave in the demo stage and so the recording process began anew with guests coming into the fray as time and schedules allowed. The project is now in its final phases. “It’s a walk through American history and an inquiry into what makes us Americans as filtered through the lens of our highest public office. There’s heartbreak and beauty and criticism and revelation. We’re trying to make it work like a big beautiful historical novel.”

The released project includes a 100+ page book featuring individual images of the Presidents by 43 different artists, all hand-selected by art curator Pitcher to be included in the project.  To quote from Kiefer’s song about President Tyler: “Oh!  Hell yes!”

Kiefer’s album Dogs & Donkeys (Undertow) appeared to favorable reviews last year and featured guests Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker (Low), Nels Cline (Wilco, The Geraldine Fibbers, etc.), and Garth Hudson (The Band). Kiefer and Jefferson Pitcher also saw the release of their collaboration To All Dead Sailors via Australia’s Camera Obscura earlier this year, a project recorded in the midst of the Presidential madness. Pitcher’s recent concept album I am not in Spain was also released this year on Mudita Records. Gerken’s acoustic indie-math rock quartet Nice Monster is also in the studio recording a follow-up EP to their full-length Good Times + Sharp Knives (Grayscale).

9/13 in Sacramento…

What’s this?  There’s actually a tour date?  Indeed, and what a tour date:

For one night only in the wee town of Sacramento, CA, I’ll be joined by Jefferson Pitcher (all the way from NY via Ontario) and J. Matthew Gerken for an evening of songs from Of Great and Mortal Men: 43 Songs for 43 U.S. Presidencies.  & we’ll have copies of the thing for sale.  FINALLY.

September 13, 2008 + 9:00pm + $3 (but bring $33 so you can buy the thing too)
Fox & Goose Pub + 1001 R Street + Sacramento, CA 95811
Christian Kiefer + Jefferson Pitcher + J. Matthew Gerken

I’m on first (on account of Chip, my drummer, having a double booking), then Jefferson (who you may never see again in Sacramento as he’s moved to Flesherton, Ontario, where he will likely live forever), and then Matthew with his crack team of sonic beasts Nice Monster.  Oh!  Hell yes!  Get there at 9pm if you want to hear the CK experience.  I’m starting with Washington and moving on from there.

‘Fork 8.5

Pitchfork ran their review of From the Great American Songbook today and gave it a staggering 8.5 (which in ‘Fork terms is really really great).

Dig it.  It’s a good record too.

Meanwhile, I’m fomenting a new music/art project, albeit somewhat hesitantly as I wonder if I’m biting off more than I can actually complete.  The Presidents project was fun and the end result is staggeringly beautiful, but it really took a lot out of me getting that thing done.  I’m thinking that I might not want to take on something like that again for a while.

Like I just told a friend on the phone: It’s a bit like giving birth; one has to forget the pain before one wants to birth more babies (or at least that’s what my wife tells me).

Doveman

Yikes!  Blurt liked my review of Doveman’s new reimagining of the Footloose soundtrack album that they ran it as a feature instead of a review.  Nice!  Check it out here.

Branca from NYT

I got the idea for this piece from mathematician David Hilbert’s well-known list of 23 “Paris Problems” (1900) that he hoped to see solved in the new century. Of course there is not the slightest connection between Hilbert’s list of problems and this list of questions. Not to mention the fact that many of these questions contain the answers simply in the asking.

Question mark Klein bottle.

1. Should a modern composer be judged against only the very best works of the past?

2. Can there be truly objective criteria for judging a work of art?

3. If a composer can write one or two or more great works of music why cannot all of his or her works be great?

4. Why does the contemporary musical establishment remain so conservative when all other fields of the arts embrace new ideas?

5. Should a composer, if confronted with a choice, write for the musicians who will play a piece or write for the audience who will hear it?

6. When is an audience big enough to satisfy a composer or a musician? 100? 1000? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? 100,000,000?

7. Is the symphony orchestra still relevant or is it just a museum?

8. Is micro-tonality a viable compositional tool or a burned out modernist concept?

9. In an orchestra of 80 to 100 musicians does the use of improvisation make any sense?

10. What is the dichotomy between dissonance and. tonality and where should the line be drawn?

11. Can the music that sooths the savage beast be savage?

12. Should a composer speak with the voice of his or her own time?

13. If there’s already so much good music to listen to what’s the point of more composers writing more music?

14. If Bach were alive today would he be writing in the baroque style?

15. Must all modern composers reject the past, a la John Cage or Milton Babbitt’s “Who Cares If You Listen?”

16. Is the symphony an antiquated idea or is it, like the novel in literature, still a viable long form of music?

17. Can harmony be non-linear?

18. Was Cage’s “4:33” a good piece of music?

19. Artists are expected to accept criticism, should critics be expected to accept it as well?

20. Sometimes I’m tempted to talk about the role that corporate culture plays in the sale and distribution of illegal drugs throughout the United States and the world, and that the opium crop in Afghanistan has increased by 86 percent since the American occupation, and the fact that there are 126,000 civilian contractors in Iraq, but what does this have to do with music?

21. Can the orchestra be replaced by increasingly sophisticated computer-sampling programs and recording techniques, at least as far as recordings are concerned?

22. When a visual artist can sell a one-of-a-kind work for hundreds of thousands of dollars and anyone on the internet can have a composer’s work for nothing, how is a composer going to survive?
And does it matter?

23. Should composers try to reflect in their music the truth of their natures and the visions of their dreams whether or not this music appeals to a wide audience?

24. Why are advances in science and technology not paralleled by advances in music theory and compositional technique?

25. Post-Post Minimalism? Since Minimalism and Post-Minimalism we’ve seen a short-lived Neo-Romanticism, mainly based on misguided attempts to return to a 19th century tonality, then an improv scene which had little or nothing to do with composition, then a hodge-podge of styles: a little old “new music,” a little “60’s sound colorism”, then an eclectic pomo stew of jazz, rock and classical, then a little retro-chic Renaissance … even tonal 12-tonalism. And now in Germany some “conceptual” re-readings of Wagner. What have I left out? Where’s the music?