It’s a simple yet sublime pleasure, and just thinking about it can make you feel a little calmer, a little more content. Imagine: You bring out one of the good rocks glasses (or your favorite mug or a special occasion tea cup) and pour a couple fingers of amber liquid (or something dark and strong or just some whole milk). You drop the needle on the jazz platter (or pull up a blues album on your mp3 player or dig out that mixtape from college). Ensconcing yourself in the coziest seat in the house, you crack the spine on a classic (or find your place in that sci-fi paperback or pull up a biography on your e-book reader). And then, you go away for a while. Ah, bliss.
In this series, some of NTSIB’s friends share beloved albums, books and drinks to recommend or inspire.
Some of you may have seen Miss Shevaughn and Yuma Wray at Couch by Couch West, where they came to us live (if somewhat delayed) from their wedding reception. They did five songs, including three – Drifter’s Compass, Coyote and Bleed Me – from their most recent record, Lean Into The Wind.
They are all great tunes, but I’m especially fond of Drifter’s Compass, because I think it’s the kind of song you’d put on at either the beginning or the end of a long trip, as encouragement, or as solace:
And also of Bleed Me; it’s a raucous stomper, and the one that hooked me on the record as a whole:
I do not use the phrase “the record as a whole” casually; I really do mean the whole thing. It’s solid, no dead weight or filler, and good company, especially, as I discovered, on the downtown bus on frigid evenings.
Here’s one more song that I really liked; it’s called Oh Tornado, and it made me smile in wry, pained recognition. Yeah, we all have that person, the one who tears everything apart, and yet – and yet – when it works, it works so well:
If you’d like to catch them live, they are out on tour starting Sunday, April 6, in Fairfax, VA – New York, your show is April 11 at Grand Victory in Brooklyn – and ending June 4 in Washington, DC, but covering huge chunks of the United States between those bookends.
With that I will turn the floor over to Miss Shevaughn and Yuma Wray, who have graciously assented to share their favorite books, records and drinks with us.
Miss Shevaughn:
A Good Drink
Since writing, road testing, recording and releasing our latest album, Lean Into the Wind, process has been on my mind a lot. Yuma and I recently moved into a house in Paso Robles, CA that is the first place we’ve gotten to live by ourselves in the three years we’ve been touring.
Painting and fixing up the house took almost a month, and having my own kitchen has prompted me to embark on ambitious culinary adventures like cultured non-dairy cheeses that take days, or even weeks. I’ve been deeply enjoying things that take commitment, patience, craft and the willingness to slow down. One of these long-term experiments was a strawberry shrub that I made to serve at our wedding on March 1st tour.
A shrub is a vinegar-based drink that was popular in Colonial times and has recently enjoyed resurgence. It takes 2 weeks to make the shrub, but it is totally worth it! It also looks beautiful on the counter while you’re waiting for it to mellow. Here’s how you make it:
In a quart jar, muddle a few sprigs of thyme, basil or mint along with sliced ginger from a peeled piece about as long as your thumb (peeling ginger with a spoon is the easiest method)
Fill the jar with fresh sliced strawberries almost to the top
Completely cover the berries with coconut vinegar or apple cider vinegar. Make sure they are covered so that mold won’t grow on top.
Cover the jar securely with cheesecloth and leave it out on the counter for 12 hours
Put the lid on the quart jar and shake the mixture once every day for 4 days
Take out the herbs but return everything else to the jar shake daily for 3 more days
Strain out the solids and add 1 cup of sugar and juice from 5 limes to the liquid
Store in the refrigerator shaking once daily for 6 days
Now it’s ready to drink!
Sublime Smokey Strawberry Shrub
1 shot of silver tequila over ice
4 Tablespoons of shrub (modify this to taste)
splash of mescal
garnish with lime
Worth the wait.
A Good Read:
Speaking of waiting, all this thinking about the rewards of time and anticipation makes me think of one of my favorite books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I was originally drawn to this author through One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I’ve grown to truly love the slow unraveling of Love in the Time of Cholera. This novel’s entire existence covers the distance that usually makes up only the climax or ending of any other story: the point where two people fall in love.
The story takes place over an expanse of time between the late 1800s and the 1930’s in a Colombian city that is dirty, ancient, haunted and colonial in a way that reminds me of New Orleans, where I spent a lot of my childhood. On some level the plot is simple. A man loves a woman. Her father doesn’t like him. She marries another man and is happy for the most part. He dies when he is old in a silly accident involving a parrot, and her childhood sweetheart once again professes his love.
He doesn’t win her over for 51 years, 9 months and 4 days, but finally persuades her to take a riverboat cruise with him. They end up drifting on the riverboat forever with the yellow flag of illness (cholera) raised so that no one will let them dock, and with only the captain and his lover as companions.
It seems simple and romantic but under the sweeping ideals of true love are human failings and frailty. There is also the strangeness of a love that has waited until old age to see itself through. Death, aging and illness are ever present behind the flowers and love serenades. Yuma and I first had a fling when I was in college and we just got married some 13 years later after I was diagnosed with cervical cancer and we sat on a long train ride down the coast wondering what would happen. In some ways we could have been suspended on that train forever.
Love in the Time of Cholera doesn’t stop where the young lovers take their lives or live happily ever after, it continues into death and beyond and forever.
A Good Listen
For my album, I chose Blue by Joni Mitchell. This record has all of the pace and surprise both musically and lyrically of something completely spontaneous, but is also clearly a work that was born out of real living and the processing of events, emotions and experiences. I know that I was exposed to this album at some earlier point. I grew up performing traditional folk music, and that folk music that enjoyed a Renaissance in the 60s and 70s with my mom. I also took a rock and roll history class in college while I was studying opera and I remember scoffing at the confessional songwriter styles of the 70s. I was really into punk rock at the time.
One thing that I’ve enjoyed about getting a little older is that I no longer feel the need to define myself by musical style or fashion. Something wonderful broke free at some point that enabled me to return to the folk songs I learned as a child with absolute love, and to listen to new music with a very open heart. When our first album, We’re From Here came out, several critics compared my vocal style to Joni Mitchell so I decided to check her out. Blue was the first of her albums I listened to and I am completely hooked on it.
It is one of those albums that I know I will listen to for the rest of my life. Sometimes it’s not about discovering new things so much as stumbling blindly across the things you had previously cast aside at a time when you’re ready and willing to let them enter your world. Time may be a completely imagined thing, but you do notice yourself change. Take the time to dig in. Listen to full albums, ponder a thought for days and create art that says what you really wanted it to say in as long a format as that takes. Others might see this as laziness or indulgence. But sometimes speed is carelessness or insincerity. Breathe deeply, think and enjoy.
Yuma Wray:
A Good Read:
Starting with the book – I spend a lot of time driving on our tours, so my choice of novel may seem a little bleak, but… I really must begin with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
I’ve yet to watch the cinematic version of this tale, but I’ve read the book at least half a dozen times. And even though I usually end up shaky and tense with this tale of a man and his son wandering through a post-apocalyptic nightmare with nothing but a shopping cart full of whatever they can carry – all the while attempting to avoid the few remaining members of humanity that have survived (most of whom have turned to cannibalism) – it hasn’t stopped me from returning to read it time and time again.
Is this a metaphor for the plight of the few “starving†record companies left in the music business? I’m sure McCarthy didn’t mean it that way, but The Road is not quite as hopeless as it initially comes off with the first perusing. It is actually a tale about change and rebirth. It ends with the father (who remembers the world before it all burned up) passing on, and his son (who was born after the world burned) being taken in by another family with children of the same age. Is this hinting at a chance of a re-birth for the human race, perhaps? It is here where my joking comparison to the “burnt-out†music biz actually offers a little more comfort.
Without running the metaphor into the ground, for those that haven’t read The Road, it is horrifyingly stark and minimal tale of a world almost completely devoid of life where the remaining few devour what is left of themselves . . .
Did I mention that The Road might have influenced the lyrics at the beginning of When The Pumps Run Dry on our recent release Lean Into The Wind?
A Good Listen
So, next, the album – As Miss Shevaughn & I have finally got a place to hang our hats (we moved to California after concluding our fall 2013 tour) – we also have a place to plug in our record player. My choice for album is the double-LP, self-titled deluxe re-issue of the 1998 debut by Queens Of The Stone Age.
I must preface this by saying I am currently a Queens fanboy – but I didn’t start out that way. The first song of theirs that I can remember hearing was Feel Good Hit Of The Summer from their 2002 sophomore release, Rated R. Most people know the song even if they don’t recognize the title – because the lyrics are just a list of drugs spat out over a single heavy chord pounding away for three minutes. And that song
cemented them (at least, in my mind) as nothing more than a bunch of drugged-out California frat boys with guitars.
Fast-forward to 2008 – when I took a job at a bar in Chicago that had at least three Queens albums on the jukebox. Over the next three years that I was employed at this establishment – the riffs that were both aggressive & heavy and also laid back & subtle burrowed their way into my brain and have yet to be dislodged. And the deluxe reissue treatment that the double LP version was given saw some of the REALLY weird & more experimental songs that were originally left off returned to their rightful place alongside hypnotic hits like “Regular John†& “Mexicolaâ€.
The repetitive drone of Josh Homme’s guitars, the robotic drumbeats and the simple, understated pop format that these songs are presented in makes Queens Of The Stone Age’s first offering perfect not just for reading along to, but for long stretches on the road – driving from one show to the next. I love everything about it – as it both exciting and tranquilizing every single time I give it a spin.
A Good Drink
And now for the cocktail – which, unless I want to attract the attention of law enforcement, does NOT go equally well with driving or reading. Just reading . . .
I’m going to have to offer up a stripped-down version of the same cocktail that Miss Shevaughn has touted. There is something magical about the flavor of good tequila and mescal – a combination which I would love to take credit for myself, but which I actually discovered during my time as a doorman at Big Star bar & taqueria in Chicago. They make some of the based tequila-based drinks I have ever tasted.
To put the flavor of smoke and the desert in your cocktail, just mix the following:
(Over Ice) – 1 part silver tequila (preferably Don Julio Blanco – but, dear god, no Patron!) – mix with:
– 1 part soda water
– splash of mescal
– fresh lime juice from about 3 lime wedges (which can go in the cocktail once they are juiced)
Stir the cocktail, read the book, listen to the album!
Thanks for reading!