The Swerve - Skysaw Live Review

Skysaw at Hard Rock Cafe - June 28, 2011

Moar...

...The highlight of the show was "Cathedral." Chamberlin and Anthony Pirog traded riffs throughout until Chamblerlin let loose with a solo that brought the audience to their feet with wild cheers encouraged by Mike Reina. Chamberlin is a musician first, and his skill allows him to forsake the theatrics of other drummers. The ease with which he plays most songs allows the audience to underestimate him until he lets loose with a solo of this caliber.

While it would be great to see Skysaw play Pittsburgh again, hopefully they will land a venue more appropriate for their talent and sound.

Videos from Jimmy Chamberlin's Skysaw Live

From the 28th June @ the Hard Rock Cafe 2011. Thanks to VastOceanCommuter

'Another' [...Be Specific] Interview with Jimmy Chamberlin

Over at the Washington Post thus;

...You're just going out on short tour. Are you thinking about a full tour later?
...There's lots of ways to put a band over these days. Doing it 200 people at a time doesn't make a lot of sense to me economically, spiritually and energetically. It doesn't add up to what it used to. You used to go out and play to a thousand people and look at [sales figures] the next day and see that 800 of those people went out and bought the record ….For me the idea of going out for two, three years to build a band in sweaty nightclubs, having done that for most of my life and being in my 40s now [is untenable]. It's not that I don't enjoy playing, but I think three good ideas are better than 50 shows ….Part of the reason I left my old band is because it was all encompassing, and I didn't have time for my family. It's just a different set of values.
When you say your old band, do you mean the Pumpkins or Zwan?
No — I was talking about the Pumpkins. Part of the reason that I left the Pumpkins is because it was becoming all-consuming. Being the only member of that band who had two kids and a wife, it was a hard decision, but ultimately it was a decision I'm comfortable with.

Was it hard to decompress from being a Pumpkin? There must have been a level of post-traumatic stress involved.
There was no post-traumatic stress, but there was a level of decompression. It took a while to be like, okay, I do have a family, I do have two kids and a wife. From the start of [Pumpkins album] “Zeitgeist” to the time I left, we had been full tilt for three years. When you have a four year-old son, that's 75% of his life...

 

Jimmy Chamberlin - Songwriter

Putting the Sophistication back into Society

Check out the full interview, over at Songwriters on Process,  right >here<

Selected morsels >below<

On Skysaw; With a song like "Sad Reasons" on this record, I sat down in my office and just played the song from start from start to finish on my guitar... It didn't involve a lot of process other than making myself available to what was going on around me. That song in particular was a telling exercise because I was interested in how it would change over time after I recorded it and again after I delivered it to the band.  But the first version I laid down in my studio in the basement is the one that made it to the record."

On Tonight Tonight; "...the muse can take many different forms. Ideally, the greatest gift it to be hand-delivered a song from the cosmos and have it be the version. Billy Corgan often writes the same way. Like with "Tonight Tonight," he said he just woke up one morning, went down to the piano, and played it. And much like with a lot of those drum parts that happened in the Pumpkins, the first time he played it for me, the drum part you hear is the first drum part I thought of."

On playing the guitar; "I'm not that sophisticated of a guitar player to be able to come up with ... the riff of the century."

On Tolkien, Thelonious Monk and Mark Twain; In the arranging and production of songs, when I'm building them from the chords up and putting layerings of production in a song, I want to feel like I'm building this Tolkienesque world of music that's available to people on many layers... Thelonius Monk was always good at playing something that on the surface appeared simple, but as you delved deeper you realized that the chord structure on which the melody was based was so complex.. The idea behind playing the drums is to play something simple enough so that people can rhythmically attach to it, but as an artist my job is also to satisfy myself with a sophistication that exists within the music.  Mark Twain invites you into his world with seeming simplicity, but once you get into his writing, you realize how complex it is.

 On Zeitgeist; When I was with the Pumpkins and we did  Zeitgeist, it had been almost seven years since we made the album before it.  So having to go and play that style of drumming again, I was often I was at loggerheads with myself because I was saying, "I don't really play like this anymore..."  It became difficult to mine that stuff from 1996 and relearn how to play like that.  It would be like writing in the style you did when you were a sophomore in college.  That would be difficult since you've moved on...

Again, go check out the full thing. It's rather insightful indeed.

Gannin Arnold DVD - Available Here

And by here, I mean here > http://www.alfred.com/Products/Gannin-Arnold-5-World-Class-Drummers--93-DV10027001.aspx