Category: News

Rina Sawayama‘s eclectic, highly anticipated new album Hold The Girl arrives next month. Today, she’s unveiling the cinematic single “Phantom,” in which she wishes to communicate to her younger self to provide comfort and reassurance: “If I could talk to you, I’d tell you not to rush / You’re good enough / You dont have to lose, what makes you you / Still got some growing to do,” she sings.

“I realized as an adult that I have spent my whole life pleasing other people and not realizing it — constantly pushing my boundaries and not realizing the difference between what I wanted to do and what other people wanted from me,” Sawayama said in a statement. “Through the lyrics in the verse I’m trying to tell this story and then in the choruses I’m mourning the loss of my real self.”

This track follows the release of “This Hell,” “Catch Me In The Air,” and “Hold The Girl.” The songs have been ranging from twangy ballads to unabashed pop anthems. She’s bringing her new music on a 13-date US tour this fall, kicking off in Brooklyn on November 1.

Listen to “Phantom” above.

Hold The Girl is out 9/2 via Dirty Hit. Pre-order it here.

If any of your Succession-loving friends live in New York City, there’s a good chance they’ve seen season four being filmed. Those lucky slime puppies. There’s even Twitter accounts dedicated to these run-ins. Most of the pictures are of Kendall (Jeremy Strong) looking sad, or Shiv (Sarah Snook) being the best by being the worst, or Logan (Brian Cox) muttering “f*ck off” to himself, but also be on the look out for Alexander Skarsgård.

Deadline reports that The Northman star is returning as bored tech CEO Lukas Mattson in the new season. Other familiar faces who will be back:

-Arian Moayed as investor Stewy Hosseini
-Juliana Canfield as Kendall’s poor assistant Jess Jordan
-Annabelle Dexter-Jones as Kendall’s kind of girlfriend Naomi Pierce
-Hope Davis as Sandi Furness, the daughter of Logan’s media rival Sandy Furness
-Cherry Jones as PGM head Nan Pierce
-Dagmara Domińczyk as the head of PR for Waystar Roco, Karolina Novotney
-Justin Kirk as right-wing politician Jeryd Mencken
-Stephen Root as conservative political donor Ron Petkus

It wouldn’t be an HBO show without Stephen Root. Just saying, House of the Dragon.

It is unclear how many episodes any of the actors will be back for. Three of the returning recurring guest stars, Skarsgård, Moayed, and Davis, are currently nominated for an Emmy for their performances in Season 3 while Jones won for her role in 2020.

Is your favorite character not listed? Well:

Succession returns to HBO in 2023.

(Via Deadline)

It would be pretty hard to confuse Hillary Clinton with Donald Trump. One of them is an overweight man with ill-fitting pants and a bizarre orange tint who can most often be found in a golf cart. The other is the woman who actually won the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election, but graciously conceded when it was clear that her opponent — Trump — had won the electoral college. While Kayleigh McEnany spent several years working for Trump, the former White House press secretary seems to have either confused or conflated the one-time opponents.

As Mediaite reports, McEnany appeared on Fox News on Wednesday, where she chatted with Jesse Watters (groan!) about Gutsy, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s new Apple TV+ series, which shines a spotlight on brave women making a difference in the world. While the series is an offshoot of their best-selling 2019 book, The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience, Watters and McEnany have a suspicion that it could be something more. Like, say, a signal that Hillary might be looking to make another run at the presidency in 2024…

“Is she setting herself to wait in the wings in case Biden doesn’t run?,” Watters asked. To which McEnany — absolutely clueless to the irony of her own words, or the inaccuracy — replied:

I know it’s portrayed as the biggest conspiracy theory since the last conspiracy theory. However, I don’t think you’re wrong, Jesse. If there is anyone that we can say, megalomaniac, addicted to power, thinks she should’ve been president, still essentially hasn’t conceded the election, and wants to be president again, it would be this woman. It would be Hillary Clinton. I’ve always said she’s the dark horse. I mean, what, it’s Pete Buttigieg? You really think she’s going to let this guy stand up and be the next President of the United States? I think she could run.

For anyone whose brain can remember back to the 2016 election (you’re excused, Kayleigh), Hillary — despite winning the popular vote by approximately 3 million — conceded the election the very next day, as soon as the electoral college results were confirmed. And she did it in the classiest way possible, by telling her supporters that “Donald Trump is going to be our president” and that “we owe him an open mind and a chance to lead.” And she said these words without even gagging!

As for Trump? Well, he didn’t take his loss in 2020 as well.

You can watch McEnany’s chat with Watters on Mediaite.

(Via Mediaite)

Veteran suicides are on the rise in America. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the suicide rate increased by nearly 36% from 2001 to 2019. Since the onset of the “war on terror” in 2001, more than 30,000 active duty personnel have died by suicide—that’s four times greater than the number killed in action.

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Marine veteran Travis Snyder was enlisted in the military for six years and served in Afghanistan as a corporal from October 2017 to April 2018 and is no stranger to the pain of veteran suicide. Snyder lost a friend and fellow veteran to it in 2019.

He’s also had his own mental health struggles.

After leaving the military and losing a friend, he discovered his new purpose in life, to help other veterans dealing with mental health issues.

“Up until that point in my unit, we had lost others before my time of service, but that was my first time experiencing loss up close. Once we lost Jeff I would say I just felt led to do something and walking and hiking was the best thing I knew how to do,” Snyder told WGVU News.

See on Instagram

So Snyder decided to do something dramatic. In 2019, he walked 810 miles of shoreline around Lake Michigan in 42 days to raise awareness for mental health resources and veteran suicide prevention. In 2020, he walked 210 miles of shoreline and in 2021, another 200. This year, Snyder had his longest walk of 900 miles around the lake.

Snyder uses the attention he gets from his monumental walks to raise money for Mission 22, a nonprofit that helps veterans with mental health treatment and support.

On all four of Snyder’s walks, he’s been impressed with the kindness of those he’s encountered around the lake.

“The first year I was going to hike, I didn’t tell too many folks what I was doing. I was merely going to commemorate our comrade we lost to suicide and hoped to reach a few people along the way. I had all of my camping gear and was ready to rough it wherever I could,” he told Upworthy.

“However, with help from Facebook, word of mouth, and other platforms, thousands of people have gathered around each venture, with a desire to contribute one way or another; whether it be a meal, a roof, a bed, or just a word of encouragement. I’m very grateful when I share that after four walks and 2240 total miles, I have yet to resort to camping out somewhere for a night. I have always had a bed, or place to stay whether it be a home or hotel,” he continued.

Snyder’s favorite spot on his heroic walks is Fayette Historic State Park in Garden, Michigan.

“At one point it was a bustling community that manufactured iron in the late 19th century, but was abandoned and is now basically a ghost town,” he told Upworthy. “However, the surrounding cliff faces, clear waters, and alluring scenery make it a must. When I went, there was no one around so it really added to the eerie yet beautiful vibe!”

Snyder wouldn’t be able to raise money without Meta tools. He adds a donate button to his Facebook posts which allows his followers to support and donate to the Mission 22 organization. Facebook is the best tool he has for keeping his followers up to date on his walks.

See on Instagram

“Thanks to Facebook and the tools and resources that Facebook provides, I was able to set a small stage, and build a small following, a community of folks that want to tie into this cause and contribute in their own way,” Travis has shared.

Facebook also allows people to join him on his journeys.

“I do my best to be consistent and to the point with my posts, so that followers are able to both stay interested and engaged. But also so that they don’t miss anything that I’m sharing; whether that be updates on the walk itself or new information in the world of veteran mental health,” he told Upworthy.

Many of Snyder’s followers on social media are veterans of wars including Desert Storm, Afghanistan and Vietnam.

Snyder hopes his walks will help inspire a dialog about mental health and encourage civilians and vets to have discussions about this challenging topic.

“I hope that the stigma behind the term ‘PTSD’ doesn’t prevent civilians from interacting or being willing to have a conversation with a veteran,” he told Upworthy. “Veterans who experience these mental health injuries are not weak for speaking up, but rather it’s the act of opening up and sharing these experiences that are saving lives, by encouraging more and more to speak up as well.”

He also hopes people learn that PTSD isn’t the only mental health struggle veterans face.

“Mental health challenges come in all forms, and levels of intensity,” he told Upworthy. “Some that experience challenges are working through serious obstacles such as suicidal tendencies, schizophrenia and depression. But some are merely experiencing anxiety, trouble sleeping and stress.”

Snyder is looking to walk even further in 2023 with either a 1,000-mile trek around Lake Michigan or, possibly, a journey around Lake Superior, which would take as long as four months.

“Trust me, the desire is there, and as long as we keep losing our loved ones to suicide,” he told Upworthy, “the calling and the need will continue to be there as well.”

On July 2, Billie Eilish shared a rendition of “Listen Before I Go” on TikTok, but it was an atypical sort of performance. The video was a duet of a clip from UK vocal coach and pianist Sheridan Coldstream, in which he instructs vocalists to sing the song while he plays it on piano. He also noted that there’s a part of the song where they might want to try a vocal approach different than the one Eilish takes on the album version.

Well, as Eilish sang along to the song, she took Coldstream’s advice, which had an emotional impact on him.

In a new BBC interview about the video, Coldstream said, “There’s a bit in the song where she normally goes down. I suggested that some singers may want to take it higher and she did exactly that, so I was gobsmacked. It was immensely exciting and I found the whole thing very moving; it made me tear up several times.”

He also said of his initial reaction to the video, “I was gobsmacked. Came inside, shouted upstairs to my daughter who was in her bedroom. I said, ‘Guess what? You know that Billie Eilish duet I uploaded?’ She went, ‘Yes yes.’ I wanted maximum impact on this. And she said, ‘What, what?’ I said, ‘Guess who’s duetted it?’ ‘I don’t know, dad!’ I said, ‘Billie Eilish,’ and her response was words I can’t really repeat on TV.”

If you’d told a rap fan in the ’90s that Snoop Dogg, the guy who pioneered West Coast G-Funk with Doggystyle and beat a murder charge in 1996, would have a children’s series on YouTube, they’d likely laugh you out of town (after you explained just what the heck YouTube is). But that’s exactly what happened, as Snoop adds another crown jewel to his ever-expanding empire that also includes breakfast cereal, an NFT label, a Big3 basketball team, and a growing list of movie appearances, video games, and K-pop songs.

Doggyland, which you can find on YouTube Kids, features Snoop rapping and singing nursery rhymes and educational songs with a cast of colorful dog characters. He says the show’s goal is to promote tolerance and acceptance at an early age in a video about the show’s creation. “You can just be you and be accepted in Doggyland, and what’s what these characters represent — diversity, so kids can learn to love each other from the beginning because hate is what’s taught,” he says. “Love is what’s in their heart.”

Snoop’s collaborators on the show include Claude Brooks, the executive producer of Hip Hop Harry, and R&B artist October London. On the show, Snoop voices an adult mentor dog named Bow Wizzle, who of course, guides the cast’s puppies with advice and songs like “Everyone Is Different” and “Sharing Is Caring.” The show’s soundtrack, Kids Hits, Vol. 1, is available to stream on DSPs.

Watch a featurette detailing the show’s creation above.

It’s been said that if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. But I don’t think that’s true, at least when it comes to indie rock. In fact, I would argue the opposite. A paltry percentage of Americans actually care about or even know what indie rock is. But there are a lot of people in New York, so that paltry percentage nets a relatively large number of listeners. Therefore, lots of bands that can’t draw a crowd anywhere else can do still do relatively well in New York. It’s more like, “If you can’t make it there, you can’t make it anywhere.”

This is why I decided earlier this month to head to Utah, possibly the least NYC-like state in the union, to catch up with one of 2022’s most hyped indie artists, Bartees Strange, while he was on tour there.

If you read music publications, you are likely already familiar with this 33-year-old singer-songwriter. For the past few years, he has been hailed by everyone from the New York Times to Pitchfork to NPR as a breakout star. (For the record, I also literally called him a “breakout star” in a column back in 2020.) Upon the release of his excellent second full-length album Farm To Table in June, Strange was praised for his musical range — he melds rock with hip-hop and funk and country and subtle jazzy grace notes, and makes it sound coherent and fresh and alive — as well as the political consciousness of songs like the psych-blues ballad “Hold The Line,” which addresses the murder of George Floyd.

Beyond his music, Strange is just an easy guy to root for. His background slots him as an underdog — he’s a Black man in a predominantly white music scene; he got indie-famous in his 30s in spite of the youth-obsessed, TikTok-ification of indie culture; he’s a country kid from flyover country flourishing among the coastal elites; he sees himself as fundamentally uncool and yet (as he sings in “Cosigns,” Table‘s first single) he’s now pals with some of the trendiest indie stars on the planet: Phoebe Bridgers, Justin Vernon, Lucy Dacus, and way too many others to name.

“It seems like the sky’s the limit with him,” says Bryce Dessner of The National, Strange’s favorite band, who invited him to open five dates in the western United States and Canada this summer, including the one I traveled to see. “I could see him having a really vast career based on what I’ve heard and just seeing him on stage. He’s got big things ahead of him.”

But all of this is just conversation. What matters — what actually moves the needle – is whether you can get in a van, drive several hours per day through the heart of America’s sprawling and scenic emptiness, set up for a gig, and get people to turn out and embrace your music. If you can’t do that, then all of the glowing reviews and flattering profiles and hyperbolic tweets amount to empty chatter.

Can Bartees Strange make it in the weird, wild West? I wanted to find out.

***

Three days before my flight to Salt Lake City, I get Bartees on the phone. I had last talked to him two years prior, upon the release of his debut full-length, Live Forever. At the time, he was trying to launch a music career at possibly the worst time in modern history to launch a music career. It was September 2020, and we were six months into Covid lockdown. Hope for a vaccine was on the horizon, but almost half of Americans were already expressing skepticism about taking it. The irony of releasing an album called Live Forever in this context seemed more cruel than funny.

Nevertheless, he pretty much … pulled it off? A former Division II college football player, Strange is more outwardly confident, competitive, and tenacious than most indie musicians I’ve encountered. This is, after all, a scene that still puts a premium on feigned apathy, even when it’s a barely adequate disguise for unbridled careerism. But Strange doesn’t even attempt to put on that kind of sham performance. He wanted to make it, and he worked hard to make sure he would, even in the midst of a pandemic. In the spring of 2022, he signed with the prestigious indie label 4AD, home to The National and countless other indie A-listers. It signaled his arrival as a major player in that world.

The day Live Forever was released, he started making Farm To Table. Unlike his debut album — which was preceded by an EP, Say Goodbye To Pretty Boy, which is made up mostly of radically reimagined covers of National songs — he had a bit of a budget this time around. He could afford to hire players for a backing band, which were culled from the Brooklyn art-pop scene he discovered in the 2010s that also includes fellow rising indie musicians L’Rain and Keiyaa.

The extra time and money is apparent in Table‘s silky sonic tableau; it is simply one of the best-sounding indie releases of the year. “I didn’t have to get on YouTube and learn how to compress drums,” he says with a laugh. (Strange has kept up his prolific pace and says he’s already close to finished with his next record. “It could be finished, if I wanted it to be,” he says. “I’m going to sit for a minute and I’ll come back to it in a little while.”)

The early jump on Farm To Table paid off by the summer of 2021, when tours started to slowly resume and Strange found himself as the most in-demand opening act on the indie circuit. Tours with Bridgers, Dacus, Courtney Barnett and Car Seat Headrest followed in quick succession as the calendar flipped to 2022. The busy road schedule immediately put Strange on a steep learning curve. “Before 2021, I’d never really toured like this,” he says. “My longest tour, I think, was a week with a friend, playing bass in their band. So I went from that to doing full national tours.”

After the relative idle of the shutdown, Strange now had to rapidly build his own touring infrastructure. “It’s just buying a lot of shit,” he explains. “It’s buying a van, buying a trailer, hiring a band, making sure everyone’s paid on time, getting a business manager, having a booking agent. And then you just hope it’s solid so you can play shows without stressing out.”

Inevitably, things happen that you can’t plan for. For instance, in July he waged his first European tour as a headliner. The first date was at Rock Werchter, a huge festival in Belgium featuring many of the very biggest bands in the world: Metallica, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Imagine Dragons. Unlike the guys in those groups, Strange still sets up his own gear. A few minutes after plugging in before showtime, he noticed something troubling: His pedal board was smoking. “I’m watching my pedals catch on fire from backstage,” he says, “and we go on in five minutes.”

Here’s a lesson for other musical rookies about to tour in Europe that Bartees Strange learned the hard way: The power sources over there shoot out about twice as much electricity as the ones here in America. The surge wrecked his pedals. “I had to change the whole setlist in two minutes and just play it for more than 2,000 people,” he says. “And that was show number one of the tour.”

Having survived this literal trial by fire, Bartees quickly learned to navigate the psychological highs and lows of touring life. There was the amazing two-show run in Toronto with Car Seat Headrest, when everything clicked and they had a great monitor engineer for once. And then there was the disaster in Tacoma with Dacus, where the audience looked like it wanted to kill him. “The thing that I’ve learned about touring,” he says, “is every show is not going to be a winner. A lot of shows, in fact, might hurt spiritually and make you question your entire life.

“But then you have moments where you just feel so present, and you begin to realize that it’s 50 percent about the music and the other half is about being present in the moment, and just taking whatever comes and just channeling it into a performance. Every performance is going to be different no matter what.”

My plan is to fly out to Salt Lake City the day before the show, spend that night doing whatever it is people do in Salt Lake City, and then drive 40 minutes north the following afternoon to the show in Ogden so I can spend time with Bartees before soundcheck.

When I pitched this story to my editor three months earlier, I had zero expectation that he would say yes. My motivation was mostly self-interest and entirely perverse: I like Bartees Strange and The National, but I also felt that this was my one and only chance to spend time in Salt Lake City, a place I had up until that moment never even considered visiting. This is not an insult to the Beehive State’s largest city — there are hundreds of mid-sized towns in our country that many of us will never think about and might even secretly suspect don’t actually exist unless we happen, by chance or company expense account, to have reason to travel there. Anyway, here was an opportunity for some Wild West adventure.

My first thought upon landing in Salt Lake City is, God, America is a big place. Honestly, it’s way huger than you probably appreciate. Though if you live in Utah, you likely have a better understanding of the vastness. Boundless expanse is a way of life out here. There are mountains and lakes and acres and acres of arid terrain. Nothing is nearby. The temperature always looms around 100 degrees. This part of the West is not crowded, but it is lonesome.

As I sit here, Bartees and The National are in Bonner, Montana, more than 500 miles to the north and a seven-hour drive. When they leave here, they will travel to Dillion, Colorado, which is just under 500 miles to the east and another seven-hour drive. Getting into my rental car, I ponder what it must be like to have to stack 500-mile drives over several consecutive days. Even with the eye-popping beauty of the scenery, this does not sound fun. Luckily, my hotel is only 1.7 miles away.

The isolation of Salt Lake City naturally breeds a unique local culture. I’ve gotten this far into the story without typing “Mormon,” which I consider a personal achievement, but yes the innate Mormon-ness of the place is undeniable. When you’re downtown, you can’t take in the mountain vistas that ring the city without also seeing a monument to the Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints lurking in your peripheral vision. But I don’t want to reduce Salt Lake City to a series of Mormon cliches. There are other distinctive attributes. The High School Musical films were made here. There is a surprisingly vibrant Mexican restaurant scene. You can’t order a cheeseburger without someone putting some pastrami on it. Famously, if you get pizza delivered to your hotel room, you might get sick and subsequently be willed to iconic feats of sports excellence. There is no other city quite like it.

Of course, this is also a place in which The National and Bartees Strange can sell approximately 7,000 tickets, so it’s not that different from any other American city populated by at least 200,000 people. During my brief drive from the airport to the hotel, I tune into the local listener-supported radio station, which is advertising a concert taking place that night by The Head And The Heart during a progressive talk show that “plugs you into Utah’s grassroots activists, community builders, punk rock farmers and DIY creatives.” Unfortunately, during my stay in town, I do not personally encounter any punk rock farmers.

That night, after dining alone at a Mexican restaurant that several people insisted I visit— it was very good! — I ventured downtown. In the manner of the sleepy Midwestern cities with which I am intimately familiar, parking is abundant and free after 8 p.m. I end up at a hipster bar with rooftop seating and a vintage soul playlist that sounds like it was curated by the music blog Aquarium Drunkard.

After ordering a beer, I take a seat and start texting musicians and comedians I know who have toured here in the past. What they tell me is remarkably similar, and jibes with my own experience — very nice people, pretty weird vibe. One person likens Salt Lake City to Mars, which seems apt. Another person recalls playing an ultimate frisbee retreat in the mountains outside of town. (“I thought they were going to harvest my organs,” he deadpans.) Yet another musician friend chimes in, with debatable irony, “I do admire their commitment to the grid system.” (The downtown grid truly is easy to navigate.)

The next day, I ask Bartees if he’s ever played Utah before, and he replies that this is his third time here in the past year. The first time was with Dacus, and Brandon Flowers of The Killers showed up at the gig. This is such an on-the-nose Utah reference that I wonder for a moment if he’s joking, but he’s not.

“I was like, ‘Damn. Weird place,’” he says.

***

The afternoon before showtime, I pull up to the venue five hours in advance of Bartees’ set. Strange and his band arrive at around the same time, and after meeting his tour manager I’m brought over to the subject of my story and we meet in person for the first time.

We decide to head over to a coffee shop a few blocks from the venue for the interview, even though the temperature is already north of 90 and coffee sounds about as appealing as a parka and gloves. But the coffee shop is nice — the barista is playing ’70s soft rock hits and at one point Bartees and I stop talking to note how pleasant it is to hear “Summer Breeze” by Seals & Crofts on a hot August day.

“National fans are so … it’s like being a Deadhead,” he says as we take a seat outside. “It’s like a cult. So, when you’re just like, ‘I love them just as much as you,’ it becomes a very low pressure and fun show. It’s pretty sweet.”

The Ogden concert is smack dab in the middle of his five-show support tour. The first night was in Calgary, and the National guys reached out beforehand and asked if Bartees wanted to sing a song with them. Bartees threw out “Murder Me Rachael,” a deep cut from their second LP, Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers. (The lyric that Say Goodbye To Pretty Boy references comes from that song.) But a more conventional standard, “Mistaken For Strangers,” was settled on instead.

“I was so emotional that I blanked on the first verse,” he says of the Calgary performance, which luckily wasn’t the one that went viral a few days later. “Afterward Aaron [Dessner] said, ‘Don’t worry, Matt does that all the time.’”

Bartees had never met the members of The National in person before this tour, though they apparently became fast friends. “Aaron was like, ‘You should come up to Long Pond whenever you want.’ And I was like, ‘I will pull up.’ I wanted to hear that forever. He’s kind of, in a way, a role model, in terms of his career and what he’s doing and how hard he works.”

Bartees pulls out his phone to show me a video from the tour’s second show in Montana. He’s on stage playing “Hold The Line,” and it’s the part during the guitar solo, which sounds like a cross between Eddie Hazel funk and David Gilmour spaciness. “This song is about George Floyd being killed. And there’s all these big beer-drinking white guys in the front row, and they’re just like, ‘The solo kills,’” he says. I watch the video and the big beer-drinking white guys are indeed swaying back and forth with their arms extended to the sky like they’re witnessing Jerry Garcia play “Morning Dew” one last time.

“It’s like, ‘Yeah dude, that’s great. Connect to that.’ There’s going to be someone else in here that connects to the words. There’s going to be someone else that connects to the vibe. Not every song is for everybody, but I’m not for everybody.

“But I think I can open people’s eyes a little bit,” he continues, “because I’m a person, and I don’t think everybody in Montana gets to meet a person like me, which definitely changes how they see the world. So I feel almost even more emboldened to just be myself, and just play my set, and just be like, ‘This is who I am. This is how I see the world.’ And be like, ‘You’re okay. too.’”

When Strange has played “Hold The Line” at other tour stops, he’s led the audience in a “Fuck The Cops!” chant. But now that you’re in a more conservative part of the country, I ask, I’m guessing you won’t be doing that here?

“No. But that’s more out of respect for The National,” he says. “I’m not trying to make it hot for them. I want to be the easiest, most cool, chill person to work with ever, so I’m asked to work with them again. You know what I mean? It’s about just getting the gig at this point. And then maybe if we know each other for long enough, I’ll be like, ‘By the way, fuck the police.’ But no, that’s not it right now.”

I ask if he has any thoughts on why he’s been such a popular opening act lately for white indie acts. He pauses for a couple beats with a knowing smile on his face.

“I have some thoughts. I don’t know if I would share all of them. But I think — I hope — it’s because my music is good. I hope it’s because I’m doing something different with my music, and I sound a little different. That’s what I hope. I hope the people that are bringing me on just genuinely like me. And when I meet them, that’s how it feels.”

Do you ever doubt that?

“Of course. Sometimes I’m like, ‘Am I just being tokenized?’ But then I’m like, that hasn’t stopped me from doing anything else I loved. I mean, I want to do these things. I’m not going to not do it. And if that’s the way I get in, that’s okay. As long as I’m in, I can do what I want to do. Because I am getting fans.”

In previous interviews, Strange has talked about opening up more space in the indie world for Black musicians. While he clearly takes this seriously, I wonder if he also resents it sometimes. Wouldn’t it be nice to just be another up-and-coming indie artist?

“No, I’m grateful that I can do it. When I watch a person in the NBA or the NFL talk about politics and they totally fuck it up, and I’m like, ‘Damn I wish that was me. I would’ve nailed it,’” he says. “I feel like in the indie rock space, I’m like, ‘Yo, I’ve got a lot of experience working in different movements, and I have an understanding of the world, and I have a perspective.’ I think it’s good that I can be someone that can open the door in a thoughtful way that are bringing people in and putting people in positions where they can do their thing, and I’m aware of it. It’s not an afterthought. It’s a part of my mission.”

The next stage of that mission will be leaving his “opening act” status behind, perhaps permanently. His first American headline tour commences in November, and he’s already dreaming big.

“When it’s my show, I’m definitely trying to cultivate a vibe in the room,” he says. “My shows aren’t like everyone else’s shows. It’s heavy. I want the room to feel thick. Like church.”

He tells me about his background playing religious music, and how before church all the singers and musicians would pray about being a vessel for a higher power. “If you get enough people that really believe that, that’s why the choir sounds so good. It’s just not about you at all,” he says. “And I feel like with my shows, everyone may be coming to see me, but I don’t see it that way. I see it as they’re all coming to feel what I feel, to experience something together. And so I want to feel what they feel, too. I try to just get out of my head and be like, ‘Fuck it. Who cares?’ Just let it run through you. It’s a gift to share.”

Weirdly — I swear I’m not making this up — a guy rolls up behind us on a skateboard as Bartees is talking about being a vessel. And then he pops up off the board and starts to play piano, because there’s a piano sitting on the sidewalk for some reason.

Bartees and I exchange “is this really happening?” glances. It’s a moment of incredible serendipity. But it’s also pretty loud, and I worry about picking up Bartees’ words on my digital recorder, so I ask him to stop. The guy shrugs, hops back on his skateboard, and floats away, returning to the place from which he was conjured.

***

After Bartees departs for soundcheck, I settle in for my scheduled interview with Bryce Dessner. Only Bryce isn’t at the venue. Nobody from The National is at the venue. They are all at an undisclosed location — an AirBnB, I’m told — working on the ninth National album. Instead of a backstage interview, I am talking to Bryce on my phone inside of my stupidly hot car out in the parking lot.

“It always feels like we cook up these albums, they come out, and then we reinvent things live,” Bryce says. “I think that this record — partly because of COVID and partly because of vinyl delays, and then coming back on tour — we’re not rushing it.”

I know from listening to recent fan-recorded bootlegs posted online that the band is playing several new songs on the current tour: “Tropic Morning News,” “Grease In Your Hair,” “Ice Machines,” “This Isn’t Helping,” “Weird Goodbyes.” That last song was just released as a single this week as a collaboration with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver.

On stage, these songs have been more guitar-heavy — with Aaron and Bryce trading solos — than anything The National have put out in at least a decade. But as of earlier this month the album was still evolving.

“Things we’re doing on stage have made their way back on the record, and then been developed on the record and then that’s affected the live show,” Bryce says. “We’re sitting in a space right now, recording a bit. And we actually have also recorded onstage. The whole record’s not that, but there’s elements of that.”

Before we pivoted to his own band, Bryce confirmed a story Bartees told me about Bryce advising him on which European cities to focus on at this point in his career. Paris and Brussels, in particular, are great markets with loyal fans who will always love you, especially if they feel like they’re getting in with you on the ground floor, he suggested.

“We were lucky to meet Michael Stipe and R.E.M. around Boxer,” Bryce recalls, “and it was a moment where they encouraged us with what we were doing. In a way, they saw us as heirs to the world that they had created. Obviously they’d had much, much bigger hits than we’ve ever had, but he was really pushing us to dream bigger.

“Someone like Bartees, he seems ambitious in a good way. He makes me think of musicians who are timeless in a way. So yeah, we’re around. If he ever needs help, he can call.”

By now, it’s time for Bartees and his band to hit the stage. It’s 95 degrees at showtime, but it’s that “dry” heat people out west talk about when trying to convince themselves that it doesn’t feel like you’re walking with a sweat sock over your face. When the musicians stride out, it’s almost dusk and the audience is indifferent. The opening song is “Black Gold,” the penultimate track from Farm To Table, and the sound is glitchy. Bartees’ microphone doesn’t appear to be working. Momentum is sputtering.

But the technical issues are short-lived. It is now quickly apparent that the band is fantastic — I don’t remember the last time I saw a group of players in an indie-rock context play with such commanding force and finesse. They seem capable of playing anything as they extrapolate Strange’s songs, turning them into lysergic EDM funk fever dreams. The star for me is drummer T.K. Johnson, a powerhouse who locks into deep grooves with bassist John Daise and multi-instrumentalist Graham Richman. But the spotlight also shines brightly on lead guitarist Daniel Kleederman, particularly on “Hold The Line,” which is prefaced by a speech Bartees gives about seeing George Floyd’s young daughter, Gianna, on the TV news.

“I thought, ‘This is horrible,’” he says. “Another Black kid has to grow up so fast.”

As the show unfolds, you can feel the crowd being won over. By the time Strange gets to his cover of “Lemonworld” — which transforms The National’s low-key comedy of manners into a cathartic electro-punk anthem — that “thick air” feeling that Bartees spoke of earlier has been achieved. The audience is with him. They give him a hearty cheer as the band exits the stage. When he comes back to load up his gear, they cheer loudly again.

He’s made it here. He can make it anywhere.

While Rudy Giuliani’s unwavering loyalty to Donald Trump has seemed misplaced to many — especially given that the former president seems to have essentially abandoned his pal, who is in deep legal doo-doo for conspiring with Trump to overturn the 2020 presidential election — a new revelation from Rudy’s ex-wife (but not his cousin-wife) might shed some light on the reason behind the former New York City mayor’s unwillingness to rat on Trump.

The Guardian recounted a story found in Andrew Kirtzman’s upcoming book, Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor, in which Judith Giuliani — who was married to Rudy from 2003 to 2019 (but, again, is not his cousin, though she is currently suing him) — told the author about a time when Trump seemed to show… dare we say compassion?! This surprising bit of empathy came in 2008, following Rudy’s failed presidential run, which led Giuliani into a deep depression that saw him drinking to excess. Recovery came in the form of a month-long stay at Trump’s Palm Beach home and golf course. “We moved into Mar-a-Lago and Donald kept our secret,” Judith says in the book.

Judith, who is a nurse, recognized that her then-husband needed help. ​“She said he started to drink more heavily,” according to Kirtzman. “While Giuliani was always fond of drinking scotch with his cigars while holding court at the Grand Havana or Club Mac, his friends never considered him a problem drinker. Judith felt he was drinking to dull the pain.”

Today, stories of Rudy’s taste for tipple are kind of legendary, though he has always insisted he does not have a drinking problem. Still, many Trump insiders have claimed that The Big Lie really started on Election Night 2020, when an allegedly shitfaced Rudy convinced Trump — who had lost — to simply declare that he had won. Which admittedly sounds like the kind of brilliant plan one would have to be inebriated to come up with. Rudy, for his part, swears that he “refused all alcohol” on that evening and only consumed Diet Pepsi.

As for his 2008 stay at Mar-a-Lago: The Guardian reports that he mentioned it to The New York Times once in 2018, when he said that following his loss in the GOP presidential primary, he and his wife “spent a month at Mar-a-Lago, relaxing.”

Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor will be released on September 13, 2022.

(Via The Guardian)

The Oklahoma City Thunder announced the worst-case scenario for Chet Holmgren‘s foot injury. In a statement released by the team on Thursday morning, the Thunder indicated that Holmgren suffered a Lisfranc injury in his right foot that will cost him the entirety of the 2022-23 season. Holmgren suffered the injury last week while playing in Jamal Crawford’s pro-am, The CrawsOver.

Here is a video of Holmgren appearing to suffer the injury. It came early on in the game — which was called in the second quarter due to condensation on the floor — when Holmgren attempted to play defense against LeBron James. He came up limping immediately after and went right to the bench before leaving the gym.

“Certainly, we are disappointed for Chet, especially given the excitement he had about getting on the floor with his teammates this season,” Thunder executive Sam Presti said in a statement. “We know Chet has a long career ahead of him within our organization and the Oklahoma City community. One of the things that most impressed us during the process of selecting Chet was his determination and focus. We expect that same tenacity will carry him through this period of time as we work together and support him during his rehabilitation.”

The Thunder selected Holmgren with the No. 2 pick in the 2022 NBA Draft after one productive season at Gonzaga.

As expected, the far-right is not down with Biden’s (modest) student loan debt forgiveness plan. The Daily Wire creator Ben Shapiro got his butt handed to him after people pointed out his own forgiven federal loan, and a whole host of Republicans (including MAGA cheerleader Marjorie Taylor Greene) are hopping mad that people are seeing a drop in the bucket of relief ($10,000 for most federal loan borrowers) against a predatory lending scheme.

As one might expect, Lauren Boebert is also ready to pull out her guns over this development, proving that she didn’t learn after being piled onto after she seconded former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s call to abolish the Education Department. And really, there’s nothing wrong with getting a GED, but Boebert famously secured hers less than a year before her House election. She has subsequently refused to study up on what she needs to know as a lawmaker (an understanding of civics and the U.S. Constitution beyond the Second Amendment). Boebert is also so good at mismanaging money — she used campaign funds to pay rent and reportedly bought breast implants with money that should have paid her Shooters’ Grill employees — that it’s rather rich of her to bash the smallest amount of debt forgiveness for education.

“I loved paying back my student loans so much that I want to do it for other people,” the rooting’ tootin’ lawmaker tweeted. “[S]aid by no one ever.”

Let’s just say that Boebert probably should have stayed out of this fight. Again, there’s nothing wrong with holding a GED, but it does give people ammunition when said GED holder (who is bad at managing money) decides to bash people who inadvertently signed up for a lifetime of debt to advance their own education. And she’s being compared to Madison Cawthorn for that level of hypocrisy, too.

There are no real winners in this argument, but Boebert clearly should have stuck to tweeting about guns this week.