Sound Stories & Interviews

Mare’s got peeps in Bend. We'd like to spend a little time here discussing singer/songwriter Mare Wakefield and why you insist on mispronouncing her name. While on paper, it looks like Wakefield's first name should rhyme with "hair" or "bear," but in fact when said aloud, her name is the world that belongs in the following blanks: Peter, Paul and _________ or the Virgin _________, or perhaps ________ Kate and Ashley Olsen.
Some
 
Central Oregonians, might however, not have been caught off guard by the intentionally quirky and seemingly erroneous spelling of the Nashville-based artist's name. Those who've been here for a few decades (don't all raise your hands at once) might remember Wakefield as part of the band Sister Southpaw, a Bend-based troupe from the early 1990s. Or perhaps more recently, you might remember her set at the Silver Moon Brewing Co. last fall, a venue she's returning to on Wednesday during a grueling cross-country tour.

Talkin’ bout freedom!When Richie Havens called my cell phone earlier this month, I was expecting to hear a great, booming voice reminiscent of the musician's singing style, one that grabs the listener's inner ear and demands attention. Instead, I found myself straining to hear a soft-spoken man. At one point I had to turn up the volume on my phone, causing me to miss the beginning of his answer to the question: How do you go about writing songs?
 
" … a different way every time, whether I'm riding the bus or walking - wherever I am," Havens said. "First, the song's title pops into my brain, and the title suggests whether it's a song or a title for a whole album. So they come and I write them down. I take the title … and before long the first thing happens: I hear a melody and start to figure out how that's happening. Then, I play a couple of chords and the first line comes. From that moment on I hear the song being sung, as if by someone else."

Bring on the night. Nightlife in Bend is peppered throughout the downtown area (and a few, but not many non-downtown locales) but for whatever reason, it's on the fringe of downtown that live music is taking hold. On Saturday, April 26, in only a matter of a block, or maybe a block and quarter, there were four venues, with four different musical acts all playing simultaneously. All four joints were pouring beers, and all four were pretty much packed.
 
As is standard on a Saturday night, the Domino Room was bumping. It wasn't a national touring act rocking the stage but rather Bend's own hip-hop super group, Person People. While the rumors we reported of Talib Kweli and KRS-One appearing on PP's new album turned out to be unfounded, it seems that the seven hip-hoppers and their live band don't need the assistance of rap legends to find greatness.

Mo’ Betta Blues. There are few artists who just keep coming back to Central Oregon, eventually emerging as local favorites, even if the musician already has all the national and international fame and respect of which he or she could dream. While it's understandable that big-name acts with big reputations and discographies would pull the 40-foot tour bus off of I-5 long enough to pack 5,000 sun burned, grass-stained fans into the Les Schwab Amphitheater, well-recognized names are also returning to Bend to pack the Tower, or even the Sisters High School auditorium, as in the case of blues man Keb' Mo'.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Dig Lazarus Dig!!!
Mute Records
If I'm stumbling out of 7B (a quintessential drinking hole) and making my way down Avenue B, it's a record like Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! that flows through my head. The latest from Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds seems to bring me to that place - New York City. It opens with a drunken melody reminiscent of David Johansen circa 1973, closes with the Lou Reed inspired "More News From Nowhere," and in between travels across several sounds that are so Manhattan you can almost smell the street.

Not even mega fame can keep the jeans intact.The West Coast leg of KT Tunstall's current tour takes her to historic music halls like the cavernous confines of Los Angeles' Wiltern Theater, the fabled stage of San Francisco's Warfield, and the supposedly haunted Moore Theare in Seattle. Oh yeah, and she's also coming to Bend to play the less than 500 seats of the Tower Theatre.
 
Tunstall, of MTV and VH1 fame, is one of the most commercially popular acts to grace the theatre's stage in recent memory. The Scottish folk-rocker rocketed to fame in the last three years with mega hits like the thumping power folk standard "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree," as well as the girl-power fueled sing-a-long "Suddenly I See." Last fall, she released Drastic Fantastic, a record that proves Tunstall isn't the flash-in-the-pan popper that some may have written her off as.

Minus the bear brings their invisible trampoline sideshow to Bend.In the four or so years that I've been listening to Minus the Bear, I've always envisioned them as wearing white lab coats, all the time. On stage, in the studio, eating a grilled cheese sandwich - always in the white lab coats.
 
The Seattle band is often considered one of the premiere "experimental" rock bands in the U.S., which is the tag that first caught my attention, and also instilled the lab coat image into my brain. Minus the Bear bassist Cory Murchy doesn't wear a lab coat, or goggles, and, like the other four members of his band, shouldn't be cast as an Emmett Brown-like madman, tweaking massive amplifiers in a cluttered basement laboratory.
"Ultimately, we're just a rock band and making music that we're going to be excited about playing in the next couple of years." Murchy says before a show in Tucson as the band's tour heads west for an appearance at Indio, California's Coachella festival.