Pick Six is a half-dozen cool things in music, from two points of view.
John Eichten of Minneapolis:
1 TripShakespeare.net. John Munson has updated the late '80s/early '90s Twin Cities band's website with a treasure trove of unedited live shows, audio recordings, stories, new and vintage merch, and video footage before cellphone cameras were at every gig. Fun stuff!
2 Chris Perricelli mini-tour. The Little Man bandleader came up with an ingenious idea to do a Sunday social distancing "tour" of 10 small shows in backyards in the Twin Cities. Instead of us going to see him, he came to us, playing four to six songs at each stop and collecting food for the Little Kitchen Foodshelf. A great event for everyone involved.
3 Trey Anastasio, the Beacon Jams. He is doing an eight-week residency at New York's famed Beacon Theatre, streamed free on Twitch on Fridays through Nov. 27. So far, no song repeats, but lots of surprises, including a string quartet and some famous covers. A must-see!
Jon Bream of the Star Tribune:
1 Raul Malo, "A Change Is Gonna Come" video. There is something emboldening about this golden voiced singer, the son of Cuban immigrants, doing a solo reading of this classic on a still night in front of the U.S. Capitol.
2 Rosanne Cash, "Crawl into the Promised Land." She serves up a haunting, hopeful new anthem. "Deliver me from tweets and lies/and purify me in the sun," she sings. In an accompanying essay, she writes: "We can get back to our dream of America, where the 'enemy' is an individual burden, inside each of us, aching for a truce. We're exhausted. We're disoriented. But I know we have the strength and will to deliver ourselves."
3 Adrianne Lenker profile, the New Yorker. Writer Amanda Petrusich gets inside the head of the indie rock favorite, who was raised in Minnesota and made her name fronting the band Big Thief. It's a portrait of a vulnerable and gifted 29-year-old artist, probing into her complicated life and organic creative process as she releases two new albums, "Songs" and "Instrumentals."
