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Syl Johnson, but whatever.

Looks like both the album with Raise The Rent as well as the aforementioned Moxie can be found on Spotify as well, fwiw. Thanks for the info about her. She has a cool-sounding voice, and a pretty interesting, hard-to-peg sound. Would be interesting to see her (and presumably, her band) live. Too bad she doesn't appear to be coming close to Chicago in the near future, but I'll keep an eye out. In a larger sense, it's definitely a reminder that there's good music being made in just about every little corner of this vast land of ours and that it's up to us to support it as much as possible. Esp

Here's a link to an interesting little piece from the UK's Guardian newspaper about this, which I believe I saw when Joyce tweeted about it. Cool that you're friends with her, Tim!

Classic. (I'm curious as to what this latest auction will benefit, but I think it'll go for a bit more than in the old days... )

Well I could think of worse jobs, I suppose...

All these Numero stories over the years are kind of insane, but I have to say I find them all pretty fascinating. Noticed they've been diving into reissuing some of the 90's shoegaze stuff recently, so I wonder if the soul stuff is finally starting to get tapped out...

I just have to say, this was actually my first Wilco show (and a great one, even though I knew next to nothing)!

Not really a surprise, but Solid Sound Festival just posted this on Facebook, referring to Nels' duo with Julian Lage: Rumor has it this amazing pair might appear at Solid Sound this summer: http://nyti.ms/ZEVt32

Here's a link to, IMHO, a very good interview with Nels about this project... Nels interview with CT.com

Anyway, to briefly finish up the musical recapping from the Letters to Santa event... Playing solo electric guitar and laughing out loud a lot, Kim Deal did three mini-sets of three songs or so apiece, including the Breeders' Cannonball to end the second set and the Pixies' Gigantic to end the third. One surprise, at least to me, was her great cover of Chris Bell's You And Your Sister. I totally didn't realize that she and Tanya Donnelly had sung it on a This Mortal Coil record more than 20 years ago, but I'm glad she still sings it. JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound definitely provided a jolt

Oh yeah! Mind freeze this afternoon. How could I have forgotten that one...thanks, B!

As I said in the thread in Just A Fan, I feel like the musical performances at this year's recently concluded 24-hour Letters to Santa event at the Second City's etc. stage deserved a thread of their own, so here it is... Most of the songs Jeff played have already been mentioned in the other thread, but despite his claiming when he first took the stage that "What Are They Doing In Heaven Today?" was the only song he currently remembered, he turned in another terrific intimate set for the crowd that completely packed the theater (as well as to the many folks waiting in line to get in, thanks

Here's a pretty solid recap of the entire 24 hours, including some of the names I missed in the Albini segment.

Yeah, I asked Nels when he and Julian are coming to play a Chicago date and he said it's "pretty much inevitable." I think Nels might be in town in February sometime doing some Wilco stuff, so maybe there will time for a gig then but I'm not sure...

As for the musical performances, I think they probably deserve a thread of their own so I'll start one later in After The Show...

Yeah, Nels and Julian really do play wonderfully together. After a recent show I caught in NYC, I thought to myself, "It seems like they've been playing together for years." But I think they just met earlier this year, through, appropriately enough, Jim Hall. I think this might be a (the?) collaboration that Nels brings to Solid Sound next year. Anyway, for lucky folks in the Northeast who have a chance to catch this little tour they're doing this week, it's definitely well worth the effort!

Sorry no one answered your question, Tim, but let me try now that I've had a decent night's sleep. I assume you mean Albini's interview with stats guru Nate Silver? This happened around 10 a.m. and it was another in the series of on-stage interviews he's done with in interesting folks over the years. I'm not that bright, so I couldn't report with a tremendous amount of accuracy what they talked about, but basically the first part of the interview dealt with Silver's initial success with baseball and developing the PECOTA model to predict player performance. PECOTA was named after Bill Pecota,

For the record, the bidding eventually got up to 30k, but the Tweedys generously offered to do four shows for 28k apiece if all of the groups bidding at the later stages of the auction contributed that amount. This wasn't the first time they've done four shows — it's happened twice before, I believe — but I think it was the highest per-show price yet. At any rate, the amount of money raised over the years as a result of Susan and Jeff's generosity has been truly staggering and made such a difference for so many people. So they deserve all the credit they get — and then some.

White light and white heat, right?

Thanks for the link (and the compliment), sir! Quite odd — to me, anyway — that a Minnesota paper would go to the expense of covering a random show in Colorado, so I have to assume that Mr. Riemenschneider is originally from the area or had some other reason for being there (e.g. was on a ski vacation or something). I didn't report the Morrissey comment because it's one that Jeff has often made when the aroma of nearby grilling meats wafts up to the stage. Riemenschneider seems to suggest that the joke that the show "would be over by now" had to do with the weather when it really was an allu

There were some kind of heating implements on stage, at least I think so. If you were fairly close to the stage, you could probably see these monitor-like things connected by big white tubing to what appeared to be gas tanks of some sort. So maybe those helped, as well as the stage lights? A lot of the acts were also using those portable hand warmers (à la the Residency) so perhaps some of the guys had those in their pockets as well? I guess the cold also affects different people differently. I was quite frozen the first night of the fest as well as in line last night. But by the time Wilco

Nope, she wasn't with them in Vail. A guy whose name I didn't totally catch but might have been Matt was playing lead guitar.

Good to meet you as well. I don't think I even caught your name, though. Sorry about that. It's still a bit awkward when people "recognize" you out of the blue, especially when you're freezing. Glad you survived the cold!

Wilco's final show of 2012 — as the closing act of the three-day Vail Snow Daze festival — was an abbreviated one because of a 10 p.m. curfew, but it proved to be pretty memorable nonetheless. That was due in no small part to the weather conditions, which were what you might expect they would be outdoors at night during winter in a town that's more than 8,000 feet above sea level. It snowed lightly throughout most of the show and was probably 10 degrees (or less) by the time it was over. So needless to say, there were a lot of bundled-up people — both on stage and in the crowd. Jeff played t

It was a nice event to honor 18 years of service by Emanuel Congregation's Cantor Michelle "Shelly" Drucker Friedman. Dexter Walker and Zion Movement, the gospel choir in the peach-colored robes some of whom can be seen in the picture, was pretty awesome. I counted nearly 50 of them, which made for a diverse range of voices that nonetheless blended together beautifully. They played about six songs themselves and then added handclaps, etc., while Jeff and others performed. Jeff himself played four songs, which he said were some of Shelly's favorites among his compositions: Airline To Heaven