Parquet Courts‘ A. Savage made his second solo album in Bristol with producer John Parish (who worked on PC’s Sympathy for Life) with players that included Cate Le Bon and Jack Cooper (Modern Nature, Ultimate Painting). While you can tell this is the same person who gave us “Borrowed Time” and “Total Football,” this is a gentler, more introspective Savage and it’s a terrific record. You can read our review in Indie Basement and listen to the album below.
For more on the record, we asked Savage for a list of influences behind Several Songs About Fire, which include Television Personalities, junkshop glam, his Parquet Courts bandmate Austin Brown, Morrissey on The Tonight Show in 1991, and more. You can read his commentary the the list below.
A. SAVAGE – 10 INFLUENCES BEHIND ‘SEVERAL SONGS ABOUT FIRE’
Sailor “A Glass of Champagne”
If I ever get invited to play on another TV program, I’m going to reference this performance somehow. Frankly, I wish I’d seen it earlier.
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Morrissey – “Sing Your Life” on The Tonight Show, 1991
Speaking of television performances, did you know that Morrisey played on Carson? Hey look I’m angry with Morrissey too, but let’s assume that in 1991 he hadn’t yet aligned himself with an extreme far-right British party (as he did on a much later, much less compelling TV performance). With that disclaimer out of the way, I think it’s captivating how Moz, through the idiom of American rockabilly music, can compress the diamond of queerness from the coal of machismo.
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Zena Foster “Make It Me”
I doubt Zena Foster ever got the chance to play on television, which is a shame. This track I found on the B-side of my copy of “Since I Found My Baby” by The Metros (another soul classic). Such a beautiful soul number sung by an amazing vocalist with some real class backup singers! This is all I know of this mysterious singer, and any further info would be welcomed.
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Television Personalities “A Life of Her Own”
One of the darker TVP cuts, the bass lead in the chorus lives rent free in my head. To be played deep in the hours of a lonely night.
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Shakane “Love Machine”
I don’t usually associate glam/bubblegum with profound lyrics, but I think we can all relate to the following:
I am just your love machine baby
You don’t know how hard its been
You turn me on when you want me
When you don’t, I’m not your scene
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Kamikaze Palm Tree
Dare I say the best band from Los Angeles? Dylan Hadley plays in my band, and you can watch her sing and play drums with me live on tour this fall. But also please support her band and if you have a chance, see them live. This is high art of the musical, visual and performance variety.
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Philip Guston at the Tate Modern
I haven’t been yet but it just opened and as I am in London at the moment I will be going. Philip Guston is one of my favorite painters, and I celebrate his earliest work up to his last painting. Guston made paintings that referenced the graphic aspects of cartoons and advertising, but not in a pop-art way. His works were never shy about being paintings, and his labor and syntax were evident in every brushstroke. His later work uses a visual vernacular that’s as codified and mysterious as the one Chagall developed a generation earlier (both artists were mastered at a poetic articulation of Jewishness, in much different contexts). Like I said, haven’t been to the show yet, but I’ve been looking forward to it for years (as it’s been postponed) and will be in attendance tomorrow.
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Maximum Security
Did you know that Austin Brown of Parquet Courts is not only an extremely talented songwriter/guitarist/keys player, but he’s been making some of the most interesting remixes under his Maximum Security moniker? Check out his recent work with Shame and Baxter Dury as evidence of his talent for alchemizing indie rock into mysterious, seductive, dance floor classics. My man’s is DJing all around so keep an eye out.
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Chloé Girten
It’s my opinion that this ceramic artist from Brussels is a bit of a genius. Her work stretches a wide emotional and aesthetic range that is whimsical and playful, but also a frequently melancholic, often bizarre and always beautiful. I’m currently living the transient lifestyle of a touring musician, but the next time I pay rent somewhere, I would like one of her pieces to be displayed prominently in my home.
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Nothing But a Man
I recently saw a screening of this Michael Roemer film at Christine Cinema in Paris, and I had to pick up my jaw off the floor as I left. This film is a thing of beauty. Shot in the segregated south, during segregation and about segregation, Roemer’s message is radical, for its time and now. The film is a gorgeous study on American blackness, and the diversity of attitudes within southern black communities in relation to segregation, labor and American identity. The entire cast is incredible (which features Yaphet Koto’s first credited film) but the stars of the show are the two leads, played by Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln, who play a young couple from very different walks of life. It’s a mystery to me why this film doesn’t occupy the same place of cultural esteem as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Do The Right Thing or Moonlight. Please watch as soon as possible.
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Yusuke Okada
I know nothing about this painter aside from a show of their’s I saw at TV Eye in Queens. But the way they glean so much humor from the bleakness of Trump-era American life is, and this should come to no surprise, very much my thing. This artist uses the iconography of late capitalism the way Hieronymus Bosch used demons, building a bizarre hellscape the articulates the current American psyche in a way few others can. Respect.
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A. Savage starts his North American tour on October 20 in Portland, ME and plays NYC’s Bowery Ballroom on November 11 with Sluice. All date are below:
^ w/ Annie Hart
* w/ Cha Cha
# w/ Diet Lite
% w/ Sluice
