I’ve got a terrible fondness for most Minnesota musicians anyway, and even though Haley Bonar’s from one of the Dakotas she’s known as a Minnesota musician (for her time in Duluth and, now, St. Paul), and so I’ve got a soft spot for her just as is. Still, geography’s not enough to make me love a song or an artist, and Bonar’s songs are freakishly pretty. I first heard her track “Am I Allowed,” off her first disc The Size of Planets, and that song might still be one of the prettiest, gutsiest, most honest songs of love and ache I’ve ever heard. The song’s action is of a lover returning to a lover she’s left, and though some of the phrases are sort of stock and simple, Bonar edges them into new territory with strange new additions to what the listener might be expecting: “Just let me see you, I sure miss your smile, we’ve both been lonely, we can kiss for awhile…” She sings that passage toward the start of the song and it’s unfair to even go too far into all this just because to understand the impact of Bonar’s singing you need to hear her soft, slightly sad voice—she sounds both exhausted and quietly determined, if that makes sense. Anyway: the song to get, if you’ve never heard her, is “Am I Allowed.”
Her new single is the title track from her latest CD. Another weakness I’ve got is for stuff titled Big Star—the band (obviously), the Jayhawks track (off Smile)—and so this track made me smile even before I heard it. The singer this time is not the one who has left, is not even the one who is leaving, but is a lover singing about her beloved’s desire to find “all the loving that you need.” In the chorus her voice takes off, assuring her beloved “You’re gonna be a big star,” and then later advising that “They’re gonna call you baby, treat you like a symbol, something that they’ll never understand…I’m gonna read your stories, spend springtime in the gardens…” There’s a weird lack of overt sentiment in the song—it’s not clear that Bonar’s happily wishing this lover well on his way to fame and glory or if she’s really really hurt by it. It seems to me to be both, simultaneously, which is all the more devastating. Anyway: download it, listen to it, buy her album, come to see her when she comes to your town.
The Rural Alberta Advantage “Don’t Haunt This Place”
I know next to nothing about this band: I know that they are a trio (2dudes/1girl) from Canada, and that this song is from their debut album Hometowns, which they self-released this past fall and which should have a much wider release than it presently does, and at the end what I know about the band is sort of unimportant: I got this song a week ago and I haven’t gone a day without listening to it four or five or nine times a day, no joke. I can’t believe how crisp and cool the drums sound, how basically this sounds like a song with a folk lyric and melody and a pop guitar/strings part with techno drumming and somehow those three things work perfectly despite the fact that it’s not (I’m guessing) anyone’s idea of the perfect Neapolitan ice cream of music. Still though: believe it, the song’s perfect, it’s a great early evening summer song, and everyone should download it and listen and listen and listen.
Langhorne Slim “Spinning Compass”
I can’t speak with anything like coherency about this guy, so I’ll try to make it quick. This is a track of his recent self-titled release, which was supposed to come out on V2 but, of course, didn’t because there’s no more V2. Langhorne Slim’s apparently been around for 2+ years and I’ve known of him for 1+ month which makes me feel just stupid and awful because I’m sure at some point in the last 2+ years I could’ve used some of the music he’s made, but I had to suffer through with whatever I had. The other side of that coin, though, is that now I do know his music, and my life’s all the better for it, and from what I’ve read and found about the musician he’s worth plenty of attention and enjoyment and etc. Exhibit A: he’s buddies with the Avett Bros, which might be the greatest band in America at the moment and who also seem to be some of the nicest guys in the world (and seriously, if you don’t have Emotionalism, you’re missing way, way out). Exhibit B: in an interview with Daytrotter, Langhorne had this to say: “I wanna make peoples’ heads explode with good feelings. I would like to move people and be moved.” Is it even reasonable to not give a guy with that sort of idealism and hope five of your minutes for one of his songs? And it’s not even five minutes: “Spinning Compass” is a wild one minute, fifty-four second blast that is the perfect pop song—it makes you want to sing along and shake, and then when it’s over you want to hear it again right away (the first time I heard it I played it four times in a row). I don’t know what else to say about Langhorne Slim. Buy his discs. See him play. Do whatever you can think of doing to make sure he has more time and energy to spend writing music.
