Archives for September 2019

Certain Songs #1624: The Posies – “Conversations”

September 5, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Every Kind of Light
Year: 2005

. . .

But, of course, The Posies didn’t break up in 1998. At least not for good. There was just too much chemistry in the Ken Stringfellow / Jon Auer paring for them to ignore it for the rest of their lives. And while Ken Stringfellow toured with R.E.M. for several years, as well as played on both Reveal and Around the Sun while putting out a couple of solo albums as well, it was clear that the Posies weren’t truly finished.

In fact, they almost instantly they put out a live album culled from the last tour, Alive Before The Iceberg, and in 2000 Stringfellow and Auer reunited acoustically, as captured on the In Case You Didn’t Feel Like Plugging In live album in 2000 and the studio EP Nice Cheekbones an a PHD in 2001.

Certain Songs #1623: The Posies – “Fall Apart With Me”

September 4, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Success
Year: 1998

. . .

The third time I saw The Posies, it was one of the greatest shows I’ve ever witnessed.

It was also their final show.

One of those statements is, of course, now a lie. But not at the time. When Rox and I (and Matt, I think) went to the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco on September 19, 1998, it was billed as the Posies “Final Show,” and they certainly treated it was such, and blowing the roof off of the place in a performance that was emotional, celebratory and went an hour past curfew, to boot. I don’t remember if the cops came to shut it down as they were approaching 3:00am on a Sunday morning, but it would have been kinda cool if they did.

Certain Songs #1622: The Posies – “Throwaway”

September 3, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Amazing Disgrace
Year: 1996

. . .

One of the reasons that Amazing Disgrace is my favorite Posies album (though just barely, truth be told) is that it successfully combined the fuzzy noisy guitars from Frosting on the Beater with some of the dynamic mid-tempo songs that worked so well on Dear 23.

So yeah, while there were ravers like “Daily Mutilation,” “Ontario” and the utterly awesome “Grant Hart,” what truly made Amazing Disgrace were the weird, moody mid-tempo songs like “Song #1,” “Will You Ever Ease Your Mind?” and Jon Auer’s “Throwaway,” which starts out with a guitar solo that is falling apart before your eyes before coming to a dead stop in time for Auer’s first verse, the opening which was just sung over an acoustic guitar.