Every track on Visitor is a poignant piece of work but “Getting Old” always struck me especially so. As an adult, the lyrics are beyond relatable – who amongst us hasn’t looked in the mirror and considered another year passing? Musically, the song manages to skirt the line between an elevated optimism and quiet melancholy. Once the choir of voices kick in for the chorus, you’re hooked.
Visitor will be released in full on May 29th. Annie will play a show in celebration over at Soft Junk with Styrofoam Winos and Shrunken Elvis. Coincidentally, it will be her birthday too.
You didn’t think April was going to slip past without new music from The Robe did you? No way! Two brand new songs are now available everywhere – “The Beat” with “Dark Circles.”
Every month so far in 2024 The Robe has unleashed two new songs; each a surprising evolution in sound and style. There is, intentionally, no back story or behind-the-scenes making of tales to share with you. Just listen and form your own stories for these songs.
I’m biased but highly recommend giving this playlist of all of this years releases a listen. Just tap on that first track and let it roll!
As luck would have it, we released this CHOOSE ROBE shirt a few months back and the pink variant works quite nicely with the artwork for “The Beat” / “Dark Circles.”
Per usual, The Nashville Scene provided a great deal of coverage for Record Store Day activities across the whole city for the 2024 festivities. In particular, they captured performances from The Groove and Vinyl Tap, extensively.
This 2024 Recap piece from them features so many incredible photos and summaries of the performances that it goes without saying it’s worth a read. They were kind enough to make special note of the Tower Defense performance at Vinyl Tap, saying:
Rock stalwarts Tower Defense, meanwhile, practically blew the windows out with tunes from across their post-punk-inspired catalog, including their newest single “Friendly Factions.” Their music continues to be a sterling example of how growing older and feeling more responsibility, both personal and civic, doesn’t mean you have to stop rocking — in fact, that’s one of the best ways to cope with the anxiety and reach out to others.
“In Nashville sometimes and Tennessee especially, it can feel hard to feel like you’re at home sometimes, so watch out for your neighbors, keep your loved ones close — those that might be targeted by, I don’t know, the state legislature,” said singer-bassist Mike Shepherd. “This is our town, and they can’t take it.”
I don’t want to overstate how great of a review this is but it does summarize many of the feelings expressed in literal Tower Defense songs. Go listen to “Schools” or “Friendly Factions” to hear the band blast out songs about being relevant and feeling upheaval at our local politics, respectively.
All that is to say, many thanks to The Scene and photographer Steve Cross for capturing such a wonderful weekend. Hopefully more YK artists get invited back next year.
YK Records is honored to present Visitor, the debut LP from Nashville based Annie Williams. The collection of songs within Visitor find a balance between the delicately introverted and the euphoric extrovert. That seeming dichotomy is the result of indelibly intimate lyrics being wrapped inside drum machines, sidewalk casio keyboards, acoustic guitars and beautifully delicate vocals.
Truthfully, Annie’s music is best explained by Nashville writer Chris Crofton; in his words…
Do you ever think about “the sacred and profane?” I do. Especially these days, I’m interested in the sacred. And I’m not talking about religion. Nothing against religion, but I’m interested in the secular sacred – kindness, flowers, coffee, music, waterfalls, being of service – that sort of thing. If you get enough kindness and coffee in one place – for me, that’s church. Annie Williams takes you to that kind of church. These songs of hers are sacred spaces. Little universes, where, through the honesty of Annie’s voice, small subjects become large. In Annie’s world, a lost dog (“Midnight”), the movie “Thelma and Louise” (“Thelma”), a highway (“Hwy 287”) and love (“Oh My Love”) are all equally-worthy inspirations.
Annie is based in Nashville, TN. You wanna know how she got here? She was playing her guitar at a party at University of Wyoming, and a touring gospel hip-hop group saw her. They invited her to come to Nashville, and be on their label. The deal fell through, but Annie stayed in Tennessee.
When you listen to this record, you might say to yourself, “Gospel hip-hop group? I don’t get it.” But I get it. At that party in Wyoming, sacred recognized sacred.
In the midst of the 24-hour news cycle, it’s easy to lose track of what’s important. Annie’s songs gently, effortlessly – and joyfully – remind us to refocus.
– Chris Crofton
Personally, I initially heard of Annie Williams when I saw her name in the credits of the first Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection album. I saw her perform at Grimey’s on “To Be Blinkered” and absolutely loved it.
The songs of Visitor can be heart wrenching. You can hear that on the first single, “Midnight,” that’s streaming everywhere today. They’re heavy songs but they’re also catchy, burrowing into your mind. They sit with you. This is good.
We pressed the album to limited edition jade green vinyl. You can pre-order it over on Bandcamp and even get it bundled with a tote! We kept the run small on this, so act fast if you’re interested.
Annie will be playing a record release show on May 29th at Soft Junk here in Nashville. You’re advised to mark your calendars now.
Today TOWER DEFENSE released their third single from the Tanglewood Compound recording sessions. These two new tracks continue a new, more prolific, era for the band.
The lead track, “Friendly Factions,” is a harmony laden, bass blasting, upbeat rocker with a catchy as hell chorus that will surely incite raising a clenched fist in solidarity as you sing along. Oh, and there’s a great new video for it too!
Tower Defense have always written about Nashville, politics and the strife that often exists between the two. For “Friendly Factions,” the lyrical inspiration is as epic as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or P. D. James’ Children of Men. I’m positive the band would not want me citing those two well revered sources as it may color your experience in listening to it but there’s parallels there, no doubt. Bassist and vocalist Mike Shepherd says of the track:
When it came time to write lyrics, all I had was the chorus hook, “Approach the city at night.” So I started thinking about why that admonition would be important, and landed on a narrative about a small group of Nashvillians retreating to Memphis following the fall of the State Capitol. I was imagining a tattered leaflet with instructions for folks to make the trip using backroads, along with information about where resources could be found.
If you’re familiar with TN State politics, a song about the fall of the State Capitol sounds more like terrifying premonition than it does sci-fi. Feeling like a stranger in your own town, seeking like-minded compatriots, plays a part in the brand new video that’s out today as well.
The b-side is “U Got the Look,” a classic face melter by Jeff the Brotherhood, originally from their Heavy Days album. You can’t go wrong with a Jeff the Brotherhood cover.
Matt Glassmeyer, aka Meadownoise, plays a great deal of live shows. Lately, he’s taken to posting many of them on his YouTube, for which we are grateful.
This rendition of “Cliff House Kids” (from his 2020 release, Threeve) is a different version than the record but as it meanders, expands and contracts across the various players of the Glassmeyer Live Band it finds a new sort of life. I’m not here to describe the magic of live music to you. You know the deal.
If you aren’t already following Glassmeyer on YouTube and Instagram, you may want to do so now so as not to miss out on these explorations.
Oh, and look closely at the crowd and you might just spot another YK Records familiar face.
TLDR: head over here, sign the form and contact your representatives for a chance at introducing a fund that pays musicians more fairly for streaming. The site will help you do both easily.
You can read the announcement about the act on Tlaib’s website here, on the UMAW’s site here or dive headfirst into the full text of the bill. The helicopter summary of the initiative is this:
The Living Wage for Musicians Act would create a new streaming royalty, with the aim to compensate artists and musicians more fairly at a penny per stream when their music plays on streaming services. Currently, musicians make tiny fractions of a penny per stream, while streaming has grown to represent 84% of recorded music industry revenue in the U.S. Spotify, the world’s largest streaming service, pays rights-holders an average per-stream royalty of $0.003, which means it takes artists more than 800,000 monthly streams to equal a full-time $15/hour job.
To achieve the above, you can dig into that full text. They propose a “living wage royalty fee” between $4 and $10 to be applied to streaming service providers such as Spotify, Apple and Google which gets paid by the consumer. Those fees are paid out to a third party service that will then distribute them directly to artists based on the streams they had in the last month. The bill provisions for a cap on the payouts per artist per month to ensure that the largest artists aren’t receiving all of the funds.
Overall, a fairly straightforward proposal that would ultimately result in increased prices for streaming services so that artists can get paid. There’s even a payment calculator on the UMAW site to show what kind of funds a specific artist may make once these monies are collected. It’s not necessarily a sustainable amount (i.e. 1,000 streams would be $10) but it’s an astronomical amount more than what is currently being paid.
There’s plenty of discourse on Reddit and other sites frowning upon this proposal but no one is suggesting any alternatives. DSP’s have been in the critical spotlight for a decade over how little they pay and nothing has changed except they have managed to pay artists less.
Devaluing music is a growing problem and paying artists fairly is a difficult and complicated topic. There’s never going to be a perfect solution but having some solution sounds fantastic.
Please consider showing your support for this proposal by adding your name to the form on the UMAW site and contacting your US Representatives – two actions that the website makes extremely easy to do.
Two bits of excellent news today. First and foremost, The Robe has released two more brand new tracks – “I Could Stay” / “The Last Dancer.” Much like the previous releases – “Destroyer” / “The Handbook” and “It’s So Easy” / “Never Tear Me Apart” – there is no background story or about this song tale to tell you. It’s not that the songs don’t have meaning, it’s that it’s up to you to apply the meaning yourself. Simply give them a listen to discover it.
Long story short, in just three months we’ve been bestowed six new songs from The Robe. What did we do to deserve these treats? Ours is not to question why, ours is just to fully enjoy.
The second dose of good news is that The Robe will be playing at The Blue Room here in Nashville on Friday, March 15th. The High Vibrations lineup put together by Leanne Merritt of Xposure is most excellent.
A press release generally contains a little snippet of background information about a song. Maybe it’s an anecdote about what inspired the lyrics, or a tale about why certain changes or instrumentation were chosen. These stories act as an enticement to the reader to click through and listen to the music being offered up – providing context for what lies on the other side. You still can’t embed music or video directly into an email (thankfully), so a press release is meant to lure you in. It can work very well!
However, providing a background story or context to any creative endeavor will, inevitably, tint the lens through which the listener receives it. What do you do when ambiguity is the intention?
Explaining lyrics, giving stories from the studio or laying out inspiration for a song can be fascinating indulgences but giving listeners the opportunity to form their own opinions can be an even better experience. Tho, a more difficult one to explain.
I won’t tell you what these two new songs from The Robe mean because I don’t know. I could tell you what inspired the album art but I won’t because you can draw your own conclusions. I won’t break down the lyrics to either song (tho I have pored over both of them) because I don’t know what inspired them.
What I can tell you is that The Robe continues to evolve their sound in a way that checks a lot of boxes for me. As someone on this mailing list, maybe that’s enough enticement to continue on this journey.
Duct Tape and Dreams is a short film about the revival of the SFMOMA’s soapbox derby. Here’s a piece of the official excerpt:
After more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was time to bring art outside the museum’s walls. On April 10, 2022, SFMOMA revived the legendary artists’ soapbox derby — first organized by the museum in 1975 — and thousands of people lined the curving hill of McLaren Park’s Shelley Drive to watch the action unfold. Selected by invitation and an open call, more than 250 artists and fabricators collaborated on art-on-wheels to compete for thirty artist-designed trophies. The cars took numerous forms, including recognizable food items, animals, everyday objects, and tributes to our local landscape. All of them capture the spirit of radical joy that this event brought to our creative community and to the people of the San Francisco Bay Area.
It’s a delightful tale that follows a number of artists as they create and race their soapbox derby vehicles. It’s honestly not even that important that it’s in San Francisco or put on the SFMOMA, it’s just a very joyous expression of creativity and fun – a much needed reprieve in 2022.
How does this relate to yk Records? Well, the majority of the score is set to Uncle Skeleton tracks that you may know and love.
How did this come to pass? Well, directors Ian Watt and RJ Kosineski found Uncle Skeleton on the licensing service Musicbed and felt it was a great fit. According to this quote, they really liked it!
“Uncle Skeleton’s incredible sonic landscape perfectly captured the quirky and passionate display of community, art, and pure joy of the Soapbox Derby. In a way, it telegraphed the still-present thriving underground scene in an otherwise tech-overthrown San Francisco—weird, yet beautiful!”
This isn’t an ad for Musicbed but we certainly appreciate when opportunities like this one come to pass that most definitely would not have otherwise. It is a great fit between music and story and hopefully you’ll give it a watch.
