Normally, when you start comparing a singer to anyone who came before him you’ll typically get shot a look of disgust and a response along the lines of, “Hey Dude, I just want to be judged on my own merits!”, but Bay-area based, neo-psych, garage-grunge, fuzzy-guitar-playin’ Ty Segall so embraces the obvious similarities to Marc Bolan that he actually released an EP of classic T. Rex covers called Ty-Rex a few months back! And now he’s out with a full-length album, Goodbye Bread, where alongside the obvious Bolan touches, he’s mixed in a little bit of John Lennon vocalizing and some dirty Neil Young & Crazy Horse garage guitar licks. Goodbye Bread is his first album with Drag City and you can pick it up on iTunes. And then check out what he’s up to over on his website.
We had a Beck cover yesterday…how about a Nirvana cover today?!!
Brooklyn’s own Charles Bradley…the Screaming Eagle of Soul…cranks up the James Brown and makes Nirvana’s ‘Stay Away’ sound like a Motown standard! Backing him up are The Menahan Street Band, an ensemble featuring musicians from Antibalas, El Michels Affair, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings and the Budos Band, who took their name from Menahan Street in Bushwick. The 63 year-old Bradley only began his singing career in his 50’s when he began performing in local Brooklyn clubs performing his James Brown routines under the alter ego “Black Velvet”. Gabriel Roth of Daptone Records, recognizing raw talent when he saw it, convinced Bradley to drop the “Black Velvet” act and signed him to Daptone where he has performed ever since.
SPIN is offering ‘NEWERMIND’…a Tribute to Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’…free for a couple of days, and since free don’t cost much, I hit the ‘DOWNLOAD’ button. Honestly, I was surprised at how most of it is unlistenable shit, especially an absurd version of ‘Come As You Are’ by some ridiculous Aussie outfit going by the name Midnight Juggernauts, who turned a Rock & Roll classic into a 4 minute Discofied atrocity on helium! But again…it is free and your taste might be different from mine (doubt it!), so head on over to SPIN, enter your e-mail address and you can make up your own mind, but for my money, I’d also make a bee-line to Daptone Records and pick up a couple of Charles Bradley records!
Late last year, Nadia Ackerman kept telling me about a singer/songwriter friend of hers with the most amazing and soulful voice that would immediately have me thinking of a female Tom Waits, and that I simply must meet her. Well, since then I’ve gotten to be very good friends with Chiara Angelicola…..Bird Call as she’s known on stage…..and while her vocals can go to the dark, bluesy place that Tom calls home, on her latest EP, Other Creatures, she’s recorded covers of songs from Fleetwood Mac, Nick Cave, Man Man, Kate Bush and Beck that don’t simply parrot the originals, but instead her unique voice gives a heartfelt interpretation to each one in her own style. I remember when Beck released Sea Change…his melancholy country-blues masterpiece…and how ‘Lost Cause’ quickly became my favorite song on the album, so hearing Chiara throw a sitar in the mix really caught me off guard. This from Chiara…..
“Lost Cause is one of my favorite Beck tunes. I think the Sea Change record influenced a lot of people my age at the time it came out. It signaled a major shift in the music world. I knew that it would be a challenge to recreate, but I was working with some really talented people and we found a way to diverge from it in a spiritual and organic way and stay true to it at the same time. I think the sitar really expresses the spiritual and emotional aspects of the song alone. I’m really glad we went that route.”
Joining Chiara on the record are Indra Roy-Chowdhury on the aforementioned sitar, Dave Smallen on guitar & vocals, the amazing Harvey Jones on electric pianos, harmonium & synthesizers, Aaron Nevezie on bass and the whole thing was mixed & produced by Joel Hamilton at Studio G in Brooklyn.
You can follow Bird Call on her website, then go pick up a copy of the Other Creatures EP on iTunes for only 7 bucks!
Finally…I was gonna drop the video for ‘Lost Cause’, but Chiara tells me that apparently Deli Magazine is getting a temporary exclusive on that one, so you’re all gonna hafta do with Beck’s original version and I’ll drop Chiara’s version when it clears Customs…..
The guys over at Mola Soft Lights just noticed that I used a Demi to shoot Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren a while back, ‘cuz they just wrote about it on their blog…check it out HERE!
This isn’t a Song of the Day. It’s too passive and all those electronic clicks and pops don’t really fit the Indie framework I think of when I kick out something for the SOTD…..but it’s still a nice, non-confrontational way to get going this morning. ‘The Broken Places’ is the first track from Moby’s latest album, Destroyed. And since there’s really nothing I can’t say about Moby that hasn’t already been said, just check out his website!
A few weeks ago, Adrian asked if I wanted to head up the Turnpike to shoot a couple of fund managers…Ed Nicklin and Andy Knuth of the Westport Select Funds…for the Barron’s Mutual Fund Report. We were both hoping to get anything other than the usual office environment portraits and since the Westport offices were kinda on my way up to Damn Ugly’s weekend command center, I swung by to take a look around and right behind their building I found this…
It’s funny how one simple prop can get your juices flowing on a shoot, but as soon as I saw the plastic Adirondack chairs and the river location I knew we had something to play with. And I’m not usually one who tries to cram a metaphor down the reader’s throat, but when we found out that Andy and Ed kept fishing poles in the office and that they were known to ‘fish for good deals’ in the market, I couldn’t turn up the chance to turn these fund managers into sport fishermen!
Once that was done, Kaz and I set up a nice, relaxing scene next to a waterfront shed where the boys could kick back and enjoy the sunny day…..
…which gave Barron’s the perfect opener for the section…..
The other day, Aussie photographer Morgana Creely sat down with Damn Ugly Photography (via email…cuz she’s in Melbourne!) and asked me Five Questions…you can check out the answers on Her Blog
The year is half over and that means The Mid-Year Roundtable issue of Barron’s has hit the stands. I’ve already spilled the beans on some of some of what went down at the Harvard Club that cold day in January in PART ONE and PART TWO, and now comes the final story of how we shot the ten members of the Roundtable separately and put ’em all together into a cover, an inside opener and individual portraits that would accompany each of their stock picks.
Adrian DeLucca and I figured we would hammer home the Global theme we started in the January issue by shooting each person against a section of a World map and I thought it would be a perfect opportunity for me to squeeze a few Artificial Portraits in at the same time. I photographed a giant map I picked up from IKEA and then printed it out in ten 40″ x 50″ sections that would serve as a backdrop for each individual portrait…..
Since we had precious little time to waste the day of the shoot, I decided to ‘map out’ who would be in front of which section ahead of time…..
I kept the lighting pretty simple…just a gridded 20″ Profoto beauty dish way up high on a boom and an on-camera ringlight…..
Because we were jumping between the two sets, I gave myself a few cheaters to remind me what my settings should be…..
Oh yeah…just about forgot…I added an over the shoulder fill in the form of an open-face Octalite…..
…all of which gave us ten images that I had to re-assemble into a map of the World…..
…which looked like this on the cover…..
…with a variation for the inside opener…..
But while I was shooting the images for the cover, I also had to come away with some individual portraits that were a bit different and that’s where the Artificial Portraits came in…..
…and these shots were peppered throughout the article…..
And another year of the Roundtable was in the can! So until next January, Photo Editor Adrian DeLucca, Art Director Pam Budz and yours truly wish you well!
A lotta you know that I just loveHaley Bonar and not just because we were both born in Brandon, Manitoba! The Minneapolis-based singer/songwriter with that honey-dipped sweet/sad voice has twice before graced the pages of the Song of the Day, but the news that she had self-released her new album, Golder, back in April, somehow evaded my radar. She funded the new record through a successful Kickstarter campaign and after hitting ‘repeat’ on the album all day, I can say the new stuff is jauntier, tighter, wonderfully melodic and a bit more upbeat than her earlier work. You can stream Golder on her website, and then pick up the album for only ten bucks over at BandCamp.
*UPDATE* I just found out Ms. Bonar will be playing The Bell House next Tuesday, June 21st….get your tickets in advance HERE, and then at The Mercury Lounge on Thursday. I gotta make room for this…
I think this must be the third time I’ve put up Kate Tucker’s Roman Candles as a Song of the Day. The first was way back when she gave me the Ball Of Wax compilation CD where it first appeared and I was still firing off email versions of the SOTD before it morphed into the blog you’re mired in. The second was about a year ago after I saw her rock it at her release party for White Horses at Spike Hill, and today I get an email telling me she’s gone and released a new version…recorded with Patrick Boyle (Lead Guitar), Andy Dolson (Keys), Michael Shepard (Backing Vocals), Andrew Cushman (Bass), Eric Baltrinic (Drums) and dedicated it to yours truly…and is offering it as a free download over on Bandcamp. And she even put together a little DIY video to accompany the latest version, too. You can listen & download more of Kate’s music over at Bandcamp and head on over to either her MySpace or Facebook pages and say hello!
Roman Candles
Recorded December 20, 2010 in Alliance, Ohio
Released 03 June 2011
Where o where can my true love be
Is she running circles away from me
In the morning she’s sailing in
With her gold and silver
In the palm of her hand
Tell me tell me you’re telling lies
I can see through circles into your eyes
You say haven’t we had the finest times
And there’s no one like us
There’s no one under the sun
Lay your head down just lay your head down
There’s no surprises with these disguises
Lay your head down just lay your head down for me
Baby one day I’m gone for good
They will never find me they never could
You’ll remember our finest times
How there’s no one like me
There’s no one under the sun
Lay your head down just lay your head down
There’s no surprises with these disguises
Lay your head down just lay your head down
These highway vandals shoot roman candles
Lay your head down just lay your head down for me
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A few weeks ago, Manuela Oprea, photo editor at BloombergMarkets, offered me a job that proved to be one of the more interesting business magazine gigs I’ve done in a long time…to shoot a cover story on Barry Silbert, the Founder and CEO of SecondMarket and some of the people that make up the largest secondary market exchange dedicated to creating liquidity for illiquid assets. Silbert came up with the idea for SecondMarket when he was an investment banker struggling to sell off pieces of the bankrupt Enron…he figured, “Wouldn’t it make sense if there was an organized marketplace, like eBay, where illiquid assets could be bought and sold?”. To me it all sounded ridiculously dry and boring. So much so that when I went up to scout the place I really wasn’t expecting any of the craziness that would follow…..
First off, the offices were painted in super-bright primary colors…
…people sat on big inflated rubber balls…
…they wrote all over the walls…
…and played ping pong and air hockey to relax and had toys and games everywhere! Including this inspiring throwback to my youth…the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots!
This ain’t your father’s stock exchange! And we were gonna have some fun!
We decided to use the bright colored walls of the reception area for the cover shot of Barry. Here’s what things looked like before we set up the lights…
And here’s what 6 lights and 5 Profoto packs will do to reality…
Next we went to work on that lime-green wall…
Which resulted in the opening spread for the story…
With Barry’s part of the shoot done, we moved on to the Green Lantern T-shirt wearin’ Chief Strategy Officer, Jeremy Smith, paired with the Uber-Traditional, buttoned-down Managing Director, Kevin O’Connor, over a nice round of Robot Boxing!
And the last shot of the day would be of Adam Oliveri, their Managing Director of Private Company Markets…
But we weren’t done yet. A few days later, Manuela called and said that the story would now include a sidebar on the venture capitalist who got SecondMarket off the ground…Lawrence Lenihan, the CEO and Managing Director of FirstMark Capital. While I was looking around for places to shoot him, I kinda barged in on lunch…..
…but it resulted in this rather tasty portrait…
But I really wanted to come away with a second shot, and the reception area had a nice feel to it…
…so after a bit of furniture moving, we did this…
And finally, to bring this endless story to a close, here’s 7 seconds of cell-phone video Manuela caught of me shooting Barry for the cover…
$10.3 Billion Dollars. That’s the value of the funds run by Bill Ackman, the founder and CEO of hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management. When you’re in charge of that kinda money, even I know you probably don’t wanna spend a lot of time posing for pictures. But I had to shoot a cover for Barron’s and little problems like this weren’t gonna get the job done….
I went up for a location scout, but as is the case with most of the investment companies I’m tasked to photograph, where I can shoot is often extremely controlled. Pershing Square’s offices are very striking…42 floors above Central Park, ultra-modern, with white glass walls and a view most people would kill to shoot…but I didn’t really wanna do a ‘view’ portrait, and besides, I knew that Art Streiber had already done that picture for Portfolio Magazine a couple years back…and a lot of the other areas of their office we strictly off-limits because of SEC rules, so my choices were whittled down to these two spots…..
A possible cover location…
…and a second spot, in their kitchen, that had an repeated Op-Art view of a vintage print of the original Pershing Square…
Of course the two locations were on opposite sides of the floor, and of course we would have maybe ten minutes with Bill to get both photographs done! That meant setting up both shots ahead of time (with the ‘normal’ six tons of lighting gear!) and work fast. We started with the doorway shot…
…which gave Barron’s this for the cover…
And then were off to the kitchen for something a bit more relaxed…
And since we finished both shots so quickly, he even gave us another minute to re-set and blast off a few ringlight portraits, one of which sits at the top of this post.
I’ve obviously been slackin’ off on my Song of the Day duties, but life and work have gotten in the way recently. So when I saw that Ryan had dropped a little video on YouTube of one of the many throwaway songs he’s recorded for the upcoming Low Roar album, I figured I could take a few minutes to quickly shotgun it out to you guys. Nice way to end a rainy Friday. You can check out more of what Ryan’s been doing with Low Roar over on his Facebook Page
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A few weeks ago, Mr. DeLucca asked if I would like to take a trip up to Herald Square to shoot Terry Lundgren, the President, Chairman of the Board, Director and CEO of Macy’s. “Yeah”, I said, “but only if I don’t hafta do some lame picture of him on the retail floor!”. Thus began our journey…
I went up to Macy’s for a quick location scout and was of course shown every square inch of the million square feet of retail space in the World’s Largest Department Store…none of which really interested me. What I really wanted to see was their display department…I had a kind of cool idea that required mannequins and such, but I got shot down on that one. I was then offered a look around their ‘Executive Offices’, which is normally the kiss of death, but in this case it proved damned inspiring. The floor dates back to the 1902 origin of the building and was stunning, but what really got me going was the Executive Dining Room. The walls were covered in frescos painted in the 1940’s that show views of the building as it looked back then…
But using the P/R guy as a stand in, I saw immediately that just dropping him in front of the wall was gonna be flat-footed and boring…..
I needed to raise him up and get him into the scene, and that was gonna take a lot of gear! (And since this was a Barron’s gig, I only had one assistant) So Kaz and I showed up early…we got to Macy’s three hours before the shoot…and proceeded to turn the dining room into a photo studio for real. Besides my usual two tons of lighting gear, we hauled in apple boxes, saw horses, a sheet of plywood and a 4 x 8 piece of white plexiglass and went about rigging a platform that would raise him up to the right height…
But we still had one final hurdle to get over…the P/R guy walked in while we were setting up and had concerns about our plastic saw horses….”Do you have any stronger sawhorses for the Chairman?!!”. I had to get up on the platform and dance a jig to convince him we were safe. And it was worth it…here’s the resulting page in Barron’s…
But I wasn’t done. My favorite image was actually like that set-up shot I sat in for. The much more dramatic, pulled-back view of Lundgren is now sitting at the front of my portfolio…
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That’s right…Baryshinkov! I can’t help but love my job, but when I get to meet some of the people I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with, even I hafta to step back from time to time and ask myself…really?!!
I’ve done a few gigs lately for the London Sunday Times, so when photo editor Sean McKillop called and asked if I wanted to shoot Mikhail Baryshnikov and his wife Lisa Rinehart up at their country house for the weekend ‘Home’ magazine, I didn’t skip a beat before saying yes. The couple was selling the centuries-old converted barn they’ve lived in since 1981 and I was there to not only get a few portraits of them, but also as many views of the house as possible. The only problem…Misha’s schedule was extremely limited and I would have no more than half an hour with the two of them. Of course, the Times wanted ‘four or five’ portrait situations, never mind that on the day we were to shoot it was about 38 degrees and pouring rain!
After a whirlwind tour of the house, we started by lighting what would be the cover image of the two of them at the front door to the house…
…..then very quickly set up two additional portraits in the sunroom (bathed in clouds)…
…and in front of a fireplace in the original part of the house…
With his part of the performance over, Misha bid us good day and I then got off a photo of Lisa relaxing with one of the many cats that share the house with them…
With the portraits out of the way, we then went about shooting as many detail shots as possible…
Thanks to Sean for the gig and thank you Misha & Lisa for allowing me the opportunity to spend a bit of time with you…
Since Audrye Sessions packed it in last year, frontman Ryan Karazija moved to Iceland, got married to a lovely Icelandic lass, and spent a lotta long, cold, dark Icelandic nights writing news songs. Cold, dark, moody songs. And after trying out a few names for his new project, he’s settled on one that perfectly matches the feeling these songs evoke…Low Roar. Monastically holed up in an igloo with little more to eat than dried reindeer meat and the occasional sick Puffin that dropped outta the sky, he put together a collection of beautifully crafted stories, then went into the studio and with that remarkable voice of his, set them to music, playing all of the instruments and handling the production himself (with his friend and Audrye Sessions producer Andrew Scheps doing the mixing). Ryan told me today that the as-yet untitled album will be out in a month, he’ll be playing in California in August, and if he gets enough demand, will try to get to New York, too. Let’s help him out…head on over to the Low Roar Facebook Page and hit the “LIKE” button.
Finally, here’s Ryan doing an acoustic version of another of the new songs, ‘Help Me’…..
My portrait of Azim Premji…the Bangalore-based gazzilionaire who owns Wipro, the third-largest Indian IT company…was featured this week in ‘The Time 100’, the magazine’s annual list of the most influential people in the world. And if that wasn’t cool enough, the story was written by none other than Bill Gates.
Damn Ugly Photography 