Saket Vora

Heading up north for some white water rafting in the North Fork of the American River, then camping in Yosemite. Should be back Monday.

Have a great holiday weekend everyone!

Here are two remixes of Lord Huron I’ve been listening to quite a bit recently. The first of Into the Sun, done by Teen Daze. It’s an electronic treatment of the original’s tropical, laid back, sunny mood, and I especially like the way the remix not only gives the song a great sense of focus, but it also lifts a particular lyric to greater prominence: listen near the end for “You’re as soft as a feather…you’re as gorgeous as ever” and when the tsst-tsst-tsst of the high hat kicks in. Love that.

Lord Huron – Into the Sun (Teen Daze Remix)

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The second is of Mighty, the great song I’ve written about before. Here, Painted Palms’ interpretation is heavy on the synth, but still retains the tribal sound of the original. I like how how the aaaahhhh backing vocal washes over the melody.

Lord Huron – Mighty (Painted Palms’ Remix)

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The 100th anniversary of the infamous Bay to Breakers footrace took place last Sunday in San Francisco, and this year I took part in it. For the uninitiated, Bay to Breakers is an annual race held in San Francisco in which runners go across the City from east to west, from the ‘bay’ to the ‘breakers’ of the Pacific Ocean. The scale is epic — upwards of 60,000 people participate in this race. But this event is much more than running — it’s actually a 4 mile long block party! Behind the hardcore runners is a parade of tens of thousands of people who dress up in wacky costumes, jamming to music, house parties rocking all along the race course up until Golden Gate Park, and of course alcohol. The San Francisco spirit :)

This year Sam organized a big group of people for a Scrabble theme. We all wore cardboard letters and formed words as we walked along — often in response to the costumes we saw or by request from fellow paraders. Paul went wildcard and came as a ? mark. It was great — he’d go up to all the random costumes he saw and take a picture with a puzzled look on his face. And, he kept accessorizing his costume as the day went along from other costumes people had.

What friends are for:

The house parties all along the race route are pretty epic.

The weather forecasters were predicting rain, but instead it was beautiful.

The goal was to make it to Sam’s house along the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. This is usually when the parade starts to thin out too — most people are too um, gone to make it to the ocean. We ran into Nevin too, romping around with a giant gnome flag and with a huge group of fellow gnomes.

Sam got the grill out, the cornhole boards, and we spent the next few hours kickin’ it in the park.

A really great day.

This is another hat tip to Paste Magazine, their recent “Best of What’s Next” really meshed with me. The artist is a five-piece called Seryn, from Texas. They are multi-instrumentalists and you’ll hear guitars, banjos, ukelele, viola, and accordions throughout their album, This is Where We Are.

The songs lean towards the long side, with the band showing patience and exploring shifts in key and temp in their songs — which makes sticking with songs the whole way through well worth it. Harmonized vocals, soft guitar and banjo pickings, and orchestral flourishes make this album a treat to listen to. If you’re a fan of Sufjan Stevens, Fleet Foxes, and Mumford & Sons, then I highly highly recommend you give this young new band a try!  Here are two songs to sample:

Seryn – We Will All Be Changed

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Seryn – Our Love

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Bay Area folks – Seryn will be playing a show at the Hotel Utah Saloon on Sunday, June 19th. Tickets are just ~$8, so why not? I’m going. There’s also a Berkeley show at the Starry Plough on Saturday, June 11th. Might go to that too.

Yo dawg, I herd you liked peanut butter & chocolate…

I present for your consideration, a peanut butter cookie coated with chocolate with a Reese’s peanut butter cup inside :)

Last weekend I headed back east to celebrate my sister Sachi’s graduation from nursing school at the University of Charleston, in West Virginia. Sapana and I were on the same flight from Chicago, and we ended up killing nearly five hours at Chicago O’Hare. Our intended flight was oversold by two, and when the offered travel vouchers for volunteers to take a later flight reached $300, we bit (we cleared it with Mom, first). So we ended up making it out of O’Hare $600 richer, and still was able to have dinner with Sachi and our parents in Charleston.

On Saturday they had the nursing school commencement and the Lamp Lighting ceremony, a special tradition in homage to Florence Nightingale, the “Lady with the Lamp”. It was great to meet Sachi’s classmates and her professors, whom she has gotten quite close to over the past two years. A few weeks back, she received a special award given to the outstanding nursing student of the whole class, and it was clear how much everyone liked her.

That evening we had dinner in downtown Charleston at Pies & Pints, a classy pizza place. We waited for our table at the lovely independent bookstore next door, where to my delight there was a live music show. A couple in their fifties played an assortment of acoustic guitars, mandolins, banjos, slide guitar, etc. with original songs.

On Sunday the overall graduation ceremony took place. Alas, the lovely weather we had on Saturday didn’t hold up so the ceremony was moved indoors. The commencement speaker was Dr. Charles Vest, a West Virginia native who served as President of MIT from 1990 to 2004. He actually met the woman who would become his wife while spending a summer in Charleston as an intern. It was a nice ceremony, and the weather cleared up afterward enough for everyone to stream out onto the lawn by the river alongside the campus, with the golden dome of the capitol building in the background.

Later that night, as we were getting ready for bed early (Sapana and I were to fly out at 6am the next morning), I got a text from Mike telling me I better turn on the TV. The news: President Obama to announce that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a US special operations raid. Whoa. We stayed up Obama’s address, and ended up getting little sleep. But after a weekend of spending time with the family and Sachi’s graduation, it was well worth it.

An opportunity came up for this past Monday night that was too good to pass up. Patrick, our super intern extraordinaire from NC State, tells us that his (2nd) cousin Peter is the drummer for the band Here We Go Magic, and they were coming to San Francisco and he got backstage passes. Heck yeah! Sean, Joey, Patrick, and I headed up to the Rickshaw Stop, met up with Peter, and ended up hanging out at a bar in Hayes Valley for almost two hours.

It was awesome. We talked about how he got involved with the band, what touring is like — how do you keep things fresh after dozens or hundreds of shows? — and fun moments that happen when you’re in a real bona-fide band. Here We Go Magic was Thom Yorke’s (of Radiohead) favorite band from last year’s Glastonbury Festival, and Peter described having a jam session one night in New York with Yorke himself. Like whoa. Peter is really well read — the conversation drifted deep into music theory, accessibility of music, the feel of music in different cultures and how people connect to it in a very fundamental way, etc.

The show was nice. I was going on just 3 hours of sleep from my flight back to the Bay Area that morning, but I enjoyed it. Many of the songs live get into a nice groove, and there is definitely a jam feel to them, especially near the end. Their music is often described as ‘electro-folk’, with some psychedelia mixed in a few songs. Whatever that means, heh. The band came back on for an encore, and Peter even gave us a shoutout: “Thanks to my cousin Patrick and his friends!” So cool of him!

Check out this song from their latest album, Pigeons.

Here We Go Magic – Collector

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By the way — Here We Go Magic is playing at Schubas on May 9th for you Chicago peeps, and at the Local 506 on May 17th for you Triangle peeps.