FIVE QUESTIONS WITH... FREE ENERGY

We are young and still alive / And now the time is on our side.

My friends Andy and Ryan over at We Hate Music have been counting down to Free Energy's inaugural show in Des Moines for, what, weeks now? Months? And with good reason. When Minnesota native son Paul Sprangers and the rest of his now-Philly-based band-- who kick off a set of dates with Weezer later this month-- descend on Vaudeville Mews this Wednesday night, I don't see how it could fail to be an awesome time. Some people around here may have caught Sprangers when he was fronting Hockey Night, a band that recorded for late, sadly missed Bay Area punk label Lookout!. These days Free Energy have teamed up with another much-loved label, New York's DFA, where they worked with label co-founder and LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy to help craft 2010 debut album Stuck on Nothing: a classic-rock-tinged pop record in that fun, summer barbecue kind of way. It looks like we might not be barbecuing around here for a while, so until Wednesday night, here are five answers (plus an extra one, just in case) Sprangers was kind enough to share with me via e-mail. Also please definitely listen to his interview with the We Hate Music dudes.

1. You're from Red Wing, Minnesota, and when you were with your old band, Hockey Night, I know you played Des Moines at least once. Any standout memories of our fair city? It's OK to be brutally honest.

PS: yes. i love des moines. being brutally honest.

hockey night played the vaudeville mews a couple times. always good.

there was a weird frat/dance bar down the street that had psychedelic stuff on the tvs. that was cool.

2. Any advice for musicians in a smaller city trying to get fans and get noticed?

PS: i would say to all musicians in smaller cities and towns: you are at a huge advantage right now.

you can pay less rent than the kool-aid drinking hipsters in the big cities. your cost of living is lower.

practice your ass off, write tons of songs, and MAYBE, eventually, put some music online. that's only if you're getting SOME Kind of positive feedback. even if it's from your best friend or your mom or whatever. do nothing but write, record, and play live. get some shitty job and don't buy useless shit. get your furniture off the streets and wear the same jeans for years.

this is what i did/do.

i am going to die making art. nothing else is important to me.

actually, girls are a very close second.

3. Along the same lines, I know you've said you guys still consider yourselves as being a Minnesota band. And I think that's pretty significant. I don't know about Minneapolis, but I feel like I've picked up a different vibe when it comes to being a music fan in Des Moines than in NYC, or even a bigger Midwestern city like Chicago. And not just that people come out for different shows than they might on the Lower East Side, either. What do you think is different about being into music and going to shows here in the Midwest versus on the East Coast? Or am I just imagining things?

PS: i don't know. a fan is a fan. i lived in nyc and went to as many shows as i could and loved every second. always.

maybe midwest kids are a bit more desperate for live shows? whereas on the east coast you can throw a rock in any direction and hit a live show.

4. For us music geeks, it's year-end list time. I've seen you raving about Rihanna's "Rude Boy," which is awesome. Any other favorite 2010 albums or tracks we should check out? 

PS: titus andronicus, hollerado, miniature tigers, drink up buttercup, kurt vile, war on drugs, gang, gayngs, sun airway, bear in heaven, kanye, robyn, beach house, EASTBOUND AND DOWN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

also, LOUIE! check this show out. louis c.k. writes and directs.

brilliant. silly. funny. sad.

5. My buddy Travis says if and when he and his better half, Missy, get married, you guys once said you might play their wedding. Uh, no pressure! But I'm curious: What do you imagine a hypothetical Free Energy wedding gig would be like?

PS: kegs. loud p.a. system. confetti explosions. zip line into hot tub filled with champagne.

chutes and ladders (LIFE SIZE!!).

bridesmaids orgy. 

6. People used to compare Hockey Night to Pavement; I saw an interview where you said you didn't listen to Pavement anymore. In the same interview, you (justifiably!) raved about Thin Lizzy; Stuck on Nothing is an album with a lot of classic rock reference points, including, if I'm not mistaken, some Thin Lizzy-style guitar harmonies. So, should we expect another big shift on the next Free Energy album?

PS: yes.

what connects "born in the u.s.a" to inxs' "kick?" synths? clinical production? wet snares and slapback on vocals?

all of these are correct.

the new free energy is gonna be huge, bombastic, clean, gnarly, melodic, dancey, live, and more like the late stones than it probably should.

thank you!

CAN YOU HELP ME FIGURE THIS OUT?

I'm a fool now that it's over.

"I wish somebody would do a Pazz & Jop-style list made up of only people's #1 albums and songs," I tweeted Nov. 10. "Feel like #10s (and #50s!) are irrelevant." This led me into a really fun and enlightening e-mail back and forth with my friend and the person who used to hand me wines I'd love but then immediately forget how to describe intelligently (I'm telling you I must just have a terrible sense of smell, which would also explain why I dislike bland foods such as mayonnaise or American cheese but will gladly quaff a red wine recommended to me-- accurately-- as tasting like "fried ice cream and green peppercorn"), Cole Chilton. Now, Cole started with the premise that, as previously niche interests have become more popular, a narrow top 10 list tends to miss a lot, which seems inarguably true. In our conversation, he also (it seems to me correctly) noted that top 50s and other long lists constitute a form of "signaling"; a longer list signals that a critic has taken the time to listen to so much and with such critical attention that you should take this person's top pick very seriously. And then we started talking about how he approaches rating the wines he tastes, which was super interesting but really none of my business to start sharing here.

I guess it's Cole's second point that starts to nag at me. Readers of this blog and its Tumblr are probably bored by now with my constant crusade for the idea that there's always at least a slight potential gap between a sign and what it signifies. (I just finished reading this great book called The Gift by Lewis Hyde, and I found out that Albert Einstein, of all people, made sort of a similar argument in a different context: "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.") By the same token, I start to wonder if all the effort that gets expended signaling expertise risks taking away some of a list's communication of any actual expertise. It might be the journalist in me talking, too: If we're signaling our own expertise, are we really serving the readers' interests first? Or our own? (Like, when you're a reporter, sometimes you want to quote a source in an article, because the source took the time to speak with you and you want them to speak with you again, but it only muddles up the account for the reader, whose interests come first, so you cut the quote and apologize to the source.)

But mostly, I worry about the effect that lists of a gazillion albums can have when they're assembled into a poll. For all the greater potential for diversity that has come with the internet, you ultimately seem to have more critics working for less money and listening to the same basic universe of albums. I have plenty of disagreements with Chuck Eddy's essay for the Village Voice at the beginning of the year, "The Year of Too Much Consensus," but I, um, agree that there's an awful lot of consensus. When everybody is filing a list of 10 or 50 or 100 "top" albums of the year or whatever, does this basically mean that the medium-profile, critically safe stuff that ends up in people's 8th spots or 35th spots is going to rise to the top, just because it's going to be on everybody's list somewhere, given a long enough list? Someone with access to the actual data could correct me on this, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if year-end lists end up being more in accord with critics' #1 albums than with their #12s. If my worries are at all well-founded, though, here's where I again think about the reader: As a music fan, how much do I care about an album that some critic ranks at #10 but not a single critic in the country ranks as #1? (Might such choices sometimes be as much about "signaling"-- ooh, a token [insert niche] pick!-- as about how much, if we really thought about it, we'd expect ourselves to enjoy the record if we were in our readers' shoes?) Could the cumulative effect of year after year of longer and longer lists be not to give readers more choices, as the numerical growth might indicate, but rather, to constrict them by providing an unnatural consensus based on what looks good on a list more than on what makes us passionate?

As with all of these debates I constantly find myself stumbling into on the internet, there are of course shades of gray, and I recognize there's probably never a clearcut situation where one choice is purely "signaling" and another is purely based on how passionate we are about a record. And I mean, really, here's the worst part: While it's easy for me to come up with my top album, or even my top 3 albums, once we get past that, I keep coming up with more and more records I enjoy and want to share with you in case you might like them, too (or is it partly, as with my example earlier of quoting a source in a news article, because I want to show the artists and other critics who like them that I'm not a hater? Who knows!). So here are a whole bunch of records that while I'm listening to them make me feel stuff and think stuff and maybe occasionally wanna move around and shout stuff and I hope if nothing else I can pass some of those feelings along to you.

So here's my 2010 year-end wrap-up post. For the albums list, I used an expansive definition of what constitutes one album, which I think is appropriate considering artists are experimenting with new ways of releasing music now that the album is in decline; for the tracks list, I tried to limit choices in the top 50 to two per artist, although The-Dream kinda sneaks through because I wasn't counting guest appearances (or songwriters, for that matter).

WASN'T WAITING FOR NOTHING TO DO

Why you gonna pray and pray? You're gonna go to hell anyway!

Just got back from taking the dog for a walk. His name is Chuck. I'm pretty sure I've told you before about our friend Chuck, aka Chet, aka Chet Boom. Well, his girlfriend, who I told you about because she sort of randomly ended up working merch for Black Mountain, already has the same first name as Mrs. Des Noise. So confusion reigns.

We got the dog about three weeks ago now, and he's the first dog I've ever had, because I'm allergic, but he's a labradoodle (unfortunate name for a poodle-labrador mix), so he doesn't bother me. Contrary to popular belief, it's not that he doesn't shed-- oh man, he does-- but I guess it's true what they say about the dander or whatever, because so far I've been feeling fine. Mrs. Des Noise used to work at a kennel, and she had a co-worker who is now a dog trainer, and the dog trainer knew Chuck, and it turned out Chuck needed a home, which was a special case because it's hard to find hypoallergenic dogs in shelters or whatever, so we met Chuck's previous owners, they were looking for the right people to come along, we were waiting for the right dog to come along, and it just so happened Chuck was the right dog for us. I know this is supposed to be a music blog, so I'm sorry to go on and on about a dog, but that's really the main thing that I've been talking about/obsessing over lately.