A True Definition of Soul

I have a piece in the Metro Times this week that is as close to what I want to do with writing as I've gotten yet (I'm not even close). I don't think I've ever wanted to get a story right as much as I did this one. It's a profile of Melanie Rutherford, a Pontiac, MI-based songwriter and singer who I discovered this winter after becoming obsessed with her guest appearance on Black Milk's "Bond 4 Life."



Read the story: Until The Wheels Fall Off

Melanie is a fascinating character and meeting her and trying to put my impressions into words made my brain hurt, but it excited my heart. She is all music, all of the time. At her request, we did the interview at this Pontiac Cony Island she goes to every day to write. Every few minutes during our talk she'd end up busting into song in the middle of this diner and schooling me on all the soul music I didn't know about. Here are 4 short audio excerpts of our interview to give you a glimpse of what I'm talking about:

"I Like Real Music"


"On Curtis and Otis"


"A New Song, Bravos"


"You Are Not a Marvin Gaye Fan!"


Black Milk "Bond 4 Life (Feat. Melanie Rutherford)"

The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar and the Horror of Compromise

Speaking of questioning...

Saturday's This American Life came at an inconvenient time for me. I was running a couple of crucial errands for my girlfriend, who was home sick with the flu. A few of these errands required me to get out of the car during this, one of the most captivating pieces of radio programming my ass has ever heard. I was so torn!

This American Life "The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar"

I was conflicted listening to this story of a woman who begins questioning her own family story, a story which involved the kidnapping and eventual rescue of her great grandfather. She goes on a search for the truth, approaching the issue with a hunger for objective facts with a journalist's code, a code we've all been told is a high ethic to uphold. My whole life I've wanted to be fearless about the truth, and to face it straight on. But then at some points I've asked myself, as this story asks of her, what good does it do? And whether I, like she, like every journalist, have an agenda I'm not acknowledging.

A friend of mine and I have been hitting on this topic recently, not just of questioning the building blocks of our own story - most of which has been supplied by those who came before us - but of the value of questioning itself. I think it's one of the hardest things of all to come to terms with. To wonder, after spending your whole life unraveling a ball of yarn, if you shouldn't have just left it in tact. Is there a point where questioning is just destructive? When it's done in the service of a quest for absolute truth - so-called truth for its own sake - doesn't that reduce truth to something amoral, like a block of ice existing in a void. What about people's feelings? What about getting along? And isn't the idea that facts and histories have a greater value than anything else an idea that other people thought of for us? In other words, is questioning everything just another way that we are being a follower?

And yet another question about questioning - do we even have a choice in the matter? My gut says no, that some of us were just born to blow things up. So it is what it is. If the lie is more comfortable, but you see through it, what difference does it make that it's convenient? It's too late either way.



I just saw Revolutionary Road after waiting for weeks to get the chance. I almost don't even want to talk about the film. I'm still getting over it. It's an artistic devil articulating the unmentionable and asking the most inconvenient questions about happiness, hope, change and the compromises that come with stability. It's like a horror movie about domestication and it scares because it calmly, clearly, with terrifying accuracy picks off all refuges - and then doesn't offer any answers in their place.

Revolutionary Road is the story of a couple in the 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler, who lose themselves in the search for stability. The obvious route for telling this kind of story, especially with this time period, is to create characters who blindly accept the suburban dream and then watch them fail. Something we've all seen before. But Revolutionary Road is different because its subjects are soulful, passionate people who are ambitious about ideas and are trying to live uniquely and be the exception. They see through the trap. Watching them get ensnared it anyway, I felt like I was watching a possible version of my own future.

The film is about taking the clear-eyed view of life, no matter the consequences. This kind of crystal-clear focus is even a visual motif, as the film is shot in a bright, open and transparent style that allows you to see every detail, every skin pore, every dark sparkle in the hard empty eyes of the film's most soulless characters. And the clarity is painful. Road doesn't flinch. And it's not fair. It isn't just about coming to an awareness of the truth, but whether awareness is enough.

There was a scene that killed me where one of the Wheelers admits to an infidelity and the other asks, "Why did you tell me?" They would have rather not known, not because they're in denial but because they've reached a point of clarity about the marriage that makes the cheating irrelevant in light of the corruption that has already taken over.

The best line happens after the Wheelers hatch a plan to move to France and "really begin living." They're discussing it with John Givings, a mental patient they've befriended recently, who's on a short leave from the hospital. Givings' true illness is his inability to play nice, and he makes enemies wherever he goes as he challenges the tiny lies around him that people are using to fuel their lifestyles. Walking through the woods with them, Givings asks why the couple is moving. Frank says to get away from the "hopeless emptiness." This stops Givings in his tracks. "Now you've said it," he says. "Plenty of people are on to the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness."

Antony Interview

I loved Terry Gross's interview with Antony. As someone who's fascinated with questioning my suppositions, and withdrawing from society's psychological rules as much as possible in my own slow way, a trans-gender artist like Antony has a perspective I want to learn from.

I had a similar experience reading Esquire's "What It's Like" piece on Coral Hull, a writer with multiple personalities.

In Antony's case, he's been seeing things from an outsider's height since he was a child. But even now as a trans-gender adult, and in Hull's case as someone with many selves, they bring up questions of identity that go beyond the usual classifications of male/female, gay/straight. When asked by Gross to define trans-gender, and why sexual surgery isn't a part of his path, Antony is quick to stress that there is a level of cruelty and lack of subtlety involved in reducing people to their genitalia or sexuality. It's not a question of erotic orientation or physical makeup, but a difference of spirit. He feels that what sets him apart is a sensibility about life.

I also loved his answer when Gross asked him to describe how supportive his parents had been to him as a "different" child. He says that all of us emerge from childhood with a level of brokenness and our work is to look at what went right and what went wrong. This is a part of the human condition, not just his own story. He has a good relationship with them now, and that's what matters.

Gross also picked my two favorite cuts from his new album The Crying Light.

Antony and the Johnsons "Another World"


Antony and the Johnson "One Dove"


Listen to the interview.

You Need To Get With Jazmine Sullivan

That's all I have to say, really. You need to get with Jazmine Sullivan. And that Top 40 music needs to follow her direction: i.e. lyrics can be smart without being preachy; modern and raw without being hedonistic. And that her record has the songs, but it also has the production, so everybody wins. And that she's got weapons-grade pipes, but she keeps it in check with real-soul phrasing and leaves the fake out. And that Jazmine Sullivan is the middle path. And that you need to get with her.

Jazmine Sullivan "Live a Lie"



Jazmine Sullivan "Fear"


Jazmine Sullivan "Need U Bad"

Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship Is Finally Available

The Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship long player is finally available today for download at Romantic Air Records' web site. This album is a phenomenal work of art. The group is largely the work of Detroit-area composer/artist Trevor Naud, done in collaboration with PAS/CAL drummer TLD. Like the name of the project, the music is mysterious, rare and elevated. Download it now and you might just survive the winter.

I'll repost my original blog about HGBS from this past fall.

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(L-R, Trevor Naud and LTD)

Back in June I leaked some early mixes of Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship, a new project of my good friend Trevor Naud in collaboration with Pas/Cal drummer LTD. (I hesitate to mention that Trevor is kin because I don't want to imply that my fascination with his music is in some way pro-rated by my affection for him as a person. The majesty of Trevor's gift is wide and timeless and I just happen to know him.) And now, I have the final album in my hands and I need to talk about it.

Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship is like some rare exotic flower that flourishes in the secret dark and contains double helices of hallucinogenic gunpowder entwined deep in its stems if you know how to unleash it. Trevor told me he made it in a period of extreme personal blockage. No doubt, part of that frustration was with his own band, Zoos of Berlin, who, with over four years of stunning gigs and avant-garde alchemy under their belts have yet to produce a full-length album (there is every indication that dawning of the Zoos long player is finally nigh). So Trevor set up some mics and a computer in his kitchen and made this in a season. His impatience emerges in the ADD'ness of it all, the quick-acting brevity and the conjuring of swift, but complete, worlds of sound. They are less songs than glints of melodic hooks strung together like Christmas lights to form a shimmering path. The best way to listen is to avoid grasping - just let the vignettes fly by fully formed in their warbled and buttery baroque shapes.

HGBS came out more gentle than early mixes suggested. The first mp3 Trevor slipped me last summer was "A Head For Gabriel Dove," two and a half minutes of compression-crushed jazz drumming and reverb-soaked baritone that was as carnivorous as it was surging. But a listen to the finished record shows something much more haunted than hunting. It is a quiet anxiety slowed into sadness, more in keeping with the winter around me and things falling into sleep and death. It's a pop requiem for emotional shut-ins and the spiritually claustrophobic.

Fans of Scott Walker, David Bowie, Arthur Russell and Eric Matthews - in other words, artists trying to repossess dead rock forms with the jagged spirits of 20th century classical and avant garde - will come pre-primed for going deep with these tracks. But it doesn't require some kind of exclusive, arty membership to respond to something this gorgeous and immediate. It's very tuneful, very lucid stuff.

As far as I know he's currently figuring out the terms of the record's release. Go bug him about it.

NOTE: For some reason my audio player is being weird about these files. You might have to hit play, then pause, then play.

Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "Glass Case"



Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "Jonaccce"



Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "Nineteenth Usher"



Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "A Head for Gabriel Dove"



Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "Once Outside"

Mayer Hawthorne Continues the Motown Revival

I know nothing about Hawthorne. Just some white kid from the burbs who moved to LA and ended up sounding black. Aside from the Marvin Gaye-on-grass intro and roomy backbeat, I'm hearing way more of a Jamaican influence than Detroit on the way he's singing those notes: dipping down, rather than up "out."

Mayer Hawthorne and the County - "Just Aint Gonna Work Out"

Mr. Hudson - Picture of You

There is so much cool music. But most of that cool music has nothing to do with me and my life, and I often suspect that it has nothing to do with anybody's life, including the people making it. And so what good is detachment?

Once in a while, I'll see something by somebody who's cool but not afraid of sentiment. It takes skill to walk that fine line. I think that this song by Mr. Hudson walks it gracefully. I especially appreciate the joyful, simple moment where he says, "Imagine that, getting paid to sing."

A Tiny Tear in the Fabric of the Universe

So I'm standing in the living room of my friend A.J. making small talk when it happened. I had come by to borrow a midi controller and it was my first time setting foot in his home. We had digressed about cats, Christian rock and a pretty mindblowing concept for a screenplay based on A.J.'s recent breakup when I looked across the room and saw it. And my speech slurred to a stop. "Wha–? Is that... I don't, under...."

A.J. stared at me, perplexed, his big, sweet Ewok eyes growing wider. He said nothing.

"Why do you have that...? I mean, what is that? I just don't understand."

I was staring at this painting, on the cover of an LP, which he had framed and set on his table.


And the tiny tear in the fabric of the universe happened in my brain, which short-circuited because I couldn't understand what multiple levels of perverse indie irony had caused someone to create a retro-tinged oil painting of spoof-epic Tropic Thunder's Kirk Lazurus (actually the white actor Robert Downey Jr. in blackface), and dress him in WWII-era pilot garb.

I heard A.J., as if from a great distance, mumbling something about Jazz composer Thelonious Monk and great deals on frames from Urban Outfitters, but I had already fallen down the rabbit hole.

Circuit Bending With Satan

Daniel Demaggio is a visual artist working out of the Detroit area. He's been drinking the next-level gravy for sure and I'm a little infatuated with his perverse and beautiful style. A friend hipped me to "Circuit Bending with Satan" yesterday and I can't stop watching it. In this bizarre short, Satan patiently explains to his child viewers how to hack into their music toys and rearrange the circuits to produce hip, experimental sounds - the better to make (the devil's) tracks with.

It's funny on many levels and visually ebullient, with crude lo-fi giving way to gorgeous bursts of dayglo animation. The way it tweaks the "learning" genre of the Saturday morning kids' TV programs from my youth is cute, and could lend itself to only working on one level of ironic nostalgia. But it's too strange for that and doesn't come off as ironic on any level. Like all great comedy, it works because it takes itself completely seriously and abides by an internal logic: of course the devil is wearing dishwashing gloves; of course he speaks in a dated hard-rap cadence; of course he's trying to capture children's immortal souls, and yet takes a moment to caution them about socket safety.

The thing I like most about this is that it was clearly done for the love. It justifies itself and sells nothing. There's no product tie-in, no band being plugged. It's just a brief, distorted thought bubble popping from one artists' brain that needed to be captured.

Why Isn't Everybody Freaking Out About Black Milk?

The record is called Tronic. A made-up word that combines "The Chronic" + "Tron" = the second territory of rap. Black Milk is a disciple's disciple - a producer who's clearly separated the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the landfills of mostly-stupid urban music that have preceded him. But he sifts through it to pave his own way, like half-trained Jedi with the right amount of reverence for the good and powerful things that have come before, and the right amount of "fuckit" to say, let's move on. He's the manifestation of the J Dilla spirit. Keeping everything in his tracks at cross purposes to serve a higher groove. His sounds raw and not-stock. His beats always sick with the flu.

It's not a competition, but this is the only hip hop album I've heard all year* to get under my skin.

Black Milk "Overdose"


Black Milk "Bond 4 Life (Feat. Melanie Rutherford)"




Black Milk "The Matrix (Feat. Pharoahe Monch, Sean Price, & DJ Premier)"


Black Milk "Try"


*Unless you count Kardinal Offishall's amazing Not 4 Sale.