Last night, my friend Dan visited Kyle and I. Dan’s a musician. He’s one of the few people I know from high school who went on to do something with his life. However, I did learn about an interesting endeavor by a guy I knew back then, Jacob Morgan.

Jacob, who apparently works for the Disney Channel in Southern California, is in a band called Pilbilly Knights. It’s a raunchy faux-cowboy band headed by Todd Lowe, the guy who plays Zack on Gilmore Girls.

(Jacob is the guy on the left)

And as much as I disapprove of what the writers are doing to Lane, Zack’s wife on that show, (She’s pregnant with twins and her annoying mother is living with her and Zack? What about Lane’s dream of drumming in a band? Lame!) I think Pilbilly Knights is pretty dern cool. I mean, cowboys? Songs about DUIs and chai tea? Zack from the Gilmore Girls? All awesome.

Check out Pilbilly Knight’s myspace page.

Somehow it completely escaped my notice that an album of Johnny Cash’s last songs, Amercan V: A Hundred Highways, was released in 2006. Cash wrote and recorded the vocals shortly before he died, and the songs were finished by other musicians.

Usually, an album completed after a musician’s death is pretty bad. You can always tell things were done to the songs that the artist wouldn’t have done himself, he had lived. But I think this Johhny Cash album is an exception. The songs on this album are mature meditations on death and life, and are often really sad, but they have a restrained elegance to them. The arrangements are suitably subtle and drift more towards blues than country. I hope when I’m on death’s door, I’m still producing art that is as relevant and interesting, although really, I’ll just be grateful if it’s readable.

Anyway, I’m really digging this tack from the album, God’s Gonna Cut You Down. Listen Here.

I am really really enjoying this mash-up by dj BC of hip-hop and dixieland jazz. Louie Armstrong and Method Man? Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Old Dirty Bastard? How does that work? And yet it so does. Oh and did I mention that you can download the whole album for free?

(Uh, once upon a tme, this was going to be a lit blog. I wonder what happened to that.)

This weekend, Kyle and I drove to Portland to see Sleater-Kinney’s last concert. The band, which is one of my favorites, is breaking up. It’s a bummer for a lot of reasons, among them:

1. They just released their best album ever
2. They are one of the few bands today creating music that is politically relevant, but still interesting and fun
3. They appeal to both men and woman, a rarity for an all-women band
4. They rock

We drove up on Friday, spent Saturday in the city, and drove back on Sunday. Since it’s a nine-hour drive to Portland, Kyle and I spent a lot of time in the car. But it was worth it. The concert was excellent and I got to go to Powell’s, where I bought several books, including a biography on Eugene O’Neill, the play Medea, and maps of Rome and Florence for our upcoming trip to Italy. I also discovered that I still get mad at Oregon drivers and that smoked trout goes really well with eggs.

(Corin Tucker, Janet Weiss, Carrie Brownstein)

Even though I’ve listened to Sleater-Kinney since college, I’ve only seen them three times in concert, twice in San Francisco and once in Portland. It took seeing them live to really understand how good the band is. If I hadn’t, it probably wouldn’t have sunk in that Janet Weiss is one of the best drummers, ever. She is flat-out phenomenal. She is also possibly one of the most unphotogenic people in the world. In all the pictures I’ve seen of her, she looks 45 and tired. In real life, she has a child-like, wide-eyed face that I guess the camera hates. Beyond all that, she is juggling so many balls as a drummer that I find her mesmerizing.

Before the band went on, Eddie Vedder came out on stage and played a folk song about the war and then sang “You Belong To Me” with Janet. He summed up the evening by saying that he had always wished he could have seen The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Moon, etc’s last shows, but he was grateful to be there to see Sleater-Kinney’s.

The band absolutely rocked throughout the show and two encores, going out with a definite bang. At the end, they played a choked-up version of “One More Hour” with lyrics like, “in one more hour / I will be gone / in one more hour / I’ll leave this room.” I left at 12:30 a.m., sweaty and tired, and feeling it was one of the best shows I’ve ever been to.

I’m very curious why the band broke up. It probably has to do with Corin having two small kids and their being together for 11 years and besides, bands don’t do well when they stay together forever. But to go out at the top of your game is also a little sad.

I still hold out hope that they may reunite after awhile. Or go on to make something even better.

Listen to Sleater-Kinney here.