MUSIC The Georgia Straight Confessions, an outlet for submitting revelations about your private lives—or for the voyeurs among us who want to read what other people have disclosed.
NEW ORLEANS INSPIRED CUISINE
Morton laughs at mortality There’s no point making a solo
2 record unless you’re going to do
Scan to confess Let me take a sele I just changed all the lightbulbs in my bathroom to “daylight white” from “soft white” because it’s better light for taking selfies.
Sober New Year One of my new year’s resolutions is to quit drinking. Waking up hung-over every morning was no fun for me, plus booze got too expensive. Call me the buzzkill, but alcohol is something that I can definitely live without. I realize that I don’t need booze to make me happy anymore. Here’s to a sober 2017!
Safe Streets I think that if the city councils of Vancouver,Burnaby and New West spent as much on plowing snow as they did on their hair products or well-deserved raises then our streets would be driveable and walkable - no getting stuck in ice patches and no slipping on black ice.
FAT TUESDAY!
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Pasta is $ 95 from 5 till 9 Come down for 1/2 price pasta and free live jazz! BLUEMARTINIJAZZCAFE.COM 1516 YEW STREET, VANCOUVER, BC | 604 428 2691
Resolutions
JANUARY 11
From time to time I’ll almost drink enough to bravely contact you. Almost. And I’ll probably creep your Facebook every day. Just like last year!
Fifteen Minutes Of Fame I’ve performed on stage in the past numerous times but am in a spot right now where it does not occur. Because I always did it for the music, I’m not that upset about not getting the limelight but could see how a celebrity would really feel that their world is crumbling.
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JANUARY LIVE MUSIC SHOWCASE TUESDAY, JANUARY 3RD 8:00 THONG SUNDAY, JANUARY 8TH 7:00 KRISTIN BUNYAN TUESDAY, JANUARY 10TH 8:00 TOKYO BLUE SATURDAY, JANUARY 14TH 7:00 SAIL WITH KINGS W/ RUNE & MATTHEW ST. JOHN SUNDAY, JANUARY 15TH 8:00 BREAKTHROUGH COUNTRY MUSIC PROJECT WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18TH 8:00 MAN MADE TIME THURSDAY, JANUARY 19TH 8:00 MOSAIC RIDDIM FRIDAY, JANUARY 20TH 8:00 ELEANOR RISING THANKS FOR VOTING US BEST STRIP CLUB!
SATURDAY, JANUARY 21ST 7:00 THE POOLSHARKS W/ SAM THE ASTRONAUT SUNDAY, JANUARY 22ND 8:00 BREAKTHROUGH COUNTRY MUSIC PROJECT TUESDAY, JANUARY 24TH 8:00 WICKED LIQUOR FRIDAY, JANUARY 27TH 7:00 WOODSHED SUPPLY CO W/ STEPHANIE STANDERWICK SATURDAY, JANUARY 28TH 7:00 COASTLINE PILOT W/ THE ECHOS & BRENDAN CADE SUNDAY, JANUARY 29TH 8:00 BREAKTHROUGH COUNTRY MUSIC PROJECT
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26 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT JANUARY 5 – 12 / 2017
something fans won’t expect. On that front Kyle Morton executes almost perfectly on What Will Destroy You. The key word there is almost, because as the Portland-based singer notes from Los Angeles, the first record where he goes it alone isn’t a complete departure from the themes he explores with his full-time Portlandia project Typhoon. For proof of that, look no further than What Will Destroy You’s haunting leadoff track, “Poor Bastard”. A winning exercise in glitchy antifolk, the track begins with Morton singing “I awoke inside a coffin/Being lowered into the ground.” Evidently, you can take the boy out of the orchestral 11-member Typhoon, but you can’t take an obsession with death out of the boy. You can, however, put a twist on things. “What Will Destroy You sort of walks near the darkness a bit,” the wonderfully outgoing Morton says, speaking on his cellphone. “But I also think it has its funnier moments, where, say, Typhoon doesn’t have that comic side. I mean, the first song on the record is kind of a parody of the character that I’ve become with Typhoon, which is sort of death-obsessed. Someone asked me ‘Why do you always write about death?’ And I was like, ‘Well, on this record I only do a little bit.’ ” If mortality is often on Morton’s mind, that probably has plenty to do with a childhood marked by multiple organ failures thanks to Lyme disease. For the stripped-down and often skeletal What Will Destroy You, however, he was more interested in what makes life worth living—namely, love. Fittingly, the singer comes at the most complex of human emotions in many ways. The devastating “The Aftermath” details a reconnect between two former lovers with lines like “Seducer’s calculus/I feigned an accident/Reached out and grazed your neck,” this ending the morning after with “And when I leave you will own my nothing/When I leave it will mean nothing.” All grey-November guitars and ghost-world vocals, “Survivalist Fantasy” sets love in a postapocalyptic world where two survivors are having serious trouble keeping the flame going thanks to a lack of outside stimulus. But lest one think that What Will Destroy You is more depressing than Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, things come to a life-affirming end with the celestial country ballad “My Little Darlin Knows My Nature”. That’s where the observation “But every year I am getting older/And I lose my good looks, lose my charms” is offset by this album-ending ode to a loved one: “I will be your witness if you be my wife.” While the temptation might be to assume that Morton is unlucky in love, that couldn’t be further from the truth, the singer having married his girlfriend of nearly a decade in 2016. Just because he’s obsessed with death with Typhoon doesn’t mean that he’s convinced life isn’t worth living. On that note, he couldn’t be more excited about stepping out from the considerable shadow of Typhoon for a solo tour. “As anyone can see if they listen to my songs, I’m capable of some despair,” Morton says with a laugh. “Despite the general climate of the past year, which has been, um, lunacy with one absurdity after another, personally, I got married in 2016 and I’ve been happier than I’ve ever been. That’s an encouraging thought. I don’t know if anyone expects things to get much better as you get older, but for me it’s been an upward trend. One can write out of despair and it can be beautiful. And on the flip side, one can write out of a kind of euphoria, and even though the songs aren’t necessarily elated, that was the case on this end.” > MIKE USINGER
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Kyle Morton plays the Rickshaw on Monday (January 9).