What Will April Showers Bring This Year?
This week: RSD 2026, New Music, Playlist, Liner Notes, and more...
Is it Spring yet?
Hello Again! It’s been a few weeks, but a lot has been going on, including some live music in both Portland, Maine, and Boston, Massachusetts.
Recently, I headed up to SPACE in downtown Portland to see drummer Daniel Villarreal perform with two exciting young musicians — vibraphonist Victor Viera-Branco and bassist John Moran. Fresh from the Big Ear Festival and on stage for a truly exciting set of music. Keep your heads up for this vibe player, as I’m sure he’ll be everywhere before too long!
The next night, I met some folks in Boston for dinner, then went to the MGM Music Hall at Fenway to see Bridget Everett perform with her band. You may know her from the HBO show, “Somebody Somewhere,” but she’s also a great singer and a very funny person. Everett has described herself as an "alt-cabaret provocateur." Did you know her bass player is Adam Horovitz, a.k.a. Ad-Rock of The Beastie Boys?
A Quasi-Book Review
Adventures in Modern Recording by Trevor Horn (Nine Eight Books UK, 2022)
Something new here, and something I won’t do too often… I’m not really a book reviewer, but I picked up Trevor Horn’s memoir in London last Spring. It’s a producer’s life told through the records that he made. Instead of a straight, year-by-year story, Horn uses each chapter to zoom in on a song, which includes “Video Killed the Radio Star,” “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” “Relax,” “Slave to the Rhythm,” “Kiss from a Rose,” and more. Each track is a different moment in his career and in pop music history.
If you grew up on 80s pop, like me, you were exposed to a lot of Trevor Horn records. He was the singer and producer of The Buggles. He briefly fronted Yes, believe it ot not… He produced ABC’s “The Lexicon of Love” and helped build Frankie Goes to Hollywood into a one-hit wonder. He produced Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” in 1984 and later worked with Seal, Pet Shop Boys, Cher, Rod Stewart, and too many more.
Each chapter in this book takes a record and tells you what was happening around it: the artist, the studio, the gear, the accidents that became features, the fights, the jokes. It’s a memoir shaped just like an album. Anyone who cares about how records get made or loves the 80s, this is for you! Also, a signed copy is a nice thing to own.
Liner Notes
Sharing stories about albums in my collection. My mission is simple: one record and one story at a time. Since I bought my first record in 1982, I’ve been obsessed with the stories hidden in the grooves. This is a sanctuary for the music nerds and the audibly curious, dedicated to records and the liner notes that keep them alive.
Christmas Day, 2004. Wes Anderson released The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou into theaters, and I was there. Co-written with Noah Baumbach, the film starred Bill Murray as Steve Zissou, a washed-up oceanographer chasing a jaguar shark across the open sea. The box office was unkind, but it didn’t matter. I walked out of that theater in love with the film and obsessed with its soundtrack…
The secret weapon in this film was Seu Jorge, the Brazilian singer and actor who played a crew member who spent his downtime strumming an acoustic guitar and singing David Bowie songs in Portuguese. I bought the original soundtrack on CD within a few days after seeing the film.
As a lifelong David Bowie fan, and someone who has traveled to his childhood home in Bromley, South London, and stood at the Bowie Bandstand in Beckenham, where a 22-year-old Bowie performed at the Growth Summer Festival in August of 1969, I thought I knew these songs inside and out. “Rebel Rebel,” “Life on Mars?,” “Ziggy Stardust,” and “Changes.” Then Seu Jorge stripped them down to an acoustic guitar, translated them into Portuguese, and created his own magical interpretation of these classic songs.
I have this album on CD and on limited edition yellow vinyl, which I picked up last year at a Barnes & Noble in Rhode Island. This is also the album that deepened my love for Wes Anderson’s approach to music in film. He doesn’t just pick songs that sound good over a scene, he picks songs that become the scene.
The Royal Tenenbaums wouldn’t be the same without “Needle in the Hay.” Rushmore lives and dies by its British Invasion soundtrack. And The Life Aquatic simply doesn’t work without Seu Jorge sitting on the deck of that ship, softly singing Bowie while the world falls apart.
Playlist
This playlist moves between jazz tradition and modern experimentalism with quiet confidence. You've got post-bop in Abercrombie, Henderson, and Milt Jackson sitting alongside the raw, improvised energy of Corsano & Orcutt and the slow-burn ambient drift of Pullman's 13-minute "October."
The Fontaines D.C. cover of Sinéad O'Connor is beautiful, while Steve Gunn closes things out with something reflective. It could possibly be a late-night listening session where the thread isn't simply genre but mood. I hope you enjoy!
“Pebbles” – John Abercrombie Quartet
“Waltz For Sweetie” – Joe Henderson
“Black Boys on Mopeds” – Fontaines D.C. (From Help 2, War Child Records)
“October” – Pullman
“My Funny Valentine” – Milt Jackson
“Distance of Sleep” – Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt
“Park Entrance” – Steve Gunn
New Music
It was Record Store Day, and while I didn’t stand in line, I did get some great new albums later in the day. Did you participate in RSD 2026? If so, what did you get?
Here are my quick highlights:
Don Cherry - Blue Lake (Live)
Stuart Copeland - Rhythmatist (Autographed)
Jazz Dispensary: Magia Brasileira
Also, I’m really looking forward to Saturday, May 16, in Keene, NH, for The Thing in the Spring, featuring Natural Information Society. Are you going?
Thanks again for reading. Until next time! - JB