Today, we’re excited to share with you all the second in our series of Mr. Kind & … . This time, we have Bay Area mainstays Picture Atlantic collaborating with us on Spoon’sYou’ve Got Yr. Cherry Bomb. Picture Atlantic was one of the first bands that we pitched when we first started the series because I thought lead singer Nikolaus Bartunek had a voice that was perfectly suited for a Spoon tune.
We’ve made the track available for Free Download over at Bandcamp and the video (posted below) is also on You Tube.
With only two weeks til the release of the new season of @officialarresteddevelopment, we’d like to remind everyone that there’s always @roadsmatt in he #bananastand. #cantwait
This past Sunday, we had the lads from Picture Atlantic into Dirt Room for a Mr. Kind & … session. I had only met them in passing at a couple of their shows but when we started putting the series together, I knew that we had to book them as soon as possible.
Thomas Arballo (who subbed drums at a recent Mr. Kind show) and his partner Connor Luther followed us around with cameras for the day. We plan on releasing this collaboration on May 7th. Stay tuned for the song we chose and the simultaneous video and single release.
This week, I’m jamming on the new music video from Ghost and Gale. This track was engineered by the inimitable Brad Dollar and our very own Jonathan Devoto ripped the drums on this one. Listen to this incredibly polished country rocker that calls to mind The Civil Wars (for those of you who need a touchstone).
Whatevs. Just take a listen. They’re Bay-based but will be having much more to come down the line.
Our April Fools’ joke last week left many good friends and fans scratching their heads last week. As a peace offering, please enjoy a real clip from our soon-to-be-released single, Maliced Hearts.
And for those of you who didn’t check out what we released on April 1st, check out below.
Since our inception as a band, Mr. Kind has made no bones about paying tribute to artists that we’re inspired by as well as recognizing other independent bands that we think are rad. A couple of months ago, we conceived of an idea (admittedly not original, a’la Beck’s Record Club and Live from Daryl’s House) to have a band join us at Dirt Room (Jonathan Devoto’s studio) and in the space of a day collaboratively record an arrangement of a song by a band that mutually inspires both acts involved. We’d rehearse, set-up, and track, with a video crew coming along for the ride to film the session and then present it to the public for free download.
We contacted LA’s holychild who were previously featured in our Band Crush series (our sinister motives now becoming clearer, mwahaha). We chose Clark Gable by The Postal Service who are celebrating the 10th anniversary of Give Up, their only LP and the CD that this songis off of. Liz and Louie from holychild came to Dirt Room armed with a new arrangement, eschewing many of the electronic elements of the original, in favor of a percussion and Wurlitzer driven version. We spent a couple of hours rehearsing and divvying up parts then off we went.
We’ve made the track available on Bandcamp, the video on You Tube (and below), and photos from the session on Facebook. We hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed creating. For those of you that connected with The Postal Service upon their initial release, those who will be seeing them on tour this summer, and those who are only listening to them for the first time, please enjoy our take on Clark Gable. To The Postal Service, thanks for the great music.
Yesterday we released a clip of our first new release since July. Maliced Hearts was a bit different stylistically than what we’ve put our previously, especially so because we dubbed fake vocals, misaligned the drums, and detuned the guitar (among other things) for this April Fools release.
Though the clip was meant as a joke, there were all these weird insecurities tied up into putting it out. For one, we haven’t released new music in a while so this was the first folks have heard from us in a while. To try and put out something that is intentionally bad presented a weird tightrope that needed to be walked because we wanted it bad enough that it would register as such to the widest number of people possible but not so overwhelmingly bad that people would turn it off before completion and would at least initially question if the release was authentic. Also, we wanted to make sure that the threshold of badness wasn’t so low that people thought it was a real song.
I don’t know what we really learned (if anything) from this experience but I do know that reactions anecdotally distributed pretty even between:
Got the joke and thought it was funny
Got the joke and thought it was terrible
Didn’t get the joke and tried to understand what we were ‘trying to do artistically’ (that’s a euphemism for something I’m sure.
Didn’t get the joke and just thought that we released a crappy song.
The real version of Maliced Hearts will be coming along really soon, we promise, as well as a bunch of other new songs. Don’t worry. We are working on some real things in the studio (besides soap and Lite Brite videos).
For an example of something more objectively bad, please see here.
Mr. Kind is happy to emerge victoriously from the studio with a clip of our newest song, Maliced Hearts. A release date is pending but we figured what better way to start off the month of April. ; )
