About a month ago I had a chance to talk to Keller Williams via phone about his new album, this summer’s tour, his new bandmates, Bob Weir, the future, and everything in between. I believe he was walking around in the woods at the time as you’ll see in his first response. Throughout I’ve thrown in some pictures from his recent Urbana show at The Canopy Club on 04/25/2007. Check it out:

Kane Jamison: You’ve always been solo, other than some Keller Williams Incident shows, Keller and the Keels, the new album, Dream, and now the WMD’S tour. I was wondering what sparked the transition towards working with the full band more often.

Keller Williams: Well first and foremost it is definitely not a tour, we are just doing…. Whoa! There’s a snake… hello!… Uhhh… oh my god that’s a big snake right there, hang on just a second….

Ok… I’m just going to walk over here… Let’s see, we are just doing four festivals, four weekends in a row, that’s what we have right now. There is a possibility that one day there will be a tour, but as of right now we are just kind of playing it slow and playing it easy. I’m definitely excited about these festivals though. It’s kind of… I’ve always wanted to do the band projects, and a long long time ago there wasn’t really anything in the budget for it, you know? I just wasn’t able to afford it, the money wasn’t there, and it just wasn’t feasible to do it, and then all of a sudden, it just started to work as a solo act. And now I can afford it, and I’m really excited about it. It’s not going to be anything different, it’s not going to be a new sound, I’m not venturing out to look for something completely new, it’s going to be a lot of the similar songs, and it’s just going to be new life breathed into those familiar songs. It’s still going to be me, people are still going to see a Keller Williams show, it’s just going to have that new life breathed into it.

Kane: Alright, you said you were excited about the upcoming festivals. I personally am a Summer Camp fan being from Central Illinois. You’ve been a staple there in recent years, why that particular festival?

Keller: Simply because I get invited. There’s so many festivals that want to change it up so much and have acts every now and then, but I think it’s really great to be able to play a festival and go back there every year and see how it progresses and see the same folks. You know, it’s them that invite me, and I’m really grateful that they do.

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Heads up for some new videos at NotMTV.tv.  Highlights from Summer Camp 2005 include Keller Williams, Oteil and the Peacemakers, Groovatron, Umphrey’s McGee, Hot Buttered Rum String Band, RAQ, moe., Michael Franti and Spearhead, and Particle.  Click on the picture to head straight there.

I just caught wind of an amusing application via False45th called the Last.fm Mainstream-O-Meter. If you have a Last.fm account you can just pop in your username and it will compare your listening habits to anyone else who has listened to that artist, and then spit out your “mainstreamness.” You can check out my results here, anyone got me beat?

Sidenote, I think I’d prefer they named it “mainstreaminess,” taking a page out of Colbert’s book.

It’s been a long time since I have contributed to the Contrast Podcast.  For those who don’t know, it’s something of a meta-podcast of music bloggers.  If you take a look at the blogroll on the sidebar of the website, you can see just how extensive the list of contributers has become.  The theme of podcast #63 happens to be a song chain.  Three different podcasts were made, starting here, proceeding to here, and ending in our current episode.

If you haven’t caught on, Person A picks a song, Person B picks a song based off of the previous song, etc, etc.  The song preceeding mine was The Walker Brothers, “Deadlier Than The Male”, picked by ZB from So the wind won’t blow it all away.  While I know nothing of The Walker Brothers, whose music sounds like a theme song from a long lost James Bond movie, I do know of The Walker Brothers Pancake House, in the Chicago suburbs where I grew up.  My immediate reaction:  Jack Johnson’s “Banana Pancakes.”

While these podcasts are always unique and interesting due to Tim’s editing and the wide variety of music and contributers, this episode is particularily fun to listen to because of everybody’s explanation of why they picked the song they did.  Without further stalling, here’s what you need:

MP3: Song Chain Part 3

Contrast Podcast iTunes Subscription: Click Here

Contrast Podcast Website: Song Chain Part 3

A couple weeks ago FADER dedicated their current issue to Jerry Garcia, and on top of that, decided to distribute the .pdf of it for free.  Though the Grateful Dead will give any band a run for a spot in my all time top 5, I’ve rarely posted on them here at Burning Oak and the last two posts plus this one make up the first three Grateful Dead posts at the site.  Sad, eh?  Oh well, I’ll make up for it with a Garcia podcast, link, a free Garcia magazine, and if you stay tuned in the next week or so, a Garcia poster/shirt giveaway compliments of Burning Oak and FADER magazine.  Good stuff, no?

Podcast: http://www.thefader.com/blog/articles/category/podcasts

Magazine PDF: http://thefader.cachefly.net/thefader_issue46.pdf

Items to be given away (details soon):

Shirt: Link here

Poster: Link here

“If you get confused, listen to the music play.”