Nearly two years ago, a friend sent me a URL. No description, no title, just a URL. I clicked it, waited for a video to buffer, and found myself captivated by the band Grizzly Bear performing The Knife a cappella while walking the streets of Paris. It was raw and it was intimate and I was absolutely captivated.
This was one video of a handful called The Take-Away Shows -- a video podcast from La Blogotheque.
They say it best:
"Every week, we invite an artist or a band to play in the streets, in a bar, a park, or even in a flat or in an elevator, and we film the whole session. Of course, what makes the beauty of it is all the little incidents, hesitations, and crazy stuff happening unexpectingly. Besides, we do not edit the videos so they look perfectly flawless, instead we keep the raw sound of the surroundings. Our goal is to try and capture instants, film the music just like it happens, without preparation, without tricks. Spontaneity is the keyword."
Since leafing through that handful of artists featured back in 2006, I'd forgotten The Take-Away Shows was floating around. But last week I found it again, and was stunned to find that the handful of gems has turned into hundreds of videos. While I was playing the same records again and again every day, La Blogotheque was catching a personal moment with a different musician each week.
Get ready to lose yourself for hours. Go explore their archives. Find Swedish artist Jose Gonzalez singing his soft melodies over his nylon string guitar on the back of a pickup truck driving around a tiny Texas town. Find John Vanderslice strumming and singing while walking around my old neighborhood in Seattle. Find The Arcade Fire packed into a freight elevator before a show in Paris, ripping paper for percussion.