I’ve been writing this literally just as an email I directly send to friends for a bit, but it’s starting to get a bit unwieldy, so I decided to move things over here. By way of introduction, here’s what I said way back in the first edition of this a year and a half ago.
Several of you have asked how I keep up with what’s coming. The answer is…I spend a fair amount of time curating a list of venues, following stuff on social, subscribing to the right emails, and then I have a mostly comprehensive guide of what’s on my mind. It’s not authoritative or the final say or anything, and I would like to very much emphasize that it’s what catches my eye. So if you like a certain band and are like…why didn’t Jane include this, well, that might be why. Not everything is for everyone. That’s okay!
But if you are looking to expand those horizons a bit in line with what I’m listening to or just stay up to date…well here you go…I spend some amount of time carefully curating my calendar. There are certain days/weeks that fill up with a ton of stuff, it helps me keep things relatively in order, not buy tickets to two shows on the same night (at least not on purpose), etc
Alright, you are up to speed now! Let’s dive in like normal, welcome to Jane’s Going Out Guide
Calendar
This is a shareable calendar. You should be able to add it to your calendar here if you use Google calendar
Not ready for that kind of commitment? Just take a peek here. I do not think you can see the colors this way though
✅ means I have tickets to a show
❌ means I can’t make it but I thought it was worth putting on there at some point, I’ve already purchased tickets to another show that night, whatever. You can still benefit!
💸 means it’s sold out (which we all know is a construct)
New Shows
Clipse - 8/6 at the Indy (this is extremely sold out sadly)
heavens to betsy - 10/17 (sold out) and 10/18 at Bottom of the Hill
Whew, the back half of the year is already filling up
Highlighted Show - Ted Leo & The Pharmacists 7/9-11 at Bottom of the Hill
Yes, yes, these shows are technically sold out. But c’mon, where there’s a will there’s a way. This is another one of those atavistic takes me back to my mid-twenties bills I could not say no to, and while I only ended up getting tickets for the Shake The Sheets night, all three of those records are great. I strongly considered the Hearts of Oak night as well, that’s the record that got me into Ted Leo in the first place.
Have I kept up with the last 20 years of Ted Leo? Not really. Fun that he’s been playing Chisel shows and such but idk, just one of those artists I drifted from as I found other things, got more excited about other stuff, and saw enough that he wasn’t a priority. But then 10-15 years pass and you feel differently, you know? When I hear “Me and Mia” I still can’t get it out of my head. It’s a catching fucking song, so much so that you don’t always think about what it’s about. Power pop has long smuggled dark ideas in catchy riffs though, so Ted Leo is certainly not alone there.
I anticipate this crowd will basically be 40 and up. But maybe the kids have discovered Ted Leo. Maybe I’ll be surprised.
Something Old - “Sherlock Holmes” - The Dirtbombs
My friend has been hosting this really fun concept where a few of us get together and we take turns spinning songs that we select, and this time we have a loose theme of covers, so I’ve been digging through some of my favorite covers.
What makes a perfect cover? Sometimes it’s a transcendent ability to take a song and recontextualize it in a way you just had not considered before. Sometimes it’s the malleability of a song (Fountains Of Wayne take on “...Baby One More Time”, Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn”, Devo’s “Satisfaction”). Sometimes it’s the reverence (basically any cover Pearl Jam does, but for my money, their cover of “Sonic Reducer”, here’s a good version from 2003). It can be a lot more too. It can also fail greatly (let us never speak of BSS’s cover of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” ever again).
I always enjoy covers that are entry ways into artists I didn’t really know much about before, and this cover by The Dirtbomb from their underrated We Have You Surrounded is in that category. As covers go, it’s not really a reinterpretation of any means, but it was a huge gateway for me into Sparks, for which I am forever grateful. It’s also an absolute banger.
Something new - Fazed On A Pony - swan
I don’t know what I was expecting when I put this on. I had clicked through KEXP’s “Albums You May Have Missed In The First Half” email and indeed this is an album I missed. It’s the second from New Zealand singer-songwriter Peter McCall and lives somewhere in between indie rock and alt-country, fitting in with a bunch of other great tunes and records I’ve been enjoying to start this year (the new ones from Ovven, Mildred, Brown Horse, for example) but with a bit more indie in the dna than country. It’s definitely a catchy listen! Even more so than I expected when I first read about it.
It’s an album, you should listen to the album, but after a couple springs definitely I’m starting to pick up a bit more that’s under this. Wish I’d caught this at the time as it’s sold out online and god knows where I will find a copy of it, but thankfully that’s not the only way to listen to music these days, so I’ll wear out some digital files in the meantime.
Alright, that’s enough for this week! See you at a show soon