I used to work at a Dairy Queen. It was a great job with a great boss and great perks (all the Mister Misties you could drink!), but the one thing about it that did suck was our ratty boombox perched in the back of the store. It was this clunky, discolored old thing with one speaker that had been blown out by a brick several years earlier (part of an attempted store robbery once upon a time) and another speaker that popped in and out.
Regardless, that crusty old stereo got us through all the summers I worked through from high school through college, and considering the long, hard hours I put in at that place, it’s impossible now for me to hear certain top 40 songs from that era and not immediately think of Dilly Bars.
Probably the one I heard more than any other song was “One Week” by the Barenaked Ladies, which had to have dominated something 30% of all radio airspace throughout the entire year of 1999. I’ve heard that godforsaken song so many times that I could pick out the lead singer’s voice in a crowd easier than that of my own mother.
Which is how I had my “aha” moment while sifting through new releases this week. I had been previewing an album by a gentleman named Steven Page, who’s got a new record, “Page One,” hitting stores today, and within seconds I literally said to myself—out loud—“That’s the dude from Barenaked Ladies.”
A quick Wikipedia search while the song continued to play confirmed my suspicion, and it was at that point I was finally able to unwind and enjoy the music. That first track, “A New Shore,” was as jumpy and fresh and catchy as any other BNL song has ever been, and I of course fell in love with the track immediately.
With other keepers like “Indecision,” “Marry Me,” and “She’s Trying to Save Me,” it became clear very quickly that Page’s foray into solo stardom was off to a hot start. “Page One” is the first original solo album the former Barenaked Ladies frontman has put out after breaking from the group over a year ago. He’s dabbled in some theater stuff and collaborative works, but only now is getting to releasing a true solo album.
Thankfully, it’s a good’n, and if all goes well, some teenager forced to spend his or her entire summer working a Dairy Queen can have the same imbedded affinity for Steven Page as I clearly have for BNL. It’s what we in the business call the Circle of Life.
Okay, so nobody in any business really calls anything that, but “Page One” was good enough to make my taste buds long for a blue raspberry Mister Misty, and that proves more than anything that Page hasn’t lost his touch.
Musical discovery is a beautiful thing, and it hardly ever happens the way you’d expect. Sometimes, the dots just start connecting until you’ve found a link between two or three songs and realized, “Whoa, I’ve liked this band for a long time and didn’t even realize it.”
That’s sort of the way I got smacked in the face by Little Big Town, who apparently has crafted an entire catalog of fantastic country blues that I knew little about until researching this column.
See, I wanted to write about their song “Bones,” a non-single track from their 2005 album “The Road to Here,” because I’d heard it at the end of a True Blood episode a couple years ago and really loved it. For some reason though, despite my love and curiosity for discovering new bands, I never really looked into the band beyond that one song. Just kept playing it over and over again without growing tired.
Little did I know that they had released other songs since then which I also loved, yet had no idea that it was the same group. Exhibit A is “Good Lord Willing,” which was my favorite country song of 2008, and “Little White Church,” which came out earlier this year. Again, all this time I’d come across these songs independently of each other, liked them all, and never figured out it was the same people.
As a scout of freshness, it wasn’t my finest moment.
Now that those dots I spoke of earlier have been connected, I feel the need to pass the greatness of Little Big Town onto the masses, even though they’ve seen pretty solid success on the country charts for going on nine years now. The thing is, I’m not a huge country fan, and based on correspondences with readers, I’m guessing most of you guys aren’t huge country fans either. In every genre, however, there exists some really good stuff, which is what this is.
Despite the fact that this is a Nashville country group, there’s a lot of deep south in them, too. It’s bluesy and deeply soulful, which is part of what made “Bones” so believable in the True Blood Vibe. What makes them so unconventional, on top of being talented, is the fact that there’s no real lead singer. All four members of the group take turns singing lead, which also means there’s a ton of four-part harmony going on in these tracks, too. All of them are so talented at everything that it almost makes you sick.
But sick in a good way. Similar to the wrench in my gut I felt when I realized I’d screwed the goose on Little Big Town for so long, but that I’d found the perfect band to feature in my next column. That kind of sick.
As I said, musical discover is a beautiful thing.
Skillet – “Awake and Alive”
I know a lot of people enjoy rocking out as long as the lyrical themes are hardcore and frightening and angst-ridden, but Skillet has made a name for themselves by rocking out rather positively and optimistically. “Awake and Alive” is something I’d let my kids listen to, had I children of appropriate music-listening ages.
Ne-Yo – “Everything’s Alright”
Ne-Yo is the kind of unapologetic pop R&B that’s usually plastered all over top 40 radio, but “Everything’s Alright” is too good to ignore. If you hurry, you can enjoy this one for a couple weeks before it, too, get overplayed on your favorite FM station.
Saving Abel – “The Sex Is Good”
This probably isn’t one I’d let my hypothetical children listen to, but that doesn’t mean we adults can enjoy the musicality of the track, which is undeniably mellow and fun. It’s got a fun hook, too, which is normally the secret to good, modern music.
Let me tell you the difference between professional music journalists and us here at FreshScouts—they talk about music like it’s food, with all sorts of gorgeous, poetic ways of describing exactly how a song is beautiful (or equally negative poetic ways of describing the pungent stench of crappy music, like that of Ke$ha). We, on the other hand, steer clear of negative reviews by only choosing bands we legitimately like, and when featuring said band we normally skip the poetry and offer clever quips such as, “This album is really good” and “These guys rock out.”
Are we poets? No. But we also don’t flower things up and waste your time with groups that blow. Instead, our job is just to introduce hot artists and give you a few samples of their flavor. Today, we’re going to have a look at a pop-rock group called Parachute, who most recently toured with Kelly Clarkson.
Their album is really good. These guys rock out.
Those prosaic music journalists, specifically the ones at “Fly Magazine,” call Parachute’s music “Blue-eyed soul, adult pop, Maroon-5-Style faux-funk,” but we’d define them more as a bunch of guys that do cool stuff with melodies in a mellow, pop-rocky sort of way. Lead singer Will Anderson’s voice is relatively typical of the genre, but he throws in some unexpected minor notes in an otherwise major hook, and that’s part of what makes this group so interesting.
“She Is Love” is by far the best track these boys bring to the table, but their entire debut album, “Losing Sleep,” is very, very good. Other notable tracks include “The Mess I Made” and “Under Control,” but you could easily put this entire record on in the background while doing homework or making out with a hottie. Or, if you’re really talented, both of those things at the same time.
Put as simply as I can put it, Parachute is solid music. Good tunes, sweet lyrics, unique melodies. And you don’t need poetry to figure that out.
Check out “She Is Love” here:
It’s a small world, musically speaking. Here we are, loving Glass Pear’s “My Ghost,” without realizing that his sister, Jem, had already been featured here on FreshScouts, and that his other sister, Chloe, represents V.V. Brown, who has been featured here as well.
In our early email correspondences I joked with Yestyn Griffiths that he was the missing piece to our collecting the whole set. Now, of course, that collection is officially complete.
Griffiths, in the midst of recording his sophomore album, has seen plenty of success in the last couple of years with songs getting featured on popular television shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Bones.” With a couple of good breaks, his debut indie release “Streets Of Love” has allowed Griffiths to strive as en emerging artist.
“I had a lot of luck getting songs off the record onto these big shows [in America],” he said. “That really blew up the whole thing and led to a lot of people buying the record, especially digitally. That was really the break that I needed being a completely independent artist.”
That exposure immediately led to more downloads of Glass Pear songs than Griffiths could’ve even hoped for.
“Off the back of TV, I sold about 10,000 downloads within a month because your exposure is to millions of people,” he said. “The difficulty is, how do they find out who’s singing the song? I think a lot of people struggled to find the name of the song.”
For some, just using the iPhone app Shazam can help identify a song from a TV show, but for others, tracking down “My Ghost” and/or “Wild Place” proved to be a little more difficult—not that that kept the serious music fans from tracking them down anyway.
“Some people go on a bit of a pilgrimage to find the song, so that when they do finally find it it’s that much more worth it.”
Now, Yestyn is back in the studio working on a follow-up to “Streets of Love,” and he says the new record will be considerably more rhythmic while still upholding the mellow, emotionally-charged vibe that’s made him so popular already.
“I’ve really been exploring because, as an artist, I really don’t want to stay in the same place. I suppose that’s both a virtue and a vice. I’ve always wanted to bring more rhythm into what I’m doing. I’m not doing the classic second I’m-going-disco indie record, but I’m bringing in a lot of other interests in music such as hip-hop rhythms. It’s actually very similar to what Jem did on her debut record.”
His sister’s record, “Finally Woken,” included several songs written by Yestyn himself, including “24,” which is the track that sort of put Jem on the map.
“’24,’ has some pretty wicked hip-hop beats and actually probably could have had a rapper on it. I write a lot of different stuff, and that’s why I’m just so excited to go out and do something a little different. It’s not radically different; I’m just trying to merge my love of bands like the Beach Boys with some of the rhythmic elements you hear in something like Radiohead.”
However the music sounds, and whatever changes Glass Pear may undergo stylistically for the sophomore go-round, Griffiths just wants to keep the songwriting process organic and try to reach as many fans as he possibly can with the music he works so hard to write.
“It sounds corny, but for an artist like me, there’s nothing more fulfilling than to write a song that started in a room, just me and a guitar, that came spontaneously out of nowhere,” he said.
“When, through hard work or luck, it finally gets out there to thousands of people—and on some of these TV shows, to millions of them—it somehow works its way into people’s lives. I’m not arrogant enough to think that it changes anyone’s lives, but it genuinely adds something to their lives. I get messages back from people that say, ‘This song has really affected me,’ or ‘This song has helped me with something I’m going through in my life.’ That whole process of songwriting—from the inception of the song to finding someone who loves it—is why I do music.”
Listen to “My Ghost” (free download available below) and try to ignore the emotion in Griffith’s vocals. Look at his relationship with musical siblings and his commitment to independent production and try to call him anything but an artist. You can’t, because he is.
Besides, we’ve been taught to like the things television tells us to like. Right now, it’s telling us to like Glass Pear. We really don’t have any choice.
Free Download : Glass Pear – “My Ghost.” Click the Downward Arrow in the widget to start your download.
