Lost Causes, “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” (play) This is the opening track on my first album, and I vividly remember where I was and what I was doing the first time I heard it on one of the real, honest-to-goodness manufactured CDs I printed up. It’s a memory that’s lingered not only because listening to your first “real” album is usually a pretty significant personal milestone, but because the emotions it triggered were so seemingly incongruous that it[...]
Archive for March, 2011
Like a lot of people, I think, the romantic entanglements of my teenage years and early 20s were colored by a lot of unexpressed, misunderstood, or just plain repressed emotions — guilt over feelings that weren’t supposed to exist, or relationships that ended badly, or simple longing for what (and who) I couldn’t have. I walked around in denial a lot of the time, and every so often my subconscious rewarded me for it with a dream that would force[...]
Had a terrific chat this morning with Gorman Bechard, the director/author/photographer/all-around creative whirlwind whose latest film, Color Me Obsessed, is currently making the rounds at the festival circuit. It’s a documentary about the experience of being a hardcore fan, as viewed through the prism of the Replacements’ music; the interview was recorded with Dave Lifton as a segment for the next episode of the Popdose podcast, so listen for it soon. Our discussion, naturally, included a lot of talk about[...]
What follows is the full transcript from my interview with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s Ben Jaffe, conducted for an article published in the March 2011 issue of the Hilton Head Monthly. While preparing for our talk, I read a few of your interviews, and one thing that really stands out is how often you talk about the need to respect the traditions of your music. I was raised with a sense of tradition, and I was also surrounded by[...]