News
Set-pieces & Scene Reports. 11/5/11 For my upcoming UK tour with Chris T-T, more about I’ll have this tour EP, unhealthy called “Live Free,” in a limited
UK TOUR (w/ Chris T-T) 24th Nov – Slak, Cheltenham 2nd Dec – Old Hairdressers, Glasgow Tickets 9th Dec – Bargate Castle, Southampton Tickets 17th Dec – Jack Chams, Plymouth (only Franz) 10/18/11 Thanks to everyone who helped make the Kickstarter campaign such a success. In all, almost 200 people contributed, from $3 to $1000. (The median donation, in case you’re interested, was around $25). I’ll be recording two covers and playing five private shows; making some handsome hand-screened shirts and spending a lot of time at the post office. I’m starting work on the album in early January & I’ll post some updates as we go. It should be ready to go sometime in early spring, so expect a package in the mail or email around then! 9/17/11 Please help me make a new record by donating here. You’ll get mentioned in the liner notes, copies of new chapbooks of my music writing and tour diaries; home concerts, recorded cover versions, and more! This kind of community-sourced arts funding can be controversial. Here are my responses to some frequently asked questions and comments. I feel weird about this. Why should I support a musician? Isn’t this up to the market? Let me suggest a couple ways of thinking about this. 1. ARTS FUNDING: Society in general has decided we’re OK with subsidizing the “unpopular” arts. Jazz & classical musicians and organizations; performance artists, dancers, and installationeers are already largely funded by both public and private grants and foundations. In fact, as long as you pay taxes, you are de facto already funding arts and artists, since your tax dollars go into things like the National Endowment for the Arts and state Councils for the Arts, which re-grant it to groups from Anti-Social Music to the New York Philharmonic. (Even more so if you’re in Europe). Since your money is already going to arts which you yourself never consume, why not take ownership of being an arts patron and direct some of it to artists you support? Some people get squeamish because the idea of “popular” music is that it rises or falls on the strength of its own “popularity,” and that its role is to live and die by market Darwinism. But jazz and classical music were “popular” music once, and we artificially support them because of a general agreement that it falls within society’s interest that they survive. In a world of diminished value for content, there are an awful lot of experimental musicians that make a better living – with the help of grant funding – than the indie rockers, or art rockers, or whatever the flavor is that you consider to have “artistic merit.” At what point does today’s “popular” music pass out of the market and into the world of arts and arts funding? To put it another way, I don’t think you get to love Spotify and be annoyed by Kickstarter. 2. THE PUBLIC RADIO/PODCAST MODEL: (This analogy won’t work for those living outside the U.S. Not sure what the equivalents are.) When you turn on NPR twice a year and they’re doing a weeklong pledge drive, sure, you’re annoyed. They get that. And, they’re even funded by large patrons. In the case of public television, at this point, they basically sell advertising. And yet there’s Ira Glass saying, “Listen. We’re just trying to be straight with you – we’re not quite self-sustaining, and if you get any pleasure or enlightenment out of this, we’d love your help keeping the lights on.” I’ve noticed that certain podcasts, even those with sponsors, (including WTF with Marc Maron and TBTL with Luke Burbank) have adopted this model. 3. POLITICAL CAMPAIGN FINANCE: We have a political system in the United States that requires candidates to be constantly raising tremendous amounts of money for campaign costs. Depending on your politics, we can disagree about whether this is a good or bad thing, but it exists; and given that existence, we often praise candidates who raise a greater percentage of their money in a “grass-roots” way – $20 each from “regular citizens” who may not be a part of the political establishment but feel strongly that a particular candidate’s message is worth supporting. Do they get anything material from their donation? Not necessarily; certainly not in the same way that a corporation who donates hundreds of thousands of dollars does. Can, and do, many candidates raise most of their money in bulk from the rich or corporate? Of course. But don’t we prefer when many people have a small stake in something to a situation where only a few have a huge stake? To make the analogy explicit – we have a music industry in which albums cost a certain amount of money to make. Are there labels who will front the money? Sometimes. Can you go behind the scenes and solicit private donations from wealthy people? Sure. The movie business is run this way – filmmakers of all levels spend a huge chunk of their time, and artistic capital, raising millions from the wealthy to finance the projects they can with as little compromise as possible (read Orson Welles’ life story.) But wouldn’t we, in general, prefer to spread the risk in order to spread the sense of ownership – and to make it more likely that more projects get made? Is $25 really the going rate for a signed CD? No, obviously not; and I’m not trying to claim that it is. But neither is $100 the going rate for a public radio tote bag – when we fundraise, we make an implicit agreement that the reward isn’t the same as a market-rate transaction. See “public radio fund drive” above. You tour all the time. Doesn’t touring cost money? Not if you’re doing it efficiently. Touring has some upfront costs – $800 for a plane ticket to Europe, $125 for excess baggage, $100 for excess weight (vinyl!); $70/day for a rental car, $50/day for gas – but in general those are fixed costs. If you average $200 at a show and sell $100 in merch, you’ve paid your expenses after the first week. (See next question…) My friends made their record in the basement while they worked their coffeehouse job. Why can’t you just do that? Why so defensive? …So that’s how I make my living (rent, student loan payments, food, and so on). And it works for that. But as anyone who tries to put aside money for big expenses knows, the money that you live on sometimes only gets you to the next paycheck – in my case, to the next tour. In other words, I do have a job. It pays about as well as a coffeehouse job – really – but it’s a good job, I like it, and I’ve worked hard and sacrificed to get it. (And not for nothing, but in a country with 16% of its people out of work, it’s not that easy for a guy with a hole in his resume going back to 2006 to just pick up a second gig, when they know you’re just going to leave and go on tour again.) I’m going to borrow a point I heard succintly stated by my friends at the Future Of Music Coalition. Most music fans, and most musicians, only have two models with which to think about a life in music: the Starving Artist or the Rock Star. The starving artist has moral authority and credibility, and the rock star is rich as hell and has total independence. Most Starving Artists imagine, in their heart of hearts, that they’ll eventually be Rock Stars. But most musicians who spend their life in music fall somewhere in between – the Middle-Class Musician. Somewhere in between blue-collar and white-collar; making enough to live on – let’s say $20k-$60k – and caught somewhere along the margins as far as things like health insurance, mortgages, and car payments. And it’s on the head of the Middle-Class Musician that most judgments about morals and ethics in the music world fall, about licensing songs for commercials, about which other bands to tour with, about signing with particular labels (major v. indie v. major indie) – and independent fundraising. A lot of arguments against things like commercial licensing are the ethics of the Starving Artist, which the Rock Star has the comfort and flexibility to ignore or indulge them. So let me re-personalize this argument. I think some music fans, who embrace the new realities of the music business when it comes to things like Spotify ($0.00029 artist royalty per play) and iTunes ($0.30 artist royalty per track), simultaneously continue to cling to the old reality of a music business where a record is paid for by a label then released – a passive, one-way, producer/consumer path. And they don’t like to see, as they say, how the sausages are made. For someone like me – I’m not a big deal, but I have a couple thousand people who are interested in hearing my music. I’ve had my face on some blogs and magazines, but I’m not famous. I can find labels that are willing to put up $3k to print 2,000 copies of my record. But for most labels, asking them to invest another $10,000 in making that record – 333% more – is a step well too far. And this goes for many artists you like. So, if you stick by the old model, the record will never get made – the risk is just too much for two entities to support. But if you can spread the risk from two entities to several hundred, then it’s a risk that everyone can afford and support, and the record gets made. And in general, more records made is a net benefit to the music community. One of the things I’ve always liked about punk rock world is the idea that it’s a community, that the people who make the music are no different functionally than the people who consume it, that it’s a conversation, not a monologue. And part of being a community is having a stake in it, feeling a sense of responsibility toward keeping that community moving forward. If you don’t like my music, by all means don’t feel an obligation to contribute. But there is some other musician out there whose music you love, and could use your help. And if we can agree to support the idea of community-sourcing funding for projects from this, to Kevin Seconds’ tour van, to who knows what coming down the line, we’ll all have more music from the people whose work we love. Can’t you just make the record more cheaply? Obviously, whether this works or not, I’ll do my damnedest to get the record made by hook or crook, as I always have. But let me just point out, it’s not just the person making the record who is affected by budget constraints: there is a ripple effect. To do a record on the cheap, I have to ask the other musicians to play for little or nothing, call in favors with engineers, and so on. Frankly this is often how records get made, and why talented musicians drop out of music-making every day when they realize how rarely they are paid a wage commensurate with their ability. Every dollar you put into this is passed on to the music-making community at large; and supports all kinds of musicians, artists, and engineers whose name isn’t on the front cover. 9/1/11 I’m excited to be included on Xtra Mile Recordings’ new comp “Xtra Mile High Club Vol. 3 – Yanks vs. Limeys”! Pre-order from Xtra Mile & iTunes; or stream for FREE. Features friends old and new incl. Frank Turner, Dave Hause, The Xcerts, Chris T-T, Jim Ward, Andrew Jackson Jihad, Jon Snodgrass, Joey Cape & many more… New tour dates are incoming! September with Dave Hause to Chicago and back; German/Austrian/Swiss/Dutch dates in October, and back to the UK in November and December with the great Chris T-T. Check them all out here. I also wrote a few guest columns. First, at Scratchbomb, a story about the Kings of Leon locking The Hold Steady in our dressing room. Then, at Scene Point Blank, a new song about a gang of conceptual terrorists. 5/10/11 Did you know I write a quarterly column for the literary rag InDigest? My new column is up; it’s a rant – well, an op-ed of sorts – about the “troubadour” and “patronage” models of making a living for musicians, and why the fact that people don’t really buy that many CDs is more a crisis for people on the periphery of the music “industry” than the people that make it. 3/31/11 On April 16, I’ll be a guest on Radio Happy Hour, a “live-mystery-meets-late-night-talk-show, that engages guest stars in wildly right-angled conversations that careen between interviews, performances, and an audience quiz show. At the center of the show is an old-time radio murder mystery/comedy, where the guest star is written into the storyline as him or herself. Past shows have seen Norah Jones as a motel manager; Michael Showalter as the host of his very own cable fitness show; Andrew W.K. as the iconic John Bender character from The Breakfast Club; Tunde Adebimpe as the founder of a wilderness camp for ineffectual men; Kumail Nanjiani as a ventriloquist with a southern dummy; Craig Finn & Tad Kubler as brothers and Chuck Klosterman as their dad on a doomed road trip to a small town called Manhattan, Minnesota. The show regularly stars host/creator Sam Osterhout, actors Robin Reed and Matt Skibiak, as well as music by Rich Bologna.” It’s at Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker St., NYC at 1pm. 3/14/11
Coming April 29: Anti-Social Music’s debut record, “Sings The Great American Songbook,” was received as everything from “punk’s next breath” (Real Detroit Weekly) to “nearly unlistenable” (Pitchfork). Never ones to take a hint, the incorrigible new-music collective celebrates its tenth anniversary year with “Anti-Social Music Is The Future Of Everything,” a state-of-the-union grab bag that restates ASM’s whiskey-soaked and combat-booted commitment to new chamber music as the last bastion of socially unacceptable sounds. Produced in part by group founder Franz Nicolay, the album finds room for processed water droplets, triangle-driven bastard ragtime, a rec-room mass, the aptly-named “grunt work for the avant-garde,” and a nihilistic setting of Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide note. With artwork by Vice Magazine’s Nicholas Gazin, Anti-Social Music reminds you that things are bad, they’re likely to get worse, and that string quartet on the deck of the Titanic probably wasn’t all that in-tune either. My Old Kentucky Blog debuts the first mp3 from the album, Kamala Sankaram’s “Fear” from “Bitter Suite,” here. Check out Anti-Social Music at facebook.com/antisocialmusic and antisocialmusic.org. 2/24/11 Excited to announce that I’ll be supporting Frank Turner in May on his first solo acoustic UK tour in some time. Tickets are on sale Monday 9am and will sell out quickly! Frank is claiming it’ll be “like the Three Amigos on Charlie Sheen’s drugs,” so, you know, I’ll do my best. FRANK TURNER (solo)/FRANZ NICOLAY/BEN MARWOOD UK TOUR May 9 – Arc, Stockton May 14 – Library, Lancaster May 23 – Guildhall, Gloucester Also, I co-produced thie “Follow Me” EP for The Debutante Hour in January; MTV’s Iggy blog raves about it here. NYers should check out their video & release show March 5 at Bowery Electric, there’s a great lineup: http://on.fb.me/gbBnvB. 2/23/11 I have a track on the “Live Fast Get Folked” compilation from the DIY collective Start Something NJ, available for download at startsomething.tumblr.com. It’s called “It Is Never A Mistake To Say Goodbye” and was a Bushwick Book Club song based on Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle.” This recording is from the “Luck & Courage” demo sessions. 2/20/11 I’ll be on tour, but Opera On Tap is including my “Note On A Subway Wall” in their New Brew program February 26. It’s curated by Anti-Social Music’s Kamala Sankaram and also includes music by Daniel Felsenfeld, Stefan Weisman, Taylor Ho Bynum, Eve Beglarian, Lisa Bielawa, Andrea La Rose, Nick Brooke, Kirke Mechem, Steven Sondheim, David Mallamud, and Foreigner. It’s at Barbes (9th st. and 6th Ave, Brooklyn) 7 pm – free! Also, I’ve started writing a quarterly musi column for the online literary mag InDigest. The first installment, on fear and performing, is up here. 1/26/11 Starting next month in Brooklyn, I’ll be out on an exhaustive seven-week US tour co-headlining with the great songwriter David Dondero, including SXSW dates. You know he’s great because NPR’s All Songs Considered named him one of their “Ten Greatest Living Songwriters”, alongside Bob Dylan and Tom Waits; and Conor Oberst calls him his biggest influence. Plus he was This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb’s drummer for a couple years. Anyway, interesting guy. We start in Brooklyn with Poor But Sexy (who you may have seen opening the Dismemberment Plan reunion dates), and are doing a few shows with O’Death in southern CA along the way. AND! Hamell On Trial (Righteous Babe) was just added to the Harrisburg show, which I’m excited about – I used to go see him every time he played NYC when I was in college. FRANZ NICOLAY/DAVID DONDERO SPRING TOUR Feb 25 – Union Pool, Brooklyn NY (w/ Poor But Sexy) Feb 28 – The Southern, Charlottesville VA Mar 9 – Sluggo’s, Pensacola FL Mar 18 – SXSW: Steven F’s Bar (1am ie early Sat am), Austin TX Mar 30 – Sam Bond’s, Eugene OR Apr 7 – Slowdown, Omaha NE 12/31/10 So, the last couple years I’ve put together an audio yearbook – 50 or so songs that were the soundtrack to my year. So here’s year four (in two parts, ’cause better-quality mp3s), everything from Perry Como to GG Allin. It’s in no particular order, so put it on shuffle. Hope you like, and happy new year! 12/18/10
This should be a cool thing. I’m doing a UK tour with old buddies Dave Hause (The Loved Ones/Fat Wreck Chords) and Jack Terricloth & Sandra Malak (World/Inferno Friendship Society). Four punk rockers in a small rental car, driving on the wrong side of the road in cold and rainy January, what could possibly go wrong? Be sure to get there early if you’re coming to these shows – we’ll be rotating the running order every night, playing some songs together, making it up as we go along, so you don’t want to miss it. Jan 7 – The Gaff, London Jan 13 – Tiger Lounge, Manchester 12/16/10 Our bassist Brad Kemp made a four-part video tour blog on the recent Franz Nicolay & Major General tour with Stornoway, featuring live performances, footage from inside out Daytrotter session, bloody deer carcasses, Muppets and Leatherface covers, and a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel. You can see all four at www.youtube.com/franznicolay. 11/18/10
“Anti-Social Music vs. Franz Nicolay: Unlucky & Discouraged” is a remix and re-imagining of tracks from Franz Nicolay’s recent “Luck & Courage” LP by members of the long-running NYC composer-performer collective Anti-Social Music, which celebrates its tenth anniversary early next year. It includes a track from Dischord Records’ Beauty Pill (featuring Anti-Social Music’s Jean Cook) which is their first release in three years; as well as works from composers Team Science Records (US) and Decor Records (UK). Also check out new tour dates with Two Cow Garage and Stornoway. 9/26/10
Several intriguing pre-order packages are circulating for “Luck & Courage.” Interpunk has a free patch-and-pin set with your order; Team Science has T-shirts and gorgeous silkscreened posters autographed by me and my sister Sophie who designed the record. UK/EUers can get the disc with a bonus track at Decor Records, and the vinyl will be out in October (also with bonus track) on Sabot Productions. 9/23/10
It was a chilly week in March. “Fight Dirty” had finally come out. Guignol hit the road to play a punk house, a college, and a dive bar outside of Boston. We saw Chuck Schumer in a strip-mall bookstore. And we stopped off at U-Mass Lowell’s venerable radio station WUML to play a live set on-air. And guess what? We played pretty good! So for you, we offer “Guignol: Live on WUML” for exclusively digital download at guignol.bandcamp.com (where the rest of our catalog is also streaming). 8 tracks, 30 minutes, all with a nice spit-and-polish from Danny Shatzky at good ol’ Vibromonk Studios. (More about Guignol at guignolband.com). 9/22/10 I recorded a version of “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) [feat. Sxip Shirey]” for the awkwardly-titled Subterranean Homesick Blues: A Tribute to Bob Dylan’s “Bringing It All Back Home”, which will be out digitally October 5. Other artists on the comp include the Morning Benders, Peter Moren (of Peter Bjorn and John), Castanets, Asobi Seksu, Mirah, J. Tillman (Fleet Foxes), and Laura Viers. Pitchfork has all the info, as does the label Reimagine Music. I also recently produced and did a string arrangement for an Emily Hope Price song called “Manek & Ilona” on the new Pearl and the Beard EP. Well, they’ve got it online and you can check it out at blackvesselep.com. 8/11/10 Paste Magazine has more about my new album, “Luck & Courage,” including the cover and tracklisting:
1. Felix & Adelita 6. Job 35:10 “It’s who you leave behind, it’s not who you save/That you’ll be judged by.” In Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut coined the term “a nation of two” to describe that stage of love in which a couple seems to be creating their own self-contained world, with its own language and culture. In Franz Nicolay’s haunted and redemptive new album Luck & Courage (out October 12, on CD/Digital from Team Science Records and vinyl from Sabot Productions in the US; and Decor Records in the UK/EU), he expands the idea and writes the history of the rise and fall of one such country, one inhabited by the titular characters Felix & Adelita – in Latin and Spanish, luck & courage. “They’re untethered,” Nicolay says of the protagonists. “She’s a sometime bartender, he’s been in the service, he’s a little violent and she’s a little distant; they don’t really live in any one place – and they’ve accustomed themselves, at some point, to the idea that ultimately their lives are going to be their own responsibility, so that when they find themselves together, almost against their will, their nation of two is doomed before it even begins. They’re so used to leaving things behind, they don’t remember how to stay – a battle between the pull of domesticity and the habit of packing up and moving on. And so their story, and the story of their nation of two, becomes the story of a plague-ridden, Cormac McCarthyian country as its society collapses.” “It is not raining, my shoe is not untied/I have not been unhappy my whole life.” Nicolay’s band on Luck & Courage is Brian Viglione (The Dresden Dolls) on drums, Yula Be’eri (World/Inferno Friendship Society) on bass and Maria Sonevytsky (The Debutante Hour) on piano. Other guests on the record include Mark Spencer (Son Volt) on pedal steel, trumpeter Ben Holmes, guitarist Jared Scott (Demander), Ken Thomson (Gutbucket) on saxophones; and featuring cellist Emily Hope Price (Pearl and the Beard), who co-writes and duets with Nicolay on “Z for Zachariah,” a love song from a plague to its victims. Luck & Courage was made Brooklyn in two weeks in spring 2010, with producer Jim Keller (Willie Nelson, Franz Ferdinand). “When you leave again, leave something of you with them.” OLDER NEWS, TOUR DIARIES, AND MORE… |
For Franz Nicolay physical merch, go to the WEBSTORE. -For digital downloads of Franz Nicolay music, go to franznicolay.bandcamp.com.
|
