It's Music time, baby

Yay, it's super happy fun ball time! (Hopefully without the vertigo or slurred speech!)

[Disclaimer- I am just a fan writing about musicians whom I love using the info I've gathered from the albums I own, shows I've seen, and the stuff I've read on myspace, facebook, wikipedia, etc... so if I got anything wrong or smixed up, just tell me nicely and I'll do my best to rectify the sitch, werd?]

This is the music post in which I salivate over Jenny Owen Youngs and friends. It's long overdue. Basically, if you've listened to Jenny you've probs listened to Bess Rogers, Dan Romer, Allie Moss, Andrew Futral, Saul Simon-Macwilliams, Ingrid Michaelson... I could go on because JOY and peeps are the kind of friends that make music together and apart not unlike all the members of Broken Social Scene. Let me try and break it down for you.

There's solo Jenny Owen Youngs. There's solo Bess Rogers. Bess Rogers has also appeared on JOYs solo work and written songs with her. There's a podcast called Once More With Feeling starring Bess Rogers, Jenny Owen Youngs and Andrew Futral, and it sometimes has a video counterpart. There's Age of Rockets, a band that includes Bess Rogers, Andrew Futral, Adam Christgau and Saul Simon-Macwilliams. Adam Christgau has also played on Jenny's solo stuff. Dan Romer is a producer/mixer extraordinaire who is also lead vocals/guitar for Fire Flies. He has worked on albums for Bess Rogers, Jenny Owen Youngs, Ingrid Michaelson, etc. There's Robot Explosion, a band that includes Andrew Futral, Bess Rogers, Jenny Owen Youngs, and Saul Simon-Macwilliams. Saul Simon-Macwilliams has appeared on Bess and Jenny's solo work. There's solo Allie Moss. She has also been backup vocals/tour support for Bess Rogers and Ingrid Michaelson. There's a 'dutch pop' project called Ingrid + Andrew that is Ingrid Michaelson and Andrew Futral. There's Jukebox the Ghost, a band Jenny has written/performed a song with. There's Au Revoir Simone, a band that has an Age of Rocket's remixed song. There's Gregory and the Hawk, Jenny's friends whose songs she likes to cover sometimes. The singer for Gregory and the Hawk, Meredith Godreau has also appeared in Jenny's solo work. There's Chris Kuffner who has played bass/double bass/produced for most of these people at some point, no exaggeration. I think that's all the major players. There is also Chris Garneau who is friends with many of these people and is also a musician, but to the best of my knowledge he hasn't actually played/recorded with them (but Chris Kuffner has played bass for him.) My apologies to any musicians who play on these various albums whom I haven't mentioned. You rock too! And of course I wouldn't really know about many of these fabulous musicians had Jenny Owen Youngs not opened for her friend Regina Spektor a few years back. I heart ReSpekt! Her voice appears in an early JOY song. So, did you catch all that?

ps- Do you tweet? You can follow Jenny, Bess, Ingrid, Allie, and Andrew on Twitter and see what kinds of wacky convos these friends have! For other band info you can follow Jukebox the Ghost and Au Revoir Simone as well. There is a twitter for the Gregory and the Hawk fan site, Wide as the Ocean. If you want the others... look them up. But most of them (like Dan) don't appear to tweet. Not yet, at least ;)

Oh no! I almost forgot to include the link to Ingrid Michaelson's song about Twitter. It's hysterical (and includes a little Eminem reference) :D

AND NOW... what you've all been waiting for.... THE VIDEOS!!

I'm going to start you off with one of my fav JOY songs, Fuck Was I. From her first album and edited (censored) for the interwebs, unfortunately. Bess is there too:


This is an excellent live recording of Jenny singing Voice On Tape. The original album recording of this song includes snippets of a voicemail from Regina Spektor. There is also a Robot Explosion version of this song, but I like this one the best:


If you don't watch any more of these videos... 1- Shame on you! 2- Watch this one before you leave! It's Jenny's cover of Hot In Herre and it's brilliant! When I saw her play it live, at the end the band started morphing the song into Oasis (Wonderwall) and it was amazing:


Here's a great new video from her album that just came out this month. The song is Clean Break, the album is Transmitter Failure:


Here is the first ever video counterpart to Jenny, Bess and Andrew's podcast, Once More With Feeling. They are nuts and it's funny:


This is a so-so quality video of a live performance of Bess Rogers playing Modern Man, accompanied by Dan Romer:


This is just a snippet of Secret (an old performance of a song on Jenny's new album) but it shows Jenny and Bess singing together and Chris playing bass between them. It also has good sound quality:


Factoid: Transitter Failure is a song that Jenny and Bess wrote waaay back in the day and performed on the Robot Explosion EP. Recently Jenny redid the song and it became the title track for her second album. Here is a performance of the song, it's so beautiful:


There isn't much out there on Youtube as far as Dan Romer/Fire Flies performances go, but this one isn't too bad:


Here is a great one of Allie Moss singing I Will Go Anywhere:


This past winter Ingrid did a song with Sara Bareilles called Winter Song. Embedding is disabled (for all Ingrid Michaelson official vids, actually), but it is soooo worth the click.

Here is a pretty good live recording of Ingrid Michaelson and Jason Mraz performing her song, You and I:


This is a fun and super recent video of Jenny and Jukebox the Ghost performing Last Person, the song that JOY wrote with/for JTG. When I saw them in concert here in Chicago recently JTG performed the song WITHOUT Jenny and I was sad:


This is Au Revoir Simone singing Fallen Snow, the song that was remixed by Age of Rockets/Andrew Futral:


This is my favorite Au Revoir Simone song, Stars. It's actually one of my fav songs of all my fav songs/artists:


Here is Gregory and the Hawk performing Boats and Birds followed by JOY covering GATH followed by GATH covering Beyonce!:




AAANNNNDDDD I'll leave you with Jenny covering a Dan Romer song, Rays. She also talks a little bit about her covers and is her awesome, weird self. I have heard the chord progression/medley that she talks about, twice :D