It’s finally here! Just below you have the opportunity to download one of The Weeknd’s first ever live shows in the states. Recorded at Chicago’s Lincoln Hall on a night of a deluge, The Weeknd rocked the sold-out intimate space, that was packed with more bros than anyone else.

The recording below is not fantastic quality, but it serves as an accurate representation as the show. As you’ll hear on the tape, there was about as much crowd participation as a Dashboard Confessional concert. And moments of deep bass were as disorienting live as they are distorted here. Live, Abel knows how to work a crowd, and despite incessant chatter, you can hear how pumped up everyone is to be there. It was excellent to see this young performer at the beginning of his game, next time he comes through Chicago will certainly be at a larger venue.

Without further adieu, below is the download link. This serves as the second ever FP Bootleg Series, the first being James Blake’s 2010 show in DC. If you’re interested in that recording, or if this link goes inactive, let us know.

The Weeknd – Live in Chicago

1. High For This
2. D.D./The Birds (Pt. 1)
3. Rolling Stone/Gone/Crew Love/The Zone
4. The Party & The After Party
5. Montreal
6. The Knowing
7. Outside
8. Loft Music
9. (I can’t for the life of me figure out which song this is)
10. The Morning
11. House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls
12. Wicked Games (Acoustic)

Peter Lillis is Assistant Editor of Frontier Psychiatrist. He’s learning that there isn’t a huge difference between Abel Tesfaye and Chris Carrabba, but that must be left for another day.

Riesling: Grape of the Gods

Last week, I tried more than 100 German Rieslings in one day. How is this possible? The short answer is highly functioning alcoholism cleverly disguised as gainful employment based on an advanced knowledge of the great and varied fermented grape juices of the world.  I am a buyer slash salesman for a wine shop in Manhattan. One of the perks of my job is the ability to leave work in the middle of the day and go to places where I normally wouldn’t be welcomed to taste and evaluate wines for purchase. On the day in question, a trade organization for the Wines of Germany put on a grand show in Tribeca featuring the stellar 2011 vintage. It’s hard work, but someone’s got to do it.

Before we go any further, let’s clear up a few things about Riesling.  Forget what you heard, Riesling is one of the great grapes of the world, with a wide range of styles and quality levels. Riesling can be crap sugar water in blue bottles or single-vineyard God-Juice capable of ageing for a century.  It can be so dry and mineral as to be nigh overwhelming to the senses (trocken) or dessert wine (Beerenauslese, Trockenbeerenausle, Eiswein), or somewhere in-between (Kabinett, Spatlese, Auslese). Grown in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, California, Oregon, Hungary, Slovenia and China, it’s the ideal pairing for any kind of fish, ham, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, or Szechuan food. It was  a favorite of the tsars and 200 years ago, if you walked into the best restaurant in London, it would have been the most expensive bottle on the menu.

Good Riesling, for me, is akin to drinking joy.  There is a more than bearable lightness coupled with precision, hidden power and quiet depth.  Add a touch of sweetness and you’re left with something like a perfect spring day when the sun is strong enough to warm the skin but the remembrance of winter is still on the wind.  Summer lies somewhere in the future, with all the potential it brings, but for now you’re content to simply exist in a crisp, clean moment and, my, isn’t it sweet?

Pardon my poetry but good wine reflects its place (the French call it “terroir”) and its people so I beg you not to brush aside as pretension the rhapsodic reaction to the bottled soul of culture.  Wines, like dogs, reflect their masters and German Riesling is no exception.  They are efficient wines, too acidic for some, capable of great power yet never flamboyant.  They are some of the longest-lived white wines in the world yet currently out of fashion.  When they are dry, they can be mean and unyielding but with a touch or more of sweetness, they brighten and sing.

All of this was on display at the German Riesling tasting I attended last week.  2011 is a fantastic vintage (for those keeping score at home, 2007, 2005 and 2001 also qualify as fantastic with the 2010 only losing out because the drier wines are not that good).  To reiterate, we’re talking about the good stuff here (though great vintages raise all boats so if you see a cheap 2011, it’ll be better than it should be).  By “Good Stuff” I mean single vineyard Riesling grown and vinified by caring, dedicated farmer/winemakers, many of whom are the umpteeth generation to make Riesling on estates their families have owned since before the Plague was a big problem.  For instance, you might be confused and intimidated, if you saw this label:

Dr. Thanisch Bernkasteler Badstube Riesling Spatlese 2011

Then you would reach deep inside yourself and realize Dr. Thanisch is the producer; Bernkastel is the town; Badstube is the vineyard; Riesling is the grape; Spatlese is the sweetness level and 2011 is the vintage. Not maddeningly complicated at all, but specific for a reason.  In a world where food ingredients and coffee are traced with Portlandian specificity, why would a great wine not tell you where it was from and what you can expect from the taste?  Spatlese is a term which refers to the amount of sugar left in the bottle.  It’s a hierarchy.  Trocken has absolutely no sugar; Haltrocken has just a smidge; Kabinett has a noticeable sweetness but not a lot; Spatlese has definite sweetness; Auslese is very sweet.  Halbtrocken and Kabinett are best drunk within the first five years of the vintage but Trocken, Spatlese and Auslese are built to age.

Paul Grieco is the owner of Terroir, a triad of truly amazing winebars in New York City and also this year’s recipient of the James Beard Award for Outstanding Wine, Beer and Spirits Professional (sort of the Nobel Prize for Booze People).  He is also the originator of The Summer of Riesling, an international celebration designed to raise awareness of this most misunderstood grape.  For the last several years, he has been kind enough to host The Long Night of Riesling, a charity tasting benefiting Help Us Hope, a wonderful charity that exists to fight AIDS in South Africa.  This was one of the more remarkable tastings I’ve ever attended.

There was a hundred Rieslings set out on a table, many of them pre-dating the 21^st century, nearly all of them five years or older.  Something truly remarkable happens to Riesling as it gets older.  The sweetness which might have been overwhelming in the wine’s youth mellows with time and the hidden depths reveal themselves. You’re left with a wine which is light yet complex, precise yet rounded.   You can drink a whole glass without noticing but it’s hard to forget the taste.  For those keeping score, I loved the 1994s but 95 and 90 were very good and, again, 2001 might be the greatest German Riesling vintage we’ll ever experience.

Someone once told me, “Old German Riesling is where wine geeks go to die.” At the time, I didn’t understand.  Now, I do.  I am lucky enough to have tasted some of the great examples of nearly every wine region known to man and if I had to pick one type of wine to drink for the rest of my life, it would German Riesling with some bottle age.  In fact, I almost once got evicted because I was buying so much old German Riesling off the Internet.

So, 100 Rieslings in one day.  Could I taste much at the end of it?  Nope.  Was I pretty drunk?  Definitely.  Did I have a wicked hangover the next day?  Damn right.  If someone asked me if I was up to the challenge of doing 200, would I jump at the chance?  Absolutely.

Jared Thomas is an author and scriptwriter living in Brooklyn. His works include The Street Dreams of Electric Youth, The Last Amesha, and Gre & The Devil. He recently wrote about The Avengers and the most anticipated geek movies of 2012.  

Esperanza Spalding, Best “New” Artist

Last month, I saw Esperanza Spalding perform for the third time in 10 years. On each successive occasion, the venues get larger, the expectations are higher, and the performances are less exciting.

My first opportunity to see Spalding came in 2002. I was plying my trade as a freelance jazz musician in Portland, OR and  everybody was talking about this “Esperanza kid” who was killing it on the bass. A fundraiser was scheduled at the tiny club Disjecta to help pay for her pending move to Boston to attend Berklee. That night, I saw exactly what I wanted: a kid killing it on the bass, in an assortment of different ensembles of a jazz and hip-hop variety. Fast forward to 2008. Once again, everybody around me is talking about this girl with an afro killing it on the bass as a result of her late-night TV appearances. I see Spalding with her quartet in a double-bill with Anat Cohen’s band at an uptown theater as part of the JVC Jazz Festival in New York. This time she was as capable and engaging as ever, while also clearly coming in to her own as a bandleader. Spalding’s set grooved hard enough that I caught Cohen dancing in the aisles

Fast forward to April 21, 2012. Spalding is now a Grammy winner for Best New Artist, (beating out sure-thing Justin Bieber), and has four albums as a leader under her belt, including this year’s beautiful Radio Music Society. The venue was the large and poorly managed Webster Hall, with no less than 10 musicians joining Spalding on stage. The band was fantastic, particularly Tia Fuller on alto sax, Jeff Lee Johnson on guitar, and longtime Spalding cohort Leo Genevese on keyboards. Spalding was entertaining, and the performances, drawing exclusively from the new album save for the solo encore, were all faithful to the compositions and competently executed. But compared to several other recent jazz shows, Spalding’s show was simply less engaging.

This is somewhat baffling. The crowd was clearly in her corner before she stepped on stage, and the tunes on the new record are some of her most enjoyable and accessible, but live the experience felt flat. For one thing, the staging is distracting, and out of place in a jazz context. The large horn section sat on a bandstand positioned stage-left, and made to look like the dial of the boombox from the cover of the Radio Music Society. The show opens with the band, sans Spalding, playing a sequence of short bits ostensibly designed to suggest that its the music coming from the radio as the dial is moved back and forth. The segment lasts entirely too long, and concludes once Spalding awkwardly makes her entrance from offstage, playing her fretless electric bass (the size of the band made this entrance a little tricky, even on the moderately large Webster Hall main stage).

I’d like to blame the sound engineer for the fact that Spalding’s attack on the electric bass sounded “clicky,” especially because her upright was also clearly suffering from sound difficulties. Yet my experience with basses suggest that Spalding may simply be plucking the strings too hard, a common problem for bassists who switch between upright and electric. Her playing on upright is so fluid and expressive, it’s somewhat frustrating that it hasn’t quite translated to her electric playing.

Perhaps I’m being too critical. The crowd, who based on the pre-show chatter was comprised primarily of Spalding first-timers, clearly enjoyed the show, with the current single “Black Gold” and the cover of the Stevie Wonder-penned Michael Jackson classic “Can’t Help It” receiving particularly rapturous applause, and Spalding was understandably distracted by the sound difficulties that plagued her instruments, as well as the pounding bass from the club night in progress in another room at Webster Hall. Reemerging on stage for her encore alone and armed only with her upright, she told the audience she wasn’t sure if she had anything to play, because she didn’t know anything in that tempo (referring to the four-on-the-floor house beat emanating from the other room), before delivering a redeeming and enchanting rendition of the song “Precious,” from her sophomore, self-titled LP.

My takeaway from the show was that Spalding is a great singer and upright bassist, and sounds better the fewer musicians are on stage with her, and at least in this instance sounds better on upright bass.  I hope that as the tour progresses that the show tightens up and the sound problems are properly addressed, but for now I’m just holding out hope for an even-better next album.

Wayan Zoey plays drums and bass with and for a number of other people. He also plays guitar, but only when alone and listening to Phish. He recently reviewed Robert Glasper and Soulive’s Brooklyn Bowl shows and new albums by Glasper and Esperanza Spalding.

Our collective notion of order is slowly being eroded by the postmodern era in which we live. Howard Stern is the host of a television talent show. Dumpster diving is a fad. Edamame is sold at grocery stores in portable pouches. People are becoming fragmented and contradictory, at best diversified and informed, at worst overexposed and under processed.

Consider Daughn Gibson’s All Hell (2012, White Denim) a reflection of the postmodern condition. Gibson makes folk music with flourishes that feel reminiscent of modern electronic music. As a result, classifying All Hell is difficult. Should we call it Folktronica? Post Cash-step? The best analogue I can come up with is the Beta Band, based mainly on the folk tie-in and the undeniable groove that characterizes the album’s best moments. All Hell is largely sample based, centered around repeating loops of twangy guitars and saloon-style piano lines over simple drum machine beats. Gibson’s booming baritone is the centerpiece of the record, alternately channeling Johnny Cash and Ian Curtis. He also uses his voice as his own personal backing choir, punctuating songs with manipulated, cooing vocal samples.

One of the defining characteristics of All Hell is the nostalgic Americana that pervades throughout. Gibson exhibits Cash’s penchant for storytelling, spinning tawdry yarns with all the familiar tropes (highways, ocean waves, the neon lights of a bar, a mother’s love). The characters are straight out of a Bukowski novel: unrepentant sinners, adrift and reeking of booze. This is rock bottom. Gibson wants to show you around.

Few songs better encapsulate Gibson’s style than the true opener “In the Beginning”, featured on the last FP Monthly Mixtape. The song is propulsive, with a boozy piano line, a driving bass line and some echoing keys. Gibson croons soulfully as he pleads an unnamed lover to take him back. The song is infectious and feels on the verge of being club-worthy, like an unfinished Frank Sinatra remix.

“Tiffany Lou” features Gibson at his most fractured. Gibson’s echoed moaning, gritty postpunk-style drumming, some unsettling organ and occasional piano stabs underscore the story of a troubled girl and the strained relationship she has with her father. The verses give way to an ethereal chorus as Gibson coos unintelligibly over a manipulated country guitar riff. The manipulated samples and indecipherable vocals give the song a dreamlike quality that is prevalent throughout the rest of the album.

Gibson sounds at his most low during “A Young Girl’s World” as he details an encounter with a crying drunk. Gibson croons like a lounge singer, backed by shimmering jazz organs and guitars that sound vaguely pornographic. Upon asking the man why he is crying, he responds, “I’m just an old man living in a young girl’s world.” It’s a statement that seems to speak volumes about this album.

Gibson’s electronic take Johnny Cash may seem kind of gimmicky on its face. But Gibson’s ability to filter dormant strands of folk, country and punk through a modern perspective is what makes this album so appealing in the first place, and what helps it stay engaging. This cut and paste aesthetic is what defines some of the modern era’s most compelling music. Kanye West’s affinity for 70’s prog rock is reproduced in some of his best beats. Beck feels equally at home making Prince-style funk albums as he does making folk/hip-hop/however you would classify Odelay. Girl Talk somehow makes Aerosmith enjoyable. And to a meme based generation fated to seeing a new remake of “The Amazing Spiderman” in theaters every summer for the rest of our lives, these fragmented albums speak to us. Consider Daughn Gibson’s All Hell a new entry into this postmodern canon.

Tim Myers is a frequent contributor to Frontier Psychiatrist. We hope to see him around these parts more often this summer.

I don’t know much about transgender dysphoria, but it doesn’t sound pleasant. However, I do know Tom Gabel the songwriter and performer quite well, as I was immersed in his artistic output for years of my life. His recent announcement of his longtime transgender dysphoria, and subsequent plans to undergo an intensive transformation to begin life as Laura Grace has sent the press into a frenzy (Rolling Stone’s exclusive interview hits shelves today). While there never is an opportune moment to radically change one’s life, this announcement feels timely as the nation becomes more welcoming and more alienating at the same time.

For the better part of the Aughts, Against Me! was my favorite band. Obsessed with honesty and compelled by personality, they stayed true to the core of punk rock with simple song structures that explode with life and positivity in the face of a dying and restricted scene. My love for Against Me! has defined my personality and my own creative output, and has enabled me to enjoy life’s questions with a cold beer, ringing ears and sore vocal cords. While I have had my disagreements with the band in recent years (namely White Crosses), the majority of their work has left a profound impact on my life that will not wane or tarnish with age. And as the leader and songwriter of Against Me!, my love and respect for Tom Gabel will prevail as well. That said, the news of her transformation has not strayed far from my mind these last few days.

In light of her surprising (but not unbelievable) announcement, everyone—myself included—is looking to his confessional lyrics for insight. The most obvious excerpt comes from the phenomenal second verse of “The Ocean” that closes their fourth record, New Wave, produced by Butch Vig. “If I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman/My mother once told me she would have named me Laura/I’d grow up to be strong and beautiful like her.” He then goes on to describe his imagined family, complete with an honest husband and a home on the Gulf of Mexico. However, the most devastating line from that song comes at the end: “there is an ocean in my soul where the waters do not curve.”

Upon further review, there are other startling moments of honesty that provide depth to already strong songs. There’s “Thrash Unreal”, also on New Wave, which tells the story of an aging female punk. “They don’t know nothing about redemption/They don’t know nothing about recovery.” What was once an interesting piece of catchy fiction, now reads as an imagined autobiography.

There’s also “Searching for a Former Clarity”, the shattering and chilling closer off the album of the same name. On the surface, the song is about a patient dying of AIDS, which is certainly deep enough. Upon initial release, I heard it as a swan song to his former life as a relative icon in a scene ready to dispel him. Post-announcement, the song takes on a much more personal and specific meaning: “Confessing childhood secrets of dressing up in women’s clothes/Compulsions you never knew the reasons to.” He goes on to explain the toll the “disease” has taken, pumped by the heart. Now, it’s clear that the song is a document of his internal war, and it’s never been more powerful.

If you were familiar with Against Me! prior to this announcement, you would know they aren’t strangers to controversial decisions at the cost of alienation. Once identified as leaders in the anarchist punk movement, Gabel led his band from self-released cassettes to a major label record deal, from empty basements to arena tours. Gabel was maligned, protested and slandered by the anarcho-punk community for his band’s success, eventually claiming “they set their rifle sights” on him, and that “their revolution was a lie, ” on White Crosses’ key track “I Was a Teenage Anarchist”. Being a member of the anarchist community is not for the faint of heart, and neither is taking them on publicly, but courage and conviction is something that has long defined Gabel, and will continue to define Laura Grace.

While he has distanced himself from what was once his guns and butter, there is much we can learn from a young Tom Gabel, and find sentiments that will certainly help her during her transformation. On one of the most classic Against Me! songs, “Those Anarcho Punks are Mysterious…”, Gabel manages to explain the magnitude of the anarchist plight in a few short phrases. Strangely enough, it applies to her current decision and announcement: “And we rock ‘cause it’s us against them/We found our own reasons to sing/And it’s so much less confusing when lines are drawn like that/When people are either consumers or revolutionaries/Enemies or friends hanging on the fringes of the cogs in the system/It’s about knowing where everyone stands.” What was once a cut and dry song about the tenants of anarchism, is now a compelling work that challenges social constructs and how they affect one’s identity.

If you peruse the comment sections of the initial Rolling Stone announcement, you’ll see plenty commendations or condemnations (2225 at last count). It’s clear that this will be a heavily discussed and argued event within the punk and transgender communities. Fellow FP contributor Tim Myers informed me that when he was at a Voice of Addiction (Chicago punk band) show in Columbus, OH, the singer urged Tom to “Stop! Take some time to think,” aping his line from New Wave’s “Stop!” Laura Grace knows that this disrespect and ridicule will be rampant, and how she deals with that is entirely her business. Maybe she can take comfort in one of Tom Gabel’s lines from Reinventing Axl Rose’s tranquil closer, “8 Full Hours of Sleep”: “The sun’s always rising in the sky somewhere.” Hopefully, this is the sunrise she’s been seeking.

We commend her bravery and look forward to the newest incarnation of Against Me! with Laura Jane Grace at the helm. Below, enjoy a Spotify playlist of our favorite Against Me! songs.

Peter Lillis is Assistant Editor of Frontier Psychiatrist. He doesn’t have anything snarky to say about this one.

Author Brian Oliu

From romantic missed connections to video games, Brian Oliu‘s writing takes on subjects from his own experience, but presents them in a way that is magical in their strangeness, generous in their openness, and deeply human in their resonance. Oliu is most recently the author of Level End (Origami Zoo Press, 2012) and The Fullness of Everything: Three Chapbooks by Tyler Gobble, Brian Oliu & Christopher Newgent (Tiny Hardcore Press, 2012). In 2011, Tiny Hardcore Press published his collection of Craigslist Missed Connections, So You Know It’s Me. Originally from New Jersey, Oliu currently lives in Tuscaloosa, where he teaches at the University of Alabama. Following the tornadoes of April 27, 2011, Oliu organized the anthology Tuscaloosa Runs This: An Anthology of Tuscaloosa Writers. Originally published as an eBook in the weeks following the storm, Tuscaloosa Runs This was published as a print book in April 2012. Additionally, his work has been anthologized in Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2 (Norton, 2008), Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction (University of Iowa Press, 2012), and Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction (University of Nebraska Press, 2013).   Gina Myers first met Brian at the Slash Pine Festival at the University of Alabama in 2011 and previously reviewed So You Know It’s Me. She recently interviewed him over e-mail about his recent publications, Tuscaloosa, and future projects.

It seems like a lot of your work–at least what I am familiar with–is project based. Come See For Yourself, your contribution to The Fullness of Everything, is a collection of short prose pieces named after the counties of New Jersey. Can you tell me where the idea for this project came from?

I’ve always been interested in the idea of cartography and map making: I find place really interesting and I had just finished writing ‘So You Know It’s Me’ which is very much about place & I obviously hadn’t gotten that theme entirely out of my system yet! It was a project I started while I was home in New Jersey over the summer of 2011–we had just survived the tornado down in Tuscaloosa and it felt strange to be away. I started to take in the strangeness of New Jersey (it is an extremely peculiar & haunted state) and decided to run with it.

How would you categorize the pieces in Come See For Yourself? Your work is often referred to as lyric essays or literary nonfiction, but it seems the pieces could just as easily be prose poems or fiction. Is genre important to you?

The concept of genre isn’t overly important to me, although I have never seen myself as anything but a lyric essayist: obviously there has been some major backlash against the term recently, which is all ridiculous & unfounded. To me, the essay is less in the product and more in the craft of the thing. I feel as if the people who are against the term believe that a lyric essay is created by taking a poem that doesn’t work & suddenly turning it into ‘a lyric essay’. It doesn’t work that way. I’ve always ascribed to the traditional definition of ‘essay’, in that it is an ‘attempt’. My work has been published as prose poems & as fiction and I am fine with that. However, ideally, I want the reader to know that these stories are true and that “I”, Brian Oliu, is very much a part of these stories: I don’t want the reader to lose track of the author which might be a little narcissistic of me & the opposite of, say, how fiction writers want the reader to be immersed in a story, but I feel like it adds a sense of urgency & importance to the work, almost like I am working these emotions and situations out in real time & thus telling the reader a secret.

I think that is one of the interesting things about Level End–that while the pieces within read like fiction where the narrator is traveling in a magical world and has to battle  the awaiting boss, they are really about your experience as you assume the role of the character in a game. Are the pieces in Level End all based on actual games? And for people who may not play video games, can you define what a “boss battle” is?

When playing a videogame, at the end of a stage or a level the hero typically has to fight an enemy in order to advance in the game. Typically, this enemy is unlike any other enemy the hero has faced thus far and much stronger, or has to be attacked in a certain way. In a game like Super Mario Bros., the fight against Bowser is a boss battle. The pieces are based on actual games: there are “boss battle tropes” if you will–there’s always a boss that will disappear & reappear, a boss that is underwater, and usually a boss that is deeply personal to the character. I had The Legend of Zelda in mind while I was writing this, as well as Mother 3, & I think people who are familiar with those games can see their influence.

When I was young, I played a lot of pinball at the hockey rink, but I’m not familiar with too many videogames. Even so, I could recognize the tropes, and I loved the repetition of “When I arrived, the music changed” that occurs at the opening of the boss battle pieces. I think this gets at what Mike Meginnis called the games’ “strange, surreal logics.” At the same time, there’s human/real-world experience interwoven with the game logic. Did these seemingly disparate threads come together naturally for you?

It’s really interesting that you bring up logic because that is something that has always been very important to me as a writer: that when I write everything links back to itself in a certain way. Although I don’t necessarily intend for the reader to be completely aware of the logic, it is one of the ways that I determine that a piece is ‘done’ when I am writing it. The thread between “game” & “gamer” is a strong one: unlike films where we are watching other characters & have no say in the outcome, the gamer is in control of a character in a predetermined world. Not only that, but we “become” the character–when Mario accidentally falls into a pit we exclaim “I just died”: as a result there is a connection there; that we are a part of the journey & we have a responsibility to see the story until the end.

Brian Oliu, Level End

In a way, I can see this interest in interactivity relating to your collection of missed connections that you originally posted on Tuscaloosa’s Craigslist and that was later published as So You Know It’s Me. By choosing to post these in such a format, you allowed people who read the missed connections section to read themselves into the pieces. What was the response like to these? Did you receive any e-mails back through your posts?

That’s a really nice way of putting it: the idea of people ‘reading themselves into the pieces’. Many people have asked if they were written to anyone in particular, & the answer is that they were written to a multitude of people all at once: strangers whom I saw about town, people in my past, a few folks who had passed away. I knew a few folks who really did think that the posts were specifically about them when they weren’t, & I like to think that is a pretty good compliment in regards to what I was trying to accomplish. I received a few emails: one from a high school girl who said that she wasn’t the girl that I was looking for but she ‘takes poetry classes’ & thought ‘it was really nice’. Another one said ‘interesting, tell me your greatest fear’, & another one said that a painting I was referring to was ‘Starry Night’ (it wasn’t). There were a few homages on the board for a short period of time, all eventually revealed to be friends of mine, which I all thought were really great.

It seems like you have a great community of friends and writers in Tuscaloosa. Can you tell me a little about what it was like to put together the collection Tuscaloosa Runs This?

After the tornado, there was such a great outpouring from the writing community for those down here in Tuscaloosa–there are a lot of great writers & people down here and I think most folks in the literary scene knew of at least one person that has ties to Alabama. I remember waking up two or three days after the storm & thinking that I should put together an eBook of Tuscaloosa writers as a fundraiser: I put a call out on facebook (from a patch of grass on the University of Alabama campus–literally the only place in town to have Internet in the first few days after the storm) to those who no longer lived in Tuscaloosa, & let as many people around here know about the project. I wanted to get it out into the world as soon as possible so I gave everyone a deadline of a week, which I think forced & allowed people here to sit down and write for the first time since the storms. It was definitely an honor to publish those pieces. In January, I was approached by Bob Weatherly, owner of Egan’s, our favorite bar, about printing a physical copy of the book. We got the print copies in around the end of March & we have been selling them around town & online ever since.

You have a lot of pride in Alabama, from the writing community, to the football team (Roll Tide!), and you were even an early advocate of Huntsville-based rappers G-Side and received some vindication when Spin named them one of the top new acts. Do you feel like there’s a musical and artistic resurgence occurring, or has the rest of the nation just been slow to pay attention?

I think that folks have been slow to pay attention, but I also feel as if the word is getting out there a bit quicker because of the Internet–it really does change everything and lets people know that there is quality stuff to be found & heard down here in Alabama. I believe in that Spin interview G-Side talks about the importance of the Internet community: they realized they had fans in Norway & so that’s where they went. They release everything online & have a very active Twitter account. Actually, they were one of the first people to retweet about Tuscaloosa Runs This way back in the day! But I think people feel as if Alabama is a tough place to be ‘proud of’, considering its history & its on-going problems, however, there are a lot of things that folks down here can take pride in, & I think that excites people a great deal. We can sure as hell take pride in our football team, that’s for sure!

You also DJ at Egan’s. If someone were passing through Tuscaloosa and happened to catch your night, what could he or she expect to hear?

The secret of DJing is actually quite easy: play stuff that makes girls dance. If the girls dance, everyone else follows. I have an unabashed love of cheesy pop music & considering my New Jersey origins, the ridiculous club anthems have always been in my blood. I really love playing 90s hip hop & some gems that folks have forgotten about. I played Nelly’s ‘Country Grammar’ the last time I DJed and the place went bonkers.

What are you currently working on? Do you have any upcoming readings or publications?

It’s pretty quiet on that front as of right now–it’s been a long few months of publicity for the two chapbooks and getting Tuscaloosa Runs This off the ground, so I’m going to allow myself to get back into writing and creating. I’ve been writing dance song/DJ-inspired pieces that I’ve really enjoyed, & so that’s my current project. I’ve been doing some translations as well: my aunt wrote a book of poetry in Catalan so I’m translating that as a warm-up to tackling a book-length project that is about my grandfather, who wrote a book on long-distance running (also in Catalan). It’ll be nice to have the summer to relax and (hopefully!) be productive.

Gina Myers is the author of A Model Year (Coconut Books, 2009) and a regular contributor to Frontier Psychiatrist. She recently reviewed Alabama Shakes’ Boys & Girls. She lives in Atlanta.

One of the better lessons I learned from cooking Mark’s recipes is that some things are just not worth buying at the grocery store because they’re way better made from scratch.  In some cases it’s because it’s way cheaper to make yourself, or way healthier, or way tastier.  In all cases your return on investment is well worth the time spent in the kitchen.

My absolute favorite would-never-buy-it-in-a-box-again recipe is for granola.  When the packaging says things like

Freshly baked granola

maple and brown sugar crunch, or mango ginger flax, it’s easy to be intimidated into thinking granola is something better left to the cereal experts and their uncanny ability to create those heavenly clusters.  Envy not the cluster makers!  Perfect granola is within your reach.  The base is plain old rolled oats (no, not the quick cook kind, unless you want charred oat flake granola), and everything else is customizable to your taste.  Mark’s granola recipe, originally something I found in his Minimalist column for the NY Times, suggests 6 cups of oats and 2 cups of nuts as the main ingredients.  If you’re crazy about clusters, which I clearly am, forgo about 1/4 or 1/3 cup of nuts and replace it with about ¼ cup of peanut (or almond or cashew or sunflower) butter.  Sometimes it helps to melt it in the microwave a bit for improved spreadability.  See the recipe below for more ideas about add-ins.

The second thing I never, ever buy in a bottle anymore is salad dressing.  Have you ever read the ingredients on a bottle of that stuff?  Some are better than others, but I have a bottle of balsamic vinaigrette in front of me that contains fish gelatin and xanthan gum.  Hmm.  Instead, I typically whip up a little dish of vinaigrette each time I make salad.  It takes about a minute, and it’s so much fresher.  And not at all creepy.  Like granola the add-ins are endless, but my favorite combination is olive oil, balsamic vinegar, Dijon mustard, honey, and black pepper.  For something lighter, perhaps olive oil, lemon juice, honey and black pepper.  Basically oil + acid + flavor = dressing. Done and done.  You can mix up a larger batch of dressing and it will keep in the fridge for at least a few days.

And the final food Mark taught me to make on my own is sorbet.  Unlike ice cream, which involves a machine to churn it and bring it down to temperature, making sorbet is quite straightforward.  Similar to salad dressing, pre-packaged sorbet often contains various acids and concentrated juices and “natural flavor” (OMG, my favorite flavor!).  But all you really need to make it yourself is frozen fruit, a little liquid (wine works well!), yogurt, sugar, and a food processor.  Just another way you get to control all the elements of what you’re eating and how to flavor it.  You want peach blueberry sorbet?  Go for it.  Haven’t seen that one in the freezer aisle!

Whoosh! Sorbet in the making.

Crunchy Granola
Adpated from The Minimalist by Mark Bittman

Some of my favorite things to add: pine nuts, flax seeds, almond butter, currants, dried cherries, pumpkin seeds, chocolate chips (at the end).

Time: 40 minutes
Makes: About 8 cups

6 cups rolled oats (not quick-cooking or instant)

1.5 cups mixed nuts and seeds: sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, chopped walnuts, pecans, almonds or cashews

¼ cup (or more) peanut butter or almond butter

1 cup dried unsweetened shredded coconut, optional

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, or to taste

Dash salt

1/2 to 1 cup honey or maple syrup, or to taste

1 cup raisins or chopped dried fruit, optional

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a bowl, combine oats, nuts and seeds, cinnamon, salt and sweetener. Place on a sheet pan and put in oven. Bake for 30 minutes or a little longer, stirring occasionally. If you’re using coconut, add it about halfway through.  Mixture should brown evenly; the browner it gets without burning, the crunchier the granola will be.

2. Remove pan from oven and add raisins or dried fruit. Cool on a rack, stirring once in a while until granola reaches room temperature. Transfer to a sealed container and store in refrigerator; it will keep indefinitely.

Salad Dressing

Adapted from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything

Time: 2-3 minutes

Makes: Enough for 4 salads

¼ cup olive oil

2 tbsp balsamic vinegar

1 tbsp Dijon mustard

2 tsp honey

1/8 tsp ground black pepper

Combine all ingredients in a small dish and whisk with a fork until combined.

Raspberry Cabernet Sorbet

Recipe from Mark Bittman’s The Food Matters Cookbook

Makes: At least 4 servings

Time: 10 minutes

All you need is a food processor to make this super-easy frozen dessert. If you can find good fresh raspberries and freeze them yourself, so much the better.  The small amount of alcohol in the mix makes the texture a little less icy than in a typical sorbet, and leaves you and your guests with nearly a full bottle of wine to polish off.

1 pound frozen raspberries

1⁄2 cup silken tofu, yogurt, or crème fraîche

3 to 4 tablespoons sugar

2 to 4 tablespoons cabernet or other full-bodied, flavorful red wine

1. Put the raspberries, tofu, sugar, and 2 tablespoons wine in a food processor. Process until just puréed and creamy, stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed and adding more wine 1 tablespoon at a time if the fruit does not break down completely. Be careful not to over-process or the sorbet will liquefy.

2. Serve immediately or freeze for up to a day or two; if serving later, allow 10 to 15 minutes for the sorbet to soften at room temperature.

Freya Bellin writes alternate Wednesdays for Frontier Psychiatrist. Her recent FP recipes include A Duck of My Very Own, Why Ramps Make People Giddy, and Cookie Season.

Iyer’s latest book sketches the author’s life alongside the life of Greene. In The Man Within My Head, stories of Iyer’s  upbringing in America and England, his time in Bolivia, an unintentional experiment with MDMA, and unfortunate events involving automobiles are juxtaposed with accounts of Greene’s coming of age in England in the era of flight and television, his unconventional Catholic attitude, his hate for Mexico and support of Cuba at a problematic time. While Iyer provides many details and insights about Greene, the book comes off as nothing more than a personal diary entry posing as an enigmatic character study.

It is easy to see why Iyer identifies with Greene so much. Both are worldly men. Iyer, currently living in Japan, laments how he is strip-searched every time he returns to his home country. Likewise, in the same paragraph, Iyer proposes “that a physical location is unimportant…home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.” Greene himself was never one to settle on a particular location, and seemed to revel in his “foreignness.” But where Iyer has found a way to make a relationship work (perhaps helped by modern communication), Greene’s love life was more distraught: “It was as if there was a question mark where his heart should be.” At the same time is a prime example of the dual nature of Greene. Iyer suggests that his “need for intimacy seemed at least as strong as his need for apartness.” This assertion, mentioned close to his interest in sex shows and brothels paint the portrait of womanizer who views relationships only in self-interest and convenience. While Iyer tries to defend that this isn’t particularly true, (“he came to life around women, every one of his friends told me”), he does admit that Greene may have turned to “professional lovers” as there was no way he could betray them.

While it is interesting to consider the apparitions that follow both authors, Iyer doesn’t necessarily make this a universal topic. This point is driven home when he brings his father into the mix, and which even confuses his wife as to who he is actually writing this book about (the three major sections are titled “Ghosts,” “Gods” and “Fathers”). Likewise, by trying to cover both his own and Greene’s life, he doesn’t quite paint the most detailed picture (the book clocks in at 238 pages). Iyer admits he wasn’t interested in “Greene the man of politics or Greene the Catholic or Greene the rumored spy.” Therefore, he fails not only to get us more interested in Greene, but in the man within whose head he lives.

Despite such idiosyncrasies that we learn about him, something about this book makes Greene so fascinatingly uninteresting. Every story seems only a glimpse, and while Iyer may find his connection to Greene so brilliant, he doesn’t explain it in an entirely convincing manner. As for the bits about Iyer’s life, it is the same thing. Sure he gives a bit of background into his life and the major life-changing events, but barely beyond what could be found in a Wikipedia article. Essentially, this book really only works for a very narrow audience: those that are familiar both with the works of Graham Greene and Pico Iyer, and more curious about the latter’s life than the former. For those that actually fit this criteria, I say keep going with all of the works you haven’t read by these authors; diving into their deep cuts will be much more rewarding.

Andrew Hertzberg is a Chicago music writer for Windy City Rock, a deep dish pizza slinger, and a night-time bike riding enthusiast. His recent reviews include Teju Cole’s Open City, Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory, and The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus.

Abel Tesfaye is undoubtedly a star in the making. His commitment to quality and character is apparent on all of his free releases. The ongoing question around his art deal with his reality: if these are actually his Thursdays or if he’s just an excellent, disturbed storyteller. If his show revealed anything, it’s that he’s fucking pumped to be doing this well this young. While Abel’s giddiness on stage seems at odds with his recorded melancholy, it also suggests a complexity beyond his deranged, masochistic persona.

On his first-ever tour, 22-year-old Abel Tesfaye (aka The Weeknd) celebrated his sensational success in the biggest U.S. and Canada markets, announced less than a month ago. Each show sold out in seconds despite a lack of promotion, much like his records would, should he have decided to sell them. Fans were content to pay the $30+ fees ticket price, disregarding his lack of performing experience and opener: they knew this would likely be a rare opportunity to see the potential superstar in such an intimate space. He delivered.

With a three-piece backing band (and several loops), The Weeknd brought his dead-eyed, designer drug anthems from his three phenomenal “mixtapes” to life in style. Engaged and seemingly ecstatic to be there, Abel was far more awake and human than his recorded character would have you believe. “High For This”—the exceptional mission statement of House of Balloons—served as our introduction to his live show, the biggest difference being his genuine smile and drum set.

From there, he tripped us through the best selections off the new-classic HoB (“Loft Music”, “The Morning”, “The Party and The After Party”, “House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls”, “The Knowing”, “Wicked Games”), the spacey Thursday (“The Birds Pt. 1”, “The Zone”, “Rolling Stone”) and the stellar, slow-jamming Echoes of Silence (“D.D.”, “Montreal”), each live version translating better than expected. In just about an hour, the group banged out 15 songs, but the set never felt rushed or shortened, despite some audible rumblings upon exit.

Allow us to make an educated guess: Abel Tesfaye and The Weeknd are different entities. The recorded persona is calculated, expertly produced and detestable. The Weeknd serves as a fictional output for Tesfaye, which he has gone through great lengths to make believable. That’s not to say it isn’t real, because after all, there’s always truth to be found in fiction. He’s just excellent at making us forget there’s a question at all.

Check back later today, we’ll have audio from the show uploaded. Just going through a few fixes.

Peter Lillis is Assistant Editor of Frontier Psychiatrist. He’s going to have to get used to being older than his favorite performers.

In these days of obsessive self-promotion, it can be a challenge to remember the artists who don’t feel the need to beg for your attention, those performers who are more enthused by their own art and less by their recognition. Pontiak, three Appalachian psych-leaning brothers content with their blues jams and reverb pedals, are one of those bands. Operating in a space that is entirely their own, Pontiak is a band that thrives upon their own independent nature and experimental urges.

Existing on the stoner spectrum somewhere between My Morning Jacket and Sleep, Pontiak have been honing their spacey Americana for nearly 10 years now, with nine releases, each as distinct as they all are consistent. There’s the delay-infected blues of Maker (2009), the riff-machine of Echo Ono (2012) or the concept exploration of Comecrudos (2011), all different faces of the same 12-sided die. The bands greatest strengths—their brotherly love and an equal commitment to style and substance—are found on every Pontiak release. The cool identity of the Carney brothers is imprinted on every track, an attribute that could be stripped if they were a band more dependent on their reception and the machine.

Last week, Pontiak rocked a sparsely populated Empty Bottle as an opening act for Chicago’s cacophonous Spanyurd. Rather than relying on hardcore theatrics and disjointed compositions like their headliner, the Carney brothers dug themselves into a deep groove using focused blues licks, group vocals and tasteful amounts of drone and space. Much like on their recorded output, the Pontiak live performance is as enjoyable off the cuff as it is when playing close attention. Their love of the jam is always present; you can’t help but get caught in it yourself.

This year’s Echo Ono is the band’s most accessible and comprehensive work to date. Less interested in space and concept as last year’s excellent but heady Comecrudos, Echo Ono is further proof that a future of real rock and roll is upon us. Less interested in getting weird, and more interested in kicking back, Echo Ono is a versatile record that wouldn’t sound out of place during a cloudy session, at a dive bar or on your work headphones.

Discussion continues over the advantages and disadvantages of the independent music structure. It’s the bands that are more concerned with their own work, and less with hitting it big, that show the strengths of our current model. These artists, under the old model, could be discovered, crafted and promoted by the machine to a music-hungry consuming mass. For better or for worse, that infrastructure is next to non-existent. For worse, we have an artist like Van Hunt, whose woes with the music industry we discussed last month highlight the lack of focus and interest major labels have in producing and marketing a high-quality product. For better, we have the talent of Pontiak, a band that uses their freedom to scratch any creative itch it comes.

Pontiak is a perfect example of a band that can thrive creatively in their own space, content to make the music they want to make and proud to share it with those willing to listen. But they also seem aware of their stance in the great pop spectrum. They will never be a hit band, and they’re fine with that. With a supportive label like Thrill Jockey behind them, the Carney brothers are in the middle of what could be considered the ideal music career. Unburdened by delusions or hype, Pontiak are true independents, free to explore their own psychedelic, riff-heavy America as they please.

Peter Lillis is Assistant Editor of Frontier Psychiatrist. He hopes you think of him as an independent.

Chromatics, Kill For Love

The new Chromatics album starts with a remake of the Neil Young classic “Hey Hey My My (Into the Black).” It’s a bold move to open a record with a cover, much less a cover of such a seminal rock anthem. Young himself did two versions of the song on the 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps, and the tune has since been redone by everyone from Dave Matthews to Oasis to Battlme, whose version appeared in the FX family drama Sons of Anarchy, a.k.a. Hamlet on Harleys. Yet the Chromatics cover –a closer cousin to Young’s acoustic “My My Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” than the electric “Into the Black” –works both in its own right and as a prelude to the rest of Kill for Love. Singer Ruth Radelet replaces Young’s nasal earnestness with her ethereal tone and narcotic delivery, the anthemic A minor guitar riff survives, and percussive squeaks foreshadow the album’s hypnotic electronic melancholy.

Chromatics have made music for nearly a decade, but were relatively obscure until their 2007 song “Tick of the Clock” not only made it onto last year’s acclaimed Drive soundtrack, but accompanied the movie’s opening scene. According to the liner notes, Kill for Love took five years to make and was recorded in seven cities: Montreal, Los Angeles, Houston, Minneapolis, Paris, Jakarta, and the band’s hometown of Portlandia. (Their record label, Italians Do It Better is based in New Jersey. Ohhhhh.)

Much of Kill for Love feels like a time warp. Ironically, Chromatics often champion some of the musical styles that Young feared would make him irrelevant as punk, disco, and electronic music challenged the hegemony of what later became codified as “classic rock.”  The percolating synth and syncopated bass line in the gender-bender “Lady” could be from the Knight Rider theme song.  The eight-minute anthem “These Streets Will Never Look the Same” replicates the percussive guitar riff from “Eye of the Tiger.” Several tracks feature New Wave sounds: sparse, melodic, and reverb soaked guitars and keyboards, minimalist bass lines, and electronic beats; others sound like the synthesized spirit of Brian Eno.

More broadly, Chromatics join a new new wave of mixed gender retro electro pop groups such as Chairlift and Polica, as well as Bon Iver, whose latest album channels 80’s music without apology or irony. Beyond the pop-rock instrumentation and electronic effects, producer Johnny Jewel embellishes the sound with orchestral backbenchers bassoon and viola, folk fair favorite hammered dulcimer, and the slightly more obscure bowed psaltery.  The result is a warm collision of past, present, and future.

While Kill for Love has an cohesive aesthetic, the 17 songs –including five instrumentals– include a fair amount of variety in terms of style, length, and mood. After she does her best Neil Young, Radelet sings four upbeat pop songs, then yields the microphone to a male singer whose auto-tuned voice repeats the mantra:  “The streets are flashing in my mind” over a single chord played for nearly nine minutes.  The album’s middle third is more mellow and includes three dreamy instrumentals, the languid and hazy “Candy,” and two piano ballads: “Birds of Paradise” and the seven-minute “Running from the Sun” which features more auto-tuned male vocals and a farty retro synth. The beats return on a trio of laments “Matter of Time,” “At Your Door,” and “The River,” and in a move as bold as the opening cover, Kill for Love ends with a 14-minute instrumental entitled “No Escape.”

In context, the long coda makes sense. While there are some standout songs, including “Lady,” the title track, and “Into the Black,” Kill for Love is best savored as an album, a 90-minute trance that seems to start at midnight and end at dawn. In this case, it’s better to fade away than to burn out.

Keith Meatto is co-editor of Frontier Psychiatrist. Last week, he reviewed Soul of America, a documentary about soul singer Charles Bradley, and M. Ward’s A Wasteland Companion. Italians do it better, but the Irish do a pretty decent job, too.

Today we bring you our April mixtape for your listening pleasure.  Stream it track-by-track below, or head over to our tumblr and download the whole thing.  Enjoy!

1. Daughn Gibson – “In The Beginning”

2.  Mr. Muthafuckin eXquire – “Position of Passion”

3. Dive – “How Long Have You Known?”

4. Field Report – “Taking Alcatraz”

5. Action Bronson – “A Simple Man”

6. jj – “Beautiful Life”

7. The Fresh & Onlys – “Do What I Came To Do”

8. Purity Ring – “Obedear”

9. Gold Panda – “4″

10. Moss Icon – “Guatemala”

11.  Ab Soul feat. Danny Brown & Jhene Aiko – “Terrorist Threats”

12. MV & EE – “Too Far to See”

13.  Ed Schrader’s Music Beat feat. Randy Randall of No Age -”Car”

14. Echo Lake – “Even The Blind”

L.V. Lopez is co-editor of Frontier Psychiatrist

Charles Bradley

For most of his life, Charles Bradley was a talented but obscure performer who sang at small bars and clubs as a James Brown impersonator dressed in a wig and cape and doing his best primal soul scream. Then in his 60’s he got a record deal, went on tour, landed a slot opening for Sharon Jones, another neo-soul late bloomer, and received international attention. This unlikely musical success story is the subject of the inspiring and heartwarming new documentary Soul of America, which premiered last month at South by Southwest and is now seeking distribution.

On screen, Bradley comes to life through fly on the wall reportage, footage of concerts, rehearsals, and recording sessions, interviews with his family, friends, and bandmates, and the stylistically incongruous reenactment of how he slept on the New York City subway as teen runaway. The glue that binds the movie is the music, and the music –from Bradley’s early gig as “James Brown Jr.” to his triumphant concerts under his own name—does not quit.

Charles Bradley, The World (Is Going Up in Flames)

Beyond showcasing Bradley’s vocal talents and off-stage charisma, Soul of America is a biography that tugs on the heartstrings.  Director Poull O’Brien captures Bradley at home in the Brooklyn housing projects, cooking for his elderly mother, and sleeping in her squalid basement when he needs a break from the projects. Two of the film’s many tender moments are when he works with a volunteer tutor who teaches him to read and his tearful reaction when he revisits the spot where his brother was fatally shot.

Besides his personal struggles, Bradley faces the obstacle of his age. As his much younger musical collaborator Thomas Brenneck says in the film. “I don’t know how many artists have been 62 years old and released their debut record.” The comment underscores the reality of a pop music industry and audiences that have long preferred youth to experience.  With the exception of classic rock stadium acts and revivals such as the recent Kraftwerk show at the Museum of Modern Art, few bands make it to middle age. Even barely legal Justin Bieber is already old, more newsworthy for his paternity suit than his, ahem, music.

One uncomfortable implication of the film is the degree to which Bradley, who is African-American, owes his belated success to white audiences and champions: from the retro hipster tastemakers at Dap-Tone Records to the filmmaker himself. The movie’s triumphant finale occurs at a club in the bourgeois bohemian Brooklandia of Park Slope, only a few miles from Bradley’s home in the projects, but a long way from his world shown elsewhere in the film. For at least a century, music from jazz to Motown to hip-hop has crossed racial barriers. But in a post-racial society and digital era where music has never been more accessible to more people, Bradley’s story begs the question: why are music audiences still so segregated? And is Bradley’s success an example of what the ruthlessly satirical and cynical web site Stuff White People Like calls Black Music that Black People Don’t Listen to Anymore. His summer tour schedule includes blues, jazz, and folk festivals in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland, and Canada, places not exactly known for their diversity.

Soul of America skirts such divisive and contentious issues, and instead focuses on one man’s musical triumph against the odds, a message of hope for anyone who’s ever refused to quit on his dreams.

Keith Meatto is co-editor of Frontier Psychiatrist. He recently reviewed M. Ward’s new album, A Wasteland Companion, and Alain De Botton’s book Religion for Atheists. He was a story advisor on the documentary How To Grow A Band, which closes its two-week run in New York today at the Village East.

Last weekend, I met the people living my dream.  Right down to the little quacker.  Upstate in Columbia County, I visited family friends who have a growing operation in their backyard, somewhere between enormous garden and mini-farm.  Their vegetables and strawberries grow in a greenhouse, asparagus stalks shoot straight up from the ground, and a dozen chickens cluck from within a pen.  And then there’s Diddy, the duck, who will eventually lay eggs of her own but currently fits in the palm of a hand, soft and gentle as the children’s books would lead you to believe.

At this garden/farm, named Toad Hall by its owners, I picked crisp, sweet miner’s lettuce, thick and hearty spinach leaves, and the spiciest arugula I’ve ever tasted.  I petted a chicken about to lay eggs, and I held a baby duck, who had imprinted on a human as her mother.  I saw the mobile pen where the new meat chickens will be living come summer.  And then I ate the veggies I had picked for dinner.  They were objectively delicious and flavorful, but the added satisfaction came from knowing that I had pulled them from the ground earlier.

My experience—just a casual afternoon at Toad Hall—really got me thinking about farm-to-table and why it’s so appealing.  We’re all vitally connected to food but without much concept of how it has made its way to us.  I know I’m not the first person to pick up on this trend; eager 20-somethings flee from Brooklyn all the time to intern at various upstate NY farms, like Kinderhook, ready to birth lambs and shear sheep.  But we can’t (and needn’t) all do that.  Just spending a bit of time with farmers has shown me the dedication, care, and craftsmanship that goes into responsible farming, and that makes me feel good about eating what they’ve grown.  I suppose my point is that it’s worth at least getting to know a farmer (or a master gardener).  Seeing where truly good food comes from might change the way you think about what you eat.  And in a world where pink slime was even conjured up, this seems to me something that our society must do.

I do believe that I could love small-scale farm life.  And I’m certain it would be more work than I think.  But at the very least it would be rewarding and delicious, and there isn’t much more one could ask for.  (Except… wait for it… a duck.)

Freya Bellin writes alternate Wednesdays for Frontier Psychiatrist. Her recent FP recipes include Why Ramps Make People Giddy, Cookie Season, and High on Grass: SXSW Beef Lovers Edition.

M. Ward, A Wasteland Companion

M. Ward seems to have a pretty good life. Over the last decade, the singer-songwriter’s output includes several solid solo albums, the Monsters of Folk project with Jim James of My Morning Jacket and Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis of Bright Eyes, and collaborations with a bevy of female singers, including Beth Orton, Neko Case, Jenny Lewis, and Zooey Deschanel (sigh). On his eighth studio album, Ward sticks to his successful formula that centers on his gravelly yet tuneful voice and strummy acoustic guitar. Although A Wasteland Companion is nothing revolutionary, the 12 songs deliver Ward’s reliable brand of indie adult contemporary music: a fusion of folk and blues with splashes of country and swing. While nominally a solo record, the personnel includes 17 other musicians, including Mogis and Deschanel, whose bright warbly voice balances Ward’s signature rasp.

As in the past, Ward has his melancholy moments, such as the bluesy title track and the opener “Clean Slate,” on which he sings “When I was a younger man/I thought the pain of defeat would last forever” over fingerpicking reminiscent of Nick Drake. But despite these songs, the ominous album title, and spooky cover art with Ward silhouetted against a full moon, A Wasteland Companion is often a cheery record. “Sweetheart,” a duet with Deschanel, is a wholesome paean to chaste love, enlivened by handclaps, shoo-be-doo vocals, 50′s guitar arpeggios, and a swooping pedal steel. The song begins: “You have a sweet heart/Sweetheart/You have a nice smile/Baby/You drove me crazy/Down Lover’s Lane.”)  In a similar vein, “I Get Ideas” centers on the sort of playful innuendo that may have seemed risque for Buddy Holly or the early Beatles, but in 2012 sounds almost quaint. And the last track, “Pure Joy,” is just that, reinforcing the notion that A Wasteland Companion is more idealistic and homespun than dark and apocalyptic, more Garrison Keillor than T.S. Elliot.

I was tempted to buy A Wasteland Companion on vinyl on Record Store Day, during which I hit four shops in New Jersey before and after a somewhat premature beach trip. Unfortunately, I gave my turntable to a friend two years ago, so I settled for the free digital stream. Still, for the retro sheen of Ward’s music and the crackly warmth of his voice, 33 1/3 RPM seems like the perfect  speed.

Keith Meatto is co-editor of Frontier Psychiatrist, back this week after a post-SXSW hiatus. In May, he’s off to Philadelphia to see M. Ward at Union Transfer, Yards Brewery, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. He bought A Very She and Him Christmas as a present for his mom and is an unapologetic fan of New Girl.