Here’s our weekend to-do list. Print it out. Check it off. Enjoy.

–TeaParty

P.S. Feel free to add your own events in the comments.

[ ] Kindly ask Bonfire Bandit to demonstrate what “electro-Americana” is

at Precinct

[ ] Wash your ampersand t-shirt to welcome Pretty & Nice back to Boston

at the Middle East Upstairs with Title Tracks, Gary B and the Notions.

[ ] Say Hey Mama to Tim Gearan and Jesse Dee

when they open for Hey Mama at The Paradise

[ ] Dance like there’s…um… right.

at NO TOMORROW at Machine

[ ] Celebrate male toplessness at FOXY!

at Zuzu

[ ] See some good live music and still maintain your schoolnight bedtime

at the Ambitious Tugboat residency at O’Brien’s with Glam Hammer, The Woodrow Wilsons and The Dedicated Heads

Let’s think about what you really want to do this New Year’s Eve: Watch the ball drop on TV with Dick Clark and Ryan Seacrest?  Freeze your butt off outside waiting for fireworks at First Night?  No, you want to rock, and while there are plenty of fantastic events to choose from, none will have as much feel-good fun as spending the night with Jason Anderson & The Best at P.A.’s Lounge.

A Jason Anderson show is much more than just a rock concert–it’s an experience.  To Jason, a New Hampshire native, the goal of the night is not simply to entertain, but to bring people together to share in a night that is uniquely theirs.  Shying away from the term “fans,” he prefers to think of his concerts as a big group of friends having a good time, with performer and audience together on the same level. It is those kind of basic-yet-beautiful parts of life that Jason writes music about, like hanging out with friends listening to records or just sitting in the car with that girl you liked when you were 16.  His band plays big chords while Jason sings simple, heartfelt choruses, made for joining in and singing along.  Even songs you’ve never heard before quickly feel familiar after a minute or two–and it becomes hard not to feed off Jason’s relentless energy and want to participate.  The feverish enthusiasm in the room is utterly contagious in the best way possible.

Jason is known to keep the same intensity even when playing to a handful of people, but you can bet that a capacity crowd at P.A.’s will be starting off 2010 with smiles and sore voiceboxes. Before the show, which will also feature local glitch poppers Math the Band and the Pennsylvania folk of Strand of Oaks, we traded some emails with Jason, so you can read a little about his love for New England, love for music, and love for sharing his New Year’s Eve with Somerville.

– Kevin Junker

Hi Jason, happy holidays! How are you?

I’m awesome, thanks! This is such a great time of year.

Please tell us a little about yourself and what you’ve been up to lately!

Okay, sure! I’m from New Hampshire, but have been living in New York City for the last three years.  I work for a wonderful non-profit in NYC, teaching music to kids. I totally miss New England, it’s true, but the job is super inspiring. Plus, since I’m on school schedule, there’s always plenty of time off for visits home. It rules. Actually, just before Christmas I was up for a couple really awesome holiday shows and am beyond pumped for New Year’s Eve.

You’ve spent a good amount of time living in the New England community– what do you think makes the music scene here so special?

Well, there are certainly awesome people wherever you go, I think that goes without saying. But, yes, there are definitely some next level people in the northeast, making amazing things happen. If I stop to think about all the folks I’ve met who are doing it in New England, what all these people undeniably have in common is that they are really friendly and really positive and all love to see fun, inclusive stuff happen, and work towards that. And isn’t that the way it should be? I feel incredibly lucky to have made so many great friends in New England, and to have had the opportunity to be a small part of it all.  This is making me want to move home, by the way.

What do you draw upon for inspiration, in terms of musical influences and personal experiences?

I love lots of different music. In terms of inspiration I think I’m probably no different than most people who make up songs, in the sense that I write about my life and my friends and different experiences, relationships, ups and downs. I try to keep a hopeful perspective and realize–as I try to do on a day to day basis, too–that there are always great things coming down the line if you are open to them. I don’t know. Being alive is cool and scary and weird, but, ultimately, a great adventure filled with friends and challenges and transcendent simple things; it’s definitely these small moments I love the most, and am perennially excited for. I think it’s here where we find ourselves truly in the moment–and truly ourselves–alive and free. Or something like that.

One of the most remarkable aspects of your live shows is the enthusiasm and energy displayed by your wildly devoted fans.  Can you tell us a little about your connection with them?

It’s all just friends. I’ve never been comfortable with the term “fan,” as it seems to imply some sort of distance or separation or, worse yet, hierarchy. But maybe that’s my problem. Maybe the word itself is okay. Still, I know that there is literally nothing different between myself and anyone else at a show. We’re all just trying to get through each day, and have more good ones than bad ones.  And, sure, I’m the one who’s up there singing, but I guess I see that role as more of a conduit for the bigger experience, and less of a centered focal point. See, one of my ideas with playing shows–and, I guess, just being a person, too–is to make positive, meaningful connections–an acknowledgment that we’re all experiencing this together–and share in these small moments that bring us close, that unite us. But, bottom line, at the heart of it all, I love music and love playing it. All I can do is give it everything I’ve got and hope that it’s contagious, and we do all end up experience something wonderful at once.

What are your favorite places to play shows around Boston and New England?

Definitely the Nave Gallery, which is located at a church near Tufts, in Somerville.  Every show there is extremely special, and Randy, who helps make them happen, is such a warm, generous person.  I couldn’t say enough good things about this place if I wanted to.  It’s beautiful and perfect. Thank you, Randy.

Are there any local bands/musicians that you think are doing something special?

Yes, of course. Harry and the Potters, Math the Band, Ette, Gregg Porter.  These dudes immediately come to mind as ruling hard.

How awesome is this New Year’s show going to be!?

It’s going to be so fun! I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time now.  We’re all really, really excited!

Among the labyrinths of traffic and Madonna statues in Union Square, Sherman Market is easy to miss. There’s no sign, just a couple of 8.5 x 11 printouts taped to the windows. We walked right past it the first time, and you will too.

But step inside, and you’re met with cherry red shelves stacked with honey, rustic loaves of bread, glass bottles of milk, baskets of winter squash all dappled and glowing in the fall light, and Matt Lavallee, slapping a side of beef with a gloved hand.

“I like to give it a good smack,” Lavallee says, before hefting the brisket into a glass-front refrigerator and inviting you to try some cheese (this one has lavender in it) or a sip of black currant juice (so rich and winy, it stains your lips). Lavallee, who’s had stints at Formaggio Kitchen and The Fishmonger, sits behind the counter here, at Somerville’s newest, coolest grocery, with Jodi Malone, who ran an independent bookstore. We hung around one fall afternoon, hoping they’d toss us some more samples.

Just weeks old, Sherman Market is already implementing an exciting project: to source all its products from local farms and producers. This means everything – from meat to soap – comes either from Boston or other surrounding areas of Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, New York, and New Jersey, with just a few exceptions like yogurt from Quebec and pretzels from Pennsylvania.

It sounds like one of those great-in-theory-but-not-so-practical spots, nice on the conscience, but not the wallet. Pretty, with the hardwood floors and chalkboards, but a place you’d go on the way to your Market Basket, your Trader Joe’s. And there is some whimsy to be sure (little golden grains of bee pollen! Hived on the streets of Boston!). Tofu made from non-Monsanto soybeans a few miles away in Jamaica Plain (didn’t you just know tofu was being made somewhere in JP?). There’s cultured butter rolled up in pretty yellow paper. And, recently posted to the market’s Twitter: “LARD. Several packages of it.”

But if you come for the foodie items, you’ll end up staying for the basics. Prices are really low. Our favorites: frothy milk in real glass bottles (return the bottle and get your dollar deposit back). Eggs with yolks the color of fall leaves (cheaper than the “free-range” ones at Trader Joe’s). Fresh bread from Clear Flour Bakery and B&R Artisan, with day-old loaves at a steep discount which, as Jodi points out, are perfect for turning into a savory bread pudding.

Still, because Sherman Market is still in its soft-open stage – hence the lack of sign – you won’t find everything you may be looking for. Canned goods are limited to a few clam chowders and pasta sauces. Produce is dependent on farmers’ deliveries (some via those hot Metro Pedal Power bikes). But there is definitely something exciting about walking in and not knowing what you’ll find. And if you don’t find what you want, write it down in the notebook on the counter. Many earlier recorded suggestions – like Moon Brine pickles and 21^st Century Tofu– are now on the shelves.

It’s that kind of populist spirit that brought Sherman Market into existence. The shop is owned by the same folks who run Sherman Café around the corner. Instead of a bank loan, Sherman Market was funded by “Sherman Shares,” loans provided by future customers that are now being repaid in groceries.

Everything is hands-on, and the scale is small. Samples are constantly taken from a small, well-stocked cheese case (our favorite: the creamy, sour Bayley Hazen Blue from Jasper Hill Farms in Vermont). There’s also a really sensible way of selling herbs: by weight, not by the bunch. You can get a couple of exquisite sprigs of fresh thyme for a handful of pennies, and avoid guilt over a moldering pile of herbs in your fridge. Express interest in an odd-looking root, like celeriac or kohlrabi, and Jodi will give you a recipe (she likes to grate them into a winter slaw). Pick up the weird ball of lamb soup bones and Matt will tell you how to brown the bones and make stock. A shelf of cookbooks in the back might become a lending library.

It’s all very cozy, but as the afternoon crept into twilight, we had to ask the question. Eating locally is a pleasure in the summer and fall, when farmer’s markets overflow with the bounty of New England. “But what about that whole…winter thing?”

Jodi, known to dress up in ballgowns and go outside to play in the first snow, isn’t worried. She wants to get a food dehydrator and start drying and canning. Matt is poetic. “Winter is like being in a bad relationship,” Matt says. “It starts out really alien and wonderful and strange, and then it just drags on.” “You know your girlfriend is going to read this,” Jodi says. Matt thinks she’ll understand.

Relationship metaphors and eveningwear aside, Matt makes a good point. “The cows are still milking,” he says. “The tofu guy is still making tofu, the chickens are still laying, the soap guy is still making soap, the bread is still being baked. Cellared vegetables are still coming up out of the farms.”

We leave with a big, substantial bag of groceries and go home to make Jodi’s savory bread pudding, day-old bread dripping with cream, sage, parsley, and leek, which keeps us warm all weekend (see recipe below!). Sherman Market will be open all winter, and now we’ll have no trouble finding the place.

–Lucia Jazayeri

Savory Bread Pudding with Fresh Herbs and Leeks

Jodi Malone’s recipe makes use of all the cheapest ingredients from Sherman Market, including day-old bread and fresh herbs. A lifelong saver of scraps, Jodi likes to toss in the rinds and ends of cheese.

1 tablespoon butter

2 leeks, chopped

1 onion, chopped

3 cups whole milk, or 2 cups milk and 1 cup cream

1 cup fresh herbs, like parsley, sage, and thyme, chopped finely

1 large loaf day-old bread, cut into bite-sized pieces

1/2 cup hard cheese, such as Tarantaise (or bits and pieces of any cheese in the fridge), grated

4 eggs

salt and pepper to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In a saucepan over low heat, cook butter, leeks and onion until soft, about 15 minutes.

2. Add milk and herbs, stir, and cook until just warmed. Remove from heat.

3. Grease a 9×13 glass pan. Place bread pieces and cheese in pan. Add milk mixture, making sure that bread is fully submerged.

4. Lightly beat eggs. Stir them into the pan with the milk and bread.

5. Cook for 30 minutes, until egg and milk mixture has set and bread is golden brown. If desired, place under the broiler for five minutes.

Serves 6.

–Adapted from Jodi Malone and Mark Bittman (How to Cook Everything Vegetarian)

The first time we saw Ad Frank in action was onstage at Boston Band Crush’s One Night Band this past summer: Frank, along with various varsity members of Boston indie rock, played one of our favorite sets of the night as a member of Awesome Chariot.  The band, visibly amused and enjoying themselves as the kick-off act for the evening’s festivities, seemed to be a surprisingly positive experience for Frank as this Boston-based performer is a self-described one-man show.  This Ad Frank, the one who’s goofing around and screaming “WE ARE AWESOME CHARIOT”, is a far cry from the Ad Frank that Boston’s come to know as a heartbroken guy with good voice and a sad guitar.  When comparing old material of his to his forthcoming release, Your Secrets Are Mine Now, Ad Frank is borderline-giddy when talking about how this album is a departure from previous work: “I sort of had this local persona going, being the guy with the perpetually broken heart that’s always getting stopped on.  It was kind of like a joke.  We even had Ad Frank with a big broken heart on them.  This record is all about what a son of a bitch I am.”

This Saturday, October 24, Ad Frank and the Fast Easy Women will be celebrating their new album with a CD release bash at Great Scott.  Ad will be sharing new material from Your Secrets Are Mine Now, so Ad Frank fans will get the chance to listen to the new stuff before the album is readily available on November 3.  Read on to get the good’s on what goes into Ad’s songwriting, what brought him to the conclusion that a saxophone wasn’t a very punk rock instrument and what’s next for Ad Frank and the Fast Easy Women.

-Hilary Hughes

OPENING ACT: AD FRANK AND THE TEAPARTY TEN

What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?

Cracklin’ Oat Bran, but I almost never eat breakfast.  I usually just grab handfuls of it like it was pretzels or something.  I like Grape Nut ice cream, does that count?

Who would you rather punch in the face: Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles, or Mouth from The Goonies?

Okay, definitely not Long Duk Dong and I’ve never seen The Goonies. Who would punch Long Duk Dong?!

If you were a kitchen appliance, what would you be?

I’d like to be one of those mixers, but I’d like to be a big, pastel one.

You go to bed, wake up, walk into the bathroom to brush your teeth, and you look in the mirror and you realize that you’ve turned into one of Jim Henson’s Muppets overnight.  Which Muppet are you?

I took the Facebook Muppet quiz and it told me I was Gonzo, so… I don’t know.   I’ve always liked Floyd, the bass player, but I’m more of a Gonzo.

Say you have a crazy night, you black out, and you wake up feeling like crap the next morning and you realize… you got a tattoo.  What’d you get inked?

That’s easy.  I would get black racing stripes tattooed all the way up both sides of my body.

Would you rather be a rodeo clown or a sumo wrestler?

I wouldn’t mind behind manhandled by a large Asian man, so I’ll go with sumo wrestler.

If you were a particular style of facial hair, what would you be?

You’re making me feel bad because I can’t grow any.  I’m going to go with stubble.  It matches my capability.

If you were a type of cheese, which cheese would you be?

The Stinking Bishop.  I don’t really know what kind of cheese it is exactly, but it’s really pungent.  The sell it at the Wine & Cheese Cask.

What’s your quintessential “I’M GONNA DANCE AROUND MY APARTMENT IN MY SKIVVIES AND LOVE LIFE!” song?

“Cuts You Up” by Peter Murphy.

What’s your favorite word?

I don’t know if I’d say it’s a word, but I like how “Speen Street” sounds.  It’s a street in Natick.

THE MAIN EVENT: THE AD FRANK TPB INTERVIEW

Hi, Ad!  Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I grew up in Melrose, and I’ve been in Somerville for the last ten years.  I was in a band called Perma Cross for most of my adult life until I quit.  I quit with the intent of retiring, but didn’t and couldn’t.

Now you’re doing your own thing, right?

I have my own band, Ad Frank and the Fast Easy Women.  I play guitar in a band called Life Style, and that’s pretty much it right now.

How did you start playing music?  Are you one of those people who were born with a guitar in hand?

I’ve always made up songs, and I’ve always made up words to interesting tunes since I was like, four.  I can’t really blame it on punk rock because I think I wanted to … the lure of the Sex Pistols sort of proved that anybody can do it and I think it’s true.  That was probably around seventh grade when I started thinking about it.  I was playing saxophone but for the most part it wasn’t a very punk rock instrument, so I picked up a guitar then.

Who would you credit as creative influences for you?

Let’s see… I feel strange strange saying these two in the same breath, but it’s true: The Ramones and David Bowie.  I remember that the song “Switch” by Suzie and the Banshees came on the radio and I had an epiphany while listening to it, like, “YES! I must be in a band!” I don’t know what I liked about the song, but I think I was just overripe for an epiphany at the time.  I should listen to that song again; I haven’t heard it in about ten years.

Who are you listening to right now?  If we were to steal your iPod and check out your “Recently Added” playlist, what tracks would we find?

I’m so out of it.  I’ve been listening to Scott Matthews’ record a lot, but I think it’s a couple of years ago.  I like the Great Lake Swimmers, too.

In terms of your creative process, can you take me through it?

Usually, what happens is somebody doesn’t return my phone call and then I get really mad and then I start thinking about all the things I would say to this person if they were to call me back and then that’s the song.

That’s amazing.  What about the compositional portion of your songwriting?  Do you collaborate with anyone?

I’m not very good at writing with other people.  I almost said no to One Night Band because I don’t really know how to write… usually, I bring the song to the band and the chords, words and melody are done, but for the most part everybody writes their own part.  I might have like, a guitar noodle or a keyboard part that I’ll sort of make it known that it’s not optional, but for the most part everybody writes their own part, which is probably good.  It’s good that I’ll often bring a song in without telling the band about how I hear the song going in my head so they can pick what they will out of it.  The arrangements and the production of the songs performed by Ad Frank and the Fast Easy Women are collaborative; the songwriting is not collaborative.  There are certainly bands where certain bands contribute less than the people in my band do and they get writing credit.

Are there any songs in your catalog that you feel particularly connected to, or any songs by Ad Frank and the Fast Easy Women that stand out as favorites?

It’s called “U-Hauls and Ryders”, and it was written right around the time when I decided I was not going to retire.  I was pretty much going crazy: I had lost my apartment, and my job, and my band, and my engagement fell through, all within six weeks of each other, so I was squatting in this apartment in Brighton and that was, the song was sort of my process of being like, “What the hell just happened to me?”  The good thing about a song is that you get to sing it over and over and over again until you finally figure out what it’s about.  Hopefully it’s not just good for me.  If someone’s in a similar situation, maybe I get to articulate something for them.

It sounds like a cathartic process for you, what went into writing that song.

The stuff I write and the songs I like are usually all written because they have to be, not because somebody set aside three hours on a Sunday and said, “Oh, what am I going to write about now?”  The songs I really like are ones that sound like they had to pull their car over and grab a pen and paper and write it down so that they wouldn’t forget it.

When it comes to songs you love to play live, what are some songs that you make sure to include in your set list for every performance of Ad Frank and the Fast Easy Women?

Solo, I like to play “U-Hauls and Ryders”.  There’s one called “Open Up The Patio Pretty Girls Are Back In Style” that I won’t let the band play during the wintertime, I only play it in spring and summer because it’s a spring and summer song.  We usually like to close with a big, bombastic, arena rock-style song called “Timing is Everything”.

In terms of touring and your experiences outside of Boston, what cities have been really responsive to your music?  As the frontman of a Boston band and a Boston-based musician, do you tend to stick close to home or do you play elsewhere, too?

Ad Frank and the Fast Easy Women is mostly a Boston-based operation.  It gets less glamorous when you’re spending ten hours a day and sleeping on couches [while touring] as you get older, but I do a little bit of it.  I have a gig in Chicago coming up and one in D.C.  It’s really, really random.  We had one of our best shows ever in Detroit, and I have no idea why…

What are you working on right now with Ad Frank and the Fast Easy Women?

We’re kind of like the Spinal Tap of keyboard players; I think I’ve gone through fifteen of them!  I guess I’m difficult.  Our last one left a little under two years ago and that was right around the time we started getting to work on this record. For the most part, though, we’ve been playing shows and working on the record that’s about to be released.  The CD release show will be our first show with a full band in almost two years.

How is this upcoming album a departure from previous material you’ve released before?

Lyrically it’s a departure: I sort of had this local persona going, being the guy with the perpetually broken heart that’s always getting stopped on.  It was kind of like a joke.  We even had Ad Frank with a big broken heart on them.  This record is all about what a son of a bitch I am.  This is actually the first record where the band and I have played out all the songs live before they come out on the record, so they won’t be new to people who have been coming to see us.  We really took our time with this record and it took us four years to do.

Let’s talk about Boston venues for a second.  Are there any Boston venues that you love to play or any that stand out as great places to go to shows at?

I love to see shows at the Lizard Lounge.  I don’t play there often just because we’d have to turn it way, way down, but every time I go there I always have a great time.  TT the Bear’s Place feels like home and I love playing there.  I love the Cantab Lounge and the vibe it’s got.  You know that Frank Sinatra album, No One Cares, and he’s sitting at a bar or a café alone at a table with a drink, and behind him are all these happy couples and he’s just sitting there?  The Cantab always reminds me of that.

What about the Abbey Lounge?  I feel like that old venue has come up in conversation a lot recently, especially because a hot new restaurant [Trina’s Starlite Lounge] was recently put in it’s place.

I don’t have any stories from playing there myself, but…  (Laughs) There was this whole graffiti thread on the bathroom wall making fun of this poor guy, and I was reading it, and I was thinking, “Oh, this dude must be a real prick!” And then I got to the bottom of the thread and it was me! (Laughs)  It’s nice to know that someone was thinking of me I guess.

What Boston bands are you following right now, or that you’d love to bill with?

Trying to book this CD release party I realized how out of it I am.  In my band, I have Sarah RabDAU of Sarah RabDAU and the Self-Employed Assassins, and Chris Mascara from the band Mascara, and Sean Connelly from the band Francine, and those are three bands that I also like.  I like this new band, Mystery Roar, a lot.  Everyone in that band is so good!

How do you feel about your Boston fan base?  Let’s talk about your relationship with your fans here and the crowd you see at your shows.

I’m trying to figure out who’s still there because we haven’t played!  I think some of our fans might have been in college or might have had babies and moved to the suburbs, so we’re nervous about the CD release to see if anybody shows up at all.  We have great radio in Boston.  College radio is fantastic, and I feel like there’s more of an opportunity to get heard here than there is in other cities.  As much as people and bands complain about FNX and the former WBCN, the idea of a commercial radio station having a local music show doesn’t happen in most cities, and we have that here and there’s definitely more right going on then wrong in that regard.  I haven’t felt this in while because it’s been awhile since I’ve been on the verge of anything, but there is a tendency to – there’s a lot of backlash when a band starts to do well.  I don’t even know if it’s still active anymore, but the Noise Board would be a forum where people would tear me apart every couple of months.

Have you thought about moving on to other cities?

I have a lot of friends in LA who keep telling me to go there and it’s tempting.  I need something a little more than just picking up and starting all over again.  If I got a publishing deal and would be doing some co-writing with some people I would go, but there’s definitely a lot more opportunity and a lot more … you can go to a party and odds are somebody there is going to be the music director for a TV studio or something, or the guy who picks out the songs for a movie.  On the other hand, all of the people at the party are also musicians and actors so there’s more … I feel like if I need to be connected to the industry I can be by just hopping on the Fung Wah and heading down to New York, but LA seems – well this is sort of deteriorating too, but the idea that you have to be in your early or mid-20s and you have to be a different kind of rock band, in LA they get that you don’t have to be those things to be a songwriter.  They have a better understanding of the fact that people who write the songs aren’t necessarily fronting rock bands and there isn’t that much of an age ceiling.  I think that the age ceiling is crumbling along with the rest of the record industry.  Nobody’s getting signed to a major label and having a hit record, so the thirty-year-olds, twenty-year-olds, forty-year-olds… we’re all going no where together.

What’s next for Ad Frank and the Fast Easy Women?  What do we have to look forward to from you and the band in the next couple of months?

I definitely want to get out to some other cities, hopefully with the band, but they’ve got their own things going on.  One of them has a four-year-old at home, so… that’s the advantage of being “[Your Name] and the [Something-Somethings]” because your name still has some kind of weight.  The album is going everywhere and it’ll be streaming.  I just want to see who likes it.  If I turn out to have a huge pocket of fans in Akron, Ohio, I’ll head out there and go say hi to ‘em.  I was having a huge span of writer’s block after we finished the record.  It was like a year before I finished recording it and before I wrote anything.  I always figured that I would just retire and move on to something else, like writing fiction or painting, but I just finished another thing this week that I’m really excited about so I guess I’m committed to another record in the future.

City-wide, thrift junkies are abuzz over the opening of the latest Buffalo Exchange in Davis Sq. The Somerville store is the first New England location for the national consignment heavyweight and the chain’s reputation of quality, stylish pieces at discounted prices holds up well in the two-story Elm St. outpost. At street level, shoppers are greeted with an admittedly meager rack of Halloween costumes (there has got to be more on the way, no?), but just behind sit two racks of coats, jackets and blouses, a wall of sweaters and a small men’s section. Down stairs boasts a wall full of shoes, opposite a wall full of jeans, both surrounding multiple racks of dresses. It is, I must say, quite lovely. All of the merchandise appears of high quality, though we’d prefer a less intense return policy (within 5 days? Who has time to decide on an item and get back to the store in 5 days? Only store credit with receipt and tags? Yeesh.)

The original Buffalo Exchange was opened in Tucson, Arizona in 1974. A swap meet and thrift store addict, founder Kerstin Block wanted to create a store that would buy, sell and trade clothing items and accessories in a fun and socially responsible way. Originally from Sweden, she chose a name that sounded American to her (“buffalo”) and also described what they were trying to do with the business (“exchange”)—and thus Buffalo Exchange was born. The company now has 37 stores and two franchises in fourteen states, making $56.3 million a year in sales.

A company of that size has a lot of power, and Block and her husband (who is also co-owner) decidedly use it for good. Besides the environmental benefits of reusing and recycling clothing, Buffalo Exchange raised over $25,000 for Save the Whales at their Earth Day Dollar Sale in April. The company also donates used fur to The Human Society’s Coats for Cubs program that provides bedding to orphaned and injured wildlife. The Buffalo Exchange website also claims that, through their Tokens for Bags program, shoppers are encouraged to accept a token instead of a bag for purchases and the company donates five cents to a charity of the customer’s choice. Though this TeaPartier was not offered a token in exchange for stuffing her new shoes into her camera bag, the site reports that the program has generated almost $320,000 for hundreds of nonprofits since 1994 and has saved 6.4 million bags.

Still, we would be remiss if we did not mention that, despite its good deeds, Buffalo Exchange is still a national chain. It is the Wal-Mart to the mom-and-pop shops of local favorites such as Poor Little Rich Girl, Garment District, Second Time Around and the Closet—who not only paid their dues cultivating a market for quality vintage and consignment in Boston, but also will undoubtedly hold their own against the new giant in the neighborhood. Still, if you’re going to get your new party dress at Buffalo Exchange (which we would recommend, the selection was great), at least get your coffee at Diesel instead of Dunkies.

–Jessie Rogers

The leaves are changing, the kids are back in town, and everyone’s trading in their iced coffee for the real thing as fall has hit full force in Boston.  For the last month of this short-lived summer, Gab, Jessie and I spent at least a night a week at the Lizard Lounge and it’s smaller, rowdier counterpart, Toad.  At Lizard, we sat with jaws dropped and eyes wide at the octave-leaping antics of Jesse Dee; we then had our minds blown by the concentrated intensity of The Mieka Canon as they delivered flawless sets and handed out free copies of their new EP, From The Mouth of Paris, every single week in August.

While both of these Boston bands and artists held court at the Lizard Lounge, the feet-stompin’, hootin’-and-hollerin’ and epic vocal prowess of Tim Gearan and John Powhida were occurring simulataneously as the two men led residencies of their own at Toad.  From both Powhida and Gearan, we saw retrospective displays and departures of sorts from the two established Boston-based musicians.  Gearan, whose Monday night slot at Toad will be vacant come October, is taking his 15+ year residency and moving it over to a Friday night show each week at Atwood’s Tavern in Inman Square.  Powhida, who spent his residency sharing the stage with numerous friends as well as former and present members of his band, John Powhida International Airport, is hitting the drawing board again after his rowdy Toad shows and his performances at various festivals and charitable events in the Greater Boston area this summer.  A good thing can’t go on forever, though, and as seasons change so do the schedules of Boston’s favorite venues and nightclubs.  The Toad residencies of John Powhida and Tim Gearan were merely forums for these two to showcase their unparalleled energy, prolific songwriting abilities and unmatched appreciation for their Boston fans, and there’s only more to look forward to from this singer/songwriter stalwarts as the days grow shorter in the coming chill.

- Hilary Hughes

“Call me, TeaParty Girls, the next time you wanna go SAKE BOMBING!”: Shoutouts and Other Whimsies from John Powhida

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A Farewell to Toad: Tim Gearan on an Autumnal Change of Scene

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The Powerful Pipes of a Boston Boy: Jesse Dee and his Local Lizard Lounge Residency

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“Cambridge Doesn’t F_ck Around”: Cutting Teeth with The Mieka Canon

If you live anywhere in the Union Square/Inman Square/Porter/Davis/Harvard/Central area, chances are you’ve seen a flyer or two plastered in store windows and on various telephone poles promoting the residency of The Rex Complex at Precinct.  These posters, which have featured such bizarre images as drummer Jeremy Gustin and lead vocalist/xylophone/jug playing maven Rex Hussman lounging in snowbanks in their underpants, flailing around in overalls, and most recently featuring a Rorschach-type print in the shape of both their profiles, are incredibly accurate visual representations of this eccentric, eclectic pairing.

After meeting at Berklee, the two classically trained musicians ventured off to Ghana together and then found themselves back in Somerville playing a residency at the Precint Bar in Union Square a few years later.  Rex brought his Ghanian xylophone-type instrument called a gyil with him, and the sounds of this unique contribution to the band, paired with the vivacious showmanship and musical skill of the band’s other members, makes The Rex Complex an out-of-the-ordinary act to watch.  Sadly, we’re losing the boys to Brooklyn soon enough, but they’re celebrating the release of their second record Saturday, August 29th at The Lizard Lounge.  If you make it out, who knows?  You may even get to see a shirtless Rex push over a member of the audience,  or something.

-Hilary Hughes

So, fellas, give us a quick bio.  How did the Rex Complex come to be?

Jeremy: We met through school.  Rex is from Georgia and came up to Boston for school; I’m from around here.

Rex: Jeremy is very “to-the-point.”

Which Boston school did you guys attend?

J: Berklee.  Rex was the only person at Berklee who I actually liked playing music with, so he kind of stood out.

R: We had an arranging class together with a loveable sleezeball.

J: I was mostly playing in a lot of different bands as a drummer and Rex started writing songs, so I started playing with his project.  This is after we went to Ghana together for a while to study African music, so-

You really just glossed over that.

R: He’s a glossy guy.

J: Well, if I’m gonna do a quick bio-! We went to Ghana, we came back, Rex started writing his own songs which would eventually lead to the Rex Complex, and then I got in on the songwriting as well, and that’s when it became more than just a collaborative project.  It’s been developing and changing a lot over the last year or two.

R: For me, it was like, basically experimenting with oh, I’d say Americana music using this baliphone I got in Ghana, that’s the big xylophone thing, and banjo and upright bass, and I was writing songs, just kind of trying to use it as a springboard for experimenting with I don’t know, five or six songs written and Jeremy started collaborating and throwing songs in there and now it’s something completely different.

J: Yeah, the Americana/Bluegrass thing? You can’t really hear it anymore, but that’s where [the Rex Complex] started.

R: Not really.

Well, if you don’t hear Americana/Bluegrass, what do you hear?

R: We were just talking about this the other day.

J: Joyful noise.

R: Joyful noise! Yeah!  Wait, isn’t that in a spiritual?  It’s much more loud and raw and –

J: Primal? (Laughs)

R: Yeah, than it was.

J: There’s a lot of improvisation in the music and in the full spectrum, like some of the stuff we do is fully improvised and some of it’s incredibly arranged, and then there’s a whole lot of stuff in between.

R: And improvised can mean anything from like, making up lyrics and words or a story in the middle of a song or Jeremy and I sort of doing yelling back and forth at each other until we find something that works rhythmically.

J: We play with some great improvisers, too, like Lyle Brewer.

R: It’s a combination of definitely like, improvising and, yeah, I don’t know man, fuck. (Laughs)

J: Sometimes we sound like we’re going to fall apart, like controlled chaos a little bit. I think it does get really loud and aggressive and crazy and experimental, but I think we do that in a way that expresses joy and like, love, as opposed to a lot of music that has that aggressive loud thing that expresses more like, angst and maybe testosterone or anger or something like that.  We don’t have any of that stuff.

R: No testosterone.

Yeah, you do play drums with a maraca sometimes, which is confusing to me…

J: Why?

…. I don’t know.

R: And he taped his snare drum to his bass drum!

J: And I stack my cymbals, and I play with pots and pans, too.  Playing drums is so fun because when you hit anything it makes a sound.

R: We like finding new songs with old instruments, too, like instruments that have been already used.  We like to try to find ways to make things sound new.

J: One of the things that excite me the most about music is sound.  Although melody and harmony are so incredibly important and integral to music, there’s no new melody or new harmony or new notes or anything like that, but there are still so many new sounds that haven’t been used or combined together, so a lot of the stuff that excites me the most is when I hear combinations that I haven’t heard before, sonically.  Rex and I are always exploring new ways to make things sound different still using bass, drums, guitar, the normal sounds that you’d hear in a rock band.  We do use the xylophone and a glockenspiel and Rex plays an accordion…

R: I guess for me also the Rex Complex has become a lot of movement. I like dancing a lot and getting crazy.

J: Are you gonna take off your shirt today?

R: … No.

J: (Laughs) Yeah, that’s a new part of the show to look out for.

(Jessie giggles.)

R: He, like, suppressed my balls about that.

Did this happen once, or…?

R: I tried it once on ScatTV.

J: It was great!

R: Jeremy loved it.  I have one person who loved it.  I had a fun time.  I loved it too.

J: You looked great.

R: Thanks, Jeremy.  (Reaches out to Jeremy, fondly.)

Let’s talk about songs you’ve done with The Rex Complex.  Do you have favorites?

(Jeremy makes a lot of popping/farting noises with his mouth.)

…Um…

J: That’s the name of our new song.  (Makes the damn noises again.)

R: That’s the one! (Rex makes the crazy poppy farty noises, too.)  Well, definitely the last song, which has been labeled “Dirty Eyeballs of Lust.”

J: That’s a complete free improv.  I think that song inspires a lot of stuff.  It’s always new, and it affects how we play in general with our writing.  There’s a certain kind of freedom, this primal, cave man thing-

R: It’s kind of a fuck-all thing, you know?

J: -It kind of creeps into other stuff we do.

R: It’s the freedom to be an asshole or do whatever you wanna do and it’s no rules.  I can be an asshole if I wanna be an asshole.

J: You did push that person over once.

R: Well, that’s ‘cause she was grindin’ on me.

….Whaaaat?

R: She was slobbering on my face!  The only way to get her off of me was to lay my body into it, and she kinda hit the wall…. (Jeremy cracks up; Rex follows suit.)

J: If you stick around you may see her come in, she always shows up and gets wasted.

R: When I say being an asshole, I mean there’s no rules, there’s no format or structure; I like being able to do whatever I wanna do and try anything, which maybe rolling on the floor or like, I don’t know! Just whatever I feel!  It’s like, having fun, just to see what happens.

And you’re saying you can do that, especially, when you’re performing “Dirty Eyeballs of Lust”?

J: That’s the extreme version.  We do that in all our songs to some degree, but in “Dirty Eyeballs of Lust” especially.

If your style is so improvisational, what keeps that song that song?

J: There are some motifs that sometimes happen and sometimes don’t happen, but there IS a chorus which we usually do maybe once, at least once.

R: An example of a motif would be, “I got dirty eyeballs o’ lust! I got dirty eyeballs o’ crust! [Jeremy comes in] You can take it from me if you really wanna stay it’s a whole lot o’ sleepin’ with dust!”  That’s a motif.

J: There’s also one about eating sandwiches, but that one doesn’t always happen.  “Can’t wait to get home to eat that… Can’t wait to get home to eat that… Can’t wait to get home to eat that can’t wait to get home to eat that EAT THAT SANDWICH!”  That’s a motif, too.

J: There are usually some new ones every week.

R: We also have a song called “Picking Up Shit” which is a song about a dog walking job I had.  It’s also about anybody… everybody… (Cracks up.  Jeremy, again, follows suit.)

What?! Did we miss something, here?

J: It’s metaphorical.  We all pick up dog shit. (Laughs)

In terms of going into the studio, how does that process change from when you guys are writing to when you’re playing live? Is it just the two of you in the studio?

J: The next record we make is going to be a different experience.  We have a new record coming out on August 29, and how we did this one was very live and arranged so we were really prepared and knew what we were gonna do.  We didn’t do “Dirty Eyeballs of Lust.”  The songs that we had were very arranged in parts.

R: We were trying to capture the live sound as much as we possibly could.  We recorded most of the songs and all the parts live, so the actual performances were done altogether, mostly.  Then, we did go back and throw some extra things in there.

J: As far as the improvising it was more arranged, but we still wanted to do it live.

R: We recorded it in a schoolhouse in the woods of the Berkshires with a fireplace and it was all wood, and it was just a great experience and it was one of the best days of my life.  It was so fun.

J: And we recorded for 18 hours straight.

R: We recorded for 18 hours straight the first day, and then we slept for six hours. I slept in the same bed as Jeremy.  It wasn’t… I mean, it was fun.  It was a lot of fun. (Rex cackles.)

J: We made love. (Jeremy guffaws.)

R: I mean, now you know where all the inspiration comes from.

So, who was the big spoon?

R: Is the big spoon the one that wraps around the outside?

J: I would be the big spoon.

R: Oh, shit.  Does that mean taking and giving, basically?

Rex, we’re trying to keep this as PG-13 as possible.

R: I mean taking and giving can just mean sharing, really!

J: The whole nature of the collaboration is like a give and take, really. (Jessie giggles.)

R: I think we both give and take.  We both give and take a lot, at a time.  Especially in recording sessions, because somebody wants theirs at some point.

(Jeremy Cracks. The. Hell. Up.)

So, when it comes to recording with The Rex Complex, is it just you two in the studio?

J: No, we have a bass player and a guitar player, too. There’s a couple of different bass players we work with and a couple of different guitar players.  Two of them are moving with us to New York in September.

R: Literally, we’re all getting a place in Bushwick in Brooklyn.

Hey, now you can go to Junior’s all the time!

R: Oh, the cheesecake! Yes! Don’t they also have really good barbeque chicken?  I think I offended someone at Junior’s once with the way I was eating my chicken.

J: You do eat a little funny.

Wait, what?  How does Rex eat, Jeremy?

R: I’ll tell you what happened at Junior’s.  Basically, when I eat chicken, I have to pick up the whole thing and it’s really like, you have to just go for it.  I guess the person was a vegetarian who was eating with me, and they said the chicken was hanging from my mouth.  I was just enjoying the chicken, you know?

J: Rex gets really into it when he’s hungry, but he keeps talking to everyone, so there’s food hanging out of his mouth.  He can’t breathe out of his mouth because his mouth is so full, and his nose is really little, he has little nostrils-

R: I can’t breathe out of my nose very well.

J: – And he’s like, blowing in and out of his nose really hard.

R: A doctor told me that I have tiny, crooked nasal passageways.

J: You really hear the breathing in the nose, in and out, and when the mouth is full…

R: The chicken has to come in and out as well.

(Jeremy dies laughing.  Aaaaagain.)

Spooning in the Berkshires, Rex inhaling chicken, Brooklyn, you’re moving in September… Wow.  In terms of people you also play with, are there any guests artists in addition to the rest of the band that come in and perform with you?

J: Dana Colley’s performed with us, and Jimmy Ryan, Alex Spiegelman… well, he plays with everybody.  Mostly, we’re a core group that just switches up the bass and guitar players with a couple of different people.  Every once in awhile we’ll have someone sit in with a horn.

So, why are you moving to New York?

J: I feel like New York has more of a niche that we can play in.  I mean, Boston is awesome: It’s a small scene and we’ve had a hard time fitting into it in a good way.  Part of it is that it’s a small scene and part of it’s our sound.  The smaller venues, also, it’s hard to play a gig when a Red Sox game is on.  Sports are competition for musicians here.  If there’s a Sox game or a Pats game, you get fucked because people won’t come out, or they’ll be watching the TV in the bar and not you.  Like we’ll be playing and people will cheer and we’ll look up and be like “Oh, Papi hit a home run, that’s not for us.”  There’s less of that in New York because there’s so much more of a music scene.

R: I’m excited to move to a new city, too, because I’ve been living in Boston for about nine or ten years now.  I gotta switch it up.  I’ve always wanted to try living in New York and I feel like I gotta try it now.

Well, before you leave, I guess let’s talk about what you love about Boston as opposed to why you’re leaving for New York.  What do you love about the Boston music scene?

J: I love the Boston music scene dearly and I play with a shitload of bands here.  Actually, instead of saying the Boston music scene, I’d say the Cambridge and Somerville music scene because it’s very different.

R: That’s a good point.

J: It’s like this roots rock kind of base thing that goes out of that, and it’s so tight-knit, it’s like a family.  A lot of the bands are intermingled and very incestuous, in a great way.

R: You get the best breeds when you- well, actually, that’s not true.  I guess incest is not mixing the breeds.  I think it keeps it in the family.

Yeah, incest is a game the whole family can play.

J: (Laughs) Yeah, I’m worried that I won’t feel that in New York too much.  I’m going to miss the small scene of Boston, and I’m going to miss the sense of community in Union Square in Somerville especially.

R: Boston is so compact and tight.  There’s so much going on within a tight space.  It’s like… um… I’m sure that’s going to be overwhelming as hell to try to establish a community in a city the size of New York.  Here, it didn’t take us very long to feel like we were a part of the community in Somerville.

J: After living in Boston for a few years you can figure out what bands to follow and what clubs to go to if you want to make music.  In New York, it’s not, it’s like a life force and it’s constantly changing.

R: The Rex Complex got its start because Robert Elliot who owned Tirninogue happened to love music and he was like, “Yeah, come in and play!” I asked him if I could play because I had been hanging out there, and Jeremy had been playing there, and that was like our family stage.  He just let us come in there and try it out.  I don’t know how easy that would be in New York.

J: As far as the scene in Cambridge and Somerville, when I got back from West Africa I moved to Somerville not knowing anyone and randomly got into Tirninogue and that was like the epicenter of the Somerville music community.  Because of that gig on a Thursday night I started playing that bar four or five nights a week and that’s how I got involved with other musicians.

R: Do you guys know Tirnanog?

No.

R: It means “everlasting youth”… and now it’s over!  Ain’t that… that’s irony, right there.  That kind of makes me sad.

J: People would hang out there ‘til four, six in the morning playing music during the week.

R: Robert books now at Precinct, which is where our residency is.  Tirninogue was a family of people who loved to play there and love to go there.  It’s where Bull McCabe’s is, now.  Robert’s the one who gave us our start, and we’ve been playing at Precinct every week for a year and a half now.

J: It’s a different spirit at Precinct and it’s great, but Tirnanog, it did die.  It was great, now it’s gone.

R: … That’s pretty fucking depressing.

Can we talk about your experience in West Africa?  I feel like that’s a really important part of your story.

R: Let me give you a little footnote about our experience in West Africa: In terms of the Rex Complex, I feel sometimes that we tend to, I don’t know, I feel like the shows and the music we’re producing has very little to do with African music even though we’re using an African instrument and we went to Ghana for three months.  It definitely grew from that, and it still, there’s a lot of African influence in what we listen to, but I wouldn’t label the Rex Complex as a world music band.  People tend to focus on the xylophone.

J: The reason why the xylophone works is because it’s so awesome!  The sound of this instrument is so beautiful and unique; it has this raspy distortion.  It’s called a gyil.  Anyways, with Ghana, I was finishing up school and I decided to go away and I thought I would go to Australia and live with Aborigines.  I went on Google and listened to some Aboriginal drumming and realized it wasn’t really for me, even though I’m fascinated with Australia’s Aboriginal art and culture.  So I was like, “Where else in the world can I go to study drumming?”  The next logical choice was West Africa.  I never studied West African drumming, but I had a connection to it at Berklee through a professor there, and I knew he had gone to Ghana, so I looked it up and it was just one of those things that clicked.  Rex was one of my closest friends at the time and I told him I was going, and he had actually studied with this professor, so he had been thinking about going to Ghana anyways.

R: I had been thinking of going to Ghana for quite awhile.  Even before Berklee I had gone to school in West Virginia for a little while and I was talking to an old piano teacher who knew someone who taught in this village in Ghana and she recommended I studied there.  So, even before I went to Berklee I knew I wanted to go to Ghana, it had always been on my mind.  I went there, at Berklee, I met Joe Galiota, this guy who teaches Ghanean music, and it kind of fell into place.  We just happened to be free at the same time and we were really good friends and we both wanted to take a trip so we went!  That’s how we got to Ghana.

J: That’s how we figured out how to go together.  We didn’t go with a program.  We went to a music school there, but we both traveled around somewhat like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book.  We went to different villages, and then we were doing our own things in different parts of the country.  We went around and studied all this different music.

R: I went up to the north of Ghana and that’s where I started studying the gyil, and I traveled across Ghana with it on top of buses and vans.

Wow.  That’s a big piece of equipment to lug across the whole country.

R: Yeah, it was tough to carry it back.  I had to find a huge cardboard box in the middle of the capital city that would fit the xylophone, and looking for a box took like, four hours.  I had a guy take me to the cardboard box pile, and we picked it up, and I walked it to the post office and shipped it back here and it made it in one piece.  It was meant to be. [Jeremy laughs.]

J: There were times in Ghana where we’d hear the xylophone being played, and Rex and I would be like, “If this xylophone would be a back beat to a song, that’d be so cool!  Think of a riff that would sound good with that xylophone.”  So, there was something that was starting to simmer in the back of our heads about trying to fuse western stuff with it.

What was the hardest part about your trip to Ghana?  Were there any difficult aspects of your trip?

J: It was like, the best year of my life!  Well, having malaria kind of sucked.  Rex took pictures of me shitting and puking.

R: I just wanted to document the trip!

J: There were times sometimes when I would travel where there would be incredibly uncomfortable, long bus rides, but like, I wouldn’t say …. That trip to me was just beautiful and perfect in every way.

R: Oh boy. (Laughs)

What?

R: I was thinking about the shitting and the puking.

J: Yeah, that was wild. (Laughs)

R: For me, the most difficult thing was definitely getting deep into situations where you think you know what you’re doing and you really have no fuckin’ clue.  We were living on the coast, and one day, there were a bunch of kids who were body surfing.  They were playing with body boards-

J: Naked!

R: -They were surfing naked!  They were body surfing with these planks of wood that came from these fishing boats, and they had nails sticking out of them, and whatever, they were surfing with them anyway.

J: These waves were HUGE.

R: No, man, I don’t think they were that big.  They were a good size.  Anyway, I asked a kid if I could try his body board out, this piece of wood, and I started body boarding, and then before I knew it I caught this really big wave and it ended up plowing me straight down into the ocean floor and I wound up on top of the plank with the force of the wave propelling me down into it so the plank went straight up into my ribcage and I knew I was FUCKED.  I rose up, and I had a huge, perfect triangle of black and blood already black from the bruise, probably the size of a grapefruit but in a triangle shape, if that makes sense.  The kids saw it and freaked the fuck out and kept apologizing and they kept repeating “Sorry!  Sorry!  Sorry!” And, in fact, I broke the kid’s body board in HALF, so I’M like, “I’M sorry! I’M sorry!” And we were all saying I’m sorry.  I thought I broke a fuckin’ rib, and there was no where to go, I was like, “I have a broken rib and a bloody fuckin’ triangle on my chest.”  That was scary!

J: I had wounds in my foot and in a tropical climate it’s really hard for cuts to heal, so, my foot got really bad and I couldn’t get amoxicillin.  We were studying in this one village with a bunch of Liberian refugees, and there was this one woman there who called herself Mama Africa, and she was one of the most amazing women I’ve ever met in my life.

R: She was like the female George Clinton… from Liberia.

J: She was unbelievable.  Anyway, we’re hanging out with her and her daughters, and they were teaching us music.  But my foot was fucked, and there was no real hospital or even bandaids, so all she had to help was nail polish remover-

(Hil gasps in horror.  Jessie looks like she’s gonna puke.)

Did you SCREAM?!

R: She was like, “This’ll do the trick!”  He was trying not to scream so hard.

J: She was LOVIN’ it.

R: She was like, “Shut up, you little pansy!” I was laughing so fuckin’ hard.

J: It was incredibly painful but it did disinfect it.

R: But Jeremy got me back when I had the little triangle of blood, because I had to disinfect that, and I went in a bar, and supposedly this guy was like a medicine man, and I took off my shirt and had this big black triangle on me, and this guy was like, “Oh my God!  I have to cure you!  Come here!”  He pulled out this bottle of this pure alcohol with some kind of weed living in the bottle, and he was like, “This is … something … in the name of Christ, this is going to help you!”

J: There’s a lot of Jesus over there.

R: Yeah, there’s a lot of Jesus stuff.  And I was like, “Okay, so what are you gonna do?”  Before I knew it, he was pouring alcohol on my wound and rubbing it vigorously with a rag in the name of Jesus Christ.  (Jeremy cracks up) And Jeremy was laughing his ass off.

You both seem to take such pleasure in each other’s pain.

J: We do.

R: We do!

So… that was Ghana… lots and lots of blood, music and disinfection.

R: It was the most amazing three months of my life.

Back to Boston: What are your favorite venues?

R: Lizard Lounge!  The Lizard Lounge is great.

J: I have a great time at Toad, too, even though it’s small.  Those are bars that aren’t sports bars: They’re full of people who are there because they want to listen to music and be out.

R: Precinct is one of my favorite bars now because there is no television.  If I were to compare Precinct to other bars in Boston, it fucking kicks a lot of ass because the way Robert sets it up is there’s no television.  The front bar is the sports bar, the back bar is the music bar and that’s where it all happens.

J: I love it here, I play here all the time, but I prefer Lizard in general because the sound there is amazing.

R: If, you know, they put a sound system in at Precinct and a sound guy, this could be the Lizard Lounge of Somerville.  You can print that shit! (Laughs)

Who would you say are the musical influences of The Rex Complex?

R: Hmmmm!  Do you want to go first?

J: I don’t care.  Do you want me to go first?

R: I’m a slow thinker. Jeremy’s a quick thinker.  I can tell you a lot of influence comes from me right now is stuff like, oh boy, here we go, oh, Deerhoof, no, this is kind of like, now, I mean, it ranges from anything from Outkast to Iggy Pop to Deerhoof.  I guess, the thing is is like I’m influenced by everything, but what comes out in the Rex Complex specifically is kind of like, more the band’s that are for me lately are expressing themselves through movement, like, I don’t know how to explain it to be honest, but I feel like there’s a lot involved in action and dancing and movement and shouting and yelling.

So, more performance based music as opposed to recording based.

R: Definitely.  I’m definitely in “letting loose” mode. Iggy Pop I guess would be somebody.  And Richard Pryor.  He’s definitely someone who’s all about action and experimentation and making the audience respond.  I like to push against the audience.

J: Sometimes literally. (Laughs)

R: We’re in a scene right now where I know we don’t get pushed back very much, but I know that we will, and I’m looking forward to that.  Yeah.

What do you mean, “pushed back”?

R: Like, more physical contact.  We’ve been playing venues like Toad and once again, getting back to the joyous noise, it’s not aggressive or painful, there was a guy who came up to me at Toad drunk and fucked up out of his mind, he came up to me smiling and dancing and he couldn’t stand up, so I grabbed him and we started dancing around, and before I knew it motherfucker fucked up two tables and fell on his back and we just kept going.

J: He was wonderful.

R: We got another incident at the Plough and Stars, a friend of mine I work with.  She used to go crazy and she used to come out.  We were running up and down at the Plough and Stars and she was writhing like a snake on the floor and I accidentally kneed her in the face, and I went down to see if she was okay and touched her on the forehead, and she raised up on her knees and screamed.  I felt like a Baptist preacher who was exorcising demons from some fucked up person.  I only say that because I grew up in the South and have seen Baptist preachers who think they can exorcise demons.  (Jeremy craaacks up. Again.)  It was a fucked up situation! (Laughs hysterically).

So do you want your performances to be more along those lines?

R: I don’t know.  I like when everyone’s included in the picture and the performance.  It’s not just “here’s us, here’s them”; I like us to cross and intermingle.  A lot of times you have to physically go out there and do that.  I think we kind of came up in a different scene that’s not into that or used to that, and maybe that’s kind of good for me because it forces me to push harder.

Well, what instrument did you play before you acquired the gyil?

R: Piano.

Was that an easy transition, from piano to massive wooden xylophone?

R: in some ways it was a liberating switch because I was, in a lot of ways, I took myself too seriously on piano because it was “my instrument”, whereas with xylophone I was just fuckin’ around, and because of that I had more freedom, I felt more freedom to experiment, and that is a big reason… I went sun up to sun down at this master of the gyil’s place, and he kicked my ass every day for a whole month, but I’m trying to try it into the question you asked me.

So, Jeremy, what’re your influences, to bring it back?

J: Starting out, I come from a family of classical musicians and coming from that.  That was a big part of my life.

Were you a classical drummer, then?

J: No, I played oboe for a long time.  It was a big part of my life.

R: You traveled to Italy!

J: And then I found drums, my own kind of thing, it’s what I wanted, I’m self-taught and was all about improvisation and it changed my life.  Eight, ninth, tenth grade, that was when I really started jamming out in my basement with my friends.  The band that I probably got obsessed with was Levon Helm, he’s a drummer that changed my life.  Aphex Twin at the time, yeah, those were very significant, and then Miles Davis and John Coltrane were like pillars for me, those were very significant years in my development.  Besides that, I was really into Sex Mob and a lot of other electronic stuff, Em Tobin, Square Pusher… I saw Em Tobin live here; he was the shit.  As I’ve progressed and grown older –

R: He’s an old wise man.

J: I’ve kind of figured out everything about life at this point and I could tell you what the meaning of life is but I’ll let you figure it out for yourself. (Laughs)

What’re you listening to right now?

J: Mikachu kicks my ASS.

R: OH!  MIKACHU!  Yeah!

J: Ponytail and Mikachu are two bands with female singers.  Interesting connection.  They have this joy noise thing that’s loud and aggressive and fantastic and crazy and controlled and the emotions I get from that are love and joy, and that immediately translates to me.  I get sick of hearing angst and anger and testosterone-driven music, but I do like aggressive music, so it’s awesome to see new bands playing with that, and that’s what we’re playing with.

R: Mmmhmm! Very good Jeremy.  That’s very articulate of you.

(Jeremy cackles.)

R: Why are you cackling? I like how he’s going over the whole picture.  That’s good.  I like how you did that.

You did a good job too, Rex.

R: Thank you.

Any final thoughts, Rex?

R: Final thoughts?  Let us all enjoy ourselves and hold hands and look at the candlelight flickering amongst our faces.  This has been a joyous evening.  I’d like to thank whatever it is that brought us together-

J: He’s a preacher’s son.

R: I feel the power coursing through my blood.

J: … Amen?

R: “Amen” is an exclamation.  It’s a way of saying, “Yes!”  It’s a way of saying “I feel good!” It’s a way of saying “I WANT TO SQUEEZE YOU.”

J: Oh!  I didn’t know THAT.

R: It’s a way of saying, “I want to FEEL you!”  It’s a way of saying “I want to drink my water until I quench my thirst!” It’s a way of saying that that fire flickers the way the fire flickers within my vein!  It’s a way of saying, “I want to keep on going and having a good time!” Amen.

J: Amen!

…Amen…?

J: That’s a good finale, I think.

Before I properly introduce him I think I need to qualify my own stance and let the reader know that I, Hilary Hughes, am an unabashedly, embarrassingly huge fan of the Boston blues/rock/soul/big-haired/high-voiced/folk powerhouse that is Jesse Dee.  I saw him for the first time a few years ago at Harper’s Ferry when a dear friend of mine attending Mass Art invited me out to see “a friend of a boyfriend’s friend of a friend” who turned out to be Dee, and since then I’ve been spending roughly every other Sunday night dancing like an idiot to the sounds of the Sea Monsters, a side project of a handful of Boston’s most talented singers/songwriters/musicians in which Dee participates.  When I was working as the East Coast Music Editor over at Chicks with Guns, I was handed Dee’s debut album, Bittersweet Batch, to review, and gave it 5 out of 4 stars for Dee’s refreshing sound that continues to evolve while conjuring up images of vibrant, sweaty dance halls (“My Two Feet”; “Alright”) and sullen, heartbroken hole-in-the-wall speakeasys (“Still Here”, “Around Here”) simultaneously.  Dee’s lyrical and compositional prowess aside, his voice is a force to be reckoned with: With a multi-octave range rivaling Stevie Wonder’s, Dee trips over scales and riffs as though his vocal chords were created for that purpose alone.

So, yeah.  Basically, I really, really love Jesse Dee’s music and was pleased to find that Dee is just as humble and gracious as he is talented and driven.  Jessie and I were able to catch up with him over a beer at Atwood’s while he was waiting to check out the Lyle Brewer Trio on a Monday night, and over an hour we picked his brain regarding his residency at the Lizard Lounge this August.  With many of his fellow musician-friends sharing the bill each night of his Lizard stint, Dee’s shows have been intimate in the sense that they’ve included some of the heaviest hitters of Cambridge and Somerville’s jazz/blues/folk/singer/songwriter scene (which, as I note after writing all those forward slashes, has yet to be defined in a single term by the members of it.)  Tonight marks the end of Jesse Dee’s Tuesday Night Residency at the Lizard Lounge, so if you want to dance or simply sit and listen and feed of the energy of this man with a set of pipes singing songs that are wise beyond his years, head down the stairs of 1667 Mass Ave in Cambridge and take a seat.

-Hilary Hughes

OPENING ACT: JESSE DEE AND THE TEAPARTY TEN

What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?

Jesse: Honey Bunches of Oats.

Who would you rather punch in the face: Long Duk Dong from “Sixteen Candles”, or Mouth from “The Goonies”?

J: Long Duk Dong, because … honestly, I don’t think Mouth is such a bad guy!  So, yeah.  I’m going with the “Sixteen Candles” guy just because I have Mouth’s back.

If you were a kitchen appliance, what would you be?

J: A juicer.  A manual juicer.

You go to bed, wake up, walk into the bathroom to brush your teeth, and you look in the mirror and you realize that you’ve turned into one of Jim Henson’s Muppets overnight.  Which Muppet are you?

J: Bork bork bork! The Swedish Chef.  I think that guy’s awesome.  What’s the dog’s name, Rolf?  I like him, too.  I’d be Rolf wearing the Swedish Chef’s cooking uniform and hat and trying to do a Swedish accent.

Say you have a crazy night, you black out, and you wake up feeling like crap the next morning and you realize… you got a tattoo.  When you were under the influence of SOMEthing.  What’d you get inked?

J: Something really stupid and random, like a pan of lasagna or something on my gut. (Laughs) I’d get TEAPARTY BOSTON across my chest.

Would you rather be a rodeo clown or a sumo wrestler?

J: Rodeo clown.  It’d be more exciting.  And faster too, I’d think.

If you were a particular style of facial hair, what would you be?

J: A neck beard.  Or the hockey helmet!  That’s the one where you can connect your beard to your hair going underneath your ear… that’s a lot of hair.  That’s a very masculine style of facial hair.  You have to be a certain extent of hairy to pull it off.  Or maybe the soul patch.

Because “you got soul”?

J: No.  Because I’m… patchy.

If you were a type of cheese, which cheese would you be?

J: I would have to say that cheese is my favorite food.  I might have to be Muenster cheese.

What’s your favorite word?

J: I don’t think I have a favorite word.

What’s your quintessential “I’M GONNA DANCE AROUND MY APARTMENT IN MY SKIVVIES AND LOVE LIFE!” song?

J: Marvin Gaye’s “Gotta Give It Up.”  That one you can’t resist to move to.

THE MAIN EVENT: THE JESSE DEE TPB INTERVIEW

Hi Jesse! Tell us about yourself.

Jesse: Hello!  I’m from Arlington, born and raised, which is not far from here at all.  I’ve always lived in the area and I went to Mass Art.

Right!  Aren’t you also a painter?

J: Yeah!  I don’t get to paint as much as I’d like to these days because I’m mostly focusing on my music, but here and there I do some design work and some various commissions.  I’m mostly just doing music now.  I’ve been playing in Boston for almost twelve years.  I was writing songs and teaching myself how to play guitar right about around when I was starting college, so I was playing open mics and studying performance in school and I ended up joining up with some guys from Berklee and I toured around the country.  I guess I started out as a solo performer, and I definitely came up in the folk singer/songwriter scene in Somerville and Cambridge.  I started out playing an acoustic guitar, but I picked up electric because it better lent itself to the music I wanted to play.

Yeah, you have a pretty gorgeous Epiphone.

J: Thanks!

How would you describe your creative process?  Let’s put the songwriting and music making of Jesse Dee into words.

J: There’s not a specific method at all: Sometimes there’ll be lyrics written, sometimes it’ll be a general concept of how a song can function, sometimes it’s just music.  A lot of times I find I write from just singing a song to myself and singing a melody in my head, and if I’m still singing it the next day or a couple of days later I’ll write lyrics to it.

Do you collaborate with anyone when you’re writing?  Do you have anyone to bounce ideas off of?

J: For the most part I just write by myself, and I kind of present it to my band and they’ll add their parts to it and we’ll all fine-tune it together just to see what works.  In that sense, it’s been collaboration.

What about Bittersweet Batch? I noticed that you had a lot of guest artists on it.  How was recording that album?

J: It’s been out for almost a year, and recording it was incredible.  It’s something I’m very proud of, and it was a lot of fun to do.  After performing, I love being in the studio and recording and I just felt very lucky to have so many of my friends and peers that I really look up to as musicians come in and add their part to the album.

Did you record Bittersweet Batch in Boston?

J: Yeah, in Allston.  It’s certainly opened a lot of doors that I’d never expected that could’ve been opened after recording it.

In terms of playing live and being in the studio, what do you love about both processes?  How does your music change between the two settings?

J: My approach to recording in the studio would be to capture as much of the live energy as possible.  The pro for the live show is obviously the audience, and the energy that’s created between the performer and the audience and how the two play off each other.  I try not to track vocals or anything; none of those tracks on Bittersweet Batch were more than one or two takes. I’ve never recorded with a live studio audience, so I like to capture a little bit of that energy because I think that’s one of the strengths of my band is the energy we create in a live setting.  I’ll go back and try to utilize the studio for the instrument that it is in order to make the song or the album the best of what it can be.

Are there any songs in your catalog that you feel particularly connected to?

J: Ohhh, I don’t know…

I know it’s kind of like asking you to choose between children.

J: Completely!  Being so connected to the material from the very beginning, it’s very much for me depending on how I might be feeling that night.  I might not want to play a certain song.

What about your side project with Christian McNeill and a whole roster of other musicians, the Sea Monsters?  Do you and Christian collaborate when it comes to writing?

J: We talk about our respective material and the role it could take on in Sea Monsters and I guess the parameters of what it could be, but for the most part of what we do, he does his stuff and I do mine.  That’s how it’s always been, ever since we started the band.

Now, with your Lizard Lounge residency, are you going to play songs from the Sea Monsters?

J: Nope, not necessarily.  I mean, there’s definitely a pretty big overlap, though I’ll play my songs differently with the Sea Monsters.  There’s more attention to detail when I’m playing them myself because we work out arrangements but with the Sea Monsters we don’t really rehearse anything, we just show up every week.  There’s difference in arrangements, but there are certain songs that, like, “Waves”, for example, that’s something that was a concept I was playing with in my head and I more or less wrote the song with the Sea Monsters in mind.

In terms of stuff you’re working on now, are you recording presently?

J: I recorded some stuff a couple of weeks back for a 7” 45 and a couple of songs that’ll be on the next album.  I’m gonna have a Christmas song coming out this year, too.  It’ll be digital and on a Christmas compilation.

Who would you list as your influences?

J: How much time do we have?  I mean, I listen to just about everything and I appreciate a bunch of different things, but mostly older R&B and soul music is the stuff I’m really into.  Sam Cooke is the top for me, as is Etta James.

Opening for Etta James a couple of months ago must’ve been a dream come true, then!

J: It was surreal.  It’s probably something I’ll never forget and I’ll never get sick of talking about it.  I mean, plain and simple: If I had the opportunity to pick anybody in the entire world who’s still alive to play in front of, it would be Etta James.  It was at the House of Blues, which is an incredible room.  It was just a tremendous opportunity for me and the band played great and the crowd received us very well.

In terms of people you would like to collaborate with in the future: Are there any acts in Boston that stick out as artists you’d love to work with?

J: I hope I get the opportunity to collaborate with lots of different people!

Rachael Price mentioned you, when asked a similar question.

J: Oh, that’s good because I was about to say her.  She’s definitely my favorite singer.  I love singing with Rachael.  It’s the best.  So, yeah, hopefully I’ll get to collaborate with her.

Give me some other people that you love billing with in Boston.

J: Well, definitely Lake Street Dive, Tim Gearan is right up there, Dwight and Nicole, Dennis Brennan… It’s definitely a special thing going on here and it has been that way, and I think you can find a really wonderful community here in Boston that you can’t find in other cities at all. The music scene in Boston is fertile here because the community really fosters that creativity.  Talent aside, there’s a kind of a familiar, communal aspect that just really supports that talent even further and contributes to why I think the music scene is great around here.

We have all these great musical conservatories and schools here in Boston, like Berklee and the New England Conservatory of Music.  Do you think these programs contribute to the community you’re describing?

J: A small percentage.  I think that’s just part of it.  I mean, there’s always a new crop of musicians, if you will, which doesn’t hurt at all.  It’s really… I don’t know, I think I tend to separate the Cambridge/Somerville scene from the Boston scene.

How do shows differ for you, between Boston and Cambridge and Somerville?

J: It’s funny sometimes how much of a journey it is for some people to make the trek across the river!  Obviously, Jamaica Plain has some cool stuff going on, as does Allston, but I just like it over here.

We like it over here, too.  So, you’ve toured really extensively this past year…

J: Yeah, I was in Amsterdam in April and then I was all over the place in Europe in June, and then I was in Italy for a week a couple of weeks ago, and then I’m heading back to Europe in September.

Since Bittersweet Batch came out you’ve done a lot of travel.  How does Boston differ from other destinations you’ve played abroad, or even just elsewhere in the States?

J: It’s hard for me to measure in the sense that Boston is where I have the biggest draw for people to come see me, and it’s kind of my hometown, so playing here is different than playing other cities, obviously.

Do you have any cities that stick out for you as places you loved?

J: Amsterdam is one of the greatest cities I’ve ever been to, reputation aside.  (Laughs) It’s just such an amazing city and I got to play an amazing venue there called the Paradiso, which is one of the best venues in Amsterdam.  A distribution deal with a record company based in the Netherlands is what brought me over there, so hopefully I can keep going back.  I was kind of recognized over there from the promotion of the CD and from them hearing my songs on the radio, which is strange enough.  It’s a cool kind of “weird”.  They’re playing your music on the radio, which is cool, you know?  I don’t always like hearing myself, though. (Laughs)  I’ll always be my own worst critic.

Do your songs change much between the record release and then playing your songs live after the album’s been out?

J: I wouldn’t say they do, extensively.  A good amount of them are played differently live and suddenly evolve in various ways, in that setting.  Some of them are arranged differently live, and that could come from listening to them or being like, “Oh!  It would be cool if we did this like this.”  I’ve performed a lot of it solo, so the context in which I’m playing has affected my choice of songs in a set.  A song like “Still Here”, for example: That wouldn’t be a song I’d play often with a band at all.  If it’s a big huge room of people I won’t play that song.

With the Sea Monsters, are you guys going to be recording anytime soon?

J: Maybe at some point.  We don’t have any current plans to.  I love playing with the Sea Monsters and I always have, but it’s very much so a side-project for me and not my top priority.

Yeah, I think that’s the best part of the Sea Monsters, the fact that you all have very different things going on and I think that you all contribute such a positive vibe to the project.

J: It’s nice when you can see a band having fun onstage, you know?  I feel like it translates to the crowd.

How are the songs you’re recording now a departure from the material you’ve released on Bittersweet Batch?

J: I’m not sure it’s a departure so much as an extension, maybe.  It’s very much so rooted in the same ideas as far as the sound and instrumentation of it.  The material is obviously different, and hopefully it’ll be kind of pushing things a little further on the next record.  It’s still at the point where I have more than enough material; it’s just gotta be the right material.  I need to finish up a few songs.  I’ve been working a lot on that.

Favorite venues in Boston: What do you got?

J: The Lizard Lounge is probably my favorite and that’s very much why we’re doing this residency there this month.  I just like playing there!  I did a residency there during the month of June last year, and they were looking to do another one, so I booked out August.  I think I like playing the Lizard Lounge for the same reasons I like seeing a show there.  Just the environment of it being such an intimate setting like that, you’re able to turn it into a listening room if you really want to and play really quiet, or you can play much louder, and I think it’s that the whole crowd is just there about to engulf you.  It’s certainly appreciated more after I’ve played really big stages where there are lots and lots of people but you’re very much removed from the crowd in that setting, you know?  The idea of the energy flowing back and forth between the artist and the audience – I mean, I’m trying to engage the audience and engage individual members of it as much as I possibly can, and the setting at the Lizard Lounge is ideal for that sort of thing.

I feel like the Lizard Lounge is a universal venue in Boston that’s loved by Boston bands and artists who specialize in every genre.  Are there any other venues you fancy?

J: I like Toad, too; I guess it depends on the show.  I’ve played Club Passim a number of times and I’m doing a big show there in November.  The House of Blues is a pretty amazing place to play, though I can’t say I’ve played it regularly.  I’ll be playing there on October 15 opening for Al Green.  I’m really psyched about that.  Atwood’s is a great place to play, too.

How do you feel about the politics existing between club owners and musicians in Boston?

J: It depends on the bar.  We’re all very lucky to have some of these places, especially in Cambridge and Somerville.

Do you feel like these venues that we’ve talked about are especially friendly to musicians?

J: The music itself holds a lot of weight, I think.  That’s not to say that it doesn’t elsewhere, but there are definitely places like that in Boston.

The Boston vs. New York debate is interesting, too, and there are a lot of musicians that you play with that bounce back and forth between the two or that will be moving there soon.  What are your thoughts on playing in both cities?

J: There’s no other place like New York to play.  The energy there is just amazing.  It can be a weird place to play, though, as far as building an audience goes and getting a crowd of people to come out to see you.  I feel like the Boston music community is more distinct than that in New York and I don’t think the community in New York is as supportive.

Do you have any crazy stories for us from your time on tour?  Any big adventures occur abroad for Jesse Dee?  I mean, do you remember Amsterdam?

J: (Laughs) I do remember Amsterdam.  I’m sure there’s been all kinds of stuff.  I stayed up late a few times.

Back in June, I found myself sitting underneath the vast ceiling of the Armory Center of the Arts in Somerville completely and utterly intoxicated with the swells and soaring of Nicole Nelson and Dwight Richter’s voices.  As Dwight and Nicole played to the sounds of each other’s resounding heartbeats during the first Somerville Jazz & Blues Festival, I and the rest of the audience could sense that the connection between the dynamic “rock and soul” duo was one that can only exist between two people whose incredible talents are matched by their deep appreciation, creatively and affectionately, for each other.  Dwight and Nicole have been playing with each other for years, but the couple onstage and off haven’t always been rocking out to the minimalist drive behind their guitar and tambourine driven side by side: Both musicians met while holding residencies at various jazz and blues bars in Boston, and both credit Boston as being the city in which they honed their craft and built their fan base.

Since moving to New York a few years ago and exploring the multitude of musical opportunities provided by Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs, Dwight and Nicole have recently left the Big Apple for Boston (Brookline, to be precise) in order to record a follow-up to 2007’s self-titled album.  They’ve been playing some of their favorite haunts in the city throughout the summer as well, including Precinct, the Lizard Lounge and numerous festivals and venues along the North Shore while billing with assorted artists/friends in the area including Jesse Dee, the Mieka Canon and the Sea Monsters.  With tambourine and Flying-V guitar in hand, Dwight and Nicole will continue to appease their fans from their stomping ground until the finishing touches are put on their forthcoming disc, so be sure to catch them in action at the most intimate acoustic, blues and jazz spots in Somerville and Cambridge while you can.

-Hilary Hughes

OPENING ACT: DWIGHT AND NICOLE AND THE TEAPARTY TEN

What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?

Dwight: Honey Smax, or Large Frosted Mini Wheats.

Nicole: Captain Crunch with Crunchberries.

Who would you rather punch in the face: Long Duk Dong from “Sixteen Candles” or Mouth from “The Goonies?”

N: Mouth.

D: Yeah, Mouth.  I like the Cyndi Lauper song from that movie.

If you were a kitchen appliance, what would you be?

D: Toaster oven.

N: I’d be a standing mixer.  Those things are AWESOME.

You go to bed, you wake up, you go to brush your teeth… and you realize that you’ve morphed into one of Jim Henson’s Muppets overnight.  Which Muppet are you?

D: Animal!

N: I don’t know! I love Miss Piggy.  She was probably the first Muppet I wanted to be as a kid.  I love them all, though.

After a raucous night out, you wake up at some point the next day and you realize that in your fit of crazy you got inked.  What tattoo did you wake up with?

N: Some big ridiculous rainbow and clouds.  Something astral.  I have a tattoo with stars already.

D: I’d probably have “Nicole” on my neck or something.

N: [Gasps] We’re getting you drunk!  Drink up!  (Laughs)

Would you rather be a rodeo clown or a sumo wrestler?

N: Sumo wrestler.  I like the thong. (Laughs)

D: Sumo wrestler.  The rodeo clowns are brave, but…

If you were a particular kind of cheese, what kind of cheese would you be?

N: Oh, they’re all good!  I’ve never met a cheese I don’t like.  I’d be Brie.

D: Pepperjack.

If you were a particular style of facial hair, what style facial hair would you be?

N: I would definitely be mutton chops.

D: I’d probably be a goatee, I wear one every once in awhile.  Not a great answer, either.

What’s your quintessential “I’M GONNA DANCE AROUND MY APARTMENT IN MY UNDERWEAR AND LOVE LIFE!” song?

N: “Borderline” by Madonna!

D: “Hungry Heart”, by Bruce Springsteen.

What’s your favorite word?

N: Raw.

D: Breathing.  Probably breathing, right now.

THE MAIN EVENT: THE DWIGHT AND NICOLE TPB INTERVIEW

So, tell us the back-story of Dwight and Nicole.

Dwight: All right!  We lived in Boston.  I lived here for four years and Nicole lived here for about the same around nine years ago, and we each had bands in town, the Dwight Richards Band and the Nicole Nelson Band, and we each had a residency here.  Her’s was at the Times Pub.

Nicole: I played a lot of blues; he played a lot of original stuff.  I played mostly blues; it was a blues jam.  He used to come and sit in on my shows, and some of the people who were here tonight, like John Aruda, he’d come down a lot.  Afterwards there were lots of dance parties in the streets outside of the Cantab [Lounge] and after-parties. (Laughs)

D: I was working construction at the time, and then I’d get off a work gig, then we’d go see her, we’d eat dinner and then we’d go to my gig later.  The first time we sang together was on a tune called “Move Right” which I wrote ages ago, she came up and sang with me, and we just always had a really good chemistry together.

N: Yeah, it’s very familial.  He felt like a long-lost boy from kindergarten and we loved each other and lost each other and found each other again.  It’s a really beautiful thing.  We both moved to New York around the same time and we started playing a little bit together, but mostly we each had our own gigs.  We’d just sit in, because it was like, “Oh! Dwight from Boston’s here!  Get up and sing with me!” Or I’d get up and sing with him, and then that turned into a thing.  People were like, “Do you have a CD of the two of you, together? Because these harmonies…” and we were like “Oh, no! But you can buy each of our albums-“ and they were like “Wait. No.”

Liiiike maybe something should happen.

N: (laughs) Yeah!

D: So, we’re in Brooklyn where she grew up, incidentally, and I grew up in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and we were low on money, so we decided to book a few shows and we got some gigs as a duo, and Nicole’s on the tambourine –

N: -I had never played tambourine before-

D: -And it just caught on.  We both feel the beat the same way.  We both sort of- I guess you’d say we compliment each other, and we just had a thing that really took on.

N: It did.

D: We recorded an EP at Club 39 in Sudbury a few years ago.

N: One day we just went in and played the songs, and we just sat down and made a five song CD in five hours.   We kind of just had to talk what we got, but we wanted to make something really beautiful.  We got lucky.  Phil, who played guitar tonight, he has a beautiful studio in Brookline and it’s called Rear Window Studio and it’s UNBELIEVABLE.  So, he was just like, “Come stay at my house and record.”

D: I think he recorded Godsmack’s record.  Phil basically dug a pit in his basement and the ceilings are twenty feet high, almost 10,000 pounds suspended by spring, so when music hits it the whole room gives.

N: We’re thinking of doing our record release at the Somerville Theatre, because we’ve got a good thing going in Somerville, but this place [the Armory] is awesome!

D: Yeah, it’s a very cool room.

N: So, yeah, that’s how we got our thing together.  Just sort of organically playing duos.

D: I’d play guitar and she’d play tambourine and we’ve developed this really cool thing as a duo, and now we’re gonna go and play with a band, a larger group.

N: Not to sound strange, but performing is a very spiritual thing for me.  It feeds me.  That conversation between the audience and us is this thing that bounces back and forth.

You can absolutely say that.  And I’m gonna blow up your spot a little bit: When we were watching you earlier, we were like, “That girl can work a tambourine like nobody we’ve ever seen before!”  The connection between you two was very strong in the sense that you were playing to her heartbeat.  That absolutely comes across to your audience.

D: We’ve been friends for about ten years and we’ve been together for almost five, and it’s so nice to be able to reaffirm that onstage a lot.  It’s cool to be able to go onstage and do our thing.

Can you take us through the creative process behind Dwight and Nicole’s music?

D: We both bring songs to the table, so it’s very collaborative.

N: I have to be in a clear-minded state in order to be creative.  When things get jumbled because of stress or confusion, I have to try to clear my head in order to feel that thing where you’re focused and creative.  It’s not easy for me at all.  I’m always critical of what’s around me.  I want it to be perfect and I want it to be very precise, I want it to have that great point, so I tend to throw things out before they’re done.  He’s the complete opposite; he’s like, “Keep going! Keep going!” and I’ll be working on a song all day, and he’s like “Work on it all year! It’s a rough draft, keep drafting!”  He’s constantly writing and coming up with ideas and riffs and tunes.  For me, it’s always been hard but it’s getting easier and I’m learning my triggers.  I know how to just clear my mind and go for a walk and sit and do that kind of thing so I can be creative.  Dwight has taught me how to get through all that stuff.

D: Thank you!  Going back ten years the Aruda brothers and I had a group that would go around town playing all over the place and that’s actually how those guys got into the original scene.  We built in a big following.  So Johnston, who plays with Club D’Elf, we released two records together, and I got going with the creative stuff with that project and just kept up with that.  This project is so cool because we’re together, she can write songs, and I can write songs, and I can talk to …. So, yeah, this thing is like a, we have a creative house that we can bring stuff into and write stuff together and do whatever, and it’s like, all under our little roof and it’s cool, you know?  The original music thing, writing tunes has always been my passion, it’s my thing, and then with her, we’re doing it.  It’s really cool.  We’re very lucky to be where we are right now.

N: And he can rap, too! (Laughs) He can freestyle.  Every little thing he can pull inspiration from!  He can start talking about your scarf and your eyes and he can turn everything into a rhyme.

Can you give us one about those Donutties on the table over there, on the spot?

D: No!  I wish I… if I ate all of those I’d have a heart attack with that round one, in a black stack of, lovely powdered sugar treats, what would be great with a whole table of eats, would be luscious donutties, perhaps some ice cream and cereal, too, but more than anything, I’d like to share… a donuttie with you.

That was great.

D: See, it’s just things to make her laugh and make our life fun.  It’s just funny ridiculousness.  So, yeah, we like to write songs.  Our influences would be EVERYTHING.  We love Michael Jackson, we love Dolly Parton, we love the Beach Boys, we love Van Halen, we love Nirvana, Black Sabbath, B.B. King, Patsy Cline, Merle Travis, Ricky Lee Jones, Solomon Burke, Sam Cooke, Jimmy Smith, Bill Hailley and the Comets, the Rolling Stones…

What about Boston bands, maybe some current local acts?

D: We like The Sea Monsters, Mieka Pauley-

N: Yeah!  She’s like my favorite singer.  You know Eva Cassidy?

Yeah.

N: If Eva Cassidy was like, rock n’ roll like Joan Jett, she’d be Mieka Pauley.  She’s amazing and writes songs and plays guitar, she’s also one of our dear friends.

D: Yeah, and Jesse Dee.  Jesse Dee’s our BOY!

[Editor’s Note: Jesse happened to be walking through the backstage area in the basement of the Armory just as he was mentioned.  Dee, upon hearing this, beamed.]

D: That’s my guy!  I love his music, I love his painting, and I love his spirit.  He’s another one of our favorites around town.  We also love Ryan Montbleu, he’s a great guy.  There are so many original songwriters here that are good.  When we moved to New York, and we’ve been there for about four or five years, I came back here and there was an unbelievable singer/songwriter scene.  Jesse, and Christian McNeill, and Danielle Miraglia… and Four Piece Suit, too!

N: Yeah!  They did all the music for Sex and the City for the first three years.  I’m gonna segue into the whole Boston thing.  The Boston music scene is very family-like:  It’s a lot of friends getting together, there are a lot of late night jams and stuff.  New York has this really ridiculous level that comes there and just any night of the week you go out in New York, any little whole in the wall, you can go and see some music.  I mean, first of all, Eric Clapton might walk in, that kind of stuff happens all the time.  The other thing is somebody just flew in, like the hottest band from Belgium or something, and they’re playing there for like, a bucket or something.

D: James Hudger!  I saw James Hudger’s first show in America.  Do you know him?

The name sounds vaguely familiar. I would probably recognize his stuff if you pla-

[Dwight and Nicole then break into song, on the couch, Nicole’s clapping and they’re both harmonizing and I’m sitting on my chair with my mouth gaping open like a four-year-old with a chronic sweet tooth who just walked into a candy store.]

D: I mean, Norah Jones, even, everyone’s out on the scene and around.  The people who are famous, Moby and those people, they hang in the scene and proliferate the buzz or whatever it is.  And everything is made up of slots, so you’ll have five bands a night- Like, we’ll take the Lower East Side, there’s like ten clubs, which means five slots each on any given night.  You could see fifty shows a night.  Here, people can actually have two or three hours to themselves to develop something like The Sea Monsters, to develop a project.  It’s not like showcases for labels, necessarily, and New York is much more a Mecca for that, and there’s a million great artists there, too, but Boston, I mean, it’s more relaxed in that area and can give someone who would be overwhelmed by New York a chance to develop their sound and their maturity as an artist, and the community here is amazing,

N: That’s what I love about here, besides the fact that it’s just gorgeous, too, it’s a beautiful city.  It’s a beautiful place to exist in with all this water and these parks and the river and all that.  There is a family kind of vibe here.  We’ll hang out with friends, like all these guys, and we’ll all jam for five or ten in the morning.  There are a lot of clubs that support that kind of thing, and they’re dwindling and it’s sad, especially the blues scene, because we came up in that and all those clubs are gone.  The House of Blues in Cambridge is gone-

D: The Yard Rock-

N: We both loved it here.  I came up in this town.

D: I love Boston, I love the musicians here, and I love people like you guys who are fiends for music.

N: And the school scene here drives that so much.  I think that so many young people are hungry for creative energy.

D: Christian [McNeill] was saying that he started out playing Matt Murphy’s or something, and just getting people interested at a little place like that.  Same thing with Tim Gearan at Toad, people get sucked in.  To bring back the blues thing we were talking about, we saw the last movement of that.  I’m talking The Yard Rock, the original House of Blues, the Cantab Lounge was like, the most unbelievable place ten years ago.  When I moved here, it was old, old cats doing their tunes, and it was absolutely insane.  You’d have every type of person there singing songs.

You have a really special place on that stretch of Mass Ave in Central Square, between the Cantab Lounge and TT’s and the Middle East…

N: Yeah!  I love the Boston scene for having those heavy roots in the blues and jazz scene.  Everything came out of that stuff, and there’s a great rock scene, too.  Boston has just all these great music scenes where you can just hang.  You can hang in New York, too, but everybody’s working all night in these spots all over the place.

I think that the fact that there aren’t really 18+ venues in Boston is a problem, too – you have a lot more of those in New York.

D: Yeah, I don’t like that at all.

N: That’s awful!  When you have a good college following that cuts your audience way down.

D: For the amount of revenue it would generate, you should be able to find a staff that’s trained well enough to card people.

N: Plus, going out at that age was huge.  Going to see people when you’re in those formative stages of creativity, that’s how you learn!  You don’t learn from reading a book about music.

D: Yeah, that’s so true.  Those are defining years.

N: A show like tonight, for example, it was 18+.  I’m like, “Hey, why can’t it be 16+?”

We haven’t touched on challenges you guys have faced, either creatively speaking or even about the transition between here and New York.  How is it for you guys, being a couple that also happens to make music together? I’m sure it comes with a whole set of difficulties!

N: It does, but we’re surprisingly well-suited for it.  We have a really, really good thing.  For me, we wear all these different hats, and sometimes we’re business, and sometimes we’re lovers, and sometimes we’re friends, and sometimes we’re maniacs who are trying to kill each other!  Well, not maniacs (laughs).  We’re like, in business mode half the time, and the challenge from that, while we do work really well together in all the different areas, we’re still always together, so we’ll be in business mode at home and dates happen less and less when we get busier-

D: I take you out on dates!  You’re crazy!  We went out dancing last week!

N: (Laughs) I know!  That’s true.  So, that’s where we found the biggest challenge, to keep all these things growing all the time and healthy and moving forward.  The New York/Boston thing?  They both have their challenges.  Down falls and great things about them?  I think our feelings about both cities are pretty positive, and they’re just different.

D: We suffered the financial thing by doing original music.

N: Yeah, but it’s worth it!  When we switched into doing original stuff, all of a sudden I switched and was doing solo stuff with a guitar, and people were used to seeing me with a big band and horns and a gown, and people were like, “What’s this? What happened?”  It’s worth it, to get to what it is that I really have to say.  Everything that Etta James already did, I’m not going to do it better, so I need to do my thing!  I guess that’s a challenge.

D: It’s a challenge going into Club Passim with a full-length beard and not scaring the crowd away! (Laughs)

So, what’s next for you guys?  You mentioned that you’ve been recording your album and that you’re excited to play in front of people again.  What was your performance tonight like, how did it feel?

D: It was so great to be with you guys.  It was fucking awesome.  It’s been a long time.  It feels so good to go back playing gigs.  We’ve worked so hard on this record and when the record comes out, we’re gonna do that whole push that everyone talks about doing with a new record.  We’ve built up a very good thing, and then we’re gonna do the thing and hit the road.  The great Boston musician Marty Blue is going to be hitting the road with us too, he plays with Dennis Brennan sometimes.  Dennis Brennan, too, he’s one of the greatest people.

N: Very rarely do I feel the whole, you know, “I don’t wanna follow that!”  But going on after Dennis Brennan?  His band is ridiculous, and I’ve definitely felt that when we’ve played with him before.

D: Yeah, the song that made us feel that way was Charles Browns “Fool’s Paradise”.  That was the tune.  Dennis is awesome.

Can we talk about the songs on the new record?  How is this a departure from previous material we’ve heard from Dwight and Nicole?

N: I think it dives a lot deeper.  With the blues and jazz and folk stuff, we were in the ten-foot deep section before, and now we’re like, in the center of the earth.  Everything is just a direct connection between what we’re hearing.  We’re so psyched.

Is that “My Hell is Burnin’ for You” song on the new record?

D: Yeah!

Yeah, that song really hit us.  Hard.

N: It stands out?  It does for me too!  I wish we could play you some new stuff…

D: (Looking around the room) Does anybody have a guitar?  Seriously?

N: We can after-hang, maybe!

(Editor’s note: This is when I became smitten with Dwight and Nicole, and wanted to become best friends with them.)

What kind of journey has it taken to get to this point, lyrically and musically, for these delving deeper new songs you’re doing?

D: Production wise, too, we’re doing a lot of different sounds and a lot of different styles.  We have this tune that we did as a duo, a song that she wrote for her grandma, and now it sounds orchestral.  It sounds bigger, and fuller, and the potential of the song has come out more because there’s more people involved musically, more musicians, more production things-

N: When I say that this record goes deeper, too, I mean that we are diving deeper into what it is that, pulling out every little influence. For me, I’ve always been like, “Well, I’m singing blues, so I’m going to sing blues”, but I think of the blues style of singing or jazz standards, and that’s changed since I’ve gotten older and that’s what I’ve been looking for.  The reason why I never did a record is because I felt, before, that I had nothing to say that hadn’t already been said.  It’s cool for me to say something new.  If you’re going to say something, say something new; Otherwise, it’s just noise.  We’ve been diving into all of those things, so you’ll hear a little Sheena Easton in there, and you’ll hear all this other stuff, and that’s all part of me so you have to dive in and get it and let it come out and get your own voice that way.  For me, that’s what it is: Not trying to sing a certain style or try to do a song justice, which is what I used to kind of do, but now, I’m not gonna think about anything and whatever comes out comes out.

Let’s talk about the Boston crowd and Dwight and Nicole’s Boston fans.  How is your relationship with them different than your audiences in other cities?  Does it go back to the familial nature of the singer/songwriter scene in Boston?

N: I feel like that the people who are working in New York and living in New York are doing really well, and it’s ridiculous to try to exist there as a musician professionally and that’s all you do, so the guys who are on a really high level are all the musicians who are on Saturday Night Live and the Letterman Band and they’re totally like that, too.  New York has this influx of all these other people all the time, so you get this sense of, “Holy Shit.”

D: Boston is our highest drawing city, so we do big publicity pushes for our shows here.  Every show counts and it doesn’t make a difference, but in New York, we’re smaller, so it’s cool to have more people in Boston and it makes our shows here bigger events.

N: I feel like there’s another difference too where I feel like Boston- like, in New York, people want new stuff, and that changed me for the better as an artist, because when I got there people didn’t want to hear covers of somebody else’s stuff at all.  They wanted us to just be ourselves.  In Boston I feel that there’s such an appreciation for the roots of the scene here, where people want to hear the jazz tradition and they like the tradition and want to hear standards.  The city, to me, feels very heavy with a lot of tradition, and people take it very seriously and respect it.  If you play old blues, people love it.

Bridget Kearney and Rachael Price of Lake Street Dive.  Photo: Jessie Rogers

The first time I saw Lake Street Dive perform was in the murky days of early spring this year and, due to the sardine can-like conditions of the crowded room at the Lizard Lounge that night, I was forced to spend the show peeking my head out from behind one of the concrete reinforcement pillars in the basement bar.  Normally, I would’ve been pissed: I’m small enough in stature that most people can push me around in order to get a better look at those performing on Lizard’s well-worn oriental-carpeted stage, but  I was too busy gawking at bassist Bridget Kearney and drummer Michael Calabrese as they owned downbeats and tripped over complex rhythms to care, as  I could see them fine if I leaned to the left just so from behind my pillar post.  Even though Rachael Price, velvet-voiced vocal powerhouse and Lake Street Dive’s lead singer, and Mike Olson, Lake Street Dive’s Boy Friday with his trumpet and guitar playing skills, were completely out of my sightline, I left the Lizard Lounge completely uplifted and enthralled with the contagious energy the blues/jazz/”free country” foursome produced through song.  I didn’t need to see all four of them in action to know they were legit: I knew then that their sound is cohesive and indicative of the skill and time that’s gone into making Lake Street Dive a Boston band to watch.

Fast forward to an equally dreary Sunday in June: Boston wouldn’t let up with the storm clouds for the first part of this summer, and Alipio and I found ourselves knocking on the front door of a house in Jamaica Plain where Lake Street Dive was practicing before their show at Toad scheduled for that evening.  What ensued was a hilarious hour chock full’ o dirt on the creative process that drives the foursome who met while honing their vocal/percussive/otherwise musical skills at the New England Conservatory of Music, as well as some silly fart games and a breakfast food they refer to as “bactopus.”  Lake Street Dive will be performing this Thursday night, August 6^th, at Club Passim, so be sure read on up and check them out as you don’t want to miss them before they hit the road in the fall.

-Hilary Hughes

Rachael Price.  Photo: Jessie Rogers

OPENING ACT: THE TEAPARTY 10

What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?

Mike Olson: Cocoa pebbles.

Mike Calabrese: Corn pops.

Rachael Price: Peanut Butter Puffins.

Bridget Kearney: Lucky Charms.  I’ll add that my favorite food is the breakfast sandwich, though.

MO: When the four of us wake up together…. (Uncomfortable silence) (Everyone laughs) Our go-to breakfast is “Bactopus”, which is Octopus Bacon, which is this super special bacon that we can get at Doctor Super Market, down the street.  The strips of bacon look like chromosomes but it’s like, an X of bacon.

MC: It looks like squid almost!

Who would you rather punch in the face: Long Duk Dong from “Sixteen Candles” or Mouth from “The Goonies?”

R, B: AWWWW!

MC: I could totally punch Mouth in the face.

R: I’ll go with Mouth, too.

MO: I would punch them both….

If you were a kitchen appliance, what would you be?

R: A WISK!

MC: That’s a utensil.

It still works out.

MO: Juicer!

MC: You don’t even have a juicer.

B: I’ll say coffee maker because it’s pretty much the only one I use.

MC: I’m gonna say coffee grinder.  I love that thing.

You go to bed, you wake up, you go to brush your teeth… and you realize that you’ve morphed into one of Jim Henson’s Muppets overnight.  Which Muppet are you?

R: Swedish Chef.

MO: Sweetums.

MC: What about characters from Labyrinth?  Ludo from Labyrinth.

B: I was thinking of you know, the Muppets in the MANAMINA? I’d be the dude with the little blowjob mouth.

MC, MO: ?!?!?!?!??!!

After a raucous night out, you wake up at some point the next day and you realize that in your fit of crazy you got inked.  What tattoo did you wake up with?

B: Lake Street Dive faces.  On my chest.

R: I’d get KITTENS.  KITTENS EVERYWHERE!

Like, Hampton Beach t-shirt style kittens?

R: Yeah! Like the kind you see on decorative cat plates.

MC: I have no idea.  It would be like… the word “bagel” or something.  It might be a bagel around my bellybutton, actually.

MO: I’d get all of your birthdays.

R, B, MC: Awwww!

Would you rather be a rodeo clown or a sumo wrestler?

MO: Sumo wrestler, because I’d get to be soooo fat.

R: I guess I’d be the rodeo clown.

B: Rodeo clown.

MC: Yeah, me too.

If you were a particular kind of cheese, what kind of cheese would you be?

MC: I identify with Muenster.

MO: Blue cheese.  It’s crumbly.

R: I would be cheddar.

B: you know those hotdogs with a little squirt of cheese that runs all the way through them?  I would be that, because it’s sometimes overlooked or made fun of and it’s not super classy but it really makes the hotdog.

If you were a particular style of facial hair, what style facial hair would you be?

B: I would be eyelashes.

R: That’s amazing.  That’s so nice.  I’d probably be eyebrows; eyebrows are nice, too.  I’m very expressive.

MC: I’d be a neckbeard.  A “turtleneck”, I guess.

MO: You know those people with Werewolf Disorder, where their whole face is covered in soft hair?  Siiiiick.  They’re always on [Jerry] Springer.

What’s your quintessential “I’M GONNA DANCE AROUND MY APARTMENT IN MY UNDERWEAR AND LOVE LIFE!” song?

R: That’s like, my whole childhood.

MO: The one with the fingersnaps… “Nothing Really Matters”, Lauryn Hill.

R: It’s either “Bad Mamma Jamma” or “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” by Simon and Garfunkel.

B: “I Want You Back”, Jackson 5.

MC: I would say “Dance To the Music”, by Sly and the Family Stone.

B: Nice.

What’s your favorite word?

R: You asked the wrong band!

MO: I recently discovered the word “bloviate”.

B: That’s so hard!  There are so many words!

MC: Bank.

R: Pants.  It’s definitely my favorite word.

Photo: Alipio Hernández

THE MAIN EVENT: THE LAKE STREET DIVE TPB INTERVIEW

Hey guys!

Lake Street Dive: Hello!

Let’s get some proper introductions and some names for the record.

Rachael: My name is Rachael Price, and I’m from Tennessee.

Bridget: Bridget Kearney, and I’m from Iowa.

Michael: Michael Calabrese, and I’m from Philadelphia.

Mike: Mike Olson, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Wow, y’all are from all over the place.  How did you wind up in Boston?

MO: We met in the jazz department of the New England Conservatory of Music, and we just sort of- it’s a sort of iconic story, I guess.  We didn’t start as a pop band like we are now, or at least that wasn’t the original thrust.  The original idea for the band was that we would play country music, we were gonna be a country band, but a free country band, but not as in “FREE COUNTRY! AMERICA! GO!” with big muscles and cars.  We were thinking more along the lines of free jazz, structureless, and it’s really big at the New England Conservatory, so we thought, “Hey! Free country!”

R: It wasn’t “we”, it was you. (Laughs)

MC: It was his child.

R: It was your baby.

MO: Well, sort of.  The reason that we stayed together was that after we played for awhile as a free country band and we were like, “This sucks!”, the reason why we didn’t disband there and then was because we would hang out and listen to Paul Simon and be like “Hey, I like this song too.”  We united ultimately over our love of old pop music, and that sort of became, after country music crumbled we used 60s pop to sort of build our sound back up.  Sorry If I’m not incredibly lucid, I’m on like, two hours of sleep from last night.

It’s cool, I’m going on four!

MO: (Laughs) All right.

Do any particular bands from 60s pop stick out as inspirations to you?

R: The Beatles.

MC: The Beatles, yeah.

MO: Joni Mitchell.

R: Anything by Paul Simon.

MC: MoTown.

R: Current bands?

MC: Wilco.

R: Just that one record, though.

MC: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Elliot Smith…?

MO: Sort of.

MC: In terms of songwriting, yeah.  I guess Fiona Apple, too.  I wrote one song based on her.  David Bowie.

Can you guys take me through your creative process and try to put the nature of it into words?  Is it collaborative or does someone head up the majority of the effort before the record comes out and in the studio?

B: It usually starts out with one songwriter and that person will write the chords, and the melody, and the lyrics.  Then, usually make some kind of demo, whether it’s just a tape recorder and a guitar and them singing, or a Garage Band demo, and that’s a good way to like, really, for one person to get their vision as far as they can get it, as true to the way that they originally heard the song, to have everyone understand that, you know?  Beyond that, it’s very collaborative.  Once we bring in the song, and we sit around playing it together, usually- we were now just learning a new tune of Mike’s, and he sent us a demo of himself playing guitar and singing on it, and then we sat around and Rachael was kind of singing through it and thinking of hits, like, some places in the guitar part where it’d be good for- Sometimes, if the song is just chords and melody, it’s lacking a certain, I don’t know, cohesiveness or shape.  It lacks a shape if its kind of flat and strummy, so that part of it we do a lot together, and we think of where we’re gonna add background vocals and where the parts are gonna be and where we’re gonna have the drums drop out for a chorus, like that part of it is where-

MO: I think that’s where our jazz background really helps too, because we’re very improvisation-minded, just keeping it mind that it sort of goes where it needs to go.  When I make a demo that has parts and arrangements and things, more often than not we wind up abandoning them for something that feels more organic in rehearsal because there’s sort of no way of knowing how it’s gonna end up, especially if we do a classic quartet without a guitar.  I play the trumpet and he plays drums.

R: “Classic quartet”, that’s our own phrase that we use in the band for when we play…  We have a guitar in the band now, but initially it was just trumpet, bass, voice and drums.  There was no…

MC: Our creative process also includes a lot of ice cream.  And Doritos.

Got any favorite flavors of ice cream?

MC: Mint chocolate chip is our favorite.

R: Actually, I think our first couple of years were mostly snacking.

B: More snacking than rehearsing.

MC: It was only until recently that I actually played a drum set during rehearsal.  Usually I’d just play on a table.

Is it the same way in the studio?  Do you guys record in Massachusetts?

R: Yeah.  The last two we’ve done have been recorded in Massachusetts and it’s been pretty similar.  Both times we’ve gone in sort of with an idea of what we wanted because our time in the actual studio was short.  Our last record was a lot of brainstorming in the studio.

MC: In the weeks ahead of it we would assign arranging duties to people and created arrangements and focused on…

B: We augmented the album with a lot of different horn parts and keyboard parts that we don’t do live, so we didn’t have a chance to play a bunch of shows with this large ensemble and just let it work itself out so we had to be much more prepared to have the piano player come in and be like, “This is your part! Play it!”

MO: We also don’t have the flexibility because we’re not signed or fabulously wealthy.  We sort of have to know the tunes front to back.  We don’t have the flexibility that a lot of bands do to be like, “Hey man, I have this new tune, let’s figure this out in the studio and build it up.”  We do a lot of tracking live, and we try to do as much in one take as possible.  Most improvising is done in one take.

MC: We never opened up solo or anything like that.

MO: We do if there’s like, if I’m playing guitar on a tune and I have to go back and record a trumpet solo or something.  We don’t paste together solos so that it’s perfect, you know?

B: Except for in one case…

MO: Except for in one case, with this one guitar solo.  It’s because I’m the worst guitar player ever.

MC: He’s gotten a lot better.

When you look back at your discography are there any songs that you feel particularly connected to? What are your favorite Lake Street Dive songs?

MO: Well, we like to play, and we have played consistently from early on, “Sometimes When I’m Drunk”, which is not from Promises, Promises.   It’s from the other one.  “Sometimes When I’m Drunk” is the reason we are a band, because it won a big major award and it provided the money for our first tour and our first album.  I remember the first night on the road with that first tour, I was like, “Why are we doing this? We suck!  This is the worst band I’ve ever played in!”

R: OW!

MO: No lies between us guys.  Only truth.  But by the end of that road trip and by the end of that recording process I was like, “I LOVE THIS BAND.  THIS IS THE BEST BAND I’VE EVER PLAYED WITH!”  If it hadn’t been for that song, Bridget’s song, winning the John Lennon Songwriting Award, we wouldn’t have had the bread to do all that and who knows where we’d be.

MC: We still play it because it’s a good song, and the music represents us.  We also play “Panhandling Song” a lot because it’s a crowd pleaser.

Yeah!  I love that one!  Bridget, your bass line in that is unbelievable.  I really enjoy that one.

R: Definitely the up-tempo songs stick out because they’re necessary for performances, and like, they’ll always be songs that’ll be harder to play on a regular basis live.  Like, Mike’s song, “Death on Pluto”, which is on promises, promises is one of my favorite songs.  We never get to play it live because it’s really somber.

B: One thing I was gonna say about “Panhandling Song” too is that that song in a sense defines an improvisational element in this band that we all really love.   That song, we always put it at the beginning of a set, though not necessarily first: It always gets the band going, because it gives us the chance to play something really funky but it also has parts that are, like, different every time.

MC: Yeah, super loose.

B: It can be a lot of different things.

MO: When we say “improvisational” we don’t just mean the featured solo.  Bridget makes up what she’s gonna do over a certain section and she may do something she’s never done that.

You can see that, when you guys are playing.  Is “Betty” another song that sticks out?  I saw you at Lizard Lounge this spring, and you were taking requests and somebody screamed “PLAY BETTY!” and you guys were like “YEEEAH!”

MC: Mike is never like that when it comes to that song!

MO: I HATE that song.

Really?!

MC: It’s the song that we’ve played for the longest consistently, and even though he hates it we force him to do it.

R: It’s generally our set closer or encore.  We never write it into a set.

MO: THAT’S the tune we had to cut and paste a solo on.

B: When we recorded our first album, Mikey had been playing guitar for something like a year and a half, maybe.

Do you feel like touring affects your creative process in the sense that you, like, seeing songs evolve and stuff, are there any examples like, you went around the country with it and you played it and it completely changed?  Are there specific songs that you can think of that sound very different before and after a tour?

MC: There are songs on the green album that I think we sort of wish we could go back and record that album.  There are songs on that album that we’ve played so many times, and I think each of us discovered more of what the song means at this point from just playing it a bunch, especially when you’re on tour and banging it out night after night, especially if it’s a crowd pleaser.  That happens a lot.  We learned a bunch of new songs that we were gonna put on the second album and then played them on tour and then got really used to playing them to work out the kinks and find the right tempos.

R: I think it happens bit by bit with every song.

MO: “Velvet Room” has become a lot funkier.  It used to be a slow jam back when we would rock out on it.

R: It used to be a slow folk song initially and now it’s like, a rockin’, r+b it.

MO: “Love to Food” has evolved a little bit because during one performance Rachael neglected to come in and Bridget made up a part that has stuck, and now we play it everytime.

R: Neglected is the right word.  It was very purposeful. (Laughs)

B: Another song that’s evolved is “I Make the Wrong Decisions”, which is off the green album.  (Laughs)

MO: It has evolved into nothingness.

B: Yeah, a Broadway-style duet was kind of made of it…

MO: And now we NEVER play it.

In terms of touring, can you guys take me through a couple of your more recent experiences?

MO: Well, we all gained a lot of weight because of the last road trip.  A lot of time in the car, tour bellies…

R: When was our last show out of town?  We tour over the summer.  We’re a super nerdy band.  I’ve found that we’re not rock star party people after talking to other bands.  I thought that we were because I don’t know anything.

B: I was like “OH MAN!  WE’RE STAYING UP SO LATE!”

MC: “WE ARE SO BADASS.”

MO: Like, waking up in strange apartments?  We don’t do that.

R: But we DO make farting noises, in the car.  That’s our tour life ritual.

So, you’ll be driving by someone passing on the road, and you’ll make a fart noise out the window…?

R: Yeah.  Exactly.

MC: If we have the window possibilities we’ll double-shot it.

MO: So we were touring one summer and there were tons of people out in the street after a show one night, and it was really beautiful, and Mike INSISTS on driving the entire time we’re on the road.  Our last road trip, we had seven cities we were trying to get back and forth from.  Like, Chicago to Bloomington and back to Chicago for the next night.  It’s really great, because Mike is FEARLESS when it comes to the farting song.

R: He’s a really good driver for the game, possibly the only one… And that’s about as wild as we get.

(Lake Street Dive cracks up.)

MC: So, that’s what we do.  We watch movies when we can.  We don’t do drugs.  We DO do badminton.  We bandercize.

So, what’s Lake Street Dive working on now?

R: We’re working on a couple of small tours, and that’s about it.

B: Basically, we have tours planned in August and September and October.  We pretty much every summer go out to the Midwest because Mike and I have connections there, Rachael has connections there-

MC: That’s why I drive, because I don’t. (Laughs)

B: In September, we’ll be going to the South for the first time.  We’ve never been down there as a band, which is where Rachael’s from.  We’re really excited about that.  In both cases we have one bigger festival or performance or outdoor concert that we base the tour around, and then we book shows from that.  We’re playing a festival in North Carolina, and then we’re going to Nashville and a bunch of other places.  October, we’re thinking East Coast Tour.

MO: We’re also nearing enough tunes for a third record, though we’re not quite there yet.

Is this material a departure from stuff you’ve previously done?

R: In some ways the material is a little poppier, but I think it’s more of a continuation than a departure.

MO: Mike and I were thinking that because we did such a production-heavy second record that we could do a more paired-down third record because there’s so much more with what we can do live there.  It’s mostly in terms of arrangements.  I think it’d be kind of cool too as we progress more into the pop world to address with very attentive tunes and paired-down jams.

MC: Mike and I have also done a good amount of home recording, he especially.  We’re sort of hoping to have a more cohesive song on the album as a whole because the first one is sort of all over the place and the second one was more connected, but maybe we’ll go for a concept sound.

MO: We also did an EP that we haven’t even discussed calling a Lake Street Dive record, even though it is this band.  There are no trumpet solos.

Let’s talk Boston:  What was it like coming here for music school?  How did the community help you grow as a musician?

R: Well, we found each other!  I would say that that’s the best possible experience in coming here in many ways, because the band and having such, such similar musical tastes, like, the same, so that’s been good.  The city has been great to us as a band, in terms of gigs and performances.  We’ve had a really good time booking shows here and in the last couple of years we can book them regularly, all the time, and we have nice crowds and have gained a good fan base.  It’s all positives.

MC: I think going to school in Boston was an awesome choice.  Boston is smaller, although it has a lot of young people, and it’s also very intelligent as a city and very open in terms of the type of music you can hear and go see that people make money doing, even as far as avant-garde jazz.  For that reason, I think it was easy for us to be here because chances are there was some group of individuals who was really going to like us, just because there’s a group of individuals who like all the stuff going on in Boston.  It’s not so huge and out of control that you can get washed to sea.

B: I think the scene we’ve been embraced by and become a part of is mostly the Cambridge singer/songwriter/folk scene, with places like Atwoods, Toad, Club Passim and Lizard Lounge.  Those were places that it took us awhile to catch on to, that they were even around.  First two or three years that I was living in Boston I was like, “Oh, there are no venues for jazz! There’s no where to play!”  And then all of a sudden through Miss Tess we discovered new places, and the crowds were great, and it was just so amazing that there were all these venues we didn’t know about that had these supportive audiences and cool bar owners, so that was something we caught onto and it was a good thing for us.

MO: One of our first gigs was in a bubble tea café.

R: Bridget just really liked bubble tea, and that’s how she got us a gig there.  (Laughs)  We were like, “Oh, really?  Bands play there?” and she was like “Welllll…. They have really good bubble tea!”  We’ve played the Middle East and things like that, but we feel more at home on the other side, I guess, just because it’s more like, we like playing in a place where we’re the band that night.  I know I do.  Playing a show where it’s like, “well, it’s just us for the next three hours!” as opposed to playing a show with five other bands.  It’s like a good way to work on your material and get your stuff together.

MC: With the indie scene in Boston I feel like you can’t play with the crowd as much, and we love doing that.  You don’t have to be this wall of sound.

You don’t have to buy earplugs to get the point, you mean.

MC: Yeah, exactly.

Do you have any particular favorite venues that you love?

R: I feel like Toad is our second home, we’ve played there regularly for the past two and a half, three years.  We did a residency and then played there pretty consistently.  Rarely have I seen a bad show at Toad.  There are always people who come out who’ve never been there or heard of us and they just decided to come out for the night.  I love Club Passim for the sound, it sounds really good.

B: I really love the Lizard Lounge.

R: Oh, I LOVE the Lizard Lounge!

B: It’s always really a good experience and the sound there is great.

MO: The reason why we don’t play certain venues isn’t necessarily because we’ve turned our nose up at it; there are some places that are true jazz clubs, and we’ve played them before, but the problem with genre specific venues is that we call ourselves, we know that we have jazz and folk influences and we know that we have all this stuff going on but it doesn’t always necessarily translate for purists.  We played a folk festival in Connecticut last summer, and some woman came up to us and was like, “You guys are NOT a folk band.  Why did you play this festival?” We were like “What’re you talking about? We love folk music.”  She was a little weird.  She also told Rachael never to wear pink.

What?!  I don’t understand why people feel the need to breed that kind of negativity.

MO: Right!  But I think that purists feel the need to hear bands that are very true to whatever it is they want.  Even though we know the jazz thing pretty damn well and it informs what we do, if we were to sit down and play for jazz purists, I think we would get a lukewarm response because we have so many rock and pop influences that that’s the reason why love Toad and Lizard Lounge because anything goes there and we don’t have to be a one genre band to be accepted at those venues.

Segueing into your fans in Boston: How is your relationship with them? The singer/songwriter scene you spoke about seems to be more familial than cliquey.

MC: We have characters here, and regulars for sure.  There’s like the bearded guy, John, who comes to every show at Toad, he’s always real jovial and always shows up.

MO: And he’ll give us constructive criticism, too.  He gives each one of us notes.

MC: Well, we also have Sing-Along Girl.  It took us awhile to start talking to her, but there’s this girl and she’ll be there with her boyfriend, and he’ll be nursing a beer and not really paying attention to us, but she’d be looking at us the entire night and just mouthing every single word that came out of Rachael’s mouth.  She’d come in before we started playing and split before we stopped.  She like, all of a sudden she was nervous.  We’re cool with Sing-Along Girl.

MO: There’s also a cast of men that just love the female element to this band.

R: I feel like there’s always a slew of four or five guys who are just watching Bridget being like, “DOOD. THAT CHICK’S PLAYIN’ BASS.  DOOD.  DO YOU SEE THAT CHICK PLAYIN’ BASS.”

I do gotta say, I haven’t seen a female upright-bass player in a long time.  There’s a novelty about you, girl!

B: (Laughs)

R: There are a few upright-bass players that are girls, but none of them are as good as Bridget.

B: There’s a really nice thing about the community of musicians in the singer/songwriter scene, and there’s a lot of collaboration and support.  People go out to each other’s shows, and somehow it’s never been competitive at all.  People do shows together, and that’s one great thing about Lizard Lounge is that you frequently invite friends to play with you there.

R: Mike (Calabrese) and I play in a band with Miss Tess-

That’s the Sweet and Lo-Down, right?

R: Yeah.  There’s so much love!

Are you going to work with Jesse Dee in the future?

R: We haven’t planned anything official but we’ve played shows with Jesse a couple of times.  We’re doing a show with him soon, and hopefully we’ll do more.

MC: Here in Boston, we’ve been able to cultivate and avoid getting jaded or over-covered.

R: Boston has been a really great place to be a band, cultivate a sound, get a crowd and see how people react.

MC: We can be free here, and it’s cool.

B: I live in New York now, and I think that these clubs that we’re talking about, where you can just go and be the event and play for awhile, I think that’s something really special about Boston and it’s not as present in New York because the rock clubs there, you play for tips and there’s a band every hour over the course of seven hours.

MC: You need a product in other cities, like Nashville and New York and Los Angeles, and maybe we have a product, maybe we don’t, but it gives us a chance to get ready.  Boston has given us a chance to get ready, to experiment and to be accepted.

What bands do you really love coming out of Boston?

R: I love Jesse Dee.

MO: As do I.

MC: Yeah, we all love Jesse Dee.  And the Rex Complex!

R: Miss Tess, obviously.

MC: Joy Kills Sorrow.

B: That was what I was gonna say: There’s a great bluegrass folk scene around here, Perfect Still, Annie and the Beekeepers…. There’s a hugely amazing scene of young bluegrass going on.

Photo: Alipio Hernández