JDub Records

The Wailing Wall played at TT the Bear’s in Boston on Monday night, and I had the pleasure of being accompanied by my good friends Alana Skyring (drums, from The Grates) and Gabriel Birnbaum (saxophone, from Boy Without God, formerly of Eli “Paperboy” Reed and the True Loves). Our friend Dylan Metrano captured one of the more “out there” sections of the set that night, and I am honored to share this video with you.

A vastly different/gentler permutation of the band will be returning to TT’s on March 31st with Clare Burson.

Our dear friend The Wailing Wall has 2 shows in Brooklyn this week, one tonight and one on Thursday.  Check ‘em out:

TONIGHT (2/8) @ Death By Audio
8PM / ALL AGES
The Wailing Wall (full band), Horse’s Mouth, Your Nature, Blastoff!

Thursday (2/11) @ Bar Matchless
7PM/ FREE
Vol. 1 Brooklyn & Gigantic Present: Greatest Three-Minute Rock N’ Roll Story Ever
20+ Readers (including Aaron Hartman of Girls in Trouble) with a special set by The Wailing Wall

Jesse from The Wailing Wall recorded this cover of “Remember Me (When The Candle Lights Are Gleaming)” for Hanukkah. (Get it? Candles and Hanukkah) The song has also been recorded by Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan among others.

The Wailing Wall Live on Phoning It In -

On Monday evening, I had the pleasure of appearing on the legendary radio show Phoning It In on KDVS, hosted by Nadav Carmel. Since 2005, Nadav has had such esteemed musicians as Devendra Banhart, The Mountain Goats, The Wrens, WHY?, and Daniel Johnston play their music live over the telephone. Rather than being an impediment, the lo-fi sound of the phone connection often enhances the performances, adding a special sense of intimacy that would likely be absent from an in-studio appearance. Indeed, many of musicians have utilized the phone line as an instrument in and of itself in their performances - I’m a big fan of The Blow’s appearance, where Khaela Maricich sang unaccompanied fragments of new songs she was working on, and the completely improvised set by Daniel Higgs from Lungfish. For my appearance, I opted to play six songs on the harmonium - three new, two old, and one cover of a song from a David Lynch movie.

Nadav had this to say about it:

“Jesse Rifkin phones it in from Annapolis, MD. Jesse is a ‘Jewish’ musician (on a ‘Jewish’ record label), in the same sense Leonard Cohen is a ‘Jewish’ musicians, a ‘Jewish’ poet. That is, Jesse’s explorations into language and song, emotion, pop culture, life and death are informed by many things, and one of them happens to be the faith of his birth. And while there’s plenty of Cohen in the Wailing Wall (and even some cantorial music, I think), he’s also been influenced plenty by the modern crop of DIY troubadours- many of whom he’s shared the stage with- Tiger Saw, Thanksgiving, Castanets. It’s a moving blend, and that it recalls a Mangum or a Meloy is an asset to this end rather than a weight. Even over the phone, accompanied only by harmonium, Jesse’s songs are never less than electric.”

Sure you’ve heard “Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah” before, but have you ever heard it played on the saw? Jesse from The Wailing Wall brings a new twist to this traditional tune.

This week all purchases from the JDub store come with a free download of The Wailing Wall’s debut LP.

As many of you New Yorkers (hopefully) know, The Silent Barn in Ridgewood, Queens is one of our great treasures - a DIY, all-ages venue that has been home to some of the best indie rock shows the city has seen in the last few years (they also house a zine library, and have had numerous art shows). Perhaps you’ve even been to one of our shows there, like, for example, the Hospital Blossoms release show we played in June alongside Jason Anderson, Mountain Man, and Alex Bleeker and the Freaks.

What you probably didn’t know was that they recorded the whole thing. As it turns out, the nice folks who live and work at the Barn have microphones set up all over the building (in the show spaces, yes, but also in the hallways and even by the front door), and have recorded a handful of shows by having all of these microphones set at equal levels, going straight to cassette. The end result is less of a “live recording” in the traditional sense and more a documentary of the overall experience of the show (see G. Lucas Crane’s eloquent discussion of this “non-amoral surveillance” here).

And now, they’ve kindly posted a number of these recordings for your listening pleasure right here, including a good portion of our set from the release show! You’ll have to listen to a bit of Mountain Man to get to it, but that is totally ok because they are awesome (WW starts about a third of the way through the recording).

Now, I will be honest, I wouldn’t really recommend listening to this stuff unless you have a pretty high tolerance for dissonance, ambient noise, and extremely lo-fi recording technology, but if you do, this right here is a goldmine. On our recording, you’ll find one of the best WW lineups of recent memory (Jason Anderson on piano, Ted Gordon on bass, Dylan Clark on drums, and myself on electric guitar) blazing through one Hospital Blossoms favorite, a couple new tunes, and a sweet Tom Petty cover. You’d be wise to listen to Jason and Bleeker’s sets as well. If you close your eyes and use your imagination, it would almost be like you were at this awesome show in the flesh.

Of course, it might also help if you had a couple beers and danced until you were really, really sweaty.

Ampeater, a blog specializing in FREE digital 7-inches, has released a 2-song 7″ from our friends in The Wailing Wall.  The 2 songs (”The Words We Choose” and a stripped-down version of “Hospital Blossoms”) are accompanied by one of the most thoughtful and sweet write-ups of a band that I have ever read.  I’ve included an excerpt below, but the entire thing, including the music, is available HERE.

“David Foster Wallace once spoke of an epiphanic “click” he heard while reading the very best fiction (he took the word from a Yeats poem which features a line about “the click of a well-made box”), something instinctually felt but impossible to explain, and something that is curiously absent from some of the most outwardly skillful writing (Updike, in his example). To steal another phrase from Wallace, The Wailing Wall “clicks like a fucking geiger counter.” They always make those tired old chords sound like something you’ve never heard before.”

The Wailing Wall - Words We Choose (Pipe Organ Version)

Hello again, loved ones!  First and foremost, forgive me for the title of this post. My sense of what is and isn’t legitimately funny isn’t as sharp as it should be today.

A few weeks ago, after kicking off my tour with a fantastic show at Wesleyan University, I found myself recording a session for “Wild Wild Live,” a show on WESU (Wesleyan student radio) hosted by Ben Seretan. The concept behind Ben’s show is that he only plays live recordings, preferably exclusive and unusual ones, so with that in mind, we went off to Wesleyan’s chapel where Ben held up his field recorder, I sang, and frequent WW collaborator/organist extraordinaire Ben Bernstein accompanied me on the chapel’s impressive pipe organ. We recorded four songs, one of which Mr. Seretan has generously posted as a free mp3 on the Wild Wild Live blog.

The original version of “The Words We Choose,” the non-album song Ben selected, can be found here along with some other goodies.  Read Ben’s very flattering write up of the session after the cut:

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I know I am hardly the first person to mention this on the internet today. But come on. Come on. This is amazing.

Nothing I write here will do it justice. Just prepare to have your mind blown a little bit.

This week, my good friend and past tour mate Dylan Metrano of Tiger Saw released his first book, All My Friends Are Right Here With Me, which documents his ten years of making music and being a part of the American DIY community. The book features interviews and first person accounts of tours and collaborations with such artists as Dirty Projectors, Kimya Dawson, Songs: Ohia, Little Wings, Viking Moses, and Castanets. The book also comes with a CD of Tiger Saw covers courtesy of past and future Saw collaborators, including Jason Anderson, Strand of Oaks, White Hinterland, Picastro, and yours truly.

To celebrate the release of the book, Tiger Saw and The Wailing Wall will be teaming up (alongside South China) for a northeastern tour this October! Our sets will all emphasize the spirit of collaboration and friendship that Dylan’s book describes, and certain performances will include readings from the book, accompanied by puppet shows (I will be one of the puppeteers). Check out the dates HERE.

On a personal note, I was a Tiger Saw fan long before I was a friend. Dylan is constantly collaborating with new musicians and reshaping his songs, and his doing so was one of the big influences on the way I chose to work in The Wailing Wall - I have known the Saw to be everything from a gentle acoustic duo to a horn-powered funk band to an eleven-piece ensemble with both electric and upright bassists (see this mind-blowingly impressive list of past Saw members). Check out the video above of Dylan performing “Postcards and Letters” alongside White Hinterland’s Casey Deinel and Dirty Projectors’ Angel Deradoorian (and watch at 3:30 for an awesome surprise ending)!