New music, old friends, campfire-like atmosphere, followed by a private house concert/ after-party Chez Jonnie Two-Time!
PLAYLIST
“Big Indian” – The Dandy Warhols
“Road to Nowhere” – The Talking Heads
“The Letter” – Baby Boy Bartels and the Boys (+ 1 girl 🙂 Jillian Goods, who played on the show last week with her killer band, The Damaged Goods.) LIVE These guys!! See them! What great group energy. Vibrant songs, rich mesh of sounds, great musicianship.
“Workin’ Song” – BBB & the B LIVE If you were lucky, you caught em at Checkpoint’s right after, too.
“Little Darling” – Sweet Crude
[something; I forget which track we played. twas a slow, pretty one] – Little Maker
– panel discussion (topic forgotten)
“Secret Palace” – Dana Abbott Band
“Rag Mama Rag” – The Band (one name)
[convivial banter & preemptive nostalgia. I love all these floozies so much.]
[pre-recorded banter from previous episodes. A bit much, Laura.]
“See Red” – Deltaphonic
“Cotton Fields” – CCR
“Spend the Night” – Mike Doussan
“We Are Revolting” – Jean Bayou LIVE Best word play song title! Also appropriate for current political mileu…
“Southern Lady” – WhoNAt LIVE Who Nat Jazz Fest set! I also would idolize this southern lady she met in the beer line…
“When the Nevilles Play” – #WhoNat In honor of Charles Neville, and when the Nevilles used to close out the Acura stage.
“Bird On A Wire” – Neville Bros covering Leonard Cohen. RIP Charles Neville 🙁 (And RIP to Leonard Cohen too. Too many amazing musicians gone in recent years! 😭 )
“Best of Me” – Shawn Williams LIVE Beautiful song- stalk the sneak peak of the album version somewhere on facebook, feat. the fabulous Lynn Drury on backup vocals. Those harmonies! Can’t wait to hear the whole thing.
“Desert Baby” – Shawn UnDEAD we world-premiered the mixed-but-yet-unmastered version of another of my faves, which will also appear on the upcoming album (‘Motel Livin’’, due out June 15th 🙂 )
“The Roofer’ –Ted Hefko, off his new album Gas Station Guru’ (Motel livin’ and gas station gurus… be still, o mine heart!) Also, big thanks to Ted for recording a great WHIV station i.d. for Musicians, Mentors, and Barroom Heroes!
[The “Pizza Lisa”. Bahahahhaa]
[Meanwhile, Shawn and I are having a moment of silence for our livers, dead under the pool table at Checkpoint Charlie’s.]
[Pre-gaming for the after-party, with Beans and No Beans options, Diet Coke, and no O’Doul’s for everyone!]
Lagniappe (in the loosest sense of the word) for the folks lately who’ve been telling me to play my songs out: I won’t, cuz I don’t have time (and also I’m a chickensh!t re performing) but here are a few shitty ipod recordings, so I have somewhere to direct interested parties. Not necessarily the songs I would pick to share; chosen for how comparatively-little the sound of my recorded voice makes me want to amputate my own ears, haha. (Even with these ones though, computer speakers = Van Gogh fantasies.) But you’ll get the general idea: angsty and/or corny crap I personally wouldn’t want to listen if it wasn’t me, set to piano that sounds (in the words of famous music journalist Laura DeFazio) “like somebody tripping up a staircase.” (DeFazio went on to note that “when she gets all worked up, all she can do is bang.” 🤣🤣🤣) Luckily, most of the songs that contain full or partial nudity were too over-modulated to post ;P… Seriously though- I’m a total novice surrounded by rl musicians, these are rough/abrasive recordings of rough takes, and the piano playing is just barely good enough to convey what it would sound like if I could accompany myself properly. Enjoy!!
“Every Word”
I was rereading one of my favorite fantasy books (“The Wise Man’s Fear”) and had a creepy dream I was living in a bizarro-New Orleans in one of the countries in the book, that has all these taboos r.e. the arts. And I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote this with that in mind, partially.
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“Clean Animal”
An old-oldie, at least lyrically. Musical rendition I put together this January in Massachusetts of a semi-fictionalized poem I wrote 7ish years ago. (Tis funny looking back now and remembering some of the things I was thinking when writing it; per usual, I didn’t understand nearly everything I thought I did.) The Casio pains my ears. Ow. Ow. Owwww.
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“Crazy Kind”
Written in California last November upon visiting an old friend and hearing the saga of his long distance tindr lovrrrr. Unlike most of my songs, it only has two chords, because I wrote it on my sister’s roommate’s boyfriend’s guitar, which is an instrument I cannot play.
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“The Lives”
Written about a year ago, recorded in Massacusetts last summer. I’d had a conversation with my grandfather where he talked about how important he thought it was to always smile at people and try to be kind and interested in their lives (which kind of put me to shame at that moment, because he was suffering from a debilitating stroke trying to think about how to treat strangers better, and I was stuck in my head whining about my little babybitch problems and not really being present for anyone but myself) and another totally different conversation with my father about the woes of parenting (parenting my siblings, that is; I was a joy to parent.) Both of those conversations were in my head when I started writing the song, but I wasn’t trying to write about anything in particular. (And when you’re not trying to write anything in particular, things just write themselves about whatever it is they want to be written about, too 🙃.) I guess it ended up being mostly about how things you tell yourself to give up on can sometimes work out for the best somehow anyhow, in ways you may not have expected. Yay, life! (I played this once at the Old Arabi Bar with a shitty casio beat that sounded like a bad Prince song, but thankfully, this is on a real piano…)
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Anyways, the after-party! [Gracias a Natasha por los fotos]
[Presenting Jean Bayou! The winner of the lifetime Jonnie Two-Time Passes and the reason we were all treated to this show!]
This guy! <3 Must be pretty patient to have Jonnie Two-Time for a mother…. But for real, big thank you to J2X and his generosity- having us in his home, giving out awesome presents (see the hat I’m wearing) playing his loud and romantic tunes, giving us a chance to pay respects to/reminisce about Washboard Lissa, etc. What a great night!