Books

BYT Interviews: Cary Elwes

Jenn TisdaleSeptember 12, 2017

As you wish......

BooksFeaturedFilm & TVInterviews 06 min read

Duende District: FALL 2017 READING LIST

Svetlana LegeticSeptember 8, 2017

Small presses for the PoC win!...

ArtBooks 010 min read

Photos: National Book Festival

BYT at largeSeptember 5, 2017

A celebration of all the genres and writers we love the most...

BooksPhotos 03 min read

Your Best September

BYT at largeSeptember 1, 2017

Are you down with the clown or a fascist? It's one or the other. ...

ArtBooksFeaturedFilm & TVFunny StuffMusicRestaurants & BarsTheatre & Dance 034 min read

Preview: UNCENSORED – Banned Books Week

Kaylee DuganAugust 30, 2017

A book is a loaded gun....

BooksPhotosRestaurants & BarsStuff To Do In DC 03 min read

Meeting Dick Gregory

BYT at largeAugust 21, 2017

"That's a funny name, is that your real name?" ...

BooksFunny Stuff 03 min read

Giveaway: Brewer’s on the Block VIP Tickets (8/20)

Jenn TisdaleAugust 16, 2017

Buffy the Sober Slayer ...

Books 00 min read

Things To Do/Things To Know

Kaylee Dugan and Brandon WetherbeeAugust 15, 2017

We're living inside of the Matrix and we can prove it...

BooksMusicNews 03 min read

Free and Almost Free Things To Do In D.C.

Kaylee DuganAugust 8, 2017

Here we focus exclusively on the cheapest YET most satisfying entertainment to be found around DC....

ArtBooksFilm & TVMusic 06 min read

Things To Do/Things To Know

Brandon Wetherbee and Kaylee DuganAugust 2, 2017

We forgot how nice it felt to be proud of our city....

ArtBooksFilm & TVMusicNewsRestaurants & Bars 03 min read

BYT Interviews: Drew Magary

BYT at largeAugust 2, 2017

Author Drew Magary on writing "The Hike", his Minnesota Vikings fandom, sports media, and Kid Rock....

BooksFeatured 012 min read

Things To Do/Things To Know

Brandon Wetherbee and Kaylee DuganAugust 1, 2017

We're one step closer to watching Guy Fieri race a shark...

BooksMusicNews 03 min read

Free and Almost Free Things To Do In D.C.

Allison Desy and Kaylee DuganAugust 1, 2017

Here we focus exclusively on the cheapest YET most satisfying entertainment to be found around DC....

ArtBooksFilm & TVMusic 015 min read

NYC Best Weekend Bets (7.27.2017-7.30.2017)

Megan BurnsJuly 27, 2017

Ughhhhh you guys. This week. THIS WEEK. I am very ready for it to be pretend-over (because let's face it, weekends are pretend improvement upon everyday life) f...

BooksFilm & TVFunny StuffMusic 014 min read

NYC Best Weekend Bets (7.13.2017-7.16.2017)

Megan BurnsJuly 13, 2017

If you're not planning on pounding Game of Thrones episodes until Sunday's new episode premieres, you've got LOTS of get-out-of-your-house options this weekend!...

ArtBooksEat & DrinkFilm & TVFunny StuffMusic 015 min read

What Books To Read At The Pool

BYT at largeJuly 11, 2017

Pools are great because they mostly exist as a place where it's acceptable to read a book and not do work....

BooksFeaturedMusic 017 min read

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08sep(sep 8)10:00 am22(sep 22)1:00 pmOn-Location Photography: DC’s Public Sculpture and Architecture10:00 am (8) - 1:00 pm (22) S. Dillon Ripley Center

17sep(sep 17)10:15 am05nov(nov 5)1:00 pmIntroduction to Watercolor10:15 am (17) - (november 5) 1:00 pm S. Dillon Ripley Center

18sep6:30 pmAlison Krauss6:30 pm The Anthem

18sep6:30 pmAmos LeeCaitlyn Smith6:30 pm Lincoln Theatre

18sep7:00 pmFIDLAR - A North American Tour in 2018w/ Dilly Dally, Nobro7:00 pm 9:30 Club

19sep7:00 pmCar Seat Headrestw/ Naked Giants • Don Babylon7:00 pm 9:30 Club

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Toledo always knew he would return to Twin Fantasy. He never did complete the work. Not really. Never could square his grand ambitions against his mechanical limitations. Listen to his first attempt, recorded at nineteen on a cheap laptop, and you’ll hear what Brian Eno fondly calls “the sound of failure” – thrilling, extraordinary, and singularly compelling failure. Will’s first love, rendered in the vivid teenage viscera of stolen gin, bruised shins, and weird sex, was an event too momentous for the medium assigned to record it.

Even so, even awkward and amateurish, Twin Fantasy is deeply, truly adored. Legions of reverent listeners carve rituals out of it: sobbing over “Famous Prophets,” making out to ‘Cute Thing’, dancing their asses off as ‘Bodys’ climbs higher, higher. The distortion hardly matters. You can hear him just fine. You can hear everything. And you can feel everything: his hope, his despair, his wild overjoy. He’s trusting you – plural you, thousands of you – with the things he can’t say out loud. ” I pretended I was drunk when I came out to my friends,” he sings – and then, caught between truths, backtracks: ” I never came out to my friends. We were all on Skype, and I laughed and changed the subject.”

You might be imagining an extended diary entry, an angsty transmission from a bygone LiveJournal set to power chords and cranked to eleven. You would be wrong. Twin Fantasy is not a monologue. Twin Fantasy is a conversation. You know, he sings, that I’m mostly singing about you. This is Will’s greatest strength as a songwriter: he spins his own story, but he’s always telling yours, too. Between nods to local details – Harper’s Ferry, The Yellow Wallpaper, the Monopoly board collecting dust in his back seat – he leaves room for the fragile stuff of your own life, your own loves. From the very beginning, alone in his bedroom, in his last weeks of high school, he knew he was writing anthems. Someday, he hoped, you and I might sing these words back to him.

“It was never a finished work,” Toledo says, “and it wasn’t until last year that I figured out how to finish it.” He has, now, the benefit of a bigger budget, a full band in fine form, and endless time to tinker. According to him, it took eight months of mixing just to get the drums right. But this is no shallow second take, sanitized in studio and scrubbed of feeling. This is the album he always wanted to make. It sounds the way he always wanted it to sound.

It’s been hard, stepping into the shoes of his teenage self, walking back to painful places. There are lyrics he wouldn’t write again, an especially sad song he regards as an albatross. But even as he carries the weight of that younger, wounded Toledo, he moves forward. He grows. He revises, gently, the songs we love so much. In the album’s final moments, in those ” apologies to future me’s and you’s,” there is more forgiveness than fury.

This, Toledo says, is the most vital difference between the old and the new: he no longer sees his own story as a tragedy.

He’s not alone no more.

Time

(Wednesday) 7:00 pm

Location

9:30 Club

815 V ST NW, Washington, DC 20001

Cost

$25

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19sep7:00 pmHyukoh 24 Tour - North Americaw/ Inner Wave7:00 pm U Street Music Hall

20sep7:00 pm9:00 pmFree Weekly Bingo w/ Union Market7:00 pm - 9:00 pm Union Market

20sep7:00 pmThe Buttertonesw/ Wild Wing7:00 pm U Street Music Hall

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Last year the Buttertones put out Gravedigging, but on their newest Midnight In A Moonless Dream, they’re digging deeper and discovering something dark. If Gravedigging felt like an oversaturated spaghetti-western desertscape, Midnight is much more biting—music made for the swampland that spit out Australia’s mad Scientists, or for the Mickey Spillane night city where the Cramps met all those garbagemen and werewolves. Or maybe the Buttertones are heading for an even more primal place: “Show more teeth / Bite your way in,” sings guitarist Richard Araiza. “You’re back in the jungle again!”

They’d started in 2011 as a trio of music-school misfits. Araiza, bassist Sean Redman and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Modesto ‘Cobi’ Cobiån all wanted to pursue something more than boring industry adequacy, and soon locked together their current five-piece line-up with sax player London Guzman and guitarist Dakota Boettcher. With Gravedigging, they leapt from backyard parties to back-to-back tours, including their first trip to Europe, and scored a Coachella slot for 2018. It was a year that made them sharper, stronger, even more sophisticated. And when they were ready to record, they were ready to do things differently.

Midnight was made in two flash sessions at Long Beach’s Jazzcats studio with Gravedigging producer Jonny Bell, whose genre-smashing record collection and appetite for experimentation made for a perfect match. (He’s really a guru, they say.) What was supposed to be a six song EP during the summer of 2017 bloomed into a full-length by the end of that December. Midnight was like a trust fall, the band says—leap of faith after leap of faith, cut to tape as it happened by a tight and tour-tested band. On this album, they’d decided, everything would be new—not just new sounds, like their first-ever string section, but new ways of working together and writing together. They worked on trust and instinct, by feeling instead of thinking. If it worked, they’d keep it, and if it didn’t, they’d burn it and move on. Gravedigging played like the soundtrack to a good heist movie, but Midnight was like the true story itself—a perfect and intricate crime, executed by a crew of professionals under cover of night.

On the vicious “Winks and Smiles,” the spirit of sax and violence that powered cult-classic L.A. punkers the Deadbeats suddenly comes to life; on the starked-out “You and Your Knife” and fog-and-smoke follow-up “Brickhead,” you’ll hear the cryptic echoes of Suicide or Bauhaus. It’s music made for dancers but also for doomed romancers, and you’ll hear it best on the pocket symphony “Eros,” which closes the album with Lynch-ian vision and power—here Araiza sings with almost startling passion, and if you don’t linger on the idea of graveyard angels in perpetual embrace, it’s a love song for the ages. This is the strong stuff, the kind that comes in an unmarked bottle and burns when it hits.

“It’s the darkness that brings us together,” laughs Guzman—in person, this is a band who prefer comedy to tragedy, even if they do claim to spend hours listening to Smiths records all day. But there’s still a tension and even a sinister new dimension on Midnight that the Buttertones never quite had before. Like lead single “C4,” which ignites like something from a New York no-wave song, with slashing sax and ferocious drums and a piano riff falling of a cliff before Araiza fights through the noise and gunsmoke, and what’s the very first word on the whole album? “Bang!” he shouts—and that says it all.

Time

(Thursday) 7:00 pm

Location

U Street Music Hall

1115 U Street NW Washington, DC, 20009

Cost

$15

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7-Session Daytime Course

Monday, September 17 to November 5, 2018 – 10:15 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

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