As I write this on Monday, the first day of a brand new year I can report to you, dear readers, that I am sharp of eye and frosty of mind, having bucked my regular New Year’s Eve trend of getting wasted drunk. So rather than sitting in the soggy detritus of another tanked evening […]
The Setlist
Our picks for the week’s best live music plus interviews and music news.
Posted inMusic
Rockin’ in the New Year
Have you ever skipped a rock across a frozen pond? It sounds like tension cables snapping or an industrial spring being tuned. It sounds like Star Wars blasters, particularly if the ice is thin or there are holes in it. It’s a perfectly natural sound but it doesn’t seem like one at all. It seems […]
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Enter the Yuletide Slumber
I have to admit it: I am a bit of a Grinch. It isn’t because I dislike Christmas as a holiday, mind you; I enjoy the lights and the bonhomie and the carols (the minor-key ones anyway). I even like fruitcake and being cold, though both in very small doses. As I write this I […]
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Macktown Smackdown
By Collin Yeo Having gotten slightly verbose and heavy in last week’s introduction, I am going to leave this one a tad lighter. This week I’ll be looking for themes to some evenings while making occasional rude personal connections to our local geography and generally stinking things up with what I’d like to think passes […]
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Singing at the Landscape
Last week was a weird one for me. The whole Sunday-Sunday run I felt a little out of frame and unusual. Blame it on the Super/Frost Moon. Blame it on that modern vampire-cult the GOP passing a dungeon-crafted tax bill during the witching hour that doesn’t even disguise their contempt for basically everyone I know […]
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Hear Some Music, Make Your Own
For most of us, last week was likely less stuffed with music and more stuffed with other temptations. A few legendary artists came through town but the streets were fairly empty over the holiday. This week is enjoying a trickling in of musical acts as the students and civilians likewise return to our county. So […]
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A Musical Feast
It’s finally here. That most musical of feast days when we celebrate the gift of harmony with the rapturous delight of food. That most sacred day of eating for the musician and music fan alike. I am, of course, talking about the Wednesday, Nov. 22 feast day of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. […]
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Niche and Nuance vs. Nazis
When Janis Ian wrote her seminal song “At Seventeen,” she started with the perfect stanza about tragic, trapped, popular and doomed teenage girls who peaked too soon: “I learned the truth at 17/ That love was meant for beauty queens/ And high school girls with clear-skinned smiles/ Who married young and then retired.” She goes […]
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Cold, Comfort
It’s cold and wet. I know I mentioned the weather in my last column but that was mostly an attempt to inure myself against the inevitable. It didn’t really work and now the weather is tormenting us like a crazy lover with days of sun and freezing rain with no obvious pattern behind it all […]
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Keeping the Gray at Bay
As November descends and the days turn grayer and shorter, our sweet Humboldt County begins to resemble the Asphodel Meadows of Homer’s underworld or the garden of virtuous pagans in the first circle of Dante’s Inferno. Limbo, in other words — everything around here can start to resemble a wet, green-gray limbo. Which leads us […]
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Trick or Treat Yourself
I don’t like Halloween. I have fallen asleep in a graveyard on two non-consecutive Halloweens. I once coated myself in homemade corn-syrup blood to the point where my own friends didn’t recognize me and I had to explain why my face was stained pink to my coworkers for a week. I have sat through the […]
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Welcome to the Party
I suppose the best way to start this off is by introducing myself. My name is Collin Yeo, I am 35 years old, unmarried, no kids, a native son of Humboldt and I love live music. I spent my 20s in New Orleans, where I worked as (among a whole lotta other things) a musician. […]