Micah Blue Smaldone
Micah Blue Smaldone
Micah Blue Smaldone has a story that in many ways mirrors my own. Growing up in the pleasant (but less-than-stimulating) atmosphere of a quiet New England town, Smaldone found his salvation in skateboarding and punk rock.... Sounds familiar!
Kennebunk, Maine, lit some kind of fire under Smaldone, and the road ever since has been long and winding, indeed. He went from being a founding member of the snappy and provocative punk group the Pinkerton Thugs, to producing a series of beguiling, mostly acoustic solo records that almost exist out of time: His phrases, both vocal and musical, are consistently poetic and graceful.
“The beauty of music-making is that there is always somewhere new to go, but it’s also important to remember that we all came from somewhere.”
After 20 years of continuous touring, Smaldone credits his approach to neither his hometown nor his current digs, where he builds excellent amplifiers under the moniker Arkham Sound in South Portland, Maine. Rather, he says, “The strongest memories are the ones where I felt that I was part of a moment that called upon everyone present. A performer is only part of the equation. Scenes, movements, even just circles of friends who are all feeling something together at a certain time, place, era, stage of life—for me that’s what gives urgency to a musical experience. I am so lucky to have felt that so many times already in my life.”
Micah has reconnected with his roots in a big way in the last couple years, forming the rock trio Wake in Fright and releasing a new eponymous album that offers a set of confident, Clash-inspired tunes that might just get you back in the pit!
Charlie Rauh
Photo by Andrew Golledge
Charlie Rauh didn’t just take the road less traveled; he cut his own very unique path. Growing up in the South, first in Huntsville, Alabama, and then Herndon, Virginia, Rauh began forming his musical personality in the gathering clouds.
“I remember the scent in the air before the intense storms we would get, and the shade of green the sky turned before a tornado. I didn’t play an instrument at this time in my life, but the atmospheric elements of the environment had a massive emotional impact on me.” Nature’s push and pull are all over Rauh’s playing, which centers around a measured, intimate, fingerpicked style that is truly his own. I still have the business card that he gave me when we first met, and the tagline still puts a smile on my face: “Charlie Rauh—Won’t Play Loud. Can’t Play Fast.”
Rauh is now an in-demand session player in his current home of New York City, and recently participated in a first-of-its-kind residency at the Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine. “I was brought in based on my solo guitar work, with the directive of translating the intention of interspecies wellness through my music. The experience was completely life-changing for me, and the music I composed for solo acoustic guitar and 6-piece choir would become my album, Theoria. In addition to performing the music live, I have been presenting guest lectures on the process as well as publishing written pieces and lessons on the process I used to create it. The way I think about music has been deeply impacted by my time spent with the animals and doctors I worked with.”Rosali
Photo by Jamie Davis
I first became aware of Rosali when she released her excellent second album Trouble Anyway in 2018. This year, her ascension continues with Bite Down, her Merge Records debut. The album is full of masterful melodies, rollicking alt-country backing, and no small amount of artsy, homespun guitar goodness. Originally hailing from Michigan, Rosali considers Philadelphia to be her hometown: “I spent 12 years there—my formative adult years. The scene was cross-genre, tough—in a good way—and psychedelic. So many intelligent players, intricate and also bone-headed. I think there was a beautiful mix of approaches and appreciation for one another, at least in the early days. I think of Jack Rose and Meg Baird, Mary Lattimore, Weyes Blood. I went to a lot of noise and DIY shows in West Philly. Not to mention the energy of the city itself. Just rough and raw and very real. It toughened up this midwestern girl in an invaluable way. I owe a lot to that place.”
James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg
Photo by Joan Shelley
Of all the musicians I spoke to for this column, James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg have probably logged the most miles. Elkington grew up in the English village of Chorleywood, about an hour outside of London, while Salsburg spent his youth in Louisville, Kentucky. To date, the pair have produced three outstanding records of guitar duets (their latest, All Gist, is out now), and have also collaborated on several albums for Joan Shelley, a top-tier singer-songwriter who happens to be married to Salsburg.
Despite musical excursions in and out of London from the age of 16, Elkington’s imagination was truly captured by the Chicago scene of the early 2000s, with bands like Gastr del Sol and Tortoise being his guiding lights.
“I had got it into my head that Chicago was a musical wonderland where everyone played on each other’s records and labels really supported each other, and when I came here that turned out to be sort of true.” Indie music in Chicago is historically known for being some shade of “post”—post rock, post hardcore, etc.—but Elkington’s expansive playing takes in the past, present, and future. He can effortlessly conjure contrapuntal folk baroque, fuzzy, abstract expressionism, and pretty much everything in between! Elkington carries the musical influences of his place of origin, as well as those from his current home, with equal aplomb.
The connection that Elkington found with Nathan Salsburg is of a rare and wonderful kind. Like Elkington, Salsburg is something of a musical polymath. He came up in the vibrant punk and post-rock scene of ’80s and ’90s Louisville, where bands like Slint, Rodan, and Squirrel Bait were redefining rock for a new generation. All the while, Salsburg was absorbing the Bob Dylan, Mississippi John Hurt, and Dave Van Ronk records played by his parents. After stints in a handful of local bands and a few years in New York City, Salsburg returned to Louisville with “a desire to make music with focus, rigor, thoughtfulness, and peace of mind.” He developed a highly melodic and animated fingerpicking style that has put him at the top of his class in the world of guitar soli.
But if one guitar is great, can’t two be greater? Enter Elkington, and a wonderful partnership was born. Not since John Renbourn and Stefan Grossman have two players cooked up such a heady brew of English and American folk-guitar concepts, and the transcribers of the future will surely be scratching their heads trying to untangle Elkington and Salsburg’s playful, harmonically dense lines.
Whether we realize it or not, the places we are from, the places where we are, and the places that we’re going play a huge role in the music we make. We can even look at our individual journeys like we might look at the structure of a song. Is your hometown the intro, the overture, or is it actually the theme that runs through the whole piece? Is your song carefully composed, or are there a few extended improvised sections? How different will the ending be from the beginning? To paraphrase author Jon Kabat-Zinn, “Wherever we go, there we are.”
The live shows in New York and Los Angeles will be Gilmour’s only concert appearances in North America and will take place at The Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, CA on October 29 & 30 and at Madison Square Garden in New York, NY on November 4 & 5.
Fans will need to sign up at davidgilmour.comto get first access to tickets on Wednesday, May 15 at 10am local time. The general on sale for all shows will take place on Friday, May 17 at 10:00am local time.
The touring band includes: David Gilmour, guitar & vocals; Guy Pratt, bass and background vocals; Greg Phillinganes, keyboards; Rob Gentry, Keyboards; Adam Betts, drums; Ben Worsley, guitar; Louise Marshall, background vocals; Hattie Webb, background vocals and Charlie Webb, background vocals.
Luck and Strange was recorded over five months in Brighton and London and is Gilmour’s first album of new material in nine years. The record was produced by David and Charlie Andrew, best known for his work with alt-J and Marika Hackman.
The majority of the album’s lyrics have been composed by Polly Samson, Gilmour’s co-writer and collaborator for the past thirty years. Samson says of the lyrical themes covered on Luck and Strange, “It’s written from the point of view of being older; mortality is the constant.” Gilmour elaborates, “We spent a load of time during and after lockdown talking about and thinking about those kind of things.”
The album features eight new tracks along with a reworking of The Montgolfier Brothers' "Between Two Points" and has artwork and photography by renowned artist Anton Corbijn.
Musicians contributing to the record include Guy Pratt & Tom Herbert on bass, Adam Betts, Steve Gadd and Steve DiStanislao on drums, Rob Gentry & Roger Eno on keyboards with string and choral arrangements by Will Gardner. The title track also features the late Pink Floyd keyboard player Richard Wright, recorded in 2007 at a jam in a barn at David’s house.
Some contributions emerged from the live streams that Gilmour and family performed to a global audience during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021; Romany Gilmour sings, plays the harp and appears on lead vocals on "Between Two Points". Gabriel Gilmour also sings backing vocals.
From left to right: Jonas Stein, Jemina Pearl, John Eatherly, and Nathan Vasquez started out as Be Your Own Pet when they were all still in high school.
Photo by Kirt Barnett
When it did eventually happen, the Nashville-based band’s reunion was swift. In late 2021, they met up at an event at Third Man Records (which is owned in part by Pearl’s husband, Ben Swank), after having loosely kept in touch over the decade or so prior. They had one rehearsal, Jack White caught wind of it—and they agreed to join him on a couple weeks’ worth of dates on his Supply Chain Issues Tour in spring 2022. And just like that, they were back.
Be Your Own Pet’s third full-length album, Mommy, was released on Third Man in late 2023. It’s their first record in 15 years, following 2008’s Get Awkward. The songs are boisterous yet tempered, at times charged, at times playful, and always joyous in their freedom of expression.
Erotomania
“It can be kind of easy to see through something that doesn’t feel totally authentic,” comments Stein on what makes a great punk band. By those terms, at the very least, Be Your Own Pet is great. On the new record, Pearl’s authenticity shines in lyrics that address her experience living with bipolar disorder (“Bad Mood Rising”) and sexual assault (“Hand Grenade”). Underpinning those sensitive, personal subjects, Stein’s insistent guitar work pushes them further to the forefront with the urgency they deserve.
The explosive, broiling Mommy poises itself like a zealous boxer, delivering one punch after the next in controlled bursts of enthusiasm. While the band picks up where it left off in their way of expertly packaging tumultuous—once teenaged—emotions into zipping, neatly clamoring arrangements, they’ve also become more articulate in their own musical language, going from pouring out raucous, nervous energy to fusing together beats, screams, and strums that are more confident than they are angsty.
On Mommy, Be Your Own Pet displays a new sense of confidence, channeling an angst that slightly departs from the energy of their teenage years to focus on more mature issues.
But don’t worry—they are still angsty. On the opening track, “Worship the Whip,” Stein switches between steady, supporting downstrokes to matching the vocal melody with a knifelike lead, as Pearl cries out with insolent commentary on right-wing authority figures. 'Goodtime!” is a lament on becoming an adult with responsibilities, especially as a punk—which Stein fleshes out with sharp, clever riffage. And on “Bad Moon Rising,” Stein savvily rides his overdrive back and forth between mild and heavy, paralleling Pearl’s shifting, riotous intensity. All the while, Vasquez and Eatherly act as bellows to the blaze, serving the songs with relentlessly energetic and intuitive rhythmic backing.
“In a very funny, positive way, there was always a little bit of hazing on one another, and all that stuff came right back.”
The first time Be Your Own Pet played together, Stein was around 15 years old. “I definitely did not have my driver’s license yet,” he says. “We had to get picked up by our parents to do rehearsals and stuff. Then shortly after, I was the first person to get my license, so we’d all pile into my car and go be rascals around town and play music when we could.”
It wasn’t long before the band gained traction—they released a demo CD, and soon after played South by Southwest, eventually signing to Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label to release their self-titled debut in 2006. What followed was a somewhat chaotic musical career that, due to the pressures of the industry, ended just a handful of years later. When they reunited, it was their first time seeing each other in person since their disbandment.
“I was always more inspired by the guitar players who can make two or three notes sound really badass.”
“Thirteen years sounds like a long time, but it did not feel like it’d been 13 years after we got back in the room together,” says Stein. “It just felt like meeting back up with your childhood best friends or your siblings, like ‘Oh, we know each other. We don’t have to try to figure each other out again.’ Aside from the musical chemistry, even the humor and personality traits that we all once carried…. They still carried over. In a very funny, positive way, there was always a little bit of hazing on one another, and all that stuff came right back.”
When Be Your Own Pet rehearsed together in late 2021, it was the first time they’d all seen each other in person in 13 years.
Photo by Angelina Castillio
Despite how quickly they fell back in step, a lot had also changed, but in a good way. The band had grown as musicians from the other projects they’d pursued over the years: Pearl released a solo album that featured Iggy Pop, Eatherly played with a handful of successful acts, and Stein fronted the band Turbo Fruits and built a career in DJing. “Coming back and doing it all again just felt like we were on performance enhancers,” says Stein.
During their time apart, Pearl also learned how to play guitar, which now enables her to bring more arrangement ideas to the rest of the band than her past, mostly lyrical contributions. “She’s been able to bring some really cool ideas that show up very barebones and rudimentary, which has been really nice because the boys are able to reconstruct and enhance them,” says Stein, referring to himself, Vasquez, and Eatherly. Compared to how they worked together when they were teenagers, today, they’re more comfortable with giving each other constructive criticism and feedback, and are able to come to agreements more easily. The “greater good” and what works for a song has taken priority over their egos and preferences as individuals.
But since the band was created when its members were in their formative years, there is still a subtle but “goofy pecking order,” says Stein. As the two oldest of the group, Stein and Pearl have always borne the “older-sibling responsibilities,” and more recently, Pearl has taken on the largest workload, he says. “She’s kind of wearing the crown in all this.”
Jonas Stein's Gear
While soloing, guitarist Jonas Stein, who’s inspired by bands like MC5 and Buzzcocks, either sticks to pure noise or uses as few notes as possible.
Photo by Jim Summaria
Guitars
- Customized Epiphone SG
- Customized Gibson SG
Amps
- Live: Fender Blues DeVille 212
- Studio: Peavey Decade
Effects
- Fulltone Full-Drive
- Electro-Harmonix Nano POG
- Generic wah
Strings & Picks
- D'Addario Nickel Wound (.011–.050)
- Dunlop Tortex .6 mm
Stein admits that when Be Your Own Pet started playing together again, he hadn’t played guitar for about six years, as he’d been spending most of that time focusing on DJing. So, when the band booked their dates with Jack White, he decided to invest in a new axe. He purchased a white Epiphone SG with the intention of hot-rodding it—and brought it to Dave Johnson of Scale Model Guitars in Nashville. He described to Johnson what he wanted the guitar to sound like, and Johnson went ahead with modding. “I just love something that breaks up pretty easily,” says Stein. “I don’t like my guitars to be too bright. I like them to be sort of easily distorted, really easy to play, and warm-sounding.”
Johnson gutted the electronics, adding Seymour Duncan humbuckers and simplifying the knob configuration (from four to two), changed the tuning pegs, replaced the nut, and put a custom Be Your Own Pet graphic over the body. Stein also plays a Gibson SG that Johnson modded years ago, which has an American flag graphic on it to resemble Wayne Kramer of MC5’s guitar. The pickups in the Gibson are stock. “I really like it; it’s kind of a darker, heavier tone,” Stein explains.
Live, Stein likes to play through a Fender Blues DeVille, but in the studio, he goes for “the weirdest, craziest, shittiest, fanciest-sounding amp there is.” For Mommy, he ended up recording a lot on a Peavey Decade. He explains how the amp rose to popularity after Josh Homme divulged that they were his “secret weapon” on the Queens of the Stone Age episode of the documentary series Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson. “These tiny little Peavey amps used to be like $40,” says Stein, “but now that the word is out there, they’re going for like over $1000 apiece.”
There are fiery leads and riffs on the album, but not solos in the traditional, elaborately improvised sense. As Stein explains, that’s never really been his speed. “I really took to the MC5 when I was a teenager. I liked the messiness and the imperfections of their playing. It made me feel better about myself as a guitar player because they were never perfect.
“I was always more inspired by the guitar players who can make two or three notes sound really badass and less focused on the players that were really well-versed in music theory and could play circles around everybody else. I was more into the energy that I would hear from a two-note Buzzcocks solo.”
This live performance shot was taken during the first phase of Be Your Own Pet’s career, when they were still teenagers.
Throughout the album, Stein captures that energy by bridling it in minimalist, yet galvanized, passages. Sometimes, that means a few measures of pure noise, à la Sonic Youth, heard on “Erotomania” and “Never Again.” Alternatively, on “Hand Grenade,” he builds a triumphant arc that perfectly suits the song’s impassioned, empowering message. And over the “Psycho Killer”-reminiscent groove of “Rubberist,” he carefully unravels a series of spacious phrases that climb over the steady bassline and eerie crowd vocals. His approach to that song in particular was influenced by his experience as a DJ, where he’s immersed himself in disco, Italo disco, funk, and dance genres.
Stein describes “Rubberist” as featuring “more time and space and less full-on riffage.” His disco familiarity comes into the songwriting process in terms of “knowing when to bring the guitar down, to let other things shine a little bit more, let the bass shine, let the vocals shine, let the drums and bass shine together. I think just being around more dynamic music, like some 8-minute deep-cut disco tracks, has shaped the way I would look at writing a song today.”
“I started from pretty close to beginner status. But I think that in itself is pretty punk rock.”
Citing Giorgio Moroder, Nile Rodgers, and Gino Soccio as influences, Stein shares, “I grew up mostly on punk rock and rock ’n’ roll and I was always like, ‘Disco sucks,’ ’cause that was always the theme. But listening to disco music and classic dance music from the early ’70s to early ’80s has been really refreshing for my ears. It’s so much different from what I was used to playing in all the bands I played in.
“I was on the tail-end of, you had to pick a clan and stick with them,” he shares. “In the ’80s, you were either a punk rocker, or a metalhead, or you went to discos. You couldn’t really cross over. But now, I feel like we’ve entered an age, probably because of the internet, where everything’s so immediately at your disposal that you can like anything you want and everything you want, and it’s okay.”
Stein was just becoming a musician when the world was in the midst of entering that age. He grew up with a dad who worked in the music industry, and while he was never “force fed” into learning an instrument, the opportunity was always there. When his parents did eventually put him in guitar lessons, he ended up hopping from guitar to drums to bass and back to guitar—which then, of course, led pretty quickly to him performing. “I probably, for certain actually, started playing in bands before I had the skills to play in bands.”
When it all began, he says, he strung his guitar with just the bottom four strings. He was mostly playing power chords at the time, and the other strings just got in the way—but as the band started getting more shows, his playing had to catch up to where he was as a performer. “I started from pretty close to beginner status,” he says, looking back. “But I think that in itself is pretty punk rock.”
Be Your Own Pet @ SXSW - 03/15/2023 - Mohawk, Austin, TX
In a performance at SXSW 2023, Be Your Own Pet rips through two tunes, digging in with unconventional arrangements and raw punk spirit.