Olympia | Heartbreaking Bravery

March 9, 2017

2016: A Year’s Worth of Memories (Erica Sutherland)

Heartbreaking Bravery recently went offline but all facets of the site are back to being fully operational. Apologies for any inconveniences. All posts that were slated to run during that brief hiatus will appear with this note.

Littlefoot has earned consistent mentions on this site ever since their set at DBTS acted as an overdue introduction. Over that time, I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know Erica Sutherland a little better, whose constantly involved in any number of fascinating projects. Sutherland graciously agreed to be a part of this edition of A Year’s Worth of Memories and offered up a beautiful photojournal chronicling a fateful 2016 trip that had a finale that was a little terrifying before it became necessarily heartening. Take in the sights (and accompanying memories) below.

At the beginning of 2016, I flew to California to escape the harsh Boston winter and go on my first solo tour. After a stressful fall and an even more stressful week, I was ready to get away for a while. It was my first time seeing most of the west coast, and I was about to be traveling with two of the most easygoing people I’ve ever met. Scott, my photographer friend from Providence, works long hours at a pizza shop so he can save up money to travel.

I’m always impressed by Scott, because along with being a dreamer, he gets things done. He doesn’t just talk about things like going on a trip to Spain with a bunch of his friends to take photos, he actually does it. Miles, whose project, California Redemption Value, I was touring with, never seems bothered or stressed out by anything. He just kind of floats. He has a mysterious accent that has a little bit of a southern twang to it, even though he grew up in California.

When I started writing this, it became a detailed account of everything we saw, everyone we met, and all the bands we played with. For the sake of anyone with a short attention span (myself included), I’m just going to write my favorite moments as a list.

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THE DRIVE

Everything along route 1 // listening to Mississippi Mixtapes // stopping in Eureka, CA and finding an abandoned train car // running around on a foggy beach at sunset, somewhere in Northern California // driving through all of the wide open spaces, the kind you don’t see back east // reading Stevie Nicks’ biography // many many trips to In-N-Out Burger

LOS ANGELES

Staying with Kaede, Jason & Lucy (three of my favorite humans) & their dog Monkey (one of my favorite non-humans) by the beach in Corona del Mar // meeting up with our pals Ian Sweet to play a show at a bowling alley // watching Nicey Music’s pop princess Banny Grove cut a rug on stage while wearing an amazing wig // window shopping on Rodeo Drive pretending I’m Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman // playing a show at Gnarburger with Shannon from Feels // being in the audience on the Conan O’Brien show

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PORTLAND

Mississippi Records // playing with Haste and Brumes (she plays an electric harp!!!) // getting a big hug from my long lost pal Chip King // hanging out with Ty Segall & the Muggers (Miles’ friend Garth who we were staying with was opening for them) // Powell’s Bookstore

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OLYMPIA

Skrill Meadow’s karaoke-style set // lots and lots of coffee // meeting Phoebe from Tiny Thunder Jewelry // our new friend Opio (same birthday as me!! same year!!) // meeting all of Miles’ old friends

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SEATTLE

Playing with CAMP and Night Cadet // staying with Jenn Champion and her cute dogs // picking the nose of the Fremont Troll // octopuses on ice at Pike’s Market // riding the ferris wheel with Scott // taking a day off to explore Snoqualmie, the filming location of Twin Peaks >> the waterfall at the Great Northern, coffee and cherry pie at the diner, Ronette’s bridge

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OAKLAND

Playing with Peacers and the Moonsaults! // exploring BIG SUR, the most magical place on earth, before the show

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SAN DIEGO

Playing with Fake Tides & Big Bloom (& Miles at all of these shows – I never get tired of listening to CRV) // and what followed:

My memory of what happened after our last show in San Diego is a little fuzzy. I woke up back in LA with a fierce hangover and a Facebook message from a stranger that said “Did you lose something?” It was only then that I realized at some point during the night I’d lost my backpack, which contained my wallet, passport, medicines etc… basically my entire life. The woman who’d messaged me said her mother had found the backpack and asked her daughter to find me on Facebook to tell me, since she didn’t speak much English herself.

Miles and I drove back to San Diego, arriving at a tiny house where we were met by two elderly Mexican women and my backpack. I thanked them profusely in English while they spoke to me in Spanish, their hands gesturing in a manner that I assumed meant they were talking about how they found my backpack. The fact that a complete stranger cared enough to go out of their way to help me get my things back gave me that warm-fuzzy-“oh good, I still have faith in humanity” kind of feeling. I texted her daughter afterwards to thank her for getting in touch with me, and she responded, “We’re all put on this Earth to help each other.”

A year later, with the Trump administration rearing its ugly head, her words are more important than ever.

All photographs by Scott LaChapelle.

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February 15, 2016

2015: A Year’s Worth of Memories (Sam Clark)

sam clark

No contributor has collaborated with me on as many projects, both in terms of writing about music and writing music, than Sam Clark. We’ve played together in at least three bands and we’ve written together for at least three different publications. We continue to make music and we continue to write about music on our own terms but jump at collaborating any time we’re presented with the chance. For the past few years, he’s been running the outstanding dimestore saints and last year he released two EP’s of deeply compelling ambient music under the Ancient Mariners moniker. I’m very fortunate to be able to call him a close friend and to have found someone in such an isolated town that shared in some incredibly niche interests. I’m also very lucky to have him back as a returning contributor to the A Year’s Worth of Memories series. Here, he turns his attention to the difficulties of living in an area that severely restricts access to good shows, finding solace in Washington through visiting Wisconsin artists, and learning that isolation isn’t always because of physical surroundings. Read the piece below, keep both eyes on dimestore saints, and remember that you can always build new homes.

2015 is already a flickering memory, and I’m fine with that. This past year was one of my darkest and most disorienting on record – save for perhaps 1992, which was half-spent in utero. I was out of school for the first time in seventeen years with little to show for all of my academic work, and spent most of it in the midst of a year-long lease on an apartment in the northwestern-most tip of the Pacific Northwest, two thousand miles away from all of my close friends and family; I was listless and sometimes lonely, and things generally felt stagnant.

A burgeoning homesickness for western Wisconsin was partially alleviated by an intimate S. Carey living room show in late February. I feel somewhat like a fraud in admitting this, but I go to relatively few live shows a year in comparison to some of my fellow writers. Part of this shortcoming is probably derived from social anxiety, sure, but another key factor has always been proximity; local music scene aside, the nearest concert venue was often an hour or more away from where I lived, and travel time frequently became an issue.

Bellingham is a bit different – it occupies a sweet spot on I-5 almost halfway between Vancouver and Seattle that’s often attractive to bands in the middle of West Coast stretches – so I jumped at the chance to see a homegrown artist whose national tour happened to bring him within a half-mile of my apartment.

The ensuing performance was beautiful; fifty people crammed into a pristine turn-of-the-century home with vaulted ceilings to hear sprawling ambient soundscapes culled from little more than a Fender Rhodes, pedal steel, and heavily-textured electric guitar. That brief respite was then extended into the following month, thanks to a stellar Field Report solo set at a bar around the corner from my apartment; together, these events served as a reminder that salient musical traits of home were, miraculously, much closer than I believed.

Coincidental Wisconsin-related things continued throughout the spring, from a co-worker whose improv trio had performed with one from Eau Claire that I know well, to a random stranger stopping me on a footpath for a conversation because he too had graduated from the alma mater embroidered on my sweatshirt nearly forty years prior, to Sylvan Esso stopping in at the bagel shop I managed the morning after their Vancouver show. A strange conglomerate of events, to be sure, but they were absolutely intrinsic to my growing level of comfort in an unfamiliar place.

I’m back home in central Wisconsin now, and will be for awhile, but it was reassuring to watch all of those connections fall into place so organically, and to learn that I’m never quite as isolated as I feel.

-Sam Clark

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May 16, 2014

Naomi Punk – Television Man (Stream)

There are a few labels that get a lot of love around these parts- Burger, Exploding in Sound, Don Giovanni, and Old Flame Records all have a pretty strong foothold by continuing to operate with the kinds of bands who make music that caters to exactly what this site was built to celebrate. Captured Tracks can officially be added to that list. The label’s the home of the band that’s earned the most features here as well as a tantalizing spread of others (Mac DeMarco, Craft Spells, Medicine, etc.) and has been on an impressive run lately. Enter: Naomi Punk. A band built on weirdly frenetic post-punk tension and the kind of instrumental interplay that would make Spoon proud, they’re bound to be one of the year’s bigger discoveries. Yesterday they revealed a lot of details about their home-recorded sophomore effort, Television Man, and offered up the title track for streaming. “Television Man” is a jaunty run through a maze of stop-start rhythms and twisted riffs that somehow manage to subtly recall various miniature aspects of the 90’s underground punk scenes while sounding distinctly modern. It’s one hell of an introduction to the record (which is due out August 5th) and will likely have a lot of people salivating while begging for more.

Listen to “Television Man” below and give in to its relentlessness.