I’m a big, big fan of Imogen Heap/Frou Frou, Esthero, Aimee Mann, and the like, so I loved Sarah Fimm immediately. I just ordered and downloaded all three albums. I think this is the best $30 I’ve spent in a good while.
Hardly “famous” but Imogen Heap / Frou Frou songs (other than Hide and Seek) have regularly appeared on various movie soundtracks like Garden State and Prince Caspian. And of course that song Hide and Seek appeared just about everywhere for awhile.
Glad to see Junior Brown and Bill Kirchen up there. True guitar heroes, all the more so when it seems like any headbanger with a big pile of amplifiers and a distortion pedal gets crowned as a guitar god.
Any fans of Robbie Fulks here? He’s one of the best songwriters around, and no slouch as a performer, either.
These guys have one album, but it is awesome! It’s kinda like classical meets techno, but not as awful as that sounds once it’s typed out. Where’s their next album?
Delmhorst also plays Americana standards in a band called Redbird with Peter Mulvey and Jeffrey Foucault - they’ve only released one album, as far as I know, but there are a few more tracks available at that link, and I’ve come across a few other tracks in other places as well.
It’s hard for me to choose which album I like best; I give a slight edge to Dog Problems only because it was more varied stylistically. Yes, I do know about Fun and Sam’s new band Destry…I’m very excited to hear “The Gambler” in full and without rude college kids talking in my ear.
The Format
Interventions and Lullabies “The First Single”: This is one of the best I could find on there, since all I can find searching for it are blaring clips from concerts, covers and music videos set to the demo version, which imo, isn’t as good as the final product. There used to be one with the album version done as a Lost fanvid, but it was recently removed. “Tie the Rope” Dog Problems “Dog Problems” and its odd video. “The Compromise”
Somebody’s homemade video for “She Doesn’t Get It” They do have an official video for it, but I can’t find it.
I think you and I have pretty similar tastes based on the artists you just named, so I feel compelled to suggest a few other criminally underrated artists . . . namely The Romanovs (dark cabaret/synthpop), Jesca Hoop (experimental folk rock?), and Grand Ole Party (art punk?). I’ve started threads on all these acts, but none got more than a half dozen replies, if even that.
I don’t want to dominate this discussion, but if you want to talk music more, my email’s in my profile and my last.fm profile is in my signature.
Time for my customary plug of my favorite band. Marah. They’ve toured with plenty of big stars like Bruce and Steve Earle, but never hit themselves. I hope they don’t turn out to be one of those bands that people cite as influential but never gain any success on their own.
I love this band! Though I have to confess when I first heard “Look Out Young Son” I thought it was a Meg White song.
“Troubadour of the Water” and “Gypsy March” are awesome. And when riding a train through the hills of Nevada and/or Utah (lost track of where we were exactly), “Roll On Down” is the perfect song.
Yep. One of the ones that came to mind as soon as I saw the thread. He’s not just great, but able to do seemingly anything, as songs like “That Bangle Girl” and “Fountains of Wayne Hotline” demonstrate.
Nick Hornby, the British novelist who wrote High Fidelity, About a Boy, How to Be Good, and others, is a big fan (here’s a link to a NYTimes op-ed piece about them from 2004 in which he says “what I love about them is that I can hear everything I ever loved about rock music in their recordings and in their live shows.” Even then, nearly five years ago, Hornby fretted that they might never achieve any commerical success, as they’d already released four albums without making any significant inroads.
I don’t keep up with current stuff closely enough to have much insight on current artists, but I still can’t believe that you’re more likely to find Kelly Hogan waitressing or bartending in a Chicago dive bar than headlining world tours. I became a devoted fan over twenty years ago, during one of the few shows billed as “An Evening with the Garbageman” at the White Dot in Atlanta, followed her through The Jody Grind, her stint with The RockATeens, solo work, collaborations with anyone who’s anyone in the Bloodshot Records orbit, and especially her semi-permanent gig as a backing vocalist with Neko Case’s various projects (if you’ve seen Neko Case live, you’ve probably seen Kelly also). Here’s a twenty-year-old video of a song called “Eight Ball” from the first Jody Grind release (One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Treasure).
Kirsty MacColl was the paradigm case for me, however. Everyone in the world wanted her on their sessions in the eighties and early nineties. She was a great songwriter, had an amazing voice, and was an gifted producer as well. Bonus points for having the balls (figuratively speaking, at least) to record a brilliant cover of the Smiths’ “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby” as a sort of answer to this very question. She got more attention than some of the folks mentioned here, but certainly in the States she was never even close to being “famous”. She’d have been 50 this year had she not been fatally injured by a speedboat while diving in Mexico in December 2000.
Another blast from the past: the San Francisco band Translator. Their albums on 415 Records in the eighties were outstanding examples of how good straightforward rock with a pop sensibility could be. They weren’t weird or quirky or wearing oddball clothes (at least, not by the standards of the time). They just wrote excellent songs and played them very well. Very glad that I got a chance to see them on their last tour in the summer of 86, just before they split up. Here’s a video of one of my favorite songs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9fPjeuLM8w&feature=channel
Lou Ann Barton is another example of the “musician’s musican.” A long-time Austin blues/blues-rock singer, she’s on just about everyone’s album, at least from that scene, but she hasn’t had much success on her own.
