The cover of Craig Finn’s latest solo album, Always Been, directly nods to Randy Newman’s 1977 lp Little Criminals. Shot in the same location, on the West 7th Street overpass over the I-110, it presents The Hold Steady frontman posed exactly as Newman is on his classic album. And like Newman’s songbook, Always Been is filled with character studies, a cast of people who aren’t quite sure what to make of their lives and the directions they’ve taken. It also arrives with a book of short stories, Lousy With Ghosts. Finn joins us to discuss the expansive universe he’s created.
Category: The AD Interview
John Maus :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Since the mid-2000s John Maus gained a reputation as an arcane conversationalist, whose public dialogues offered as much intricacy as they did enthusiasm, with a philosophical repertoire only matched by his own nervous body language. For this interview we plunged into the specifics of those discourses to try to trace the strange continuities between the continental thought and mystical traditions Maus is enamored with and the postwar pop sound his work inevitably comes to represent.
Carson McHone :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
In her vividly descriptive lyricism, which comes alive across all her albums, but especially on her latest release, Pentimento, Carson McHone is a natural artist. Written on paintings and postcards, McHone deftly utilizes color, texture and movement in these exceptionally compelling and immersive arrangements.
Jens Kuross :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Before recording Crooked Songs, Jens Kuross was making cabinets, teaching children how to play the piano, and having a lot of difficult conversations with himself. After a series of disappointments following the release of his 2020 LP The Man Nobody Can Touch resulted in his return to Idaho to lead a quieter life.
Cate Le Bon :: When You Make Things, You Let Go
Cate Le Bon is an elusive talent, adept at evoking emotional states without fully explicating them, suggesting resonances with other times and places without ever unpacking them. Her latest album, Michelangelo Dying, for instance, has very little to do with the renaissance artist, mentioned in a fragment of “Love Unrehearsed,” and whatever that connection is, Le Bon is uninterested in revealing it. But even so, the piece conveys a fluid, complicated relationship with love and art and longing, one revealed in bits of startling sonic clarity, but also hidden in suggestion, implication and mood.
Whitney K :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Bubble the new LP from Whitney K, like their previous releases, has a hypnotic and languid manner that belies percolating depth, humor and force. Sonically, it’s is their boldest and coherent to date, adventurous but unhurried, segueing smoothly between choogling acoustics and scalded electricity. Ahead of this week’s release of Bubble, AD caught up with Konner Whitney, the group’s center if not its leader, as he prepared for an extensive tour.
Lucrecia Dalt :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Lucrecia Dalt has spent the better part of the last decade crafting some of the most quietly ecstatic sounds in experimental music. The new album by the Colombian-born, Berlin-spun, US-based artist finds her the most content with her own creative process, weaving together the intimate and the vast, the conceptual and the personal, the intellectual and the sensual, with imperative freedom. Recorded in the high desert of New Mexico, A Danger to Ourselves breathes with the expansiveness of the surrounding landscape and her own avant-garde influences while remaining tethered to pop song forms and to the self-centrifugal experiences of love, eroticism, romance, and loss.
Golomb :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
There are several standout moments on Golomb’s The Beat Goes On, a record whose DNA is shaped by traits synonymous with Yo La Tengo, the Velvet Underground and Silver Jews. Each influence is applied conscientiously in these dynamic arrangements to demonstrate the Columbus, Ohio trio’s appreciation for those artists rather than resting on the merits of sonic achievements.
Director Ethan Silverman on AngelHeaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex
AngelHeaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex isn’t a typical music documentary. While it does do what a viewer might expect in terms of using talking heads, archival footage, and critical analysis to tell the story of glam pioneer Marc Bolan and T. Rex, it also presents behind the scenes footage of artists like Nick Cave, Joan Jett, U2, Macy Gray, and many more cutting Bolan’s songs in the studio for the late producer Hal Wilner’s T. Rex tribute album (also called AngelHeaded Hipster). The result is a film that puts his songs at the core. Director Ethan Silverman joins us to discuss.
Vish Khanna of Kreative Kontrol :: “The Creative Motivation Remains the Same”
This week, music journalist Vish Khanna published the 1,000th episode of his long running Kreative Kontrol podcast, a fascinating conversation with the ever-prolific Ty Segall. And while lesser broadcasters might take a few weeks off for a leisurely victory lap, Khanna instead just got to work putting the finishing touches on episode 1,001 (also published this week). Khanna joins us to discuss the milestone.
Catching Up With Adrian Sherwood
While collaboration has been a hallmark of Adrian Sherwood’s storied career, he is currently stepping out on his own with a full-length The Collapse of Everything and an EP The Grand Designer, his first solo efforts in 13 years. We recently connected with him to discuss this new work, his ever-evolving set of studio tools, his history in music and his lifelong commitment to learn and grow.
Ryan Davis :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
We caught up with Davis in the run-up to the release of his new LP New Threats from the Soul to discuss his first band State Champion, the different struggles he faced in making the two albums, the comedy in his songwriting, and more.
Floating Action :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Over the last 20 years, Seth Kauffman has quietly released more than a dozen albums of languid, slightly exotic indie rock once clunkily described as “Appalachian Beck.” He plays and sings every note tracked in his basement studio with a DIY touch that renders the hallmark Floating Action sound characterized by slightly-off-kilter groove and woozy warmth. With a new LP dropping next month, we caught up with Kauffman at home in North Carolina to discuss all things Floating Action.
Barry Walker Jr. :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
The Barry Walker Unit’s At the 13th Moon Gravity Well is very much a band effort, with Rose City bandmates Ripley Johnson (guitar) and John Jeffrey (drums) and Mouth Painter bassist Jason Wilmon joining Walker for a loose-limbed, thoroughly exploratory collection of live recordings taped last year at a local pub. With four instrumental tracks clocking in at over 40 minutes, this is deep, transportive stuff, giving Walker and co. a chance to stretch out and get loose, regularly finding moments of collective ecstasy. There’s groove mixed with freedom, melody crashing into dissonance. A total thrill from start to finish. To get a little more background on this magnificent record, we chatted with Barry a few weeks back from his home in Portland.
Sandro Perri :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Sandro Perri is a patient excavator of musical possibilities. For the last three decades, the Toronto based musician has put out meticulously crafted toy adventures marked by hypnotic loops and heartfelt deliveries, in songs that feel refreshingly un-derivative and that carve a distinctive space in the landscape of contemporary experimental pop. What unifies the cerebral techno of Polmo Polpo, the imaginative funk of Impossible Spaces, or the seemingly infinite mosaics of the more recent records, though, is the piecemeal lacing of cell fragments by the game of restraint and discovery of his artistic research.