On Warmer Music's Travel Mix - Side A: Maps & Legends

Spring will arrive Chicago. I promise it will get here.

I get a lot of crap from my friends for my unrepentant winter-boosterism and fairly so, but everyone knows that the best part of a good Midwestern winter is how much sweeter it makes the spring.

There's something so completely and utterly-joyful about the first warm, sunny day after a long winter. When the grass is still brown and the trees bare but the air tells you that better things are coming. If there were a way to bottle the feeling of walking around in a tee shirt for the first time, it would be the hottest thing since sliced crack.

The Christmas Party - On Warmer Music's Christmas Mix 2012

Christmas music is easily my most uncritically sentimental music of that year and God bless it for that. Christmas is the one time of the year that I still let myself go all out and try to recreate my childhood (unlike the rest of my generation which seems hell bent on recreating every aspect of their childhood in a bubbling nostalgia bath as soon and as often as possible).

Of course at the same time, so much Christmas music is produced with such insufferably cheeriness that it's, well, insufferable. God knows the holidays are just as much about disappointment, an inability to recreate the past and the passage of time as about blithe celebration. Hopefully this mix will succeed in balancing that hope and alongside songs about the imperfect reality that is more often our lot.

Celebrate Leap Day With Chisel!

Sometimes spring is just as much a state of mind as a season and today was one of those days. Chicago may have had an historically warm winter this year but that doesn't mean that it was an easy one. Personally speaking, this season has been more than its usual grind. So it was without shedding a tear for my beloved snow that never fell, that I awoke to nearly 60 degree temperatures with a smile on my lips and spring in my step. On these early spring-like days I'm a sucker for two things - driving with the windows down and relentlessly energetic music. So with my trebly speakers blaring out the open windows, I headed off to work this morning, my ears full of Chisel and my head full of Leap Day cheer.

Covering Our Bases - The Ted Leo Covers Mix

There are some bands or artists that you just grow up with. They're seminal to your musical development and act like cool older siblings, showing you the musical ropes, opening your mind and pointing out other cool things worth checking out along the way. To me, Ted Leo is certainly an artist who fits this bill. Sure, I was waned on the Beatles, cut my teeth on the Clash and first held indie rock's hand with the Pixies, but all those bands were gone before my time and traded in a lot of classic touchstones I'd grown up with. Ted, on the other hand was still hitting his stride as I got into him (even if he was already into his second decade of his career) and thus he came to serve a my guide to a number of musical and intellectual worlds.


Leo's catholic musical taste (no, not in the religious sense), voracious appetite and seemingly natural playing aptitude have mad him a voracious cover-er of songs, such that his number of recorded covers has now topped the quarter-century mark. Along the way he's hit everything from classic rock to dance pop to rap and Top 40. Oh, and soul. And reggae, and folk, and alternative, and... well you get it.

Covering Our Bases - The Beatles (Pt. 1)

I grew up on the Beatles. I'm one of those people. Terri Hemmert's Breakfast With The Beatles was the soundtrack driving to church every Sunday of my childhood. I have strong opinions on the Capitol stereo mixes and the remastered albums of 2009, I believe that all groups of four can be divided into Johns, Pauls, Georges and Ringos and I believe that the Beatles, if not invented, at least popularized and and helped define the modern rock band. From the expectation of constant exploration to the redefinitional self-titled album to the drug influences to the folk period to the... well everything, the Beatles template has defined rock as we know it. And you know what, I'm incredibly happy for that. Their musicianship, restlessness, reverence for tradition, humor and songwriting abilities have never been fully matched and are about the best legacy that rock could ask for.


It is with this in mind that On Warmer Music presents its first batch of Beatles covers. It is done adivisedly, given the fact that every shitty band since 1964 has, at some point or another, banged out a Beatles cover. These are songs that add something to the original, show us something new about the artist or otherwise stand out in some way. Enjoy!

"Johnny Appleseed" - Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros

Transmission of ideas has always been something that's interested me. As a history major, I'm attuned to how the spread of concepts, the course, speed and mechanism of their journey alter both global and personal history. Writing about music also brings up this idea, because, it is by its very nature at attempt to spread both musical content and analysis. You do it because you're passionate enough about something that you feel compelled to share your opinions and passions (and also self-important enough to think they might appeal to anyone).

Our Concert Could Be Your Life

Elvis Costello never said that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture", despite what you may have heard. I'm glad too, because although many of music's joys are ineffable, that's no reason not to try to put them into words. Michael Azerrad knows this better than most people, as the author of Our Band Could Be Your Life, the seminal history of the "post-punk" or "alternative" or "D.I.Y." or "whatever name you care to give it" movement of brash, independent and unfiltered music that bubbled up around the country during the 1980's before jumping the charts in 1992 (to very mixed results).


The subtitle of Azerrad's book is "Scenes From The American Indie Underground" and it's not unfair to say that the bands chronicled in this book functionally started the musical genre that is now ubiquitously and unhelpfully referred to as "indie rock." Of the 13 bands profiled only one, Sonic Youth is still going. A few such as Mission of Burma, Big Black, the Butthole Surfers and even the Replacements have reformed (although the latter was a two song, studio-only affair). But the influence they project onto the scene today is almost incalculable.

Live Preview - Ted Leo & the Pharmacists

It’s a good week to be a Chicagoan! On top of having a three day music/arts festival pull up down the block from me this weekend, I’ve also been graced with not one but two visits from punk torch-carries Theodore Francis Leo and his Pharmacists.


In the best use of taxpayer money in the history of the world, Ted and the boys will be playing a free show Monday Night at architectural and sonic gem Millennium Park as part of the city's Downtown Sound series. Tuesday night however, I won’t have to do anything more than hop on the #74 bus for The Fireside Bowl, a classic Chicago punk club/bowling alley that Ted has been playing for over a decade.

I’ll have reviews later in the week. Meanwhile, here’s your sweet taste below.

Track Review - "On Warmer Music" - Chisel

“On Warmer Music”

A fitting call-to-arms for this blog, “On Warmer Music” is the lead track off Chisel’s third and final album, Set You Free. Chisel was Ted Leo’s first band with bassist Chris Norberg and drummer John Dugan. They formed at Notre Dame and were indie stalwarts throughout the 90s, turning out three albums and assorted singles of wickedly catchy and fuzzy mod-punk before breaking up in 1997.