On the way to making Death Cab for Cutie’s forthcoming album, “Codes and Keys” (Atlantic), singer Ben Gibbard quit drinking, got married and ended up relocating to Los Angeles, a city he once despised.
The dramatic changes were foreshadowed by Death Cab’s bleak 2008 release, “Narrow Stairs.”
“That record is kind of a fulcrum in my life,” Gibbard says. “So much of the negativity in my life got funneled into it. I realized after the fact that I didn’t want to go any darker. I wanted it to be the bottom for this band and my own emotional spectrum in terms of writing. I had no grandiose plans to turn my life around. But there was this eerie moment ...”
It’s a good thing Gibbard has a video of the moment because no one would’ve believed him. He prefaces the story he’s about to tell by asserting, “I am not making this up”:
"Around spring of ‘08, I went with my mom to a (Seattle) Mariners game, and I had this very real thought as we were sitting there that my life was about to change. Then a foul ball came flying off the bat and I caught it in my hat. I have the video to prove it – the ball, the hat. It was out of a movie, but it was indicative of something. A couple months later I reconnected with the person who would become my wife.”
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Paul Simon has played stadiums and festivals. He’s done Central Park. So it was a treat Monday to see one of the most venerated songwriters of the last half-century turn the relatively intimate, sold-out Vic Theatre into his living room.
The 69-year-old singer-songwriter dressed for the occasion in loose-fitting jeans and black T-shirt underneath an unbuttoned shirt. His eight-piece multi-culti band framed him, with Simon at times resembling a crossing guard at a three-way intersection as he directed musical traffic. His foot tapped, his arms waved, he crouched and jutted a guitar toward his musicians, he even played an air washboard solo.
In one sense, the two-hour, 24-song performance played like a mini-history of rhythm, spiraling out from the doo-wop of Simon’s native New York to West Africa down the coast to Capetown and then out to the Caribbean, into Brazil, Memphis and New Orleans. His band of multi-instrumentalists was versatile enough to keep pace with Simon’s game of continental hop-scotch, the singer demonstrating how he synthesized his rhythm journeys into durable pop songs.
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The Bulls pop out of a fourth-quarter time-out and stride back into the thick of a tight home playoff game against the Atlanta Hawks knowing that U2 has got their back. At this moment, the dramatic, slow-building intro to the Irish band’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” is like a sixth man on the floor, stirring the fans out of their seats and eliciting a giant, collective “Yaaaargh!” Bono would likely approve.
Soon after, Derrick Rose is bringing the ball upcourt in a must-score situation and the R&B star Usher is right there with him in a short snippet of his hit “Yeah!” As the Bulls grab a defensive rebound, the Bo Diddley beat to Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” urges them to push the ball upcourt on a fast break.
Every Bulls game at the United Center has its own soundtrack. Just as each game is different, rollercoasters of volatile emotions and rapidly changing fortunes, the music and sound effects roll with the changes. A team of about 20 technicians plays DJ each night at the United Center, accenting the ebbs and surges on the floor.
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In concert, Merrill Garbus slams out chords on a ukulele, hammers on a drum, turns her voice into a choir by recording it and then manipulating the sound with a foot pedal, and sings like she’s busting a vow of silence. The one-woman band who records under the name of Tune-Yards has lately added a few collaborators – bassist Nate Brenner and a horn section – but there’s no denying the central personality at the core of one of the year’s best albums so far, Tune-Yards’ “Whokill” (4AD).
For Garbus, 32, the journey to the place where she is now – an intersection of ecstatic East African music, folk earthiness, avant-garde experimentation, and bigger-than-life vocals – brimmed with tangents and detours.
She grew up in a family of musicians on the East Coast, but gravitated toward theater. While in college she became fluent in Swahili and studied in Kenya, where she immersed herself in African music. Puppetry, of all things, came next; she picked up a ukulele and wrote a “creepy” puppet opera “about a mother selling her kids to a butcher.”
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Femi Kuti, 48, is the first-born son of a legend. It is not an easy life constantly being measured against a man who changed African music, but Kuti has forged a brilliant career of his own.
“I can’t run away” from Fela’s legacy, he says in a conversation while on the road with his 14-piece band, which arrives Saturday at Metro. “In a way, I’m much luckier than my father, because he went through a lot to make music. He went through a lot just to live.”
Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the late Nigerian saxophonist and revolutionary, pioneered a militant brand of African funk called Afro-beat, openly opposed his country’s dictatorial government and was beaten, jailed and constantly harassed for his troubles. All the while, he released a steady stream of politically charged albums and performed thousands of epic-length concerts worldwide with a band numbering nearly 30 members. Over the decades he became a venerated and outspoken voice of truth in Africa and an international superstar. When he died in 1997, a million people attended his funeral in Lagos, Nigeria. In recent years, the saxophonist’s life and music were celebrated on Broadway in the hit musical “Fela!” and a movie of his life is in the works.
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