Edward Sharpe and the 10 Amgios

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It was hard to miss “Home” a couple of years ago, as the hit single from Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros’ first album, Up From Below, penetrated pop and public radio airwaves as well as TV commercials and soundtracks. The Up With People-meets-Manson Family vibe of the sprawling band has charmed many, though some critics have doubted the sincerity of their sunny perspective.

A collective that probably could only have begun in Los Angeles, the band was formed by Alex Ebert, who had previously sought dance-rock stardom with Ima Robot. After beating his youthful demons, Ebert met Jade Castrinos, whose powerful vocals propelled “Home.” They brought together another dozen or so rotating collaborators, and a musical family was born.

One of those SoCal collaborators was Nora Kirkpatrick, an actress who met the pair at Burning Man. A co-star of ABC Family’s “Greek” and the web series “Dorm Life,” Kirkpatrick joined the band on accordion, though she lacked experience on the instrument at the time. She now also adds keyboards, harmonica, tambourine and backing vocals, and has begun writing scores and songs for films as a third job.

LEO spoke with her recently, as she pulled her bicycle over to the side of the road, to discuss the band’s mellower second album, Here, its more upbeat follow-up, and the lasting virtues of the comedy film “Three Amigos!”

LEO: Between your acting work and the people you’ve mentioned in previous interviews, you seem to love comedy and improv.

Nora Kirkpatrick: Yeah, that’s been all my training. I try to get back to that whenever I can ... “Dorm Life” was a bit of that, though “Greek” was all scripted.

LEO: Does that training help when you’re in a band with a dozen people?

NK: Yeah, it does. I think there’s a lot of real-world applications in acting training. It can come in really handy to communicate with different people, even though you’re not acting in real life.

LEO: I read that “Three Amigos!” was a big influence on you and your comedy.

NK: Oh, yeah! Totally! I think that Dorothy Gish monologue that Martin Short gives was probably the first thing I ever memorized. I told my parents I needed to show them something, and I sat them down and performed the monologue. That’s when I told them I was interested in theater.

LEO: So that’s when you came out to them as an actor?

NK: (laughs) Yeah, exactly … I was 7, I think.

LEO: You joined the band after you met Alex and Jade, because you’d just graduated from UCLA and were figuring out what to do next, right?

NK: Yeah, that’s basically right. That was about five years ago, and we’ve been touring and recording ever since.

LEO: The new album is mellower, more serious than the first.

NK: Yeah, we recorded 40 songs and ended up splitting them up over two albums. They seem more mellow, but they’re not the only kinds of songs we recorded. We have an album coming out in early 2013 that’s a bit more rambunctious.

LEO: How’s the live show?

NK: Amazing. Exciting. Because we have so many people on stage, there’s a great light show happening, the new songs are great — we’re playing songs from all three albums, so you’ll hear songs you’ve never heard before.

Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros
with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Wednesday, Sept. 26
Iroquois Amphitheater
1080 Amphitheater Road
iroquoisamphitheater.com
$30; 8 p.m.

Photo by Laure Vincent Bouleau

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

Catherine Irwin’s time comes

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Catherine Irwin is nothing if not patient. Her songs are leisurely and deliberate, seductive in their Southern Gothic charms for those who let them take over. They parallel her solo career itself. Her new solo album, Little Heater, is her second, following 2002’s Cut Yourself a Switch.

Best known for co-leading the influential country/folk band Freakwater since the late 1980s — a band that has released only one album in the 21st century so far — Irwin has shown she can write faster when required. Neko Case’s singing partner, Kelly Hogan, commissioned a song for her recent solo album, which Irwin quickly crafted. (Case, Jolie Holland and Califone have also sung her songs.)

“I guess I’m just real slow,” Irwin laughs. “I don’t have any good reason … I don’t think it’s any better, necessarily, because I took 10 years to make it.”

Irwin had written a couple albums of material during that time but didn’t consider it up to her standards. “But I don’t think that’s the best way to proceed … If someone else was in charge, rather than me, I might’ve made several records.

“I need structure — I went to the Brown School! I was trained to need structure by an institution lacking in structure.”

She did not thrive at that school, getting thrown out for “chronic truancy.” Ironically, another Brown School student (a graduate) was Will Oldham, who has been releasing approximately one album per year for the past 20 years. Oldham sings on two songs on Little Heater, “Mockingbird” and “To Break Your Heart.”

Irwin’s songs are beautiful but dark, tinged with a pinch of humor and a pound of lonesome, full of what her bio brags as “loss, despair, self-destruction and delusion,” and her country has more in common with Hank Sr. or Hazel Dickens than modern pop stars like Blake Shelton. Irwin attributes that to her roots.

“My father was from Northern Ireland. That explains a lot, I think, about what’s wrong with me,” she says, breaking into another laugh.

“Basically — the gloom. I’m not sure, really, what that explains, but there was a lot of Clancy Brothers going on in the house, a lot of bagpipe music.”

Her musical education was also formed at the “hippie schools” she attended (“when I did go to school”), where folk musicians like Pete Seeger and John Jacob Niles were taught to unassuming school kids.

Another Irish-American Louisville native, Tara Jane O’Neil, produced and performs on Irwin’s latest album; steel guitarist Marc Orleans and members of Ida add parts; and Irwin recorded songs by both of this week’s concert’s opening acts, fellow Kentuckians Wooden Wand and Brett Ralph.

Enlisting O’Neil as a producer worked well for Irwin. “She records herself and makes these beautiful-sounding records in her house, and I’d been trying to do recording on the computer. It turns out I’m not very well-suited for that.”

O’Neil “… has many skills, and some of them are quite practical. Little things like getting everybody in the room at the same time … It was pretty great. I don’t think I’d ever had a pleasant experience recording anything before. I was listening back to this record the other day and I thought, ‘Oh! That’s nice! I remember that and Tara hopping around in a kimono, there was a little dog there ...’

“I’ve never listened back to a record before and felt anything but some sense of dread. Like, ‘Oh, that was where somebody lost their mind and had to be taken out of the room,” she laughs. “’That’s where somebody had a tantrum. I remember that part now.’”

They recorded the album in a studio in Woodstock, N.Y., one year ago. Irwin felt at home in the musically active hippie town. “There are some people who look a lot like the people here. Like the kind of Civil War re-enactor people you see walking around here … It’s like that, but with tie-dye. Really nice people were bringing us kelp sandwiches.”

Catherine Irwin with Wooden Wand and Brett Ralph’s Kentucky Chrome Review
Saturday, Sept. 22
The Rudyard Kipling
422 W. Oak St.
therudyardkipling.com
$10; 8 p.m.

Photo by Sarah Lyon c. 2012 LEO Weekly

Blues clues

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The Bad Reeds launch their second full-length album on Friday at Headliners, and they’re bringing some friends. Hunter Embry caught us up.

LEO: Solid rock is having another moment now, and your new album sounds very in synch with the new ZZ Top, who are perpetually hip. How do you feel about blues-inspired rock’s place in the commercial world?

Hunter Embry: Blues is the roots, everything else is the fruits. It’s a warm, comfy feeling for us. We started what would eventually be The Bad Reeds in high school (seven or eight years go), and the style of music was in response to everything else that was around at the time. What we were doing wasn’t hip and was better suited for our parents and their friends. It’s nice to hear music of a similar style on the radio now.

LEO: You had some local rock stars help produce this. How did that happen?

HE: Scott Carney and Peter Searcy are two of my good friends. I have the utmost respect for what they’ve done throughout their musical careers, thus far, and feel that they have a completely different “ear” than I do (different from each other, as well). I reached out to Peter because I felt he was very good at taking any style of music and making it pop. On the other hand, I wanted Scott to help broaden the sonic landscape of our songs, space it up a bit, as he does so very well.

LEO: How long has this line-up been together? Since the 1970s?

HE: Three of us — Dane, Brantley and I — got together when we were teenagers. John Clay Burchett is beating the skins for us now (Friday’s release will be his second show). Steve Sturgill will also be joining us on keys, and Rachel Hagan on backup vocals. And we may have some friends join us as well (hint, hint).