F i eldston LP

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Editor in Chief/Layout and Design: Barr Balamuth Editors: Ben Farhi, Bianca Asare, Reed Pryor, Nick Koepp and Dante DeSarioCover Artwork: Dante DeSarioFaculty Advisor: Bob Montera

Enjoy the LP’s first issue of 2014. If you would like to write for the magazine, please do not hesitate to contact any of the editors listed above.

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Fall Releases 3Paul Schorin

Interview: Gregory Grene 5Benjamin Farhi

The Rise of ILoveMakonnen 7Barr Balamuth

Alt J - This is All Yours [Review] 9Nick Koepp

Profile: FKA Twigs 10Bianca Asare

Groundislava - Frozen Times [Review] 11Reed Pryor

LP Reccomends: HypeMachine 12Dante DeSario

The Pursuit of Happiness: Phollowing Phish 13

Karen O - Love Songs [Review] 16Roma Murphy

LP Playlist 17

Contents

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Fall Releases By Paul Schorin

Jessie Ware – Tough Love

The British songstress is looking to add another criti-cal and public darling to her discography after her debut Devotion captured the attention of the pop world in 2012. The latest track released, “Kind Of…Some-times…Maybe,” was released online recently and features Miguel. Ed Sheeran is also rumored to have played a part in what should be an excellent and re-freshing pop experience.

Release Date: 10/6/14

Electronic savant Flying Lotus will be re-leasing his fifth studio album this fall and initial reviews are already extremely posi-tive, with some even claiming it to be his

best work. Anyone who has heard the album’s first singles, including a col-

laboration with Kendrick Lamar, may be inclined to agree. How-ever, Flying Lotus is no stranger to critical acclaim; both 2010’s Cosmogramma and 2012’s Until the Quiet Comes were near the tops of many critics’ year-end

lists.

Release Date: 10/7/14

Taylor Swift seems to keep shed-ding her country roots more and more with each passing year, and if her controversial single “Shake It Off” is any indication, she will continue that trend on her upcoming LP. Still, the album will most likely chart fairly near to the top, if not at the top, as Swift remains one of the major players in a crowded pop scene.

Release Date: 10/27/14

Taylor Swift - 1989Flying Lotus - You’re Dead!

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Fall Releases By Paul Schorin

David Grohl’s hard rock act is set to re-lease their eighth record after nearly a year of anticipation. There will be an HBO

series called Sonic Highways to go along with the record, which Grohl calls “a love let-ter to the history of American music.” Addi-tionally, as part of the album’s attempt at be-ing high-concept, each of the eight songs on the album was recorded in a different city, including Austin, Chicago, and New York.

Release Date: 11/10/14

These Brooklyn art rockers have been critically revered since their 2006 effort Return to Cookie Moun-tain and now they look to release their first record since the death of their bassist Gerard Smith in 2011. They released the albums first single “Happy Idiot” in early Sep-tember, which was met with near unanimous critical acclaim with its smart lyrics and ironically bubbly sound. Release Date: 11/18/14

TV On the Radio - Seeds

Rumors: Radiohead has hit the studio in recent weeks as more and more cryptic Thom Yorke tweets come out every day… Kanye West’s new album is supposedly coming out sometime this fall, with a leak of one of the album’s tracks “All Day” surfac-ing in mid-August… fans of Frank Ocean are still hoping that his sophomore LP will come out before 2015 – the artist claims to be almost finished… Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox, a.k.a. Panda Bear, is reportedly releasing a new album this fall to fol-low up 2011’s Tomboy.

Foo Fighters - Sonic Highways

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Gregory Grene: English teacher, Char-ity Executive, and resident rock star. Prior to his Fieldston career, Mr. Grene formed w Celtic band, The Prodigals, with whom he has toured the country, sold out venues such as, The House of Blues and Webster Hall, and whose music has been featured in films and television shows as such as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Mr. Grene spent the first 14 years of his life in Ireland, where he developed his fondness of traditional Irish music before refining his skills and taste in the United States. Fortunately, he took some time to meet with the LP and offered some further insight and anecdotes on his musi-cal origins and composition process.

LP: Can you give LP readers some background on your band, how you got started in music? Who some of your influences are?

Grene: The way I started playing music is I grew up in Ireland, born in Chicago, but moved to Ireland when I was 5 months old, and I spent the majority of my childhood in Ireland. We used to

q&a Gregory Grene By Ben Farhi

have very traditional harvest parties every year on the farm, where the locals would join. There is an old wooden staircase running up the side of a stone flagged kitchen, and at the parties, we used to have musicians sit on the stairs. So, one of the musicians there played an accordion and it’s just the way sometimes a particular instrument speaks to one—in a way that doesn’t have to do with any logic or plan—just for what-ever reason, I fell in love with the instrument. It was like a continuing sort of obsession, and my mom very sweetly decided she was going to try and accommodate this obsession, so we drove across the Irish countryside backwards and forth to find the perfect accordion, and that’s how I started the whole thing. When I was 14, I moved back to Chicago for high school and ended up studying there with a legendary Irish musician—fiddler—called Liz Carroll. There was another accordion play-er—very esoteric unless you follow the circuit—called Joe Burke. I went back to Trinity College in Dub-lin and founded the Traditional Music Society and continued to play quite obsessively. I then ended up coming to New York to study at an acting conservatory, and while I was doing that, I ended up on the circuit here with the music and met one guy while doing some theater and we

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discussed setting up a band to play over St. Patrick’s Day… We did it essentially just for that weekend, but it turned into this whole thing and it just took off.

LP: How did the experience of moving to the United States change the music tastes you developed in Ireland?

Grene: Somewhat counter intuitively, go-ing to high school in America, put me much more in traditional music than I was before. When I was in Ireland it was more of a folk music thing, when I went to Chicago, Liz Carroll taught me and I became involved in the more traditional more purist kind of music.

LP: How do you find a way to organize concerts across the country while balanc-ing your duties as a parent and English teacher?

Grene: As an English teacher that is actually the easiest part because the main seasons for Irish Music—the stuff we are playing—is during the summer, when school is off, and March, when school is off. It really is for-tuitous and it syncs nicely with the school calendar. The craziest it gets was last spring when we did this tour and a large form band with dancers as well: we were playing in New York, Georgia, Florida, Cleveland, Wyo-ming and finally Arkansas. As a parent, I rely on patience and kindness, and indulgence

LP: Can you explain the feeling of having hundreds of fans roar as you walk on stage at venues such as Webster Hall, Lincoln Center, or the House of Blues?

Greene: It is marvelous; the House of Blues in Cleveland where we play every Paddy’s Day is the most extreme form of that. It is euphoric, it is insane. While the diamet-ric opposite of that was playing at Lincoln Center, not with the band, but traditionally I was playing with a classical quartet and it was the most nerve racking, horrific experi-

ence I have ever had on stage and looking out and seeing everybody wearing suits and ties, having paid over $100 for a ticket was the most horrific experience I have ever had playing music. The happy medium is that we play these concerts in a Cathedral in Austin, Texas every Christmas time and that is a little bit of the suit and tie quality with a very big audience.

LP: As an English teacher, who specializes in Irish and British literature, do you approach your lyrics from a Joyce frame of mind? What is your lyric generation process?

Grene: I think in general in writing songs, one tries to speak one’s own truth. My frame of refer-ence includes the books we read, which form the language in our heads, so I think that’s where the references come in, but I don’t think I can say they are deliberately done. The typical places I write are neutral. I am on the road and wake up in a hotel room at three in the morning and have a total- ly insomniatic moment where there is nothing else going on but I have a tune in my head and write something down, hopefully will get back to sleep again, but you lie back down and can’t go back to sleep, since something else is ringing in your head, so you write that down. And at the end of it, you have a sleepless night, but a song to make of it.

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Seven years ago, things were not going well for Makonnen Sheran (pronounced Muh-CO-nan Shi-Ran). An 18 year-old graduate of Atlanta’s North Clayton High School, he faced life in prison after being implicated in the murder of one of his younger friends. Confined to house arrest for two years, Sheran’s entire life was put on hold. His parole officer told him he had to find some-thing to occupy his time, so he decided to follow in his mother’s footsteps and join a cosmetology school. A couple months later, a jury found him guilty of invoulantary manslaughter, sentencing him to five years of probation. It was around this time that Sheran started a blog called The New-ness (www.thenewness.info), where he shared his eclectic music preferences ranging from Lykke Li to Lil’ B, his obsession with cutting-edge gadgets and apps, and a few unrefined, early tracks that he coupled with low-budget videos. He even managed to get a brief interview with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. “I AM THE HAPPIEST 19YR OLD IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW!” Sheran

wrote in the introduction. After his blog started to gain some traffic, Makonnen realized how powerful of a tool the internet could be for self-promotion. He started taking his music a little more seriously, honing in on a distinct sound that has been described as ”opera trap” in a weak attempt at classifying it. There’s not really another way to put it, Makon-nen and his music are both very, very eccentric. Scroll through his blog or his Instagram and you’ll find dozens of images of a creepy mannequin head (pictured bottom left), a remnant from Ma-konnen’s beauty school days that he’s adopted as a symbol. In his songs, he switches between rapping and off-key singing on a shoestring, relying on a trembling falsetto throughout. His lyrics are occasionally very brash, like on early cut “21st Street” when he raps “Shut up bitch, you don’t know our lingo/ILoveMakonnen turned a song into a single” but they can also be tender and emotional, like when he reminisces about his times with an ex-girlfriend on “Sarah.” Hate it (as many do) or love it, Makonnen’s sound is completely unique and inimitable. The only artist who even comes close to drawing a compari-son is auto-tune master Future. After catching the ear of Atlanta super producer Mike Will Made It, Makonnen’s career slowly started to take off. But, although he got signed to a small songwriting contract through Warner Bros Records, no one in Mike’s crew wanted his songs. So, he branched out. With Warner connections and a foothold in Atlanta, home to probably the highest concentration of talented producers in the world, all it took was a few e-mails to link up with bigwigs like Metro Boomin’, Sonny Digital and FKi. These aren’t some random MySpace producers looking to sell a beat for $500, they’re first-rate heavy-weights who have produced for the likes of Wiz Khalifa Gucci Mane, Ludacris, Rick Ross, even Kanye West. Ever hear 2 Chainz’s thundering

from prison to billboardHow ILoveMakonnen Defied the Odds and Became a Star

By Barr Balamuth

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“Birthday Song?” That’s Sonny’s work. As Makonnen recently told music blog Pigeons & Planes, “It’s really Metro and Sonny Digi-tal and all them that deserve all the fucking credit for this music and this new wave, because to tell you the truth, Mike Will didn’t want none of my shit out, and my shit would still be on the low and quiet and being stolen and swagger-jacked by Future and all the other artists he works with.” Merely working with producers of this level garnered some serious attention, but, they were more than just a publicity boost, crafting beats that im-peccably fit the sing-songy, irreverent style of ILoveMakonnen’s music. Soon enough, his name would start to gain traction among Atlanta record executives.

On July 14th, Makonnen got a boost from an unexpected fan: Miley Cyrus. After the controversial pop star posted a screen-shot of Makonnen’s single “I Don’t Sell Molly No More” to Instagram for all 13,000,000 of her followers to see, the Sonny Digital-produced song climbed to the top of the HotNewHipHop Hot 100 within an hour. It’s success was probably a little overdue considering that the song is, and there’s truly no other word for it, a banger. Over sinister synths, Makonnen drops instantly quot-able lines like “Strawberita dreams turn to champagne reality,” which could very well become the new “Started from the bottom now we here” if Makonnen maintains his current trajectory. But after months with no popular follow-ups to “I Don’t Sell…” he was quickly pegged as a one-hit-wonder lucky enough to have been graced with a co-sign from Queen Miley. Two months later, not much had changed. Makonnen was still spending countless hours in the studio with Sonny Digital refining tracks and performing at small events in Atlanta. His ode to week-

day raging, “Club Goin’ Up On A Tuesday,” had gained some traction online and publications like Complex had done brief profiles on him, but stardom still seemed unlikely, if ever possible. Makonnen seemed destined to remain one of those Internet rappers who could never made the leap to the mainstream, more Earl Sweatshirt than ASAP Rocky. Then, in the late hours of August 12th, the life of Makonnen Sheran was forever changed. While most of America was sleeping, Drake re-leased a remix to ““Club Goin’ Up On A Tuesday” on his SoundCloud page. A show of support from Miley was one thing. A remix from Drake, Hip-Hop’s biggest crossover star, is a game changer. The track amassed over a million plays within two days. In a video posted by one of his friends, Makonnen can be seen in hysterics, practically having a mental breakdown as he hears Drake’s verse for the first time. It’s quite difficult not to get chills watching it, knowing that the moment could have easily never happened and that, instead of stardom, Sheran could have easily been spend-ing 25 to life behind bars. After “Tuesday” blew up, Sheran trav-elled to New York, where he took meetings with record executives from Warner and Island. It was Drake himself, however, who would ultimately sign him to his label imprint OVO Sound. Re-cently, Makonnen has made guest appearances on the Drake vs. Lil’ Wayne tour. With a debut album set for an early 2015 release, it seems as if Makonnen will be keep the club going up for the forseeable future.

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Alt J - This is All YoursBy Nick Koepp

[REVIEW]

English band Alt-J has been turning heads in the alt-rock scene as of late. They first caught my attention after the release of their debut album, An Awesome Wave. The record featured vibrant guitar and drum sounds, and dreamy harmonies. The grooves were strong and, overall, it was an enjoyable album to listen to. However, it met difficul-ties when it came to its sonic dynamics. The album would go from peak to valley abruptly, not in the emotional, exciting way a Jazz band might, but rather with a uncomfortable, more forced approach. It seemed like the singer thought his voice was a new creative sound he’d come up with, when in reality, it sounds much more like an emo Citizen Cope. This didn’t stop me from liking the album. Though it certainly felt stale at certain parts, it com-pensated these moments with evident emo-tion, energy and some undoubtedly powerful tracks, such as “Fitzpleasure” and “Some-thing Good.” I listened to This is all Yours, the new Alt-J record, hoping the Brits could build off of their debut and steer away from their more irksome habits. Yet, after the first couple tracks on This is All Yours, Alt-J nearly lost my attention. A four-minute vocal intro that crawled its way towards a soft, subtle piano interlude sound-ed like it was trying to be profound, but end-

ed up just being very bland and pastiche. Yours begins to pick up at “Every Other Freckle” and “Left Hand Free,” but not in a captivating or thrilling way. The only thing that accelerates is the tempo, really. “Left Hand Free” just sounds like a bad Cage the Elephant impression, with maybe the least catchy hook Alt-J has ever delivered. The rest of the album, I’m afraid, is a total snooze fest. Lead singer Joe Newman’s vocals maintain their same winey pitch that bothered me on the first record, and, though the feels don’t change up abruptly in a very jointed manner, the album feels like a long coastal glide of melancholy and boredom. I’ll give credit where necessary, Alt-J are very good at delivering nice vocal harmonies, but after fifty sluggish minutes, even these be-comes tiresome. It’s really disappointing to see a band that I thought had tons of potential glide on exactly the things I was hoping they would cut out for this new album. What we’re left with is a spineless record with no grit whatsoever. Though the instrumentation and the production are unquestionably solid, they can’t cover for the many flaws of This is All Yours.

4/10

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Open up Spotify, and search for FKA Twigs. Click on the top result. Start with EP2, re-leased in 2013. Begin with the very last track, titled “Ultraviolet,” simply because the name is super rad. Try to decide whether what you’re listening to is electronic, R&B, hip-hop or dream pop. Continue to think about this all the way through EP2, and into her first full-length album LP1. Con-tinue thinking about this and attempt-ing to place her music under one genre before understanding that the beauty of FKA Twigs is that she doesn’t fall undern one category, and doesn’t need to. Tahliah Debrett Barnett was born in Gloucestershire, England on January 16, 1988. She acquired the nickname “Twigs” due to the way she cracked her joints. Evidently, it stuck. She began singing at her local youth club, and began writing her own music at the young age of 16. Initially, Twigs worked towards a career as a

dancer (you can see her in the background of music videos for artists such as Ed Sheeran, Jessie J and Kylie Minogue), before dropping out of dance school

and realizing that all she wanted to do was make music. On December 4th 2012, Twigs released her first EP, EP1, which consisted of four tracks with haunting electronic beats from critically acclaimed producer Arca,. The first-rate pro-duction and Twigs’ otherwordly voice come

together to create a satisfying, complete debut. Her second EP was released

on September 10th, 2013 under the Young Turks record label. Critics compare her music to “trip-hop,” a UK based genre with elements of electronic, soul, funk, hip-hop, and jazz music. The EP’s beats set up a foggy barrier that her lyr-ics cut through in a striking way. On Track 3 on EP2, “Water Me.” she sighs and sings, “I guess I’m stuck with me.” The song pro-foundly captures her heartbreak and suffering, yet still manages to

soothe and sedate listeners. Now 25, Twigs rocks a septum pierc-ing, wears a gold nameplate necklace and dates Robert Pattinson while crafting mellow tunes with a mellowness similar to that of the xx, a darkness that channels Grimes and a overall quirky vibe reminiscent of Björk. Her first official work, LP1, was released in August 2014. Now open Spotify again and search for FKA Twigs. Click on the top result. Start with EP2, released in 2013. Notice that her music is simulta-neously trippy and calming, and praise her for how difficult it is to create such parallels in music. Then listen to LP1. The album opens up with the words “I love another, and thus I hate myself,” a direct quote from an English Renaissance poet that repeats throughout the entire first track, “Preface.” Continue praising FKA twigs through LP1, but save her third, most popular track “Two Weeks’” for last. Her bold experimentation and willingness to bend the stagnant genre of R&B sets her far apart from her contemporaries. Keep an ear out; FKA Twigs is on the rise.

Rising: FKA TWIGSBy Bianca Asare

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Groundislava, née Jasper Patterson, is a bud-ding electronic music producer from Venice Beach, California, who has gained an underground following over the years with his experimental, interpretative, and deeply personal ambient beats. In the past, his music sounded like the soundtracks to a ‘80s movie. I can imagine hear-ing his “Olympia 2011,” a uniquely uplifting yet rug-ged symphony of synths, during the Breakfast Club scene in which John Bender and Claire Standish kiss. His music had a distinctive aura of youth, for it told the story of sad and lonely young people that were searching for some purpose outside of the textbooks and other bullshit that was force-fed to them. Additionally, one of the most important con-stants of his earlier work was how he let the music speak for itself. Groundislava used to restrain from featuring vocalists on most of his beats, instead chal-lenging the listener to cultivate their own response to his work. If he did feature a singer, he used distorting effects and other electronic music techniques so as to allow the vocals to truly merge into the beat.

On September 23, Groundislava dropped his most recent effort, an album called Frozen Throne. This record is a unique one, but one that almost entirely diverges from his old style. On this record, I find that Groundislava overuses vocals by an artist called Rare Times. On many intricate and sonically intriguing beats such as the dazzling and dream-like “Girl Behind The Glass” and the dynamic “Steel Sky,” Rare Times’ rather corny vocals (“Is that really you standing next to me? Baby can we touch in real-ity?”) come off as rather dull and nullify the stories that the beats express on their own. Moreover, the repeated Rare Times features prohibit the listener from forming their own interpretations about the main focus of the album: the production. One of

my best memories of Groundislava was listening to his an old song of his called “After Hours,” which utilized piercing synthesizers, a muted trumpet, and resonating bass all in one. That remains my favorite song of his, partly be-cause I was able to extract my own understanding of it based on the sonic production alone. On Frozen Throne, that room for creative thought and analysis is lost by the Rare Times vocals, whose presence comes to dominate and define the songs. This isn’t to say that an album is a total failure, but rather that it was just sort of shock-ingly different from the master work Groundisla-va was producing two years ago. While I support artists who continue to push their own boundar-ies by exploring different facets of their artistic personality, I still don’t understand the drastic shift in various artistic choices that Groundislava made on Frozen Throne. I believe that his self-ti-tled 2011 album and Feel Me (2012) both featured work that was far more experimental and pow-erful from this young and talented artist. While his new effort is still acceptable, its presentation isn’t very raw or imaginative and, more importantly, the impact it leaves on the listener is not lasting.

6/10

[REVIEW]Groundislava - Frozen Throne By Reed Pryor

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How HYPE MACHINE Won Our By Dante DeSario

Like many Fieldston students, I have re-cently started using Hype Machine to find and lis-ten to my music. All of it. From doing homework to cruising down the West Side Highway, the only songs I have listened to for the past few months have come from Hype Machine. It is without a doubt, a tool of greatness. Started in 2005 by An-thony Volodkin, then a computer science major at Hunter Col-lege, Hype Machine has become increasingly popular, especially among the Fieldston student body.It’s main fucntion is to aggregate scattered MP3 files from over 1,500 curated music blogs into an easily digestible, user-friendly format that bares a minor resem-blance to popular streaming ser-vice Spotify. Users select songs from dozens of genres, most prominently progressive and chillwave to electropop and also “Love” their favorites, which adds songs to one, chronologically ordered playlist. Unlike Spotify, however, Hype Machine is more directed towards emerging artists, paticularly those who focus on electronica and remixes. The site is free to use, with apps for your smartphone that cost $3.99. Compared to the $9.99 monthly charge for Spotify, Hype Machine is clearly a bargain. What attracts me the most to Hype Ma-chine is its large and diverse selection of new, great music. As someone who is constantly listening to music, I can become bored with multiple albums in a single week. Even prolific artists like Kanye West only release albums at an annual pace, far too slow to satisfy my need for fresh material. Hype Machine has such a large variety of new, great music that I never seem to have a period of complete boredom with my

music selection anymore. In January of 2003, the site partnered with SoundCloud to provide both its bloggers and users with a larger selection of

new and pre-released tracks. Hype Ma-chine is the perfect tool for finding great music. However, if you’re looking for music from popular artists not remixes or electronica, I would look elsewhere. The excellent Hype Machine app (pictured left) is constantly being up-dated with new features. Most recently, it has enabled users to organize their fa-vorite songs into three different playlists, adding another element of customiza-tion. Search parameters are frequently updated as well, allowing users to use specialized criteria, such as searching only for songs with 500+ favorites. Hype Machine will surely grow ex-ponentially in the coming years. There is a reason it’s been on the Guardian’s list of 100 essential websites, called “The best thing to happen to music since the Rolling Stones” by Fred Wilson, and “the future of all media,” by Gawker founder

Nick Denton. If you haven’t already created an account, go do it now. And follow me desariorox. I promise you won’t be dissapointed.

URL: http://hypem.com

13 The Pursuit of Happiness: A Recollection of Experiences Following Phish

By Jake May

The date was July 5th, 2014. I was exiting the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York after witnessing my fourth Phish concert in five days, and my third in a row at that venue. Along with a friend of mine, I weaved my way through the slow-moving crowd, many of them under the influence of something (drugs, alcohol, or both). Because of this, my friend and I, both dead sober, had a relatively easy time navigating the sea of people. As we approached the exit, I noticed a father in front of me, holding the hands of whom I thought were two children. One, a son, was walking swiftly, keeping up with the man, while the other, a daughter, was dragging behind, barely able to stand straight. I thought this was quite peculiar; if the child was that tired, the father ought to just pick her up. However, as I got closer to trio, I had a dis-turbing realization. The “daughter” dragging behind the man was not a child at all, but a fully-grown woman, most likely the mother of the aforemen-tioned boy. And, of course, this woman was not too tired, but too spun out on some sort of substance. That’s right: a mother and father brought their child

to a Phish concert, and allowed him to wit-ness the mother (and possibly the father too) consume so much alcohol or drugs that she could not even stand on her own.

Now, it may seem odd that I, an un-abashed Phish fanatic, would tell a story so

seemingly degrading of Phish fans, but the reality is, many of the pre-conceived notions that exist about them – or us, rather – are true. Many fans are barely interested in listening to the music; they only want an excuse to use drugs. Many fans are dirty “hippies” who live on the road, at least while the tour is going on. I saw drug dealers, with no intentions of going to the concert, flock to the outside of venues to take advantage of des-perate, drug-addicted fans. I saw fans young and old being carried out of venues by para-medics because they had gotten careless with their drug use. And, at the seven Phish shows I saw this summer, there was not one where I wasn’t asked to purchase “doses” or “molly” on

Picture credit: Jake May

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more than one occasion. The fact is these types of Phish fans do exist, but they should not define the band, or even the fan-base as a whole. While on tour this summer, in addition to seeing these questionable acts, I saw more happy people in one place than I had ever seen before. Because that is the true essence of Phish: they are a band that makes people happy. Sure, there are fans that are only in it for the drugs, but they are the minority. Most of the people there, including my friend and myself, are there to bask in the glory that is live

music played by our favorite band. Perhaps the most inspiring moment of the whole tour was before the very first show (7/1/14, Mansfield, MA). Because I had won a couple of tickets through a lottery, I had obtained an extra ticket for the show. Instead of selling it online or scalping it outside the venue, I decided to partake in a somewhat common practice at Phish shows: “miracle-ing” someone in. This basically means giving away your ticket to a fan that needs one, free of charge. After a little searching, I found a man who was holding up one finger, which is the sign, among Phish fans, of needing a ticket. I walked up to him and handed him the ticket, without a word. He gingerly took the ticket from me and looked directly into my eyes. His face lit up, and his beaming smile was contagious. He looked down at the ticket again, and, still without either of us saying a word, hugged me. It was one of the more genuine embraces I have ever ex-perienced. This man was truly grateful just to be able to enter the venue and hear the music, and, of course, to do it for free. The Phish community cannot be defined by one group of fans. There is no archetype of a Phish-head. The are young fans, old fans, people who have been going to shows for years, and people who are just attending their first. There are fans who love Phish for the incredible music that they have been producing for over thirty years, and

unfortunately, there are those fans who love going to shows just to do drugs. But what one must understand about the culture of Phish is that it is not driven by drugs or alcohol or ticket scalping. It is driven, simply, by the pursuit of happiness.

15 Karen O - Crush Songs By Roma Murphy

You’re sitting in your room. You’ve just ex-perienced the glimmers of a new feeling, of a new crush, and it’s fluttery and it’s painful and you’re not sure if it’ll last, but in this moment, it’s taking over every bodily system you’ve got. You pick up your guitar. You’re Karen O, and you’ve just written Crush Songs, an LP that was composed through-out 2006-2007, but was only released for the public on September 9, 2014. Written when she was 27 and wasn’t sure whether she’d ever fall in love again, Crush Songs brings to life the kind of emotions that you know are universal but still feel like they are expressed only for you. It’s a lo-fi album that almost sounds like it was recorded on an iPhoneand the longest song only lasts for about three minutes, but it’s perfect to put on when, like her, you’re “just try-ing to make sense of [your] life and express those feelings and get it all out.” Crush Songs, however, was not received very well by the music world, especially in com-parison to her work with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a considerably more upbeat, loud, dance-y sound (Crush Songs could not sell out Barclays Center). But that wasn’t the goal of this album, in Karen O’s

eyes. “This record is not going to make me any money, it’s just needing to come out of me,” she told The Quietus. And to those who would criticize the lack of a punk

feel in an album better suited to relax-ing in your bedroom than moshing in a

sleazy slub, Karen O would say, “for me, what takes the most amount of courage is becoming vulnerable and bearing your soul, and not ever

worrying about how the crowd is go-ing to react to you playing soft, sweet songs all of the sudden. It’s punk rock to sing, write, and perform love songs.” And that’s, unsurprisingly given the title, exactly what this album is com-prised of. She starts off with “Ooo,”

a relaxing acoustic song with only a few chords played in a simple,

rocking-chair-esque rhythm. Next is “Rapt,” which begins with a melody that harkens back to the

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but shifts into a chorus that is entirely her own, with the haunting lyric “do I really need another habit like you?” She then moves into a portion of the album with enigmatic lyrics and haunting melodies (even straying away from purely acoustic songs on “Visit,” ). Julian Casablancas, owner of the label that re-leased her album and lead singer of the groundbreaking band The Strokes, says that her choice to end track 4, “Beast,” with the reptetition of “didn’t you ever have enough?” in a falsetto is “a whirlwind of intense thoughts all in just one line.” “Comes The Night” continues the string of haunting melodies in minor keys. “NYC Baby,” however, changes the mood to something more akin to classic Yeah Yeah Yeahs hit “Maps,” with the touring musician conflict of being on the road but missing those you’ve left behind. “Other Side” brings a note of Cat Power to the album, while “So Far” brings to mind Neil Young with its melodies. Next, “Day Go By” is the most conventional structurally on the album, and possibly the most easily relatable. Continuing the string of songs practically made to narrate rainy days, “Body” gives a reminder to O’s listeners, and possibly O herself about the steps necessary before loving someone. “King,” de-spite its cheerful melody and innocent lyrics, ends on a ominous note suggesting O’s fear of death. “Indian Summer” and “Sunset Sun” follow this vein, switching back to a sadder mood (“Sunset Sun” employing strings and imagery of sunsets to do the job). Finally, O finishes up the album with “Native Korean Rock,” a message to her more youthful fans (“you’ll be fine fine fine fine”) with a more rock vibe and “Singalong,” a song pos-sibly made for the purpose on the tin— something suited to sitting around the campfire with friends (emphasized by guest vocalists Jack Lawrence and Dean Fertita). The album has an incomplete, demo-like feeling, lacking the production value expected from a veteran artist. Like crushes, most songs on the album end before they have begun, and if Karen O’s goal was to chronicle her love life,

[REVIEW]

8.5/10

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