The Hold Steady
Jaill
- Crystal Hotel & Ballroom - Crystal Ballroom |
- Friday, August 20
- 8 p.m. doors, 9 p.m. show |
- $23 advance, $25 day of show |
- All ages welcome
Tickets on sale now!
About The Hold Steady
During our time as The Hold Steady, I've made a lot in interviews and onstage monologues about what little ambition we had when we started this band. We weren't sure if we would play shows or release records. We had seriously managed expectations. But in the end, we did end up playing shows and releasing records, and we are better people for it. We've seen a lot of the world, met a ton of great people, and played a whole bunch of rock and roll music. Our efforts have been rewarded beyond our wildest dreams. It's not exactly a mind-blowing statement when I say that this is the best job I've ever had. That said, there are sacrifices and discomfort that come with this territory: busted relationships, distance from family, physical exhaustion, disconnection from civilian life, ringing ears, interminable waiting around, trying to get through a ninety minute show when you have food poisoning, etc.
Our new record, Heaven is Whenever, is about struggle and reward. It's about accepting suffering as a necessary part of a joyous life. It's about how love can help us rise above these struggles. It's about faith. It's about how bad it hurts to settle for less. It's about not being scared to try. It's about four guys who still believe in the power and glory of rock and roll. Because even after a thousand soundchecks, a thousand load-in and load-outs, fifty missed birthdays, and a few hundred electrical shocks, our reward still vastly outweighs the struggle. In fact, the reward would not exist without the struggle. Thus, this struggle is inherently part of the reward. And in this way, the fantasy of playing rock and roll for a living is a lot like real life.
It's hard to pinpoint when we started making this record, but I think the genesis was when Tad was doing a score for a film in early 2009. He started laying down some song ideas in the studio and sharing them with us. I started writing lyrics and at one point we even set up a makeshift studio in the back of our tour bus to record demo vocals. We spent our down time in the Summer of 2009 making demos in our rehearsal space. Songs started to pile up, and it was time to hit a proper studio and start making an album.
We tapped Dean Baltulonis to produce the record. Dean had produced our record Separation Sunday and is an old friend. We headed upstate to Dreamland Studios in West Hurley, NY. Isolated and surrounded by amazing Autumn beauty, we spent two weeks living on site, playing music, drinking beer, and standing around the grill. We hit a few things that we had already demoed, but also jammed on a lot of new stuff. One memorable night is captured on the last song on the album "A Slight Discomfort". Tad did a few guitar tracks out on the front lawn that night, and you can hear the chorus of crickets chirping from the surrounding trees as the record draws to a close. We also talked our friend John Reis into coming out from San Diego and jamming with us for a few days. He played a bit of guitar on the record and helped write the song "Rock Problems".
After we left Dreamland we hit the road for a little bit, which gave us the opportunity to try out new songs in front of an audience. When we returned to Brooklyn, we hit our rehearsal space with a vengeance. We reworked some of the new stuff and wrote even more. We soon repaired to Wild Arctic Studios in Queens. We've done a lot of work at Wild Arctic in the past and it's a very comfortable place for us. We did a number of shorter sessions at Wild Arctic throughout the Fall and Winter of 2009. The record was starting to come together.
We broke for Xmas and wrapped up recording in January 2010. We began mixing and faced the usual heartbreaking decisions about which songs would and would not make the record. We mixed and remixed. We sequenced and resequenced. Finally, we turned it in, about six months after we started. It felt good to be done, but it also felt good to know that our time and perseverance had paid great dividends. I think we made something that is both different than our previous releases, yet unmistakably a creation of The Hold Steady.
Heaven is Whenever is our fifth full length release. This is both cool and a cause to stop and think, as there are some inherent truths in any fifth record. For one, the band has to stay together long enough to last through the first four. Secondly, an audience has to be interested enough to encourage the band to make album number five. And third, the band still has to have something to say that it feels that it hasn't said before.
I just went through my record collection to see how many bands I love never made it to a fifth record. I realized that most of the bands that mean the most to me had indeed made it through five and sometimes beyond: Led Zeppelin, The Clash, Thin Lizzy, REM, Creedence, etc. In some ways, album five implies a commitment and dedication and a realization that the band's success is not a fluke, and that it's not going anywhere. Albums like Physical Graffiti, Combat Rock, Fighting, Document, and Cosmo's Factory are all fifth records that show their creators confident and brimming with new ideas. In many cases, peaking. While I am not going to compare our record to any of these masterpieces by my rock and roll deities, I am proud to unveil Heaven is Whenever and add it to our body of work. Five records in seven years. Not bad.
The title of this record comes from a lyric in the song "We Can Get Together", which states "Heaven is whenever/We can get together." In the end, that might say it best. The most amazing part of this life is the opportunity to share music with a supportive audience. It is not lost on us that people make sacrifices of their own to see us perform. They spend money on tickets and travel, they get baby sitters, they take time off work. It's an honor for us to be a recipient of this kind of dedication. So when we say Heaven is Whenever, we mean that the greatest of rewards is our privilege of being able to tour and share our music and our lives with yours.
Thank you for being a part of this.
Craig Finn
The Hold Steady
- website:
- http://www.theholdsteady.com/
About Jaill
Vincent Kircher, Austin Dutmer, Andrew Harris and Ryan Adams are a somewhat sneaky, rarely sleazy group of guys from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Together, they are Jaill, a self-described psych-pop combo who play with undeniable guts. Jaill rocks enough to let the guys feel tough and still make the girls shake their asses till there's sweat on their ankles. They'll make your heart shake its ass a little, too.
Long-time friends and musical partners, Kircher and Dutmer started the band back in 2002. It was a continuation of what they'd already been busy at for years: try some speed, smoke some weed, and record albums and albums worth of material destined only for the collections of friends. Dutmer remembers working on an album in Kircher's spare bedroom for months. "It's listed as ‘sold out' on our website but we only made like 25 burned CDs and gave them away."
The two had struck on a winning formula: up-tempo, guitar-driven twang-twee with punk attitude courtesy of Kircher's deeply wry lyrics, disarmingly cheerful at surface level. But, dive into the lyrics and things get weird. Jaill hooks the ears with insistent, upbeat pop and twanged-up garage elements which grow deliciously darker with further investigation. It's confusion in a major key. The band went through several lineups trying to bring the recordings to the stage. Bassist Andrew Harris recalls feeling nervous about being Jaill's fourth bass player, but Kircher clarifies: "It's like eating a box of chocolates with cavities in every tooth. You're gonna spit every one out until you find the perfect one. Then you'll just deal with the pain." The 2006 addition of Harris was the perfect complement to Dutmer's Animal-esque drumming, and with his walking bass and deep-knee bends, the band's backbone was formed, solid and bold.
In early 2009, the band released There's No Sky (Oh My My), a 12-song LP (at just over 30 minutes) that is irresistibly catchy, moving, dirty, sarcastic, and new. "We felt a real love for the album when it was finished. So, as best we could, we decided to promote it, tour behind it, send it off to labels and radio stations, bloggers... see what might happen, if anything," explains Kircher. Recorded nervously in the leaky basement of an old funeral home, with overdubs finished over a year's time at home, There's No Sky caught the attention of Sub Pop, with stand-out tracks like "Always Wrong" and "Beggar Sincere." Recalling the glory of '90s lo-fi pop, these songs possess a sinewy tension honed from years of basement shows and a palpable, gritty rock sense born of enduring the cold, cold Midwest winter months, day in and day out.
During the touring behind There's No Sky, guitarist and habitual sleeper/flirter Ryan Adams joined the band. A guest performer on the record, he was ready to learn the songs on the fly, and become the most nicknamed, beaten-down little brother of a band member to date. Adams' solid guitar work complements Kircher's sloppy, almost out of control approach and, added bonus: his gift at singing harmonies was immediately appreciated by all. On an October 2009 trip out to the west coast, Sub Pop representatives were in attendance at a Monday night show in Seattle. Familiar with There's No Sky and on the prowl for fresh meat, they invited the band to the office in the morning. The band brought donuts, Sub Pop countered with pizza. By Thanksgiving, Jaill was signed to the label.
While Jaill's new album, That's How We Burn, arrives on July 27, 2010 bearing the proud endorsement of their new label home, the Milwaukee band has changed little in their creative tactics. Recorded at his Mystery Room studio with Justin Perkins, the album finds Jaill wrapping its head and arms more solidly around a sound they've been building up for nearly a decade. Their ‘Sconnie sensibilities lend to a laid-back but creatively effortless brand of pop that is now making waves outside the environs of Lake Michigan. Their work ethic and energy in the studio spill into these new songs; bright guitars and amped-up pop energy skipping like a stone over Kircher's dense lyrics, only to sink into momentary mellow moments. Speeding up, then slowing down, always riding along nicely on its own natural momentum, That's How We Burn is sure to make the girls freak, the guys geek, and all the lovers weak in the knees.
- MySpace page:
- http://www.myspace.com/jailjailjailjail
- website:
- http://jaill.net/
