Vol 69 - Do You Believe In Something Beautiful?

It’s been a quiet week for me. I had lots of ideas around the 4th of potentially getting to one of the greater Bay Area Turnover shows, especially with She’s Green opening, but I couldn’t quite square Santa Cruz, San Jose, or Petaluma. Similarly other shows were happening that didn’t quite rise to my “must go” level the past few days. I also remain unsold on the sound quality at the Castro (my first show was trash sound, there’s no denying it) so I passed on a couple shows there.

What I should have done, and did not, was get a 3 day pass for all the Ted Leo shows. Alas! Past me did not think that far ahead, and while I have tickets for the Shake The Sheets show tonight, I really shoulda also done The Tyranny of Distance and Hearts of Oak. But I did not. Past me was a fool, I realized, as I was relistening to these albums for the first time in ages. 2004 was a long time ago, people! I’ve seen Ted Leo several times, and idk…I just kinda drifted? The last time I saw him must have been at First Ave, and it can’t have been 20 years ago, can it? My lord, excuse this aside, more on Ted Leo in a minute.

So yeah, it’s been a quiet week. And the World Cup volume has been winding down, which means I’m finally catching up on a bunch of stuff on my fancy “music I should check out” note. Which means I want to buy more records but I don’t know where to find some of them. Perhaps I’ll get lucky and they will just appear in the stacks of Amoeba like last time I was looking for stuff (and left with $200 worth of records). The circle of life.

Time to go figure out other ways to spend my money and see what’s popped on the 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)

Brian Fallon & The Painkillers - 9/29 at Rickshaw Stop

Substance Fest - 10/22-23, 10/29-30 at Great American Music Hall (some fun bands, might get a single day somewhere in there)

Illuminati Hotties - 10/24 at Great American Music Hall

Protomartyr - 10/24 at August Hall

Slow Pulp - 10/28 at Fillmore (second show added)

Ivy - 11/2 at Cornerstone

The Cactus Blossoms - 11/14 at The Chapel

L’Rain - 12/2 at Rickshaw Stop

feeble little horse - 12/9 at The Independent (second show added)

Com Truise / Matthew Dear - 1/8/2027 at The Independent

Mosswood Meltdown has grown into a nice little local fixture in the past few years, a local homegrown, John Waters curated, fairly approachable festival, which increasingly feels like a rarity in this day and age. The timing is such that it’s always a hard weekend for me to do all of it, but I always like the bill. This year, it’s no exception, with Iggy Pop and Bikini Kill as headliners. And the undercard is usually good and all over the place, this year it includes (Jane’s Going Out Guide fav) Mannequin Pussy and The Dirtbombs, which almost got me in on Saturday. Though it’s more likely I just do the Dirtbombs night show.

But what really won me over this year was the added Friday pre-party with OG slackers Pavement headlining but really it’s the full line-up including Wednesday and Vivian Girls(!) that really does it for me. Good tickets still available for both Friday and the weekend slate still available.

Power pop can make the darkest songs sound so bright. Ted Leo knows this. He harnesses this on what I’d argue is his best known song “Me and Mia”, a shimmering display of bright beautiful chords complimenting some pretty gnarly stuff in the lyrics. Who makes a pop song about eating disorders? Ted Leo.

But what a damn banger that song is. I have heard it so many times in my life, from buying it when it came out to several shows back in the Aughts in Minneapolis, but like many albums and artists I loved from that time, it’s been a long time since I really thought critically about his music or even thought about him at all. Time moves on, and several hundred shows and records and several thousand streams later, it’s interesting what we find our way back to.

I still think if I just had to pick one Ted Leo record it would be Hearts of Oak, which was my gateway (there’s primacy bias again), but it’s hard to find a bad song on Shake The Sheets front to back, with its short beautiful bursts of punk wrapped up in the trappings of power pop. It’s a long way from Chisel and yet not that far at all, at this point in his career, the song writing is much more assured. And sometimes still as true today as they were during Bush II. I hate how much songs from that era are still relevant lyrically.

Power pop can make the darkest songs sound so bright. Ted Leo knows this. He harnesses this on what I’d argue is his best known song “Me and Mia”, a shimmering display of bright beautiful chords complimenting some pretty gnarly stuff in the lyrics. Who makes a pop song about eating disorders? Ted Leo.

But what a damn banger that song is. I have heard it so many times in my life, from buying it when it came out to several shows back in the Aughts in Minneapolis, but like many albums and artists I loved from that time, it’s been a long time since I really thought critically about his music or even thought about him at all. Time moves on, and several hundred shows and records and several thousand streams later, it’s interesting what we find our way back to.

I still think if I just had to pick one Ted Leo record it would be Hearts of Oak, which was my gateway (there’s primacy bias again), but it’s hard to find a bad song on Shake The Sheets front to back, with its short beautiful bursts of punk wrapped up in the trappings of power pop. It’s a long way from Chisel and yet not that far at all, at this point in his career, the song writing is much more assured. And sometimes still as true today as they were during Bush II. I hate how much songs from that era are still relevant lyrically.

What was the last new song you listened to that stopped you in your tracks? I had three moments like that with the new Charlotte Cornfield. First was the bruising title track “Hurts Like Hell” followed by the funny playful nature of memory in “Squiddd” followed by just forgetting what I was doing at Trader Joe’s as “Kitchen” rolled over me. It’s been a while since I listened to a record that did that to me.

This has been on my “to listen to” list for ages (it came out in March) but for whatever reason I was just like “I’ll get around to it”. That persisted for a while but finally after a recent Steven Hyden post, I had to dive in. I’ve never really spent a lot of time with Cornfield’s catalog in the past, which is on me, she’s been in this game a while now at that intersection of music that’s indie or sometimes folk, or even occasionally has hints of Americana. At least this record has quite a bit of that. There’s nothing a well-deployed pedal steel cannot improve.

But as is the case with this style of music, it matters, but it doesn’t mean a thing if you can’t tell a story. And all the songs, even after only a couple listens, paint such vivid scenes. Even the cover sets a scene (those bucket seats), songs about how we have changed, about loss, about being too old for this shit, idk, it just feels like a lot I know. Stuff just starts to hit harder when you get too old for all the bullshit, doesn’t it?

Alright, that’s enough for this week! See you at a show soon