Behold the riches of Outside Lands: If the existing spate of night shows weren't enough, maybe this will be: Beck -- yes, that Beck, of "Loser" and Sea Change and Modern Guilt -- is playing a surprise show at Bimbo's 365 Club this Thursday night! And it's just him -- no opener.
But you better move quickly if you want tickets.
If you didn't manage to get Outside Lands tickets before they sold out, and you still want to go the festival, we've got some good news for you: Experts say that even a scalped ticket to the three-day festival this weekend is the best music festival deal of the summer.
The data comes courtesy of SeatGeek, a site that connects buyers to the best deals on secondary ticket marketplaces and tracks reams of information about what different events go for once they've officially sold out. SeatGeek's Will Flaherty tells All Shook Down that of all similar festivals this summer, Outside Lands three-day passes are going for the lowest average price relative to their original value -- $251 compared to the final face price of $225, or about a 10 percent premium.
"In terms of sheer price for a three-day festival, it ranks pretty highly," Flaherty says. He notes that not only are scalped Outside Lands tickets cheap relative to their face value, but, in absolute terms, they're also cheaper than comparable festivals like Lollapalooza or Austin City Limits. Prior to Lollapalooza last weekend, tickets were going for an average of $397 online. Austin City Limits isn't until October, but secondary prices are already averaging $314, according to SeatGeek.
Birds & Batteries have been making their own blend of electronic Americana, with a side of funk, since Mike Sempert came to San Francisco from Boston in 2006. His first album as Birds & Batteries, Selections from Nature vs. Nature, was built around home demos he made, but his melancholic take on life was already evident, along with an eclectic method of arranging his sharp vignettes of life and love. Since then, he's made two more albums and two EPs, each showing a marked evolution in production and songwriting. In the studio, Sempert tends to do most of the singing and playing, but on new album Stray Light, which dropped this week, he enlisted some of the players from his touring band -- Christopher Walsh on guitar, Jill Heinke on bass and synthesizer, and Colin Fahrner on drums -- to flesh out some of the tracks. The album sees Birds and Batteries moving away from their country/Americana sound with a collection that's decidedly more pop/rock. We recently spoke with Sempert about how the new album came together and his plans for the future of the band.
Stray Light is an evocative title. Is there a deeper meaning to the words?
Stray Light is the light that got away, but isn't lost. It's the light we often forget about. Light travels to us from far away. It's free and there's so much of this light that it can't be contained or accounted for. Stray light is the extra light. Who can say which light is the light ambling around the universe and which light is the light that came here for us to enjoy? They're indistinguishable, so maybe Stray Light is just light. I don't know.
[This post is part of our week-long preview coverage of Outside Lands 2012. Check out more of All Shook Down's Outside Lands coverage, and catch Sharon Van Etten's set this Friday at 1:15 p.m. on Outside Lands' Sutro stage.]
In music today, there's no other instrument quite like it: Sharon Van Etten's voice. It's the centerpiece to her three albums. On the most recent release, this year's Tramp, her heavy-hearted insomniac's yawn of an alto strayed from the modest arrangements found on her first two long-players and entered into a vast, slightly dilapidated cathedral of sound engineered by her co-producer, Aaron Dessner of The National.
"Aaron helped me open myself more to let something happen and he pushed me to use more distortion and ambience and drone," Van Etten says. "There's one song, 'Magic Chords,' that I didn't even want to be on the record. It's a little poppier that what I tend to write. I said to him, 'This doesn't really sound like me.' It was kind of an accident, writing it. And he said, 'You wrote the song, you recorded the song -- it's you.'"
