CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Dan Wilson
Cory Chisel

Zankel Hall
Saturday, October 10th, 2009 at 8:30 PM

Dan Wilson, Vocals
Cory Chisel and the Wandering Sons

Program is approximately 1 hour, 45 minutes, including one intermission

Presented by Carnegie Hall in partnership with WFUV.

Program Notes:

BOB GOLDEN on
DAN WILSON

As the most eloquent expression of his musical inspirations and evolution to date, True Life, Dan Wilson’s first full-length solo album will be a primary focus of the Minneapolis-based singer-songwriterguitarist’s Carnegie Hall appearance.

The album, which was released two years ago, encapsulates the Harvard University Art graduate’s varied range of influences, such as Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, Radiohead, Miles Davis, and Neil Young with the crystalline vocals, melodic elegance, and sophisticated lyrics that have earned Wilson international renown as a major contemporary pop music presence.

First publically prominent as a member of his brother Matt’s cult band Trip Shakespeare, Dan began to more seriously explore his songwriting talents in the mid- 1990s when he formed his own group, Semisonic, with several Trip Shakespeare members. They soon released The Great Divide, Semisonic’s critically acclaimed 1996 album. Two years later, the Semisonic platinum-selling Feeling Strangely Fine firmly established Dan Wilson as among the most important musician-songwriterproducers in the alternative-pop genre.

After producing landmark albums for such luminaries as Mike Doughty, Epic Hero, New Standards, and Storyville, Wilson achieved another artistic and commercial pinnacle when he co-wrote “Not Ready to Make Nice” for the Dixie Chicks Taking the Long Way album. The song earned Wilson a 2007 Song of the Year Grammy Award, while the album—with five other Wilson co-writes—garnered an equal number of Grammies that included top honors in the Album of the Year and Country Album of the Year categories.

Soon after, Wilson signed with Rick Rubin’s label, American Records, from which Dan’s self-produced True Life is the first release of the association. “The
best thing about my album, in my opinion, is the incredibly intimate feeling it evokes,” he says. “These songs sound like they already existed, but at the
same time, they project a feeling that they’re about somebody’s life.”

Dan Wilson has arrived at a creative summit that both incorporates and departs from his prior pop-rock accomplishments. He now looks forward to the further
deepening of his signature truth-telling, worldy lyrics, and compelling melodic sensibility that is at the core of his highly individual musical communication.

“I’ve always loved songwriting that sounded like the truth,” states Wilson, “like first-person confessions, like confidences whispered in your ear.”

As American Records chief Rick Rubin regards his label star, “He is/has the perfect combination of inspiration and songcraft. He is a timeless artist whose music will feel as good in 50 years as it does today.”



BOB GOLDEN on
CORY CHISEL

“If you go to small towns up here in Wisconsin, they all have their own little feel to them. You’ll walk into a very Norwegian or German one, and they’re all reconstructing where they came from and incorporating other traditions. It’s the exile idea that I’ve been working on for quite a long time in songwriting.”

The son of a Baptist preacher, Cory Chisel—an Appleton, Wisconsin native—was imbued with the hypnotic, deeply soulful hymns of his father’s church and the spacious plain fields of his home, forming a most magnetic, lyrical and singular musical identity.

With a mesmeric performance persona admittedly derived from his father, and songwriting that is equal parts of midwest prairie storytelling and the profound Baptist gospel mainsprings of sin, strength, joy, diminishment, and salvation, Chisel has built a loyal following through many years of playing in rural lounges in US farm states. Finally in 2009, Chisel produced his major label debut. The collection, Death Won’t Send a Letter, was released in September by RCA/Sony.

In concert, and with a uniquely and fittingly Coplandesque instrumentation of oboe, piano, bass,
percussion and guitar, Cory and the Wandering Sons—his live touring band of in-demand midwestern studio and performing musicians—exquisitely reflect the rustic and spiritual essence of Chisel’s evocative songs.

“It’s tough for me to write when I’m away from Wisconsin,” Chisel admits. “The pace of life offers the
chance for a lot of introspective moments. When it gets dark and cooler, you can just stay inside and drink wine, which naturally presents songs much quicker than
sunny beach time.

A natural heir to such legendary American songwritersinger influences as Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, and Townes Van Zandt, Cory Chisel—through the power and poetry of his songs and vocals—has begun to quickly and persuasively create a similar legacy for
the next generation of his musical peers.

Bob Golden is a music industry veteran who is currently
Vice President of Marketing at Carlin America, a major
multinational music publishing corporation.

© 2009 The Carnegie Hall Corporation.

More Information:

A Grammy winner for his songwriting with the Dixie Chicks, Dan Wilson is also an accomplished blues-pop performer in his own right. He shares this double bill with another American blues favorite, Cory Chisel and the Wandering Sons. Their brand-new CD, Death Won’t Send a Letter, was recently praised on baeblemusic.com as “big and soulful.”

Dan Wilson, Vocals
DAN WILSON
Dan Wilson is a Grammy Award–winning Minneapolis-based singer, guitarist, producer, and songwriter. His most recent CD, Free Life, was released on Rick Rubin’s American Recordings in late 2007. In addition to his solo performing, Wilson is also the lead singer of the Minneapolis alternative rock band Semisonic, for which he wrote the hits “Secret Smile,” “Closing Time,” and “Chemistry.” Through the early 1990s, he was a member of the psychedelic folk-jam band Trip Shakespeare.

Free Life, his first solo studio album, showcases Wilson’s distinct ability to create new music that is both intimately personal, and yet also timelessly beautiful. The album is a blend of rock and folk, featuring contributions from Sheryl Crow, Sean and Sara Watkins (Nickel Creek), Gary Louris (the Jayhawks), Eric Fawcett (N.E.R.D.), and Benmont Tench (Heartbreakers.)
While he was writing the album, Wilson was living in a house built in 1903, and the place served both as a subtle influence on the writing and a perfect setting for the recording. “I found a few books of sheet music from that era at antique stores and spent lots of time singing the songs at the piano: chords and melodies the house probably hadn’t heard for a hundred years,” he says. “‘Sugar’ and ‘Honey Please’ both seem to have that spirit, as though they
were written by the house as much as by me.”

While Free Life is in some ways a departure from Wilson’s previous work, it also perpetuates certain of his tendencies—the elevated, chill-inducing melodies, the thoughtful yet straightforward lyrics, the striving for honesty of expression. “I’ve always loved songwriting that sounded like truth,” says Wilson, “like first-person confessions, like confidences whispered in your ear. Even if I’m willing to tinker with reality and my own history, I want the song to
feel true.”

Wilson is also well-known as a songwriting collaborator. His recent songwriting collaborations include KT Tunstall, James Morrison, Rachael Yamagata, Jewel, Jason Mraz, and Mike Doughty (whose albums Haughty Melodic and Golden Delicous Wilson also produced.) He co-wrote six songs on the Dixie Chicks album Taking The Long Way, which won five Grammy awards, including Song of the Year for the anthem “Not Ready to Make Nice.”

Cory Chisel and the Wandering Sons
CORY CHISEL
Like many artists before him, Cory Chisel first connected with the power of song—and the spellbinding possibilities of live performance—through the music he heard in church. The gospel’s rich vernacular of loss and redemption also informed his innate poetic sense and lyrical range. “For most of my life,” he says, “my dad was a Baptist minister, so I learned a lot about being a showman, and I learned a lot about music. Many of the hymns from church are still the most beautiful songs I know. I think I’m still trying to achieve the same euphoria I felt at a very young age, when I would be completely taken over by these rhythms and these sounds and these stories.”

An equally potent influence on Chisel’s worldview and wellspring of musical storytelling is the American heartland, from which he hails. Based in Appleton, Wisconsin, his family’s roots reach about 500 miles north and west to Babbitt, Minnesota, and to neighboring Ely, located beside the pristine Boundary Waters—the largest wilderness preserve east of the Rockies. The vast, open spaces and clear, deep lakes of the wild north are ingrained in Chisel’s songs,
which sound as if they come to him as naturally as breathing. In an upbringing where he was largely sheltered from pop music, Chisel’s fluency with music comes in great measure from always having played it with his family. One of his grandfathers had nine brothers and, he notes, “they’re all great guitar players, and half of them play harmonica, too.” He also cites his
Uncle Roger, a blues musician—whose epic record collection exposed him to Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Robert Johnson, Johnny Cash, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, and countless others—as a chief source of inspiration. “He was a musical force,” says Chisel. “I always felt like I possessed something similar, that I understood the exorcism I saw him receiving through music.”

Death Won’t Send a Letter, Chisel’s full-length debut for Black Seal Records, is a dark and urgent rock and roll vision. It takes a romantic albeit gutsy stance on the meaning of love and spirituality, as the songs seek to make sense of the world outside and human desires within, reconciling the call of the road and a longing for home—literally and figuratively. With Grammy-winning producer Joe Chiccarelli (The Shins, The White Stripes) at the helm, Chisel’s songs have transformed into lush and nuanced recordings that never sacrifice his emotional
vulnerability or his rich and unique vocal tone.