Vermont multi-instrumentalist Katie Trautz has been recording other people’s music for a decade. But, until now, never her own.
She plays fiddle in a host of of local bands, from country music group Wooden Dinosaur to Cajun duo Chaque Fois. She sang in vocal choir The Bright Wings Chorus, and wrote a book a couple years ago teaching harmony singing to kids. She co-founded the Summit School of Traditional Music and Culture in Montpelier, and teaches violin in her spare time.
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This summer, Nine Inch Nails released Bad Witch, originally billed as the final EP in a three-EP trilogy. Only Trent Reznor said upon release that, even though it only contains six songs, it wasn’t an EP after all. “Want to know why it’s being labelled an LP instead of an EP?” he wrote in response to a fan questioning the change. “EPs show up with singles in Spotify and other streaming services = they get lost easier. EPs feel less important in today’s music-isn’t-as-important-as-it-once-was world. Why make it easier to ignore?”
In the digital-music era, the boundaries between an LP and an EP are porous at best. Bands can mostly decide for themselves what to label a release. Some artists have begun calling their EPs “mini-albums” (which is not a thing). Kanye West produced a series of seven-song projects this summer, few topping 25 minutes. None were labeled EPs. In the physical media era, there were concrete differences between an album, EP, and single: size, price, etc. Now it’s a free-for-all.
Rock has a storied history of songs about life on the road, from “Turn the Page” to “We’re an American Band” to half the Creedence Clearwater Revival catalog. But these chronicle the journeys of successful touring artists. You won’t find as many road songs by baby bands nowhere near their first Odyssean mega-tour.
The Giant Peach has stepped in to fill that void. Their new song “I-89” is less life on the road than life on a road: Interstate 89, which runs through band leader Harrison Hsiang’s Burlington, Vermont home base. “I-89” chronicles a less-celebrated – but more common – side of live performance: the hustling young musician’s lone drive home late at night after a one-off gig in some remote outpost.
Reid Parsons wasn’t nervous by the time she stepped on to the competition stage. Sure, she was nervous before her slot in the (deep breath) 2017 Advance Music Acoustic Singer/Songwriter Contest Finals. Her solo performing experience was pretty sporadic, the occasional gig for tips here and there. Few knew her songs, since she couldn’t afford to record them. Then, on top of that, contest organizers told her minutes before that she’d have to fill fifteen minutes instead of the five she’d prepared. But she regained her confidence and sang some of the songs she’d been carrying with her for years.
“I knew I’d slayed it,” she says in an email. “That’s not being conceited or proud; that’s knowing what a good performance is. I have my fair share of poor performances, but I love performing under pressure and rising to the competition, and I did that night. I wanted that prize so bad.”
She won it, and, if the songs she performed then sound anything like they do now, I can’t imagine anyone else was even close. And without her victory that evening, we might not have one of the most fully-formed debuts of the year. The prize included two free days at a local Vermont studio, and the Reid Parsons EP she recorded there sounds like someone preparing half their life for this moment – which this 25-year old has, writing songs since age 13.
Though she hadn’t recorded before, Reid Parsons hardly sounds like the work of a first-timer. One song (“Charlie,” which I’ve already raved about elsewhere) features Faulkner-esque shifts of narrative perspective. Another (“Not Ready to Return”) switches genres halfway through, beginning folk and ending somewhere close to gospel.
Parsons cites some standard influences for a singer-songwriter, artists like Jason Isbell and fellow Vermonter Grace Potter. But a more unusual influence seems equally informative: slam poetry. Through high school and college, Parsons competed in slam competitions on a national level before growing disillusioned with the scene. So if the songwriting chops on Reid Parsons bely her professional inexperience, she has deeper wells to draw from. Just listen to the opening lines of “Not Ready to Return”:
One by one, all my bones break
Ashes start rising up like hell’s snowflakes
Somehow I’m not reborn
Just standing in the wreckage of this unnatural storm
Three original endings got discarded before she landed on that song’s cathartic finish: a repeating gospel chorus that may be the single best moment on the EP. “I hate strong resolutions in songs, because they’re so final,” she writes, “so [producer] Yasmin Tayeby and I worked really really hard on the ending to come up with something that was powerful but didn’t have all the instruments/voices resolving simultaneously.”
Having been amassing songs in notebooks since she was barely a teenager, the EP her contest prize enabled her to record show only the beginnings of her promise (and one of the songs she performed at the contest still awaits a proper recording). She’ll surely be playing bigger stages, and winning bigger prizes, soon.
Buy the ‘Reid Parsons’ EP here.
On a new album, Vermont metal trio Savage Hen deliver three Christmas carols you probably shouldn’t play at your office holiday party.
The band pulverizes three classic shopping-mall holiday tunes, thundering through “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Here Comes Santa Claus,” and “Jingle Bell Rock.” All have been covered thousands of times, but rarely with this much throat-shredding screaming. Bing Crosby this ain’t. Continue reading »
See previous monthly Best-Of lists here.
The first song we featured from songwriting vet Bow Thayer’s latest album found him right in his bluesy Americana pocket. “Looney Brook Road,” also off the just-released A Better Version of the Truth, pushes him in some quite different directions. Ambient and spacious, this sonic tour de force takes its meandering time getting to anything like a lyric. When words finally arrive, they sound like the Beatles at their trippy late-period peak, part Sgt Pepper and part White Album and part Paul side-eyeing Yoko in the corner. Continue reading »
In year where Beach House returned, Low garnered some of the best album reviews of their career, and Slowdive continued their surprising second life, The Onlys picked the perfect time to join the dream-pop renaissance. The Vermont quartet have their second EP, Decay, coming out November 29, and just released the first single “Tell Me.”
“Tell Me” channels Galaxie 500 or the mellower sides of Yo La Tengo with a lot of reverb and light touch of pscyhedelia. As which much of the genre’s best music, the echo-y haze does nothing to obscure the supercatchy pop song within. “The song is based around a feeling of indecision and uncertainty,” the band writes. “It’s about helplessly looking for direction and knowing (but really just thinking) that it could never be found internally.” Continue reading »
In my short time running this blog and my 11 years running Cover Me, I’ve read a lot of promo blurbs from bands, publicists, and record labels. But in all that time, I’ve never read an album description quite like this:
“Part Greek play, part book of Job, the high concept story should also appeal to casual listeners of punk, indie alternative, cabaret, and hardcore.”
And here’s the really crazy part: That’s actually a pretty succinct description of The Jobz’ wild new album Die. Continue reading »
When I first wrote about Vermont folk singer Dave Richardson’s new album Carry Me Along, I highlighted his wonderful song about squids. His latest single, just in time for Halloween, tackles a darker subject. Richardson covers “The Unquiet Grave,” an English folk song hundreds of years old narrated by a woman in her grave. It’s kind of a murder ballad for someone already dead, a man metaphorically killing a ghost by mourning so relentlessly her soul can’t finding peace.
“The first version I heard of this song was a recording by Jean Ritchie,” Richardson says. “The ghostly imagery of the woman speaking from within her grave, her ‘earthly strong’ breath, hooked me. It is an achingly beautiful and sad depiction of grief and loss. That combination of graphic imagery and devastating grief got into me and stayed with me. But both of those things are big in my life. I love scary stories, horror, and spooky ballads. And I really, really love sad songs that penetrate down to the deepest fibers of your being. I relate to the idea of being so deep in depression that it becomes consuming and habitual and really needing someone to say ‘hey, you have a life to live, get to it while you can.'” Continue reading »
Singer-songwriter-composer Ben Patton crams a lot into the 32 minutes of new album Meaning What. After starting with the vocal doo-wop of “Maybe I Live to Make You Happy,” it quickly careens into garage-rock, Tin Pan Alley, jazz, showtunes, and beyond. Throughout the frequent genre swerves, though, one apparent inspiration kept jumping out at me: The Beatles.
It’s clichéd to note that the Beatles’ music influenced pretty much every popular music act of the past 60 years. That may well be true in a broad sense – what they did has seeped into every genre – but little current music actually sounds all that much like the Beatles. Meaning What does, though and from all the band’s phases too. On different songs, Patton channels the Broadway covers of their first albums (“New Love New Love”), the increased studio experimentations of Sgt. Pepper’s (“For All I Know”), the White Album’s crunchy drug puns (“Do the Math”), even the ambitious Abbey Road medley (“The Jebidiah Mustache Suite”). Continue reading »