Do not obey what most people say

Thursday music corner: Bran Van 3000 is an indie rock band from Quebec, who have released five studio albums between 1997 and 2015. Of these, three entered the Canadian album chart top 20: Discosis (#5 in 2001), Rosé (#9 in 2007) and The Garden (#15 in 2010). The band has also had four Canadian top 40 singles from 1997 to 2001, the first of which, Drinking in L.A., also reached number 9 in Sweden and number 3 in the UK singles charts.

Astounded, the opening track on Discosis, is the band's most successful single, reaching number 3 in the Canadian charts and achieving top 40 status in the UK and in the US Dance chart. It features vocals from legendary American soul singer Curtis Mayfield, used after his death in 1999 by prior permission of the artist, and derived from 1980s archival recordings.

Bran Van 3000 - Astounded (feat. Curtis Mayfield) (2001)

See also:

Music: Bran Van 3000 - Drinking in L.A. (1997)

Music: Bran Van 3000 - Everywhere (1998)

Music: Bran Van 3000 - Call Me (I'll Be Around) (2007)

 

In the winter of '65 we were hungry, just barely alive

Thursday music corner: Canadian musician Robbie Robertson, who died yesterday aged 80, was a driving force alongside four other supremely talented performers in The Band. Starting out backing Ronnie Hawkins as The Hawks, after their famed role backing Bob Dylan on his first electric tour they changed their name to The Band. Robertson was a strong songwriting talent, penning four numbers on their first album Music from Big Pink (1968) and on their self-titled second album The Band (1969) he wrote eight of the 12 tracks solo, and had co-writing credit on the other four. He generally left lead vocal performance of his songs to the other talented Band singers. Robertson worked prolifically in film music after The Band split in 1976, and had solo hits in the 1980s with Broken Arrow and Somewhere Down The Crazy River.

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down appeared on the group's second album, written by Robertson and with lead vocals by drummer Levon Helm. This performance appears in Martin Scorsese's 1978 documentary The Last Waltz, and is prefaced by a brief interview from Robertson about his 2012 visit to Helm's hospital bedside in the last days of his life. 

The Band - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (live, 1976)

See also:

Music: Robbie Robertson - Somewhere Down The Crazy River (1987)

Music: Levon Helm & The Cate Brothers Band - Sweet Peach Georgia Wine (live, 1981)
Music: Rick Danko & Paul Butterfield - Stage Fright (live, 1979)

An old French peacock had told him 'Hell is other birds'

Thursday music corner: The Burning Hell are a Canadian indie-rock band formed by Mathias Kom in 2006. They have released nine albums, six EPs and eight singles, the most recent of which was Nigel the Gannet. The song refers to a New Zealand bird that the world’s media dubbed ‘the world’s loneliest’ after he was discovered living solo on Mana Island north of Wellington amidst a flock of concrete gannets designed to attract live birds to the island. The band is currently touring in Canada and is shortly departing on a tour of Europe and the UK. 

The Burning Hell – Nigel the Gannet (2022)

Before the pain, the damage done

Thursday music corner: Toronto-born Tami Neilson emigrated to New Zealand in 2007, and now resides in Auckland, where she has built an award-winning musical career through her country and soul-influenced singer-songwriting. She has won eight New Zealand Music Awards since 2009, plus the 2014 APRA Silver Scroll for Walk (Back to Your Arms), co-written with her brother Joshua. Neilson has released seven albums, with 2022's Kingmaker being the most recent. It features a collaboration with octogenarian country legend Willie Nelson, Beyond the Stars, the cinematic, female-empowerment-anthem Baby, You're A Gun, and the newly-released album title track, Kingmaker.

Neilson is currently touring New Zealand, and shortly will appear at the Tønder Festival in Denmark to start a European summer tour that will also visit Paris and a Dutch music festival in Vlieland.

Tami Neilson - Baby, You're A Gun (May 2022)

The sweater has that slightly goat-like smell which all teenage boys possess

Thursday music corner: Meryn Cadell was born in New York and grew up in Canada. After signing to Intrepid Records Cadell released the album Angel Food For Thought in 1991, from which the wry, witty single The Sweater became a surprise hit in Canada and on US college radio. The sample-based song tells the comedic tale of a teenage girl’s fixation on a male classmate’s garment. Meryn transitioned from female to male in 2003 and has taught in the creative writing programme at the University of British Columbia.

Meryn Cadell – The Sweater (1991)

The Band

Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz is regularly cited as being one of the finest concert films ever made. Recorded at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom in 1976 and released in 1978, the film is the epitaph for the 16-year career of what came to be known as The Band, the group that attained fame as Bob Dylan's backing band on his famous and controversial first electric tour in 1966, and then went on to huge success on their own. By 1976 lead guitarist Robbie Robertson (who will also be remembered by children of the 1980s for his cinematic hit Somewhere Down The Crazy River) had tired of the touring life and was keen to wind things up, but not before the group was captured in concert in one final rock extravaganza, which soon snowballed into a who's who of the mid-70s rock scene as celebrity fans queued up to pay tribute to and play with The Band one last time.

Scorsese storyboarded the concert with meticulous attention to detail, filmed band interviews to provide some context around The Band's career and their reasons for splitting, and then shot some additional tracks in a studio to fill in a few gaps in the concert running order where certain important influences hadn't been represented. The performances of The Band at Winterland was excellent, but for a novice it's also intriguing to see how adept the members were at dovetailing with illustrious guests.

Here then are three clips from the film in which The Band take the back seat and allow others to shine. First, the classic The Weight performed in the studio with the awesome Staple Singers on soul vocals. Second, the wry Coyote from fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell, a track from her influential and then brand-new 1976 album Hejira featuring deft lyrics that may refer to an affair with playwright Sam Shepard. And third, Mannish Boy, a room-filling blues stomper from a regal Muddy Waters, which was fortunately captured by diligent cameraman László Kovács when the other cameramen had stopped filming for a much-needed break. Sick of Scorsese's hugely detailed camera instructions, Kovács had taken off his headset and so fortunately missed the earlier instruction to down tools.







See also:
Music: The Band & Emmylou Harris - Evangeline
Music: Levon Helm - Sweet Peach Georgia Wine
Music: Rick Danko & Janis Joplin - Ain't No More Cane

Awesomest Canadian ever!

Cmdr Chris Hadfield performs a slightly modified cover of David Bowie's hit Space Oddity aboard the International Space Station, to mark the end of his stay in orbit. Someone make this a hit, please!  

[Via Former Flatmate Al]

The best transportation plan is a great land-use plan

Brent Toderian, the president of the Council for Canadian Urbanism and the former director of city planning for Vancouver, British Columbia, offers a view of successful urban design in this morning's Seattle newspaper. The lessons he offers apply equally well to a city like Auckland, which struggles due to its burdensome over-reliance on motorways and its long-standing under-investment in public transport infrastructure:

Align your land use with how you get around.

For decades, most cities in North America have separated their thinking around land use and transportation, and the car-capacity tail has tended to wag the land-use dog.

This has always been a recipe for failure, resulting in car-dependent cities that ironically don’t even work for drivers.

Car-dependent transportation models create self-fulfilling prophecies of gridlock by pushing land uses apart and densities down, leading to communities that are unwalkable and not viable for transit.

A car-centric model forces people into their cars for almost everything. And if you try to do high-density planning around the car it also fails. Miserably.

Vancouver illustrates a different and better way. Starting with the refusal of freeways through the city in the late 1960s (which meant we never had to spend the money to bury them) Vancouver continues to design a multimodal city that prioritizes walking, biking and transit and recognizes that the best transportation plan is a great land-use plan.

Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct, which lobotomized your downtown and waterfront, says much about Seattle’s prioritization of car capacity over better city-building. Although it’s a great thing that the viaduct is now coming down, so much more could have been done to build a better city with the money spent burying the highway.

If uses and activities are mixed and compact, with everything proximate and walkable, the “power of nearness” makes every method of getting around work better, including driving — with freedom of choice.

- Brent Toderian, Seattle Times, 14 April 2013

The Sweater

This brings back memories of student days, and is a reminder that so few pop songs are actually allowed to be funny. Canadian singer Meryn Cadell's jaunty spoken-word teenage heartbreak-themed 'The Sweater' from 1991's Angel Food For Thought perfectly encapsulates the parabolic curve of adolescent infatuation and the lightning-fast gossip transmission system that serves every high school in existence. It also sports a delightful punchline. Wikipedia reckons the backing music is sampled (vari-speeded) from Syd Dale's gently sassy 'Walk & Talk'. I picked up my copy of Cadell's CD (the first of three albums, actually) in the now-defunct Marbecks shop in Queen's Arcade in Auckland in 1991 or 1992, and still have it somewhere in storage. Seeing this video again makes me want to listen to its intriguing mix of songs and performance art again. Interestingly, Cadell later transitioned from female to male and lectured in creative writing at the University of British Columbia (although apparently not any more) and still contributes to a steering group for a critical studies in sexuality course, amongst his other work.

Now if the sweater has, like, reindeer on it, or is a funny colour like yellow – I'm sorry you can't get away with a sweater like that. Look for brown or grey or blue. Anything other than that and you know you're dealing with someone who's different. And different is not what you're looking for. 

- Meryn Cadell, 'The Sweater', 1991