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Chelou - Halfway to Nowhere

Fri, 04 Nov 2016 15:57:58 -0400

Chelou - Halfway to Nowhere

// Letters to YVYNYL //premiere: Harrison Caldeira - Higher /...

Fri, 04 Nov 2016 13:06:51 -0400

// Letters to YVYNYL //

/ Music is, as many of us know, a true medicine, healing some of the most difficult problems life sends our way. I know a lot about this from personal experience myself, but it makes me happy to receive letters from folks who know the immediate value of music. Create it, listen to it, share it. Those vibrations are the ones that make the most challenging moments palpable, if not downright medicinal.

Dear Mark,

I have always known music. It has been my comfort. My peace. Sitting in the bathtub as a toddler, I would laugh with happiness, as my dad would sing The Beatles’ “Hello Goodbye” on repeat. And I would request it every time. He would later inspire me to pick up a guitar myself at the age of twelve. It quickly became apart of my life. But I never realized how much it meant to me until it was taken away.

I’ve found that as you get older, it’s easier to let the world get inside your head. Having graduated high school, I figured I ought to put myself on a more “serious” path. I put music at the back of my mind for a while and decided to pursue an academic life at university, thinking that sooner or later I would find a suitable career.

But on February 14, 2011, everything changed. Late that night, I had a seizure and was hospitalized until morning. Six months later I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. I decided to move back home and transferred to a local university in order to receive treatment closer to home.

In December of that same year, shortly after having been diagnosed, I suffered a paralyzing relapse that debilitated my motor skills. Much of the strength and coordination in my hands, legs and feet was lost. I experienced problems with my speech, and I soon felt completely defeated. One day, my dad had asked me to pick up the guitar and play something for him. I’ll never forget the feeling I had as I strummed hopelessly and realized with agony, that I couldn’t play anymore. It was at that point that I discovered how important my relationship with music is.

I think that having experiences like these can either make or break you. Or both. After my diagnosis, I found myself in a really dark place, and I felt every minute of it. But my MS has given me much more than it can ever take away. It brought me exactly to where I need to be, where I’ve always needed to be—where my heart’s always been. I picked up the guitar, and I taught myself how to play, all over again. It was frustrating beyond words. And more than once I wanted to give up. But once in remission, I had a new perspective on what mattered in my life.

And a new determination. So I began to write. After I wrote my first album HIS·STORY, I left Canada to travel around Europe for a year. While I lived in France, it was difficult to communicate with people due to the language barrier. In these moments, I turned to songwriting to express myself. I took the Mumford and Sons approach to writing music. I wrote as many songs as I could, then from sixty or so songs, I chose my best six. When I came home, I recorded these songs at Splintered Wood Records. We were just two people for one big project, and I can’t thank him enough for the work he did.

Through endless re-recordings and re-writes, the final product came to be. I feel as if I’m always trying to get what I feel inside, out through music … it’s an impossible task, but I try to get as close as possible. I’m driven by that need to be truly venerable with myself and with my music.

Best,

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Been going through tons of iPhone photos I’ve taken over the...

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 16:35:17 -0400

Been going through tons of iPhone photos I’ve taken over the years. I realize I forgot to share this snap I took a couple months ago at a show of one of my favorite artists. I’m trying to dig up any that I took when Angel Olsen played to a few folks in a tiny yoga studio in West Philly in 2012.

// Letters to YVYNYL //The News - Fail Better / Poetry has...

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 11:29:05 -0400

// Letters to YVYNYL //

The News - Fail Better

/ Poetry has always played an important part of coming to terms with the idea of failure in music songwriting. Philadelphia-based duo Rachel Haines and Benjamin James do some meditation on this, and wanted to send me their thoughts on their first ever single release. Balancing the poser of words, the places they fall in between the cracks, the way they crawl into your skin without you understanding their impact until years later; this is what good songwriting is all about.

hello mark

we are going to attempt to write about “fail better” our debut song from our musical collaboration - we call The News. The collaboration started early 2016, and most of our songs were recorded during the summer, and we are finally starting to put them out into the world. We will be releasing them all as singles, and we fear that in the playlist culture we live in currently, the idea of taking an entire body of songs and throw them into the world, may simply be too much and fall on deaf ears. Like the Beckett quote we based our song from, distilling down the end piece to a manageable chunk, may be easier on the audience, but may in the long term, misconstrue the intent of the author.

When dealing within the pop milieu, there are so many cliches and pitfalls to songwriting, or at least that is how we feel it is, and frankly, any thoughts or feeling you are going to try and convey, undoubtedly have been illustrated by a poet far better than you could have ever hoped.

That said, we strive to apply context to our songs by anchoring them firmly within an ideology that we mutually could agree upon, as we feel it rings true to both our ears. It is with this in mind that we both agreed to firmly base our song “fail better” within the framework of Samuel Beckett’s 1983 work “worstward ho!.” Perhaps it reads as pretentious or silly to base your framework on a piece of prose that frankly was written as a parody of another work by Charles Kingsley a hundred years prior, but there is something about the quote “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better..” that has resonated with readers and interpreters since its writing nearly 35 years ago, and that seemed like a good enough reason to explore it.

The fact remains though, this quote is often grabbed out of context and is often seen as some sort of self help mantra, which honestly, we do not feel was the intent of the author, but it is easy to see how that meaning can be applied when you don’t read the rest of the prose and all the darkness that surrounds it.

For “fail better,” it is that cutting edge, just below the surface that we longed to embody. Upon first glance, perhaps this is just another “what have you done for me lately,” woman empowerment pop song, but honestly, that is not where we are coming from. It is that struggle between substance and headlines, and that drifting back and forth between people in our lives that we know are toxic, but we find ourselves returning to those places again and again, that drives this song.

This is our first song, and honestly, you never know if anyone is going to hear what you make, so that said, it most probably will be our most honest perspective we will have, as it is a song, simply not informed by an audience in any shape or form.

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better..” is a case study in the idea of success and whether or not it is a concept that really exists in life, and although we can’t encapsulate that big philosophical idea in a pop song, it can certainly help inform the character within the song. This is not self help material for sure, but writing the song was.

rachel + ben

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NVDES - My Mind Is (feat. Oliver Tree)

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 11:11:34 -0400

NVDES - My Mind Is (feat. Oliver Tree)

premiere: Sun Cop - Golden Son (feat. Cadien Lake James)

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 21:19:28 -0400

premiere: Sun Cop - Golden Son (feat. Cadien Lake James)

// Letters to YVYNYL //premiere: Sheers - Depth / The warm...

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 20:30:17 -0400

// Letters to YVYNYL //

premiere: Sheers - Depth

/ The warm movements hold cold reverberations from the low hum permeating this track, a place that feels difficult to turn away from Lily Sheers’ work. And oh, that organ! Ultimately, I am transfixed to these works that use mixed media within outside elements of craft: dance, film, color. Join this incantation for the deeper we go into this autumn song.

Hey Mark,

Firstly, I admire what you do and the music you choose to feature on YVYNYL, and the letters from artists are brilliant. I’ve spent perhaps too many hours of life wondering why I write songs, why anyone should listen, and what good it does. As a classically trained choral singer and harpist, I’ve never been certain “pop” music is the place for me. Regardless, I’m putting my best efforts into this project, hoping that if I go about it genuinely, someone will connect with my work. Anyway, I love the Letters to YVYNYL because they make listening a more personal experience.

“Depth” was an intuitively-written song. I started with only a simple bass line and a vocal melody so that the space between the two could be an instrument in itself. Working with the musical representation of distance, the autobiographical lyrics are about the isolating effects of emotional independence. At the time I thought it easier to miss people than to maintain vulnerable relationships, despite a resultant battle between the emotional and logical self.

After fleshing out the song more, I recorded the track with Scott Schaus, and our mutual friend Hasan Mahmood came up with the video’s premise, which I think is a great reflection of the song’s sentiment. The one-shot video (truly one shot, no cheats!) features the improvised dancing of Juliette Nolan. While she represents the emotional aspect of “Depth,” I act as the inhuman, a-emotional counterpart ignoring her presence. We laid out the setting to echo feelings of isolation and duality, accented by Kayla Newell’s defiant paintings.

I remember the first time Hasan asked me about the meaning of the “Depth,” I blushed and gave the briefest answer possible. For someone who writes songs about fear of vulnerability, speaking about the meaning of lyrics is also utterly terrifying. The process of completing and putting out this music video has proven befitting, I suppose. Each step has challenged me to reveal more of my emotional self. Here I am now, writing you with more detail than I could not have comfortably imagined upon creating “Depth.” It still makes me a little nervous, but if it’s for the sake of giving a genuine account, so be it.

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy the video and this bit of backstory. Let me know if you have questions I left unanswered.

Cheers,

Lily Sheers

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Shirley Collins - Pretty Polly

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 00:22:03 -0400

Shirley Collins - Pretty Polly

Madame Gandhi - Yellow Sea

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 23:18:17 -0400

Madame Gandhi - Yellow Sea

Blisss - Damien / Somehow, there are two amazing bands named...

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 22:45:39 -0400

Blisss - Damien

/ Somehow, there are two amazing bands named Blisss at the moment, both of whom have now appeared here on YVYNYL (albeit, with massively different sounds). Even though they’re clearly fans of Tame Impala, this single is exploding out trippy tracks like a bunch of hooligan shape shifters.

Vessels - Had a Love (feat. Anna of the North)

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 12:32:53 -0400

Vessels - Had a Love (feat. Anna of the North)

Magana - Golden Tongue

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 11:22:17 -0400

Magana - Golden Tongue

// Letters to YVYNYL //premiere: Midnight Garden - Something...

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 11:00:46 -0400

// Letters to YVYNYL //

premiere: Midnight Garden - Something Blue

/ Everyone who puts their focus and energy into creating something bigger finds that the roads they chose change corse in ways they never imagined, and sometimes those roads lead right back to where they started. Chicago’s Nick Donlin wrote me about this experience with his collaborator San Diego’s Zach Vouga.

Good evening, Mark,

We hope this letter finds you and your readers well. It’s cold and rainy here. The seasons are changing. Something about this change effects me subconsciously for sure. It puts me in transition mode, gets me ready for the next thing, and gives me an opportunity to reflect on the past.

Zach and I met in high school. Sort of weird kids, and where we grew up the weird kids did drugs and made music. Not that abnormal really. We were each working on separate projects at the time and I think each of those projects and hit some sort of lull. I don’t know, it was just the right moment to try and work together on something. We called ourselves Glitter Bones. We experimented around for the next couple years, releasing a couple of EP’s and playing super hot and crowded house parties in Chicago and opening for some sweet people around the city. For whatever reason, as life tends to just happen, we parted ways. Zach moved across the country to San Diego and I moved back home. I think of these as sort of the soul searching years, doing a lot of growing up or whatever.

Around a year ago I was working on the rough draft of what would eventually become the song Time. It just sounded to me like Zach should play on it, so I emailed him the basic tracks I had recorded for it. I felt it was kind of an experiment. Like, could we write music together without being in the same room? We got pretty excited about the song, so we wrote another. It turned out to be a great formula. Rather than like writing a whole record and then going into the studio, the recording and writing processes went hand in hand. I’ve always loved records where you could tell the band sort of used the studio as an instrument. So we kept writing, and piece by piece it came together. It’s kind of cool to have the freedom to let the record evolve naturally in such a way.

We decided to call ourselves Midnight Garden. While it definitely felt like we were picking up where we left off with Glitter Bones in some ways, the time apart also made it feel like something new and fresh to us. Midnight Garden is sort of a feeling. Like the way night life makes you feel, or a chilling on a porch late on a summer night kind of thing. I don’t know, I hope other people hear it and think about their own thing.

I said before that the time Zach and I spent apart before sort of reconnecting was a time of growing up and soul searching. Our songs are definitely about that. Lots of self reflection, songs about love, and relationships. Big life stuff. There’s some storytelling mixed in there too. I think all that stuff is better left up to the listener to figure out for themselves though. I just know that for me, writing music helps me get things off my chest, so I think a lot of the songs are about working through something.

This past summer, Zach and I finished up our debut record Ruined and decided to put it up on our various social media outlets, Spotify, Apple Music, etc. It took nearly a year of this back and forth writing and recording to finish the record. It may not have gotten the exposure or attention we wanted, but in the grand scheme of things that doesn’t matter that much. Some people heard it and loved it and shared it with their friends and that’s really what we’re after. Connection through something pleasurable.

Since we don’t really have an opportunity to tour right now, we are always in writing mode. This can be a good and bad thing. Sometimes we write things without any sort of clear direction of where this material might end up. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve been writing music together in some form or another for the past six years. YVYNYL even premiered a music video for us during the Glitter Bones days, so I can’t really tell you how many of these songs we’ve written that have gotten lost in the cracks of time. Songs that didn’t make it past the transition to something new.

As soon as we released Ruined, we were already writing new things. It’s sort of a trial and error process to find the sound that feels right. We decided this time it’d be interesting to share a couple of these songs rather than lose them forever. Something Blue is one of those songs. It’s one that we’re really excited about, but just don’t know if it’s the direction we’re looking for when feeling out the next record. So I hope people can listen to it and get excited about what’s coming next and hopefully we can share some information about that soon.

I think we just really love making music together and want to share our experience with as many people as possible.

Peace,

Nick & Zach

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cruelrhythm: if you realise.

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 21:48:47 -0400

cruelrhythm:

if you realise.

So this is happening. Cassettes are the new digital download....

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 21:40:34 -0400

So this is happening. Cassettes are the new digital download. Too bad I already have the vinyl, or I’d jump on this baby.

Tourist - U

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 11:02:02 -0400

Tourist - U

…and of course the signed copy of my friends...

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 10:07:28 -0400

…and of course the signed copy of my friends @mrtwinsister 10" single release of “Bad Street”

One my favorite records, the rare, original first release by...

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 09:45:59 -0400

One my favorite records, the rare, original first release by #TameImpala on 10" #vinyl. Great morning start up soundtrack.

WHIM - Alpine Metaphor

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 23:02:37 -0400

WHIM - Alpine Metaphor

Liyv - Laser Eyes

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 22:49:26 -0400

Liyv - Laser Eyes